(Ralph Brauer) The Strange Death of Liberal America

The Strange Death of
Liberal America
Ralph Brauer
PRAEGER
THE STRANGE
DEATH OF
LIBERAL AMERICA
THE STRANGE
DEATH OF
LIBERAL AMERICA
Ralph Brauer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brauer, Ralph.
The strange death of liberal America / Ralph Brauer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–275–99063–X (alk. paper)
1. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. 2. United States—Politics
and government—20th century. 3. Liberalism—United States—History—
20th century. 4. Political parties—United States—History—20th century.
5. Political culture—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
E839.5.B73 2006
973.9—dc22 2006004346
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright # 2006 by Ralph Brauer
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006004346
ISBN: 0–275–99063–X
First published in 2006
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Paul and Sheila and Mary Mac, Marcia Wellstone Markuson,
Tom Lapic, Will McLaughlin
To my parents
To Horace
To Donna and Max

I believe that every infant, every child we hold in our hands, no matter what
color of skin, no matter boy or girl, no matter rich or poor, no matter rural
or urban, and no matter what religion, that every child that we hold in
our hands, is one of God’s children. I believe that every child, every infant
should have the same chance to reach his or her potential. I tell you, that is
the goodness of this country, that is the American dream, that is what makes
us a great Nation, and that is the most important goal for our Nation. And
whatever makes that possible, I’m for it. And whatever stands in the way of
that, I’m against it.
Paul Wellstone
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single

garment of destiny.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Contents
Preface xi
1 Introduction 1
Part One: The Counterrevolution 11

2 Economic Justice: Strom 13
3 Educational Equity: Devil’s Bargains 29
4 Voting Rights: Bush v. Gore 45
5 Media Fairness: A Magical Mystery Tour 61
Part Two: Civil Rights Revolutions Raise Questions 75

6 Economic Justice: Corked Bats 77
7 Educational Equity: Green with Envy 93
8 Voting Rights: Mrs. Hamer’s Question 109
9 Media Fairness: The Two Faces of Martha Stewart 125
Part Three: The Suburban Uprising 139

10 Economic Justice: Home Depot 141
11 Educational Equity: The Final Battleground 157
x & Contents
12 Voting Rights: Red and Blue Lemmings 173

13 Media Fairness: The SUV on the Monolith 189
14 Conclusion: Shifting Winds 205

Notes 225
Select Bibliography 249
Index 257
Preface
I remember the day this book began: October 25, 2002. That afternoon
a news bulletin announced that a plane carrying Minnesota Senator Paul
Wellstone, his wife, daughter and campaign aides had crashed in northern
Minnesota, killing all aboard only weeks before election day. In the chaos
that followed the Democrats enlisted former Vice-President Walter Mondale
to replace Wellstone on the ballot. When Mondale lost the election I won-
dered how this could happen in a state where an unabashed liberal like Paul
Wellstone was ahead in the polls at the time of his death.
That defeat spawned a larger question of how Wellstone’s death enabled
the Republican Party to gain control of every branch of the federal gov-
ernment for the first time since before most Americans had been born. As a
former college teacher and administrator with training as an intellectual
historian it seemed that the only way to grasp what had happened was to
understand how past events had brought us to this point. Since both parties
admit what we face is a clash of values, the story and meaning of that clash
became the focus of my research.
Any contemporary history enters that peculiar realm C. Vann Woodward
referred to as the twilight zone ‘‘between living memory and written his-
tory.’’ For Woodward this region provides a prime breeding ground for
mythology. Certainly mythology seems everywhere today, particularly in a
systematic attempt to rewrite the long-standing relationship between the
American people and their government. Yet even as he wrote in another
troubled time, Woodward expressed hope that he could turn a ‘‘few beams
of light into the twilight zone and if possible light up a few of its corners.’’1
xii & Preface
For me that beam of light comes from my study of systems thinking. When
I lead strategic planning sessions, we always start with the question, ‘‘What
is the key measure of success?’’ I put this question in the context of Liberal
America and over the next eighteen months asked both research sources and
anyone I could for an answer. What emerged was this book’s definition of
Liberal America: government exists to keep the playing field level. The
success of the American experiment depends on how well we maintain this
equity. From there I used modeling and a great deal more research to identify
the key forces that enhance or detract from maintaining the level playing
field. From this emerged the four cornerstones of economic and social jus-
tice, educational equity, voting rights, and media fairness.
These ideals form the organizational center for this book. It could have
followed a more conventional chronological organization, but that would
have become not only confusing but also would have diminished the im-
portance of the cornerstones. The cornerstones also inform the organization
in another sense. From the beginning, I decided that unlike those of the
Raucous Right who specialize in undocumented rumors, this book would
empower readers by containing as many sources as possible that can be
found on the Internet. This allows readers to make up their own minds. I
should also add that as a person with a disability and without a research
assistant, I could not have written this book without the Internet.
We prefer our history neat and linear, the way chapters in our school-
books march from one date and event to the next in chronological order. But
as historians know, history can be a tangled skein of events and its con-
nections prove difficult to unravel. For example, Bernard DeVoto wrote a
very good book about 1846, which he called the ‘‘year of decision,’’ and yet
even his considerable narrative skills barely scratched the surface. To be fair
to DeVoto, his main canvas was the American West, but still he omits much
about the Indigenous People who lived there.
When telling the story of an idea like Liberal America, the task becomes
even more complex. The history of an idea—as Woodward knew even as he
cloaked Jim Crow in legal clothes—does not follow a straight path. In an
essay on DeVoto, Wallace Stegner observed the author of The Year of De-
cision was what Robert Frost called a ‘‘synecdochist.’’2 To Stegner that
meant DeVoto used carefully chosen events to stand for larger trends
and themes. A similar method characterizes this book. Because the book
follows the path of an idea over more than half a century, it seemed the best
way to tell the story is to use emblematic people and events that not only
represent key turning points but also could stand for larger changes.
Otherwise this book would have been a very thick volume. The other stylistic
Preface & xiii
device is to open each chapter by describing a local setting. This grounds

ideas in real places and evokes the theme of diverse local communities that
are in danger of slipping away.
As it links past with present through symbolic events, this book identifies
three reasons for the decline of Liberal America’s value of the level playing
field: (1) the assault of a Republican Counterrevolution dedicated to rolling
back the values of the New Deal, (2) an inability by both parties to answer
questions raised by decades of Civil Rights revolutions, and (3) the turn-
about of suburban America from places of opportunity created by govern-
ment programs to battlegrounds as serious as any since the U.S. Civil War.
These reasons form the book’s three parts.
Part one follows the development of the Counterrevolutionary Coalition,
beginning with the Southern Strategy and ending with a chapter on our
politicized media. Part two focuses on questions raised about the corner-
stones by people of color and women. It also introduces the theme of the
cornerstones’ interrelatedness and the history of the Democratic Party’s
failure to answer those questions as illustrated by events like the Nader-
LaDuke campaign and the 1964 Atlantic City convention. Part three details
the impact of suburban America on the cornerstones. Underlying this part is
a historical discussion that begins with the New Deal and works its way to
the present, ending with a discussion of global warming and the Iraq War.
Through these chapters weaves not only a political and intellectual history
but also a social and cultural chronicle touching on music, television, mov-
ies, and sports. While the title of this book seems mournful, I wanted the
content to reflect a hopeful outlook. Above all, Liberal America is based on
the hope that on a level playing field everyone is capable of extraordinary
feats.
I have been fortunate in having a great deal of support from those who
believed in this project. I owe much to Lloyd and Anne Svendsbye, friends
and spiritual advisors, who read the entire manuscript and when I wondered
whether it was worth continuing gave me the courage to finish it. Lloyd, a
former college and seminary president as well as officer in the Evangelical
Lutheran Church of America, also provided me with help on many of the
religious discussions in this book along with the Big Meadow story. Another
close friend, Bill Kell, provided many helpful suggestions as well as his
expert advice on how to better focus this book. Conversations with other
friends such as the Bordwells, the Jacksons, Rod Brown, and others also
greatly influenced the ideas in the book. Tom Lannom, who probably would
not agree with much that is in this book, provided me with the much-needed
balance of a true Republican and former navy pilot. I also wish to thank my
xiv & Preface
colleagues at Transforming Schools Consortium who have contributed ideas

and support over the years, in particular Jack Nelson, Russ Martinson, Jim
Orakovich, Lees Stuntz, Bill Crocoll, Jim Boos, Wayne Jennings, and Al
Myers. Former university researchers and now consultants Jeff Potash and
John Heinbokel taught me System Dynamics, which allowed me to under-
stand the dynamics of Liberal America. University researchers including
Kyla Wahlstrom, Mark Davison, Al Jones, and System Dynamics faculty at
MIT and elsewhere also had an impact on the ideas of this book. I owe to the
late George Dangerfield the title and the thesis from his book, The Strange
Death of Liberal England. I learned history from two of the best, the late Joe
Wall and David Noble, and how to write about it from the late Mary Turpie.
This book would not have appeared without Hilary Claggett. She believed in
it when others did not, nurtured it through various approvals and, most of
all, provided an unerring touch to the final manuscript. Producing a book is
a team effort and Hilary led the team well. Others on the team also did
excellent work. Terri Jennings took my sometimes quirky spelling and
grammar and formed them into a polished manuscript. She also did an
amazing job of tracking the numerous references and assuring that all is as it
should be. In the accolades that usually accompany book prefaces, the one
member of the team who often gets left out is the person responsible for
the final look of the book. Karen Treat did a wonderful job of overseeing the
production process, translating what the rest of us had done into a text that
looks and reads well. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewer who knew
just which buttons to push to prompt some significant improvements in the
manuscript. Gracias. Finally, my wife Donna and son Max should stand as
co-authors, not only because they had to live with me through countless
revisions, but also because they provided their own ideas and helped to edit
the manuscript.
None of these people would agree with all the ideas in this book, but their
probing questions helped to sharpen my own thinking. None of the opinions
expressed here are those of the Transforming Schools Consortium, its
members or officers. No TSC funds were used for this manuscript. To the
reader I have a final comment: I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as
I enjoyed writing it.
1 Introduction
Elemental. That single word captures the North Dakota high plains, its
vowels and consonants reflecting the environment’s sometimes harsh reali-
ties and the resolve required to overcome them. They called the covered
wagons that traversed this region prairie schooners for a reason—as many
commentators have remarked, the plains resemble the middle of the ocean
where you see nothing but the sky and the inscrutable ways of the wind.
These broad vistas seem to stretch beyond time, enforcing a certain hu-
mility on anyone who stands alone gazing at the horizon. For those who do
not succumb easily, the weather reinforces the point. Here, where the closest
geographical equivalent may be the steppes of Asia, temperatures unex-
pectedly drop to well below zero as shrieking winds make snow sound like
sand as it beats against fragile walls. On a hot, humid summer day, the sky
will churn into an ominous dark green as it spits out a vortex that lashes
snakelike across the fields, ripping up everything in its path by the roots and
flinging debris indifferently across the land.
It takes solid stock to persevere on some of the last plots homesteaded in
the continental United States. A Vermont dairy herder or an Iowa corn
grower might shake his or her head at the prospect of trying to make a living
from this land. But hopes mixed with cussedness, faith, and a pinch of
desperation thrown in provide powerful motivators. Here the American
Dream takes on its most elemental form, stripped down to the Jeffersonian
principle of a single-family home standing like a monument on stark yet
hauntingly beautiful ground. Maybe that is why this place might stand for
all of America.
2 & Introduction
In researching his family history in a prairie township with the poetic name
of Big Meadow, a close friend found something extraordinary that speaks of
these people’s values. Eighty-year-old minutes of the township board contain
references to cases in which the board considered payments to local citizens
asking for help. A decade before the New Deal, this local government be-
lieved it had a responsibility to use taxpayer dollars for what today some
derisively call ‘‘welfare.’’ In that elemental place the people of Big Meadow
articulated a fundamental principle that represents the heart of what I term
Liberal America: The duty of government is to ensure a level playing field.
This theme runs not only through the Big Meadow board minutes but
through those of other rural towns of the same era. In a fascinating study,
Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Social Welfare in the Amer-
ican West, Thomas Krainz details how several Colorado counties also aided
local residents. On October 23, 1912, Mary Yoder appeared before the
Lincoln County commissioners. Recently widowed with three children, ‘‘she
asked the county commissioners for help. For the next two years and eight
months, commissioners provided Yoder and her children with assistance in
the form of supplies, coal and medicine.’’ In an impressive series of ac-
companying tables, Krainz shows that four Colorado counties provided aid
ranging from $4.97 to $30.90 per month to almost 2,000 people. Perhaps
the most fascinating table shows the number and percentages of people sent
away without aid, with Lincoln being the highest at 32.91 percent, while the
other counties had numbers in the single digits.1
Townships and counties were not the only government units providing
aid. Missouri established the first widow’s pension in 1911, followed by
thirty-nine other states. Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to serve in the
House of Representatives, introduced the 1921 Sheppard-Towner bill, which
provided federal funds to local health departments for maternal and child
health. In other words, the idea of government assistance did not begin with
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
A farmer whose arm disappeared between grinding gears, a widow trying
to make a go of it after her husband had succumbed to a fatal ailment, had
their lives jerked out from under them through no fault of their own, the way
someone clumsily yanks off a table cloth, leaving everything to crash to the
floor. No doubt the calculations made by county and township boards
sometimes relied on prejudices and local circumstances so that, as Krainz
points out, aid amounts and practices varied widely, but that does not di-
minish the principle behind their actions.
That I should define this ideal as the core belief of Liberal America no
doubt will raise eyebrows. In the last few years, the word has taken on such a
Introduction & 3
pejorative tone, that for many Republicans it has become the equivalent of a
schoolyard bully’s taunt. Their Democratic rivals, who seem to loathe the
term almost as deeply, generally respond to the taunts by figuratively running
away from them. Goaded by a reporter to state whether he was a liberal,
2004 presidential candidate John Kerry preferred to dodge the question.
Among what some refer to as the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the
situation can only be described as confusion. Long-standing disagreements
have widened. Single-issue imperatives and nasty infighting have so shred-
ded meanings that Liberal America no longer seems a simple ideal, but
instead resembles thousands of slips of paper blowing in hostile winds as
people desperately grab at them hoping to find the equivalent of a winning
lottery ticket.
Some disdain the word liberal, preferring to use such euphemisms as
progressive. Even among those who accept the liberal label, it threatens to
become a laundry list of thou shalt nots every bit as daunting as those tallied
by their opponents. Ideological ayatollahs reign here as surely as they do on
the right, enforcing the correct language and the correct tone of voice, while
ready to condemn any heresy. In the pronouncements of some of these
zealots, there lies a thinly veiled contempt for the average American who
does not read the right books, attend the right concerts, and send their
children to the right schools.
It was not always this way. For a long time, words such as conservative and
fundamentalist were ammunition for comedians and newspaper cartoonists.
Mixing religion and politics was considered one of the republic’s chief
dangers; it weighed heavily in 1960 when commentators and voters alike
worried that if John Kennedy even mentioned his faith, voters might think
the pope would call the tune at the White House. Four decades later, the
reigning president reverently touts his ‘‘conversion,’’ liberally spices his
speeches with fundamentalist Christian references, and openly admits his
religion influences his policies. If John Kennedy had publicly announced,
as George W. Bush has, that someone’s choice of church influenced a nom-
ination to the Supreme Court bench, he would have been severely castigated.
So what happened to Liberal America? As all those aid programs affirm,
at the heart of liberalism lies the belief that government exists to do good for
the people. It serves to level the playing field when those with power and
money seek to tilt things in their direction, to assure that the votes are
counted fairly, to maintain a free and open ‘‘marketplace of ideas,’’ to
stimulate our society to positive ends whether in the arts or research, and to
provide an equal education so that every American not only starts from the
same point, but also has the same opportunities every step of the way on into
4 & Introduction
college and even professional school and work. Its values lie behind the
ringing inaugural addresses of FDR and JFK as well as what is the single
greatest American speech of the last century, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
‘‘I Have a Dream’’ masterpiece.
The fingerprints of liberalism lie everywhere on this nation, from public
buildings built by the Works Progress Administration, to schools, roads,
homes, and utilities paid for by government grants, loans, and subsidies.
You cannot pass through the core of any city, drive on any road, visit any
national park, or enter any school, hospital, or government building without
passing over ground built by Liberal America. Liberalism pervades every
American household, where someone has benefited from government pro-
grams, ranging from college loans to unemployment, from the minimum
wage and collective bargaining to regulations assuring the safety of the food
we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink. We do not live in fear of
someone arbitrarily knocking down our doors in the middle of the night or
of not being able to speak our minds, because the people who fought for
those rights believed in the level playing field.
Perhaps one of the most unabashed liberals of all, Hubert Humphrey,
movingly described what Liberal America meant to him when he wrote
about growing up in a small South Dakota town during the Great Depres-
sion. Driven from their home, his family was in danger of breaking apart, as
so many had during those times when monstrous, choking clouds blacked
out all light and hope. ‘‘That period was to teach me,’’ said the future vice-
president:
What government can mean to a society, how government can really affect the
day-to-day lives of individuals for the better. It taught me what government
can mean in terms of improving the human condition and improving the
human environment. I witnessed how government programs literally rebuilt
the territory and made life again tolerable, filling people with hope.2
A generation later Humphrey’s successor, Paul Wellstone—who may have

been the last senator to openly claim the label ‘‘liberal’’—put his own gen-
eration’s stamp on Humphrey’s words. His short, stocky wrestler’s body
punctuating the rapid, rhythmic phrases that were his trademark as his
hands and arms moved to put a headlock on whatever issue he was con-
fronting, Paul Wellstone could recite a long list of what liberalism has
given America. One of his greatest speeches, given to the Iowa AFL-CIO in
1998, captures this perfectly. Wellstone starts one of his classic riffs, which
uses repetition to carefully build to his conclusion:
Introduction & 5
Because of you, families have more bread on the table.

Because of you, workers receive at least a minimum wage.
Because of you, labor has the right to organize.
Because of you, we have the right to join a union.
Because of you, working families have insurance against unemployment.
Because of you, workers have protections against unsafe workplaces. . . .
Because of you, working families have more economic justice.
And because labor is part of a larger justice tradition, because of you, our
children have protection against ravaged air and water.
Because of you, people have protection against discrimination because of the
color of their skin.
Because of you, women have protection against discrimination because of their
gender.
Because of you, people have protection against discrimination because of their
disabilities.
Because of these victories, even if they do not all yet work perfectly, the United
States became a better country, for all Americans.3
Although it may be argued that the birth of liberalism, or at least its direct
progenitors, lay in the ideas of Locke and others that spawned the American
Revolution, and its adolescence came with the next century, it certainly
reached maturity with FDR and the New Deal. The Great Depression and
the liberal response marked forever an entire generation of politicians and
citizens who knew what it was to have no hope for your next meal, let alone
your next dollar, and then have government come to the rescue. Even during
years of Republican presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, those values re-
mained strong, with Nixon proposing a guaranteed annual income, some-
thing George W. Bush would consider heretical.
Throughout the history of Liberal America, through good times and bad,
like a prairie house in a blizzard, the principle of a level playing field has
rested on four strong cornerstones, large weighty slabs quarried from bed-
rock principles then wrestled into place with superhuman effort by many
anonymous hands and shoulders. To some these cornerstones represent a
gift from a power or powers greater than our own.
The first is economic justice. From the traditions of the First Nations to the
Boston Tea Party through the campaign against the trusts to the reforms of
the New Deal, America has insisted that the haves not only shall not exploit
the have-nots, but that the fortunate have a moral obligation to help the less
fortunate. We may have sometimes puzzled about how to do it or failed to
fulfill its imperatives, but most Americans approved of the principle.
6 & Introduction
The second cornerstone is educational equity. Next to the Constitution,

perhaps the most unique and important American contribution lies in its
public school system, built on the belief that local residents could decide a
common curriculum. Fights over what that curriculum should contain have
been as common as grasshoppers on the prairie. Despite disagreements ev-
eryone agreed that public education should enable all of us to be active
citizens in our democracy.
The third cornerstone is media fairness. While we commonly salute the
idea of a free press, we tend to forget that America has always insisted that
with freedom comes responsibility. When this country faced the growth of
mass communications at the same time Adolf Hitler commandeered the
airwaves to propagandize a nation, we held that they belonged to the pub-
lic. To this we added the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine, which asserted
that the victims of media attacks deserved equal time to counteract the
vitriol.
The final cornerstone is the right of all citizens to be fairly heard in the
political process. It has proven especially difficult to make this cornerstone
bear its weight. Women have been able to vote for less than a century. In
1957 Utah became the last state to abolish discriminatory voting practices
against Native Americans. The Voting Rights Act did not pass until 1965
and then only against determined opposition.
Like the foundation of a house, if the cornerstones are not all equally
strong, our democracy will stand at crazy angles and begin to show ominous
cracks. Voting rights without media fairness can produce poor decisions as
voters become deceived about candidates and policies. Media fairness with-
out equal education leaves people without the ability to clearly evaluate
what they see and hear. Equal education without equal economic oppor-
tunity can leave even the most brilliant mind to whither under the evils of
poverty.
The particular genius of the generation that fought the American Revo-
lution lay in seeing that government must balance and level these corner-
stones. That is why they enacted the Bill of Rights. The experience of the
American people since then—and in many ways the key theme of American
history—has been that each succeeding generation applied this principle to
dealing with the latest attempt by the haves to stomp on the have-nots. That
is what the Civil War, the Progressive Era, and New Deal represent.
Over the course of this nation’s history the cornerstones have never been
the property of one political party or interest group. Republicans, Democrats,
Progressives, Federalists, and countless citizens’ groups have all built laudable
platforms on the four cornerstones. The cornerstones represent the vision the
Introduction & 7
larger world has of the American experiment. A young girl living in poverty in
Bangladesh, a wizened German standing by remains of the Berlin Wall, and a
Mexican businesswoman betting on an Internet site to sell village crafts all
instantly recognize and celebrate what Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural
termed the ‘‘better angels of our nature.’’
What these people share with those long ago communities like Lincoln,
Big Meadow, and countless others stems not merely from an intellectual or
even emotional attachment to egalitarianism, but something elemental to
the very meaning of the human condition: hope. Farmers dripping sweat on
red clay, nervous families juggling monthly bill payments, and workers
fearing a layoff notice still live under pinched horizons where hope can seem
elusive. For them, as for all of us, what we proudly call the American Dream
represents not merely a balance sheet of our material accounting, but more
importantly a moral tally of the ideal that everyone can achieve the promise
of his or her talents and character.
While the battle between equality and inequality weaves through human
history, its current manifestations should be our generational ‘‘fire bell in the
night’’—that ringing phrase Jefferson used to describe the impending Civil
War over slavery. In the raging storms of our times, the word liberal has
become a lightning rod attracting bolts of random, angry energy. In the
flashes of light one sees troubling contemporary developments ranging from
diminished voter participation to rising income inequities, and increasing
media concentration.
Perhaps the most appropriate metaphor for this contentious era comes in
the form of road rage. For all of us road rage has erupted into a disquieting
social disease, like a minor ailment that becomes something more incom-
prehensible and disquieting, for which every doctor has a cure and every cure
fails because the disease is not really understood. That road rage should
occur simultaneously with tax protests and other rumblings of unrest should
have inspired someone to connect the dots. Road rage blatantly severs the
social compact that binds us all, asserting with upraised finger that the col-
lective ‘‘we’’ no longer has any relevance. All that matters is me, a me entitled
to do whatever I like, because ‘‘we’’ no longer matters. Road rage appears as
shock jocks on radio, professional athletes preening their egos rather than
helping their teams, and, most of all, the take-no-prisoners mentality that
rules everything from city council chambers and corporate board rooms to
the halls of Congress.
Road rage symbolizes the desire openly espoused by many to kill Amer-
ica’s core belief in the power of government to do good for all the people, to
be the referee in our quarrels, to balance the scales for the common welfare.
8 & Introduction
As government and this social compact have become objects of disdain, the
playing field has not only become less level but also a combat ground.
Road rage certainly occupies center stage in Washington, like a rude party
crasher who eats with his fingers, belches after every bite, punctuates every
sentence with a profanity, tries to grope the hostess, and tells all the other
guests where they can go. Hard-ball legislative maneuvering and it’s-my-
way-or-the-highway tactics fill the bag of tricks of many who occupy seats
in Congress just as they fill the bag of tricks of any third-grade bully worth
his reputation. Newsweek spoke for many when it characterized retired
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as a ‘‘creature of the past.’’
‘‘Moderate centrists are a dying breed in Washington,’’ said the article that
came out just before July 4, 2003, ‘‘O’Connor’s genteel approach is almost
quaint in the current political climate.’’4 If the early 1800s represented an
Era of Good Feelings, our times should go down in history as the Era of Bad
Feelings. Today everything points to the increasing erosion of the level
playing field and the four cornerstones supporting it. As all of us struggle to
keep from sliding backward, anger, resentment, and finger pointing multiply
in what systems analysts call a negative reinforcing loop.
Statistics gathered by the pulse-takers of America confirm our deep divi-
sions. In the autumn of 2003, pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research
Center for the People and the Press reported that the overall gap between
supporters of both parties stood at the highest ever recorded. Kohut told Ray
Suarez of PBS, ‘‘This is a time of great emotion and problems for the country
and we don’t agree.’’5 Venerable Washington columnist David Broder used
the Pew findings to pen a Thanksgiving piece that dared to use a term we had
not heard for over a century, ‘‘Be thankful this Thanksgiving that no civil
war looms, for the divisions are everywhere to be seen. . . . It is clear in
retrospect that even the worst terrorist attacks ever on American soil were
not enough to unite the nation.’’6 Even the AARP weighed in, with CEO
William Novelli writing, ‘‘Partisanship has reached such an uncivil extreme
that it is dividing our political system, threatening its ability to function
and blocking solutions to the serious problems we face.’’7
These divisions have not gone unnoticed by foreign observers, who are
becoming increasingly concerned about America’s political and social road
rage. In its November 2003 survey of America, The Economist noted that in
our nation:
Politics has become warfare. What matters most is the size and bloodthirst-
iness of your troops, not winning over neutrals. Politicians take full oppor-
tunity to reach for weapons of mass destruction, such as Bill Clinton’s
Introduction & 9
impeachment or the recall of Governor Gray Davis of California. It is no

longer possible to agree to disagree. Your enemies must be ‘‘Stupid White
Men,’’ guilty of ‘‘Treason,’’ who live in a world of ‘‘Lies and the Lying Liars
Who Tell Them’’ (to quote the titles of three bestsellers).8
Today it is impossible to turn on the radio, watch television, or pick up a

newspaper without finding an example of the culture wars, which increas-
ingly resemble one of those professional wrestling extravaganzas where two
elaborately costumed, steroid-laden Neanderthals grope one another in a
steel cage or pit full of mud. Any American could readily supply a top-ten list
of examples. One on my list occurred on a July day in 2003 when congres-
sional Republicans summoned the police to evict Democrats from a room
where they had been caucusing. Juliette Eilperin and Albert B. Crenshaw
of The Washington Post commented that the incident ‘‘represented a low
point in the history of congressional comity.’’9
This enmity took center stage during the 2004 election. Sometime in
the distant future, archeologists probing American landfills, those grave sites
of dreams unfulfilled, will come upon a layer as singular as a vein in a rock
ledge containing lawn signs, bumper stickers, banners, mail, videos, and
other trash from this contentious contest. Much of the true garbage of the
election, however, will have vanished into the ether, for the Internet reso-
nated with barely-under-control hate that should leave no doubt we live in
the Era of Bad Feelings. In the nether reaches of the Internet, a wilderness
punctuated by the tangled trails of emails and listservs where potshots came
from the likes of ‘‘random,’’ ‘‘ch2,’’ and ‘‘coz,’’ lay electronic Tombstones
and Deadwoods featuring no-holds-barred brawling and a hair-trigger im-
pulse to shoot from the hip at the first perceived insult. Their names said it
all: johnkerrysucks.com, Hanoi John Kerry, Kerry Lied, Bush is an idiot
(by bushlacksabrain), Dictator Dubya: The Fraud Who Would Be King,
Deshrubify Amerikkka. At the frontier of the Era of Bad Feelings, all the
political and social animosity came together like the partisans of some
modern range war.
The title of this book suggests Liberal America is already dead, but in fact
it would be more accurate to describe it as being in intensive care. As you can
probably tell by now, I write from the perspective of someone who is inti-
mate with the patient, who stands in the waiting room, pacing back and
forth, nervously wondering what the next report will bring, wringing my
hands at the indignities heaped on the patient by those who do not really
have any clue about wants and needs, and frustrated with how those sup-
posedly caring for the patient are making things worse.
10 & Introduction
This book asks whether there is any hope for the future of the level play-
ing field. Paul Wellstone’s answer, of course, would be a resounding ‘‘Yes!’’
for Wellstone was, if anything, an optimist, convinced in his heart and mind
that people are by nature good. This optimism personified the anonymous
members of those long-ago boards, suggesting that contrary to the cynical
view of the American people held by many, when given their head, families
and neighbors will do the right thing. As a first-generation American whose
father fled political tyranny, I dedicate my work to that belief and the ful-
fillment of its hope and promise.
PART ONE
The
Counterrevolution
2 Economic Justice: Strom
A stunning photograph shows a rutted dirt road splitting rows of blooming

peach trees like a thick brown knife. Against the neutral sky, the ethereal
pink of the peach blossoms seems corrupted by the road, as if someone had
spilled something nasty on one of those flowing, pastel-tinted dresses fa-
vored by Southern belles in Hollywood’s idealization of a place and time
that exist only in the American imagination. Taken on a farm in Edgefield
County, South Carolina, the image’s contrasts unwittingly represent those of
its region. Google ‘‘Edgefield County images’’ and you find bucolic rural
scenes, an antebellum brick courthouse, and men posing around a dangling
black corpse.
Strom Thurmond came from this place located near the Georgia bor-
der, the home of nine other state governors. A resident wearing an old
‘‘Thurmond for President’’ button told a reporter after the senator’s death
in December 2003, ‘‘He never forgot his roots, he never forgot the peo-
ple of Edgefield.’’1 It is symbolic that many surrounding towns have the
suffix crossroads—Sullivan Crossroads, Millers Crossroads, Marthas
Crossroads—for Thurmond also made himself a crossroad during his cen-
tury-long life, in the process helping to remake America. His craggy face
already seemed chiseled in stone before he died, as if he was becoming a
granite monument right before our eyes. When he was born, Mark Twain
was writing, the Wright Brothers had yet to fly, and horses still served to get
people from here to there. A teenager during World War I, he fought at
D-Day during the Second, winning a chest full of medals. Returning from the
war, Thurmond ran for governor then went on to serve longer in the Senate
14 & The Counterrevolution
than anyone else, through the terms of eighteen presidents. He participated

in more than 15,000 votes or well over 100 for every year he lived. This
alone would cast him as a central figure in American politics, but Thurmond
represented more than that. As much as any politician, his story tells
America’s story over the last half-century, carving an arc like a Halley’s
Comet that portends momentous events. The event it foretells is the possible
death of Liberal America.
Thurmond, of course, was no liberal. At ninety-three, running in his last
campaign, he pledged, ‘‘I shall not give up on our mission to right the 40-
year wrongs of liberalism.’’2 The broad sweep of the senator’s career is well-
known: how he started out as a New Dealer, broke with the Democrats to
run on the Dixiecrat ticket, switched to the GOP, and later became an elder
statesman. When he first ran for office, U.S. Civil War veterans cast their
ballots for him and before he died their great-grandchildren did the same.
Some believe Thurmond mellowed as he grew older, but it is arguable how
much he changed or how much America changed. He brought his core
beliefs of states’ rights, less government, aversion to welfare and unions with
him the first day he walked on the Senate floor in 1954 and they remained
until the day he died. The real story lies not in the mellowing of Strom
Thurmond, but in changes in the rest of the nation, for much of the Thur-
mond catechism has become the foundation of the Republican Party that
currently controls Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court,
making it—for the moment—the reigning national ideology.
Thurmond’s story tells of a tangled marriage of convenience where in the
end no one knew who was using whom. Thurmond did not design the
Counterrevolution (Newt Gingrich seems anxious to claim this title) nor
serve as its intellectual inspiration (an honor many bestow on Barry Gold-
water), but he was one of the chief carpenters, helping to lay the foundation
and build the main structure. One of Barbara Tuchman’s best books is
A Distant Mirror, a history of the waning of the Middle Ages woven around
a French nobleman connected with the major events of that time. Had she
chosen to write about our own times she could not have found a better figure
than Strom Thurmond.
Like many old time lawyers Thurmond did not go to law school but did
what they termed ‘‘reading at law’’ with his lawyer father. From there he
moved on to become a judge, where like many of his contemporaries he
might have lived out his life as a pillar of the community. But along with
fellow veterans John Kennedy and Richard Nixon he got the politics bug
after returning from World War II, becoming governor of South Carolina in
1947. Those who make the case that he was no racist point out, ‘‘[He]
Economic Justice & 15
started out as a New Deal liberal Democrat, even when he was governor,’’
repealing the poll tax and prosecuting those responsible for the state’s last
lynching.3
In 1948 Thurmond found himself at a major crossroad where many across
the nation made their first acquaintance with him. During the Democratic
Presidential Convention, Hubert Humphrey gave a fiery oration that as-
serted, ‘‘The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the
shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of
human rights.’’4 Humphrey’s speech was not the only manifestation of the
growing Civil Rights Movement at the convention. President Truman noted
in his diary, ‘‘A Negro alternate from St. Louis makes a minority report
suggesting the unseating of the Mississippi delegation.’’5 In the end, the
Democrats added a civil rights plank to their platform.
Led by Thurmond, Southern delegates walked out. In the strategizing that
followed, the South Carolina governor found himself the presidential can-
didate of a third-party effort. The new States Rights Democratic Party knew
they could not win but several alternatives seemed possible: denying Truman
the presidency or throwing the election into the House of Representatives
for the first time since 1824. Truman pondered what to call them, settling on
Dixiecrats, the term we use today. Article four of their platform stated, ‘‘We
stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.’’6
Thurmond carried Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina,
one of the more impressive showings for a third-party candidate.
Elected to the Senate in 1954 as a write-in candidate—the only time this has
ever happened—Thurmond established himself as a voice for the die-hard
segregationists. One target became the Supreme Court, which he felt had
undermined the Constitution. In this era when people believe ideological
objections to Court nominees come with the Era of Bad Feelings, we forget
Thurmond tried to derail the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall, asking over
sixty questions, grilling him on the three Reconstruction amendments.7 As
head of the Judiciary Committee, he blocked the nomination of Abe Fortas
to succeed Earl Warren (Republicans who claim the Bork nomination began
the current nastiness over the Court conveniently forget this).
As the current Senate ponders abolishing the filibuster, we should re-
member Thurmond still holds the record for the longest, a twenty-four-hour,
eighteen-minute oration that sought to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Thurmond prepared for the event like a prize fighter, sweating in a steam
bath so he wouldn’t need a bathroom break, downing a sirloin steak, and
stocking up on throat lozenges and malted milk tablets. Filibuster legends
tell of senators reading from phone books, but Thurmond’s actually had
some substance as he recited the voting rights laws of every state, the Dec-
laration of Independence, and the history of Anglo-Saxon juries. ‘‘ ‘If I had
the time,’ he told the Senate to a roar of laughter, ‘I’d tell you all the
decisions handed down by this Supreme Court.’ ’’8 Those whose image of a
filibuster comes from James Stewart speaking until he passes out in Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington will be surprised to know that Thurmond ac-
tually sat down and even grabbed a sandwich in the cloakroom.
The key move and second crossroad in Thurmond’s career came in 1964
when he switched parties to work for the Goldwater campaign. Certainly at
some point in those years between his failed attempt at the presidency and
the formal switch, Thurmond must have realized where the waters he had
helped to muddy were flowing. Opposing attempts to make the Dixiecrats a
permanent third party, Thurmond realized that he and the Democratic Party
were incompatible. Culture and Senate rules had prevented many Dixiecrats
from bolting—being a Democrat was almost something one was born with,
plus switching parties carried the possibility that Southerners might lose the
committee chairs they had used to preserve segregation.
When Thurmond made the break official, he declared, ‘‘The party of our
fathers is dead,’’ blasting his former colleagues with his characteristic style.
‘‘If the American people permit the Democratic Party to return to power,’’
he said, ‘‘Freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed, and
individuals will be destined to lives of regulation, control, coercion, intim-
idation and subservience to a power elite who shall rule from Washington.’’9
As CNN’s special on Thurmond’s career perceptively noted, those words
became the bedrock of the Republican ascendancy I term the Counterrev-
olution. Put Thurmond’s statement in the mouths of any Republican pres-
ident since he uttered them and they would not be out of place.
Although Goldwater lost, his version of the Thurmond catechism of
‘‘states’ rights’’ won him South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,
and Georgia, along with his home state of Arizona. As he pondered his
comeback while the Johnson administration unraveled in the jungles of
Southeast Asia, Richard Nixon could not help but see the gift that Thur-
mond had boldly handed him. Thus the so-called Southern Strategy was
born, as the Republican Party began to court Thurmond and his colleagues,
who by now were in full flight from Johnson’s civil rights reforms. It ar-
guably still stands as one of the most brilliant and cynical political moves in
American history, perhaps equaled only by the nation’s back-pedaling on
Reconstruction during the late nineteenth century.
The man given much credit for the Southern Strategy was the one who sat
outside the Senate chamber with a pail in case Thurmond needed a quick
bathroom break during his record-setting filibuster—aide and later Nixon

White House Special Counsel to the President Harry Dent. While historians
debate how much Richard Nixon personally bought into the Thurmond
catechism,10 clearly he could smell the peach blossoms. His elevation of
Dent to the White House staff after the election sent a clear signal of his
alliance with Thurmond. Leon Panetta, who served as secretary of Health,
Education, and Welfare in the Nixon administration noted, ‘‘Strom Thur-
mond and others thought they had a commitment from Nixon to slow the
pace of integration. That was something that was never clear until I spoke
with people in the South and they told me they had an agreement with Nixon
on civil rights and desegregation.’’11
In 1968 Thurmond helped assure Nixon’s election by steering voters away
from third-party candidate George Wallace, who tried to duplicate Thur-
mond’s 1948 run. The former Dixiecrat campaigning against the upstart from
Alabama assured that Nixon captured enough southern votes to beat Hubert
Humphrey in an extremely close race. Wallace captured all the old Goldwater
states except Thurmond’s South Carolina, but Nixon captured the rest of
the South except for LBJ’s Texas. Wallace represented the perfect foil for
Thurmond, the sneer and heavy drawl branding him as a unreconstructed
redneck against which Thurmond seemed the more reasonable of the two, as
if the head of the Chamber of Commerce faced the Klan Grand Dragon.
Thurmond did more than hold the South for Nixon. He helped make
party switching acceptable for an entire generation of Southern leaders. A
hint of his impact lies in Senator Trent Lott’s now-infamous tribute to
Thurmond, ‘‘I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran
for President, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. (Applause) And if the rest
of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these prob-
lems over all these years, either.’’12 Few would argue that if anyone deserves
credit for making the Republican Party the dominant party in the South, that
person is Strom Thurmond.
His defection provided momentum for the Counterrevolutionary agenda
as he stood at the center of one of the greatest shifts in American politics.
One milestone became the Supreme Court, whose 1954 decision had so
outraged him. As one who insisted justices should only follow ‘‘strict con-
structionism,’’ he lived to see the Court take a rightward direction. The seg-
regationist who opposed Thurgood Marshall voted for Clarence Thomas.
Another monument is the Electoral College. Since John F. Kennedy, no
northerner has won the presidency. Nixon and Reagan were from Cali-
fornia, which is a world unto itself, and George H. W. Bush was part Texan,
part Ivy League. The only winning Democrats have been Southerners.
In 1976, Thurmond temporarily seemed to lose his grip on the South, as

another Southern governor, Jimmy Carter, made it into the White House, in
part due to the backlash against Watergate. Jimmy Carter may have been
one of America’s unluckiest presidents, facing the Iranian hostage crisis and
an economic downturn. Carter’s election had people talking about a new
South, but Thurmond knew better. The South may have seemed different,
but Thurmond, whose devotion to constituent services remains legendary,
knew the minds of the voters and how to capitalize on this political op-
portunity as he had on so many others.
In 1980 he threw his support to Ronald Reagan, an alliance marked by the
most prominent photograph at the website for Clemson’s Thurmond Insti-
tute of Government and Politics. Showing Thurmond standing with a
smiling Reagan, the picture has more than sentimental significance, for
Reagan’s place in the Republican pantheon is well-deserved. In The Rise of
Southern Republicans, Earl and Merle Black make a convincing case,
backed by a daunting number of charts and tables, that it was Reagan who
truly solidified the South for the GOP.13 Reagan’s genius lay in taking
Thurmond’s states’ rights philosophy and dressing it in respectable clothes,
turning it into opposition to ‘‘big government.’’ What some saw as unso-
phisticated prejudice received a makeover worthy of one of those television
shows that turns a wallflower into a magazine cover. Employing antigov-
ernment rhetoric that mirrored Thurmond, the GOP reversed the country’s
perceptions about government as a force for equity and turned it into the
enemy of the people. In his first inaugural Ronald Reagan uttered the now-
immortal phrase, ‘‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to
our problem; government is the problem.’’14 Strom Thurmond no doubt
nodded at these words the Republicans symbolically carved into the major
buildings of the Capitol.
When George W. Bush decided to run, Thurmond played a crucial role in
staving off the challenge of rival John McCain, whose war record and in-
novative policies made him a formidable challenger. McCain seemed on the
verge of upsetting Bush when the South Carolina primary made its way to
the front pages on the heels of McCain’s New Hampshire victory. As ev-
eryone knew, whoever won Thurmond’s endorsement probably would win
South Carolina. Without it, Bush might have lost the state, opening a win-
dow of vulnerability that could have taken McCain all the way to the White
House.
Near the end of his career, the press had much fun deriding Thurmond as
a man who should have had the good graces to retire. Such attacks failed
to understand the basic spirit—what athletes call heart—that motivated
Strom Thurmond. He could have retired in comfort, but his devotion to the
cause would not let him. He resembled an aging ballplayer who can no longer
reach the fences or throw a fifty-yard pass, but loves the sport too much
to quit.
At Appomattox, some of Lee’s generals urged their commander not to
surrender, arguing that they could continue fighting as a guerrilla force. Lee, to
his credit, disdained the idea, arguing that it would bring destruction to com-
munities that had avoided it (he probably had Sherman’s scorched earth
tactics in mind). However, one general ignored Lee. Nathan Bedford Forrest,
a former slave trader and brilliant cavalry tactician who presided over one of
the more appalling events of the Civil War, the Fort Pillow Massacre, decided
to continue fighting in a different fashion, becoming the first head of the Ku
Klux Klan. Although Fort Pillow has largely been sanitized in Civil War his-
tories, it is important to remember because it illustrates how the hot coals of
prejudice can suddenly flare up. It also testifies to the true depths of the feel-
ings behind the Civil War and the aftermath that continues to haunt us. Eye-
witness testimony by a surviving Union soldier shows the extent of Forrest’s
cruelty to African American families who sought protection at the fort:
The next morning I was lying around there waiting for the boat to come up.
The secesh would be prying around there, and would come to a nigger and say,
‘‘You ain’t dead, are you?’’ They would not say anything, and then the secesh
would get down off their horses, prick them in their sides, and say, ‘‘Damn
you, you ain’t dead; get up.’’ Then they would make them get up on their
knees, when they would shoot them down like a hog.15
While Forrest did urge the Klan to disband in 1869 and disavowed any
association with it after that, his career and the founding of the Klan were
eulogized by die-hard confederate D. W. Griffith as The Birth of a Nation
(1915).
Today Americans harbor smugness about feuds in other parts of the
world, as if the people involved in them lived just one step removed from a
cave entrance. Yet the history of the American South should serve as ample
reminder that this country, even today, has no immunity from struggles
similar to those in Iraq or Afghanistan. Ideological wounds can run deep,
sometimes becoming infected and even gangrenous as they ooze hatred and
violence. The conventional wisdom holds that if Lee’s directive had not been
followed or the North decided to rigorously enforce Reconstruction, the
South would have resembled today’s Iraq or Bosnia. But then, for those with
black skins the South became a war zone long after Lee signed his surrender.
In a way Griffith had it right. The long, sordid, muddled history of the
post-Reconstruction era needs no relating here as the North eventually left
the South to Nathan Bedford Forrest and others like him. Life for people
whom Lincoln had supposedly set free became a living hell ruthlessly en-
forced by goons cloaking their terror in white bed sheets. In addition there
were the notorious ‘‘Jim Crow’’ laws C. Vann Woodward and others have
meticulously documented. For the rest of the country the real guerrilla war
was not fought in the swamps, hollows, and pines, but in the staid marble
halls of Congress and the Supreme Court. The story of Strom Thurmond is
not one of violent military action conducted by a rabid racist, it is a tale of
political maneuvering that in effect allowed the values of Griffith’s ‘‘nation’’
to be absorbed into the Republican Party, an irony Abraham Lincoln would
find fascinating.
To understand this intellectual crossroads where two strands of thought
come together to create a major intersection, we need to return to the
document that helped create it, the Southern Manifesto, signed in March
1956 by nineteen Southern Senators and eighty-one Representatives. To
someone probing the American past like anthropologists probe Olduvai
Gorge, the manifesto represents the equivalent of the missing link in the
evolution of the Republican Counterrevolution. Like a primitive skull
fragment one can see in it the heavy-browed Neanderthalism of John C.
Calhoun and those who took this nation into civil war because they believed
that one human being could hold another in perpetual bondage. Yet one can
also see the manifesto evolving into something new, a more modern creature
who has lost the primitive features, learning to use more sophisticated lan-
guage and tools to reach its ends.
While history still associates defense of segregation with the Southern
Manifesto, not as well-recognized are its other philosophical underpinnings.
Although the manifesto did not go as far as Calhoun’s doctrine of nullifi-
cation, it stood squarely in the long tradition of Southern opposition to
federal intrusion. What had kept the Constitutional Convention wrangling
for long hours that steamy Philadelphia summer in 1787 and made the
adoption of their work less than a foregone conclusion flowed in the intel-
lectual blood streams of countless sons of Dixie.
The manifesto makes its opposition to Brown v. Board clear, stating, ‘‘We
pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about reversal of this
decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force
in its implementation.’’ It affirms the values of Calhoun with ringing lan-
guage: ‘‘We decry the Supreme Court’s encroachment on the rights reserved
to the States and to the people, contrary to established law, and to the
Constitution.’’16 These words espouse entirely different values than those

of Liberal America, defining a separate reality. As the nineteenth century
ended, the liberal tradition in the voice of candidates such as William Jen-
nings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson came to see the
federal government playing a central role in maintaining the level playing
field. The ideology of states’ rights has always viewed the federal govern-
ment as a necessary evil whose main functions should be national defense,
running the post office (and some question this), and refereeing intramural
squabbles. If a state chose to support slavery, that was its prerogative.
In her fascinating study of the Dixiecrat rebellion, historian Kari Freder-
ickson persuasively argues that the values preached by Thurmond meta-
morphosed into the beliefs of the Republican ascendency. ‘‘Thurmond and
the Dixiecrats represented a reaction to the modern welfare state,’’ she
writes, ‘‘that over time would reach a broader audience frightened by school
desegregation decisions, fair housing laws, and race riots and eventually give
rise to the backlash led by George Wallace and to the growth of the Re-
publican Party in the South.’’17 While Fredrickson confines her study to the
Dixiecrats, the line from them to the present can be traced. There is probably
no better example than the following lines from the 2000 Republican Plat-
form, which Thurmond could have written in 1956:
Therefore, in our effort to shift power from Washington back to the states, we
must acknowledge as a general matter of course that the federal government’s
role should be to set high standards and expectations in policies, then get out of
the way and let the states implement and operate those policies as they best
know how. Washington must respect that one size does not fit all states and
must not overburden states with unnecessary strings and red tape attached to
its policies.18
Another section has eerie echoes with the Southern Manifesto and its
objections to Brown v. Board,
Many judges disregard the safety, values, and freedom of law-abiding citizens.
At the expense of our children and families, they make up laws, invent new
rights, free vicious criminals, and pamper felons in prison. . . . The sound
principle of judicial review has turned into an intolerable presumption of
judicial supremacy.19
The Republican Party had been dragged kicking and screaming through the
reforms of the New Deal, a fact that an astute Harry Truman used to his
advantage when he ran against the Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress. In this

sense one of the more interesting questions about the Thurmond alliance be-
comes, ‘‘How?’’ Knitting together a rag-tag bunch of die-hard Confederates—
many wearing the equivalent of tattered and bullet-shredded uniforms—with
the starched white shirts and knife-pleated suits of what I term corporate free-
market fundamentalists does not appear to make sense—especially given
the long-standing belief the industrial power of the North led to the South’s
defeat. However, the intellectual rationale fits as snugly as a well-made dove-
tail joint.
Behind corporate opposition to Liberal America lay decades of support
for the prerogatives of the plutocrats who gave the Gilded Age its name. The
ruling philosophy of those times carried the name laissez faire, a fancy name
for government keeping its hands off business. Dating back to the French
Physiocrats and Adam Smith’s immortal ‘‘invisible hand,’’ some philoso-
phers, economists, and business tycoons believed that the best way to keep
the engine of capitalism running smoothly was for government to stay as far
as possible from trying to regulate it. In its more benign form, laissez faire
merely espoused opposition to government programs, but in its more radical
extremes it served to justify all sorts of shenanigans such as Jay Gould’s
attempt to corner the gold market, as if the invisible hand trumped laws,
justice, and morality. What laissez faire defenders fail to note is that, like the
steam engines that became symbolic of Smith’s dreams, when left unregu-
lated, things tend to blow up.
The most rabid defender of laissez faire was a popular Yale professor—
and, like John Kerry and George W. Bush, a Skull and Bones member—
William Graham Sumner. In various articles, books, and speeches he out-
lined his justification of inequality. Sumner believed ‘‘every effort to realize
equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.’’ He especially reserved his ire for
social programs and what his contemporaries termed ‘‘charity.’’ Writing
about ‘‘paupers,’’ he noted, ‘‘[He] who does not contribute either by land,
labor, or capital to the work of society, is a burden. On no sound political
theory ought such a person to share in the political power of the State.’’ As
for ‘‘the weak,’’ ‘‘they constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of
the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its
struggles to realize any better things.’’20 Many plutocrats found comfort in
such words and the words of the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, who
coined the term ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ and applied it to human behavior
even before Darwin published his works. A famous expression of what
historian Richard Hofstader called Social Darwinism came from oil baron
John D. Rockefeller, who believed ‘‘The growth of a large business is merely
a survival of the fittest. The American beauty rose can be produced in the
splendour and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing
the early buds which grow up around it.’’21
During the late nineteenth century, the Supreme Court became an ar-
dent enforcer of this idea. In 1886 the Republican-dominated Court issued
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, which ruled that
corporations are people entitled to the legal rights and protections the Con-
stitution affords the rest of us. Ever since, this decision has served as a par-
ticularly nasty thorn in the side of those who would use government to level
the economic playing field. The Court’s continual application of laissez faire
became so outrageous, that in 1905 it prompted one of Oliver Wendell
Holmes’ more famous dissents in Lochner v. New York. ‘‘A Constitution is
not intended to embody a particular economic theory,’’ he said, ‘‘whether of
paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez
faire.’’22
During and after the Gilded Age, laissez faire types opposed the income
tax, the eight-hour day, the minimum wage, and environmental regulation
as surely as the Dixiecrats fought civil rights. Behind what both saw as
unnecessary intrusions by an out-of-control federal government, lay a mu-
tual belief in inequality. The Dixiecrats believed in racial segregation behind
which lurked the doctrine of white supremacy. The rabid free-market wing
of corporate America has long seen economic inequality as the driving force
behind capitalism.
While Sumner, Spencer, Rockefeller, and some other so-called Social
Darwinists did not consider themselves racists, others used similar reasoning
to get to another, more noxious point. Richard Hofstader wrote, ‘‘Although
Darwinism was not the primary source of the belligerent ideology and
dogmatic racism of the late nineteenth century, it did become a new in-
strument in the hands of the theorists of race and struggle.’’23 Hofstader
pointed out that racism had a long history before the arrival of Social
Darwinism, but the two would prove to be compatible. In essence the cor-
porate fundamentalists and the racists of the nineteenth century represented
travelers walking the same path. Like two amiable companions who hide
disagreeable secrets, neither delved much into the life of the other, so the
racist made no more comment about sweatshop brutality than the laissez
faire capitalist would bring up plantation brutality. That the two should
meet again a half-century later should be no surprise. Seeing them together
again, it remains hard not to ask, ‘‘What took you so long?’’
The Southern Manifesto represented an intersection between this long-
standing opposition to government meddling in the affairs of business and
the South’s objection to its meddling in the affairs of the states. The stalwarts
of business fundamentalism, who have influenced the Republican Party for
over a century, acquiesced in the Southern Strategy. In part this may have
come because the Civil Rights Movement resurrected old specters that
haunted the nightmares of CEOs. If the federal government could tell the
South what to do even to the point of marching James Meredith through
the front door of the University of Mississippi, could it not do the same at
some manufacturing plant? The 1960s let loose diverse voices for freedom.
Not only did people of color have equal rights but so, too, did women. ‘‘My
God!’’ one can imagine the white men in gray flannel suits fuming, ‘‘some
nuts are even saying trees, water, even the air itself have rights?’’ To them,
such craziness was as deadly as anarchism or communism. So even as Bob
Dylan sang ‘‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’’ they were, only not in the
way Dylan imagined.
What built the crossroads between business and segregationist states’
rights lay in the Southern Manifesto’s roots in the South’s social and eco-
nomic culture. What W. J. Cash called ‘‘the mind of the South’’ has always
been an enigma, even to southerners. Wading into historiographical disputes
about the South has become akin to venturing into one of those archetypal
Dixie swamps where over-hanging trees of evidence make it difficult to see
the light, myriad channels of interpretation can quickly get you confused,
and snakes and gators of dogma threaten to take a healthy bite if you make a
careless move. Yet, the manifesto says a great deal more about values than it
does about states’ rights. Speaking of the ‘‘unwarranted exercise of power by
the Court,’’ it argues, ‘‘It is destroying the amicable relations between the
white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient
effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion
where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.’’ Elsewhere it
mentions ‘‘habits, traditions, and way of life.’’24
As most Americans now realize, the South in the nineteenth century was
not the peach-blossomed myth that colored the local reality of the South,
covering what has been variously described as a ‘‘feudal,’’ ‘‘hierarchical,’’ or
‘‘caste’’ society that made political offices such as those Thurmond held
early in his career as much inherited as earned. Frederickson astutely notes
the Dixiecrat rebellion ‘‘was also a response to mounting agitation for ra-
cial and economic democracy at the local level.’’ She goes on to point out,
‘‘For Black Belt elites, maintenance of the racial hierarchy and their own
economic privilege—in particular, access to and control over natural re-
sources and domination of a captive, low-wage labor force—were intimately
intertwined.’’25
While Frederickson focuses on the South of the 1940s and 1950s, the
persistence of the values she identifies can still be seen. Anyone opening an
almanac in the last quarter-century or familiar with social and educational
statistics is well aware of the dismal rankings of the old Confederacy.
Southern states typically rank near or at the bottom of surveys on education
and health care, whether in measures such as student performance or infant
mortality. The South’s poor performance has persisted for over a century,
hanging like a millstone around the neck of America. This tilted playing field
makes the climb for people of color particularly steep.
As it remade America, the Republican Party borrowed this template,
cutting back spending on education, health care, and welfare with a zeal that
would have pleased the Confederate apologists. A year after Thurmond’s
death in 2003, the GOP budgets for social programs in some states seemed
to be trying to emulate those of Mississippi and Alabama. In an Upper
Midwest that once held the values of government aid, some Republican
politicians preach that government needs to get out of the business of
leveling the playing field.
Less recognized is how all America has become more hierarchical, even
feudal. The lower and middle classes have been under siege now for over
a decade, with results that resonate suspiciously with Thurmond’s Dixie.
Perhaps it is fitting that two of the earliest critics of American inequality
should come from the city that gave birth to the Constitution. In 1992,
Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele wrote
America: What Went Wrong whose first chapter is titled, ‘‘The Dismantling
of the Middle Class.’’ Over a decade later, the PBS series Now extensively
documented the continuing middle-class ‘‘squeeze’’ on its Internet site,
which may be why the GOP has aimed its ammunition at public broad-
casting. Bill Moyers reported, ‘‘For many Americans, finding houses in the
affordable range is becoming a challenge.’’26 Barbara Ehrenreich has written
about the increasingly difficult lives of lower- and middle-class workers in a
series of books, including Fear of Falling, Nickel and Dimed, and Bait and
Switch. In his articles on the declining middle class, The New York Times’
Paul Krugman noted, a ‘‘C.B.O. study found that between 1979 and 1997,
the after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of families rose 157 percent,
compared with only a 10 percent gain for families near the middle of the
income distribution.’’27 Other statistics show that
in 1970 the top 0.01 percent of taxpayers had 0.7 percent of total income—
that is, they earned ‘only’ 70 times as much as the average, not enough to buy
or maintain a mega-residence. But in 1998 the top 0.01 percent received more
than 3 percent of all income. That meant that the 13,000 richest families in
America had almost as much income as the 20 million poorest households;
those 13,000 families had incomes 300 times that of average families.28
This section of this book is titled ‘‘The Counterrevolution’’ because the

accommodation reached between Strom Thurmond and the Republicans
represented a campaign to roll back the programs and philosophy of the
New Deal that had largely been shaped by Liberal America. In essence
whether under the guise of the Southern Manifesto, Reagonomics or the
Bush tax cuts, the Counterrevolution believes that a tilted playing field
is best for the economy and society. In their ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ view of
the world lies a sense that the steeper the tilt, the more those who master
this climb by whatever means become stronger, in turn strengthening soci-
ety. This author has neither the space nor the inclination to go into the
economic pros and cons of that argument. Rather what is important is
how the argument plays as a moral statement that eschews the tenets of
most major religions that the well-off have a duty to help the unfortunate.
Even Andrew Carnegie, who has been termed a Social Darwinist, believed
this.
Behind the worship of the tilted playing field lies an elitist view of human
nature that we can trace at least as far back as Edmund Burke’s warnings
about the excesses of the French Revolution. Burke looked across the En-
glish Channel as the spectacle produced by Madame Guillotine drifted
across the water. He believed that if given free reign the people could create
as much destruction as any dictator. ‘‘The effects of the incapacity shown by
the popular leaders in all the great members of the commonwealth are to be
covered with the ‘all-atoning name’ of liberty,’’ he wrote. ‘‘In some people I
see great liberty indeed; in many, if not in the most, an oppressive, degrading
servitude. But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the
greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition
or restraint.’’29 A paragraph from the Southern Manifesto echoes Burke:
‘‘The Founding Fathers . . . framed this Constitution with its provisions for
change by amendment in order to secure the fundamentals of government
against the dangers of temporary popular passion or the personal predilec-
tions of public officeholders.’’30
Today Strom Thurmond stands naked before history, stripped bare by the
revelation that he sired a daughter in an affair with a black maid. Like
the South itself, this man who opposed Martin Luther King Day in part
because of questions about King’s moral character, appears more complex
than the myth he sought to sustain. So the life of Strom Thurmond becomes
for many not unlike that Edgefield photograph, a rutted dirt road shaded by
peach blossoms. For half a century throwing bricks at Strom Thurmond has
served as a particularly popular Yankee pastime. Yet the old saying about
glass houses has never held so true. As much as I disagree with it, the
manifesto shows Thurmond’s ideas had a certain internal consistency. As
states’ rights became antigovernment, as laissez faire and segregation again
converged, what some viewed as regional prejudices and peculiarities were
revealed as having deeper roots. In my own Minnesota community Con-
federate flags flew from the pickups of a racist gang calling itself the All-
American Boys. Those peach blossoms, then, covered a great deal more than
Strom Thurmond or the South. Today, some appear more than ready to
scatter peach blossoms on the grave of Liberal America.
Educational Equity:
3 Devil’s Bargains
Seen from the air, Dover, Pennsylvania, could be one of hundreds of similar
American towns. Stretching in a broad slash across the North, stand the
humps of Appalachian foothills whose dense forests are virtually unscarred
by roads or houses. Around this small town of 1,800 residents lies an uneven
geometric pattern of brown and green fields that recalls the quilts popular in
area antique shops. South of the town near Route 30 and Interstate 83 loom
the tightly packed houses that mark York, a city of over 300,000 residents
and a variety of industries including the famous barbell company of the same
name. History buffs may remember that in York the Continental Congress
adopted the Articles of Confederation and proclaimed the first National Day
of Thanksgiving.
Yet what landed the area on the front pages in 2004–2005 is not history or
weightlifting but religion. The area is a hotbed of denominational diversity. To
the east lie Amish communities with quaint names like Bird-in-Hand, where
horse-drawn black buggies driven by bearded men in broad-brimmed dark
hats commonly share the roads with the cars of tourists. Then there is Ephrata
Cloister, an eighteenth-century austere religious community known for its
music and calligraphy. Lancaster spawned the Brethren in Christ, an Ana-
baptist splinter group whose early members shunned bright colors, jewelry,
and other frills. Dover itself boasts over twenty churches, an indication not
only of the religious spirit of the area but also its variety. This spirit no doubt
played a role in giving rise to what the press termed ‘‘the second monkey trial.’’
In 1960, when Stanley Kramer made Inherit the Wind, his movie about
the Scopes trial, it portrayed fundamentalist Christians as primitive rubes
who hung out in the backcountry of the American consciousness, a view

symbolized by the film’s opening featuring a lone, mournful voice singing
‘‘Give Me That Old Time Religion.’’ Little did Kramer or those watching the
film at the time guess that four decades later American education would
confront the ghosts of Dayton, Tennessee. Those well-mannered teenagers
with their 1950s haircuts that Kramer incongruously transported back to the
1920s would find themselves propelled into a future that Clarence Darrow
and William Jennings Bryan would find strangely familiar as we again found
ourselves quarrelling over religion in the classroom.
Americans thought they had overcome the outbursts of religious re-
vivalism that periodically have raged across the land. In these upheavals
whole communities could be driven into spasms of zealotry by sermons
that painted vivid pictures of the tortures awaiting unbelievers. Because
much of twentieth-century America had been free of these ‘‘awakenings,’’
many presumed they had become extinct. Like some slumbering great beast
in a faraway chamber of a deep cavern, the fundamentalists lay forgotten by
many Americans, who wrongly assumed that the beast was largely an arti-
fact of the past with no more relevance than a fairytale. Then the Southern
Strategy awakened the beast and once again he stalked the land. The Re-
publican Party and America would never again be the same.
When the GOP cut its deal with Strom Thurmond, its leaders may not
have realized what might come along with it, as often happens in alliances of
convenience. One of the most influential consequences of the Southern
Strategy came from those who could trace their lineage directly back to
Dayton, Tennessee. With Thurmond came what we now call the Religious
Right. Its assault on Liberal America would particularly impact the corner-
stone of education.
The beginnings lie in a long-standing internal struggle within Baptist chur-
ches between fundamentalist autocrats and individualistic pluralists. What
traditionally united the widely disparate strains of Baptism was the fact that
local Baptist congregations enjoyed great autonomy, perhaps because in remote
wilderness clearings where churches were built by raw frontier families, any
idea of centralized control was not only impractical but cut against the grain of
people who regarded taking orders with a skepticism reinforced by a quick
trigger finger. In this wilderness state, Baptists regarded faith as a profoundly
personal relationship between an individual and God as mediated through
Jesus Christ. According to a recent article by the Baptist Heritage Society, ‘‘No
church or ecclesiastical organization has control over a Baptist church.’’1
In the 1960s and 1970s, a power struggle intensified in the largest Baptist
organization, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), that reshaped not
Educational Equity & 31
only Baptists but also American politics. The battle lines lay between in-
dividualists believing in the personal faith tradition and authoritarian fun-
damentalists who asserted a more hierarchical view that placed matters of
faith squarely in the hands of doctrinaire autocrats. In 1978, the funda-
mentalists succeeded in electing Adrian Rogers to the SBC presidency, then
moved to gain control of other key executive offices. At first largely un-
noticed by the mainline media, this battle for control of the nation’s largest
religious denomination became as nasty as any no-holds-barred frontier
wrestling match. Some opponents of Rogers accused him of bussing in
supporters to pack the galleries and sway the voting.2 By 1998, the funda-
mentalists had gained enough control that they could revise the Baptist Faith
and Message that served as the central creed of the organization, a move that
had occurred only twice before in the century.
The 1998 revision attracted attention from the mainline press with some
of its more radical provisions. Section XVII on the family contained the
following controversial statement: ‘‘A wife is to submit herself graciously to
the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits
to the headship of Christ.’’ Section XV, the Christian and the Social Order,
set the denomination’s political agenda: ‘‘All Christians are under obligation
to seek to make the will of Christ supreme in our own lives and in human
society. . . . Every Christian should seek to bring industry, government, and
society as a whole under the sway of the principles of righteousness, truth,
and brotherly love.’’3
The revision also contained a section on education, which did not attract
as much attention as some of the other changes, but would figure mightily in
the future of this Liberal American cornerstone. It stated, ‘‘An adequate
system of Christian education is necessary to a complete spiritual program
for Christ’s people.’’ While the passage did not openly advocate a separate
system of Christian schools, ultimately for many it pointed in that direction.
By implication it also envisioned either inserting religion into America’s
public schools or a dual system featuring government aid for religious
schools. The passage on education also noted, ‘‘The freedom of a teacher in
a Christian school, college, or seminary is limited by the preeminence of
Jesus Christ, by the authoritative nature of the Scriptures, and by the distinct
purpose for which the school exists.’’4
When the revisions first became public, the major quarrel within the SBC
came over eliminating the basic premise of the faith that identified Jesus
Christ as ‘‘the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted.’’ As critics
recognized, this change made education the center of the dispute since it
centralized interpretation of the faith with the church leadership, giving
them power over what was taught in seminaries and who could teach there
as well as over individual congregations and worshipers. By striking out the
words, the Southern Baptist Convention had gone from one of the most
individualistic churches to one of the most dictatorial with the stroke of a
pen. When combined with the section on education, its consequences would
result in faculty purges along with a centrally controlled system of religious
schools marching to the same drummer.
This earned the wrath of former President Jimmy Carter, whose faith had
been one of the most public aspects of his presidency. In a formal statement,
Carter announced his resignation from the church, ‘‘I have been disappointed
and feel excluded by the adoption of policies and an increasingly rigid SBC
creed, including some provisions that violate the basic premises of my Chris-
tian faith. I have finally decided that, after sixty-five years, I can no longer be
associated with the Southern Baptist Convention.’’ Carter pointed particularly
to the controversial wording change, ‘‘Most disturbing has been the conven-
tion’s recent decision to remove Jesus Christ, through his words, deeds and
personal inspiration, as the ultimate interpreter of the Holy Scriptures. This
leaves open making the pastors or executives of the SBC the ultimate inter-
preters.’’5 At the same time Carter left the church, the new leadership voted to
admit someone previously scorned by many Baptists, Jerry Falwell.
All of this might seem an irrelevant theological quarrel were it not for
another event that occurred the same year as the revision of the creed. This
event had its roots in a political movement that remarkably paralleled the
SBC takeover. In the 1970s new people began appearing at Republican
caucuses, not the typical business types, but people concerned with issues
like abortion, school prayer, and whether Charles Darwin was descended
from a monkey. Some of them even openly carried Bibles and quoted chapter
and verse with the zeal of a missionary seeking to convert the heathens. They
began to bring others like them and soon the equivalent of a political great
awakening was under way. By 1980, Ronald Reagan felt the need to assure
a fundamentalist gathering in Dallas that he was one of them.
As they flexed their political muscles, fundamentalists created the Moral
Majority in 1979 and the Christian Coalition in 1989. While not directly
related to the Southern Baptist Convention, these political organizations
grew from the same fundamentalist roots and quickly became powerful
players in the Republican Party, demonstrating that the agenda of the fun-
damentalists was not merely to take over churches but also influence poli-
tics. Feeling their strength, the leaders of the SBC held a strategy meeting
with Republican leaders to discuss an alliance. Richard Land, president since
1988 of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission,
reportedly told the Republicans, ‘‘No more engagement. We want a wed-

ding ring, we want a ceremony, we want a consummation of the marriage.’’6
This quote has appeared in various sources, but Land denies he used those
words. He says, ‘‘I said if the Republican Party wants the support of people
who believe in God and who believe in the sanctity of all human life from
conception onward and believe in the traditional family and believe that
homosexuality is deviant and immoral behavior and shouldn’t be approved
and affirmed by the president of the United States, then they need to come
and endorse our values and our beliefs and our understanding of the truth.’’7
Like Richard Nixon’s arrangement with Strom Thurmond, the alliance
formed around these words became a Devil’s bargain made by the Repub-
lican Party to secure power. As we will see, the provisions of the 1998
revision of the Southern Baptist creed in essence became guiding principles
of the GOP along with those of Thurmond’s Southern Manifesto.
Three of the four partners of the Counterrevolutionary coalition had
fallen into place. The first were the corporate fundamentalists who detested
any government regulation of business. The second were the former Dix-
iecrats who fought for states’ rights. The intersection between the Dixiecrats
and the corporate fundamentalists sought to pull back the government’s role
in leveling the social and economic playing field. The intersection between
the Religious Right and other Counterrevolutionary members involved a
crusade that has come to be called the ‘‘Social Agenda.’’ Although the
fundamentalists’ position on issues such as abortion has received much
media and political attention, the linchpin has been education.
If Strom Thurmond personifies the first stage of the Counterrevolution,
Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition Executive Director, personifies the
second, for like Thurmond he has that Forrest Gump quality of being at
critical crossroads. Looking like a frat boy whose too-well-groomed ap-
pearance and smirking smile suggest he has played more than his share of
pranks, Reed’s early career is characterized by questionable actions. Nina
J. Easton, author of Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative
Crusade notes he was fired from the University of Georgia student paper
for plagiarism. He then worked with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff
and Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist to take over the
national college Republicans.8 Later he built Pat Robertson’s Christian
Coalition into a major force in the Republican Party. In the 2000 election he
served as an advisor to George W. Bush. He even managed to get himself
hired by Enron. After somehow landing on his feet after that fiasco, Reed
became head of the Georgia GOP, running for the lieutenant governorship in
2006. Reed illustrates the abilities—even the necessity—of key Republican
operatives to move seamlessly between the three worlds of politics, religion,

and business. In fact these operatives probably do not see the three arenas as
distinct, but part of one divine mission.
What helped consummate the marriage Land spoke of was one major
cornerstone of Liberal America: education. The Religious Right has been
dissatisfied with public schools for some time because by law America’s
classrooms have been nondenominational. The fundamentalists became
especially incensed as courts and legislatures ruled against school prayer and
the IRS moved to revoke tax exemptions for religious schools that served
as covers for segregation the way bed sheets covered Klansmen. As public
schools invested in programs such as diversity, fundamentalist Christians
bailed out of the system, forming private religious academies or seeking to
remove programs that did not agree with their theology. Finally, Darwin
again entered the picture as fundamentalists agitated against the teaching of
evolution while advocating what they called ‘‘intelligent design.’’
In Political Agendas for Education: From the Christian Coalition to the
Green Party, author Joel Spring zeroes in on a statement in which Ralph
Reed acknowledges, ‘‘More than any other single episode, the IRS move
against Christian schools sparked the explosion of the movement that would
become known as the religious right.’’9 Paul Weyrich, one of the architects
of the new GOP coalition, agrees with Reed’s analysis, noting that the Re-
ligious Right was born in response to two decisions by the Carter admin-
istration: the IRS ruling and the belief that the FCC planned to regulate
Christian radio stations (although imaginary, it was widely believed).10
Thus began the second phase of the Counterrevolution, built around a
series of Devil’s bargains that made their coalition the equivalent of the
New Deal coalition of Franklin Roosevelt. The Counterrevolution’s road to
power was paved by two crucial decisions that have played a major role in
creating the Era of Bad Feelings. The first came from the Supreme Court in
Buckley v. Valeo, a 1976 case revolving around reforms initiated after
Watergate designed to lessen the impact of money on the electoral process.
Those reforms resulted in making the election of 1976 one of the few in
which both candidates spent identical amounts. The Buckley decision up-
held the Watergate reforms with one notable exception: the Court ruled that
individuals and groups not affiliated with the official campaign had no
spending limits.
The GOP pounced on this loophole. In the 1984 campaign when Ronald
Reagan faced Walter Mondale, Republican Political Action Committees
(PACs) spent almost four times the amount of their Democratic counter-
parts: $15.8 million to $4.2 million. In 1988, independent expenditures
amounted to $13.7 for the Republicans and $2.8 for the Democrats. A
Brown University study summed up the effect of the changes: ‘‘Since the
GOP historically had a stronger base among big businesses and wealthy
individuals, independent expenditures advantaged Republicans more than
Democrats.’’11
This came as Sunday morning religious programs became serious busi-
ness, turning preachers into instant conglomerates with tentacles reaching
into every part of the media and, along with this, money for political or-
ganizing. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to give them their due, were
doing nothing that had not been done before by the likes of John D.
Rockefeller and Jay Gould. Only this time the money lay in churches with an
ideology to advance, particularly the remodeling of the American public
education system. Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, no
slouch himself when it comes to raising PAC money, detailed the con-
siderable clout of the Religious Right in a 1998 article, toting up the coffers
of various religious organizations and then favorably comparing them with
such heavyweights as the Chamber of Commerce. He admirably pointed
out, ‘‘The Christian Coalition has one million donors, l.5 million activists,
and 2000 local chapters that distributed 66 million voter guides in the l996
election cycle. Since 1990 the Christian Coalition has trained 52,300 com-
munity activists, 18,000 in 1996 alone. The 1997 budget was $17 million
dollars.’’12 Much of this considerable war chest came from the efforts of
Ralph Reed.
A second decision that became equally important for the Counter-
revolution was the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. First enacted in
1949, the FCC ruling looked into the future and decided that because they
operated in the public interest, the mass media should present all sides of
controversial questions. The Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine in
the 1969 Red Lion case, still generally recognized as one of the Court’s
landmark decisions.
Red Lion not only involves the Religious Right but also foretells exactly
what would happen with repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. The case began
when the Reverend Billy James Hargis, the Jerry Falwell of his day, accused
the author of a book on Barry Goldwater of being a communist. The author
sued under the Fairness Doctrine and the Court found in his favor. In its
decision the Court said the Fairness Doctrine serves to ‘‘enhance rather than
abridge the freedoms of speech and press protected by the First Amend-
ment.’’ It also noted that ‘‘when a personal attack has been made on a figure
involved in a public issue’’ the doctrine requires that ‘‘the individual at-
tacked himself be offered an opportunity to respond.’’13
In 1987, an FCC packed with commissioners appointed by Ronald Reagan

voted to repeal the Fairness Doctrine. When Congress tried to overrule the
decision by passing a law extending the doctrine, Reagan vetoed it. Just as
the Buckley decision opened the door to single-issue PACS, the repeal of the
Fairness Doctrine opened the media door wide for ideologues like Robertson.
On stage stepped a key actor in the next phase of the Republican Count-
errevolution, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich helped engineer the GOP takeover of
the House of Representatives in 1994 by making great use of Ralph Reed
and his allies. At the center of the takeover lay the Contract with America, a
Gingrich inspiration laying out his party’s agenda. The preamble makes no
bones about what the takeover would bring, stating, this ‘‘historic change
would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy
with the public’s money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects
the values and shares the faith of the American family.’’14 The second sen-
tence spells out the next phase of the Counterrevolution: linking distaste for
big government with the agenda of Jerry Falwell and the fundamentalists.
Manifestoes have always served as the core of radical movements com-
posed of true believers convinced they have the answer to every problem.
Nothing signifies this better than a sentence from the opening of the Con-
tract with America, which puts a religious cast on everything after: ‘‘Like
Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act ‘with firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right.’ ’’15 In other words, the zealots of
the Counterrevolution evoked secular saint Abraham Lincoln, linked him to
God and then themselves. History is full of people who believe they are
acting in God’s name and their record is hardly one that would inspire
confidence in the Contract with America. For most of us deciding what is
the best thing to do is a daily and sometimes agonizing task, full of doubts,
questions and not a few second thoughts, and the thornier the problem the
more difficult it is to decide what is right. That is why some of us go to
church each Sunday or seek other counsel, no matter what our faith, when
we face an especially difficult issue. The contract’s authors apparently have
no such doubts. They know what is right.
Fortunately for the Democrats, Gingrich stumbled on the supremely
confident zealotry behind the Contract with America. Possessed with an ego
that often goes along with thinking in terms of big ideas, Gingrich became so
identified with the document that it became difficult to tell the two apart.
Some saw a certain presidential gleam in Gingrich’s eye, a gleam that
hauntingly resembles that of Henry Clay, whose American System was one
of the key concepts of the pre–Civil War era. Like Clay, Gingrich produced
a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare. The Democrats ran their next campaign
against him, demonizing Gingrich so effectively they had America believing

that by eliminating him, they just might eliminate the Era of Bad Feelings.
Unfortunately, they suddenly faced a terrible dilemma—they had nothing
else to run on. Rather than zero in on the Counterrevolutionary attempt to
undermine the cornerstones, they aimed at Gingrich’s personality.
Gingrich’s contract received ample publicity, but less known is another
contract issued shortly thereafter under the auspices of none other than Ralph
Reed. The Contract with the American Family affirmed such pet causes as
reversing Roe v. Wade and condemning homosexuality, and continued to
take issue with public schools. The contract illustrates Reed’s acknowledged
genius in repositioning the fundamentalist agenda around what has come to
be called ‘‘family values.’’ Much as Ronald Reagan cloaked states’ rights in
the mantle of denigrating ‘‘big government,’’ Reed’s repackaging helped the
Religious Right to become more respectable. Although abortion has received
most of the attention, the most insidious part of Reed’s campaign focused on
education.
With even more hubris than Gingrich, Reed’s Contract with the American
Family took on biblical form, as if its author had found sacred tablets as
valuable as the ones Moses brought down from the mountain. The Second
of the contract’s Ten Commandments states, ‘‘Eliminate the Department of
Education and transfer most of its money to families and local school
boards, with the remainder going to deficit reduction.’’ It also called for
the repeal of Goals 2000, a federal initiative the Christian Coalition con-
tended ‘‘establishes ‘politically correct’ national education standards.’’ The
Third Commandment advocates, ‘‘Pass laws that enhance parental choice
of schools, including voucher programs and tuition tax credits that would
provide financial assistance to parents for use at the school of their choice.’’16
Republican leaders such as Gingrich and Texas Senator Phil Gramm ap-
peared prominently at the contract’s unveiling. Gingrich and Representative
Dick Armey even promised the Christian Coalition that for its support they
would modify the First Amendment.17
With a Democrat back in the White House in 1996, the GOP resoundingly
sacrificed Gingrich. In the soap opera plot of ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Newt,’’
many ignore suspicions that a major player in the Counterrevolution had
about him. While the current Gingrich website (NEWT.ORG—note the
caps) pays some obeisance to religion, including an audio titled, ‘‘The
Centrality of Our Creator in Defining America,’’18 the allegiance seems
forced. Gingrich has tended to treat the third member of the Counterrev-
olution much the way some Democrats treat organized labor, not as a cause
to be embraced, but as another interest group to be mollified. The tip-off
is education policy. Gingrich’s plan for ‘‘winning the future’’ specifically

mentions the importance of math and science education, but says nothing
about one of the fundamentalists’ key causes, creationism. Certainly some
on the Religious Right no doubt were more than happy to hold open the
door and give the rotund worldly philosopher a good push.19
After Gingrich came Tom ‘‘The Hammer’’ DeLay, whose tactics must
have made the Democrats long for Gingrich. Gingrich has about him the
demeanor of a stuck-up teacher’s pet who any minute will start conjugating
verbs in Latin just to show how smart he is. Tom DeLay has the demeanor of
a tightly wound spring, with each calculated tick impassively rendered on a
mask-like face that somehow does not seem all there. There is an incredible
amount of force packed away in those coils, force that hints at powerful
passions barely under control.
A former bug spray salesman, DeLay treats his opponents as he must have
treated all those foul insects, gassing them so they lie there squirming in
their death throes. Commenting on his nickname, he told The New York
Times, ‘‘The hammer is the most important tool a builder has.’’20 The
Hammer learned from his extermination business how to deal with vermin.
Rushing in with loud threats and high-sounding declarations like Gingrich is
akin to trying to catch cockroaches by shouting at them. The Hammer
knows better.
Number one, you stay off the radar screen and when you are in the
spotlight you behave. Up until his 2005 travails, The Hammer carefully
guarded his publicity. ‘‘I’m not afraid of getting on television, but at the
same time, I don’t see my role as the national spokesman for the party,’’
DeLay told PBS reporter Ray Suarez in 2003. ‘‘I see my role as to get things
done, make sure . . . these bills pass and reflect what the American people
want us to do.’’21 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is on to De-
Lay’s chameleon act. ‘‘Public images are funny things,’’ he wrote, ‘‘Newt
Gingrich became a famous symbol of Republican radicalism. By contrast,
most people know little about Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader. Yet
Mr. DeLay is more radical and more powerful than Mr. Gingrich ever
was.’’22
Along with Ralph Reed, DeLay represents the supreme personification of
the Counterrevolution. His antigovernment, anti-regulation views stem
from his days as a business owner in a field—pesticide use—that has come
under a great deal of scrutiny. DeLay is also not above using Dixiecrat
tactics to shut out people of color and cement his own base as he did when
he redrew the Texas congressional map. Most of all, DeLay has gone out of
his way to announce his religious views in key speeches. Tom DeLay has
cemented these connections through a Byzantine web of PACs and corpo-

rate lobbyists that some have styled ‘‘DeLay Inc.’’23 Norman Ornstein of
the conservative American Enterprise Institute notes, ‘‘Nobody has tried to
use the link with lobbyists the way Tom DeLay has. He’s tried to make sure
that in every private sector group there is a loyal Republican he can rely on,
and he uses them in an aggressive fundraising way.’’24
For fundamentalists DeLay must represent a welcome change over
Gingrich. The Christian Coalition’s Randy Tate thinks of DeLay as ‘‘a
Domino’s Pizza delivery guy. It’s there in 30 minutes, or it’s free.’’25 One
anti-DeLay website notes, ‘‘He is the religious right’s most reliable culture
warrior in the House.’’26 Since he first ran for office, he has endeared him-
self to the Religious Right by vigorously defending the injection of religion
into government. Commenting on President Bush’s faith-based initiatives
he said they provide a way of, ‘‘standing up and rebuking this notion of
separation of church and state that has been imposed upon us over the last
40 or 50 years. You see, I don’t believe there is a separation of church and
state.’’27
Perhaps one of the most bizarre applications DeLay makes of religion to
politics lies in his support for dispensationalism, a school of prophecy that
believes Israel must return to its former self before the Last Days can begin.
After a DeLay speech to the Israeli Knesset that ended, ‘‘May the God of
Abraham continue to bless the United States, Israel, and each and every one
of you,’’28 several writers zeroed in on his injection of religion into foreign
policy. Jan Jarboe Russell wrote,
DeLay, a fundamentalist Christian who is by definition unreasonable, is not

interested in any modern maps of the Mideast. From behind his own peculiar
version of the religious veil, DeLay believes that God gave Israel and the West
Bank to the Jews, and that not one square inch of it can be relinquished. . . . The
alliance between Christian fundamentalists and conservatives in Israel is the
ultimate Faustian bargain.29
An August 1, 2003, Los Angeles Times editorial echoes this view:

‘‘DeLay’s . . . Christian Zionist religious belief holds that a Jewish Israel is
necessary for the second coming of Jesus Christ. . . . That view abjures ne-
gotiation since compromise by Israel would interfere with the fulfillment of
the prophecy.’’ The editorial concludes, ‘‘Americans are justly proud of this
nation’s long history of tolerance. But that tolerance is stretched hard by
lawmakers who pass off their personal views as foreign policy, even if more
bloodshed could result.’’30
By the 2000 campaign, the marriage between the GOP and the Religious
Right had become solid. The Republican platform incorporated many of the
demands made in the Contract with the American Family, particularly in
education. Echoing the Second Commandment is the following platform
language, ‘‘Since over 90 percent of public school funding is state and local,
not federal, it is obvious that state and local governments must assume most
of the responsibility to improve the schools, and the role of the federal
government must be progressively limited as we return control to parents,
teachers, and local school boards.’’31 The platform also supports the Third
Commandment’s call for ‘‘school choice,’’ stating, ‘‘We advocate choice in
education, not as an abstract theory, but as the surest way for families,
especially low-income families, to free their youngsters from failing or
dangerous schools and put them onto the road to opportunity and suc-
cess.’’32 The platform even goes beyond Reed’s contract, calling for the
establishment of ‘‘faith-based’’ after-school programs.
Winning candidate George W. Bush went out of his way to declare his
allegiance, making prominent mention of his religious conversion experience
during the campaign. Since then Bush speeches have often included references
meant to solidify his relationship with the fundamentalists. In the 2003 State
of the Union address Bush dropped a reference to a ‘‘power, wonder—
working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American
people.’’33 The words are familiar to anyone who has sung Baptist hymns.
The title of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge to Keep, comes from another
Baptist hymn. Bush communicates in a code understood by initiates, but
appearing innocent to those who do not know it. In the movie version of All
the President’s Men, Deep Throat in the stentorian voice of Hal Holbrook
provides the big clue, saying, ‘‘follow the money.’’ In the GOP’s case, more
pertinent advice might be, ‘‘follow the scriptures.’’ America, which once
wondered if the Vatican would call the tune for John Kennedy, now found
George W. Bush publicly expressing support for teaching ‘‘intelligent design.’’
A president essentially supporting what brought John Scopes into court
three-quarters of a century ago represents the worst nightmares of Clarence
Darrow or Inherit the Wind director Stanley Kramer. The real target of
Inherit the Wind was not fundamentalism, but Joseph McCarthy. Little could
the authors of the original play have foreseen a sitting president endorsing
‘‘intelligent design’’ or that the play’s theme of intellectual freedom would
be turned on its head by those asking for ‘‘equal time’’ for antievolution
ideas.
As skirmishes between fundamentalists and others have heated up, state
and local school boards have battled over the curriculum. A PBS website
on evolution (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/religion/revolution/1990
.html) contains an excellent summary, referencing textbook disclaimers and
the 1999 decision by the state of Kansas to drop evolution from public
school curricula. Perhaps the most eye-opening is Tom DeLay’s statement
on the 1999 Columbine High School killings. ‘‘Our school systems teach the
children they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of
some primordial soup of mud,’’ he said, explaining why fifteen people died
in Littleton, Colorado.34
That DeLay’s beliefs should surface in a rural Pennsylvania community
demonstrates the power of religious ideology to cover a great deal of ground,
encompassing not merely the Bible Belt but the entire country, not merely
the Southern Baptist Convention but a variety of churches preaching a sim-
ilar message. There is a tendency to see the Religious Right as a single,
monolithic organization, but interestingly its closest parallel lies in a similar
web of fundamentalist Muslim organizations. The story of one church is
illustrative.
The Lighthouse Baptist Church in Dover, Pennsylvania, is not a member
of the SBC, but rather is what is termed an ‘‘independent’’ Baptist con-
gregation. A prominent link on the church’s website takes you to an orga-
nization called The Sword of the Lord. A controversial group founded
in 1934 by Dallas, Texas, pastor John R. Rice, The Sword of the Lord
represents a well-honed multimedia weapon. The masthead of its national
publication, The Sword of the Lord, states it is ‘‘an Independent Christian
Publication, Standing for the Verbal Inspiration of the Bible, the Deity of
Christ, His Blood Atonement, Salvation by Faith, New Testament Soul
Winning and the Premillennial Return of Christ; Opposing Modernism,
Worldliness and Formalism.’’35 The name of the organization and its pub-
lication is revealing, in that the medieval Italian friar Savonarola, who
briefly ruled Florence as a ‘‘Christian Republic,’’ was known as the ‘‘Sword
of the Lord,’’ for his fiery sermons and beliefs. Savonarola ordered the in-
famous Bonfire of the Vanities, in which his agents went door to door col-
lecting anything the friar deemed immoral and then burning the offending
material in Florence’s main plaza.
While the Baptist Sword of the Lord has not advocated anything like
Savonarola’s republic, it has played a large and controversial role in the
fundamentalist community. It was The Sword of the Lord that published
John R. Rice’s belief that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the result of
the ‘‘curse’’ of a liquor-selling father. The Sword of the Lord also helps us to
better understand the connection between fundamentalists and the former
Dixiecrats whose opposition to Civil Rights resulted in the Southern Strat-
egy. While the full story of The Sword’s role in opposing Civil Rights has yet
to be told, it is clear John Rice was not a friend of the movement, once
stating that ‘‘false compassion’’ was the cause for the riots that rocked the
country in 1968.36 The Sword of the Lord also helped to put Jerry Falwell on
the national stage when in 1979 it published his book, America Can Be
Saved! Falwell wrote, ‘‘I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days
of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have
taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy
day that will be!’’37 The SBC’s Adrian Rogers has stated, ‘‘I believe that
some of the basic convictions I have were first born in my heart from reading
The Sword of the Lord as a nineteen-year-old college student.’’38
As a supporter of The Sword, the Lighthouse Baptist Church has been one
of several in Dover that defended the local school board’s decision to inject
‘‘intelligent design’’ into the curriculum. During one reporter’s visit, the
church’s front table featured a plastic bag of buttons saying, ‘‘I support Dover
school board.’’39 Intelligent design holds that since some natural phenomena
such as human DNA seem too well-designed to have occurred randomly they
must represent the efforts of a creator. To most reputable scientists this may
seem acceptable theology, but profoundly misrepresents what science is
about. To counter the charge that this was merely creationism in new clothes,
the Dover board’s tactic was an especially clever one: rather than actually
teach intelligent design, the board merely required that before beginning the
study of evolution teachers read a short statement to their classes. When some
teachers rebelled at this, the superintendent read its words:
Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence

is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there
is not evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies
a broad range of observations.
Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from
Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available in the
library along with other resources for students who might be interested in
gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.
With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind.
The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students
and their families.40
In December 2004, eleven parents filed a lawsuit against the district

claiming the statement constituted injecting religion into public education.
Unlike Scopes, which many mistakenly believed ended the evolution debate,
Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District represents a skirmish in a

larger war that will sooner or later be fought in the marble chambers of the
U.S. Supreme Court. Certainly the success of fundamentalists with the Re-
publican Party has created a powerful reinforcing loop as religious zealots
emboldened by political success become stronger, in turn forcing politicians
to cater to them more overtly. The state that once spawned GOP progressive
William Scranton now boasts a senator—Rick Santorum—who supports
intelligent design.
For Liberal America the creationism debate is not about science but about
whether schools should teach a particular religious ideology. Other religions
have what they feel are equally valid explanations for natural events, any of
which might pass under the label of intelligent design, but they are ignored by
the Christian fundamentalists. As Inherit the Wind made clear, when a par-
ticular religious doctrine comes to govern our public schools, then they lose the
public part of their name and become instead places to conscript young minds
as shock troops in a holy war. Dover voters, however, know what they think
about injecting religion into public schools. In an election held days after final
arguments in the case, they threw the ringleaders of the ‘‘intelligent design’’
movement off the school board. ‘‘I think voters were tired of the trial, they
were tired of intelligent design, they were tired of everything that this school
board brought about,’’ said Bernadette Reinking, one of the winning can-
didates.41 In a sense the Dover voters confirmed a venerable American truth:
It is one thing to argue over separation of church and state in other arenas,
but in education the entry of religious ideology into the curriculum and the
cries for the government to fund religious institutions represents an espe-
cially serious problem. It would dismantle our local schools and in essence
fund the American equivalent of those so-called ‘‘Ayatollah Academies’’ we
deplore.
In its survey on American exceptionalism, The Economist noted how the
embrace of the Religious Right by the Republican Party disturbs and baffles
other countries:
To Europeans, religion is the strangest and most disturbing feature of Amer-

ican exceptionalism. They worry that fundamentalists are hijacking the coun-
try. They find it extraordinary that three times as many Americans believe in
the virgin birth as in evolution. They fear that America will go on a ‘‘crusade’’ (a
term briefly used by Mr Bush himself) in the Muslim world or cut aid to poor
countries lest it be used for birth control. The persistence of religion as a public
force is all the more puzzling because it seems to run counter to historical
trends.42
For Liberal America the events taking place in a town located between
Valley Forge and Gettysburg dramatize the continued insinuation of fun-
damentalist Christianity into our politics. The larger story has all the marks
of the ‘‘Boiled Frog Parable,’’ which says that if you want to boil a frog, you
do not just drop him into the bubbling cauldron, because he will im-
mediately jump out. Instead you very gradually turn up the heat so the frog
does not know what is happening until it is too late. That story is the story of
Liberal America and its belief in the level playing field. Right now it’s in
some very hot water that is already bubbling around the edge.
4 Voting Rights: Bush v. Gore
Architect Cass Gilbert had a thing about marble. Maybe it was because he
was born one step removed from the frontier a year before Edmund Ruffin lit
the cannon that fired on Fort Sumter. They almost ran him out of Minnesota
because he insisted on using Georgia marble for the capitol of a state that
revered its regiment’s heroic stand at Gettysburg. When it came time to
choose the stone for the U.S. Supreme Court building exterior, the architect
specified the cream-colored Vermont marble that also would be used for the
Jefferson Memorial. That Gilbert made the right choice is obvious to any
Washington tourist, for although it was the last of the three major govern-
ment buildings to be built, it looks like it belongs with the White House and
the Capitol dome. Gilbert died a year before they finished his building in
1935, but will always be with it since his likeness is one of six figures over the
words ‘‘Equal Justice under Law’’ that crown the main entrance.
The state whose marble gave birth to the U.S. Supreme Court building is
a place of mountains and valleys where perspective can be fleeting. The
horizon can seem claustrophobic in valleys carved by rivers and streams.
Something that may be a mere five minutes away cannot be seen or even
imagined. Take a few steps on a muddy trail and you could find yourself
entangled in an overgrown blackberry thicket that insistently tears at your
clothes. Just as quickly, the trail can suddenly put you on the edge of a
meadow whose stone fences remind you of the hope that it took to settle this
land.
Perhaps this landscape is what makes Vermonters an independent lot who
can see nothing out of the ordinary in the fact that their representative,
Bernie Sanders, is now the longest-serving independent in the House. Not

surprisingly, Vermonters who fought in the American Revolution declared
their state an independent republic in 1777, minting their own coins and
providing their own postal service. It took some tough negotiating to get
Vermont to join the fledgling United States of America in 1791, becoming
the fourteenth state to join the union. One can grasp how an irascible farmer
named Ethan Allen spawned the legend of the Green Mountain Boys or Ben
and Jerry decided to make ice cream not far from where the Von Trapps
built their lodge.
The history of Vermont makes you wonder if some of the state’s feistiness
does not inhabit that Supreme Court marble. It certainly seems to infect the
protestors who gather under Gilbert’s visage every court session. As they
marshal on the steps, they literally stand on Vermont ground to cheer for
their side with all the spirit of football fans rooting for the home team—
complete with hand-lettered signs, crazy costumes, and victory chants. Like
everything else in the Era of Bad Feelings, the protestors’ actions seem to
have been turned up a notch, especially for divisive issues like abortion.
Bundled against the December chill in 2000, the protestors enthusiasti-
cally turned out for Bush v. Gore, as if their signs and chants could sway the
outcome. One Gore supporter held a drawing of George W. Bush and Uncle
Sam pulling on Florida. ‘‘But Jeb promised it to me,’’ said the caption. This
was countered by a large sign proclaiming, ‘‘T-minus 40 days until the Gore
White House delousing.’’ Other signs read, ‘‘Bush needs a brain, Cheney
needs a heart’’ and ‘‘Gore needs a job!’’1
The signs echoed other public reactions. The titles of two articles capture
the mood, Jamin Raskin’s ‘‘Bandits in Black Robes’’ and Vincent Bugliosi’s
‘‘None Dare Call It Treason.’’2 These titles contain all the partisan, high-
octane bitterness that justifies calling our times the Era of Bad Feelings. The
tone even entered the marble halls of the Supreme Court, where in his dissent
Justice Stevens noted that the majority opinion ‘‘can only lend credence to
the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.’’3 For
the two political parties it will take a long time for the bad feelings to recede.
Democrats will continue to believe the decision represents the equivalent of
the yet unproven ‘‘Devil’s bargain’’ between Henry Clay and John Quincy
Adams that made Adams president. To Democrats, justices who had main-
tained a Thurmond-like inviolability of states’ rights in case after case, sud-
denly did an about-face that rivals Henry VIII changing his religion to get a
divorce. On the other hand, Republicans will continue to assert that Al Gore
should have done what Richard Nixon did in the disputed 1960 election and
bow out gracefully.
Voting Rights & 47
The bitter partisan bickering over Bush v. Gore has left enough waste by
the side of the road that it will take a long time to clean up the mess. But, as
we all know, it needs to be cleaned up. Somewhere under the cardboard fast
food containers left by election workers examining ballots, somewhere be-
neath the garbage that flew back and forth from one side to another, some-
where beneath the opinion columns crumbled by angry readers, somewhere
under the cigarette butts smoked by millions of citizens glued to their tele-
visions, we lost something that desperately demanded recovery—the Con-
stitution. One cannot approach the events surrounding the Supreme Court
decision without asking, ‘‘Had the electoral process—and with it the cor-
nerstone of voting rights—become compromised?’’
To anyone watching the election returns, the Laurel and Hardy act put on
by the news anchors and their pundits became a comedy that made shambles
of the questionable process of calling state elections before the official ballot
count. Like comedians trying to move a huge piano up the steep stone steps
of a hillside house, the networks labored at pushing their heavy pro-
nouncements upward, huffing and puffing with self-importance, and a little
bickering thrown in, one laborious step at a time, making sure none of us
missed any of it. Then all of a sudden that piano would slide back to where it
started, and the networks would pick themselves up, dust off their suits,
perhaps mumbling off-mike to their so-called experts, ‘‘Here’s another
fine mess you’ve gotten me into!’’ So Florida changed colors until someone
finally had sense enough to put a question mark on it, where it remains
today. The networks’ Florida disaster set the stage for everything that
followed.
Perhaps that is because in America the networks have become de facto
president-makers, having replaced the Electoral College as the prime certi-
fier of election results. Regardless of the accuracy of their polling methods
(which were questionable in Florida and again in 2004), allowing the net-
works to crown winners before election officials have tallied all the votes
makes them the true election judges. Symbolism is important in supreme
national events and there is no more supreme American event than an
election. By allowing the press to call elections, rather than the democratic
institutions given that charge by the Constitution, we have enshrined the
media in probably the most important symbolic role in this nation. We
might as well have television anchors swear in the new president rather than
the chief justice.
That night Florida’s changing colors alerted viewers that something very
strange was happening, a feeling that heightened as network interviews
hinted that new returns would change the results. Anyone who did not
suspect trickery must have gone to bed early. Al Gore’s infamous retracted
concession only enhanced the illusion act. In that shifting position could be
seen everything that makes the Democrats resemble the Hokey-Pokey Party
(you put your right foot in, you put your right foot out . . . ). Coupled with
the networks’ Laurel-and-Hardy act, Gore’s change stirred up controversy
long before people started arguing over hanging chads.
In the end the country became weary of the wrangling that had soiled the
halls of Congress and the marble eminence of the Supreme Court with a
political mud wrestling match that reduced black-robed justices to the level
of a cheap thrill. We are left with the voluminous commentaries on the case,
a tangled mess soaked by the storm over a decision that may go down as the
Dred Scott of our times.
At no point has the Gore campaign suggested that voter fraud has cost
them votes. Were that the case, we would be in wholehearted support of
their complaint.
—The Editors, Wall Street Journal
In the end, I suppose, we have to concede that there is no way to get

a true picture of how Florida voted.
—Alan Brinkley, Slate
When partisan election officials know for a fact that a few votes could
change the outcome, they can’t help but be tempted to tilt their recounts
accordingly. And, even if they resist the temptation, who will believe
them?
—Jonathan Rauch, New Republic
So four decades of judicial activism, at both the state and federal levels,
mostly unchallenged by other branches of government, culminates in
this: judges may now select the next president of the United States.
—William Kristol, New York Times
It’s one thing to play ball when your party controls one or two branches
of government; it’s quite another when the other party controls all
branches of the government and mistakes the narrowest of victories for
the broadest of public mandates.
—Nicholas Confessore, American Prospect4
Voting Rights & 49
As for the justices they seemed equally far apart. The main theme unifying
the opinions becomes the Era of Bad Feelings itself with its tendency to turn
things into a shouting match. The decision by justices Rehnquist, Scalia,
and Thomas notes the recount ‘‘was done in a search for elusive—perhaps
delusive—certainty as to the exact count of 6 million votes.’’ The dissent by
justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer states, ‘‘On rare occasions, however,
either federal statutes or the Federal Constitution may require federal ju-
dicial intervention in state elections. This is not such an occasion.’’ This
opinion ends, ‘‘What must underlie petitioners’ entire federal assault on the
Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impar-
tiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions
if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly
without merit.’’5
Was this yet another Watergate in which one side tries to minimize the
damage while the other works equally hard to make it look as bad as pos-
sible or was it merely another manifestation of the rancor and confusion of
our times? The answer hinges on whether you believe that Bush v. Gore has
as much to do with voting rights as with the Supreme Court. In the end, no
matter how the justices had voted, the real meat of the case concerned the
weakening of one of America’s most hallowed rites, that private confes-
sional where a voter alone with a ballot assesses sins and atones for them.
A neglected photograph shows how close we may have come to losing that
cornerstone. It shows a crowd of well-dressed people gesturing and yelling.
A trio in white shirts dominates the center of the frame, their mouths gaping
in a wordless shout. Two point accusing fingers. Another holds up a dra-
matically clenched fist. Around them stand about a dozen obviously angry
people, also with clenched fists. A woman wearing a red vest in the lower
right of the image provides the only color to a scene that could have been
photographed in black and white.
The picture shows the infamous ‘‘Brooks Brothers Riot,’’ an event from
the Florida controversy that has all but receded from memory and hardly
appears in accounts of that autumn. In the Brookings Institution book and
collection of commentaries on Bush v. Gore, there is not a single reference to
it. The Washington Post helpfully identified most of the people in the
foreground: Tom Pyle, at that time an aide for Tom DeLay; Chuck Royal,
who is still legislative assistant to Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.); Duane
Gibson, an aide on the House Resources Committee; Garry Malphrus, a
former staff director of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on criminal jus-
tice; Rory Cooper, who was at the National Republican Congressional
Committee; and Matt Schlapp, then a Bush campaign aide. The ‘‘Lady in
Red,’’ is Layna McConkey Peltier, a former congressional aide who was at

Steelman Health Strategies at the time of the photograph.6
Like everything else about Bush v. Gore, the Brooks Brothers Riot pro-
vokes wide disagreements about its significance. The name comes from the
well-heeled and somewhat clone-like look of the participants, as if instead of
fatigues and helmets this army was issued business suits for uniforms, suits
that identify their users’ ranks as surely as shoulder stripes: mid-level lieu-
tenants and captains that commanded others who were expected to follow
orders as easily as they obeyed the demands of their superiors. In the Era of
Bad Feelings where language has become a particularly pointed tool, getting
to the bottom of an event such as the Brooks Brothers Riot can involve
dissecting nouns, verbs, and adjectives as if performing an autopsy. Ignoring
for the moment the use of the either volatile or ironic word ‘‘riot,’’ what
happened inspired some interesting reactions.
As Miami-Dade election officials worked their way through the laborious
task of recounting ballots, this group of Republican activists, angry that the
recount was not proceeding as they wanted, forced their way into the room
and confronted the vote counters, who in response finally ceased their task.
In covering the event, Time magazine observed, ‘‘The way the Republicans
went after it, by intimidating the three-member board or by providing the
excuse it was looking for, gave Americans the first TV view of strong-arm
tactics in what was supposed to be a showcase of democracy in action.’’7
The Democrats.com website asked, ‘‘Did the Bush campaign engage in mob
action that resulted in Miami-Dade County stopping their recount? Was it
akin to intimidating a jury, which is a felony?’’8 In a McLaughlin Group
end-of-the-year ‘‘awards’’ discussion commentator Michael Barone picked
the Brooks Brothers Riot as ‘‘Best Photo Op,’’ commenting, ‘‘Oh, I’d pick
those Miami-Dade protestors, those Republicans that were supposedly a
mob who were protesting when the Board of Canvassers proposed to take
the count outside of public view, in violation of Florida law.’’9
So what did happen? For starters, the riot has links to the Republican
Party. Accessing the IRS documents of the Bush Cheney Recount Fund
provides fascinating evenings of reading, opening the door just a bit into the
inner workings of an organization aimed at keeping Florida a red state.
Initially, to someone bleary-eyed from perusing the documents associated
with Bush v. Gore, the prospect of slogging through over a thousand pages
of additional evidence does not sound promising, but the effort does pay off.
Pages of mundane expenses detail payments to Einstein’s Bagels, Best Buy,
Cort Furniture Rental, and AT&T. Airline expenses provide some idea of
the magnitude of the effort, ranging from $101,000 to Delta and $64,000 to
Voting Rights & 51
American to several thousand for Northwest and U.S. Air. The name of
Enron appears several times in the list of expenditures, a link the Bush camp
would probably just as soon not have in the reports. They made corporate
jets available to transport staffers.10 There are also payments to Garrett
Sound and Lighting, Beach Sound Inc., and the House of Masquerades that
allegedly paid for a party for the rioters.11 Then as you slowly work your
way down the columns names jump out: Schlapp for $2,070, Pyle for $456,
and Malphrus for $180.12 Although this links some ‘‘rioters’’ to the Bush
campaign, it does not necessarily indict the campaign for paying for the riot.
The IRS forms do not list what the expenses went for.
A stronger link comes from several reports of the riot itself. Perhaps the
best descriptions come from Salon.com writer John Lantigua in his article,
‘‘Miami’s Rent-a-Riot,’’ and Wall Street Journal editorial writer Paul Gi-
got’s piece, ‘‘Miami Heat.’’13 Both confirm that the crowd was under the
direction of Republican activists including Elizabeth Ross, a staff member
for Senator Trent Lott, and the already-mentioned Thomas Pyle. According
to Gigot, when the canvassers retreated to ‘‘semi-isolation,’’ forcing people
to watch through the windows, ‘‘Street-smart New York Rep. John Swee-
ney, a visiting GOP monitor, told an aide to ‘Shut it down,’ and semi-
spontaneous combustion took over.’’14 The crowd itself had been recruited
from operatives reportedly flown to Miami specifically for the event. One
observer noted, ‘‘This crowd looked tweedy. They were from out of town.’’15
On hearing Sweeney’s order, the troops began chanting ‘‘Three Blind Mice’’
and ‘‘Fraud, Fraud, Fraud.’’16 Republican leaders also mentioned the Cuban
American protestors who had helped to turn the Elian Gonzalez deportation
ugly, warning, in Gigot’s words, ‘‘That 1,000 local Cuban-American Re-
publicans were on the way—not a happy prospect for Anglo judges who
must run for re-election.’’17 There is also evidence of involvement by the
highest levels of the Bush campaign. Tom Rhodes of the London Sunday
Times said he heard one Republican on a cell phone bragging, ‘‘I just told
Rove.’’18
Once in the canvassing area, the rioters made a beeline for Democratic
County Chairman Joe Geller. A Republican woman egged them on, shouting
that Geller was trying to steal a ballot. Geller said, ‘‘Suddenly I was sur-
rounded by a screaming shouting insane crowd . . . people grabbing at me and
my clothes and there was almost no security. I couldn’t believe those people
weren’t arrested.’’19 Although Gigot omits this incident from his account he
does disingenuously admit the riot was not exactly a garden party, referring
to it as a ‘‘bourgeois riot,’’ where ‘‘true, it wasn’t exactly Chicago 1968, but
these are Republicans.’’20
Such remarks do beg the question about ‘‘putting the shoe on the other
foot.’’ Imagine if the Democrats had organized this? If the Republicans spent
millions of dollars and several years trying to convict Hillary Clinton of
something, imagine what investigations a Democratic Brooks Brothers Riot
would have precipitated? Instead, no one has brought any of the rioters to
account. There has never even been a call for an investigation. If anything
shows the spineless and misdirected energy of the Democrats surely their
failure to follow up on this deserves to be near the top of the list.
How important the event rated with the GOP is suggested by the fact that
not long after the riot the perpetrators celebrated at a Thanksgiving Day
party (the date seems appropriate), taking thank-you calls from Bush and
Cheney.21 In January 2005, the Washington Post reported, ‘‘the ‘rioters’
proudly note their participation on résumés and in interviews.’’ Some of the
troops received promotions, with Schlapp becoming White House political
director and Malphrus rising to deputy director of the White House Do-
mestic Policy Council.22
One wonders how much the incident played on the minds of the justices.
Although there is a little question he would have voted for Bush, Justice
Antonin Scalia’s remarks have a certain resonance in light of the Miami riot:
‘‘The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view
threaten irreparable harm to the petitioner, and to the country by casting
a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election.’’23 In es-
sence the rented riot and the Justice of the Supreme Court were saying the
same thing: Bush believed he had won and anyone who thought otherwise
was threatening ‘‘irreparable harm’’ to him and the country. Gigot, who
actually witnessed the event, claims the action was justified because of the
blatantly political counting methods of the Miami-Dade ballot counters. As
he puts it, ‘‘These folks were ready to blow.’’24 Gigot’s quote should be
enshrined on whatever monument they build for the Era of Bad Feelings, for
this has truly been a time when a lot of people have been ‘‘ready to blow.’’
Luckily, most of us have kept our heads and not resorted to extra-legal
violence.
Gigot and other Bush partisans may feel the riot was a minor event be-
cause no one was gassed or hauled off in an ambulance, but in an era where
meaning has become especially important, the symbolism of the event makes
a powerful statement. Like an act of road rage, the riot was in-your-face
intimidation. As a first-generation American whose politician grandfather
endured sometimes violent Nazi intimidation, I learned symbolic acts can
hold unpleasant messages about future intents. Gigot’s language becomes a
dead giveaway. From the threat to bring in ‘‘1,000 Cuban-Americans’’ to
Voting Rights & 53
‘‘ready to blow,’’ the rioters wanted to make a forceful statement that things
had better go their way—or else. That adults in suits can behave like
schoolyard bullies sends an unambiguous message about the values of the
Counterrevolution. By rewarding the rioters with parties and promotions
the GOP underlined this message.
GOP officials deliberately interfering with a court-ordered vote count
represents yet another example of moral hypocrisy from a crowd that
preaches ‘‘moral values.’’ Coming from the party that has wrapped itself in
the mantle of law and order since the days of Richard Nixon and whose
raucous radio commentators constantly decry the latest Democratic im-
propriety, it may represent one of the largest ironies of Bush v. Gore. What is
one to make of the credibility of Schlapp and Malphrus the next time they
defend an administration determined to enforce ‘‘accountability’’ on school
teachers, welfare recipients, and bankruptcy filers? It was a very scary day
for America, a day we should be thankful did not ‘‘blow.’’ Still it revealed
how far the Counterrevolution is willing to go to get its way.
This raises a more serious question: When will that business-suited army
again be trotted out to, as Time put it, ‘‘strong-arm’’ someone into sub-
mission? One of the most quoted references to the rise of Nazi Germany
begins, ‘‘first they came for,’’ and goes on to detail a chilling list of the arrests
that culminated with Auschwitz and Dachau. The message is quite clear; if
they can do it to someone else, eventually they may do it to you. If the
Counterrevolution could organize a group of Brooks Brothers–suited op-
eratives to disrupt a lawful election count, what else might they do? Geller
called the rioters, ‘‘Hitler youth,’’25 and they got their way because two
hours after the riot the Miami-Dade board voted to cease counting ballots.
One has to ask, ‘‘Who were the voters most threatened by the riot?’’ The
answer should be no surprise to anyone familiar with American history:
African Americans, the poor, the elderly. Voting rights have been a corner-
stone of the level playing field for a long time, but the Republicans have
doggedly dragged their feet about any measure that either extends the
franchise or makes it easier for people to vote. The WomenMatter website
perfectly captured this tradition and what has happened since the days of
the Dixiecrats:
Republicans focused on guidelines for the states rather than detailed rules,
wishing to leave to the states the choice of specific kinds of machines and
training. Those states where race history makes for competitive voting patterns
between whites and blacks have been dominated by the Republican Party since
Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965.26
Confirmation that voting irregularities took place in Florida—some of

them deliberate attempts to make it difficult for people of color and the
elderly to vote—came from the Civil Rights Commission, which heard over
twenty hours of testimony from more than a hundred witnesses in its in-
vestigation of the 2000 Florida presidential vote. It concluded:
Restrictive statutory provisions, wide-ranging errors and inadequate and un-

equal resources in the election process denied countless Floridians the right to
vote. The disenfranchisement of Florida’s voters fell most harshly on the
shoulders of African Americans. Statewide, based upon county-level statistical
estimates, African American voters were nearly ten times more likely than
white voters to have their ballots rejected in Florida.27
While the commission said it did not find any conclusive evidence of a
deliberate plot by Florida officials to influence the voting process, it did issue
pointed criticisms of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Gov-
ernor Jeb Bush.
[Their] lack of leadership in the important area of protecting voting rights

encouraged the broad array of problems that occurred during the November
2000 presidential election. These officials simply permitted the unequal dis-
tribution of quality voting equipment and other needed resources state-
wide without the public being aware that an electoral disaster might be
approaching. . . . The State’s highest officials responsible for assuring effective
uniformity, coordination and application of the election were grossly derelict
in fulfilling their responsibilities and unwilling to accept accountability. . . .
[The Secretary of State’s] claims of no responsibility in the operations of the
elections are in sharp contrast to her actions in the aftermath of Election Day.
While she described her role in the policies and decisions affecting the actual
voting operations as limited, she asserted ultimate authority in determining the
outcome of the vote count.28
The failings outlined included placing a disproportional number of anti-

quated voting machines in African American precincts. This led to nine out
of ten counties with the highest percentage of African American voters
having above average percentages of ballot spoilage. The Commission also
noted that African American voters were disproportionably purged from
Florida voter rolls even before the election began. Extensively citing the
Voting Rights Act and what is required to prove a violation, the Commis-
sion left it to the Department of Justice to decide whether to prosecute
Voting Rights & 55
Harris or Bush, which given the winner of the election, became a moot
point.
Greg Palast investigated how the GOP conducted the purge of Florida
voters, finding widespread abuse. Before the 2000 election the state moved
to eliminate all convicted felons from the state voter lists. On the surface the
task would seem simple, obtain prison records, match them to voter lists and
eliminate the guilty parties. What actually happened was anything but sys-
tematic. Palast noted that ‘‘Most of the voters (such as ‘David Butler,’ a
name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because
their name, gender, birthdate, and race matched—or nearly matched—one
of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT [the
vendor hired to conduct the purge] nor the state conducted any further
research to verify the matches.’’29 So African Americans who happened to
share names with a convict disappeared from the voting booths as surely as if
someone had waved a magic wand to make them invisible. Ralph Ellison’s
‘‘invisible man’’ became the stuff of reality, not fiction.
In Florida the entire American voting process itself became suspect, for if
Florida’s methods could be that partisan and inaccurate what did that say
for other elections? Maybe America needed Jimmy Carter to monitor elec-
tions as he had monitored contests in the rest of the world. Much of the
world no doubt must have been smiling and appalled by the spectacle—
smiling because the GOP’s self-righteous attitude about foreign govern-
ments perhaps hid an election process that was not far removed from some
tin-horn dictatorship; appalled because if the American idea was tarnished
were not millions of dreams? Writing in the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne
observed, ‘‘We Americans regularly advise emerging democracies to be as
open and transparent as possible in the way they reach an election result. Are
we to be the only democracy in the world that refuses to follow our own
advice?’’30
The rented riot and the purging of African Americans from the voter rolls
represent two assaults on Liberal America’s cornerstone of voting rights.
Another serious threat also emerged: the machines doing the counting. Even
the Supreme Court could not fail to recognize this in their review of the case:
The closeness of this election, and the multitude of legal challenges which have
followed in its wake, have brought into sharp focus a common, if heretofore
unnoticed, phenomenon. Nationwide statistics reveal that an estimated 2% of
ballots cast do not register a vote for President for whatever reason, including
deliberately choosing no candidate at all or some voter error, such as voting for
two candidates or insufficiently marking a ballot.31
These problems echo a persistent theme in the Era of Bad Feelings—nothing

is what it seems. We have magazines manipulating the images of celebrities
living and dead, using Photoshop to alter features that a skilled plastic sur-
geon would find difficult to achieve. Now there is evidence that our voting
machines—the very technology designed to make the process unbiased—are
not what they seem.32
It would take another chapter twice this long to explain how electronic
voting machines work, but such details are probably only of interest to
computer geeks and gear heads, the kind who take apart laptops and car
engines just for the fun of it, glorying in all those parts lying in disarray on
the floor. What all of us came to understand after watching Florida officials
peer at ballots through magnifying glasses is that voting machines are fal-
lible. What they spew out requires as much interpretation as if voters had
filled out their ballots by hand. Bush v. Gore demonstrated that we may not
have come as far as we think from the days when polling places and bars
were not all that far apart, both literally and figuratively. The huge doubts
the Florida election planted in every voter about the objectivity of the
electoral process, represent a much more fundamental issue than whether
Supreme Court justices are biased. That fear was reinforced by voting
challenges in two critical elections that followed Florida, the California
governor’s race and the 2004 presidential race.
It seems to be a characteristic of the Era of Bad Feelings that we argue
vehemently about the little things, but rarely confront the big problems. The
issue of voting irregularities is a classic case and a missed opportunity that
will come back to haunt us, but we prefer to chase our tails. While there were
calls to fix the ‘‘system’’ after Florida and various states went through the
motions of doing so, the monster will not go away, for nothing short of
a concerted national effort will solve the problem.
Recently many states have been switching to touch-screen voting ma-
chines, but as a number of experts and investigators point out these may
have even more problems than the old methods, the chief one being that
there is no way to audit them. Like any computer, they are also prone to
problems. Stanford computer scientist David Dill posted a petition on the
Internet that was signed by 100 colleagues, in part stating: ‘‘Computerized
voting equipment is inherently subject to programming error, equipment
malfunction, and malicious tampering. It is therefore crucial that voting
equipment provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, by which we mean a per-
manent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter
before the vote is submitted, and is difficult or impossible to alter after it has
been checked.’’33 This allegation received major corroboration when Bev
Voting Rights & 57
Harris told how she was able to access a Diebold Company website storing
40,000 files that ‘‘amounted to a virtual handbook for vote-tampering: They
contained diagrams of remote communications setups, passwords, encryp-
tion keys, source code, user manuals, testing protocols, and simulators, as
well as files loaded with votes and voting machine software.’’34
The perils of electronic voting received further attention when a week
after the 2004 election, Scientific American bestowed a prestigious Tech-
nology 50 leadership award on R. Michael Alvarez and Ted Selker for
seeking to reform American voting. Scientific American noted that in July
2004, ‘‘Alvarez and Selker recommended four major steps the Election
Assistance Commission should take to minimize lost votes in the November
2004 elections. These included better voter registration processes, fixing
certain ballot problems, requiring the reporting of more balloting statistics,
and developing better voter complaint procedures.’’35
A website devoted to improving our voting process paints the scenario we
all dread, ‘‘Those slick new touch screen voting machines promise to get rid
of hanging chads forever. But how do you know your vote was recorded as
you intended? You might as well be handing it to a stranger who promises to
deliver it to the polling place unchanged.’’36 Even more troubling is an
investigative report posted on the infernalpress.com site that links the ex-
ecutives in some of these electronic voting machine companies to the Re-
actionary Right. In July 2003 Sandeep S. Atwal wrote, ‘‘If [the] charges are
true, and there is little evidence to contradict their claims, George W. Bush
has already won the 2004 election.’’37
So we are left to ponder all the twists and turns that brought us to this
unexpected place. Far from being a case about judges who may have abused
their power, Bush v. Gore is at its core a case about the fundamental issues
of our democracy. We have a major party trying to influence a presidential
recount by ‘‘strong arm’’ tactics. We have the Civil Rights Commission’s
documentation of systematic voting irregularities. We also have the problem
of voting technology that threatens to increase rather than decrease the
possibility of fraud. Shadowy companies with questionable security hold the
fate of our nation in their hands. Even a novelist could not have constructed
a more fantastic plot. The main actors may have worn Brooks Brothers suits
and lacked the colorful names of fictional characters, but the crime was as
serious as any imaginary plot, for a fair voting process is obviously a linchpin
of democracy. Without it, the train pulls out of the station with those in
front taking control while leaving the rest of us behind.
Regardless of how one interprets the Supreme Court decision its im-
plications inject a new element into every future presidential election: the
Supreme Court now decides the winner. Pamela S. Karlan of the New York
Times gets to the heart of the matter, ‘‘Who wins the presidential election
often alters the Supreme Court, both by determining who appoints new
justices and by subtly influencing the court’s decisions. But when should the
Supreme Court alter who wins an election?’’38
Bush v. Gore demonstrated that the real loser is Liberal America. No-
where is this made clearer than in an instructive piece by attorney and crime
novel author Scott Turow. In a Washington Post article Turow explains the
principle of Legal Realism that, although controversial, has guided much of
recent court history. As Turow explains it, disciples of Legal Realism rec-
ognize ‘‘when judges are free to choose, they will fashion rules that mirror
their own ideologies.’’ What makes Legal Realism work, says Turow, is that
realists ‘‘tried to erect a tradition that minimized occasions when justices
could do that.’’ Turow rightly concludes, ‘‘the events in Florida proved how
fragile the understanding about the limited role of judges could be.’’ The
result was that ‘‘the Legal Realist Compact had been shattered.’’39 Turow
calls for a restoration of the boundaries that had been established by Legal
Realism, but he does not sound too optimistic that it will happen.
In many ways, Legal Realism expresses the values of Liberal America.
Recognizing that partisanship is inevitable, Legal Realism seeks to channel
and curb its excesses to provide a level playing field where the common good
can prevail. Here we reach yet another difference between the Counter-
revolution and Liberal America. Through the last decades of the previous
century and well into this one, the GOP has endlessly repeated the mantra of
‘‘strict constructionism.’’ Perhaps it should be no surprise that the party that
has embraced religious fundamentalists should also embrace this philoso-
phy, which, like literal interpretation of the Bible, seems to be something
whose meaning is in the eye of the beholder.
Today the Brooks Brothers Riot, the systematic purging and exclusion of
voters as reported by the Civil Rights Commission, and the perils of elec-
tronic voting cast a shadow over the entire process. If the Supreme Court’s
estimate of the percentage of excluded ballots is even close to correct—and
there is no reason to doubt it—then this country’s elections take on an en-
tirely different cast.
Cass Gilbert had a thing for marble perhaps because of all the stones
he might have chosen this one holds a transcendental quality that has
been evoked by poets, both good and bad. Sheathing a government build-
ing in marble, as Gilbert did for the Supreme Court—especially marble
with almost translucent white purity—makes an optimistic statement
about the character of that government. That this particular marble came
Voting Rights & 59
from a state that has long valued independence adds another layer of
meaning.
The transitive nature of those who erect marble monuments has been a
clichéd subject for poets and epitaph writers. The questions Bush v. Gore
poses for America are a bit more complex than the ‘‘Ozymandias’’-like
theme of ‘‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’’ evoked in so many
comments on the case. New groups of protestors now occupy the marble
steps under Gilbert’s fixed gaze, their attention focused on the issue of the
day. Meanwhile three critical artifacts from Bush v. Gore—the ‘‘Brooks
Brothers Riot,’’ the systematic exclusion of voters, and the perils of elec-
tronic voting still have not received adequate attention. They remain as
open-ended questions with no satisfactory answers in sight. The still unfin-
ished agenda of Bush v. Gore asks: Will the country still firmly support the
long-standing, almost marble-like principle that free elections shall not be
compromised by intimidation and manipulation? Will the independent,
contrary spirit of the place the marble came from allow us to adequately
meet the challenges of electronic voting and the still-unfulfilled promise
made to those who are still systematically disenfranchised?
Media Fairness: A Magical
5 Mystery Tour
Minot, North Dakota, is nicknamed the ‘‘Magic City,’’ because it seemed to

literally grow out of the ground—which explains why its high school teams
proudly bear the name, ‘‘Magicians.’’ Anyone in the Midwest would rec-
ognize Minot as one of those towns created by the railroads as they laid track
across the prairie. The area has a rugged beauty, with craggy buttes thrusting
up like vertebrae from the flat plains around it. One of those buttes houses
a Cold War relic, a huge strategic air command base that still serves as one of
the major homes of the storied B-52, whose run as the main bomber of
the United States has reached half a century. Like the B-52, people in Minot
are survivors and, as one might expect in a military town, quite patriotic.
Dakotans never forget where they came from, even those as famous as
professional basketball coach Phil Jackson, who has brought his teams back
for exhibition games.
For most of America’s media, Minot, like many similar towns, lies well
off the radar screen. Most of us would not be able to tell you its home
state or even an approximation of where it lies on a map. But that changed
when a railroad accident suddenly thrust Minot into the middle of one
of the most contentious and important disputes in the Era of Bad Feelings.
Like many an American tale this is a twisted one with some unexpected
turns.
It starts in London, with an off-the-cuff remark by one of the Dixie
Chicks. By now you may have forgotten the story of these three updated,
up tempo Southern belles, who found themselves banned from the radio
because their lead singer had the audacity to criticize the president. The
public reaction to her remarks suggested the Dixie Chicks had done
something unspeakable like appear in a pornographic movie, but the only
thing they bared was their feelings. ‘‘Just so you know,’’ Texas native
Natalie Maines said on stage, ‘‘We’re ashamed that the President of the
United States is from Texas.’’1
Immediately after the remarks hit this side of the pond, a firestorm broke
out, with people calling for a boycott of the Dixie Chicks and smashing CDs
in demonstrations designed to attract as many cameras as possible. In one of
the most controversial reactions, radio stations stopped playing the band’s
recordings. ‘‘Out of respect for our troops, our city and our listeners, [we]
have taken the Dixie Chicks off our play lists,’’2 said Gail Austin, Clear
Channel’s director of programming for two Jacksonville, Florida, stations.
Jacksonville University professor Dennis Stouse did not accept this expla-
nation, ‘‘It doesn’t have anything to do with our troops or our city. . . . We
should accept the fact that there are viewpoints we don’t agree with.’’3
Florida Today writer Breuse Hickman commented, ‘‘Such corporate—and
public—McCarthyism does further expose the limits now placed on certain
American freedoms, in this case, freedom of speech.’’4 In the wake of
questions about corporate control, Clear Channel, which owns more than a
thousand stations, denied that there was any national policy to ban the Dixie
Chicks, saying, ‘‘Clear Channel Radio does not issue mandates with regard
to individual artists or songs.’’5
So what do entertainers do when they get into trouble with the media?
They line up an interview with Diane Sawyer. ‘‘It was an off-the-cuff state-
ment,’’ said Maines, ‘‘And I think the way I said it was disrespectful. The
wording I used, the way I said it, that was disrespectful.’’ When Sawyer asked
her whether the apology was genuine, Maines replied, ‘‘It’s not because it’s
not genuine. It’s because I’m on guard now.’’6 Maines’s contrition prompted
a parody website, Chiks.com, to post a picture of the band with a gag over
Maines’s mouth. The site said, ‘‘I realize it’s wrong to have a liberal opinion
if you are a country music artist. . . . I heard people on the radio and tv like
Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich badmouth-
ing the President [Clinton] . . . so I guess I just assumed it was acceptable
behavior.’’7
The Dixie Chicks incident was not the first time Clear Channel’s thought
control has sprung into action. After 9/11 it created a list of banned songs
among which were ‘‘Walk Like an Egyptian,’’ and ‘‘Bridge over Troubled
Water.’’8 Clear Channel is also the host for Rush Limbaugh. Clearly, Clear
Channel is a conglomerate whose political leanings have inspired others to
dig further. Wayne Barrett of The Village Voice fingered Clear Channel as a
Media Fairness & 63
major sponsor of ‘‘at least 13 [prowar] ‘Rally for America’ events, includ-
ing one in Atlanta that drew 25,000 people.’’9 When activist-singer Ani
DiFranco appeared at a Clear Channel–sponsored concert in Newark, New
Jersey, the conglomerate took steps to insure that no antiwar sentiments
crept into the event. Amy Goodman, the prizewinning WBAI reporter who
introduced DiFranco, told the Voice ‘‘the security guards took antiwar
leaflets out of my bag,’’ confiscated them from others, and that the operators
‘‘were constantly threatening to cut off the mic.’’10
What makes Clear Channel’s censorship even more interesting is that it
has sponsored infamous ‘‘shock jocks’’ such as Bubba the Love Sponge and
Howard Stern, whose radio gross outs earned Clear Channel the dubious
distinction of paying $1.75 million in fines to the FCC to settle indecency
charges. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps pointed out that the Com-
mission ‘‘had complaints concerning at least 200 broadcasts pending against
Clear Channel’’ and that ‘‘over two-thirds of the indecency fines proposed
by the Commission since 2000 have been against Clear Channel.’’11 One
cannot help but wonder whether Clear Channel viewed their flag waving as
a way of offsetting risqué programming.
Even after the initial controversy had settled down, the Dixie Chicks
incident kept coming back, sometimes from unexpected places such as a
Senate hearing room debating the merits of the FCC ruling on media own-
ership and from no less than Republican and former war hero, John
McCain. While he assured his audience he did not agree with the Dixie
Chicks, McCain made certain no one missed the point, ‘‘If a local station
made a decision not to play a particular band, then that is what localism is
all about,’’ McCain said. ‘‘But when a corporate decision is made that (a
company’s radio stations) will not play a group because of a political
statement, then that comes back to what we’re talking about with media
consolidation.’’12 McCain said nothing about talk show zealots who fanned
the flames, turning the Chicks into latter-day Joan of Arcs.
The Chicks, the talk show hosts, and Senator McCain’s comments to-
gether form yet another nail in the coffin of Liberal America. Label that nail
media fairness. The Counterrevolution is building this coffin using their
alliance of the old Dixiecrats, big business, and religious fundamentalists
and linking it with the power of the new media. The most visible figure in the
strategy is Sir Rupert Murdoch, who has put his vast media holdings in the
service of his majesty’s government. Imperial England might be dead or
comatose, but Imperial America is alive and well and Murdoch has been
more than happy to blow the trumpets, set off the fireworks, and arrange for
other suitable entertainment.
An Aussie native who took over the newspaper chain started by his father,
Murdoch moved the business from its Australian base to create a global
media conglomerate, buying newspapers in Britain and the United States,
and then creating a fourth TV network through his purchase of Twentieth
Century Fox. Along the way he followed the Fleet Street model, running
catchy headlines like the one in the New York Post trumpeting, ‘‘Headless
Body in Topless Bar.’’13 As James Fallows points out in an Atlantic profile,
Murdoch’s true genius has been to bring vertical integration to the mass
media. According to Fallows, ‘‘Murdoch’s companies now constitute a
production system unmatched in its integration.’’14 Murdoch’s concept of
vertical integration represents a troubling development that becomes even
more disturbing when coupled with his other singular achievement—the
creation of the first overtly politically biased television news division in
American history. With this the Counterrevolutionary Alliance added its
fourth member, call it the new political media, forging a powerful coalition
that stretch from the marble halls of Congress into our living rooms.
While Fallows portrays Murdoch as someone who cares more about the
bottom line than the ballot box, his news programs have taken a decidedly
rightward tilt under the direction of conservative commentator William
Kristol and former GOP strategist Roger Ailes (he created the infamous
‘‘Revolving Door’’ ad and produced Rush Limbaugh’s short-lived television
misadventure). As president of Fox News, Ailes has built a well-known
stable of right-wing ideologues including talk-show hosts Bill O’Reilly and
Sean Hannity and newscaster Brit Hume.15 Ailes asserts that since 70 per-
cent of Americans believe the media is too liberal this justifies his right-tilting
coverage. ‘‘We can play this down the middle,’’ he says, ‘‘and get that sev-
enty percent, while everybody else fights over the other thing.’’16 In other
words, Fox will not air liberal views because Ailes says the media has be-
come too liberal—chutzpah worthy of the man who was brought before the
FCC for illegally coordinating ads between George H. W. Bush’s 1988
presidential campaign and independent political action groups. Ailes es-
caped conviction on a 3–3 vote.17
Fox’s political leanings have inspired a steady stream of studies and
opinion pieces that counter Ailes’s assertion. The book and documentary
Outfoxed interviewed several former Fox News employees who confirm the
network’s rightward tilt.18 Perhaps one of the most sobering studies comes
from the Program on International Policy (PIP), which researched viewing
and listening habits and compared them with views of the Iraq War. The
study focused on three statements that had been exposed as either false or
exaggerated: that Saddam Hussein was a major Al Qaeda supporter, that
Media Fairness & 65
Iraq had deployable or had deployed weapons of mass destruction, and that
most of the world supported America’s invasion. Only 23 percent of those
who relied on National Public Radio (NPR) or Public Broadcasting System
(PBS) for information about public affairs believed one or more of the
propositions as compared with 80 percent of those who watched Fox News.
Even more interesting is that 54 percent of Republican Fox viewers held
misperceptions versus 32 percent of Republicans who mainly received news
from PBS or NPR. In essence, Fox plays a role in reinforcing the Republican
Party line.19
The PIP study is bolstered by an even more unsettling media polarization
reflecting the Era of Bad Feelings. A Pew Research Center study observed
that in the last few years, ‘‘Political polarization is increasingly reflected in
the public’s news viewing habits.’’ The Pew study pointed out that a bene-
ficiary of this polarization has been Fox News, which, not surprisingly, has
been attracting an increasing number of those who describe themselves as
Republicans and conservatives. According to Pew, ‘‘Fox ranks as the most
trusted news source among Republicans but is among the least trusted by
Democrats.’’20 Although it does not openly broach the idea, the Pew study
raises the obvious question of whether we have returned to the nineteenth-
century days of ‘‘Republican’’ and ‘‘Democratic’’ broadsides?
Something more insidious is also at work, reflecting the Era of Bad Feel-
ings. Pew found that conservative and Republican viewers and listeners have
a low tolerance for alternative opinions. The study points out, ‘‘Republicans
have become more distrustful of virtually all major media outlets over the
past four years.’’21 Apparently the hard-line attitudes of the Counterrevo-
lution that produced events like the Brooks Brothers Riot are shared by their
followers. The Counterrevolutionaries have little tolerance not only for
opposing views but also views regarded as neutral by the rest of the country.
They have all the traits of spoiled children who believe anyone who does
not share their opinions is a threat.
So far Murdoch has let Ailes and Kristol do most of the talking about the
politics of his holdings. His only comment came in response to a question
from North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan who asked him to explain how
there could be 300 hours per week of nationally syndicated conservative talk
shows and only five hours of liberal commentary (apparently Dorgan did not
have the benefit of Ailes’s wisdom when he asked this). ‘‘Yes,’’ answered
Murdoch, ‘‘Apparently conservative talk is more popular.’’22 Like a con-
temporary Charles Foster Kane (who supposedly was modeled after William
Randolph Hearst—who helped fuel the Spanish American War), Murdoch
seems to have an insatiable thirst to acquire more. This precipitated the
following surreal exchange between Murdoch and California Senator Bar-

bara Boxer:
BOXER: What if you owned everything?

MURDOCH: If I owned everything?
BOXER: Do you think there ought to be limits put on you?
MURDOCH: No, of course not.23
Interestingly Murdoch is not the first media mogul to become enamored

with vertical integration. The Hollywood studio bosses tried to achieve a
similar dominance when they ruled the media world. However, they were
prevented from simultaneously owning theaters and producing movies in
1948 when the Supreme Court issued what has come to be called the ‘‘Di-
vorce Decree,’’ ruling that theater ownership by movie studios constituted
an illegal monopoly.24 Yet Murdoch’s business plan has followed a similar
path and no one has issued any ‘‘Divorce Decree.’’
Murdoch’s ambitions recall the empires of John D. Rockefeller and An-
drew Carnegie. Yet while Rockefeller controlled the oil business from well
head to gas pump and Carnegie controlled steel from mine to mill, the idea
of a single corporation owning media content, production, and distribution
while controlling a significant market percentage sounds Orwellian, al-
lowing for a unified message to be broadcast into everyone’s homes. The
thought that such a system lies at the disposal of the man who used Willie
Horton—Roger Ailes—should have us wondering where the Era of Bad
Feelings will take us. Justice William O. Douglas’ opinion in the ‘‘Divorce
Decree’’ (United States v. Paramount) is instructive. ‘‘As we pointed out in
United States v. Griffith,’’ he wrote, ‘‘Size is itself an earmark of monop-
oly power. For size carries with it an opportunity for abuse.’’25 The Dixie
Chicks could probably say, ‘‘Amen,’’ to that opinion.
What Douglas did not cite, but could have, were some examples from
American history. If media concentration had prevailed over the life of this
country it is a good bet neither Elvis Presley nor Louis Armstrong would have
ever become some of America’s most influential artists, since early in their
careers both were ignored by the major media outlets of their time. Arm-
strong and many other early African American jazz artists recorded for what
were then called ‘‘race records.’’ As for Presley, his story is an American
legend of how a poor truck driver with a high school education scraped up
enough cash to record a demo record with a visionary named Sam Phillips,
who realized that he had a diamond in the rough when he heard the slick-
haired teenager sing. Curiously the two artists have not escaped criticism
Media Fairness & 67
even today. In the wake of 9/11, Clear Channel banned Armstrong’s ‘‘What a
Wonderful World’’ and Presley’s ‘‘(You’re the) Devil in Disguise.’’26 Perhaps
Clear Channel took a page from Michigan Republican Representative Ruth
Thompson, who in 1954 introduced a bill to ban mailing ‘‘obscene, lewd,
lascivious or filthy’’ rock and roll phonograph records.27
The increasing questions about Clear Channel and growing American
media concentration came together to spawn a Magical Mystery Tour, the
name given coast-to-coast hearings held by two FCC commissioners bent on
raising a ruckus about the FCC’s proposal to change media ownership rules.
Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, who served as aide to former Democratic
Senator Tom Daschle, has the face of an insurance salesman, with receding
hairline, glasses and all. One could picture him at a Kiwanis luncheon,
introducing his guest for the day or serving as an officer in the local Lion’s
Club. His colleague, Michael Copps, is cut from the same cloth. Neither
looks like the type who would go on any kind of mystery tour, let alone a
magical one, although one of Adelstein’s press photos shows him in dark
glasses jamming like one of the Blues Brothers.
In the manner of the quiet shopkeeper who finally cannot take it any more
and straps on his gun to take on the bad guys, what it took to get two
regular-looking guys to crisscross the country stirring up people was some-
thing that pushed them and a lot of other Americans over the edge. FCC
Chairman Michael Powell had leaked the fact that the Commission would
be examining some new rules about media ownership, rules that he hinted
the Republican majority intended to liberalize. According to the Online
NewsHour, ‘‘The biggest beneficiaries of the FCC’s relaxation of ownership
limits would be large media conglomerates such as Viacom Inc., which owns
the CBS and UPN networks; and News Corp., owner of Fox . . . [since they]
already exceed the 35 percent limit.’’28 In other words, a change in media
ownership rules would tighten the noose of concentration around the rest of
America.
Powell irked the two commissioners because he refused to reveal the spe-
cifics of what the Republicans would do until the actual hearing took place.
Contrary to most FCC rules changes, this would allow no time for anyone to
review the rules or for the Commission to take public comment. If you
remember the scenario about those Democratic Congressmen who almost got
arrested, the script should sound familiar. Hence the Magical Mystery Tour:
magical because it proposed to get around Powell’s refusal and mystery be-
cause it remained a mystery as to what the exact changes would be. It was
like shadow boxing. If the FCC would not hold public hearings, the two
commissioners would, inviting the public to voice their opinions. In effect
they placed some empty chairs onstage for their missing colleagues and held a
hearing anyway. They hoped to attract media attention, but they knew the
media as well as anyone and probably viewed that as a long shot.
In early 2003 the two enlisted local sponsors to host the Magical Mystery
Tour, including the Annenberg School of Communications and Stanford
University. They heard cries of opposition to increasing media concentration
from the NRA to Tom Petty, from Barry Diller to Pearl Jam, from Norman
Lear to Ted Turner. People complained about canned national news and
deplored the absence of local reporters at many stations. And they heard
horror stories about media concentration, one of which came from Minot,
North Dakota.
Not long before the FCC hearings a train carrying liquid ammonia de-
railed as it passed through Minot, releasing potentially deadly gas. The local
police needed a quick way to inform people of the accident and keep them
away from the area. One of the local radio stations appeared the most log-
ical choice, but all six were owned by that friend of the Dixie Chicks, Clear
Channel Communications. When the police tried to call each station they
could not get anyone to answer the phone. Why? Because Clear Channel
programming came from somewhere else on tape. The result: 300 people
ended up in the hospital, making it one of the biggest disasters in the history
of the town and causing other towns to wonder if it could happen to them.29
Commissioner Adelstein and others used the Minot incident to make two
essential points about the possible FCC plan. The first reminds us that
control of local markets by national conglomerates gives local citizens lit-
tle information about their own community. In a way, many towns have
become ‘‘magic cities’’ like Minot, except the magic act is to make them
disappear, as if they are ghost towns with only tumbleweeds howling
through them, their vibrant downtown areas boarded up. Along with the
loss of local voices comes the loss of venerable institutions like the broad-
casts of the local sports teams, local personalities dishing out tips on canning
this year’s tomato crop, and that lifeblood of many rural communities, the
recitation of the current commodity prices. In a sense, conglomerates such as
Clear Channel not only make people anonymous, they also make their
communities anonymous.
The second point about Minot is that when one company owns all the
radio stations in a town, there are no alternatives. The lack of alternatives put
300 in the hospital and means that the people of Minot and other such towns
must listen to whatever Clear Channel wants them to hear. Commissioner
Adelstein referred to this as the ‘‘McDonaldization’’ of the American me-
dia.30 In Clear Channel’s case they serve the Rush Limbaugh perspective.
Media Fairness & 69
This raises fear of an America where whole towns can be figuratively

wiped out at the stroke of a pen and the exchange of a check. William
O. Douglas and the principles of the Paramount decision can be buried along
with anything resembling diversity and originality. And if anybody wants to
complain nobody will be there to answer the phone. Commissioner Adel-
stein put it well: Unlike french fries or ketchup, the mass media has view-
points attached to it. Control of the media affects the vibrancy of what the
Supreme Court in the Red Lion decision called the ‘‘uninhibited marketplace
of ideas.’’ It affects the very health of our democracy. In Red Lion the Court
went on to say, ‘‘It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to
social, political, esthetic, moral, and other ideas and experiences which is
crucial here. That right may not constitutionally be abridged either by
Congress or by the FCC.’’31 We may be on the verge of creating a modern
Citizen Kane, or maybe a handful of them.32
Sobering statistics revealed during the hearings supported this. Ben Bag-
dikian, author of The Media Monopoly and one of the country’s most im-
portant critics of media concentration, testified that the 2000 edition of his
book found that just six conglomerates supplied most of America’s media-
based information.33 Commissioner Copps outlined the impact of the
changes broadcasting had experienced after a 1996 law allowing for com-
panies to increase local ownership:
The largest company owned less than 75 stations before deregulation. Today
one company, Clear Channel, owns more than 1,200 stations. . . . The number
of radio station owners has decreased by an incredible 34 percent since 1996.
The number of minority owners has dropped by a shocking, and nationally
embarrassing, 14 percent. . . . In our hearings around the country, Commis-
sioner Adelstein and I have talked to many capable young musicians and
creative artists who are simply unable to secure air time in the new consol-
idated radio environment. Real news radio is dying outside the largest cities,
and viewpoint diversity has given way to a constant drumbeat of one-sided talk
shows.34
Such fears echoed the theme that runs through all the stops on the Magical
Mystery Tour—excess, the excesses of companies such as Clear Channel,
which result in events like the Minot disaster, but also the excesses of pro-
gramming that has become increasingly outrageous. While academics quar-
rel over whether violence or explicit sex is up or down according to this or
that methodology, what does seem very clear is that the voices of the Rau-
cous Right have become more strident. It is as if they are trying to outdo
Rush Limbaugh, making him appear downright respectable next to the

likes of Ann Coulter. A similar development can be found in so-called reality
TV, which seems caught in an arms race to see what outrageous thing people
will do for fifteen minutes of fame.
In the past these orgies played themselves out like a wild party that has
gone on well past dawn until all the participants lie passed out in the yard or
have gone home. But this period of excess seems to have no end in sight,
which may be why people showed up at those FCC hearings. Although
thousands turned out, predictably the tour attracted little public attention—
only a few notes on the news, a few stories buried in the back of the paper.
Adelstein and Copps must have felt a bit like they were in the Magic City.
When the time came for the actual hearing, it ended all too quickly. The
GOP majority announced they would favor a relaxation of the media
ownership rules. Chairman Powell put the reasons succinctly, ‘‘Given the
court’s requirement that we consider the current competitive market,
keeping all of the rules in their current form simply could not be justified as
‘necessary in the public interest.’ ’’35 Powell went on to say that what he
called the ‘‘Modern Media Marketplace’’ had broadened the options for
the American people, especially through the Internet. ‘‘Google news service
brings information from 4,500 news sources to one’s finger tips from around
the world, all with the click of a mouse,’’ said Powell.36
In keeping with Republican ideology, the majority stated, ‘‘In general, we
find that program diversity is best achieved by reliance on competition
among delivery systems rather than by government regulation.’’ As for local
diversity, the FCC noted, ‘‘We seek to promote localism to the greatest
extent possible through market structures that take advantage of media
companies’ incentives to serve local communities.’’37 The GOP majority did
go on to say that it would measure whether programming responded to local
interests and whether the companies offered sufficient local news. Nowhere
did the decision mention the Red Lion case or the point Justice Douglas
made about media concentration in United States v. Paramount.
Key aspects of the FCC’s decision included increasing the 35 percent limit
for TV ownership to 45 percent, meaning a single company could control
almost half of all broadcasting stations and, more important, just two
companies could control 90 percent. It also raised the caps on how many
local stations could be controlled by a single company and widened the
ability of companies to engage in cross-media ownership within a single
market, in effect giving the green light to Sir Rupert’s business model. To
regulate vertically integrated markets, the FCC developed the ‘‘Diversity
Index.’’ Reading it is akin to deciphering a complex menu, with references to
Media Fairness & 71
column ‘‘A’’ and column ‘‘B,’’ printed in cramped ten-point type that
promises a headache. In response, Commissioner Copps stated the essential
case for those who objected:
At issue is whether a few corporations will be ceded enhanced gatekeeper

control over the civil dialogue of our country; more content control over our
music, entertainment and information; and veto power over the majority of
what our families watch, hear and read. . . . Why does any company need to
control three television stations in any city? [emphasis added] . . . Where are the
blessings of localism, diversity and competition here? I see centralization, not
localism; I see uniformity, not diversity; I see monopoly and oligopoly, not
competition.38
Commissioner Adelstein followed:
A dark storm cloud is now looming over the future of the American media.
The majority has sealed into federal regulations the most sweeping and de-
structive rollback of consumer protection rules in the history of American
broadcasting. The public stands little to gain and everything to lose by slash-
ing the protections that have served them for decades. . . . Today’s action will
likely diminish the diversity of voices heard over the public airwaves, which
can only dilute the quality of our society’s intellectual, cultural and political
life. It will also likely diminish local control of our media, the core concept
at the foundation of the American system of broadcasting, as media giants
buy more local stations and homogenize the programs and stories they
broadcast.
It violates every tenet of a free democratic society to let a handful of
powerful companies control our media. . . . Without a diverse, independent
media, citizen access to information crumbles, along with political and social
participation. For the sake of our democracy, we should encourage the widest
possible dissemination of free expression through the public airwaves.39
At the conclusion of the testimony the commissioners filed out of the

room. It had been a performance worthy of the Magic City debacle. There
was no testimony and little discussion. The people had been shut out of
one of most far-reaching decisions ever made by the FCC as if they were the
people of Minot trying to get Clear Channel on the phone. The decision
had about it the atmosphere of zealots trying to force something through as
if they knew that if they really allowed the people to speak it might prove
embarrassing.
At the time they took place, the hearings had all the drama of someone
asking to be heard on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. But New
York was well aware of what was going on. Enter the New York Times, a
venerable American institution that faced two dangers, one from Republi-
cans who had always seen it as a liberal paper even before The Pentagon
Papers, the other from the likes of Sir Rupert Murdoch who were bent on
buying up as many news sources as they could. Times columnist William
Safire blasted away all the underbrush with well-directed rhetoric. ‘‘The ef-
fect of the media’s march to amalgamation on American’s freedom of voice
is too worrisome to be left to three unelected commissioners,’’ he wrote.
Calling the event Floodgate, Safire went on to say, ‘‘A single media giant, up
to now allowed to own television stations reaching slightly more than a third
of the nation’s viewers, will soon—thanks to Floodgate—be able to reach
nearly half, a giants step toward 100% ‘penetration.’ ’’40
Having lost at the FCC, the fight now turned to Congress, where at first
things looked like a slam dunk for the Counterrevolution. Given their
control of both houses and the not inconsiderable pressure of the White
House, everyone assumed that Congress would vote to uphold the FCC
decision. The first skirmish took place in the House Appropriations Com-
mittee, where Wisconsin’s David Obey sponsored a provision that would
override the FCC decision and restore the old rules governing media own-
ership. ‘‘Information is to the democratic system what blood is to the human
body,’’ Obey said in a press release, ‘‘I think we’re in danger of shutting off
the blood supply of the democracy.’’41 Obey’s bill passed by a vote of 40–25.
By including the provision in an appropriations bill, the House created an
especially difficult situation for the White House, since a veto would elim-
inate the appropriated funds.
By the time the bill moved to the House floor the movement to repeal the
FCC ruling had gathered momentum. The final vote of 400–21 stunned ev-
eryone with its strong bipartisan support. In other words, not even everyone
who voted against the provision in the Appropriations Committee voted
against it on the floor. Massachusetts Representative Edward J. Markey
said, ‘‘Never before have I seen an FCC chairman’s decision repudiated by
the House of Representatives so quickly and so emphatically.’’42
Meanwhile the Senate swung into action as John McCain held hear-
ings about the FCC decision, the same hearings that precipitated his re-
marks about the Dixie Chicks. Thirty-five senators signed a ‘‘Resolution of
Disapproval’’ that expedited bringing the repeal of the decision to the floor.
Sponsored by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, the resolution was no-
table in that one of its cosigners was none other than Trent Lott. Dorgan
Media Fairness & 73
explained, ‘‘We are moving to roll back one of the most complete cave-ins
to corporate interests I’ve ever seen by what is supposed to be a federal
regulatory agency.’’43
In the summer of 2004, in the midst of a contentious presidential elec-
tion, a Philadelphia court ruled that the FCC had overstepped its bounds.
Of course neither presidential candidate mentioned this, nor did anyone
asking questions in the debates, even though it remains one of the most
significant decisions of this new millennium. With the election over, the
Counterrevolution continues its campaign to turn this country into a Clear
Channel nation where a few media conglomerates control what we see and
hear and local voices become as extinct as the cry of the passenger pigeon.
So we have followed the trail back to Minot. The scent is hot, but it is not
a pleasant one. The air from that train wreck has about it the odor of death,
decay, and processes we would just as soon not acknowledge. Some of it
emanates from those two lined canyons of flesh that run vertically down Sir
Rupert Murdoch’s face, framing his mouth like two walls guarding every
carefully calculated smile and every well-scripted word. That smell wafts
through the tribulations of the Dixie Chicks, the machinations of Roger
Ailes, the dictatorial bearing of the FCC, and the Magical Mystery Tour of
two principled commissioners.
Americans have a finely honed nose for rotten deals, one as sensitive to the
nuances of scandal as that of a gourmet wine taster to the subtleties of fine
burgundy. They have endured over a quarter-century of this and that ‘‘gate,’’
so that the office of special prosecutor became one of the most powerful
posts in the land. We have become so jaded by frequent scandals, charges
and countercharges that we ignore them with the same contempt the wine
taster would bestow on a bottle of cheap Chablis.
Some believe that the American people have become numb to scandal,
that we have been holding our noses for so long that the latest controversy is
dismissed with a contemptuous wave of the hand. But the storm over the
FCC decision shows how badly mistaken that view has become. When the
National Rifle Association, the National Organization for Women and
the Eagle Forum all take the same position then you know something is up.
When thousands of people pack the Mystery Tour hearings and deluge
Congress with letters, then it is clear that average Americans share their
views about this scandal.
At a time when Liberal America seemed to be on life support, the Amer-
ican people themselves had come to the rescue. The myth of our country is
that great leaders emerge at times of great crisis, but what this myth forgets is
that those leaders would get nowhere without the American people right
there beside them. The FCC decision and its aftermath represents one of
those events that is at once both very frightening and very affirming. The
frightening part is plainly there for everyone to see, as it is with most gut-
wrenching stories: would Murdoch in fact own ‘‘everything,’’ as Barbara
Boxer had asked rhetorically and would all our news and opinion come from
Roger Ailes or someone like him?
Although they may not have been thinking of the Dixie Chicks directly,
what surely must have been going through the minds of all those disparate
voices raised in opposition to the FCC decision was something like that
scenario. What loomed in the back of their minds must have been the
thought that like Maines and like those during the McCarthy period, they
might find themselves blacked out or black listed. A media manager for a
Midwestern university gave the right sound bite, ‘‘They say we have the
freedom of choice in this country but actually we have the freedom to
choose, somebody else provides the choices.’’44
The amazing part about the FCC protests was that there was no great
leader, sword in hand, leading them in the charge. This was a spontaneous
uprising, a popular revolution whose roots go back to those anonymous
‘‘embattled farmers’’ who stood at Lexington and Concord. For those who
feared for the future of the American people or the demise of Liberal
America this was a sign that neither had need for last rites.
The FCC protest represents a significant statement that the American
people still will fight for fundamental values even when they involve com-
plex, arcane language in an arena few had ever paid any attention to.
Somewhere Armstrong, Presley and, yes, the Dixie Chicks must have been
having a few laughs. What the redcoats learned in 1776 is a good lesson for
today as well: When the people find their voice, those with the title ‘‘Sir,’’
had better be on their guard. Also, do not underestimate your foes or you
may end up stacking your arms while the band plays ‘‘The World Turned
Upside Down.’’
PART TWO
Civil Rights
Revolutions Raise
Questions
6 Economic Justice: Corked Bats
When I was young, it was not unusual for us to gather at any open space we
could find and play baseball. We played in vacant lots, cul-de-sacs, and if
we could, we climbed the fence at the nearby school field. When my brothers
and I moved to the Midwest, we cast covetous eyes on a nearby green-painted,
deserted ballpark, complete with stands, outfield fence, and real bases. How-
ever, this almost mythic place where Babe Ruth had played on a barnstorm-
ing tour was kept locked tight. One long ago July evening when the setting
sun sent long, slanting shadows of the deserted stands slicing across the field,
we broke in, struggling to climb over the locked gates. No wind moved the
humid air, magnifying sounds so they took on an eerie transcendence. Some-
one had painted and cleaned the place, mowing the grass and even laying
down bases as if for a game, giving the place a spooky feeling as we stood on
home plate. Long before anyone had heard of Moonlight Graham and the
Field of Dreams, a mysterious groundskeeper had preserved this museum.
I drifted back to that moment on a June day in 2003 when the cameras
caught Sammy Sosa using an illegal corked bat. The pictures stabbed a vital
spot, showing Sosa standing there with a quizzical look holding a jagged
piece of wood that looked as if he had broken it over his knee in a fit of
frustration. The scene played out over and over on television, an endless
loop circling back on itself, time after time, prompting a mixture of disbelief,
anger, and even sadness that yet another icon had been tarnished in the Era
of Bad Feelings.
When former Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez said Sammy Sosa should
have used Spanish to answer reporters, it should have raised a few eyebrows.
78 & Civil Rights Revolutions Raise Questions
Martinez said, ‘‘They should have had someone to translate and have
Sammy talk from his heart, how he feels. We are in America, I understand,
we don’t speak the language but we are doing the best we can to express
ourselves.’’1 In those words lies a tale that asks pointed questions about
Liberal America’s cornerstone of economic and social justice.
A week later the Baseball Players Association sent a memo that supported
Martinez, urging Latin American ballplayers to speak only in their native
language to the Associated Press (AP). The reason behind this action had
nothing to do with Sosa using an illegal bat and everything to do with justice.
An AP quote of Sosa’s answer to why he had landed in such a predicament
used broken English that may well have been what he said verbatim, but in
print it sounded like the dialect used by sombrero-wearing Mexican ban-
ditos in cheap Hollywood Westerns. ‘‘You got to stood up and be there for
it,’’ Sosa was quoted as saying.2 In an even more telling story, World Series–
winning manager Ozzie Guillen, who at the time was a coach for the Florida
Marlins, pointed out that Latin American players do not receive the same
interpreter services as Japanese and Korean players. ‘‘You bring a guy in
from Japan, and you’ll have a translator in the clubhouse,’’ Guillen said.
‘‘That’s not fair.’’3
We nicknamed it ‘‘the national pastime,’’ this venerable institution, a little
gray around the edges, whose values go back more than a century, perhaps
even to the father of our country, who is said to have played a primitive
version with the troops at Valley Forge. It is, as Roger Kahn has so per-
ceptively observed, our only sport without a time clock, which means a game
can go on as long as the forces of physics are held in abeyance. An at-bat can
last a blink of an eye or dissolve into a seemingly interminable cat-and-
mouse game of foul ball after foul ball, one coming so close to the foul pole
that for a second it hangs between immortality and failure.
Baseball has always served as a weathervane indicating the direction the
winds of change are coming from and how strong. We watch the changes
the way players pay close attention to how air currents play with that fly
ball hanging in the spotlights in straightaway center field. Babe Ruth will
always personify the Roaring Twenties, his prodigious appetites and Brob-
dingnagian feats forever tied to the excesses of the Jazz Age. No sooner
had the Democratic Party fought the battle of 1948, with Strom Thurmond
stalking into history, when baseball went through a similar crisis with
Jackie Robinson finally making it truly a sport for all Americans. Unfor-
tunately the rest of the country did not always get the message, creating
tragic scenes where players were not accepted by certain business estab-
lishments.
By the time of Sosa’s corked bat incident, baseball had become something
perverted by television, greedy owners, and players into a spectacle some
old-timers found hard to recognize. In an effort to recover an audience lost
to football and basketball, teams tried a variety of gimmicks. Team sched-
ules became crowded with so many giveaways and special days, that an
ordinary game day became extraordinary.
In the midst of this slump, Sammy Sosa became part of a magical home-
run derby, as he and Mark McGwire chased Maris’ record of sixty-one
homers and then set some of their own on their way to immortality. Several
years after, baseball reached rock bottom when both Sosa and McGwire
received subpoenas to testify before a congressional committee investigating
steroid use. That Congress chose not to question football with its offensive
lines that can weigh close to a ton or basketball ‘‘power forwards’’ resem-
bling Olympic weightlifters, provided sad comment on baseball’s fall from
grace. McGwire’s guarded testimony provided vivid evidence of baseball’s
confusion and disarray. Today sports talk shows debate whether those home
run records have asterisks. The Steroid Era—a name given recent baseball
history4—stands as a symbolic monument to the pumped-up excesses of the
Era of Bad Feelings from the hyperkinetic rantings of talk show hosts to the
hyperbolic rhetoric of Congress.
So much of the Era of Bad Feelings has seemed a conspiracy to deny good
feelings, as the press and voices of vitriol feed on fallibility and doubt like
metastasizing cancer cells. In this atmosphere where the air always seems
filled with the smoke of the latest flare-up, identity has become a supreme
issue for our times; our neighborhoods and the places where we work and
shop have become interchangeable parts on some ghastly giant assembly line
designed to produce androids. Each time we venture out, we carry what
identity we have with us, like pioneers and their covered wagons, knowing
that at any time some unforeseen disaster may strike. Heroes have proven
especially vulnerable, perhaps because they carry more baggage than the rest
of us—including carrying some of our own—as one after another falls under
the burden. The Hall of Shame appears so full that it will need an addition in
anticipation of a bumper crop of inductees, their failings engraved on tell-all
bestsellers or a Beyond the Glory exposé.
In this world political and ideological allegiances spawn social and media-
driven behaviors where it becomes acceptable, even mandatory to attack
people with opposing views. The reality show ‘‘Survivor’’ is right on target
with this, choosing cast members to represent certain well-known social
stereotypes, then placing them in artificial groups where they are supposed
to collaborate. The real game is to stab people in the back. As Sosa’s troubles
demonstrated, today the bad feelings engendered by this atmosphere lie right
on the surface.
So baseball, that weather vane of the American character, registers that
we live in a decidedly stormy time, with gusts blowing in strongly from the
outfield and dark clouds threatening a rain out on the horizon. Baseball has
been brushed back, knocked to its knees and many are not sure it will ever
get up again. It had already become disdained by television audiences and
advertisers because its timelessness seemed foreign in these hyperdriven
times. Most tellingly its traditionalists refused to compromise the game with
concessions to sponsors that football and basketball had made with two-
minute ‘‘warnings’’ and television timeouts.
Baseball, with its rules, traditions, and lack of violence, also has fallen
victim to the largest-growing area of so-called sports entertainment—pseudo
sports such as professional wrestling, something called ultimate fighting and
various ‘‘extreme’’ challenges such as snowboarding down the Matterhorn.
That these ‘‘sports’’ seem deliberately outlandish and violent should not sur-
prise anyone living in the Era of Bad Feelings, for many represent scripted
exercises with growling opponents trash talking and throwing garbage at
each other. Perhaps this entertainment, which becomes more and more like a
Roman circus, provides a welcome diversion from people in Congress doing
the same things.
Baseball came to reflect America in other ways, ways that raise questions
about the cornerstone of economic and social justice. When the New York
Yankees signed the free agent who by consensus is the game’s best all-
around player, Alex Rodriguez, giving him a contract that came close to the
combined salaries of entire teams, it exposed once again America’s dirty
little secret. Baseball mirrored America, but few wanted to look at the image
staring back at them. You could buy a World Championship just like you
bought and sold once-proud corporate names and their employees. You
could do this because the rapidly growing gap between baseball’s rich and
poor teams reflected America’s own growing income disparities. It was still
possible for an immensely talented immigrant such as Sammy Sosa to write
a modern Horatio Alger story of striking it rich, but for millions of other
Americans that dream was receding steadily. Sosa’s Hispanic brothers and
sisters could sense an uncanny similarity with an economic ethos they
thought they had left behind in Latin America.
In baseball the gap between rich and poor teams has produced an em-
barrassing competitive disadvantage. Even when a miracle happened with
low payroll teams like the Twins or the Marlins, the winners soon found
themselves forced to dispose of the very players that had taken them to
the top. For the average American, a similar logic prevails, as most of us
struggle to make car payments or pay medical bills, hoping we will also have
a miracle season. ‘‘For Sale’’ signs appear and then disappear as the losers in
this lottery game slip away to new lives no one wants to acknowledge. A
sudden illness, a layoff, a merger, a divorce, a parent suddenly requiring
care, even a random car accident can trigger the downward slide. This is the
pull-tab depression in which the next ticket you scratch could put you on
easy street or family assistance. Like the millions who sit transfixed by the
Power Ball numbers each week, everyone hopes they are holding a winner,
even though the odds are not much different than those of landing a pro-
fessional baseball contract.
The middle-class squeeze has received media attention, but less well
known is how the Counterrevolution’s economic and social policies have
jolted people of color. For many Americans social and economic justice is
synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement, which for them began on
a day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. While
much of the spotlight focused on African Americans during the 1960s and
early 1970s, women and other people of color also struggled for social and
economic justice. Today American schoolchildren and college students
study how Dr. King’s cry of ‘‘Free at last, Free at last!’’ echoed on Indian
reservations, urban barrios, Asian American neighborhoods, and in women’s
minds. They learn the names of organizations such as the Student Non-
violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Organization for
Women, the American Indian Movement, and the United Farmworkers.
And they read about leaders such as Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Clyde
Bellecourt, Cesar Chavez, and Gloria Steinem—participants in actions such
as the Wounded Knee takeover, the lettuce boycott and the publication of
Ms. They also study a long list of writers and artists who brought their voices
to what can justifiably be called a Rainbow Renaissance that paralleled the
Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. At times it seemed the best American
fiction, like some of the most memorable sports moments, was the work of
so-called ‘‘minorities.’’
That questions about the cornerstones came simultaneously with the
formation of the Counterrevolution should be no surprise to anyone with a
systems perspective. For as people of color and women asked whether the
playing field was level, it aroused the ire of those with different values.
Thurmond’s Southern Manifesto spoke about preserving a ‘‘way of life,’’
while others used rhetoric like ‘‘supply-side economics’’ to defend their
belief that inequality in terms of a modern ‘‘survival-of-the-fittest’’ ideology
represents the true American center. As questions and ideology came into
conflict they reinforced one another in a negative feedback loop that peri-
odically boiled over with hatred and violence.
In a sense the policies of the Counterrevolution have amounted to a
rollback not unlike the one that occurred after the North agreed to leave the
South to Nathan Bedford Forrest. For confirmation start by opening an
almanac. There you will find that infant mortality—a key measure of the
effectiveness of the health care system—increased under the Bush adminis-
tration from 6.8 in 2001 to 7.0 in 2002. The rate for African Americans is
almost twice that, increasing from 13.5 to 13.9 over the same period. The
Centers for Disease Control notes, ‘‘This was the first significant rise in the
infant mortality rate since 1958.’’5 For those keeping score, the rate is
double that of Sweden and Japan and worse than Portugal, Italy, and most
Western European countries including our favorite target, France.6
Economic inequity among people of color continues to grow into an
American scandal under the Counterrevolution. The Census Bureau reports
median household income for whites in 2002 was $59,955 while for His-
panics it was $39,656 and for African Americans $36,692. In this economy
where benefits seem to fall almost randomly, there is nothing random about
the numbers of households making over $100,000. Here whites outnumber
Hispanics and African Americans by an astounding ratio of almost 20–1!7
Curiously, the Current Population Survey tables contain no data on the
household income of Native Americans, perhaps because it is even lower
than for the other races. Unemployment for African Americans went from
6.7 percent at the end of the Clinton years to 10.7 percent after just two
years under George W. Bush. Hispanic unemployment showed a similar
gain, going from 5.7 percent to 9.5 percent during the same period.8
Sosa’s action played into this world and the changes in professional sports
that had left sports-bar patrons shaking their heads and waxing nostalgic
about the days of Johnny U, Bill Russell, and the Mick. Movie sports agent
Jerry McGuire hit the bullseye when he said, ‘‘Show me the money.’’ For the
Counterrevolution the barroom arguments and talk radio rants of sports
fans hold a disquieting message about income disparity. It is rare to listen to
sports talk radio and not hear someone complain about greedy athletes and
owners, as ticket prices for games extend beyond the reach of many families
even as owners lobby for new stadiums that contain more luxury boxes.
Ticket prices for the Super Bowl, World Series, and even ‘‘amateur’’ events
like the Final Four can equal the monthly house payment of many middle-
class Americans. As professional sports becomes something only for the rich,
as difficult for middle-class people to participate in as joining a private
country club, people are starting to add up the numbers. As more come to
see how the disparities of professional sports mirror the disparities in their
own lives it will be interesting to see if the political winds change.
Right now, those caught in the middle-class squeeze look not at the top
but out of the corners of their eyes at the changing American demographic
landscape. At the root of the controversy and much of the tension that
pervades the Era of Bad Feelings is the fact that America, like the rest of the
world, is becoming more diverse. The 2005 Baseball All Star Team featured
names like Ortiz, Rodriguez, Pujols, Soriano, Rivera, Santana, Ramirez,
Texeira, Guerrero, Alou, Lopez, Cabrera, Gonzalez, Martinez, Cordero,
Hernandez, and Abreu. In an article on America’s increasing linguistic di-
versity, The World Almanac observed that the number of Americans over
the age of five speaking a language other than English had grown from 32
million in 1990 to 47 million in 2000. Among those 60 percent spoke
Spanish in 2000, up from 54 percent in 1990. In California, 40 percent of the
population speaks a language other than English.9 America has become a
new homeland for Hmong chased from Laos, Somalis reduced to destitution
by a civil war nobody really understands or cares about, Russians driven
from a nation with the world’s first mafia-run oligarchy, and others caught
in struggles from which the world averts its eyes.
School systems under siege from attacks by the Counterrevolution rou-
tinely report dozens of native tongues. The Minnesota state reporting system
currently contains eighteen pages of codes for students’ primary languages
including Gujarati, Kanarese, Kannada, Konkani, Malayam, Marathi, and
Telugu (all are from India).10 Russian hockey players, African basketball
dunkers, and Dominican shortstops fill the rosters of professional teams.
Russian immigrant Anna Kournikova is one of America’s favorite pin-ups
with African American Halle Berry not far behind. The commercial fea-
turing former Dallas Mavericks coach Don Nelson speaking French, Ger-
man, and Canadian to his United Nations roster of players is a harbinger of
things to come.
Yet we must remember the United States has always been a nation of
uneasily merged ethnicities. Each new wave of immigration has in turn
produced a counterreaction that has ranged from restrictive immigration laws
to darker manifestations of prejudice. The bloody street fights between im-
migrants and nativists that Martin Scorsese portrayed in Gangs of New York
vividly captured this long-running theme. The challenges between the leaders
of a gang of Irish immigrants and so-called ‘‘natives’’ before they engage in a
pitched battle that will stain the ground red echoes words spoken in other
times and places in this country. Native leader Bill ‘‘The Butcher’’ Cutting
issues the challenge that is accepted by his Irish rival Priest Vallon:
Cutting: At my challenge, by the ancient laws of combat, we are met at this

chosen ground, to settle for good and all who holds sway over the five points:
us natives, born rightwise to this fine land, or the foreign hordes defiling it.
Vallon: By the ancient laws of combat, I accept the challenge of the so
called ‘‘natives.’’ They plague our people at every turn, but from this day out,
they shall plague us no more. For let it be known, that the hand that tries to
strike us from this land shall be swiftly cut down.11
Like the Irish in Gangs of New York, today’s immigrants are chasing the
same combination of freedom, economic opportunity, and personal dreams
that have always fueled this land. Thomas Jefferson once said that a little
revolution now and then is good for this country. What he really should have
said is that a little new blood, a little immigration, is the well-spring of
democracy. Like new additions to the gene pool this keeps us from becoming
so inbred we succumb to peculiar versions of madness or are unable to meet
new challenges.
Every American should journey to Ellis Island, if only on their wonderful
website,12 and wander through ruins where walls, concrete floors, and even
the dust actually speak. The records, some of them in the immigrants’ own
words, tell us their stories, which—like a great piece of music—gives voice to
multiple variations on a single powerful theme. That theme, of course, is
written on that eighth wonder of the world, the Statue of Liberty, standing at
the entrance to the harbor many immigrants risked their lives to reach. The
words are vaguely familiar, but like many other patriotic phrases are often
only partly remembered.
Give me your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.13
As a first-generation American, the words have special meaning to me, for

my father came here fleeing a political tyranny that had gone mad, putting
a death sentence on my grandfather’s head. The words attest to the appeal of
American freedom, particularly Liberal America’s value of the level playing
field, for immigrants come to America believing everyone has an even
chance. There seems little doubt that immigration has served as a major
driver of the American economy. Immigrants provided the brains and brawn
for the Industrial Revolution and every subsequent leap forward into the
computer age. Einstein chose to come to America as have thousands who

have remade this nation.
While it has long been gospel to nativists that immigrants cause a drain on
the economy, quite the opposite is true according to various studies. An
analysis of fifteen European countries during 1991–95 found that for every
percent increase in a country’s population through immigration there was an
increase in Gross Domestic Product of 1.25 percent to 1.5 percent.14 Ken-
nedy School of Government professor George J. Borjas, recognized as one of
the leading experts on the economic impact of immigration, summed up his
findings in a 1994 article, ‘‘The Economics of Immigration.’’ ‘‘In short,’’ he
said, ‘‘the estimated correlations between native wages and the immigrant
share in local labor markets do not support the hypothesis that the em-
ployment opportunities of U.S. born workers are strongly and adversely
affected by immigration.’’15 A website posting the ‘‘5 Myths of Immigra-
tion’’ notes, ‘‘Immigrants are more likely to be self-employed and start new
businesses. . . . Immigrants collectively earn $240 billion a year, pay $90
billion in taxes, and receive $5 billion in welfare.’’16
It is clear that immigration will prove especially valuable for competing in
a global economy. Given that world trade holds the key to economic survival
in this new century, our enormous pool of immigrants provides countless
links to their homelands, links invaluable for developing new markets. In-
stead of picturing foreigners as potential terrorists with bombs in their
hands, it may be more realistic to see them clutching dollar bills. We also
constantly need reminding that a significant amount of our scientific, tech-
nological, cultural, and economic achievements come from first-generation
Americans.
In spite of this, the Players Association memo advising Latino players
not to speak English may yet lead to a predictable and ugly reprise of the
‘‘make them all speak English’’ nativism that has become this era’s version of
Strom Thurmond’s segregationism. In various states across the country, es-
pecially those with a large Hispanic population, folks who years ago might
have worn hoods and burned crosses have taken it upon themselves to cir-
culate initiatives and Constitutional amendments calling for an end to bilin-
gual education.
In 1997, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz introduced a proposition
to abolish bilingual education in the California public schools. The mea-
sure had the support of the state Republican Party. ‘‘The object of our ini-
tiative is a very simple idea: that little immigrant children should be sent to
school and taught English, which I think most people would not think con-
troversial public policy,’’ said Unz.17 Unz also sponsored similar initiatives
in Arizona, Massachusetts, and Colorado. All but the Colorado initiative

passed.
One reason may have been that in Colorado, former Bush Education
Secretary Rod Paige, an African American, expressed doubts about the idea.
This prompted Unz to email that Paige is a ‘‘black former football coach’’
who said he got his job because of President Bush’s ‘‘intense support for
‘Affirmative Access.’ [sic]’’ He also said Mr. Paige’s ‘‘apparent lack of ability
to master or comprehend that portfolio meant that he played virtually no
role last year in either shaping or articulating Bush’s signature education
bill.’’18 Unz’s racist motives became a bit clearer with this remarkable letter.
President Bush remained silent about the matter.
Many American communities have local versions of Unz. On the surface,
the Nativists’ requests seem reasonable enough, for as they contend, ‘‘Didn’t
all those folks who came through Ellis Island, their surnames mangled by
some grumpy clerk, their lives and bodies put under a microscope, have to
do the same thing?’’ The debate over bilingual education focuses on whether
it helps or hurts children, winding through an almost impenetrable tangle of
studies and counterstudies, historical analogies, and plain old-fashioned
nativism of the type that used to post signs that said ‘‘No [fill in immigrant
group of your choice] need apply’’ and distribute trash like The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion. It is curious that various groups on the Religious Right,
who vociferously lobby for choice in such matters as sex education and
creationism, apparently do not wish to extend the right of choice to recent
immigrants.
Like much else in the Era of Bad Feelings, it all comes down to politics.
Immigrants, especially those we loosely label Hispanics, have become a huge
voting bloc. Pedro Martinez spoke for several million people who, in less
time than some people may like, have performed the first reverse coloniza-
tion in history, taking back those portions of the West and Southwest that
once had been parts of Spain and Mexico. It is no accident that Unz suc-
ceeded in states where Spanish speakers threaten to become a majority.
While many Republicans have supported the ‘‘let them speak English’’
movement, George W. Bush has amassed a more confusing record. As gov-
ernor of Texas he tempered his support for bilingual education in a state
with a large Hispanic vote, saying he favored programs ‘‘that work.’’ When
he first ran for president, the 2000 GOP platform opposed all bilingual
education, a stance the candidate did not disown. As president, Bush quietly
agreed to cut funding for bilingual education programs.
Today, Republican opposition to bilingual education remains strong, an
indication that the party that cut a deal with the Dixiecrats harbors familiar
prejudices. Such stalwarts as Phyllis Schlafly have spoken out against bi-
lingualism.19 The National Review has published several pieces by Jim
Boulet, Jr., Executive Director of English First, who wrote, ‘‘Given these
facts, a formal GOP endorsement of the good intentions underlying such
programs is both an educational disaster for millions of immigrant children
and a threat to this nation’s linguistic unity.’’20 Substitute culture or race for
‘‘linguistic unity’’ and the intent becomes transparent. Never mind that any
nation in this world economy that fosters ‘‘linguistic unity’’ risks becoming
a dinosaur.
Like many on the Raucous Right, Boulet quotes fictitious sources to make
his point. It should come as no surprise that English First placed on their web
page a spurious reference to an Oregon health agency advertising for a
Klingon interpreter (Klingon is a fake language created for the ‘‘Star Trek’’
series), a story that earned a place on the Urban Legends website.21 Boulet
may appear far out, but even more visible GOP leaders have echoed his
message. Newt Gingrich told a meeting of the Cobb County, Georgia,
Chamber of Commerce, ‘‘The fact is English is the common, commercial
language in America,’’ he said. ‘‘When we allow children to stay trapped in a
bilingual program, where you do not learn English, we are destroying their
economic future.’’22 For a former college professor, Gingrich’s comment
seems naı̈ve at best, since any educator knows bilingual education’s purpose
is to help students achieve.
The dilemma Sammy Sosa presents both Republicans and Democrats res-
onates with those long ago battles precipitated by the Dixiecrats. For the
Republicans, they again face the alternative of going along with the reac-
tionary part of their ‘‘base.’’ At the same time they know that Sammy Sosa
represents a serious threat to the infamous Southern Strategy. If Hispanics
become the majority in Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona they will
control a rather large bloc of electoral votes that are currently in the Re-
publican column, electoral votes that keep increasing because Hispanics are
moving there in large numbers. For Democrats the challenge also eerily echoes
the civil rights years when they faced a decision of whether to align with the
movement or try to stand on some ever-shifting, dubious middle ground.
Currently Hispanics make up about 13 percent of the nation’s population,
but by the year 2050, a quarter of America’s population may be Hispanic.23
Fertility rates show that in 1998, 20 percent of all babies born in this country
were Hispanic. A 2003 study by Arizona State University Professor Loui
Olivas showed that by the end of 2005 Hispanics would compose a majority
of high school graduates in California, by 2011 in Arizona and by 2012 in
Texas.24
One Republican strategy to cope with these trends revives the old Dix-
iecrat tactic of gerrymandering immigrants and minorities into voting
ghettoes so their impact is reduced. This dovetails with other measures to
discourage people of color from voting (see Bush v. Gore). Hispanics lay at
the center of the infamous Texas redistricting fiasco, when Republicans led
by Tom DeLay created a cubist masterpiece of districts designed to give
them a clear majority. The most notorious example of The Hammer’s plan is
a district that runs from Austin to the Mexican border in a zigzag pattern
that appears drawn by someone with an unsteady hand.25
The plan appeared so ridiculous that even the normally docile Demo-
crats found some spine and hightailed it to Oklahoma with the Texas
Rangers in hot pursuit, like something out of a low-budget Western. At this
point The Hammer’s minions sought the assistance of the Patriot Act and
Homeland Security Office (if anything should give you doubts about where
the Patriot Act could take us, this provides an example of it being used for
partisan, domestic political purposes). The absence of the Democrats pre-
vented the Republicans from establishing a quorum. When the Democrats
finally decided to return, the Republican governor called a special session,
with the Democrats again escaping to Arizona in the nick of time. All this
only served to make the Texas Republicans look ridiculous and the Texas
Rangers inept. Once again things spiraled out of control in the Era of Bad
Feelings, with the Republicans playing the role as instigators like some
overacted villain in a silent film melodrama, posturing broadly and twirling
his handle bar mustache.
Some Republicans believe the party can woo Hispanics through the use
of religious issues. One poll revealed that Hispanics strongly support is-
sues championed by the Religious Right, including school prayer (73 per-
cent) and school vouchers (84 percent).26 Family values might provide an-
other issue, as many Hispanics are deeply family-centered, more than a great
many of the family values types themselves. But the Hispanic concept of
family is also a deeply rooted cultural value. An Ohio State University
website explains, ‘‘Traditionally, the Hispanic family is a close-knit group
and the most important social unit. The term familia usually goes beyond
the nuclear family. . . . Individuals within a family have a moral responsi-
bility to aid other members of the family experiencing financial prob-
lems, unemployment, poor health conditions.’’27 These sentiments hardly
sound like what Ralph Reed means by ‘‘family values.’’ This mutual sharing
also goes against the individualistic philosophy of the Counterrevolution.
The Counterrevolution threatens to become caught in another very dif-
ficult trap, the trap of history. Their appeal has always been to the happy
days of the past (remember the famous morning-in-America commercial for

Ronald Reagan) where the gang gathered at the malt shop in towns with
white picket fences and the smell of freshly mowed lawns (I do not re-
member many faces of color in the American morning of Ronald Reagan).
As we have learned painfully, you cannot hold back the future.
Race certainly played a role in the commentary about Sosa’s cracked bat.
Some writers appeared to be boxing a straw man, saying anytime a person of
color is accused of something, liberals play the race card. Tom Knott of the
Washington Times wrote,
The playing of the race card, if only out of habit, has become a fairly standard
ploy in America. If it is not the race card, it is the ethnic card or the gender card.
It seems everybody wants to be a victim of this or that. . . . Here’s something
positive: Sosa earns a zillion dollars to play a game in a foreign land that gives
athletes second, third, fourth and fifth chances. He’ll recover from this. So
please, cork the whining.28
‘‘I am doubly delighted that he got caught because the PR fraud that has
been Sammy Sosa is saturated with political correctness and liberal guilt,’’
said Ira Simmons of ChronWatch.29
In typical fashion the Raucous Right, which always tries to find a way to
work one of the Clintons into their diatribes, managed to connect Sosa,
Hillary Clinton, and Martha Stewart. Salon.com’s King Kaufman wrote an
article with the lead teaser, ‘‘How corking your bat is a lot like a Martha
Stewart stock deal, but nothing like throwing a spitball.’’30 ‘‘Sammy Sosa
got caught cheating. In the universe of sports this is big. Not quite Hillary,
but certainly up there with Howell and Martha,’’ said National Review
sports editor Geoffrey Norman, whose article even had the same title as
Knott’s, which had been posted online a day earlier.31
At this point, on cue, someone asks, Where are the Democrats? It is
a question Sosa and many others want answered. That answer, of course,
is muddling around. For the last two decades the party has pursued some
version of the McGovern Rules strategy of delegate quotas. The common
thread in this strategy is to give ‘‘them’’ whatever the leadership decides
will be their quota. Under this strategy, the party became a collage of spe-
cial interest groups with no coherent center. The party platform resem-
bled a Rube Goldberg contraption where anyone was handed a hammer
and nails, allowed to add planks wherever they wanted, without thought
to how it related to what someone else was doing or to some overall
plan. Planks stuck out at odd angles, some held up by bent nails in such
precarious positions that most sane candidates refused to venture out onto
them.
The party also appears to have forgotten the importance of social and
economic justice. To see how they squandered this trust you need only read
the Kerry-Edwards Plan for America, that ponderous document Kerry
referred to in the debates as much as Bush mentioned that being president
was ‘‘hard work.’’ As one of the few people to have read it cover to cover, I
find a quote opening the section titled, ‘‘Building a Strong Economy’’ a per-
fect example: ‘‘I believe the measure of a strong economy is a growing
middle class, where every American has the opportunity to success.’’32 The
tortured grammar (did these people have a proofreader?) says all we need to
know about the Democrats’ problems. Diagram that sentence the way those
little old ladies who taught me high school English would, standing at the
blackboard with chalk in hand. The phrase after the comma would have to
modify ‘‘middle class.’’ Like fingernails running down a blackboard,
the implications of that comma—those not in the middle class have little
opportunity for success—would certainly raise eyebrows. Martin Luther
King, Jr., would be outraged.
Meanwhile President Bush has found some support among Hispanic
voters, making inroads into the traditionally Democratic Hispanic vote,
which went from 72 percent for Bill Clinton in 1996 to 57 percent for Al
Gore—costing Gore the election.33 In his important book, The Latino
Wave, Jorge Ramos points out that the Hispanic vote also elected Bush in
2004. ‘‘The election was not decided in Ohio,’’ he writes, ‘‘It was decided
long before that in states with high percentages of Latino voters.’’ Ramos
also points out that Latinos made up 8 percent of the total vote, a sizeable
bloc when one places it in the states where they are especially strong.34
One huge factor in Bush’s appeal to Hispanic voters has been his use
of their native language, including delivering a Cinco de Mayo speech en-
tirely in Spanish (a speech that earned enmity from Jim Boulet, who called it
‘‘a dangerous road’’ that could lead to ‘‘a culture of multilingualism’’).35
While some question Bush’s linguistic skills, HispanicVista.com writer
Domenico Maceri admits ‘‘Bush’s Español: Not good, but pleases Latino
audiences.’’36
Unlike the Republicans, the 2000 Democratic Platform strongly sup-
ported bilingual education, stating, ‘‘We oppose language-based discrimi-
nation in all its forms, including in the provision of education services, and
encourage so-called English-plus initiatives because multilingualism is in-
creasingly valuable in the global economy.’’37 However, the bilingual mes-
sage has not gotten through to its candidates. A Democratic poll seeking to
understand Hispanic voter preferences did not even have sense enough to
ask the linguistic question. Given Bush’s use of Spanish they could have
asked, ‘‘If Candidate A spoke to you in Spanish and Candidate B did not,
would you vote for Candidate A even if you did not agree with all their
positions?’’ This blind spot carried over into the 2004 campaign. According
to Raúl Izaguirre, president of the National Council de La Raza, ‘‘Kerry had
no strategy for winning the Hispanic vote.’’38 That cost him the election as it
had Gore. That Kerry obviously had little contact with La Raza, a major
Hispanic group, shows the narrowness of the party’s vision.
What no one in this debate about language seems to be asking is what a lot
of people and thousands of communities across the country are finding out
on their own—Why don’t we speak Spanish rather than why don’t they
speak English? Driven largely by economic necessity everyone from real
estate agents to fast food franchises are learning very quickly that they had
better learn to speak Spanish, or get someone who can, or they are going to
lose a lot of business. So let me make a bold prediction: the person who wins
the 2008 presidential election will speak Spanish, and not just badly, either.
If not 2008 then 2012 for sure. Sammy Sosa, for, one, will be very happy
about that.
The Democrats remind me of what I imagine it was like at Sutter’s Mill
just before the big gold discovery: There must have been these bright objects
in the river and people either did not see them or thought they were fool’s
gold, until someone finally realized they were literally sitting on a gold mine.
It is one thing to speak about the importance of bilingual education and put
it in your party platform, but it is quite another to ‘‘walk the talk,’’ as they
say, and actually put into practice what you believe. The party would be
mindful to heed a poll I saw about Spanish-language television. According to
author Ceril Shagrin, ‘‘In l992, prime-time share of viewing to Spanish
television among Hispanic adults 18–49 was 34 percent. That share has
increased incrementally each year and, for the current season to date, prime-
time share of viewing to Spanish television among the same demographic is
55 percent.’’39 If I were a Democratic presidential candidate, I would be
spending some money right now to hire someone to teach me conversational
Spanish.
Perhaps the best capstone on the Sosa story was by Memphis reporter Don
Wade, who compared Pedro Martinez’s remarks to a conversation he had
years ago with a black player about racism in sports. ‘‘In his way, and with
English as his second language, Martinez is trying to have the conversation
Eric Davis had with us at his locker,’’ wrote Wade, ‘‘It was good to listen
then; it would be good to listen now.’’40
Educational Equity:
7 Green with Envy
There is a place where three environments come together. What maps label
the White Earth Reservation lies on the border of several distinct ecological
zones. Imagine it as occupying the center of a triangle where on one side
stretch the flat prairies, on another side lie the boreal forests of the north
woods and at the bottom stand the savannas of the Midwest. Each side also
brings unique cultures that flavored the region long before the whites came.
Seeing White Earth, it is not surprising that people who revere such a place
should find themselves both blessed and cursed, not surprising that what the
land teaches should be of paramount importance, or that the people should
fight so long and so hard to keep this homeland.
Those whose ancestors lived here since before there was a United States will
tell you this land has much to teach. To understand what lessons this holds for
Liberal America’s cornerstone of educational equity requires opening our
minds to worlds far beyond the walls of a conventional classroom. Instead the
lesson involves oral traditions, a national election, the history of Native
Americans, and the realities of life in this place. Together they lead us to view
education and America from a radically different perspective.
The journey from a rural Kansas ballpark to a Minnesota reservation may
seem a matter of simple geography, but it is also a journey of the mind linked
by a single, simple question: When would Liberal America’s cornerstones
apply to everyone? The tide of civil rights rose and then fell, as it has before
in American history, leaving behind more questions than answers. Pedro
Martinez posed one of them in response to a broken bat, thereby opening
a window on America for those who would look through it. That window
revealed how the promise of social and economic justice had faded under the
assault of the Counterrevolution and the neglect of Democrats who once
saw themselves as keepers of that promise. A woman from White Earth
would turn our attention to another crucial cornerstone.
Winona LaDuke, who lives on White Earth, is one of the Anishinaabeg
people. Whites know the Anishinaabeg as Ojibway or Chippewa. She describes
her home:
There are forty-seven lakes. There’s maple sugar, there are hardwoods, and
there are all the different medicine plants my people use: our reservation is
called ‘‘the medicine chest of the Ojibways.’’ There are wild rice, deer, beaver,
fish, every food we need; there is plenty of it. On the eastern part of the
reservation there are stands of white pine. The land is owned collectively, and
we have family-based usufruct rights: each family has traditional areas in which
it fishes and hunts. In our language the words which describe the concept of
land-ownership translate as ‘‘the land of the people,’’ which doesn’t imply that
we own our land but that we belong to it.1
LaDuke became the first Native American to run for national office when
the Green Party nominated her for vice-president. Her candidacy earned the
enmity of Democrats, who felt the Greens helped elect George W. Bush by
drawing votes away from Al Gore. No doubt Winona LaDuke has heard
similar charges. All their lives Native Americans have dealt with someone
blaming their people for something that often had its roots in the failures of
the whites. It has been that way since the first Viking longboat landed in
Newfoundland through the colonists that came on masted ships, to George
Custer and Wounded Knee. The theme of these narratives has been not
unlike the charges in the 2000 campaign: if Native Americans would only
realize theirs is a losing cause, everything would go more smoothly.
Those of us who are white not only have trouble understanding this his-
tory, we also have even more trouble comprehending an entirely different
view of history itself. Anishinaabeg poet Gerald Vizenor provides an in-
structive explanation, ‘‘[Anishinaabeg tales] are not an objective collection
and interpretation of facts. Stories are a circle of dreams and oratorical
gestures showing the meaning between the present and the past in the life of
the people of the woodland.’’2 In this view past and present forever inter-
twine as part of the same reality, which always shifts and yet also always
stays the same. Part of this, no doubt, comes from being a culture with an
oral tradition, where words and visions pass carefully from one person to
another, like a piece of delicate pottery.
Whites have always looked down their noses at oral traditions, as if

something not written in ink is less real or true. A favorite analogy illus-
trating the liabilities of the oral tradition is the game called telephone, where
a story passed around a group inevitably ends getting garbled into something
hilarious. But the game actually represents the deficiencies of listening and in
the end it makes a cultural point quite different than that intended, for, as a
Native American once told me, whites are not good listeners—at least when
Native Americans are doing the talking. Native people find this one of the
most frustrating things about whites, their inability to really understand, to
know when to shut up and listen and when to ask a question.
A true oral tradition values listening skills as much as speaking skills, for
someone recognized as a renowned orator or storyteller is someone who lis-
tened very hard, paying attention to every sound, nuance, and gesture. That
a being such as manabozho—who Vizenor refers to as a ‘‘compassionate
trickster’’—should be revered by the Anishinaabeg reveals much, because
to be a great trickster you must be a very astute observer and listener—how
else are you to know how to master your opponent if you do not intensely
study him? For this reason alone, oral traditions ultimately hold great
value in Liberal America’s cornerstone of education, but not education as
the Counterrevolution would have it with its mixture of rote learning and
fundamentalist doctrine and certainly not with ‘‘intelligent design.’’
The importance of listening figures strongly in the relationship between
the Democrats and the Green Party. Much of the recent history of the
Democratic Party seems to resemble the telephone game, where messages
are garbled and lost so their original meaning no longer seems clear. My
guess is that if you were to ask Democrats what Liberal America stood for,
you would receive a lot of nervous answers and attempts to dodge the
question. The problem lies not in garbling the message, but that messenger
and listener do not seem to care about it.
LaDuke and Nader tried to remind the Democrats to get some spine or
risk losing not only their base but along with it the principles of Liberal
America. When voices such as LaDuke and Nader desert a party and its
cause, they serve, like canaries in a mineshaft, to alert us that something is
radically wrong with the atmosphere. This becomes even more critical when
seen in the context of the uniqueness White Earth represents. Those sacred
lands with their proximity to so many natural and human cultures seem to
express the need to hold on to principles or be crushed by surrounding
pressures.
People will continue to argue about the ‘‘Nader effect’’ into the next
century. Democrats still cast the Green Party in a negative light as a left-wing
version of the Dixiecrats—wild-eyed ideologues needing a strong dose of

reality. The website stopnader.com said what was on the minds of many
Democrats, ‘‘The difficult truth of the 2000 election was that Ralph Nader
did help Bush win the White House.’’3 Certainly we need to dispense with
the simplistic idea that if the Green Party did not exist all those Nader
supporters would have voted for Gore. More than the unprovable assertion
that lies behind this, there also lies a large dose of hubris. Elizabeth Schulte
wrote, ‘‘To say that Nader ‘took votes away’ from Al Gore assumes that the
2.7 million ballots cast for Nader were Gore’s to begin with.’’4
This begs an interesting question which few in the media raised: Why
didn’t Gore move toward the Greens to enlist their support? The Gore
campaign seemed to go through several phases in regard to Nader and
LaDuke. First, the Democrats tried to ignore them, pretending they were of
no consequence. By ignoring them, Gore signaled that his presidency would
not be one that tried to involve all Americans, but, as Nader and LaDuke
observed, his presidency would merely be politics as usual. It may have been
the ultimate irony of the 2000 campaign that Al Gore lost by becoming
exactly what Nader and LaDuke said he was.
The second stage of the Gore strategy came after campaign polls began
showing Nader would draw double-digit support. At this point, columnist
Robert Kuttner noted, Gore underwent ‘‘yet another makeover, now he’s a
populist, bashing drug companies, oil barons, and tax cuts for the wealthy,
sticking up for the ordinary working American.’’5 In essence, Gore tried on
some of Nader’s clothes, but like a country rube sporting a suit for the first
time, Gore looked uncomfortable in such clothing because he had no idea
how to wear it. It was as if his tie were crooked and his shirt collars too wide.
In the final stages of the campaign Gore again changed strategy, telling
voters that a vote for Nader might put George Bush in the White House.
Gore supporters made sure to lock Nader and LaDuke out of the presi-
dential debates, which served only to anger Nader supporters. The Demo-
crats even trotted out liberal icon Paul Wellstone to bolster their position. In
a debate on the PBS NewsHour with Nader supporter Jim Hightower,
Wellstone seemed a bit uncomfortable with his role, trying to affirm his
support for Nader’s ideas (many of which coincided with his own, while
Gore’s did not) while also making the argument that, at least in swing states,
Nader supporters needed to vote for Gore.
In the battleground states, I hope that Ralph’s supporters will support Al Gore
for the reasons I’ve stated. . . . I agree with you on the issues. And I agree with
you on the importance of organizing for power. But . . . the stakes are too high,
and it’s too dear a price to see George W. Bush and his supporters take over the
national government.6
By then, so many opportunities had been squandered that Gore’s pleas

seemed the appeals of a desperate man. In retrospect, Al Gore now appears
as one of Liberal America’s worst nightmares: uncertain and wooden in
his campaign appearances, waffling this way and that as if he had no real
principles, and even more indecisive in the election aftermath when he at
first conceded and then withdrew his concession. Gore, like many Demo-
crats, held to the tenuous assumption that the party had to move right to
appeal to a larger number of Americans. So Democrats became like someone
trying to get into an exclusive club who takes on all the airs of an upper-class
snob, their copycat manners apparent to everyone but themselves. For many
Americans this adoption of appearances seemed a cynical move calculated
only to win votes, which only fed the mistrust and bad feelings many voters
had about politics.
In writing about the Green’s exclusion from the 2000 presidential debates,
Winona LaDuke observed, ‘‘The reality is that the largest party in America is
neither the Democrats nor the Republicans—the largest party is the non-
voters.’’7 She goes on to say how hard it is for people who are outside the
folds of the two major parties to participate in the political process. In
America’s Forgotten Majority Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers note the main
thing these nonvoters want from government is material improvement
in their lives. Teixeira and Rogers believe the Democrats have forgotten
these voters in recent years by focusing on issues that are of marginal con-
cern to most people.8 In other words, by not focusing on the cornerstones.
The Counterrevolution sometimes forgets most of us work from paycheck
to paycheck, trying to perform an economic balancing act that is worthy of
a federal reserve economist as we juggle house or rent payments, car pay-
ments, grocery bills, and childcare, all the while hoping no one will get sick,
and if they do, that insurance will cover whoever is ill without any large
copays. When husband and wife work to pay the bills, it generates tensions
that the main beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts can only begin to imagine.
Just think about something as simple as who makes supper. If traffic grid-
locks or the bus breaks down is someone home to meet the kids after school
and make sure they get fed on time? As we have seen, these realities are
especially true for people of color.
In the last few decades, the Democrats have behaved as if the votes of
people of color were the party’s birthright. Like some high-born lord of the
manor, they assume that, like the peasants of the estate, these voters are
theirs forever. An equally condescending attitude assumes that given the aims
of the Counterrevolution, people of color have nowhere else to go. To
people forcibly evicted from their homes to ‘‘reservations’’ because those in
power felt they had ‘‘nowhere else to go,’’ that assumption must seem
especially misguided.
Based on their belief the votes of people of color were theirs, Democratic
strategy over the last decades has focused on moving to the right. What if, in
fact, contrary to the Republican myth, the rightward tilt had nothing to do
with the Republicans and everything to do with the Democrats abandoning
Liberal America’s cornerstones? Polls seem to indicate this theory has some
validity, for a majority of Americans consistently have supported measures
strengthening Liberal America’s four cornerstones, including increasing
funding for education, fewer tax cuts for the wealthy, opposition to media
concentration, and increased protection of voting rights.
When Winona LaDuke accepted the Green Party vice-presidential nom-
ination, she spoke about her people, sending a message to those who seem
to have forgotten why government exists. After introductory remarks of
welcome in her native language she described life on the White Earth res-
ervation, where the median family income is just slightly above half the state
average, unemployment is at 49 percent and one-third of the people do not
have a high school diploma.
Now let me tell you about some real people. Native Americans are the poorest
people in the country. Four out of 10 of the poorest counties in the nation are
on Indian reservations. This is the same as White Earth. My daughter’s entire
third grade class with few exceptions is below the poverty level. The only
choice those parents have with any hope—with 45 percent unemployment—is
to work at the casino at about six bucks an hour. With two parents working
and paying child care expenses this makes them ostensibly the working poor.
Not much different than being in poverty. So my friends, a family of seven who
live in a two bedroom trailer down the road from me—a fifteen year old
trailer—on AFDC have few options under the new welfare reform plan. I will
not stand by mute as the safety net is taken away from those children and that
third grade class.9
That LaDuke painted these pictures not at a Democratic Party presidential

convention but at the convention of a third party, should serve as a pointed
warning to the Democrats. The statistics she cited and the haunting pictures
she drew for a national audience represented the first time most Americans
had confronted the realities faced by many Native Americans today. Life on
the ‘‘rez’’—as some Native Americans call it—has existed outside the con-
sciousness of the average American, even beyond places such as Bosnia, Iraq,
and Afghanistan, where the cameras journeyed far more times than they
have to places such as White Earth or Pine Ridge. It would be safe to say
virtually every American has seen more of Baghdad or Kabul than Ponsford,
Minnesota.
It is in Ponsford that LaDuke works, directing the White Earth Land
Recovery Project (WELRP). LaDuke’s fight for the return of land to the
Anishinaabeg is a key to understanding her acceptance speech. At the heart
of the White Earth struggle is the relationship between Native Americans
and the land. Through even the worst of the treaties forced on them, the
mere act of making a treaty recognized the sovereignty of the tribes. At those
signings—even those under force or duplicity—the United States recognized
them as nations just as surely as Britain or France. Today they are still
nations, enjoying a unique status in federal law that allows them to have
their own courts, law enforcement, and even issue their own license plates.
This unique legal status helps to explain the relationship between tribal
peoples and the land, for the land represents not only a geographic and
ecological entity, but also a social, political, cultural, educational, and spir-
itual one. These are tied together such that breaking this circle is akin to
blasphemy or treason. In this sense the land itself lives as surely as those who
walk upon it on two legs. You don’t just live on the land and if you are a
member of what some Native people refer to as the Wannabe tribe you don’t
just try to relate to it in some vaguely spiritual way. You are responsible for
everything that goes on there and you cannot evade that responsibility. The
idea that what is part of your sacred trust has somehow been taken away
from you becomes far more than a boundary dispute. It is as if some foreign
power had taken over your place of worship and proceeded to erect a fast
food counter by the altar, hang billboards from sacred objects, knock down
walls and repaint everything. Then after doing this they told you to leave and
not to worship there any more.
The White Earth cause fits within several centuries of treaty violations
by the U.S. government, including George Custer’s invasion of the Black
Hills. The 1867 White Earth Treaty created the reservation, which originally
was thirty-six townships square—the size of a county. Today, however, the
reservation is considerably smaller due to what Winona LaDuke and others
consider violations of the original treaty. LaDuke became involved in the
White Earth cause after she had received a degree from Harvard and decided
to devote her energy to restoring lands promised by the treaty. LaDuke
explains WELRP’s purpose and methods:
Our land is Mino-Aki (good land) whose biodiversity is essential to the health
and spiritual well-being of our people. For this reason we seek to reclaim the
land of White Earth Reservation which was stolen from us through unethical
tax foreclosures, treaty abrogations and property thefts in the 1800s and early
1900s. Consequently, our White Earth ecosystems are being continually
degraded by corporate farming and logging.10
Winona LaDuke remains as head of the WELRP, but she has taken the
values at the heart of the project to other causes including working with
other indigenous peoples and environmental organizations such as Green-
peace. In 1994, Time named her as one of America’s fifty most prominent
Americans under the age of forty. In 1998 Ms. named her woman of the
year.
In a story about the WELRP’s sturgeon recovery project, which aims to
restore the once plentiful fish to their original habitat, LaDuke articulated
the values that have moved her to such action:
‘‘River connectivity’’ is a phrase that is lived by the lake sturgeon of Central

North America. Ancient beings whose presence graced the stories, songs,
and memories of countless generations of people, they were banished by
greed. . . . Today, with the dreams and hands of fisheries biologists, tribal
members and some luck, they are returning to the rivers and lakes of the forest
country just west of the Great Lakes, returning in their own glory. Bi azhi-
giiwewag omaa: ‘‘they are returning here.’’ And as they return, they teach us all
a lesson—the lesson of river connectivity, and our own relationships with
each other. That lesson—I believe is that we can begin the process of undoing
some of what we have done to each other, and that we are all ultimately
connected.11
The word ‘‘teach’’ in LaDuke’s explanation resonates in today’s world

where education has come under fire from the Counterrevolution. In its
mildest form the Counterrevolution advocates a return to ‘‘the basics,’’
while in its more radical clothes it proposes government funding of religious
schools. Phyllis Schlafly, who has campaigned for ‘‘back to the basics’’ for
over a decade, stated the essential case in a 1993 article that railed against
what was then called Outcome-Based Education:
Outcome-Based Education is—a process for government telling our children

how to live, what to say, what to think, what to know, and what not to know.
What the children say, think and know must conform to the liberal Politically
Correct ideology, attitudes and behavior. What they do not know will be
everything else. And because they won’t know the basics of reading, writing
and arithmetic, they won’t be able to find out. OBE is converting the three R’s
to the three D’s: Deliberately Dumbed Down.12
In the sturgeon story ‘‘teaching’’ and ‘‘the basics’’ become something

entirely different, something that reverberates with Liberal America’s cor-
nerstone of education. To understand we need to remember the history of
Indian education in this country and something about its current state. The
story of Indian education stands as one of the sorriest chapters in American
history, for it remains not as much an educational story as a political and
cultural one. As an instructive lesson on the use of education as a political
tool, it reverberates strongly with the Counterrevolution’s attempts to bend
public education to the ideology of its fundamentalist allies. As was noted in
chapter 2, if Jerry Falwell means what he said in his book, all American
education will be Christian fundamentalist education.
For Native Americans that idea must resonate with meaning. In the
nineteenth century government-sponsored boarding schools took young
girls and boys away from their families and communities with the professed
aim of ‘‘assimilating’’ them into the larger, white society. In fact, underneath
‘‘assimilation’’ lay an all-out attempt to brainwash an entire generation.
Nothing symbolizes the world of these schools better than the story a Native
American friend told me about his family. After the government had forcibly
shipped his grandfather from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania, they lined up the
little boys, then randomly assigned them new names using those of American
presidents and political leaders. So a frightened, lonely child lost his identity
and became Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson. My friend’s grandfather
received the name Benjamin Harrison.
Elements of this system persisted down to what some term the ‘‘Indian
New Deal,’’ named because the level playing field ideology behind FDR’s
programs also included Native Americans. The ‘‘Indian New Deal’’ tends to
be only a footnote to most histories of the period, but that dilutes the beliefs
of Liberal America that served as its foundation. Much of the Indian New
Deal was spurred by the abuses in boarding schools outlined in the 1928
publication of the Merriam Report. It asserted:
The philosophy underlying the establishment of Indian boarding schools, that

the way to ‘‘civilize’’ the Indian is to take Indian children, even very young
children, as completely as possible away from their home and family life, is at
variance with modern views of education and social work, which regard the
home and family as essential social institutions from which it is generally

undesirable to uproot children.13
The crown jewel of the Indian New Deal was the Indian Reorganization Act
of 1934, legislation some refer to as the ‘‘Indian Bill of Rights.’’ The act
focused on strengthening Native American life and culture, halting the loss
of their lands and encouraging strong tribal governments. Additional Indian
New Deal legislation such as the Johnson-O’Malley Act of 1934 provided
federal financial aid to local districts, reservation day schools, and public
schools which had been established on Indian lands.14 While the Indian New
Deal represented a positive step, it still followed an older policy of whites
making decisions for Native people.
Unfortunately, as is often the case in Indian Country, even the Indian New
Deal’s commitments did not last. The pivotal moment came for Native
Americans at the same time it came for the rest of America—the Reagan
administration. As the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) noted
on its website, ‘‘Unfortunately, under the Reagan Administration, the du-
ration of this latest period of reform is nearing its demise.’’15 While schools
have dealt with budget cuts and unfunded mandates, schools in Indian
Country, many of which were not that well-funded, have been hit particu-
larly hard.
In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding for Indian education by $79
million—so much for leaving no child behind! An article at the National
Indian Education Association website starts with an angry lead sentence,
‘‘Members of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee slammed Bush admin-
istration officials at an oversight hearing on Thursday, questioning their
commitment to Indian education.’’ ‘‘Our constituency is becoming ever
more alarmed,’’ NIEA president David Beaulieu told the committee, ‘‘about
their concerns with the statute and what is happening to Indian education,
generally.’’ Committee Chair John McCain also had harsh words for Bush
officials, saying little appears to have been accomplished since the passage of
the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.16 Confirmation of McCain’s words
comes from school ‘‘report cards’’ published by the Bureau of Indian Affairs
that paint a grim picture of student performance in Indian Country. In
language arts and reading less than 4 percent are performing at an advanced
level, while in math the figure is under 6 percent. Just under half the students
score at the lowest, or basic level. Only 60 percent of these students graduate
from high school.17
Educational statistics of other people of color remain equally grim a half-
century after Brown v. Board promised to equalize American education.
With the Counterrevolution in control of the White House for much of the
last half-century, the party that cut the deal with Strom Thurmond and
struck an educational alliance with Christian fundamentalists has proven
unable to reverse the achievement gap. In fourth-grade reading only 1 per-
cent of African Americans and 2 percent of Hispanics score at the advanced
level as compared with 10 percent of whites. In twelfth grade the figures are
the same. In fourth-grade math 0 percent of African American and 1 percent
of Hispanics score at the advanced level compared with 3 percent of whites.
In twelfth grade these figures remain the same, but Hispanics have dropped
to 0 percent.18
The situation for Native Americans in public schools remains harsh.
Where once American education sought to strip Native Americans of their
identity, now the preferred strategy seems to be to ignore them. The Na-
tional Center for Education Statistics, which is one of the premier sources for
education data, does not even include Native Americans in its dropout and
other statistics. In a study of Indian dropouts, Donna Deyhle quotes a Native
American student:
The way I see it seems like the whites don’t want to get involved with the
Indians. They think we’re bad. We drink. Our families drink. Dirty. Ugly. And
the teachers don’t want to help us. They say, ‘‘Oh, no, there is another Indian
asking a question’’ because they don’t understand. So we stop asking questions.19
When she spoke about the children of White Earth in her acceptance
speech, Winona LaDuke pointed out ‘‘nearly one-third of all Indians on the
reservation have not attained a high school diploma,’’20 a figure similar to
that for other Native American communities. In essence, she asked whether
this country would uphold Liberal America’s cornerstones. The answer she
received from Democrats may explain one reason for the rift between La-
Duke and her Green Party and the Gore campaign in 2000: the Democratic
Party Platform remained notably silent on the subject of Native American
education and was unimaginative on education in general. This key cor-
nerstone of Liberal America and the concerted attack on it by the Count-
errevolution inspired tepid rhetoric from the Gore campaign—so tepid that
I would bet that most Americans do not remember it. A similar situation
prevailed in 2004. Couple this with the slighting of the Hispanic vote noted
in the previous chapter and it is a wonder either Gore or Kerry came as close
as they did.
Winona LaDuke is trying to tell us that educational equity goes beyond
dollars and cents into the very realm of the curriculum. In the sturgeon story
she portrays the world as both classroom and teacher, a place where one can
learn from the vibrant living laboratory of the land as well as from the
cultures and traditions of the people who inhabit it. Such ideas have aroused
the ire of the Counterrevolution. For over a decade the Religious Right has
expended a great deal of ammunition decrying curricular changes that it
refers to as ‘‘cultural relativism.’’ As anyone whose children have attended
public schools recently well knows, a new school curriculum has sought to
explain and celebrate America’s diversity. It is often said the victors write the
history, which in the case of Native Americans resonates all too loudly. In
the 1970s and 1980s, however, schools began to teach students about the
contributions of women and people of color and, yes, about the mistakes
made in places like White Earth and Wounded Knee. Sand Creek, where the
Seventh Cavalry’s slaughter of entire Native American families had some-
thing to do with the ferocity of the Little Bighorn, entered into the American
consciousness.
Long overdue dialogues began and long suppressed questions surfaced
about how true public education has been to Liberal America’s cornerstone
of educational equity. For millions of Americans the answers lay not merely
in the separate and unequal resources of the nation’s schools, but also in
what went on inside classrooms. This is what the Counterrevolution seeks to
overturn. Its focus on the history of names and dates as opposed to ideas and
issues seeks to remove that essential dialogue and discussion. For the Reli-
gious Right, this discussion ‘‘pollutes’’ the minds of children. Better to do
rote recitation than teach the critical thinking skills our children will need to
survive in the complex, diverse world of this new century.
LaDuke’s ideas contain a third, and often forgotten and misunderstood,
dimension: education is about learning. New or different knowledge and
ideas have always made people uncomfortable, as Galileo could testify. As
educators are fond of reminding us, we are all lifelong learners who hunger
for new knowledge and constantly question and change our ideas. In the
recriminations and rhetoric that hang over the Era of Bad Feelings like
smoke over a battlefield, we also overlook the fact that this contentious
atmosphere almost forces us to understand what we see and wonder about.
The Culture Wars represent a conflict between those who think they know
all the answers and those who believe we need broader tolerance and un-
derstanding. In her speeches about the values of Native Americans, LaDuke
continually points out that the larger society has always discounted or
misunderstood the deeper meanings held by indigenous people. She believes
these values can offer valuable alternatives in a world seemingly bent on
swallowing itself whole.
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES believe that all societies must exist in accordance

with natural law in order to be sustainable. Cultural diversity is as essential as
biological diversity. Indigenous peoples have lived on Earth for thousands of
years, and I suggest that their ways are the only sustainable ways of living.
Because of that, there is something to be learned from indigenous cultures.21
In her sturgeon story Winona LaDuke articulates a learning philosophy

that can only be described as organic, for it emphasizes the holistic, inter-
connected nature of reality. Connectivity represents the key theme in the life
of the sturgeon. That this idea comes from Native Americans should be no
surprise, for indigenous peoples have always stressed the circle of life. Rose
von Thater-Braan, cofounder of the Native American Academy—a network
of Native and non-Native people engaged in the study of Native science—
explains. ‘‘The core of Native science is relationship which reflects itself in
our way of being in the world’’; she says, ‘‘We concern ourselves with the
interdependencies and relationships that make up the whole.’’22 LaDuke
reminds us that interrelationships insist the Liberal America’s cornerstones
connect with one another. Interrelationships also provide the key to liv-
ing in this new century. Systems thinker Donella Meadows, who won a
MacArthur Fellowship for her work applying System Dynamics to various
global and environmental problems, quotes an ancient Sufi teaching: ‘‘You
think because you understand one you must understand two, because one
and one makes two. But you must also understand and.’’23
In another article Meadows explained how such a perspective might shed
light on the farm problem:
Farmers are caught in a vicious cycle. At any given price, for milk or grain or
whatever, the most obvious way a farmer can earn more money is to produce
more. So some of them do. But, since most of us are already drinking all the
milk and eating all the grain we can, a larger supply means a lower price. Now,
since the price is lower, every farmer has to produce more just to keep the same
income. So every farmer tries to do that and some succeed, increasing
production still more, dropping prices still further, forcing every farmer to
produce still more.24
Unlike the perspective LaDuke and Meadows advocate, the curriculum

advanced by the Counterrevolution maintains a rigid view of education that
flows from their fundamentalist beliefs. LaDuke’s view of education un-
covers a major struggle across the world between those who would maintain
the rigid hierarchies and ideas such as those held by fundamentalists here
and abroad and those who embrace a more systemic view. For fundamen-
talists who may be Christian, Muslim, or some other religion, rigid cate-
gories and preordained certainties offer not merely emotional comfort in
these turbulent times but also rock-of-ages solid intellectual grounding.
They strongly resist what they see as outside forces that would threaten what
they regard as God’s truths. For others like LaDuke and Meadows, the
world is a place where interrelationships represent the key to understanding.
Taking a cue from science, which sees genetic and ecological diversity as a
key to species and environmental survival, they believe intellectual diversity
is a key to cultural survival. Native American Rose von Thater-Braan de-
clares, ‘‘What you see is that diversity is the capacity to live in productive
interdependent relationship. Everything else in the natural order does that as
part of its nature, yet, human beings struggle with the idea of living in
harmony with one another.’’25 LaDuke asks what may be the most relevant
question for this new century, ‘‘Will we look to create isolation, or will we
look to create relationship?’’26
The full implications of this question demand another book, but suffice it
to say this clash of visions lies behind everything from the culture wars to the
religious wars of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Whether our
children succumb to fundamentalist rigidity or come to understand the in-
terrelationships that intertwine their lives may determine how we cope with
everything from environmental problems to globalization.
Certainly the Democrats need to understand. What has made the Count-
errevolution’s attacks particularly fearful lies in their simultaneous assault
on all four cornerstones. This has made countermeasures especially difficult.
Weakened voting rights, for example, makes it more difficult for those who
are excluded to fight for their economic rights. With diminished economic
power, media and educational access become more closed. Lowered edu-
cational and media access lead to less informed voting decisions. Systems
people would call this a negative reinforcing loop. When Democrats do find
the backbone to stand up to this assault, they seem to dart back and forth
like a car full of clowns trying to put out a carnival fire.
Besides the importance of interconnectedness, LaDuke also reminds us
that learning involves learners. The Counterrevolution views education as a
one-way flow from teacher to learner, something that has proven particu-
larly disastrous for Native Americans. The educational ideas of the funda-
mentalists resonate too closely with the boarding schools of the past. The
distributors of a ‘‘Christ-Centered Curriculum’’ provide some understand-
ing of the lessons taught in some religious academies. In noting what makes
their curriculum stand out, they point to a curriculum that builds all studies
on foundations of Scripture, teaches skills for development of godly char-

acter, and emphasizes how God uses and communicates through the written
word and mathematics. The distributors point out, ‘‘Students develop a
solid Biblical world-view while learning basic skills.’’27 La Duke’s views
have little in common with this indoctrination, asserting that when learn-
ers become involved in their own education, making it relevant to them, it
holds more meaning. Much like Hispanics advocating bilingual education,
many Native Americans believe their children should learn their own lan-
guage and culture.
Regardless of whether one agrees with LaDuke’s perspective—or even
understands it, since the Wannabe Tribe has a long history of distorting
these ideas—it makes an important point about the level playing field and
educational equity. The playing field stays level only if all of us remain
willing to open our eyes, ears, and minds to various points of view—even if
what they tell us is unpleasant or challenging. Only by triangulating our
position through the use of many reference points can we know if the field is
truly level. Rose von Thater-Braan notes, ‘‘It has been said that the expe-
rience of Native peoples studying in the western educational system is like
looking into the mirror and having the mirror look away.’’28 One might turn
the analogy around and say that for non-Native people it becomes looking
into a very narrow mirror.
In the past a major American failing in regard not only to Native people
but also others has been to talk and not listen. LaDuke points out that we did
not hear, for example, what so many tribes told us about our wanton de-
struction of the land that has produced a struggle to heal deep, and in some
cases irreparable, scars. In a speech she gave during the 2000 campaign,
Winona LaDuke expressed an optimism that can only come from being part
of a community that endured years of attack and exploitation and yet sur-
vived with pride still intact:
We are a society with solutions. . . . That’s what’s amazing about this country.
There’s no absence of resources. We are a rich country, the richest in the world.
We have the resources to do the right thing. What we have is an absence of
political will. We lack the will to do the right thing.29
Voting Rights: Mrs. Hamer’s
8 Question
The Mississippi backcountry is about time, about clinging to the shade on

brutally hot days, waiting for something to cool things down. In heat that
seems to slow time itself, everything can feel heavier, the air, whatever you
happen to be doing, or even life itself. This engenders a certain economy of
motion that is reflected in the rolling cadences of words that slide off the
tongue the way molasses slowly oozes from a jar, making the point that you
do not move quickly when the air is as thick as syrup.
They call this region the home of the blues and if the blues is about any-
thing it is about time, the way it works on you as the burdens of the past
weigh down the present, the way a man looking out across a gravel road lets
his fingers pluck the strings so they moan with memory. One of the greatest
of these blues singers, maybe even the greatest, was Robert Johnson, who left
a few recordings and a vague biography of legend and fact that no one will
ever sort out. In one recording he sings, ‘‘I’ve got to keep movin’ . . . there’s a
hellhound on my trail.’’1 The guitar accompaniment to this song makes one
understand why some say Johnson sold his soul at a crossroads between
Heaven and Hell.
Fannie Lou Hamer knew all about time, unfulfilled promises, hellhounds,
crossroads, and knew about the blues. Her story represents a crucial chapter
in the history of the level playing field. This large woman, with a com-
manding presence that comes from holding the moral high ground, was the
granddaughter of slaves. One of twenty children, she first went to work in
the fields with her sharecropper family when she was six. In an interview
with Dr. Neil McMillen of the University of Southern Mississippi she
remembered, ‘‘Life was very hard; we never hardly had enough to eat; we
didn’t have clothes to wear. We had to work real hard.’’2
In the still-feudal regions of Mississippi, children like Hamer received
little formal schooling because they were expected to work the fields as soon
as they were able. She described her education in a 1968 Milwaukee Sentinel
interview. ‘‘There was nothing to do in December, January, February,
and March so they let us go to school,’’ she said, ‘‘But I only got to go six
years.’’ As it has for others, this oppression only strengthened Hamer’s de-
sire for education. With a description that could have come from a pre–Civil
War plantation she described how she satisfied this hunger: ‘‘After I stopped
going to school, whenever I was in the [plantation owner’s] house, and I’d
have to sit with a sick person or something, I’d stretch out and read.’’3
Hamer and her husband were working as sharecroppers when in 1962,
organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
and Southern Christian Leadership Conference asked for volunteers to
register to vote. Hamer’s recollection provides a sad comment on the ideal of
the level playing field: ‘‘I didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote.’’4
Hamer was one of eighteen who stepped forward. Later they took a bus to
the Montgomery County courthouse. When someone asked where she
found the courage, she later reflected, ‘‘The only thing they could do to me
was to kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at
a time ever since I could remember.’’5
When they arrived at the courthouse, Hamer and the others walked
through an ugly mob with guns to face the literacy law, a segregationist
strategy to keep African Americans from voting. When they tried to enter the
circuit clerk’s office he told the group they could only enter two at a time.
When it was Hamer’s turn she was asked to read and interpret a section of
the Mississippi Constitution. Said Hamer, ‘‘That was impossible. I had tried
to give it, but I didn’t even know what it meant, much less to interpret it.’’6
This story sheds light on events since, including the Florida election and the
infamous ‘‘butterfly ballot.’’ The Civil Rights Commission report on Flor-
ida’s systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans in 2000 shows
that we have not come all that far since Fannie Lou Hamer tried to register.
Testimony given by a Mississippi registrar to a 1965 Congressional Sub-
commitee sounds strangely familiar after 2000:
For a day and a half Shankle sweated on the stand trying to explain . . . why he
had closed down one of the two voter registration offices in the county and
forced a large part of the Negro residents to trek an additional 25 or 30 miles to
register; why he refused to appoint deputy registrars to handle applications,
Voting Rights & 111
with the result that Negroes were prevented from voting the two months when
he was acting as the clerk of the circuit court . . . why he had denied a Negro
applicant the right to register . . . even though she had answered the 21
questions on the application . . . she had signed the application in only one of
the two required places.7
Courthouse employees wearing the equivalent of white hoods could not

deter Hamer. As she took on a larger role as a field organizer with SNCC, she
came to be known for her evocative singing of spirituals that spoke of free-
dom. On June 3, 1963, she was riding in a rented bus on her way to a SNCC
convention in South Carolina when police in Winona, Mississippi, stopped
the bus and jailed those on board. She described what happened next:
Three white men came into my room. One was a state highway policeman (he
had the marking on his sleeve). . . . They said they were going to make me wish I
was dead. They made me lay down on my face and they ordered two Negro
prisoners to beat me with a blackjack. That was unbearable. The first prisoner
beat me until he was exhausted, then the second Negro began to beat me. I had
polio when I was about six years old. I was limp. I was holding my hands
behind me to protect my weak side. I began to work my feet. My dress pulled
up and I tried to smooth it down. One of the policemen walked over and raised
my dress as high as he could. They beat me until my body was hard, ’til I
couldn’t bend my fingers or get up when they told me to. That’s how I got this
blood clot in my eye—the sight’s nearly gone now. My kidney was injured
from the blows they gave me on the back.8
Later she would learn that Medgar Evers was murdered while she was in jail.
Although she never fully recovered from it, the beating did not deter Hamer.
When asked later what kept her going she uttered the immortal phrase that
graces her tombstone, ‘‘I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.’’9
As records of that era come to light, like those of the former Soviet bloc,
we can see Hamer and others faced the equivalent of an Eastern European
police state. In 1956, in response to the Brown v. Board decision, the
Mississippi legislature approved the creation of the Mississippi Sovereignty
Commission ‘‘to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed nec-
essary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and
her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the federal government or
any branch, department or agency thereof.’’10
Commission records lay in a vault of secrecy and protection until a lawsuit
by the American Civil Liberties Union opened them for the public. Although
the records appeared sanitized, what emerged was shocking enough—ghosts

whose wails tell a sordid story. The handwritten records from one county
show payments to informers ranging from $25 up to almost $100, with $40
not being uncommon. Check marks march down the page, marking African
American informers, sometimes several for the same family.11 Like Nazi and
gulag administrators, the Sovereignty commission believed nothing was too
inconsequential to report. An eerie 1964 memo notes: ‘‘Rita Schwerner [the
wife of slain civil rights worker Michael Schwerner] recently purchased a
Singer sewing machine in Meridian and had it delivered to 2505 1/2 5th
Street in Meridian.’’12
To picture Mississippi at that time you have to be prepared to walk into a
fevered nightmare that periodically reasserts itself into our consciousness.
Fantastical images and shapes flit in the darkness, and curses and screams
come from beyond the edge of safety and sanity. We awake with that un-
comfortable feeling of sorting out what is real. One memo captures the
atmosphere: ‘‘It was pointed out to Shiboh by the writer,’’ it notes, ‘‘that he
was going a bit beyond the tutoring in Leland and he was advised to be very
careful he did not go beyond the provisions of the law and create a problem
which could bring about serious trouble.’’13
In another entry, an agent recommended pressuring a black college to
purge itself of Civil Rights ‘‘agitators’’ by threatening to revoke the teaching
licenses of all the faculty and of those who graduated with teaching licenses.
A third memo tells of a plant visit by representatives of a racist group that
threatened the plant owner if he did not stop hiring African Americans.
Reporting on a closed meeting an investigator noted, ‘‘The writer could not
gain access to the meeting but is very close to some of those who will attend
so I should be able to find out what was discussed.’’14 A letter documents the
Sovereignty commission’s role in providing a hidden tape recorder that
agent Woodley Carr ‘‘could use in interviewing the sister of Fannie Lou
Hamer.’’15
The online archives of the commission record over 250 entries on Fannie
Lou Hamer, a digital biography. One refers to the trial of the officers who
beat Hamer, noting, ‘‘The charges in this case were misdemeanors and the
defendants were found ‘not guilty’ by a jury after information. There was no
indictment in this case.’’16 The memo does not mention the contents of the
‘‘information’’ or where it came from. Paging through memos like this be-
comes unnerving. Looking at a document with Hamer’s name underlined
with a dark pen stroke inspires thoughts of enemies lists and death decrees.
At some point, though, the records become routine, making you wonder if
you, like those who compiled them, have become numb to it all.
Voting Rights & 113
Fannie Lou Hamer was never numb, a theme strongly reinforced by

documents referring to her as a ‘‘troublemaker’’ in ways that grudgingly
record how much she continually grabbed America by the shoulder to re-
mind it of what it should stand for. A recurrent theme concerns her long feud
with Senator James Eastland, a wealthy planter who owned 5,000 acres
tilled by tenant farmers not far from where Hamer lived most of her life. A
Sovereignty commission file notes Hamer and others successfully raised
funds for ‘‘the election of Negro candidates in Sunflower County. . . . This
county is especially important because it is the home county of Senator
James Eastland.’’17
In the past, Eastland might have ordered her execution with a Shake-
spearian ‘‘can no one rid me of this woman?’’ Fannie Lou Hamer would have
vanished into the night like so many other victims whose last screams were
heard only by those destined to enter Hell. But James Eastland had other
tools. With Joe McCarthy’s ghost still prowling the cavernous halls of the
Capitol, Eastland willingly embraced the Wisconsin senator’s tactics, a
move he must have known would attract attention from J. Edgar Hoover,
whose opinions on the civil rights movement were noted in a boldfaced
quote in the Sovereignty commission files. ‘‘We do know the Communist
influence does exist in the Negro Movement,’’ said Hoover, ‘‘and it is an
influence that is vitally important.’’18
A revealing Congressional Record clipping in commission files documents
an exchange between Eastland and fellow Mississippi senator, John Stennis.
Stennis comments, ‘‘I found the same pattern of operations in areas in which
I live.’’ Eastland adds, ‘‘I know that members of the groups would go to
town after town and try to obtain quarters in a Negro home, and there was
not a Negro home in the town that would let the members of the groups
remain.’’19 Stennis agrees, then warns darkly, ‘‘In areas in which those
people were able to stay, their activities would disrupt the business life, the
social and spiritual life of both races and generally disrupt the lives of both
people.’’ Then the two take their cue from Hoover. ‘‘After all this has oc-
curred, to learn that the most active participants and some of the most
effective of the leaders are either Communists themselves or have a docu-
mented Communist connection makes the pill even more bitter to swallow,’’
says Stennis.
With all the practice of a seasoned red-baiter, Eastland then draws Hamer
into this carefully woven net. ‘‘My colleague knows that they come back
with lurid stories such as that of a citizen of my own town named Fannie Lou
Hamer.’’ Stennis does not miss a beat, drawing the net closed. ‘‘Do not the
facts disclosed by the Senator underscore and bring out the correctness of
the repeated warnings that have been made by J. Edgar Hoover, Director of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, about the repeated efforts of the
Communist Party to infiltrate any part or element it can in regard to the
racial struggle?’’
Such charges provided ready fuel for others more than willing to light a
match to the volatile atmosphere. Hamer recalled, ‘‘They’d call and say they
were coming to take me to the river and I would say to be sure they had the
right address and I would be waiting for them.’’20 A colleague described the
atmosphere of the time and Hamer’s response to it:
Fannie Lou Hamer was sick in bed when we got there. Lee Bankhead stated she
did not know if she was going to live long because white people had been
driving by her house during the night. She stated once she saw a gun sticking
out of a car window, and that they had shot a dog once. Lee Bankhead was
asking Fannie Lou Hamer if she should buy a gun and keep it. Mrs. Hamer
stated that the Bible was her gun, but she indicated two guns that she had in
the room. She said you had a right to protect yourself in your own home
but cautioned against shooting the wrong person and getting in a lot of
trouble.21
Hamer’s leadership role in the fledgling Mississippi Freedom Democratic

Party (MFDP) must have especially irked Eastland. A grassroots attempt by
African Americans to end run the state’s segregationists, the MFDP was to
play a major role in the ‘‘Freedom Summer’’ of 1964. That year the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) linked civil rights groups
under the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in a masterful
campaign that aimed to show the moral bankruptcy of the white power
structure ruling the South as if it were a third-world banana republic. The
true extent of this system was on full display in the first trial of those accused
of killing James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.
Swaggering defendants, whose defense was badly compromised by coura-
geous eyewitness accounts, received sentences appropriate for someone
guilty of speeding. Like many totalitarian regimes, Mississippi seemed to
purposely show its system was biased, thereby intimidating opposition.
The breadth of the task that faced the organizers of Freedom Summer
testifies about the grassroots nature of what came to be called ‘‘The
Movement.’’ Commission records tell a powerful story; their pages docu-
ment the names of hundreds of African Americans who stood up in the face
of intimidation with energy and commitment. It is important to recognize
that African Americans led the MFDP. Even the Sovereignty Commission,
Voting Rights & 115
which would have loved to find Northern white hands pulling the strings,
gives the local leadership full credit.
During Freedom Summer, when many white Mississippi politicians
echoed Strom Thurmond, talking openly of bolting the Democratic Party,
the MFDP elected a slate of African American delegates to the Democratic
national convention in Atlantic City. An MFDP brief used language no
doubt calculated to evoke vice-presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey’s
1948 civil rights speech: ‘‘In the final analysis the issue is one of principle:
whether the National Democratic Party, one of the greatest instruments of
progress in the history of our nation, shall walk backward with the bigoted
power structure of Mississippi or stride ahead with those who would build
the state and the Nation in the image of the Democratic Party’s great
leaders.’’22
When the MFDP delegates arrived in Atlantic City, you would have
thought some disreputable relative had dropped in on a wedding at just
the wrong time. One delegate, Mildred C. Cosey, said, ‘‘This is not a plea-
sure trip for us. All of us knew when we left, we might not live another week
after we got back.’’23 The arrival of the MFDP forced the Democrats to
choose between seating an all-white group of segregationists or the MFDP.
In the ensuing credentials committee fight, Hamer gave an impassioned
speech carried on national television.
She began by telling of that first bus ride to register in Montgomery. She
related that when she got home the plantation owner came to evict her. ‘‘He
said, ‘I mean that. If you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you
will have to leave.’ ’’ Then she went on to tell the graphic details of the
beating, bringing tears to the eyes many who heard her. This led to her
dramatic conclusion: ‘‘All of this is on account of us wanting to register, to
become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated
now, I question America, is this America, the land of the free and the home
of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks
because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent
human beings, in America?’’24
Lyndon Johnson tried to suppress Hamer’s speech by calling an im-
promptu press conference, but the tactic backfired when the networks ran
the entire speech during prime time. Her question reverberated across the
country. As the word pictures that Fannie Lou Hamer painted seared
themselves into the American soul, it was the first time many Americans
heard firsthand testimony about the brutality of Hamer’s home state. For-
mer baseball great Jackie Robinson wrote a column describing what many
felt, ‘‘I don’t believe there could have been many indifferent ears or dry eyes
as the story of her outrage poured across the televison screens. Certainly, it
will be a long time before this writer forgets a gripping question which she
hurled at the American people.’’25
Instead of seating the MFDP, the Democrats tried to convince them to
accept a compromise of two token delegates. Lyndon Johnson used every
tactic he could from his considerable bag of tricks to force the compromise
on the MFDP and the Credentials Committee. During the lengthy discus-
sions that went on between the MFDP, the national civil rights leadership
and members of the Democratic Party, a rift emerged between ‘‘liberal’’
whites, mainline civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and the
grassroots tenant farmers and other poor blacks that formed the heart of the
MFDP. This rift would widen over the days of negotiations and persist over
the coming years.
Essentially it was a matter of policy and leadership styles. Hamer and
others believed the time for compromise was over and that all the MFDP
delegates should be involved in decision-making, rejecting backroom
deals made by leaders who as Hamer put it, ‘‘ain’t been in Mississippi two
weeks and don’t know nothing about the problem.’’26 At one point Bayard
Rustin asked if Hamer could serve as one of the two delegates, causing vice-
presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey to shoot back, ‘‘The president will
not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention.’’27
That statement epitomized all that was wrong with the Democratic Party and
the compromise. Asked about the compromise, Hamer said, ‘‘I know that
don’t mean nothing to me.’’28 At one point in the negotiations Hamer con-
fronted Humphrey, telling him, ‘‘Senator Humphrey, I been praying about
you, and I been thinking about you, and you’re a good man, and you know
what is right. The trouble is you’re afraid to do what you know is right.’’29
The forces of history may often move at an apparently glacial pace, but in
1964 a huge iceberg cleaved off the face of that glacier that forever altered
navigation in the stormy seas of American politics. Some Democrats did
recognize the South would never be the same, but they clung to a belief that
segregationists such as Eastland occupied some mythical ‘‘middle ground’’
between the Freedom Summer Movement and the hooded Myrmidons of the
Ku Klux Klan. If they could hold that ‘‘middle’’ they could keep the South
solid. By the time of the 1964 convention any two-bit fortuneteller could
have told the party that something had to give. Quite simply they could
continue to support regimes whose brutality had been broadcast into
America’s living rooms or they could build an alternative. Whether the stars
really were aligned for creating a new force in the South in 1964 will con-
tinue to inspire what-ifs, but clearly Hamer and others said the time had
Voting Rights & 117
come. The final result of the delegate challenge should have sent a warning
signal to the Democrats. The white Mississippians would not tolerate the
notion of having even a few black faces sitting among them, so most of them
left the convention just as they did in 1948.
As the convention wound down, the MFDP delegates left their Spartan
quarters in the low-rent Gem Hotel to return to Mississippi and continue
challenging the state’s election system. They returned to the reign of terror
that had engulfed Mississippi in response to Freedom Summer, as the white
power structure that controlled the state like a feudal fiefdom fought to
preserve their American apartheid. By the time the heat of Freedom Sum-
mer gave way to autumn, the toll in McComb, Mississippi, alone stood at
seventeen bombings, thirty-two arrests, nine beatings, and four burned
churches.30 Today as we struggle to instill democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Bosnia—sometimes with thinly veiled references to the supposed ‘‘un-
democratic nature’’ of these societies—we forget that within memory there
existed in this country a system that any henchman of Saddam Hussein
would recognize.
As television screens etched scenes of Freedom Summer into our souls,
especially those surrounding the murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Good-
man, it became harder to maintain that Mississippi in 1964 had even a
pretense of democracy. Instead the cameras showed images of an oligarchy
that lay protected by a gauntlet of intimidation. In the months after the
Democratic Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria
Gray decided to test that gauntlet, running for House seats that might as well
have been medieval fiefdoms. Aaron Henry also challenged the system,
running for senator. To officially qualify, they needed to win the Democratic
primary in what had long been a one-party state. The results surprised no
one who knew Mississippi, but Hamer showed surprising strength, totaling
almost 10,000 votes against the long-entrenched Jamie Whitten. Thwarted
in the Democratic primary, the three filed to run as MFDP candidates. The
Mississippi Election Commission declined to place them on the ballot,
saying their petition lacked the required number of signatures from regis-
tered voters, perhaps because the same people who had refused to register
black voters also refused to certify petitions, in some cases saying the voters
had not paid their poll tax. Shortly thereafter, in what is surely one of the
more perverse rulings in American history, a Mississippi judge added to the
insult by ruling that the MFDP could not use the word ‘‘democratic’’ in its
name.
The primary loss set in motion the Freedom Ballot, a tactic used the
previous year when Aaron Henry ran for governor, polling 90,000 votes
among the state’s disenfranchised African Americans. Amidst the papers

preserved by the Sovereignty Commission lies a copy of the 1964 Freedom
Ballot, names listed in neat rows, their order belying an explosive weapon
that was designed to bring down the structure that had stood for so long in
the Cotton Belt.31 The Freedom Ballot’s intent was to demonstrate that a
significant number of Mississippi’s African Americans were not invisible or
slaves to the power structure. To minimize the violent segregationists that
would be attracted like moths to a flame, organizers mailed the Freedom
Ballot over a four-day period. The courage behind the effort remains difficult
to imagine, for everyone involved in printing, distributing, filling out, and
counting the ballots literally put their lives on the line, testifying to a com-
munal strength and resolve determined to rid the state of oppression. When
the counting ended, over 50,000 African Americans had sent in ballots, a
collective shout for freedom that reverberated across Mississippi to the very
halls of Congress. The results more than dramatized Mississippi’s apart-
heid system. Hamer received 33,009 votes to Whitten’s 59, Devine beat
Winstead 9,067 to 4, and Gray shut out Colmer 10,133 to zero. While it
would later be pointed out that these totals would not have been enough to
eclipse the votes their adversaries rolled up in the general election, the point
had been made: Given a chance, African Americans could become a for-
midable voting bloc.
Ironically, despite the rebuff at the Democratic convention and lack of
support for the Freedom Ballot from the party, Hamer and the MFDP
campaigned actively for Johnson and Humphrey. Asked how she could
support the man who had engineered the compromise, Fannie Lou Hamer
answered in her usual blunt fashion, ‘‘Any Negro who votes for Barry
Goldwater is out of his mind.’’32 Still Goldwater won the state, demon-
strating that the compromises designed to keep the South in the Democratic
column achieved nothing. Four years later the Southern Strategy would put
an exclamation point on this.
A little more than a year after the convention fiasco, Hamer sat on the
floor of the House of Representatives as it debated which Mississippi con-
gressional delegation would represent the state. That debate represented the
culmination of a complaint the three women had filed with the House that
Mississippi had conducted an illegal and invalid election. In the ensuing
battle, which waged through the summer of 1965—at the same time as
debate over the Voting Rights Bill— over 600 depositions were taken. These
were included in the volumes of supporting evidence presented to the Priv-
ileges and Elections Subcommittee of the House Administration Committee.
On September 17 the Committee brought the issue to the floor. The list of
organizations supporting the challenge ran from B’nai B’rith to the United
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Auto Workers, from the National Council of Churches to the Elks and the
National Student Association.
If the 1964 delegate fight represented a test for the Democrats, the election
challenge represented a test for America. Today this battle usually earns only
a footnote in America’s history, barely alluded to even in Black History
Month. Yet it deserves to rank as a defining moment on the level of the
Montgomery bus boycott and arguably one of the most important con-
gressional debates in our history. As this country wrestles with the issue
of elections in other countries, we would do well to recall that debate,
when America soundly failed an important test of its own commitment to
freedom.
The majority party’s attitude paralleled that of the 1964 convention. The
subcommittee reviewing the volumes of evidence held its sessions in private,
finally issuing a recommendation to seat the white Mississippi delegation.
First, they ruled that the three women had not been official candidates and
therefore their challenge was out of order. This ruling, of course, accepted
the Mississippi Election Commission’s questionable action of taking them
off the ballot. In addition the committee held that the five white Mississip-
pians could keep their seats since there had been no direct wrongdoing on
their part. The subcommittee also acknowledged that under the recently
passed Voting Rights Act, the election would have been invalid, but since the
law was not in effect during the election, it had no bearing.
The voices of accommodation that had spoken so loudly at the convention
also echoed in the chamber of the House, urging representatives to let the
Voting Rights Act take its course and all would be well. For its part, the
MFDP worried the passage of the act would wound their challenge, sending
a memo saying, ‘‘The Voting Bill has given false hope that somehow things
will improve in Mississippi.’’33
The hour-long debate recommended by the subcommittee seems almost
quaint today in these days of acrimony. Even those who opposed seating the
white Mississippians went out of their way to say they respected the in-
cumbents. At the intercession of New York representative William Fitts
Ryan and other supporters, Hamer, Devine, and Gray took seats on the
floor. However, the usually vocal Hamer received no permission to speak
while the white Mississippians received time to present their case, even
though the vote records them as ‘‘not present.’’
Supporters of the three women mounted a spirited challenge. Knowing
that they might not have the votes to seat the MFDP challengers, support-
ers opted for a motion to send the case back to committee for a more
thorough review of the entire Mississippi voting system. Several support-
ers voiced disapproval of the rules. Others noted that the subcommittee
recommendation did not allow for further discussion. Several recited Mis-
sissippi’s checkered history. After the state was readmitted to the union in
1870, African Americans voted in large numbers, electing local, state, and
national candidates. In 1890 there were actually more registered African
American than white voters in Mississippi.34 As the century turned, African
American office holders became extinct. As representatives recited this tale,
one could hear a thumbnail sketch of the sad history of Reconstruction,
which held out such promise, only to snatch it away.
Speakers also invoked a higher purpose. Representative James Roosevelt,
FDR’s son, stated, ‘‘Once the technical and legal points have been argued
and assessed there remains a great overriding issue. It is a moral issue. Can
we support continued service in this body today of persons elected by what
must be frankly recognized as a perversion and misuse of our elected pro-
cesses?’’35 New York Republican John Lindsay, one of a now-extinct breed
of liberal Republicans, added, ‘‘I for one, cannot accept those arguments
[advanced by the subcommittee], for in essence they are really no more than
a plea that we should not ‘rock the boat.’ I say this is a boat that has needed
rocking for a good many years.’’36
In response, Mississippi’s ‘‘not present’’ representatives resorted to their
favorite tactic of blaming outsiders. Jamie Whitten argued, ‘‘As you can
readily see, we are up against a well-organized, well-financed national effort
by well-known national organizations.’’37 William Colmer sarcastically com-
mented that if the challenge succeeded ‘‘lawyers from New Jersey, New York,
and numerous other places—150 in all—would become great heroes in the
creation of chaos and confusion.’’38 When the final vote came, the attempt to
seat the three women failed 228–143 with ten voting present and fifty-one not
voting. In votes that pointed to the future of the Republican Party, future
presidential candidates Gerald Ford and Robert Dole voted ‘‘no.’’
In the years following the congressional fight, Sovereignty Commission
records document the infighting between civil rights groups in Mississippi,
struggles over strategy, objectives and control that became tinted with
gender and class issues. In the rest of America, as the Freedom Summer
Movement migrated from the almost medieval haunts of the deep South into
the North, things began to unravel. When pot-bellied, pick handle wielding
good ole boys flying Confederate flags intimidated civil rights marchers it
made for riveting drama, but what was one to do when Polish immigrants in
Illinois wearing hard hats and waving American flags began shouting epi-
thets and throwing bricks at Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Meanwhile Lyndon Johnson and the American media openly wondered
if the nation needed a vacation from Civil Rights, as if morality was a
Voting Rights & 121
nine-to-five job with one’s labors punched on a time clock. Thus began a
second rollback paralleling Reconstruction, a rollback that would lose sight
of African American equality as surely as the first. By 1968, the Vietnam
War had America shunting racial justice to a sidetrack, and the Freedom
Summer Movement itself had splintered, with many arguing that its strat-
egies were no longer relevant.
For the Freedom Summer Movement, time itself seemed to slow down the
way it does on those hot days in Mississippi. That rapid collage of images
that has become documentary shorthand for those days in the 1960s seemed
to switch to slow motion, even as those like Hamer and others sought to
preserve the ideals and energy of Freedom Summer. Winona LaDuke likes to
ask audiences if they can name ten Native American nations. She says
usually only a handful can answer correctly. It is tempting to apply a similar
strategy to Fannie Lou Hamer’s battle for voting rights. Pressed to name ten
figures or events in this ongoing struggle since Dr. King’s assassination in
1968, most people would have as much difficulty answering this question as
they do LaDuke’s.
The inability to answer both questions is linked. While voices like those of
LaDuke and Hamer serve to highlight particular cornerstones, they also
would not have us take our eyes off the entire playing field. The life of Fannie
Lou Hamer reinforces Winona LaDuke’s point about the interconnectedness
of the cornerstones. Voting rights without educational equity can leave
people lacking knowledge of those rights, like Hamer herself before she met
the SNCC workers. Education without economic and social justice can re-
inforce a feudal system like that in 1960s Mississippi. Finally, media fairness
can help to cast light into dark corners as it did during Freedom Summer.
Curiously this principle plays out in the lives of both women. In 1969 Fannie
Lou Hamer became involved in Freedom Farms, a Mississippi equivalent of
the White Earth Land Recovery Project. She describes Freedom Farms, ‘‘We
just thought if we had land to grow some stuff on, then it would be a help to
us. Because living on the farm, on some plantation, they still don’t give you a
place to grow stuff.’’ She went on to explain some of the programs designed
to make African American Mississippians self-sufficient. ‘‘Then we started
this pig bank program,’’ she said, ‘‘and we grow our own pork and we grow
our own vegetables, you know, like butter beans, peas, okra, potatoes,
peanuts, and then cash crops.’’39
Some of the last entries in the Sovereignty Commission file on Fannie
Lou Hamer are hard to read. One reports, ‘‘I made several inquiries in
reference to the activities of Fannie Lou Hamer. All those I interviewed
report that since she moved into her new house she has seldom been seen.’’40
In 1971 an informant noted, ‘‘The MFDP is virtually dead and they are
trying to reorganize and revitalize it.’’41 At the close of an oral history
interview given late in her life, Fannie Lou Hamer talked about the future,
‘‘I talked to some young people in Washington, and they said, ‘You know
we’re going to find out one day just how many blacks there are in Mississippi
because we’re going to travel that state over.’ ’’42 Many still wait for this
moment.
Meanwhile Hamer’s questioning of voting rights has become like some
relative kept upstairs under lock and key, one that no one wants to talk
about. What lies upstairs is in fact an offspring of America, an offspring sired
by racism and violence representing nothing less than a perversion of one of
Liberal America’s cornerstones. Sooner or later you must confront this
offspring even when you do not like what you see or fear what might be
revealed.
The failures of 1964 and 1965 represent clear moral failures to uphold
Liberal America’s ideal of the level playing field. In those years America
reached a critical fork in the road, and it is not hard to imagine that fork as a
dusty backroads intersection somewhere in rural Mississippi, perhaps the
same place where Robert Johnson is reported to have made his pact with
Satan. The MFDP challenges became turning points with immense national
implications. Had Hamer and her colleagues prevailed they might have
helped to straighten out the mess over voting rights and procedures that
ended before the Supreme Court in 2000.
Instead of bringing Dixie into America, however, those years brought
America to Dixie. After their Devil’s bargains, Republicans made the climate
most uncomfortable for those like John Lindsay who sought to continue the
vision of the party’s first elected president, Abraham Lincoln. A decade later,
the Lindsays had become all but extinct, done in by an environment cal-
culated to make it increasingly difficult to breathe the air that had once given
life to Lincoln.
If the Republican strategy was calculated, the Democrats’ decisions
showed a failure of vision, for they lacked the will to adopt the values
advocated by Hamer and others. The conventional wisdom holds that the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented one of the high marks of Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society, but the challenge of Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie
Devine, Victoria Gray, and Aaron Henry also dramatized that the party had
no stomach for pressing its advantage. It is surprising that the Democrats
acted as if they did not see the MFDP coming. Given the 1946–47 challenge
to the Senate election of race-baiter Theodore Bilbo and the 1948 delegate
challenge noted in chapter 2, the party had to realize that sooner or later
Voting Rights & 123
events in the South would come to a head. If nothing else Freedom Summer
should have prepared them.
The Democrats could have moved to overturn the entire voting structure
in Mississippi and the rest of the South by using the MFDP challenge to open
a full-scale investigation into voting irregularities. By losing sight of the level
playing field at a time when it was at the height of its power, the Democratic
Party paved the path for Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and the Thurmon-
dization of America. In doing so it began a steady loss of that power, as
many associated the party with hypocrisy and weakness, demonstrating that
power without principle resides in a hollow, brittle shell. Historian Todd
Gitlin, for one, understands the significance of what happened in Atlantic
City. ‘‘The national Democratic party’s rejection of the MFDP at the 1964
convention was to the civil right’s movement what the Civil War was to
American history: afterward things would never be the same.’’43
The ghosts of 1964 and 1965 came home to roost in 2000 when the
specters of the three Mississippi women hung over Florida’s systematic at-
tempts to exclude African Americans. In essence those two years cost Al
Gore the White House. Had the MFDP challenge been upheld, Al Gore
might have been president and the nation would have been spared the em-
barrassment of hanging chads and rent-a-riots. The Civil Rights Commis-
sion report of the Florida debacle represents a sad commentary on the
achievements of the MFDP, SNCC, and others.
In one sense the story of Fannie Lou Hamer shows how complacent we
have become about civil rights. It is easy to look back to a certain day in
Washington year after year, hold an event, pass out some awards, maybe
even study a little history, and, of course, play The Speech. It has become,
dare I use the phrase, a kind of cultural Christmas, and, in the hands of white
folks a white Christmas where the true meaning of the event is lost on most
people. We go through the same rituals each year, down to the ads in
newspapers by big corporations praising King, and everyone then goes back
to doing what they were doing before the day dawned. We have not yet
become so debased that we hold MLK Day sales, but it will not be long.
Nonetheless, the Freedom Summer Movement stands today as a great
achievement of Liberal American ideals, an achievement that the Republi-
cans cynically sought to overturn when they cut a deal with Strom Thur-
mond. That America stumbled and then fell does not negate the achieve-
ments of Fannie Lou Hamer and her colleagues nor alter the importance of
what they represented. This woman who was anything but plain and simple
stood for the plain and simple truth that this government exists to insure a
level playing field for all of us plain and simple Americans. Pursued to the
end by hellhounds, she died in 1977 at the age of 59 without ever receiving a
satisfactory answer to her question. By then she was virtually destitute and
plagued by fatigue and illness, including breast cancer. She had put her life
on the line, refusing to compromise on fundamental principles because, as
she put it, compromise is nothing at all when it comes to doing what is right.
That no one thought to associate Fannie Lou Hamer with the 2000
Florida debacle or the voting disputes of 2004, says a great deal about the
current state of the level playing field, even though her ghost haunts those
elections. Fannie Lou Hamer raised one of the most basic questions a de-
mocracy can ask and one that comes from the heart of Liberal America,
‘‘What is electoral fairness?’’ Her true strength lay in rejecting the easy
answers and false compromises that, as she pointed out over and over, were
not real solutions.
That this genius came from a woman who tutored herself, as many others
have been forced to do, demonstrates a fundamental liberal principle. The
ideal of a level playing field will produce uncommon people, because you
never know when someone like Hamer will seize the tattered threads they
have been given and weave them into something singular. We should also
remember that Hamer was not alone. The names of other courageous Af-
rican Americans, some forgotten, some remembered, lie in the Sovereignty
Commission files of those who made Freedom Summer possible. All of
them taught us that with each generation, each community, and, yes, each
insignificant-seeming election, Fannie Lou Hamer’s question must be asked
again and again and that only one answer is possible. If we forget Hamer and
the others, we forget the meaning of their struggle. As Wynton Marsalis puts
it, ‘‘Blues never lets tragedy have the last word.’’44
Media Fairness: The Two
9 Faces of Martha Stewart
Scattered at the edges of America’s major cities lie scores of lower- and
middle-class neighborhoods, some over a century old. On narrow streets
stand solid two-story houses with wrought iron railings and bungalows with
carved white trim. All evoke a comforting coziness, a feeling enhanced by
inviting front porches close to the street, some with tight bunches of flowers
peering expectantly from window boxes. Compact yards may sport small
vegetable gardens holding tomatoes tied neatly to improvised stakes or
perhaps the tantalizing green oval of a melon peeking from under carefully
confined vines. Behind them, ethnic aromas waft from open windows.
A strong sense of place flavors the atmosphere, as if the people in these
neighborhoods have worked hard to build something so anchored that the
powerful forces of an uncertain world cannot harm them. You cannot help
believing, even when experience would argue against it, that when these
people venture out, that order will protect them against whatever might
threaten. Of those threatening forces none may be more powerful and in-
sidious than the media, for not only does it define a reality far removed from
these streets, but it also threatens to draw away everything that makes it
a neighborhood. The cornerstone of media fairness represents something
particularly important for the offspring of immigrants who may still carry a
bit of the old country.
Martha Kostyra spent her childhood in such a place before, like Alice,
she stepped through the looking glass that sits in everyone’s living room
to become Martha Stewart. In the myth that has become her biography,
such a neighborhood forms the foundation for her life. A Food Network
portrait captures the ethos perfectly, right down to the street name,
schoolteacher mother, gardener father, and the careful choice of the word
‘‘orderly’’:
Raised in Nutley, N.J., in a family with six children, Martha developed her
passion for cooking, gardening and homekeeping in her childhood home on
Elm Place. Her mother, a schoolteacher and homemaker, taught her the basics
of cooking, baking, canning and sewing, and her father, a pharmaceutical
salesman and avid gardener, introduced her to gardening at the age of 3 in the
family’s small but orderly backyard garden.1
What began in the neighborhood grew into Martha Stewart Living Om-
nimedia (MSLO), a media empire of television, magazines, books, and
domestic ware. When she took her company public in 1999, the woman
from Nutley became worth $1.2 billion. In 2002, the former stockbroker
earned a seat on the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange.
Other women may have made more money and had more power, but
Martha Stewart arguably has become the most famous, or notorious,
woman in America, with the possible exceptions of Hillary Rodham Clinton
or Oprah Winfrey. So if you want to understand the state of Liberal
America’s cornerstone of media fairness, you need to understand Martha
Stewart. Admittedly a great deal of print has already been expended on
her—too much for some people—but there she stands in the headlines like
a blonde colossus, making it difficult to ignore her.
Titling her a ‘‘Flawed Goddess,’’ Ed Vuillamy captured the contrary
feelings Stewart inspires with a sentence in The Observer. ‘‘The Queen of
Clean has always faced envy and resentment,’’ he wrote.2 The Economist
titled a review of Christopher Byron’s biography of Stewart ‘‘The Two Faces
of Martha.’’3 Articles like these and dozens of comedy sketches suggest
Stewart represents a modern Janus, staring at us like the chiseled face on a
Roman coin who looks both ways at once. For those who have forgotten
their mythology, Janus was the god of gates and doors, his peculiar ap-
pearance suggesting an appropriate metaphor for a media star.
One Janus-like face of Stewart speaks for the millions who have watched
her TV shows, bought her books and magazines, and logged onto her In-
ternet site. Call her the Good Martha. The opposite face is the side of
Stewart that appears as a dictatorial termagant whose famous projects re-
present yet another plot by shadowy media forces to again enslave women in
domestic drudgery—baking cookies, arranging flowers, and picking out just
the right furniture for the living room. Call her the Bad Martha.
Media Fairness & 127
You can find anti-Martha rants at websites such as Free Martha, a clever
play on words for a site styling itself ‘‘the Martha Stewart portal from
HELL.’’ Among the postings at Free Martha is the following ‘‘letter to
Santa,’’ ‘‘Dear Santa, I rarely ask for much. This year is no exception. . . . I
only want one little thing, and I want it deeply. I want to slap Martha
Stewart.’’4 At the site ‘‘Martha Stewart Disease,’’ Donna Lypchuck ends
her long list of symptoms with a ‘‘cure,’’ ‘‘Buy her a one-way ticket to
Bosnia, Bangladesh or any Third World country so she can appreciate
the real meaning of ‘lifestyle.’ ’’5 A ‘‘Gothic Martha Stewart’’ site imagines
the queen of domesticity as one of those black-clad teenagers you see at the
mall.6
Behind these sentiments lies an anger with ubiquitous media voices who
would tell us that the in color for decorating is teal and the in style furniture
is French country, so we will rush out to redecorate our lives. Each night the
message of the commercials insinuates itself into our living rooms every
quarter hour, reminding us of our inadequacies. We have bad breath, bad
hair, bad teeth and need to diet, buy a new wardrobe, or take that magical
pill that will keep evil forces at bay, forces that will visit upon us plagues
ranging from erectile dysfunction to toenail fungus.
Sorting out the meaning of Martha Stewart in this climate becomes
daunting. Yet if one reads between the lines, powerful themes emerge that
tell us a great deal about the Era of Bad Feelings and the cornerstone of
media fairness. For everyone who finds Stewart’s projects a painful throw-
back to an image that carries as much baggage for women as racism does for
people of color, there are those who see in them creativity and release from
monotony. Like two powerful rivers originating from the same spring, the
two faces of Martha Stewart speak of a need to apply one’s energy and talents
to something, something that would crack open the shell and allow the birth
of impulses too long denied, demeaned, and discredited.
Stewart’s fans have their own theories, as one demonstrates in a birthday
greeting to Stewart: ‘‘Your success makes it easier for women all around the
world to succeed in business. You inspired me & my business is thriving.
Those good ol’ boys are all just so jealous they can’t stand to see a woman
succeed. You are very much appreciated out here. Don’t forget that.’’7 Such
testimony tells us Martha Stewart’s projects do not make her one of the
most dangerous women in America, rather her ideas do. Stewart has be-
come an icon because somehow she appears to erase all the dichotomies
of career versus family. Arguing with this wizard seems impossible, for, like
Peter Pan, if you do not believe in fairy dust then you are doomed to
never fly.
To look at one face of Martha Stewart is to see a woman who lives in an

environment cleansed of all problems. The kitchen counter miraculously
cleans itself. The oven does not need scrubbing, nor do the pots and pans.
Groceries appear when you need them and in just the right portions—and, of
course, fresh from the market. The remains of all those meticulously pre-
pared meals disappear into the ether, for the garbage somehow packs itself
and flies off with perfect homing instincts to the garbage can. Stewart does
not agonize over her hair or her clothes. They all are somehow ‘‘just right,’’
like that bed Goldilocks settles in to. In this Martha Stewart there is
something of those 1930s Hollywood musicals, when men in top hats and
tuxedos waltzed with beautiful women in long flowing gowns and sparkling
jewels. In her own way, Martha Stewart has become the Busby Berkeley of
the Era of Bad Feelings, her productions as meticulously plotted and lavish,
and behind them lies the same consuming wish that amidst the strife and
turmoil a pretty girl could still be like a melody.
In The Equality Trap Mary Ann Mason suggests how this image might
resonate with many American women. Mason’s book focuses on two groups
who first entered the job market in the 1970s. One encompasses the images
we often see in women’s magazines, which as Caitlin Flanagan has noted,
found a rebirth in catering to these new job seekers.8 These middle-class
women eagerly embraced the working world, seeing it as a place where they
could finally let their talents blossom. Mason also identifies another group
who were ‘‘forced’’ into work by economic necessity: ‘‘Married women with
children were flooding into the labor force because their husbands were no
longer earning a ‘family wage.’ The postwar shift away from a manu-
facturing economy and toward a service economy severely reduced the
number of high-paying jobs for steelworkers while producing a vast number
of low-paying jobs for file clerks.’’9 Martha Stewart’s appeal for both groups
comes from demonstrating that the true meaning of ‘‘having it all’’ stems
from fulfilling your dreams. Linking the Stewart personal story with the
Stewart message represents the key to understanding this, for if you allow
your creativity and individuality to flourish, as Stewart has, you might just
wind up with an empire of your own.
This dimension of Martha Stewart holds a warning that should keep the
likes of Sir Rupert Murdoch and the Counterrevolution awake well into the
night, for the Good Martha represents a revolt against the sameness of
modern life, with everything we eat, drive, and sleep bereft of any rec-
ognizable human touch. Stewart’s standard script shows how the ordinary
can become something extraordinary. By customizing the sameness of the
modern home the way custom car aficionados take an assembly line model
and turn it into a unique creation, Stewart becomes a postmodernist who

turns the commonplace upside down. By demonstrating how found objects
could take on new uses she lets us see how our environments and our lives
could take on new meaning.
She also performs a similar transformation on her audience. Bottled up in
conventions and mass-produced monotony, a great many people have felt
adrift, meaningless, and unable to control even the most essential parts of
their lives. We live surrounded by items stamped out by infernal machines
programmed by unseen figures pulling the levers behind the screen just like
the great Oz. By showing people how to make their own meaning she
brought something extraordinary to the Era of Bad Feelings—a belief that
people could take control of their lives and homes. The appeal of this belief is
demonstrated by the continuing multiplication of programs that apply
Stewart’s premises to everything from landscaping to remodeling.
The irony folds back on itself, since the larger the Martha Stewart
empire grew, the more it came to resemble that which it sought to change.
Here the face turns on us and becomes its opposite. Some women view her
as a ‘‘domestic diva,’’ a dictator in an apron who arbitrarily decides
what should be banished to the rummage sale. The ubiquity of her pres-
ence only serves to reinforce this perception, since every time you turn
around that blond head stares back like an all-knowing presence working on
your mind.
The power of both faces lies in their intimate relationship to each other,
for one could not exist without the other, one could not attain such power if
the other did not inflate it. The two faces of Martha Stewart represent all the
contradictions and tortured choices facing women today. Like two powerful
opposite charges they generate a great deal of energy, sparks flying
haphazardly, shocking people into frenzied activity or making their hair
stand on end.
That energy feeds an image of thousands of flickering pixels moving ac-
cording to a very clever and, so far, hacker-proof code. Taking over her own
manipulation of the code stands as Stewart’s most significant achievement, a
Brer Rabbit story in which the intended victim gets the last laugh. To her
detractors this manipulation goes against the cause they have devoted their
lives to, because it sells women the same bill of goods they have always
bought, only this time a woman’s doing the selling. Still, the significance of
this change cannot be underestimated. Stewart’s choice of the word ‘‘om-
nimedia’’ is revealing. Women now can write code, not merely serve as its
targets. In a telling interview conducted in 1995 by Micki Moore, Stewart
talked about her critics:
I also think there is a gender offense here. I have taken something that
everybody does and have capitalized on it, enhanced it, made money from it. If
I was a successful man, everyone would be saying, ‘‘Wow, look at what a great
empire he built!’’ And that’s to be expected in our society. I don’t waste one
second thinking about it, though. Because I edit all aspects of my life, I edit that
out—I can’t spend time worrying about what they will say about me
tomorrow. It used to bother me, I am a sensitive person, but now I just say,
‘‘They will get it one of these days.’’10
The key phrase is ‘‘edit all aspects of my life,’’ the way a film director would
put together a blockbuster for the multiplex. Previously most women in the
media did not talk like that, implying that they have total control of their image.
As with everything else with Martha Stewart, there is another face to this,
one a bit more disturbing, for it suggests that if life is a movie, as the metaphor
implies, one need only snip out the bad parts and insert something better.
This manipulation personifies the Bad Martha for many. Manipulation
has been a venerable theme in women’s history fed by an ancient prejudice
that asserts women do not have minds of their own. To many women, what
they see on the TV screen or read in magazines seems little more than
pretenses for manipulative devices aimed at them. Women could not have
minds of their own, only images programmed by someone else who told
them how to look, how to dress, how to act, what to cook, how to give
hubby his jollies in the sack.
Stewart’s story intimates how in the Era of Bad Feelings the age-old war
between the sexes has taken some interesting turns. By now we all know the
data: the increase in divorce rates, single-parent families, and domestic
violence. Instead of narrowing, the so-called gender gap seems to grow.
Instead of bringing women and men closer together our times have driven
a steel wedge between them.
One has only to visit a video store or multiplex to view that wedge. On
one screen flickers a genre men derisively refer to as chick flicks—movies
aimed mainly at a female audience. A standard plot consists of a woman
with a caring husband, a saintly figure with no nasty habits—why he even
does the dishes and cooks—but the woman must leave him for a fling with
someone more like Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford. Another traces the
tale of a single woman or group of women who must pass through a series of
trials, each symbolizing a particularly thorny modern dilemma.
On the other side of the multiplex wall, a room full of guys turns into a
platoon of Incredible Hulks, bursting out of their polo shirts as they take in
one car crash and gun barrage after another. The theme of these macho flicks
is as telling as those in movies made for their partners. They usually feature
one steroid-enhanced hero matched against 6,000 evil-doers the hero pro-
ceeds to conquer with an assortment of karate moves and fearful weaponry
that would be the envy of Soldier of Fortune readers.
Curiously, underlying both chick flicks and macho mayhem movies is a
common theme of beleaguered individuals facing overwhelming odds. In
these movies, society seems out to get you, making it hard for you to become
‘‘all you can be’’—a sentiment used by advertisements for the military and
personal makeovers. Yet as the plot twists and turns while hero and heroine
navigate through the darkness, more often than not the climax brings a
happy ending whose price depends on how hard Hollywood wants to pluck
certain strings.
The implications of this for politics rival the shifting of plate tectonics, for
the gender gap has become caught up in the bad feelings of our time. The
stereotypes of Hollywood have become grist for Internet chat rooms.
Wander into a few and it will not be long before you run into Republicans
who view the opposition in the same terms some macho males view chick
flicks. For them Democrats—and Liberal Americans in particular—are over-
sensitive bleeding hearts blind to the Darwinian realities of the struggle for
survival. The words they use sound like fifth-grade boys taunting each other
with epithets impugning the masculinity of their intended targets. At the
same time you also find postings by those who refer to Republicans as out-
of-control Rambos. Their language has the flavor of those who deplore war
as the result of too much testosterone. Like the movies, partisans of both
sides reflect the mood of besieged individuals who fight back with verbs and
nouns.
Along with this has come a renewed demonization of women. Anyone
who has ever taken a women’s studies course knows the thesis that the
medieval persecution of women for witchcraft represented an attempt to
silence women who were taking strides toward freedom. Joan of Arc is a
famous example (it is sometimes forgotten that Joan died at the stake not for
leading the French but for ‘‘hearing voices’’).
In his award-winning study The Holocaust in Historical Context, Steven
Katz refers to the persecution of female witches as ‘‘genderized mass mur-
der.’’11 The Malleus maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), an influential
and widely used handbook published by the Inquisition in 1485–86, makes
the case against women quite directly:
What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a

necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a
delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours. . . . Women are
by nature instruments of Satan—they are by nature carnal, a structural defect
rooted in the original creation.12
For some the trial of Martha Stewart represented a modern witch hunt. In
the summer of 2003, Stewart was indicted for obstructing justice, making
false statements, and committing perjury. The indictment alleged that she
sold shares of stock she held in the biotechnology firm, ImClone, because of
an insider trading tip from her stockbroker, Peter Bacanovic. He told her
that ImClone CEO and family friend Sam Waksal had unloaded his stock in
anticipation of an a upcoming Food and Drug Administration rejection of
the experimental cancer drug, Erbitrol, ImClone’s ‘‘lead product candi-
date.’’13
Waksal’s actions brought him a seven-year prison sentence for insider
trading. Stewart’s indictment grew out of investigations of Waksal and
ImClone. According to the indictment, ‘‘After learning of the [government]
investigations [Stewart and Bacanovic], and others known and unknown,
entered into an unlawful conspiracy to obstruct the investigations; to make
false statements and provide misleading information regarding Stewart’s
sale of the ImClone stock; and to commit perjury.’’ Stewart was also indicted
for securities fraud because she ‘‘made . . . false statements with the intent to
defraud and deceive purchasers and sellers of MSLO [her company] com-
mon stock and maintain the value of her own MSLO common stock by
preventing a decline in the market price of MSLO’s stock.’’14
In an atmosphere already polarized by the two faces of Martha Stewart,
her plight predictably proved a field day for detractors. Jay Leno worked in a
few jokes at the expense of Stewart. David Letterman put together one of
his famous top ten lists with humorous advice on how Stewart could
‘‘beat the heat.’’ CBS News enlisted convicted Whitewater defendant Susan
McDougal to provide ‘‘Prison Life Advice for Martha.’’ ‘‘I would tell her
try not to complain. Try to see the good parts of when she’s there. And work
on herself. I don’t think she’s had much time in her life to do that,’’ she
said.15
Stewart’s supporters quickly weighed in. SaveMartha!.com offered t-shirts,
stuffed animals, and baseball caps along with pungent commentary. A letter
to Attorney General Ashcroft referred to the trial as a ‘‘witch hunt.’’ One
posting compared the kid gloves treatment accorded basketball star and ac-
cused rapist Kobe Bryant with that given to Stewart. Most telling of all were
posts that asked why the government had spent so much time on Stewart
while Enron’s Ken Lay and other corporate wrongdoers remained free. The
site editorialized, ‘‘In a true democracy, justice must be evenhanded. We

should not prosecute people just because they are rich, famous, or because we
happen to not like them.’’16
Ever the media manager, Stewart set up her own website to explain her
side of the story. According to the site it had received 12 million hits just a
month after the issuing of Stewart’s indictment. The site included an open
letter from Stewart in tasteful green type that began, ‘‘I want you to know
that I am innocent—and that I will fight to clear my name. . . . The govern-
ment’s attempt to criminalize these actions makes no sense to me. . . . I am
confident I will be exonerated of these baseless charges.’’17
The Stewart case became the first major trial tried on the Internet, the
biggest public legal sideshow since the O. J. Simpson trial, and, like the
Simpson trial, a litmus test for millions of Americans. The trial received
the coverage we have all come to expect in the Era of Bad Feelings, complete
with hired-gun lawyers commenting on the action with all the enthusiasm,
wisdom, mangled sentences, and inside phrases that recall washed-up all-
American athletes explaining the offenses and defenses of a gridiron contest.
Tina Brown showed up to bestow on the trial the imprimatur of the media
elite, signaling that this was not just a story for the tabloids, but a real media
event. While Barbara Walters sat in the visitor’s gallery, Slate maintained
a Martha Meter that recorded the possibility that Stewart might do serious
jail time.
The big question on everyone’s mind focused on why the government
would go after Stewart, risking its prestige, angering women across the
country, and setting off some doubts among one of the core constituents
of the Counterrevolution—business fundamentalists. Well before the trial
began, the media weighed in with their views, which predictably took on the
look of the two Marthas. CBSNews.com legal analyst Andrew Cohen
framed it one way: ‘‘Everyone knows that . . . the federal government would
never have prosecuted a nameless defendant for saving $47,000 through an
allegedly inappropriate stock sale, especially when that defendant was in-
terested in making a deal prior to indictment.’’18 Another thread drew at-
tention to Stewart as a campaign contributor to the Democrats Republicans
love to hate—Bill and Hillary Clinton. Stewart gave nearly $170,000 to
Democratic Party accounts from 1992 until her indictment, including
$3,000 to Bill Clinton for his 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, $2,000
for Al Gore’s 2000 White House bid, and $1,000 for Hillary Clinton’s New
York Senate campaign.19
On the right, Oliver North rejoiced, ‘‘It’s curtains for one of the Demo-
crats’ big money mavens, Martha Stewart.’’20 Reactionary conspiracy maven
Ann Coulter commented, ‘‘Indeed, the entire Republican Party is evidently

responsible for various rich liberal ‘Friends of Bill’ who now stand accused
of insider trading, such as Martha Stewart and ImClone chief Sam Waksal.
Republicans are responsible for Clinton’s pal Martha Stewart because lib-
erals say so.’’21
The trial itself featured enough leaks and damning revelations that it
resembled a made-for-television movie stocked with soap opera-like mo-
ments, including Stewart’s personal assistant breaking down in tears on the
stand remembering a plumb pudding Stewart had sent her as a Christmas
gift. From the outset it was clear that the prosecution had decided that in
order to win they not only had to prove Martha Stewart guilty, they also had
to destroy her image. Behind the whys of the trial and certainly somewhere
in the back regions of the juror’s minds and that of the real jury, the public,
lay an image of Stewart as a woman who built a media empire founded on
the importance of detail. How could someone who worried about a properly
set table or a tastefully arranged bouquet, fretting over colors and styles the
way most people fret over their checkbook balance, have gotten herself into
such a mess?
The prosecutors predictably took a media solution, aiming for the two
faces of Martha with the idea of showing that the Bad Martha represented
the real Martha. To convict Stewart the jury would have to believe the Good
Martha represented another false public relations creation gone sour, an-
other icon whose pierced balloon leaked hot air. Assistant U.S. Attorney
Karen Patton Seymour delivered the prosecution’s opening statement,
painting a portrait of Stewart as a scheming, manipulative liar out to line her
own pockets even if it meant going beyond the law. For each dollar drop in
her company’s shares, Stewart’s personal stake fell $30 million, Seymour
reminded the jury.22 ‘‘Instead of weathering the storm of negative public-
ity,’’ Ms. Seymour said, ‘‘Martha Stewart tried to mislead investors in her
company about the reason for her stock sale.’’23
Clearly the defense’s imperative was to get the jury to see the Good
Martha lay at the root of the entire mess. Stewart’s lawyer, Robert Morvillo,
did such a brilliant job of this in his opening statement that Stewart made the
entire text available at her website, in her favorite green font. Morvillo
began, ‘‘This is an unusual case, not because Martha Stewart is a famous
person, but because there will be no direct evidence introduced by the
government that Martha Stewart conspired to obstruct anything, that what
Martha Stewart told the government during her voluntary interviews was
deliberately false, or that Martha Stewart was trying to fool investors in her
company by accurately denying guilt and explaining her innocence in June
of 2002.’’ After getting the Good Martha into the spotlight, Morvillo did
what any good television host would do, he modestly listed Stewart’s con-
siderable achievements. His summation of Stewart’s career is a brilliant
portrait of the Good Martha, so I quote it at length.
We know that she is totally self-made, that she came from a very poor family in
Nutley, New Jersey. We know that she worked her way through college and
graduated from Barnard College here in New York City. We know that she
spent a few years in a highly specialized brokerage firm, which she left nearly
30 years ago, 30 years ago. . . . We also know that Martha Stewart initiated a
catering business which by virtue of 16-hour days, fierce desire to put forward
the best possible product, whether it deals with flowers, fixtures, food, furni-
ture, expanded into a successful multimedia corporation run predominantly by
women with similar goals and ideas and skills. Martha Stewart has devoted
most of her life to improving the quality of life for others. And because she
stressed the notion of making things as good and as perfect as possible, she has
often been ridiculed and parodied.24
As the trial moved along, it was clear the prosecution had enlisted wit-
nesses who could inflict real damage, none more than Robert Faneuil, a
brokerage assistant for Merrill Lynch. When Faneuil finished with his rec-
itation of Stewart’s tirades, her disdain for underlings, her self-absorption,
the sketchy outlines of the Bad Martha had been filled in living color. After
handling a call from Stewart, Faneuil told a friend: ‘‘I have never, ever been
treated more rudely by a stranger in my life. She actually hung up on me!’’
Three days later, he emailed another friend: ‘‘Martha yelled at me again to-
day, but I snapped in her face and she actually backed down!’’ He testified
that Stewart ‘‘told you she was going to leave Mr. Bacanovic and leave
Merrill Lynch unless the hold music was changed.’’ According to MSNBC,
‘‘jurors broke up in laughter.’’25
The jury yukking it up as if a well-programmed laugh track had been
inserted at the proper moment must have been music to the prosecution’s
ears, confirming the success of their strategy. For someone who had so
carefully nurtured her image this was probably the unkindest cut of all,
worse even than the verdict when it was announced. It said Martha Stewart
was a joke.
At this point anyone with any sense of the Era of Bad Feelings could have
predicted the outcome. Maybe some day one of those tell-all books will
reveal what Stewart and Morvillo said to one another after the laughter had
subsided, but until then we can only speculate that both of them had to
know that after this moment it would be an uphill climb. Predictably

Morvillo tried to impugn the witness, but even as he grilled Faneuil, he could
do nothing to silence the memory of that laughter. It is hard to know how
much the testimony influenced what came after, but it certainly put an
exclamation point on Morvillo’s somewhat unorthodox defense, in which
he called only one witness and let the case rest.
When the judge announced the verdicts you could almost hear the col-
lective gasps from across America. The actual pronouncing of ‘‘guilty,’’ one
at a time for each charge, reverberated with awful finality. The Martha
Stewart image lay shattered on the courtroom floor. All the carefully con-
structed pieces of MSLO and most of all, her dreams, seemed a jumble of
jagged shards eerily reminiscent of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth de-
molishing carnival sideshow mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai. So we
stare at the brittle glass and wonder what happened, wonder whether there
ever was a ‘‘real’’ Martha.
In the end, each of us clutches the pieces that have the most meaning. For
Stewart, her greatest project has always been herself, rearranging her life
into something beautiful and tasteful. Now someone had dared to walk into
her living room to crudely shatter what had been built up so carefully.
Stewart had created an identity as someone who could navigate the hall of
mirrors of our times as skillfully as a veteran kayaker negotiates a particu-
larly treacherous stretch of rapids. To see her capsize is to wonder again if
anyone can master the art of coping with a mass-mediated environment.
Whether or not Stewart really deserved her sentence, it reinforced an older
message that those who dare to mess with the media will attract image-
shatterers, as Welles so brilliantly realized when he and his then-wife and
movie goddess Rita Hayworth fired bullets at each other’s reflections.
In this sense the trial becomes a tragic and pointed commentary on the Era
of Bad Feelings and what it has done to us. The labels have become reality
so that we are incredibly myopic without them, unable to sort through what
we see and hear with anything resembling reasoned judgment. In an event
like the trial of Martha Stewart we will continue to argue about the justice of
the results, all the while knowing that we do not really know the answer.
Some of us will wait patiently for the miraculously uncovered memo, the
come-clean confession, that truly explains it all.
At such times we inevitably fall back on fundamental beliefs about human
nature and right and wrong. Feminists who might have defended Stewart re-
mained silent, perhaps because of their distaste for her domesticity. Politicians
and others who might have spoken out about unequal justice and political
prosecutions also remained speechless, perhaps sidetracked by other issues
or their own inability to understand the Stewart trial. Liberalism and de-
mocracy depend on faith in human nature the way a plant depends on water.
Without that faith we shrivel up and die. When we find ourselves in a hall
of mirrors it becomes difficult to sustain that faith. In this climate the winners
become the labelers and packagers who put their mark on everything, leav-
ing the rest of us to pick up the pieces.
This has been particularly true of women and people of color who have
been raising uncomfortable questions about the level playing field for sev-
eral decades. Even as they asked about the soundness of the cornerstones
of economic and social justice, educational equity and voting rights, the
fourth cornerstone of media fairness insinuated itself into the conversation.
Sammy Sosa, Winona LaDuke, and Fannie Lou Hamer—along with Martha
Stewart—could all testify to this. It would not be too inaccurate to say the
Civil Rights Movement was viewed through the lens of the media, coloring
the impressions of the American people and, in turn, the political process.
So even as we debated remedies for economic, educational, and voting in-
equities, a variation of the Good Martha, Bad Martha theme of manipula-
tion and personal expression helped to frame the answers. That is why the
issue of media concentration raised by the Magical Mystery Tour becomes
so important.
America may have been unable to properly respond to the trial of Martha
Stewart because, as Stewart herself probably knows, the two faces of
Martha Stewart are also the two faces of the media. One, manipulative and
controlling, strives to make us all march to the same tune like an army of
zombies whose only mission is to buy things. The other, creative and lib-
erating, offers to enhance our lives with the heady food of possibility.
For several decades now America has also found itself caught in a good-
bad cultural battle it has been unable to resolve. The tension between these
polarities has periodically threatened to divide us irrevocably. Like the Bad
Martha, one face has its nose stuck in the air as it asserts various thou-shalt-
nots. There is also the face of the Good Martha who encourages creativity,
especially from places the media often disdains, from the spontaneous hip-
hop rhythms of the inner city to the Lake Wobegon humor of rural America.
It encourages us to take what the mass media have given all of us and like
Martha Stewart turn it into something unique and new.
At the root of the two faces of America and Martha Stewart lie diamet-
rically opposed views of human nature. People detest the Bad Martha as they
detest the arbiters of moral and political correctness, for both harbor a
superior attitude that says ordinary people must be taught how to behave by
their superiors. On the other hand, people love the Good Martha as they
love the positive side of America because both celebrate the creativity that
lies in all of us.
The trial of Martha Stewart captured the nation’s imagination because
behind it lay the clash of these competing visions. Perhaps Stewart felt this
all along, felt that the trial never really had anything to do with her per-
sonally, but rather brought together the two sides of the media and America
for judgment. Some of us rooted for the Bad Martha to get her comeup-
pance because it was not just her we wanted to convict, but all those media
manipulators we have grown to loathe, the loathing made all the more
spiteful by our own codependent complicity. Yet we also held out hope the
Good Martha would come out on top, confirming not only the intellectual
and emotional investment we made in her but also the optimism about our
dreams that sustained it.
The political undertones of Stewart’s trial also held larger meaning, for in
her two faces we also see the two faces of American politics. One plots to
reduce us all to unquestioning fealty to a narrow catechism, the other be-
lieves in allowing each American to reach for his or her own vision. The trial
of Martha Stewart testifies that the expanding empire of Sir Rupert Mur-
doch, the censoring of the Dixie Chicks, and the media concentration ad-
vocated by the Counterrevolutionary FCC, will make it harder for future
Marthas to make their mark.
With her release from prison, Stewart began rebuilding her empire. Today
she is back on television, apparently having weathered the crisis. Her
marthatalks.com website is closed down and her corporate site omits all
references to the trial. It is as if it never happened. Her supporters always
thought her innocent. Her detractors cannot help but admire her willingness
to accept her punishment. It seems, unlike with Orson Welles shooting at
Rita Hayworth, that this time the bullets may have hit the mirror, not the
real thing. In a large sense Stewart’s struggles fit the Hollywood script—
which may be why they made a TV movie of them. Slate’s Henry Blodget
wrote the ending to Stewart’s story, ‘‘with the addition of more humanity,
she will serve as living proof that life is what you make it—that, no matter
what, there’s always a way to mix lemonade. And then sell it.’’26 As for the
American people, they yearn for a happy ending to the Era of Bad Feelings.
PART THREE
The Suburban
Uprising
10 Economic Justice: Home Depot
Hammers hang in neat rows on Home Depot’s wide aisle, a shining promise
of self-reliance that goes back centuries. The person who could wield a
hammer with some skill and intelligence and not a little bravery had the
potential to meet the world on equal terms and become a builder, some-
one whose work promised immortality. One of the most venerated of
Norse gods, Thor, wielded a hammer. Christ was a carpenter.
Hammers may seem boring to many people, but to the avid do-it-your-
selfer, the more the better. A tool connoisseur will tell you that there is no
such thing as a hammer; there are many hammers, each for a different pur-
pose. For example, long-handled framing hammers have large, checkered
faces constructed to drive nails as big as spikes into everything from two-by-
fours to trusses used for spanning roofs. Framing hammers demand the heft
of a sledgehammer coupled with the balance of a fly rod and the shock
resistance of a shotgun stock. A good one sits in a tool belt like a gun-
fighter’s .45, hanging loose at the hip where it can be whipped out in an eye
blink by someone clinging to a joist thirty feet above the ground. The claw
end of a framing hammer is all business, as much an ax as a nail-puller.
Wielded skillfully it sends chips flying as if they had been carved by a pro-
fessional logger. Home Depot’s website lists thirty-three hammers, including
rubber hammers, mason hammers, and, of course, the claw-shaped finishing
hammers we picture when someone says,‘‘Get me a hammer.’’
Years ago some of these tools could only be found in hardware stores
catering to professionals. Now they clog mall mega boxes whose main
customers do most of their work when the pros are off fishing. Among the
142 & The Suburban Uprising
hammers, toilet flanges, and wiring cable staring at you in Home Depot lies
the story of why the American labor movement has moved from the front of
the bus to a seat further back and why Liberal America’s value of social and
economic justice needs a hammer.
With entire cable networks and dozens of ad-packed magazines spelling
out the how-tos, do-it-yourselfing has become a major American leisure
activity. Judging from the articles, homeowners feel free to tackle framing,
roofing, wiring, plumbing, and heating. As a result your local plumber, elec-
trician or painter kills time playing video games. Time first captured the
mood with an August 2, 1954, cover story that featured a homeowner re-
sembling a cross between Fred McMurray and the Hindu goddess Kali.
Dressed in a red, white, and blue plaid short-sleeved shirt riding a lawn
tractor and smoking a pipe, the do-it-yourselfer with multiple arms held the
harbingers of a new age: power tools, including a saw, drill, and buffer.1 A
half-century later, a public television show, This Old House, made Norm the
carpenter a star and turned original host Bob Vila into a pitchman for that
venerable do-it-yourself heaven, Sears.
Doing it yourself has brought dollar signs to the eyes of franchisers and
chain marketers, whose aggressive expansion threatens one of the last hold-
outs of the independent business owner—the lumber, hardware, and paint
stores that once formed the hearts of so many American towns. The rise of
Home Depot is illustrative. Since Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank quit their
jobs with a hardware chain and opened their own store in Atlanta on June
22, 1979, the fastest-growing retailer in history has expanded to over 1,500
stores throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with a new one
opening every forty-three hours. A bit of trivia at the corporate website notes
if all the two-inch disposable brushes sold at Home Depot each year were
lined up side-by-side, they would paint a stripe 1,622 miles wide, about the
distance from New York City to Denver.2
Those fancy power tools for sale at Home Depot allow even the most
worthless stumblebum to cut dovetail joints and compound miter corners
with as much skill as a veteran. A half-century ago, the phrase ‘‘good with
his hands’’ spoke praise reserved only for someone with skin made tough
and supple as a horse’s hide by long days outside, with rope-like muscle coils
whose outlines suggested the person’s main occupation if you knew how to
read them, and with penetrating eyes that came from making precise cal-
culations and exacting movements hour after hour. Such a person moved
with the grace of a professional athlete, honed by a lifetime of knowing
exactly how much it took to do something well. Some of these craftsmen
have become a modern version of the dying cowboy, elbowed out of the way
by the changes symbolized by Home Depot. Those power tools mean there is
less value placed in the expertise that allows someone to hand saw a two-by-
twelve to exact length and pound sixteen penny nails one after the other with
a virtuoso’s timing and rhythm.
In Crabgrass Frontier, the definitive history of the suburbs, Kenneth
Jackson presents an interesting series of tables illustrating the population
of nineteenth-century cities. Among the classifications is ‘‘artisans,’’ en-
compassing skilled trades like wheelwright, blacksmith, hatter, moulder,
ropemaker, and shoemaker. By the time of the Era of Bad Feelings, arti-
sans had become people who practiced their crafts as a hobby or a very
small number of artists who create for patrons in gated communities who
display the work like sculptures or paintings. A person good with his hands
could often find individual expression only at home, a trait shared by both
working men and women, as Bob Vila and Martha Stewart know only
too well.
Vila and Stewart provide a large clue to understanding how the appeal of
Home Depot and similar chains have made do-it-yourself advertising cir-
culars the meat of Sunday papers across the country. Enticing pictures of bay
windows and hardwood floors stress style and price. Judging by the ads the
predominant use of all this stuff is ‘‘the project,’’ which can be anything
from repainting the bedroom to a full-blown addition. Fans of the sitcom
‘‘Home Improvement,’’ which did a wonderful job of skewering an Amer-
ican preoccupation, will recognize all the themes.
Energy for ‘‘the project’’ comes from several compelling motivations. One
that ‘‘Home Improvement’’ hit dead on represents a theme as old as the
frontier: the macho, my toolbox is bigger than yours one-upmanship that
has thousands of real versions of Tim the Tool Man competing to build the
most elaborate barbecue or have the most dazzling display of Christmas
lights. The ads also confirm reality for today’s two-income families, because
doing it yourself goes a long way to helping pay the bills, maybe even saving
an occasional overdraft on the credit card. Projects enable millions of
Americans to enjoy a lifestyle that remains the envy of most of the world. In
essence, suburban pioneers imitate their nineteenth-century ancestors who
applied ingenuity and elbow grease to make life on the homestead livable. If
the growth of Home Depot and Lowe’s and the positioning of their stores
provides any indication, the role of the do-it-yourself movement in the
growth of suburban America has been a substantial one.
A third powerful motivation, like the projects of Martha Stewart, comes
from the American desire to individualize an environment of sameness. For
many, ‘‘home improvements’’ aim to personalize the mass-produced houses
that dominate suburbia, where the only exterior difference may be the color
of the paint and which side the garage is on.
A clue to the depth of this feeling comes from police reports of the drug of
choice in many blue-collar and even upscale suburbs as well as rural towns:
methamphetamine. Heroin and cocaine, the drugs of choice in the inner
cities, are mind-numbers that kill the mental pain associated with just
looking around the room or out the window. On the other hand, meth—
known as ‘‘speed’’—heightens everything, putting a dull world into instant
overdrive, where the moment becomes a fast-moving video game in which
you must move the controller rapidly to prevent crashing into the reality
from which you have escaped.
In an environment where some want to just speed things up, others want
to put their own stamp on that most personal of places even at the risk of
misconnected black wires or leaky new plumbing. Walk the aisles of Home
Depot and catch the stray conversations of those perusing the wares; inev-
itably you will hear talk about the need to add some improvement to the
bathroom, repaint the family room, or remodel the kitchen. This revolt
against sameness shows that the quintessential American individualist re-
mains alive and well in the aisles of Home Depot.
As individuals try to assert their identity in suburban America, the tra-
ditional blue-collar worker is becoming an endangered species. Union
membership, particularly in blue-collar unions, has dropped precipitously
over the last two decades. The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes the rate
declined from 20 percent in 1983 to 12.5 percent by the beginning of 2005.3
CNN reports that only 14 percent of those who voted in 2004 belonged to
a union, less than the 18 percent who reported incomes of over $100,000:
a mark of how political influence has changed.4
Home Depot and the rise of do-it-yourselfing symbolize some of the im-
mense shifts in the American economy that have fueled a drop in union
membership. Home Depot serves as a textbook example of how the service
economy has replaced Jackson’s artisans. Home Depot’s employees—many
of them former carpenters and plumbers—testify to this shift. The impact of
the do-it-yourself movement and the growth of suburban America on many
traditional construction trades still awaits someone to untangle the complex
interconnections. However, there is little doubt that each brush, each
hammer, each carload of building supplies sold by Home Depot and similar
stores represents a job that might have gone to a tradesman in another time.
As people putter in their kitchens, bathrooms, garages, and bedrooms, the
phones stop ringing for those who might have answered those needs. Thus
the real-life Norm the carpenter helps make life more complicated for his
colleagues, the skilled craftsmen who can cut intricate joints and rout com-
plex moldings.
The housing boom sparked by the suburbs lured from small towns many
strapping young men who knew their way around a toolbox. The traditional
unionized construction trades, some dating back over centuries to medieval
guilds, suddenly found themselves at a decided disadvantage. One of the
great unwritten stories of the last century lies in the acquiescence by the
construction trades in the building of suburban homes. The suburban
building boom grew so fast that there were not enough union laborers to fill
the gap. Only highly skilled trades—plumbing, heating, electrical workers—
managed to hold out.
The suburbs and Home Depot also embodied many of the other economic
changes historians and economists have identified, from assembly-line ro-
bots (which Charlie Chaplin anticipated in Modern Times) to the replace-
ment of other jobs by computers and advanced technology. One factor that
has kept housing costs low and productivity high has been standardized
homes containing components such as mass-produced roofing trusses. Sub-
urban developments also are planned by computers that estimate costs down
to the last penny, paralleling assembly lines where the number of people
whose hands actually touch a car have dropped considerably.
As the country shifted from the Industrial Age to the Computer Age, those
unions that still remain a major power base for the Democrats have shifted
from venerable organizations such as the United Auto Workers and the Coal
Miners to white-collar outfits like AFSCME and the teachers union. Once, a
maverick union president like John L. Lewis, whose large, dark bushy eye-
brows appeared to be colored by the coal dust that was the unofficial badge
of his members, could literally hold the country at bay with the mere threat
of a strike; but today no union leader wields such power. The Bureau of
Labor Statistics reports that in January 2005 ‘‘about 36 percent of govern-
ment workers were union members in 2004, compared with about 8 percent
of workers in private-sector industries.’’5 This shift means that unions
who heavily depend on government have placed the Democrats in an awk-
ward position with any reform of these institutions. So as the unions
changed, the Democratic Party watched its base of blue-collar support
whither away.
Here enters the dreaded ‘‘t-word,’’ for the tax revolt is linked to Home
Depot as inextricably as Home Depot is linked to the decline of the Ameri-
can labor movement. For several decades now, Republicans have run on the
mantra ‘‘tax and spend,’’ accusing ‘‘liberals’’ in particular of taking ‘‘the
people’s money’’ and putting it into inefficient bureaucracies or giving it to
people who do not deserve it. Scarcely a day goes by on talk radio without
either the host or a caller relating yet another anecdote about government
waste or welfare scam artists. These stories pop up from time to time on the
snopes.com website. Their themes resonate over and over like a bad com-
mercial jingle: some ‘‘welfare cheat’’ has used your hard-earned tax dollars
to line their own pockets or a government bureaucrat with a resemblance to
Pinocchio (wooden head, long nose, and all) has inflated your taxes by
funding some ridiculous extravagance. That these stories have become the
staple of barroom conversations, backyard barbecues, and copy-machine
gossip says a great deal about America’s pent-up frustrations. Anecdotes of
misuse and abuse pass for tall tales today just like stories of Mike Fink or
Davy Crockett. We suspect these anecdotes are bogus, but relate to them
because they express some larger emotion.
That explains why many people do not really question Rush Limbaugh’s
sources. They know he is probably exaggerating, maybe even making up the
whole story, but that is not the point any more than anyone back in the
1800s really cared if Mike Fink wrestled an alligator with his bare hands or
Davy Crockett grinned down a bear. The wilder the story, the more the
audience cheers. Those who try to inject some rationalism into the discus-
sion look like a dude who stepped in a cow pie.
Workers who have become suburban Americans are a prime audience for
such stories, spurring a much-discussed tax revolt that represents one of
American history’s more stunning about-faces. It was, after all, workers who
agitated for the income tax in the first place, outraged at the excesses of
those plutocrats who built summer cottages in Newport, the Hamptons,
and the Adirondacks, and held expensive parties where the wine bill totaled
more than several families might make in a year. In the nineteenth century
when the plutocrats flaunted their wealth in the faces of folks who unsteadily
stood one step away from falling into the gutter, cartoons showing business
tycoons as mustached, outrageously fat, monocled creatures reclining on
bulging sacks of money expressed the prevailing attitude.
Republican crusades against taxes represent nothing new. Trickle-down
economics did not originate with Ronald Reagan or the presidents Bush. The
current rants one hears on talk radio, advocate that people who ‘‘earn’’ their
millions should be allowed to keep them, are as old as history. Cornelius
Vanderbilt and his fellow millionaires borrowed it from British aristocrats
who thought God had endowed them with the right to lord over the manor
house. Exploiting the peasants was how you paid for the wine cellar and the
riding stables and all the help it took to maintain the blooming place. George
W. Bush may hold the record for running up huge deficits in the shortest
time on record, deficits primarily caused by wanting to give tax breaks to

those who drive BMWs and maintain residences in Vail, who dress in clothes
priced in Euros and get personalized health care from private clinics with
elaborate rooms. The big question is how has the Counterrevolution con-
vinced suburban homeowners to go along with this venerable prejudice?
One answer holds that suburban homeowners have certain aristocratic
pretensions themselves, a theme of advertising circulars or the Home and
Garden channel. Low taxes on well-mowed lots do not maintain the stables
but they do keep up the SUV and the minivan, the vacation time share, and
help finance those home projects. Motivations also factor in the turnabout.
Suburban homeowners who patronize Home Depot have a pioneer-like aura
of hard work and independence. The idea that government should give money
to someone perfectly capable of going out and earning it on their own is
unthinkable to them. When the Democrats start talking about discrimination
or lack of job skills, the homeowner thinks about his own battle with a leaky
faucet or the deck he built with his own hands and wonders why the ‘‘welfare
cheat’’ cannot do the same thing? Most of all, though, behind all the well-kept
lawns and landscaped driveways lies the dirty secret that many homeowners
are hanging on to their mini-estates by their finger nails: one layoff, medical
catastrophe, or blip in their precarious adjustable-rate mortgages away from
losing it all. Stretched thin, these homeowners zero in on taxes.
That the Democrats have allowed the GOP to maneuver them into this
corner stands as one of the greatest tragedies of our times and yet another
reason Liberal America seems on its deathbed. When something reaches
the point of becoming a tall tale—where all the evidence in the world to the
contrary does not matter—then it becomes very difficult to bring about
change, like a person who has picked up a bad reputation and then becomes
the subject of wild rumors. The Democrats now lie shattered on the ground
like Humpty Dumpty, oozing the rotten-egg smell of ideas grown stale.
Under pressure from the GOP, the Democrat’s position on the less fortunate
has waffled so much (especially after the Clinton-inspired welfare ‘‘reform’’)
that the clamor for the level playing field articulated by the New Deal has
become muted.
Just as they ignored the questions of social and economic justice raised
by Fannie Lou Hamer, Winona LaDuke, and Sammy Sosa the Democrats
also ignored the very same issues in the suburbs. The core values of Liberal
America that had linked the lower and middle classes, people of color and
white America, became lost, allowing the GOP wedge to be driven in with
little resistance. The average American need not page through volumes of
studies or wander the Internet in the wee hours of the morning to confirm
this; they need only consult their memories and ask if they can remember a
Democratic candidate who has forcefully spoken in defense of equity. John
Edwards may have come the closest, but his ‘‘two Americas’’ sermon seemed
muffled by the Kerry campaign. The dreams of the fixer-uppers became real
because of government programs, but how often do you hear a candidate
remind them of this?
To understand this requires a much-needed digression back to a time
when the vision of Liberal America literally saved the country. Revisiting the
New Deal, of course, has become a journey full of pitfalls, akin to walking
across a wide river of thin ice during a blinding snowstorm, where you rely
as much on instinct as you do on sight. Perhaps no era in American history
has generated so many controversial and diverse interpretations. For some
Americans, the Great Depression has become a bit like the Holocaust, a
period people would like to deny or downplay, saying it was not really that
bad and if we had only given Herbert Hoover four more years he would have
fixed it or the downturn would have just run its course. Yet the bare facts
of those grim years stare back like one of those stark black-and-white
Depression-era photographs. In the United States between 1929 and 1933,
unemployment soared from approximately 3 percent to over 25 percent,
while manufacturing output declined by one-third. By June of 1932, an
astounding 55 percent of the work force had left the American economy.6
But the numbers only outline the story, to fill it in the best place to start is
with those who actually lived through the Depression.
As with the Holocaust, people who survived the Depression—especially
those hit hardest—are becoming an endangered species. We should thank
Studs Terkel and others for preserving some of this testimony. Terkel’s Hard
Times, a series of interviews with some of these survivors, helped create an
oral history renaissance, with students from elementary school to doctoral
programs collecting stories. Also not to be overlooked remains one of the
jewels of the New Deal, the Federal Writer’s Project, whose collection of
interviews with hundreds of Americans uniquely documents our past. If the
recollections of survivors serve as the voices of the Depression, a dark-
haired, self-styled Dust Bowl refugee named Woody Guthrie serves as its
troubadour, providing yet another window on the 1930s.
Imagine yourself transported back three-quarters of a century, to a time
when outhouses commonly stood in the backyard, radio was still a novelty,
and people washed their clothes by hand. Estefana Castro remembers, ‘‘We
did not have restrooms like we do now. The rich people had restrooms in
their homes. But the poor people, like us . . . my father would make a hole,
four yards long and about a yard and a half in width. And this was our
toilet.’’7 No one had vacuum cleaners or dishwashers to help with the

household chores. Most dried clothes using the solar method—hanging wet
things out on a line. Even before the hard times hit, many families supple-
mented their incomes with food they grew themselves or caught or shot.
The Depression swept into this world like an immense avalanche. Those
on the edge saw it coming first and struggled to get out of the way. In parts of
rural America the calamity started long before the infamous Stock Market
crash, as farmers saw their income literally dry up and blow away. As the
avalanche gathered force, it swept away everything in its path, leaving parts
of the country looking like a desert.
The dust storms that destroyed large areas of the Midwest came during
some of the hottest summers on record (check the highest temperature ever
recorded for your state and it is quite likely it will be in the 1930s, especially
if you live in the Midwest). With the mercury climbing into the 100s day
after day—before air conditioning, before rural homes even had electric
fans—people hauled mattresses outside at night just to stay cool. Then they
would awaken to an eerie, dark sky as the dust storm swept down on them
like an avenging angel. Fine particles crept through the tiniest cracks and the
towels and sheets people stuffed in doors and windows. Venturing outside
required tying something over your mouth, but still the dust slithered into
your body and every fold of your clothes. Children violently choked to death
from what Guthrie called the ‘‘dust pneumony,’’ their coughs a kind of
economic and social flu epidemic. On the farms the dust piled like blizzard
drifts, covering machinery, outbuildings, and the crops people had hoped
would pull them through the year. Guthrie’s song, ‘‘Dust Bowl Blues,’’
paints a stark picture of dust so black you could not see and ferocious winds
that buried farm machinery under six feet of blowing earth.
As writers about the Depression have recognized, although those dust
storms only infected part of the country, they became metaphors for what
hit the rest of America, where ill winds also blew with abandon and the
horizon became so dark people wondered if they would ever see the stars and
sun again. Fragments of doubt, like those fine particles of dust, swept
through the land insinuating themselves into people’s lives just as the storms
had done to the farmers, making their way through windows and doors,
then working their way into people’s minds. As households failed along with
the farms, the country became a vast, aimless, and dangerous army. Some
rode the rails, making the tops of boxcars look like passenger cars with
the roofs blown off, while others took to the roads.
Back when not even a hammer seemed to offer much hope except to cobble
together the rough villages that became known as Hoovervilles, where the
homeless holed up in their makeshift camps built of cardboard, scavenged

lumber, tin, canvas, and even sticks. There they lived on the edge of sanity.
A man pushed to the edge might just fall right over it and start babbling
insanely or grab whatever he could, a tree limb, a section of rusty pipe, a
hammer and then start wildly maiming those around him although he did
not know who he wanted to kill, only that someone had to pay. In a scene
from one of America’s greatest movies, John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath,
the tenant farmer with the metaphorical name of Muley tries to stop a
bulldozer from knocking down his house and taking over his land. Beaten,
he finally crouches in the dirt, grabs a handful of dust and watches it fall
through his fingers. He asks the cat driver who he should shoot and the
driver just shakes his head and says he does not know.
Oral history interviews with real Muleys form a collage of despair, con-
fusion, faith, and courage. One does not have to listen too hard to hear the
real voice of America, a voice that held onto the country’s fundamental
values at a time when they seemed to be most in question. We worship the
‘‘greatest generation’’ as those who fought World War II, but the values of
those soldiers were forged not in the trenches but in the ditches, back alleys,
and Hoovervilles of the Depression. For some, these values were all they
had, but they held onto them even though other voices cried out in the storm,
urging revolution and violence, and it would have been very easy to succumb
to their siren-like allure.
Zacarias Pena remembers:
Back in 1933 we didn’t have anything to eat. So we would go to this pecan

shelling factory and we would get those pecan shells. You know when you
break a pecan there is always a little bit of pecan that stays in the shell. So we
used to pick up those pieces of pecans. I was little at that time, but I remem-
ber drinking coffee with them because I was hungry and that was all there
was to eat at that time, and it was good. It tasted real good, pecans with
coffee.8
One of Terkel’s most eloquent respondents, a woman named Peggy Terry,

described how some people lived during those years:
Here were all these people living in old, rusted-out car bodies, I mean that was
their home. There were people living in shacks made of orange crates. One
family with a whole lot of kids was living in a piano box. This wasn’t just a
little section, this was maybe two miles wide and ten miles long. People living
in whatever junk they could put together.9
A theme that emerges again and again in the oral histories refers to the
deep psychological wounds caused by unemployment and poverty. In the
Federal Writer’s Project collection an interviewer writes of a man named Bill
Branch.
Bill Branch tells you that he appreciates anything they can give him now when
he is unable to help himself, but he cannot live always in such a manner. He
wants out of life just a chance to make a decent living for himself and family.
By that he means: enough food, a few clothes, a house to live in which does not
leak, proper medical care, and a dollar or two for amusement now and then.
These things which seem simple enough are so far removed from him now that
he is doubtful whether he will ever have them. He says he sees nothing in store
for him and he feels at twenty-five that the best of his life is over.10
Into this storm came Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During those years few
entered into that maelstrom voluntarily; most were either forced into it by
bad luck and the greed of others or they had to walk into it, like troops
assigned a suicide mission. Only someone supremely confident and with a
great deal of faith braved the darkness with the belief they could lead others
out. As lights went out all over the world, many countries chose leaders who
were convinced of their faith and also quite mad, leading their nations into
the very pit of Hell.
Even America had such moments, for there were a fair number of people
who bordered on madness more than willing to take the country into
communism, fascism, or something else. A survivor of the Farm Holiday
movement in Iowa remembers, ‘‘It was close to the spirit of the American
Revolution.’’ He describes a speech in which National Farmers Union
president John Simpson electrified the crowd with his opening remarks:
‘‘When constitutions, laws and court decisions stand in the way of human
progress, it is time that they be scrapped.’’ Another Depression survivor
remembers, ‘‘There was a feeling we were on the verge of a bloody revo-
lution, up until the time of the New Deal.’’11
The country came close when thousands of desperate families descended
on Washington in what became known as the Bonus March, a movement
that hoped to persuade Congress to pay World War I veterans their prom-
ised benefits early. When police and the marchers collided on a July morning
in 1932, it touched off one of the more controversial actions in American
history. Under future World War II heroes Douglas MacArthur and Dwight
Eisenhower, army troops swept into the marchers’ camp and set it ablaze.
A PBS documentary on the march commented, ‘‘The sight of the great fire
became the signature image of the greatest unrest our nation’s capital has
ever known.’’12
Woody Guthrie’s song ‘‘Jesus Christ’’ illustrates the difference between
the moral center of those times and the Era of Bad Feelings. Guthrie’s album
notes mention he wrote ‘‘this song looking out a rooming house window in
New York City.’’ Sung to the tune used for ‘‘The Ballad of Jesse James,’’
among others, Guthrie’s lyrics portray a Jesus that Jerry Falwell would
scarcely recognize. The song is a vocal sermon preaching equality, from its
pointed reference to Jesus as a carpenter to its message that the rich should
give their money to the poor.
If someone had proposed tax cuts for the wealthy as a solution to the
Depression, giving money back to those who would ‘‘invest it,’’ there is little
doubt this country would have taken a far different path during the 1930s. All
one has to do is to recall the history of the Weimar Republic, where big
business successfully fought increases in public works and unemployment
benefits. Franklin Roosevelt had no such plans. Besides the sheer cussedness of
people who held onto their values as if they were money in the bank plus the
support of party leaders and a bevy of ‘‘Brain Trust’’ advisors, FDR was
fortunate that two people played special roles in helping him with his task.
One was his wife Eleanor, who as historians are fond of saying, became his
eyes and ears. The other was a tall reed—thin, chain-smoking Iowan named
Harry Hopkins, who served as an intellectual guide.
When Roosevelt was laying the groundwork for his presidential campaign
while he was governor of New York, Hopkins made a name for himself
battling the oncoming Depression in various state and local capacities.
Working for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor,
Hopkins put unemployed men to work on parks in New York City, a pre-
cursor of programs he would create for the New Deal. In a prelude of what
was to come, Hopkins earned criticism at the time for handing out checks
without conducting thorough background checks on their recipients and for
putting people to work ‘‘leaf raking.’’
Franklin Roosevelt laid out the guidelines for his work relief program in
a speech to the Seventy-fourth Congress. Drawing from Liberal America’s
cornerstone of economic justice, the philosophy underlying his address be-
came the underpinning of virtually all New Deal economic programs.
The Federal Government must and will quit this business of relief. . . . Work
must be found for all able-bodied, but destitute workers. . . . I am not willing
that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market
baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking
up papers in public parks. We must preserve the bodies of the unemployed

from their destruction, but also their self-respect, self-reliance, and courage
and determination.13
To help oversee this effort he went back to the man who had put New
Yorkers to work, naming Hopkins as head of the Works Progress Admin-
istration. Building on his New York experiences, Harry Hopkins became a
vocal champion of using public works projects to stem the unemployment
metastasizing like a malignancy eating away all the nation’s vital organs.
Although today economists ponder their graphs and data about the efficacy
of such methods, we should remember that neither Roosevelt nor Hopkins
were theorists, but instead saw a problem that needed solving and dealt with
it as best they could, all the while driven by the imperative to preserve the
cornerstone of economic justice. An aide remembers, ‘‘Any guy could just
walk into the county office—they were set up all over the country—and get
a job. Leaf raking, cleaning up libraries, painting the town hall. . . . Within a
period of sixty days, four million people were put to work.’’14 Think about
that for a moment when some talk show zealot or politician tries to tell
you that putting the unemployed to work will take too much time or money,
then do the math. Four million in sixty days is over half a million jobs
a day!
In the Roosevelt years, the gospel held that most public assistance pro-
grams involved work. The CCC and the WPA, as the history books tell, put
men and women to work on meaningful projects whose impact still stands in
virtually every town in the country. While the Republican and corporate
fundamentalists derided these as make-work projects, a vast number of New
Deal projects literally changed the American landscape. The whining about
giving people money for raking leaves did not amount to much when people
could see new bridges, roads, and civic buildings. Walk into a town today
and you will find a monument to these programs in the form of a post office,
a school, a city hall, a fire station, a courthouse, a park band shell.
Hopkins’ programs made him the number one target of what passed for
the Raucous Right in those days, voices who thought the New Deal cloaked
nothing more than warmed-over socialism that would eventually turn the
country into another Soviet republic. The Chicago Tribune published an en-
larged and framed lead editorial under the headline, ‘‘Turn the Rascals Out.’’
It said: ‘‘Mr. Hopkins is a bull-headed man whose high place in the New
Deal was won by his ability to waste more money in quicker time on more
absurd undertakings than any other mischievous wit in Washington can
think of.’’ Each day anti-FDR newspapers printed the fearsome warning:
‘‘Only x more days to save the American Way of Life.’’15 We would do well
to remember these voices because the beliefs behind them metamorphosed
into the Counterrevolution and remarks by the likes of Tom DeLay about
turning back the clock.
Perhaps Hopkins’ best explanation of the philosophy that guided his life
came in a 1939 address he gave to his alma mater, Grinnell College:
For the last 27 or 28 years I have lived around various parts of the country, and
in more recent years of my life in intimate contact with government. . . . I have
lived to see a time when a farmer gets a check signed by the Treasurer of
the United States for doing something. I see old people getting pensions; see
unemployed people getting checks from the United States Government; col-
lege students getting checks signed by the United States Government. . . . This
government is ours whether it be local county, State or Federal. It doesn’t
belong to anybody but the people of America. Don’t treat it as an impersonal
thing; don’t treat it as something to be sneered at; treat it as something that
belongs to you. . . . It is going to take brains and skill to run it in the future
because this country cannot continue to exist as a democracy with 10,000,000
or 12,000,000 people unemployed. It just can’t be done.16
Today the Counterrevolution has Americans, particularly those in subur-

bia, believing that the basic values and policies that allowed America to
weather the Depression have become as obsolete as a Model T. Yet the vi-
sions of Roosevelt and Hopkins never have seemed more relevant. As the
summer blackout of 2003 demonstrated, a significant amount of the coun-
try’s infrastructure is in serious need of repair. Urban blight, the rehabili-
tation of state park and recreation areas (many of which still have their
CCC and WPA buildings), and the demands for mass transit and new
technology all speak to the fact that there is more than enough work that
needs to be done.
Ironically, it may be the suburbs that need Hopkins’ programs in the not-
too-distant future. Even as the suburbs shifted their political allegiance, their
own economic and social equality also has shifted under the Counterrevo-
lution. The advantages these homeowners had accumulated since World
War II have begun to slip away like sand sifting through a sieve with holes
carefully punched by the Counterrevolution. Studies about the declining
economic power of the middle class have become so frequent that the latest
often elicits no more than a yawn. The Counterrevolution tends to blow
them off as the scribblings of professors whose methodologies remain as
suspect as their conclusions or yet another nasty below the waist shot in
what has become known as ‘‘class warfare’’—a not-so-subtle reference to

Marx and times when anyone who opposed greed got painted as a ‘‘red.’’
The burgeoning industry in inequality studies threatens to make the
‘‘Gini’’ index/coefficient a household word. In this case ‘‘Gini’’ refers not to
someone who comes out of a bottle, but to a mathematical measurement of
income inequality. An increase in the index equals an increase in inequality.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco noted, ‘‘From 1968 to 1989, the
Gini index for households increased 11 percent with most of this rise oc-
curring in the 1980s.’’17 In 2004 the United States had a Gini index that said
its income equality ranked behind most European countries, India, Canada,
Japan, and Australia, and just ahead of Singapore, Thailand, China, and
Guatemala.18
The PBS series Now reports, ‘‘The Organization for Economic Cooper-
ation and Development [OCED] has found the United States to be the most
unequal society of all industrialized nations. The U.S. ranks last among
OECD nations in terms of income equality.’’19 The Economic Policy Insti-
tute estimated that the bottom 80 percent of American households control
only about 17 percent of the nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, wages and ben-
efits, for workers at the bottom continue to decrease.20
But those living in suburban cul-de-sacs do not need fancy numbers to tell
them what has happened. They see the cost of putting their children through
college rising as loans and scholarships fail to keep pace with tuition in-
creases. They see the replacement of small, independent businesses that once
populated the area by large franchises. They look at their credit card debt,
the rising price of gasoline and heating oil, and hear increasing warnings
about the bursting of the housing bubble that has sustained so many of them.
They know how budget cuts have depressed their schools, their roads, even
basic police and fire service. They also know that even as their income taxes
have dropped their property taxes may have gone up to offset the loss of
services. Statistics confirm their observations. The Center on Budget and
Policy studies found that state budget cuts represent the largest declines in
state spending in a generation. Calling this ‘‘remarkable,’’ the center notes,
‘‘These shrinking revenues have led many states to reduce expenditures. . . .
In the face of rising health care costs and other spending pressures, these
spending cuts are making it impossible for most states to maintain public
services at consistent levels.’’21
So suburbanites haunt the aisles of Home Depot looking for something to
keep their homes together or give them that personal touch. In doing so they
share, perhaps more than they might realize, the qualities that brought their
parents and grandparents through the tumultuous years of the 1930s. How
long they will remain dazzled by the Counterrevolution’s media version of

the old shell game, as the GOP moves money around, is an open question.
Recalling the memories of those who went through the country’s worst
economic crisis, reviewing the fundamental beliefs of those who averted a
bloody revolution and then placing this all in the context of the changes
signaled by Home Depot shows us just how far the Counterrevolution
threatens to weaken the cornerstones of our democracy. Just before he died
at the very end of World War II, Harry Hopkins jotted down some last
thoughts about his country’s future. ‘‘We can and should have our schemes
of social insurance for the old and the sick, but it would be a terrible day for
America if the rest of us did not want to earn our living by work. These
soldiers coming home simply are not going to understand our boasting
about our capitalist economy if it can’t deliver the goods in terms of op-
portunity for work.’’22 Anyone with a hammer would understand exactly
what he meant.
Educational Equity: The
11 Final Battleground
‘‘Garage Sale.’’ Signs hand lettered with black and red magic marker on
cardboard cut from Tide and Cheerios boxes poach on suburban intersec-
tions. Boldly drawn arrows point down twisting streets with names like
Pleasant Avenue and Partridge Place. A light summer breeze carries sounds
of static-filled rock oldies and country classics that mingle with smells of
charcoal-grilled hamburgers. Round-bellied men in baseball caps stand
statue-like holding hoses and barbecue forks. Broad-hipped women wearing
pastel tank tops chat in competition with the noise of children playing on
concrete sidewalks. Tightly parked between a tan Chevy SUV and a lusty red
Dodge pickup, a dark blue Pontiac displaying a ‘‘support our troops’’ decal
gleams in the line of cars that marks the event.
The sale spills from the garage and down the black-coated driveway,
beginning with card tables haphazardly piled with multi-colored dishes,
decaled glasses, and porcelain figurines and ending in a mingle of power
tools, countertop appliances, and a stained brown arm chair. In the midst of
these household treasures lies a story about America’s cornerstone of edu-
cational equity.
It begins with the observation that an inordinate number of items focus on
children. Tables stacked with clothes for babies and toddlers, some lying in
disarray from already being picked over, form a rich catalog of fads come
and gone: Batman, Spiderman, and numbered jerseys for sports heroes who
have retired, been traded or become tainted. Next sit children’s toys which
also speak to forgotten fads, a few that would cause much second guessing if
they were in a landfill several decades in the future. What would they make
of a brownish-green plastic turtle with a mask over his eyes holding a strange
object? Or a whole menagerie of monsters resembling mutant offspring of
the real dinosaur that sits not too far away? Videotapes and books serve as
Rosetta Stones for the menagerie grouped around them. The children’s items
go quickly, so quickly that people line up outside, waiting like sprinters in
the starting blocks to race down those rows of tables to procure a coveted
trophy.
You cannot understand the suburbs without understanding the impor-
tance of children. In 1961, Lewis Mumford, an early critic of suburbani-
zation, caught the child-centeredness:
Here domesticity could flourish, forgetful of the exploitation on which so much

of it was based. Here individuality could prosper, oblivious of the pervasive
regimentation beyond. This was not merely a child-centered environment; it
was based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the
pleasure principle.1
While one can argue with some of his more outlandish generalizations
(some that hide a barely concealed elitist prejudice), Mumford did percep-
tively identify the suburbs’ imaginative center, for children provide the
primordial energy that powers all. Henry Adams wrote about the dynamic
forces embodied in the virgin of the Chartres Cathedral and the dynamo that
mesmerized him at the 1900 Paris Exposition. If he were writing today he
might say the same thing about suburban children. No true suburbanite
would deny the claim, for virtually every house contains a kind of children’s
shrine, a wall of pictures dedicated to children, some yellowed with age.
With them may hang athletic medals, honor roll citations, diplomas.
This child-centered world has become the setting for the last battleground
for the vision of Liberal America—the public school system. The Counter-
revolution has captured other prizes including the courts, Congress, the
presidency. But one holdout lies down the hallways of thousands of schools
that have become like trenches in a protracted war. Because the Counter-
revolution realizes this all its forces have turned toward it like those of some
great, lumbering army.
What drives this army is the Counterrevolution’s mission of linking the
suburban demographic with the agenda of the Religious Right. Although
suburbanites tend to be socially liberal, their GOP politicians often espouse
conservative messages. Part of this is due to the widespread takeover of
Republican parties by radical reactionaries. Another reason lies in the fact
that one institution that has made inroads in America is the church. The
Gallup organization reports, ‘‘In 1976, 34 percent of Americans were clas-

sified as evangelicals. Twenty-five years later, in 1999, this number was up
12 percentage points to 46 percent.’’2
In an area like suburban America with its institutional vacuum, these
churches rush in to fill a void. Pennsylvania provides an instructive example.
A history of the state notes, ‘‘Newer evangelical, Pentecostal, and funda-
mentalist religious groups targeted suburban and exurban populations and
embarked on major programs of building and expansion. These churches
were often successful precisely because they provided a sense of community
for people living in the amorphous new housing developments.’’3 Using
suburban Orange County, California, as a window to examine a larger
trend, Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors provides an unsettling picture
of this growth and its connection to the Counterrevolution. She shows how
these suburbanites ‘‘forged study groups, multiplied chapters of national
right-wing organizations, and worked within the Republican Party to make
their voices heard.’’4
Public schools represent the main institution competing with suburban
churches, with both striving to create parent groups, booster clubs, family
activities. That is why the major battle in the suburbs is over schools and why
the Religious Right is working hard to undermine them. If their religious
academies can supplant public schools, they will win. Vouchers are not
about inner-city kids any more than taxes are about jobs; they are about
giving parents from the suburbs subsidies to put their kids in schools where
they can be properly indoctrinated in Jerry Falwell’s view of the world.
Littleton, Colorado, provides an instructive example. In most minds, this
Denver suburb still remains infamously associated with the shootings at
Columbine High School. Littleton actually has two school districts: one,
Jefferson County on the western boarder, contains Columbine, the other is
the Littleton district, where before Columbine, another ‘‘massacre’’ took
place whose consequences, while less bloody, should haunt us as we seek to
understand the Era of Bad Feelings. The Columbine shootings stemmed
from the inexplicable acts of two teenagers, the strange turnings of their
minds distorted by hormones and elemental rights of passage that lie in
atavistic regions of the brain. The first Littleton massacre represents a major
skirmish in a crucial battle that is still waging over the future of American
education and the fate of Liberal America. The shots fired in that first battle
aimed squarely at the heart of public schools and their sounds reverberate
today in classrooms across the country.
What happened in Littleton in 1993–94 did not receive much media
attention, but anyone in education has heard the story. It revolves around
a school district takeover by right-wing activists campaigning against

Outcome-Based Education (OBE), a loose school reform effort aimed at
teaching students how to think as well as to memorize facts. Stressing pro-
jects and demonstrations of knowledge as opposed to multiple choice tests,
OBE had become a major force in public education during the last decade.
Whether the actual marching orders and strategy of those opposed to
the reforms in Littleton came from various religious right groups like Citi-
zens for Excellence in Education (CEE) has never been established. But
they certainly provided the justifications. CEE, a division of the National
Association of Christian Educators, states that its mission is ‘‘helping par-
ents rescue their children from public schools to private Christian schools
and home schools, and rescue their children within the public schools.’’5
Education Week writer Ann Bradley noted that there was no evidence of
involvement by outside groups.6 Local leaders claimed they received no
outside assistance, but there is an odor of what is termed ‘‘stealth candi-
dacy’’ in the school board members who carried out the massacre.
If the masterminds of the takeover did not embrace the reactionaries of the
Counterrevolution, the reactionaries embraced them. Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle
Forum newsletter announced the victory with the headline: ‘‘O.B.E. [out-
comes-based education—sic] Trounced in Model District, Parents Vote for
Three R’s in 2 to 1 Mandate.’’7 Whether board members received outside
help does not matter in the end, because their agenda matched that of the
Counterrevolution.
Before the takeover, Superintendent Cile Chavez was named Colorado
Superintendent of the Year and the district had been nationally known for
its achievements. Visitors from more than 100 school districts in thirty states
attended district-hosted monthly open forums to see the innovations and
apply them to their own schools.8 Other districts brought Littleton faculty
members to conduct workshops in their schools.
When the reactionaries succeeded in getting a majority on the school
board, the turmoil began. Bradley observed:
Littleton is a town torn apart by a raging argument over its schools. Once the
pride of the community, the school system is now at the center of a fierce
debate over how and what teachers should teach, what should be expected of
students, what roles parents should play, how school board members should
govern, and what schools should look like at the close of the 20th century.9
In what became known as ‘‘the Sunday-afternoon massacre,’’ the new

board fired the superintendent and people began digging trenches. More
than a thousand residents turned out to support Chavez, but their protests,
which landed them on the front pages of area papers, did not reverse the
decision. Chavez moved on to become a much-in-demand speaker and
consultant, working with education organizations across the country on
leadership and change issues. Her story created a large buzz in education
circles, yet the media’s ignorance, either deliberate or not—it really makes
no difference—never brought the story to the general public.
Yet the story bears repeating for it provides a possible blueprint for the
fate of other public schools. There seems little doubt the takeover took place
through what reactionary strategists refer to as stealth candidates, peo-
ple who hide their true beliefs so they can get elected. Workshops run by the
Christian Coalition in all fifty states have urged potential candidates:
‘‘Smile as much as you can’’ and steer clear of any true religious agenda. . . .
Other suggestions included recruiting one’s Sunday School class members as
campaign contributors. Candidates were instructed to deflect accusations of
far right politics with quips such as, ‘‘As far as the teachers union is concerned,
everyone to the right of Karl Marx is radical right.’’ The emphasis of the
seminar was on stealth. ‘‘Don’t wear your religion on your sleeve,’’ one
Leadership Manual chapter suggests. ‘‘You may be religious—but . . . talk their
language—they don’t understand yours.’’10
Once elected, stealth candidates, like an ideological suicide bomber,

have several possible missions. First, convert the system to conform to the
Counterrevolutionary agenda until schools resemble the Ayatollah acade-
mies in the Middle East that preach death to the infidels. If this does not
work, advocate a slanted, fact-based curriculum that includes opt-out pol-
icies for programs such as ‘‘sex ed . . . outcome-based education and Goals
2000.’’11 Like those school board members in Dover, Pennsylvania, trying
to inject religion into the curriculum in the guise of ideas like ‘‘intelligent
design.’’ Finally, if you cannot subvert from within, undermine the system
by attacking school officials whenever possible. A holy war against the in-
fidel liberals has been declared and nothing short of symbolically taking
Jerusalem will do.
In Littleton the morale of teachers and administrators dropped because
many thought they also would be fired. So many rumors circulated about
possible terminations and other actions that a group of parents formed an
informal phone network to try to counter them. Chavez described the new
board’s style as ‘‘vigilante consumerism’’ in which people not only want to
be involved in decision making, but insist that decisions go their way.12 She
said, ‘‘I decided as superintendent I didn’t want to deliver what the new
board wanted. I drew the line on the way they were treating people. They
wanted a top-down management. I couldn’t operate that way.’’13 Reac-
tionary fought moderate, no holds barred, egged on by the preaching of the
Raucous Right.
After the takeover the district struggled to regain its equilibrium, as the
new board’s agenda became clear. They had followed a stealth technique of
advocating ‘‘back to the basics’’ but, as Bradley noted, it soon became ob-
vious to the community that the basics meant different things to different
people. (Why are the reactionaries always surprised when someone inter-
prets anything from the Bible to the Constitution differently?) Regie Rout-
man, who has also written about the Littleton takeover, believes, ‘‘In ret-
rospect, some parents said that they voted for ‘back to basics’ as ‘the answer’
to various perceived problems but they didn’t really know what they were
voting for.’’14 In an interview after the takeover, one reactionary leader
made a statement that still gives me chills: ‘‘I don’t think we’re going to end
up killing each other off.’’15
As the stealth candidates’ agenda emerged, the community rose up against
it, so that two years later the right wingers lost by a two-to-one margin to a
slate of moderate candidates, a clear statement that people did not buy the
radical agenda of the Counterrevolution. The situation eerily resonates with
what would happen in 2005 in Dover, Pennsylvania, where an antievolution
board was dumped after trying to rewrite the curriculum. Reflecting on what
happened in Littleton, Chavez gave a classic description of the Era of Bad
Feelings:
People’s tolerance level is low, and lots of people are just angry in general. And
there’s a huge fear factor in society today. . . . We’re living in a period of major
isolation. Here in Denver, as in other communities, walls are going up around
neighborhoods. What is the real message of that?16
As Chavez intimates, Littleton represents only a skirmish in a much larger,

more serious battle. To understand you must grasp the competing visions.
Entering its third century, the American public education system has served
as the center of our democracy, becoming one of America’s most valu-
able contributions to the world, perhaps on a level with the Constitution.
While we have our exclusive private schools and tests that decide whether
someone will go to Podunk U or Harvard, the average American still has
a chance at either, and, if history is any judge, Podunk may, at this very
moment, be nurturing another Picasso or Einstein. Lincoln reading by
candlelight in the wee hours of the morning should be our quintessential

icon, done by some contemporary Rembrandt to hang in a place of honor in
all our minds. If we need something new to put on our currency, consider a
picture of a rural one-room schoolhouse.
Crucial to our commitment to universal public education is a system that
places control of schools in the hands of the people. Locally elected school
boards decide what will be taught and how. These local boards may stand as
the last refuge of democracy, where citizens gather together to work for the
common good, trying to determine the right path in a host of alternatives.
Thomas Jefferson spoke of the importance of public education in a passage
many educators can recite from memory: ‘‘Whenever the people are well-
informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever
things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set
them to rights.’’17 In one of my favorite movies, The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance, James Stewart, who plays an idealistic young lawyer, finds himself
in a raw frontier town. One of the the first things he does is to start a school
so people can learn to read and write. In a sequence where he tutors his class,
one sees written in flawless penmanship on the blackboard behind him
‘‘Education is the basis for law and order.’’
Education has always functioned as one of America’s prime tools for
leveling the playing field. One of the most revolutionary changes after the
days of the New Deal brought this country’s higher education system from
mainly being the playground of the rich to a truly open system. Besides the
increases in financial aid that made college affordable to Americans who
once could only dream about entering higher education, a major credit for
this must go the nation’s much-maligned public schools. Where once the
curriculum for lower- and middle-class children often consisted of ‘‘voca-
tional training,’’ our public schools have now shifted to offering the once
elite ‘‘college prep’’ track to a majority of students. It is fashionable to
malign the performance of American students on standardized tests as com-
pared with other nations, but detractors fail to acknowledge that only in
America do such a wide variety of students take those tests.
The Counterrevolution now threatens to put the brakes on this engine of
opportunity. Between budget cutting and right-wing attempts to politicize the
curriculum, the American public education system faces a protracted siege.
Nowhere in the Era of Bad Feelings do the choices seem more dramatically
drawn, nowhere the stakes so high. If we allow ideology and not democracy
to take over our public education system, there is little doubt that it proves
Jefferson’s point in a way that the Sage of Monticello could not have
anticipated, for America as we know it will go the way of other failed
experiments and our children will grow up under the same climate of ab-
solutes as those in schools once run by the Taliban.
A clue to what the Raucous Right thinks our schools should teach comes
from none other than The Hammer himself, Tom DeLay. In sorting out The
Hammer’s views on education religion becomes the starting point, as for so
much else with today’s Republicans. The fundamentalist creed he and others
follow is best summed up by the following from Jerry Falwell’s website
describing the mission of his ministry as: ‘‘To act as both salt and light . . .
reaching the world with the gospel, teaching and training believers, reviving
the hearts of God’s people and healing the wounds of immorality and
godlessness in our nation.’’18
In How to Live a Successful Christian Life, Falwell spells out the meaning
of this mission. First and foremost one must believe in the literal meaning of
the Bible, ‘‘We believe in the trustworthiness of the New Testament docu-
ments. There are thousands of copies of the books of the New Testament. By
comparing these texts we can be virtually certain of their original mes-
sage.’’19 (Emphasis added.) To those of us who go to church every Sunday to
understand God’s word, the last phrase seems especially interesting, with its
absolute assertion of certainty about what God means. To paraphrase a line
from the movie Inherit the Wind, ‘‘God talks to Jerry and he delivers the
message to the rest of us.’’
To Jerry Falwell, God is not inscrutable; he is easy to understand and those
who think otherwise reveal themselves as false believers. The following sen-
tence might be a description of Falwell: ‘‘When a human being believes that
everything, including himself, has been created by [God] and that He is Lord of
all the creatures, he negates any kind of independence and becomes a Servant
of Him in its true sense.’’20 Actually the word in brackets is not God, but Allah
and the sentence comes from a commentary on the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The second foundation of Falwell’s theology rests on the notion of being
‘‘born again,’’ a conversion experience during which people acquire the true
faith. This concept has always caused some consternation for mainline
religions. Their indignation stems from the idea that any individual can
acquire the faith through grace from above without doing something to
deserve this grace. The famous gospel song, ‘‘Amazing Grace,’’ captures it
all, with its lines ‘‘I once was lost, but now I’m found.’’ Even the most
miserable reprobate can acquire it, which explains why fundamentalists
readily embrace the conversion of George W. Bush.
This venerable theological argument turns on the difference between faith
and works. Those who believe in justification by faith say the strength of
faith allows you to become born again. Those who believe in justification by
works hold that what we do becomes the important determinant. Falwell

says, ‘‘A born-again Christian is one who has been regenerated by the Holy
Spirit. Spiritual life is not something we can produce by our own efforts.’’
The more miserable the sinner, the greater the conversion.
After the born-again experience, one instinctively knows what to do.
‘‘Once we are regenerated, the Holy Spirit indwells us, enabling us to live in
the power of the Spirit,’’ says Falwell.21 ‘‘In this case, such a person would
never, even for a second, give up or neglect his responsibility of servitude
toward, and worship of, [God]. In other words, the spirit of worship is that a
person must bear in mind the satisfaction of his Lord in all aspects of his
life,’’ says the Khomeini commentary.22
As for people not born again, Falwell believes that by nature human
beings are evil sinners and only a conversion experience can turn us around.
In effect, those not born again deserve whatever is coming to them. This has
obvious consequences for education that lie at the root of struggles for the
public school system. First, justification by faith has always had an implied
distaste for education because it relies on emotionalism over reason. One
can study all you want, even have a Ph.D. in theology from the best divinity
school in the world and not know anything, certainly not as much as a junkie
on a street corner who suddenly sees the light. As many born-again Chris-
tians say, you only need one book and we all know what that is. Khomeini
said a similar thing, but he had a different book in mind.
If education ultimately holds little meaning for fundamentalists, then why
does the religious right seem so concerned about public schools? Because,
the public schools, which have other texts than the Bible, plant blasphemous
ideas in not only their children but also yours and mine. Falwell made this
very clear in a ‘‘Crossfire’’ debate about sex education, where he stated that
if one of his children or grandchildren were taught ‘‘sex education without
values’’ in any school, he would ‘‘go in the classroom and personally stop
it.’’ He went on to encourage parents to ‘‘take your children back. Walk into
schools, they are your schools, and stop it.’’23
In the Era of Bad Feelings the notion that God has reached out to you in
stormy seas becomes hard to resist. If you have not walked the hallways of
an American high school recently you should, because in those concrete
corridors one can understand the motivations that can drive some to sym-
pathize with the Counterrevolution. Stand there during passing time amid
the din and chaos, keep your eyes and ears open and you will notice two
things: some girls dress like sluts and some boys talk like gangsters.
Coping with what many see as long-standing rites of adolescent style and
rebellion, conservative parents see what they believe is permissiveness and
relativism and wonder what will happen to their children in such an envi-
ronment. Parents have forever wrestled with the issue of what is right for
their children, but this has become even more pronounced in the Era of Bad
Feelings’ climate of violent, sexist video games and movies and television
programs that leave little to the imagination, either verbally or physically.
Every parent has drawn the line on such things only to have Maria or Juan
come home and say other students do it.
The absolutes of Jerry Falwell exert a powerful force in such an atmo-
sphere, as Tom DeLay knows. He has said quite forcefully that he accepts
Falwell’s theological contention that people are, by nature, evil (one won-
ders then what he thinks of his constituents, or, for that matter, the rest of
us). Writing about an incident in Michigan in which a six-year-old reputedly
killed someone, DeLay said, ‘‘Simply put, the problem is within—rather
than outside of—us, because as the Judeo-Christian tradition has always
taught we enter this world flawed and inclined to do the wrong thing. If one
accepts this perspective, then one is also likely to recognize that, as one
author recently phrased it, only two forces hold the sinful nature in check:
the restraint of conscience or the restraint of the sword. The less that citizens
have the former, the more the state must employ the latter.’’24 Think about
the implications of this, given what we have already been over—media
concentration, rent-a-riot, stealth candidates. The ramification of this scary
remark holds that if you are not born again, you are defined as a sinner and
this justifies using the government ‘‘sword’’ to punish your sin (as defined by
Falwell and company), not unlike theocracies where ‘‘the sword’’ is literally
used to punish sinners.
As for the curriculum, DeLay told a Texas church audience, ‘‘Christianity
offers the only viable, reasonable, definitive answer to the questions of
‘Where did I come from?’ ‘Why am I here?’ ‘Where am I going?’ ‘Does life
have any meaningful purpose?’ Only Christianity offers a way to understand
that physical and moral border. Only Christianity offers a comprehensive
world view that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of crea-
tion.’’25 Forget the idea that there are other beliefs in the world than the
brand of Christianity DeLay espouses, and merely think of this sentence in
terms of the great wealth of knowledge in all our libraries. To DeLay it
doesn’t matter. He has already symbolically burned those books.
We must understand these roots because while Tom DeLay has fallen
from his position of power, his beliefs express the education agenda for
many in the Counterrevolution. That agenda emerged in the 2000 Repub-
lican platform. It is useful to quote it in its entirety and then think about it in
the context of DeLay’s statement:
We advocate choice in education, not as an abstract theory, but as the surest

way for families, especially low-income families, to free their youngsters from
failing or dangerous schools and put them onto the road to opportunity and
success. By the same token, we defend the option for home schooling and call
for vigilant enforcement of laws designed to protect family rights and privacy
in education. We will continue to work for the return of voluntary school
prayer to our schools and will strongly enforce the Republican legislation
that guarantees equal access to school facilities by student religious groups.
We strongly support voluntary student-initiated prayer in school without
governmental interference. We strongly disagree with the Supreme Court’s
recent ruling, backed by the current administration, against student-initiated
prayer.26
In many school board elections across the country, this agenda has failed
to find widespread support. So rather than rely on democracy, the Coun-
terrevolution has duplicated the strategy that has worked so well with other
areas: under the guise of keeping taxes low, slash budgets to the bone, and,
for good measure, throw in the overspending argument, attacking teacher
and administrative salaries, various forms of ‘‘waste,’’ and tie it all to
‘‘performance.’’
The roots of this strategy, like so much else on the Republican agenda, lie
in the South, for in the wake of Brown v. Board, Southern racists abandoned
the public school system. Rather than go to school with African Americans,
some Southerners, especially those with money, decided to opt out of the
system and place their children in private schools. In the North, some urban
and suburban whites have followed suit, pulling their kids out of schools
that did not support their views of the world. Then they vote to slash public
school budgets. The Counterrevolution also hopes their agenda resonates in
the inner cities, where school budgets seem high and test scores and grad-
uation rates remain undeniably low. ‘‘Look at all the money schools have
spent,’’ goes the battle cry, ‘‘And still your test scores are miserable. Give
inner city parents the same options as rich folks. Give them vouchers so their
children can attend the schools of their choice.’’
That elite private schools have admissions standards that can rival Har-
vard, that most of them already have scholarships for students with special
talents (see Hoop Dreams), and that virtually none of these schools will take
special education students or discipline problems that public schools must
accept, does not matter. The most realistic option for the Counterrevolution
becomes the one that pays parents to put their children into schools that add
a fourth ‘‘R,’’ to the classic three—religion.
The growth of religious schools represents one of the great underreported

stories in American education. According to the Council for American Pri-
vate School Education (CAPE), private schools now account for 23 percent
of the schools in the country and 1.5 percent of all students. In other words
they have the buildings but not the bodies (which is why vouchers become
crucial). Only a paltry 13.2 percent of the nation’s private schools are
nonsectarian. The most explosive growth in private schools has occurred in
those preaching the values of Jerry Falwell and Tom DeLay. CAPE reports
that enrollment in schools identifying themselves as evangelicals grew by
what it terms ‘‘an astounding increase of 46 percent’’ during the decade of
the 1990s. The Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), which
serves evangelical Christian schools, has become the nation’s second largest
private school association.27 While one could argue into the wee hours of the
morning about the difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists, the
ideology of ACSI sounds suspiciously like that of Falwell. ACSI states that it
‘‘strives to enable and equip Christian educators and schools worldwide to
effectively educate children and young people with the mind of Christ. Thus,
students will be prepared for life because Christ, the creator and sustainer of
the universe, possesses ‘all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Co-
lossians 2:3).’’28
That fundamentalist schools could take over CAPE should cause concern
because of tactics fundamentalists have employed in the past. The takeover
of the Southern Baptists discussed in ‘‘Devil’s Bargains’’ provides the tem-
plate. Those who have the most to gain by the passing of vouchers legislation
and other measures that allow government funds to be diverted to so-called
‘‘private’’ schools represent the Religious Right, whose schools are multi-
plying the fastest.
While direct attempts to fund religious schools have not yet worked, the
Raucous Right has conducted a stealth campaign focusing on funding and
so-called accountability, of which the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is
the most infamous example. NCLB stands as probably one of the most
dangerous pieces of legislation to come from Congress and the White House
in some time. On the surface, it seems eminently sensible to require schools
to meet standards set by states and the federal government, but NCLB is not
sensible.
With NCLB, the Counterrevolution has largely succeeded in reframing the
debate about education funding much as it reframed debates about taxes.
Resource-poor schools where the toilets work intermittently, the textbooks
have pages missing, and teachers must buy their own classroom supplies
also tend to have large numbers of students not performing well on the
standardized tests that are at the heart of NCLB. For these schools, the GOP
moved the debate from lack of resources to lack of performance in a way
that would earn the admiration of the most sophisticated riverboat gambler.
Schools with inadequate resources and low test scores get grilled about low
test scores, not whether lack of resources contributes to them. NCLB even
goes further, taking resources away from resource-poor schools with low
test scores. That such logic escaped John Kerry and other Democrats when
they voted for NCLB received little comment from Kerry supporters, which
included education organizations.
Educators have no problem with accountability, after all locally controlled
public schools help ensure it. What they do question are what they term
‘‘unfunded mandates,’’ for like the much-discussed federal requirement to
provide special education services, NCLB does not provide funds to raise
achievement. In fact it does not even provide some districts with adequate
funds to administer the tests! This became the basis for a lawsuit filed by
the state of Connecticut in 2005, one that could end up with the new Bush
Supreme Court. The lawsuit stated, ‘‘Connecticut cannot comply with both
its state statute and the federal Department of Education’s rigid, arbitrary
and capricious interpretation of the NCLB mandates unless the mandates of
the NCLB are either fully funded or the mandates are waived.’’29 According
to National Public Radio, ‘‘a cost analysis finds that by 2008, Connecticut
will have to pay $41.6 million to implement all the requirements of the
federal law. The federal government disputes that number.’’30
People attending suburban garage sales are only too well aware of the
impact of unfunded mandates. One might say they are partly responsible for
them, since garage sales are the equivalent of a homeowner’s fundraiser. In
many suburban districts, the Last Battle seems on the verge of becoming a
rout; with teacher layoffs, program cuts, and what has become an annual
rite in even the most affluent districts—levy or bond referendums. The knock
on the door from a youngster seeking to raise funds for his or her school has
become as common for most of us as the car wash or bake sale trying to keep
the band or the debate team solvent. Even as they offer advertising contracts
in exchange for needed cash, school officials lament in private that they have
become the equivalent of those Dickensian characters who sold their virtue
in dark alleys so they might have a roof over their heads and some morsel on
the table. In short, the vaunted public education system that has been both
the mainspring of our democracy and the envy of the world is slowly being
bled to death by people who resemble those eighteenth-century quacks who
thought bleeding the patient was a cure. The GOP tactic of starving public
schools to save them sounds suspiciously like the strategy of saving the lower
and middle classes by giving tax cuts to the wealthy. In this America’s future
becomes a high-stakes game, where the Counterrevolution has wagered its
future and ours on a profoundly undemocratic end. The question is how
long will it be before a backlash appears?
The other objection educators have concerns the tests themselves, some-
thing also mentioned in the Connecticut lawsuit. The debate about valid
assessment instruments that has raged through education for over a century
has become especially heated given the stakes of NCLB. Some states have
been accused of ‘‘test shopping,’’ a derogatory term used by educators to
describe the practice of finding the test that allows the most students to pass.
Connecticut State Education Commissioner Betty Sternberg told NPR,
‘‘They’re actually telling us to, and I hate to use the word, but dumb down
our test.’’31
Curiously, this debate opens a window on the relationship between the
partners in the Counterrevolution. Through much of the 1980s and early
1990s, business served as a major booster of education reform. The influ-
ential 1983 report A Nation at Risk served as their bible. Concerned that
students who could pencil in the right answers on tests could not deal with
real world problems, they funded a variety of efforts designed to improve
critical thinking skills, among which was OBE. The 2000 and 2004 Re-
publican platforms mark a major shift in the business commitment to edu-
cation. During George W. Bush’s administration, business seems to have
conceded the field of education to the Religious Right. Corporate voices—
and more important corporate dollars to fund innovation—have muted.
Behind all the cries about unfunded mandates and dumbed-down tests,
NCLB signifies an unprecedented attack on the fundamental principles of
public education. Instead of government leveling the education playing
field—assuring that a child born in Watts shall have the same resources as
one born in Shaker Heights—it slaps that responsibility rudely in the face,
turns on its heels, and coolly walks away as if nothing had happened. Where
once the Counterrevolution decried government intervention in education
(well into the 1950s the Republicans opposed federal aid to education, es-
pecially government-prescribed curricula), now they have inserted govern-
ment squarely into education, squashing the long-standing belief in state and
local control.
What really makes NCLB a blatant shell game stems from the big question
plaguing education policy: after decades of research on how and why chil-
dren learn and dozens of curricular experiments, no one has a definitive
answer for what it takes to raise test scores. For example, if an inner-city
school is marked as under-performing by NCLB, it begs the obvious ques-
tion, ‘‘Why is it under-performing?’’ Why does one school have high scores
and another low ones? How does one compare the two faculties? What role
do facilities and teaching resources play? Is such a comparison possible,
since there are those who argue students learn differently?
In the end we come back to money. If they seriously cared, the Coun-
terrevolution should be able to show with some degree of certainty how
much is needed to educate Juan or Silvia. They cannot. That the Counter-
revolution cannot tell you what it takes to improve a child’s performance on
a standardized test reveals the bankruptcy of NCLB and uncovers its true
motives. NCLB represents another stealth effort—this one purporting to
improve public schools—that hides an agenda of allowing children to attend
voucher schools.
The failure of NCLB also reveals the bankruptcy of other Counterrevo-
lutionary attacks on government. Substitute welfare for NCLB and you get
the picture. Just as we do not know what it takes to improve a student’s
academic performance we do not know what it takes to move someone out
of poverty. Is it job training? How much? What kind? What if the jobs do
not exist or only are the equivalent of flipping burgers?
No one seems to be frame the issue in terms of the level playing field where
the stakes are nothing less than the American Dream of giving every child an
equal chance. At its roots the argument of the Raucous Right about public
education seems profoundly undemocratic. The basic principle of the public
school system historically holds that through the democratic process we will
together decide what is to be taught, how to teach it, and how to assess it.
The arguments of the Counterrevolution amount to a kind of childish ‘‘I
don’t like what is happening, so I’m going to take my ball and go home.’’
NCLB says that if we do not like what schools are doing, instead of trying to
make them better, we should leave them to their fate. Such a policy repre-
sents a profound failure of imagination, and an even more profound moral
failure.
Arising from the fundamentalist position on education, the Counterrev-
olution’s education platform becomes nothing less than saying, ‘‘Either
schools teach our ideology or we will send our children to schools that do!’’
Besides the kind of citizens such ideological rigidity would produce, imagine
that argument extended to every area of American life. That seems to be
exactly the direction much of this country seems headed: We all either think
like The Hammer and his allies, or as he himself advocated, they will be
forced to use the sword.
The education card represents one of the strongest in the Demo-
crats’ hand, yet they seem unable to play it effectively. Instead of framing
education as a choice between a democratic public school system and one of

religious academies preaching fundamentalist orthodoxy, candidates babble
incoherently about issues the public neither understands nor connects with.
People like Winona LaDuke have tried to awaken the party to the impor-
tance of diversity in education, but they do not seem to hear. The Democrats
should invoke the specter of Littleton and the dangerous words of Tom
DeLay every chance they get.
Wandering through that suburban garage sale with its piles of children’s
clothes and toys puts a special exclamation point on the battle over edu-
cation. The issue facing this country could not be plainer: Do we want every
community to go through what Littleton experienced? Do we want an ed-
ucational system like Iran’s or one that prepares our students to be par-
ticipating citizens in a twenty-first-century democracy? The garage sale has
it right, for it is above all about our children. Contrary to what some believe,
education has always been about inculcating values in the young. What
makes the Counterrevolution’s take on this so insidious comes from the
nature of the values it seeks to force-feed young minds. We have moved from
a time when values came with words Martin Luther King, Jr., preached—
values like economic justice, voting rights, equal education—to an era when
values have become thought of as thou shalt nots preached by Jerry Falwell.
Do we want our children to grow up in the world envisioned by Thomas
DeLay or Thomas Jefferson? That people do not raise this question more
forcefully should cause us all to wonder what the Era of Bad Feelings has
done to America.
Voting Rights: Red and
12 Blue Lemmings
Like lemmings marching to the sea they came, one following the other, until
the numbers became a stream and the stream a river. Still they kept coming,
drawn by some irresistible urge, packing themselves closer together when
the need demanded it, climbing over, around and past each other, devouring
everything in their path so that pastures of grain, meadows of flowers, even
whole forests were reduced to bare ground. If the landscape deterred them,
they leveled it so that hills and valleys became as flat as Nebraska and
streams, ponds, and wetlands evaporated.
This human migration stands as one of the largest freely undertaken,
government-subsidized mass social movements in history. It accomplished
by democratic means what dictators over the ages have tried to accomplish
by force: alter the physical, economic, and social environment to create a
unique culture. In 1970, the United States became the first nation to have
more citizens living in suburbs than either rural or city areas.1 In its 2003
‘‘Report on American Exceptionalism’’ The Economist noted, ‘‘Among all
the ways America is unusual, one of the least noticed but most important is
that more than half the population lives in suburbs. In this, it is unique in the
world: in most European countries, for example, over two-thirds of the
population is classified as urban.’’2
In 1961 Lewis Mumford wrote the most widely quoted and persistent
critique of the American suburb:
In the mass movement into suburban areas a new kind of community was
produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban
refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at

uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited
by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing
the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated
foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward
respect to a common mold.3
Whether or not one agrees with Mumford, the American suburb points
out that Frederick Jackson Turner was wrong when he said the frontier died
over a century ago. In 1893, Turner wrote that the frontier functioned as a
social safety valve by making cheap land and opportunity available to
anyone who had the pluck and luck to file a claim and begin the exhausting
process of trying to make a crop by felling trees, uprooting stumps and
boulders, cutting prairie sod, then hoping the heck that the rains would
come at the right times and in the right amounts; that enough rifle shots
would find their targets of wild game; and that the winters would be mild.
The place these pioneers occupy in our national mythology is well deserved,
all the more so because the more historians learn about them the more like
ordinary folks they seem, making their deeds seem that much more ex-
traordinary. That frontier conditions should produce a Lincoln seems at
once a miracle and inevitable. Maybe it took someone who lived his early
years in what amounted to a lean-to to weather the harsh conditions of the
Civil War. That American folklore staple, the tall tale, had it right, for only a
person who was half-hoss, half-gator with a bit of snapper thrown in seemed
capable of surviving the waterless deserts, impassable mountains, and in-
domitable weather that faced the wagon trains.
But the safety valve did not become extinct with the passing of the pio-
neer. The near-disaster of the Great Depression and the pent-up needs of
World War II for housing, education, and jobs demanded satisfaction. Even
the most right-wing reactionary could see the need for government action.
The suburb represented for many new homeowners all that is right about the
philosophy that government should intervene on behalf of the common
good. Gratitude fueled the suburban revolution, the strong belief that those
who saved the world for democracy deserved to have a home of their own,
a college education, decent health care, and good wages. The ‘‘Greatest
Generation’’ had gone from almost losing hope in the depths of the De-
pression to giving the free world hope from places such as Iwo, Normandy,
and the Bulge. Now they too deserved hope.
Through a variety of government subsidies the creation of the suburbs
allowed people of modest means to attain what real estate ads have chris-
Voting Rights & 175
tened the American dream. The immensity of this achievement is only be-
ginning to dawn on us, for it constituted the kind of land and social reform
that governments everywhere still try to accomplish. Single-family housing
starts in this country rose from 114,000 in 1944 to 937,000 in 1946,
1,183,000 in 1948, and 1,692,000 in 1950.4
It would take a supreme economic historian—and so far no one has
proven equal to the daunting task—to untangle the full extent to which
government largesse made the suburbs possible. Probably the closest anyone
has come is Crabgrass Frontier, an invaluable book by Kenneth Jackson.
Jackson notes, ‘‘Suburbanization was not an historical inevitability created
by geography, technology, and culture, but rather the product of govern-
ment policies.’’5 He points out ‘‘the main beneficiary of the $119 billion in
FHA [Federal Housing Administration] mortgage insurance issued in the
first four decades of FHA operation was suburbia.’’6
Home loans represented only one aspect of government aid to the sub-
urbs. Arguably a large amount of federal highway aid in the last half century
has gone to the suburbs, first to get people there and then to relieve the
congestion caused by those very same roads, so highway construction has
degenerated into a vicious circle of building roads to relieve congestion,
which creates more congestion, which creates the need for more roads. With
the roads came water, electricity, sewer, and phones. The suburbs also be-
came the drivers of cable television service and helped to create the In-
formation superhighway, changing the Internet from a defense program to
the dispenser of Google and eBay.
On top of infrastructure funding there were subsidies for local institutions.
New communities, as any pioneer knew, needed schools and places to shop.
Frontier folks most often built their own, but the conquerors of crabgrass
and Japanese beetles took advantage of government aid. Tax Increment
Financing, originally intended as a tool for reviving decaying inner-city
neighborhoods, built acres of malls. Programs for senior citizens or low-
income families helped erect suburban townhouses and apartments. Federal
aid to education helped suburban schools.
A significant amount of government aid also went directly to the new
suburbanites themselves. The Depression had helped to take the stigma off
‘‘being on relief’’ so that by the 1950s government assistance went to—and
was demanded by—a variety of citizens. The much-touted GI Bill opened the
gates for housing, education, and job training programs for the middle class.
Suburbs themselves gave grants to first-time homeowners. And so the middle
class bellied up to the government table, taking generous helpings of tax-
payer dollars.
We must note one major dimension of the suburban migration that weighs
heavily on Liberal America: The suburbs deliberately isolated Americans of
color as surely as if brick walls had been erected around their neighborhoods
with the same purpose as walls built by the Nazis in Warsaw or the Com-
munists in East Berlin. Crabgrass Frontier notes that FHA policies deliberately
discriminated against people of color. Since the FHA and the VA financed
almost half the housing in the 1950s and 1960s, they shut the door of op-
portunity on millions of Americans. Jackson states, ‘‘FHA also helped to turn
the building industry against the minority and inner-city housing market, and
its policies supported the income and racial segregation of suburbia.’’
Warnings began as early as 1955 when Columbia Professor Charles Abrams
charged, ‘‘From its inception the FHA set itself up as protector of the all white
neighborhood. It sent its agents into the field to keep Negroes and other
minorities from buying houses in white neighborhoods.’’7
According to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now) these discriminatory practices continue. In October 2002,
ACORN released ‘‘The Great Divide,’’ a report on 2001 national loan data
as well as for sixty-eight metropolitan areas. The report found continuing and
even growing racial and economic disparities in home mortgage lending.
Nationally, African American mortgage applicants faced rejection 2.31 times
more often than white applicants, and Hispanics were denied 1.53 times
more often than whites.8 Income made little difference. ACORN notes in
Chicago African Americans earning more than $84,600 had 2.06 times more
likelihood of being turned down than whites earning less than $28,450.9
ACORN also points out that loan discrimination is accompanied by
discriminatory banking practices in communities of color. A study by Fed-
eral Reserve economists found that the number of banking offices in low-
and moderate-income areas decreased 21 percent from 1975 to 1995, while
the total number of banking offices in all areas rose 29 percent during this
same period. In 2001, one-quarter of families with incomes below 80 per-
cent of the area median income did not have a bank account. To make up for
this, these communities often rely on what ACORN terms ‘‘shadow banks’’
such as pawnshops, check-cashing services, and payday lenders, many with
questionable practices.10
The link between the suburbs and discriminatory housing is no secret, but
in the larger context of the Era of Bad Feelings and the critical state of
Liberal America, the creation of all-white enclaves at the same time the
Republican Party dallied with Strom Thurmond becomes especially im-
portant. Racist housing policies enabled the Southern Strategy to assume not
merely a regional but a national base. Elements of Thurmond’s Southern
Voting Rights & 177
Manifesto that became gospel for the Counterrevolution now had a far-
reaching appeal.
As for suburbanites themselves, they attracted anthropologists, sociolo-
gists, and others like a newly discovered Amazonian tribe, becoming research
subjects whose most intimate parts were poked, prodded, and sampled.
Myopic professors then placed them under a microscope and peered at what
they saw with looks of wonderment and confusion. Enter ‘‘suburbia’’ in the
books search on Amazon.com and you will turn up an astounding 10,686
volumes.
As for the realm of fiction, which can often be more revealing than dozens
of studies, the novels of Mailer, Updike, Cheever and others do not truly do
it justice, for their stages seem cramped, the actors and actresses hemmed in
by the author’s own prejudices and personal hangups. The movies have not
captured it either, suffering from similar problems. Perhaps the art form that
has best caught the suburban ethos is that quintessential television genre, the
situation comedy.
As much as anyone, Lucille Ball established the successful recipe for the
sitcom by building her show around a zany personality who always lands in
hot water because of some harebrained scheme. People around the world
can recite the basic plot: Lucy enlists someone, usually her friend Ethel
Mertz, to do something she has been warned not to do. This transgression
puts Lucy in an embarrassing position, from which she is rescued just before
things get out of hand. In the end the audience learns bad things happen if
you stray beyond established boundaries. Since ‘‘I Love Lucy’’ first appeared
in 1951, some variation of this basic recipe has come to characterize vir-
tually every sitcom on television.
In the tension between group and individual that animates these shows we
find a safety valve for similar tensions in our own lives. In a sense the
situation comedy serves as a form of cultural exorcism—one hesitates to use
the word because it is so loaded. Yet that describes the sitcom’s function
perfectly. Like America, the sitcom is torn between the individualism of the
Declaration of Independence and the group spirit of the Constitution. In the
situations that grow out of attempts to balance the two, we see a reflection of
our own tribulations. In laughing at them we exorcise those demons from
our cultural psyches.
This theme also captures the classic tension of Liberal America, which has
always tried to balance the individual and society. Where Republicans have
tended to come down heavily on the side of entrepreneurial individualism,
believing the market will take care of everything, Liberal America has seen
that excessive individualism can become antisocial when predatory and
amoral manipulators gain control. On the other hand, it also recognizes

government can overstep its bounds. It is the four cornerstones that have
allowed Liberal American to maintain the balance. That early sitcoms
should reflect and affirm the idea of balance that underlies Liberal America
and also guided the building of the suburbs represents a fascinating parallel.
The rise of the sitcom in the 1950s and 1960s should have signaled some-
thing to those who cared about Liberal America, for in the long-standing
attempt to balance individual and group the sitcom came down heavily on
the side of the group. Even the so-called ‘‘liberal’’ sitcoms like ‘‘All in the
Family’’ did not stray far from the formula, they only modified it. Stereo-
typical ‘‘conservatives’’ such as Archie Bunker became the outsiders raising
havoc with the group.
This groupthink should have provided a tip-off that something had shifted
in America, something that some came to label the suburban ethos. This
would come to play a major role in the struggle over the cornerstone of
voting rights. At precisely the time women and people of color were raising
their questions about whether the country still believed in the principles of
Liberal America, middle-class whites, aided by the government, were
moving to the suburbs. So like two trains passing in the night Liberal and
suburban America went their separate ways. Those sitting in each train
perceived only images on their television screens that flickered as quickly as
glimpses of passengers on a real train. Standing precariously between the
two tracks was the Democratic Party, which appeared fearful and perplexed.
It should come as no surprise that in the Era of Bad Feelings, the sitcom
should find itself in hot water. As television critics write about the decline of
the sitcom and its replacement by reality shows, the numbers confirm their
fears. Only two sitcoms could be found among the top thirty shows in 2004
and one of them—‘‘Everybody Loves Raymond’’(note the title)—did not
return in 2005. That the sitcom formula should fall victim to the plotters
of ‘‘Survivor’’ or the spectacles of people willing to devour anything that
crawls on six legs says a great deal about our times. The reality shows offer
us a central theme—the Death of Liberal America.
Contrary to what some critics have written, there is nothing new in au-
diences finding perverse pleasure in watching people debase themselves for
money and fame. This form of ‘‘entertainment’’ has a long, sordid history.
What makes the reality shows a fascinating social document comes from a
theme far removed from that of the sitcom, for the reality shows feature
plotting and back-stabbing deliberately designed to undermine the group.
The message is that underneath our seemingly benign appearances, most of
us will behave just like the executives of Enron. Liberal America’s belief in
Voting Rights & 179
the common good does not exist in this world, where the only way an
individual can win is if the group loses. The story behind the shift from
sitcom to back-stabbing is a tragic one in which the very people whose
everyday comforts now exceed those of Roman emperors and medieval
nobility turn against the very idea that had made their luxuries possible. In
so doing they may unwittingly be committing cultural suicide.
Analysts first noted a political shift to the suburbs over a decade ago. An
influential Atlantic article by William Schneider, currently a member of the
conservative Hudson Institute who serves as a political commentator for
CNN, captured it with the title, ‘‘The Suburban Century Begins.’’ Schneider
pointed out that ‘‘while the suburbs grew larger, they also became more
Republican.’’11 He cites impressive statistics to bolster his argument. In
1960, the suburbs provided one-third of the national vote, voting slightly
more Republican than Democratic. By 1988 they accounted for 48 percent
of the vote, with 28 percent for the Republicans and 20 percent for the
Democrats. Eerily echoing Strom Thurmond, Schneider concluded that
these results show, ‘‘the Republicans can ignore the cities,’’ describing
suburban voters as ‘‘suspicious of programs aimed at creating social change
rather than providing public services.’’12
Schneider affirms that if the suburbs altered America’s social and eco-
nomic landscape, they also altered its political landscape. If Bush v. Gore
dramatized the Counterrevolution’s sometimes violent attempts to prevent
liberal- and Democratic-leaning voters from exercising their franchise, the
suburbs emblemized another key in their efforts to skewer voting fairness
and what the Supreme Court once referred to as the ‘‘one man, one vote’’
principle. As we shall see, the reasons this has come about are complex.
Like the reversal of suburban attitudes toward government, the changes in
the political landscape portend trouble for Liberal America. To understand
this point, think back to that night the pundits bumbled with Florida’s
changing colors during the 2000 Presidential Election. Red states and blue
states, the pundits lectured, provided the key to understanding American
politics, the terms coming from the colors used by the networks to record
electoral votes. Like most sound bite attempts to understand America this
one reflects black-and-white simplicity. Perhaps the best statement of its
absurdity came from former presidential candidate Pete du Pont, who
pointed out that a map showing the sales and rentals of porn movies bore an
eerie resemblance to the map of the 2000 election results.13
The meaninglessness of the red/blue analogy is demonstrated by one of the
most misunderstood and abused terms in recent elections: soccer moms. The
term surfaced in the 1990s to describe a group of swing voters. According to
a New York Times story, published the day of the first 1996 presidential
debate, soccer moms ‘‘are the most sought-after voters of the campaign
season.’’14 That year the media ran around in search of these mythical
creatures, the way heroes and heroines in medieval tales lusted after uni-
corns. In a humorous, but telling analysis Jacob Wiesberg asked, ‘‘Who
exactly, we must ask, are these soccer moms who hold the nation’s fate in
their hands?’’15 He found as many definitions as there were media sources.
Soccer moms refers to what is known as a cluster segment, based on the
analytic technique known as cluster analysis. The readers of American
Demographics would understand this perfectly since this is what many of
them do for a living. The magazine itself noted this significance in its tenth
anniversary edition in 1989: ‘‘Consumer information systems are becoming
essential competitive weapons in the micro-marketing wars.’’16 As one de-
mographic expert observes, the object of clustering, ‘‘is to sort cases (people,
things, events, etc.) into groups, or clusters, so that the degree of associa-
tion is strong between members of the same cluster and weak between
members of different clusters. Each cluster thus describes, in terms of the
data collected, the class to which its members belong; and this description
may be abstracted through use from the particular to the general class or
type.’’17
Virtually every corporation (and every politician who can afford it) uses
cluster analysis to guide how they market soap flakes and policy initiatives.
The Contract for America used cluster analysis to refine and direct its
message. One researcher described the efforts of the cluster analysis firm
Claritas to organize neighborhood zip codes into forty different cluster
groups using a technique they named PRIZM for Potential Rating Index for
Zip Markets. ‘‘These groups were given catchy names like ‘Blue Blood Es-
tates,’ ‘Shotguns and pickups,’ and ‘Bohemian Mix.’ Classification schemes
like PRIZM have proven useful in designing direct mail advertising,
choosing radio station formats, and deciding where to locate retail stores.’’18
Microsoft admitted, ‘‘Several cluster studies have been conducted to help
organize information available on MSN, for version 2.0 of the product.
These studies focused on the organization of Web content, proprietary
content, and children’s content.’’19
For all the studies we have of the suburbs, those who really know them
best may be market researchers who see this new culture as a ticket to
riches. Unfortunately their data are as guarded as a CIA file, Air Force de-
fense plan, or nuclear weapon design. Certainly commercial market re-
searchers have probably spent more money, and perhaps even more time, on
the suburbs than their academic colleagues.
Voting Rights & 181
The use of clustering by advertisers parallels the rise of the relatively

homogenous suburbs. Government policies that created tight communities
of like-minded people suddenly made it possible to corral consumers who
for all practical purposes resembled sheep in statistical holding pens. They
could then be led to large concrete boxes that painlessly relieved them of
their money and allowed them to emerge as transformed as if from a
shearing. In essence the suburbinization of America with its geographic
sorting of races, income levels, and tastes intersected with the rise of the
computers that make cluster analysis possible. This represents yet an-
other irony in the death of Liberal America: All those rows and rows of
tract houses and asphalt streets largely subsidized by the government op-
erated against Liberal America by institutionalizing homogeneity and ra-
cial exclusiveness in a way that must have warmed the heart of Strom
Thurmond.
How researchers distill cluster groups remains a secret as closely guarded
as the recipe for Dom Perignon. As a consultant to a large federal public
health project, I worked with one of these demographic bibles, a back-
breaking three-ring binder of data detailing forty-seven taste groups. They
had names such as ‘‘Affluent Urban Singles,’’ and ‘‘Young Ex-Urban Fam-
ilies,’’ each accompanied by charts and tables dictating a score on the criteria
used to identify them.
If we do not know about specific cluster formulas, we do know a great
deal about their ingredients. The main ingredient is census data about in-
come levels, family, and employment that number-crunching computers can
break down to zip codes and even city blocks. Besides demographic data from
the Census Bureau’s short form, the recipe uses the more complex data
from the long form with its more detailed questions. With these data alone
researchers can pinpoint what areas of the country have more cars, more
computers, more televisions. A simple recipe using these ingredients can
be put together by your average undergraduate marketing major. This fact
does not downplay the considerable massaging these data undergo, for by
running extensive cross-tabulations researchers can identify how many
people with two cars also have more than one computer and more than two
bathrooms.
On top of the census data come additional ingredients. Start with all those
warranty cards you fill out that ask what magazines you read and sports you
play, then add the surveys from those annoying phone calls you get at dinner
time or while you and your mate are just heating up the bed. Finally, throw
in those online data forms that you must fill out to allow you to access
whatever Internet sites you covet. After researchers distill and refine these
data comes that subtle touch which only a master can truly pull off—the
focus group.
Once, I naively believed that at one time or another every American would
serve as a focus group member. Now I know better. Focus groups refine and
pinpoint the cruder analysis done by the data folks. Part art, part science,
part witchcraft, it requires a very good facilitator, well-defined questions,
and truly creative analysis. From this emerges a masterpiece like soccer
moms.
Seemingly simple, like that bottle of fine champagne, such terms hide an
incredible amount of complexity that is lost on most of us. Like a master
wine taster whose nose and mouth can detect the vintage, the subtle flavors
and even the vintner, the analysts who use such cluster data can tell you
everything you want to know about these groups: what they eat, how they
dress, what toothpaste they use, what television programs they watch. As a
marketer once told me, ‘‘If I know your zip code, I probably know a lot more
about you than you think.’’
One firm that specializes in using cluster analysis for political campaigns
touts its abilities on its website. ‘‘We understand the American electorate
and we know how to craft effective political communications to achieve
attitude change. . . . Having worked with many political figures, we also
know how to talk to legislators to make the most persuasive case in the
language they know and understand best.’’ After an explanation of the basic
tools it uses, the firm explains how it uses cluster analysis in a language
foreign to many of us. ‘‘After collecting the quantitative data, we utilize
multivariate analysis to define a series of respondent clusters—those most
significant constituencies with common attitudinal, behavioral, and values
characteristics.’’ They conclude, ‘‘Taken together, these clusters form a
portrait of the landscape of public opinion on the issues we’re examining.’’20
To understand cluster analysis make an inventory of your possessions such
as the car you drive, its color, make, model, and year. When they ask this
information at a motel these days it’s not just to check their parking lot, rather
it can be plugged into demographic clusters to identify the prime audiences for
that particular chain. Think of how this one variable, your car, fits in with
others around you. What type of people drive the same car? Now play the
same game with other parts of your life. What clothes do you wear and where
do you buy them? How much of your income do you spend on clothes? Is
your TV the latest and greatest model or has it been around for a while?
Invariably others have similar preferences, probably your close friends.
Together you form the foundations of a cluster of similar people across the
country. A good market research firm can pinpoint the cluster characteristics
Voting Rights & 183
of a neighborhood block. If you have ever listened to ‘‘The Motley Fool’’

radio program, the financial analysts have a segment where they play a sim-
ilar game, trying to guess which stock a guest might hold by asking a series
of questions.
Claritas has a website where you can explore clusters using their PRIZM NE
system (http://www.clusterbigip1.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp).
After you enter your zip code, the web page will spew out a list of the clusters
in your area and their characteristics. I entered my zip code and found the
following live in my home town: ‘‘Country Squires, Fast-Track Families, Kids
& Cul-de-Sacs, Middleburg Managers, and New Homesteaders.’’21 Looking
up one of these groups, the Country Squires, gave me the characteristics of the
1.89 percent of U.S. households belonging to this cluster: ages 35–64, families,
mostly white, college grads, professional, household income of $97,596.
Lifestyle traits include: ‘‘Have broadband Internet access, go skiing, read USA
Today, watch the Disney Channel, and drive a GMC Denali.’’22
The site once featured multicolored national maps that showed where
these clusters concentrate, but this feature is now available only to clients.
For those who have seen them, these maps provide a mix of white, green,
yellow, blue, and red as if some Jackson Pollock imitator had shaken a paint
brush on a U.S. map. The colors function like those in a weather map,
marking the degree of concentration the way weather satellites mark storm
intensity. An article highlighting the Claritas site in USA Today was titled
‘‘Old Labels Just Don’t Stick in 21st Century.’’ It noted, ‘‘The research brain
trusts are pinpointing who lives where; what they’re most likely to read,
drive and eat; how many kids they have; and where they shop. And they are
doing it with unprecedented precision.’’23
The article also goes on to point out that while contemporary suburban
houses and lawns may still fit the old stereotypes, what lies inside them may
not. We have already seen how Martha Stewart and Home Depot symbolize
a need to individualize the standardized layouts that have made buying a
house like buying a car—choose your model and then your accessories.
Equally important is that the people inside no longer all look the same. USA
Today writers Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg observe, ‘‘As Hispanics,
blacks and Asian-Americans increasingly move to middle-class suburbs and
prosperous neighborhoods, they’re identified more by their lifestyles and
spending habits than by their ancestry.’’24
Here lies a new American landscape where state and geographical
boundaries have little meaning, but the boundaries of collective minds stand
clearly delineated. Now you can begin to see the absurdity of red and blue
states. National campaigns rely on maps a great deal more sophisticated
than the ones described here. On such a map, states disappear into blotches
of color. On a national scale the map would at first appear a crazy mosaic, a
modern art rendering of America, almost like those painters who used to
paint with small dots of paint, each dot a census tract. Stare at it long enough
and like one of those trick puzzles that at first seems gibberish but after some
staring becomes something recognizable, so too would this pointillistic
portrait of America become clear.
The art analogy is instructive, for the demographic techniques used by
market researchers resemble a work of modern art hung next to an eighteenth-
century landscape. As any Art 101 student knows, there is a profound dif-
ference of perspective and philosophy between the landscape and the modern
work. Clustering and modern art emphasize multiple perspectives; landscapes
and red and blue maps represent a single perspective. Reality in the world of
the landscape is simple, perhaps two-dimensional if the artist is especially
gifted. Reality in modern art and clustering is a complex arrangement of
interrelationships seen from multiple dimensions.
From this perspective we can understand why clusters hold the keys to
the White House and Congress. Wonder why all those election ads sound the
same, even the ones for local candidates where only the names and faces are
changed? Clusters. If you happen to fall into one of those target groups,
every minute, every dollar of the campaign aims at you. If you do not, the
ads probably seem boring or obnoxious. Robert Scheer wrote about this
feeling in his article ‘‘A New Low: Pandering to ‘Soccer Moms.’ ’’ Unnerved
by the Dole-Clinton debate, he wrote, ‘‘Never have I so wanted to be a
soccer mom as during the Dole–Clinton debate.’’25 To him the two can-
didates seemed to be ‘‘oily salesmen selling something I didn’t need. . . . But
what do I know, not being in the target group for this electoral season?’’ He
concludes by expressing frustration with the entire debate because it did not
seem to have anything relevant to him. ‘‘There must be some special code
language that has a particular resonance with soccer moms as they buzz
around in their minivans filled with kids.’’ He wrote, ‘‘Clearly they don’t
care about any of the traditional issues.’’ As Scheer found out, fall into the
wrong cluster and you might as well be invisible. Demographics dictate
where candidates visit, what they say, and how they say it. Whole phrases,
the order in which they are delivered, their emphasis, and even the tone of
voice and tilt of the head may come from cluster data.
The cluster-driven campaign has created a perplexing constitutional issue
that none of the framers could have foreseen. Certain clusters have become
the swing vote, and by becoming the swing vote they have more political
power than any state or group of states. Campaigns, of course, have always
Voting Rights & 185
tried to identify like-minded groups of supporters. However, when the

framers wrote the Constitution they thought in terms of comparatively
simple groups like classes and regions, never imagining a tool like clustering
that would allow campaign managers to target messages as precisely as a
smart missile. The framers argued about big states and small states, industry
versus agriculture, city versus country. They did not envision a situation in
which a voter in suburban Atlanta, suburban Seattle, or suburban New York
might not only live in what looks like the same place, but also have so many
similar marketing characteristics that they could be clones or androids.
Maybe that is why this theme dominates current science fiction.
Never before have we had tools that enable political parties to define not
merely voting tendencies but the very lives of people as if they were right
there sitting on the sofa, drinking a soda like a member of the family. And
never before has there been a way of linking like-minded groups as if they all
lived next door, reaching them instantaneously through that flickering glass
hearth they stare at for hours at a time. Like some army resembling the giant
terra cotta statues buried in neat military rows by a powerful Chinese em-
peror, clusters lie sleeping, waiting for only the right message delivered in the
form of an ad to awaken them. Once moving, they devour a steady diet of
images as carefully formulated for their peculiar tastes as the food given to
pigs and cows that eke out their lives on giant feedlots.
Clustering explains much that has happened to American politics and
Liberal America in the last decade. How many voters feel like Scheer,
watching those debates and commercials and reading literature that does not
resonate with them? No wonder voting percentages have dropped. People
feel disconnected from the process because the process no longer has any
interest in communicating with them.
What makes clustering unique lies in its ability to precisely identify those
inclined to toe the party line and then connect them instantaneously through
everything from direct mail to media ads. In some respects the use of clus-
tering in our political campaigns has created a classic negative feedback loop
with the researchers focusing only on likely voter clusters. Meanwhile they
ignore everyone else. This feedback loop promises to continue to spiral
inward, until a few clusters form the focus of a campaign and everyone else
finds themselves left out.
Now we again find ourselves at one of those blind intersections that seem
regular features of the Era of Bad Feelings. The GOP has understood how to
use cluster data for quite some time. The master of this put George W. Bush in
the White House—Karl Rove. He understands how to link voter lists, direct
mail, and targeted campaign material in a way that would draw the envy of
any market researcher. Rove seems to have grasped the new American map
that clustering has drawn. Advertising Age recognized his talent in December
2004, when it identified him as one of ten people who made a mark on
marketing that year. ‘‘He did it again,’’ Advertising Age trumpeted. ‘‘He
connected red loyalists with some of the saviest direct marketing.’’26
While many view Rove as a master of dirty tricks, his selection highlighted
an overlooked dimension of the 2004 election—the triumph of clustering.
The chapter on the Dixie Chicks explored the possibility of a few media
conglomerates controlling all information. The chapters on Strom Thur-
mond and Devil’s bargains delved into the ideology and formation of the
Counterrevolutionary coalition. When ideology and politicized media in-
tersect with Rove’s use of clustering, some very troubling issues surface.
A favorite scare scenario of the Information Age evokes shadowy people
sitting at computer screens compiling hidden databases. Clustering repre-
sents the powerful use of these data, especially as it becomes more and more
sophisticated. If you can be placed in a cluster then you have already been
defined. In the not-too-distant future when all those avuncular anchors get
together on election night they may no longer be speaking of red and blue
states but what is happening with the ‘‘Young Urban Ethnics’’ and ‘‘Older
Mobile Well Educated.’’
When clustering is combined with reapportionment it creates a condition
that threatens the very foundations of what the Constitution’s framers strove
to create. The gerrymandering of this new century will come to increasingly
resemble a Claritas map of like-minded voters, as did the redrawn map of
Texas supposedly first sketched on a napkin by Tom DeLay. As a result, we
now have a Congress in which a growing number of districts can be de-
scribed as ‘‘uncontested.’’ The Center for Voting and Democracy has issued
a series of reports over the years about how uncompetitive our elections have
become. Their report ‘‘Dubious Democracy 2003–2004’’ notes:
Over 90% of Americans live in congressional districts that are essentially one-
party monopolies. This means that most voters are faced with unappealing
choices: ratify the incumbent party, waste their vote on a candidate who is sure
to lose, or sit out the race. Not surprisingly, increasing numbers of American
are opting for the latter option.27
The center also found that what they term the ‘‘landslide index,’’ which
measures the percentage of races where incumbents won by a margin of 20
percent or more, has increased to the point of where 80 percent of con-
gressional races fall into this category.
Voting Rights & 187
This huge percentage of ‘‘landslide’’ districts now gives office holders free
reign to push forward their most radical ideas plus the luxury of never
having to compromise. So we have a Congress that epitomizes the Era of Bad
Feelings. Enter ‘‘congressional rancor’’ into a search engine these days and it
inundates you with examples. One of the most notorious came when Vice-
President Dick Cheney used a four-letter word to upbraid Vermont Dem-
ocratic Senator Patrick J. Leahy, then told the media ‘‘I think that a lot of my
colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long
overdue.’’28
Something vital also disappears: the spirited give and take of real debate
that is the lifeblood of democracy. Those with landslide districts do not need
to listen anymore. Each congressional seat might as well be a suburban
house in a gated community where everyone thinks alike and the world
beyond the guard house at the entrance is kept carefully at bay. Say hello to
the Stepford Congresswoman.
The Democrats appeared numb as they watched the pieces fall into place.
First came the creation of the homogenous suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s,
a creation that began as they tried to hold onto the myth of the Solid South.
The same attitude that allowed them to rebuff Fannie Lou Hamer also
permitted them to look the other way—or even support—FHA discrimi-
nation. Then came the creation of the suburban ethos symbolized in the
sitcom, one that leaned heavily to group conformity, at the same time
women and people of color were articulating their questions about diversity
and the failures of the level playing field. Finally came clustering, which
allowed researchers and political operatives to corral suburbanites into like-
minded groups.
The GOP pricked the old FDR coalition and its members went sailing off
into the wind. The Democrats rebuff of Hamer in 1964 began a slow
bleeding away of voters of color who had flocked to the party of FDR during
and after the New Deal. The dramatic rise of Hispanic voters has largely
been misplayed, as have the concerns of Winona LaDuke. Meanwhile the
steady decline in union membership has bled away blue-collar support that
had served as the heart of the party for over a century. An overlooked trend
also had a profound impact. In what constituted a political transfusion,
those rural voters who had also been a key part of the New Deal moved to
the suburbs where their own ambivalence about their rural roots plus the
pounding of cluster-driven messages in essence transferred this life blood
of the New Deal coalition to the heart of the Counterrevolution. No wonder
the body of the Democratic Party became pale and anemic, dominated by
those pushing single-issue causes.
Describing the suburban migration in terms of lemmings captures how

clustering has altered our democracy. In myth, lemmings are driven by some
inner switch that, when thrown, sends them all simultaneously scampering
in the same direction. The homogenous groupings identified by clustering
and the analysis of the hidden switches that motivate these groups creates an
ominous possibility. The mythical end of the lemmings in a mad rush off
a cliff and into the sea has long stood as a metaphor for humans blindly
following some misguided impulse. In the Era of Bad Feelings that metaphor
takes on new meaning.
Media Fairness: The SUV
13 on the Monolith
In the artificially muted sunlight, the shiny maroon SUV sits improbably on
the flat top of a stone monolith whose daunting vertical sides emphasize the
miraculous scene, as if God’s hand had carefully set the vehicle there like a
child playing with a toy. In the background reddish brown buttes and rocky
crags stretch past the edges of the frame. With the incongruous exception of
the SUV, you cannot see a trace of another human being, not even a faint trail.
This Monument Valley setting has become the backdrop of choice for a
saurian menagerie of vehicles from tyrannosaurus-like pickups to four-
wheelers that skim across the landscape like velociraptors. Advertisers de-
liberately choose this setting to echo in the American imagination, for since
its appearance in John Ford’s Stagecoach, Monument Valley has represented
moviemaking shorthand for the Old West. One half expects the Duke
himself to appear holding a rifle.
The incongruity of the scene draws a second look that leads to a question
the Duke himself might ask, pointing his rifle, ‘‘Just who the heck put that
darned thing up there?’’ Someone who might answer that question is Leo
Marx, who almost half a century ago wrote the classic The Machine in the
Garden. Marx’s exploration of art, political speeches, and other nineteenth-
century artifacts showed the era’s profoundly ambivalent attitude toward
America’s growing industrialization. One prime exhibit came in the form of
a George Inness painting, The Erie and Lackawama RR, which portrayed
a dark, steam-belching locomotive cutting across the edenic scenery of the
Hudson River Valley. The SUV on the monolith appears to contradict the
theme Marx uncovered, a contradiction that speaks volumes about where
America, and particularly Liberal America, has traveled over the last cen-
tury. If for Marx the ambivalence in the Inness painting came from the
smoke of industrialization, the image of the SUV betrays ambivalence about
reality itself in this media era.
Were he alive today, John Ford would have no ambivalence about that
SUV. Since the singular, symbolic place that is Monument Valley served as a
virtual cast member for Ford’s famous stock company, punctuating the
action like a moody chorus, the director would have regarded that SUV as an
obscenity, like spitting in the Sistine Chapel. That might be too strong an
opinion, but most SUV commercials do have the tone of video games where
the player tries to maim as many people as possible, only instead of human
beings it is rocks and trees that they ride roughshod over. These ads typically
feature some four-wheeled beast careening over the landscape, undaunted
by precipitous mountain sides, rapids-filled streams, or piles of immense
boulders. In the SUV commercials, unlike the Inness painting, the vehicle not
only dominates the composition, but seems to impose its will on the land-
scape. It is all about ‘‘intimidation’’ intones one ad, as if to say, nature means
nothing to me, save as a playground for my pleasure.
A series of Chevy pickup ads even seems to parody the whole genre,
blowing its trucks up to monster size (honey, I’ve enlarged the truck!), their
brontosaurus-like proportions causing us to feel like those people in Jurassic
Park who wander too far off course. The audacity of these ads, which range
from the ridiculous to the obscene, suggests that not merely nature, but
reality itself has become a playground where the bag of tricks that lie in hard
drives can make the impossible real.
Seeing an SUV on a monolith seems appropriate for an era where cor-
porate logos crop up on everything. Certain parts of the country resemble
a NASCAR racer or an Olympic skier, who after a particularly draining
downhill run where life hangs by a ski tip, somehow musters up enough
energy to ensure the logo on her skis earns prominent placing in the camera’s
eye. Endorsement deals come faster than an auctioneer’s cadences, each
corporate signing of some sports hero rivaling Shaq’s latest team switch. In a
race for Olympic gold, companies compete ruthlessly to supply every-
thing from uniforms to track shoes and bobsleds (which do look like
NASCAR racers). A marketing study of the 1992 Barcelona Summer Games
found, ‘‘When respondents were asked about the commercialization of
the Olympics, the majority (59%) confirmed that the Olympics are ‘over-
commercialized.’ However, three-fourths (75%) of the respondents agreed
that they are ‘more likely’ to purchase a product which sponsors or finan-
cially supports the Olympics over a product that does not.’’1
The corporatization of the Olympics should serve as a lesson for all of us, for
its story may foretell something about the future of America. Under Repub-
lican Peter Ueberoth, the 1984 Olympics established the precedent for mer-
chandising the games. Needing quick cash, the Olympic movement became an
unabashed commercial enterprise, up for the highest bidder. The Barcelona
Olympics put commercialism on center stage when the basketball Dream
Team won the gold medal. Reebok had paid big bucks to ensure that all
American athletes wore warmups with the company logo prominently dis-
played because they knew photographs of the winning athletes standing there
on the medal platform, their eyes watering with tears as the National Anthem
played in the background, would appear in newspapers all over the world.
The problem at Barcelona came from six Dream Team athletes who had
contracts with Reebok nemesis Nike, including the biggest Nike money-
maker of all, Michael Jordan. Jordan and teammates Charles Barkley and
Magic Johnson made it clear they had no intention of serving as a rival
product’s billboard. With typical insouciance, ‘‘Sir’’ Charles came right to
the point, ‘‘Us Nike guys,’’ he said, ‘‘Are loyal to Nike, because they pay us a
lot of money. I have two million reasons not to wear Reebok.’’2 As the main
drama unfolded at the medal ceremony, all three wore their Reebok warm-
ups, but they carried American flags that they purposely used to cover the
offending logos. Whoever thought of that idea deserves a gold medal, for the
symbolism goes well beyond the protest. By using the flag the three players
made a forceful statement that neither they nor the country should be
bought and sold. African American athletes protesting this modern corpo-
rate slavery reinforced the message.
Corporatization like that plaguing the Olympic movement has now be-
come a problem for all of us, not just Michael Jordan. Everyone in America
today faces the same issue he did: whether to cave in and become a corporate
billboard or to reassert the primacy of the flag. With city and state budgets
getting tighter each year, more consider selling out. The first wave came
when sports teams began demanding expensive stadiums with luxury suites
for their corporate clients. When citizens rebelled against paying taxes for
this blatant corporate welfare, cities began offering naming rights in ex-
change for money to build these sports palaces. Meanwhile college teams did
not want to be left out of the action, producing a holiday season crammed
with bowl games that have announcers mangling the namesakes of some
obscure sponsors.
The advertising even insinuates itself into our public schools. A high
school stadium without a scoreboard highlighting some business has become
a rarity. Entrepreneur Chris Whittle pioneered a deal that offered television
sets and news broadcasts to schools in return for the privilege of running a
few minutes of daily advertising. Other corporations placed ads masked as
informational posters in the hallways. The lunch room and teachers’ lounge
went up for bids to companies who wanted the right to put their products on
students’ plates or in vending machines.
While it is questionable how much these efforts truly aided schools, the
symbolism of them becomes troubling. As Jordan, Barkley, and Johnson
pointed out, when America is for sale, nothing remains sacred. There may
come a time when a school district needing money for a new building will
offer the naming rights to some company or a national park sell naming
rights to natural features. So we might hear, ‘‘Hello, my name is Mary, I’ll be
your park ranger for today. This is no longer Mt. Rushmore but Mt. Hal-
liburton.’’ The rapid approach of such a time hit home when a friend of mine
reported that his newest motor vehicle renewal letter came complete with an
envelope full of coupons and ads, because his state had entered the prosti-
tution business, whoring for the aptly named Super America. Mark Twain
once referred to the corporate excesses of the late nineteenth century as the
Great Barbecue, so perhaps the Era of Bad Feelings ought to be remembered
as the Great Whorehouse.
With ‘‘privatization’’ (read corporatization), the new buzzword courtesy
of the Counterrevolution, the selling of assets has become a strategy for
cash-poor governments everywhere. A Maine newspaper reported that two
communities even considered pasting logos on squad cars, turning their
officers into uniformed Jeff Gordons. According to the article, ‘‘For just $1,
local governments can purchase a new police car, ambulance or even a fire
truck through a national program. The only catch—communities have to
keep the vehicle for three years, and the cars and trucks themselves will be
sporting as many as a dozen corporate logos.’’ With typical Yankee humor
the article concluded, ‘‘Aren’t there already enough jokes about cops and
doughnut shops out there without sticking a ‘Mr. Jellyroll’ logo on a town’s
police cruisers?’’3 When you connect this ridiculousness with budget cuts
being imposed on many municipalities because of tax cuts for high rollers, it
does not take a conspiracy nut to ask the question as to whether the tax cuts
force cities into becoming corporate fiefdoms.
‘‘Hello, sir, I’m Trooper Jones from Nike. Yeah, I know it used to be
called Centerville but we needed the money and besides no one really liked
the name Centerville much anyway. Isn’t it neater to have a town with a
swoosh on everything? Sure makes these badges look sharp. And I don’t
have to wear those clunky shoes any more or those itchy uniforms. And you
if think these look sharp you should see what the guys on the garbage detail
get to wear. Why when they pick up those cans up, they say they feel just like
Olympic athletes heaving that garbage into the truck. Nike told us they may
put the whole town in a commercial and maybe bring Michael, too. Now,
that would be something, wouldn’t it, Michael right here in our little town?’’
If you think this scenario fanciful, ask the people in Richland, New Jersey.
Situated on Route 40, the town serves as the headquarters for Dalponte
Farms, which grows mint for Bacardi rum. Both Bacardi and Richland had
mint green on their minds when they cut a deal that would rename Richland
‘‘Mojito’’ in honor of a cocktail being publicized by Bacardi. In exchange,
the rum manufacturer offered the township $5,000 for a park gazebo, play-
ground equipment, and a revitalization project for Route 40.
The idea of selling your name for a cocktail put a new twist on the old
story of selling your soul to the Devil, a twist that undoubtedly has more
than a few Hollywood script writers salivating about a plot for the next Bill
Murray movie or perhaps a new reality show (Town X takes on Town Y to
see who gets a new school). Mayor Chuck Chiarello gave the Mojito affair a
benediction worthy of any sell-out, ‘‘We weighed all the facts and looked at
it as something good for the farmers, good for recreation and having a very
short-lived existence.’’4 This last refers to the fact the renaming took place
only for two weeks in May. Perhaps if Bacardi had offered more they could
have had a year.
A threat that might cut into the future business of municipalities with such
plans comes from the use of the computer-generated images that put that
SUV on the monolith. The SUV advertiser wants us to think of the power
it must have taken to get that truck up there until you realize the truck is
not even real (curiously a subgenre of these ads deliberately makes clear the
scenes are taking place on someone’s hard drive). This clearly represents a
different kind of power than Leo Marx saw in the Erie and Lackawanna
painting, whose imagery foretells the era of the railroad robber barons
crudely imposing their will on the country. SUV ads and their computer-
generated images stand for a power that Shakespeare and Homer respected
and that has become a major force in our own times: magic. Anyone who has
played with a digital photograph knows the potency lurking in all those bits
and bytes—the ability to alter reality to our liking. Taking the red eye out is
only the start. With a few mouse clicks, blemishes and wrinkles disappear. A
few more clicks can change someone’s eye or hair color; another click and
we can put that image on top of a monolith.
That SUV in Monument Valley confirms what all of us have feared:
The distance between the television screen and audience is disappearing,
transforming the tube from glass hearth into an electronic portal through
which we can commute to another world as surely as walking through a

wardrobe into Narnia. There no longer exist separate realities of real and
make-believe, heaven and earth that remain clearly delineated in everyone’s
mind. Somehow the gods have come down to earth. Mighty Olympus has
been reduced to a molehill and Zeus and Athena walk among us while
plotting the fates of the cosmos on their cell phones.
Hollywood tricks have become the playthings of any teenager with enough
megabytes to fashion passable imitations of what the masters at Industrial
Light and Magic once claimed as their own. The fate of The Incredible Hulk
provides an instructive lesson, as anyone who saw it at a multiplex knows.
As you tried to watch the movie, worldly teenagers pointed out the tricks
while snickering at the badly edited parts.
With doctored photographs becoming the norm, Hollywood stars file
lawsuits to prevent their images from being altered on magazine covers or pay
the magazine editors to alter the image and keep quiet about it. Flat-chested
actresses no longer need silicone, they just need Silicon Graphics (a maker of
computer design ware). Brunettes do not need the bottle to become blonde,
just a mouse. Why spend days in the gym buffing up and throwing up, when
the folks with digital workouts can bulk you up. A picture of Kate Winslet
on the cover of GQ was ‘‘highly styled, buffed, trimmed and altered’’ accor-
ding to the journal’s editor. In a statement that could serve as the motto for
this era, he went on to say, ‘‘Almost no picture that appears in GQ . . . has not
been digitally altered in some way.’’5 A quick trip on the Internet produces a
catalog of ads, television programs, and movies where nothing is what it
seems. The scary part comes not from Hollywood but from what we used to
think of as ‘‘reality’’—news and documentary programs.
The alteration of news photographs has become such a ubiquitous prac-
tice that the National Press Photographers Association felt compelled to
publish a statement about it. Referring to a picture of former Texas governor
Ann Richards sitting astride a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that appeared
on the cover of Texas Monthly, the association pointed out that the only real
part of Richards in the photo was her head. The magazine tried to claim a
small caption took them off the hook, but the association noted. ‘‘No
amount of captioning can forgive a visual lie. In the context of news, if a
photo looks real, it better be real. This photo looked real but it was a fake.
We have an obligation to history to leave behind us a collection of real
photographs.’’6
Such rules may apply to photographers who work for legitimate pub-
lications, but what about everybody else? Websites showcase truly amazing
legitimate works by digital artists, but unfortunately ten times as many porn
sites feature pictures purporting to be some Hollywood star in various states

of undress or doing acts only possible in a digital world. Carl Sanchez of the
Amateur WebMaster Association says ‘‘In a survey we conducted, web-
masters and graphic designers ranked putting Bush’s head on a different
body #1 on a list of favorite design activities.’’7
The list of culprits caught in this manipulation would make for another
book. An article by Jack Karp notes the following: O. J. Simpson’s face
was blackened by Time in a mug shot that appeared on the cover, the Uni-
versity of Idaho and the University of Wisconsin digitally manipulated
publicity photographs, CBS superimposed its own logo over an NBC logo
appearing on a Times Square billboard during a New Year’s Eve broadcast.8
The United States, believing Saddam Hussein had altered his appearance,
admitted issuing altered pictures of the Iraqi dictator to help those who were
trying to track him down.9 An even more frightening example comes from
the great murderer, Osama bin Laden, whose infrequent appearances on Al
Jazeera have the world wondering if he really lives or is merely the product
of some clever video editing. The thought that the United States has spent
millions of dollars trying to capture an image that may be about as real as
Yoda may earn al-Qaeda an Academy Award.
Perhaps the most famous digitally altered photograph appeared on the
Internet showing a man standing on the observation deck of the World
Trade Center as one of those fateful airliners made its murderous approach.
A digital Where’s Waldo, the same gentleman has popped up on altered
photographs of the Hindenberg explosion, the Titanic, and a host of other
famous modern disasters.10 Another series of widely circulated pictures
purportedly captured the space shuttle Columbia exploding in space. These
fakes and others can be found at snopes.com.11
The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings films brilliantly captured this
world, their phenomenal success showing that not only does everyone get it,
they have a great deal of fear about it. The magic ring, which makes you
invisible, the awesome feats of wizards with crooked staffs and crystal
globes, the perverse creatures they summon at the mere wave of a hand, take
our world back to the dawn of history, when humans sat in the dark huddled
around uncertain fires, dreaming nightmares about the phantom shapes that
circulated just beyond the fringes of flickering light. Plato’s cave, where
people mistake shadows for reality, has mutated like one of the Dark Lord’s
creatures. The loser becomes democracy, which cannot hope to survive long
if our information sources become suspect. The inevitable result only further
isolates people in their cocoons, as we retreat to the safety of places we know
and trust.
Liberal America stands to lose a great deal from this. It is not out of line to
expect those media voices of the Raucous Right, who play havoc with the
truth, to embrace the world of digital images and begin to bend them to their
own purposes. Protected by a Supreme Court that appears to value corpo-
rate freedom above individual freedom and the demise of the Fairness
Doctrine, digital trickery could take the vitriol to a new level. Imagine in-
nuendoes of Hillary and Bill featuring images purporting to show the actual
transgressions. Imagine the political possibilities that could come from
coupling manipulation with clustering.
The last presidential election featured a glaring example of political media
manipulation—an altered photograph supposedly showing John Kerry
standing next to Jane Fonda at an anti–Vietnam War rally. The fake at-
tracted so much attention that Ken Light, one of the photographers whose
photos were stolen to make the image, felt compelled to write an editorial
condemning the act. He said the digital trickery, ‘‘tells us more about the
troublesome combination of Photoshop and the Internet than it does about
the prospective Democratic candidate for president.’’ Then he added, ‘‘Who
could have predicted that my Ethical Problems in Photography presentation
would be showing young journalists how National Geographic moved one
of the Egyptian pyramids to make it fit on a cover better, or the way colleges
seeking a more diverse image edit African American faces into sports crowds
that look too white?’’ The fingerprints of the Counterrevolution were all
over that altered photograph, which Light pointed out was circulated by
‘‘conservative groups’’ on the Internet.12
A second, even more frightening example concerns former Corporation for
Public Broadcasting chairman Ken Tomlinson’s attempts to politicize the
Public Broadcasting System. In an argument that sounds suspiciously like
Roger Ailes’s defense of Fox’s political bias, Tomlinson announced that PBS
needed to counter the what he called the ‘‘liberal’’ leanings of Bill Moyer’s
Now. The exchange between Tomlinson and Moyers tells us a great deal
about the Era of Bad Feelings. In a widely circulated address, Moyers asserted
his program was being tarred as ‘‘biased’’ because it raised uncomfortable
questions. ‘‘What some on [the PBS] board are now doing today, led by its
chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing, and yes, even
dangerous for a gathering like this not to address it,’’ Moyers told the Na-
tional Conference on Media Reform. ‘‘We’re seeing unfold a contemporary
example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch—to punish
the journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests un-
comfortable.’’13 In other words, if you do not like what someone says, call
them a ‘‘liberal.’’ In November 2005, an investigation by Corporation for
Public Broadcasting Inspector General Kenneth Konz found that Tomlinson,

who by then had resigned from CPB, violated statutory provisions for directly
negotiating with the programmers for the right-leaning political program he
commissioned as an alternative for Moyers and used ‘‘political tests’’ to re-
cruit President and CEO Patricia Harrison. Konz’s most troubling finding,
though, concerned collusion between Tomlinson and the White House. In-
vestigators said they found email correspondence between Mr. Tomlinson
and the White House that while ‘‘cryptic’’ in nature ‘‘gives the appearance
that the former chairman was strongly motivated by political considerations
in filling the president/C.E.O. position.’’14
Given this level of manipulation, is anything real? We fall back on our
basic instincts, our gut feelings and the opinions of those we think we trust,
modern Frodos and Sams trying to do the right thing. Meanwhile the Dark
Lords of the Raucous Right link diatribes about Hollywood and manip-
ulation by the media with their favorite bugaboo, Liberal America. ‘‘Yes,
you are being manipulated,’’ they shout. ‘‘And guess who is doing it to you:
those nasty liberals.’’ Hear the talk show hosts rant: they want you to think
Saddam never really had any weapons of mass destruction, they want you to
forget about Whitewater and Monica, they’re trying to take your hard-
earned taxes and give them to wooden-headed bureaucrats. In suburbia,
where everything can seem an illusion, such pleas have some logic.
A typical diatribe appeared in The National Review. ‘‘The fact is every-
body knows that Dan Rather is an egomaniacal liberal,’’ wrote Jonah
Goldberg. ‘‘Everybody knows that the major news networks lean to the left.
Everybody knows that Grape Nuts tastes like kitty litter.’’15 (No apologies
to Grape Nuts eaters.) Another example comes from the book Bias by
Bernard Goldberg (no relation to Jonah Goldberg), a former CBS news
journalist, who provides a long list of examples of why the news is con-
trolled by liberals. Critic Tom Shales views Bernard Goldberg as an eq-
uivalent to the woman who wrote the book about ‘‘liberals’’ committing
treason, noting, ‘‘Goldberg’s specialty is conjuring vast, sweeping general-
izations that fit in with his own very obvious bias and are based on the tiniest
of specifics rather than well-researched evidence.’’16
As has already been said, this book is not about who is manipulating the
media, but the larger issues it raises. If those who work in the media are
liberally biased one would assume that the White House would be against the
FCC decision allowing more media concentration, since that gives liberals
even more power. The real concern is if The Matrix is right, what power do
we have against these shadowy forces? If they can put an SUV on top of a
monolith what can they do with me? Fannie Lou Hamer’s Mississippi knew
just how this strategy operates—fear coupled with power becomes a mighty
weapon that only the angry or the desperate will dare take on.
That the media have failed to police themselves has become almost a
cliché. Outside of the Newspaper Photographer’s Association statement,
neither the television networks nor the working press have constructed a
policy to deal with the problem of digital manipulation. Everyone seems to
look the other way, including our legislators. At this date I know of no
attempt by anyone in Congress to propose legislation that would address
media truthfulness.
Media trickery that puts SUVs on Monument Valley monoliths and alters
political photographs means Americans view reality through a distorted
lens. How distorted our view has become was revealed after the 2004
election by USA Today, which detailed the arrangement between the Bush
administration with African American commentator Armstrong Williams
‘‘to regularly comment on NCLB [No Child Left Behind] during the course
of his broadcasts,’’ and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV
and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.17 After USA Today
reported about Williams, rats seemed to literally explode from the dark
corners of the room in the form of revelations of media connivance. As they
scurried for cover, they illustrated how the lines between news, entertain-
ment, advertising, and editorializing have become so blurred that only a
seasoned critic can even begin to sort them out. During the 2004 election, for
example, the Alliance for Better Campaigns reported that candidates, par-
ties, and independent groups spent ‘‘more than $1.6 billion (emphasis
added) on the November election, double the amount spent in 2000.’’18 The
almost two million spots in the nation’s top 100 markets (calculated at the
standard thirty-second time slot for ads) meant that viewers in these areas
absorbed a staggering 677 days of political commercials. Viewers in Tampa
endured over 47,000 ads, the most of any market area. Local Philadelphia
station WPVE pulled in $23.8 million in political advertising dollars.19
This same distortion became even more pronounced in local campaign
coverage. A study by the Lear Center found that in House races six times
more hours of ads ran for these candidates than news stories about them. In
Denver, which featured a highly competitive U.S. Senate race, 88 percent of
news reports contained no stories about the contest.20 In his opening re-
marks at a press conference announcing the findings, Lear Center Director
Martin Kaplan stated, ‘‘Coverage of local politics on local news is an en-
dangered species.’’21 In other words the main purveyors of the knowledge
we need to understand Social Security reform or Middle East policy are
becoming the same people who sell us soap flakes. We may find ourselves
deciding the most important issues facing our nation the same way we
choose which shampoo to use and with less understanding.
Along with challenges to voting rights and our growing economic in-
equality, the commercialization of elections coupled with growing media
concentration and politicization has reached a point of no return, where the
public can no longer sort out what is real from what is merely another
cynical attempt to manipulate them. In this world it becomes easy for people
to dismiss all sources or trust only those that share their prejudices. Eco-
nomic justice can become an illusion, educational equity becomes useless
except for those knowledgeable about the magician’s tricks, and voting
freedom becomes as valid as throwing darts at a ballot. Figuring out whether
the playing field is level becomes the equivalent of floating weightlessly in
space where up and down, left and right, lose meaning.
A second dimension of those SUV ads raises more complex issues. If, as
Leo Marx suggests, such documents help us to understand how people view
the balance between nature and civilization, then the ads signal a shift in our
national consciousness. Nature and its mysteries have traditionally been the
sources of magic and spiritual visions. Shamans harnessed those shapes that
flickered in the firelight, Moses and Jesus went into the desert, and more
recently Thoreau and Muir become secular saints whose sermons celebrated
the power of wilderness. In the SUV ads we manipulate nature—whether on
a computer screen or in reality does not really matter. The nature of the
shaman disappears forever, the magic tamed by SUVs, CPUs, and CPAs.
The manipulation of our media environments symbolized by placing an
SUV on a monolith parallels a similar attitude about manipulating our
natural environment. Where one says we have the tools to create and ma-
nipulate any vision from the orcs of Middle Earth to the multiple Mr. Smiths
of The Matrix, the other says that we can also do that to the realm of the
real. We can control nature just as surely as we can control computer
images. The phenomenal achievement of The Lord of the Rings series lies in
its ability to literally create an entire world with exacting detail, from its
landscapes to every living thing that populates them.
In suburban America developers have created equivalents to Middle Earth
by bulldozing, blasting, and even dewatering to create totally artificial
worlds within what used to be acres of grass and forest. Much of the pre-
vailing interpretation of the suburbs speaks about them as a classic example
of our need to live somewhere between nature and civilization. The suburbs,
goes the interpretation, lie between city and country, their expansive lawns a
symbol of that desire for what Marx termed the ‘‘middle landscape.’’ In
actuality, though, the suburbs and SUV ads represent the domination of
nature. Suburban construction routinely ignores the natural features of the

terrain in a way that would cause Frank Lloyd Wright to become apoplectic.
Hills flatten, wetlands dry up, streams straighten, ponds fill, and forests
disappear with the wave of a transect, all to fulfill some master script, much
as in the filming of Hollywood epics, where if something in the ‘‘real’’ world
does not fit, it can be matted out with something better.
The motivations that put SUVs on monoliths and suburbs in farm fields
stem from the same ideology, one which sees nature as something that can be
manipulated however the developer wishes. The much-maligned sameness
of many developments comes only in part from their architecture. The real
sin lies in the bulldozing of unique natural features that might place those
houses in some truly distinct setting. Even as they replant the landscape,
these developers often forego native trees and shrubs for generic greenery,
the way plastic trees populate children’s play sets.
This brings up a touchy subject: the role of environmentalism in the liberal
canon. Does it belong among the cornerstones, or is it another cause that has
nothing to do with Liberal America? Conventional wisdom holds that en-
vironmentalism represents a ‘‘liberal’’ belief, that ‘‘liberals’’ favor protecting
spotted owls, preserving wilderness, and condemning SUVs. Yet as currently
framed, many environmental initiatives have only a tenuous connection
with the cornerstones of Liberal America. This understanding explains why
the Democratic Party is in trouble. Like the Democrats, the environmental
movement has failed to show how their proposals will help to keep the
playing field level. For many Democrats, environmentalism represents one
of a long list of litmus tests for party candidates such as the one whom I
asked what she advocated. ‘‘I’m for the environment and health care and
education and jobs, of course,’’ the candidate shot back.
Yet the case can be made that environmentalism should be part of any
liberal agenda. The most critical case is global warming. Still dismissed by
some members of the Raucous Right and the Bush administration, which
refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, the consensus among most researchers is
no longer whether average temperatures have increased, but how quickly
this is happening and how far-reaching are the effects. The interlocking
consequences of global warming threaten to alter our landscape, which in
turn will affect activities from agriculture to commercial fishing, influencing
economies and the societies that depend on them.
Among the many stories missed by the mainstream press lay an ominous
report from Alaska detailing how the area once referred to as ‘‘Seward’s
Icebox,’’ could become ‘‘Bush’s Hell.’’ According to a story by Seth Bor-
enstein in The Anchorage Daily News, ‘‘Glaciers are receding. Permafrost is
thawing. Roads are collapsing. Trees are dying. Villages are being forced to
move, and animals are being forced to seek new habitats.’’22 Just ask tourists
at the $8 million Begich-Boggs visitor center built in 1986 to showcase
Alaska’s most popular tourist attraction, the Portage Glacier. Located about
an hour from Anchorage, the center has become a monument to global
warming, since the glacier has receded so far that it can no longer be seen
easily from the center. Scientists calculate that about 98 percent of Alaska’s
glaciers are receding or stagnant, adding 13.2 trillion gallons of melted
water to the seas each year and causing worldwide concern in coastal
communities about rising water levels and a warming of the oceans that
could dramatically change the world’s climate since the oceans serve as our
planet’s thermostat.23
Glacial melting is not the only apocalyptic sign of global warming in
Alaska. The melting of the permafrost has caused native villages that had
been located in the same place for generations to ponder whether they need
to move because severe erosion caused by melting permafrost makes them
vulnerable to storms blowing off rising oceans. The warming has also re-
duced the use of ice roads that service North Slope oil rigs from 200 days a
year in 1970 to 103 days in 2002, according to Alaska state documents. The
most visible result of global warming in Alaska can actually be seen from
space: the death of more than four million acres of the spruce trees that many
regard as a symbol for the state and for wilderness. Glenn Juday, a professor
of forest ecology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, says ‘‘It’s the largest
episode of insect-caused tree mortality ever recorded in North America.’’24
The devastation stems from the revitalized spruce-bark beetle, whose
numbers traditionally remained low because of Alaska’s notorious winters.
If Alaska does become Bush’s Hell, the consequences for the average
American will be to tilt an already tilted playing field. Take one potential
consequence: the food supply. In America alone, the Great Plains may earn
back their nineteenth-century epithet as the Great American Desert. Thou-
sands of families could abandon dried-up farms and ranches in an eerie
replay of the Great Depression. Meanwhile the huge quantity of food they
produce will dry up as surely as the land, sending prices skyrocketing and
increasing this country’s importation of foreign products. Those farmers and
ranchers who remain will face greater pressures to sell out to large cor-
porations. Small towns will continue to empty, adding thousands to the job
market while putting greater pressure on suburban resources.
For the average American the bottom line of global warming lies not in
some of the natural disasters the media love to contemplate but in a simple
fact: life will become more expensive. It may also become less enriching, for
parks and recreation areas that serve as vacation spots for those of us who do
not own condos in Aspen or Carmel could lose their natural beauty. Hunting
stands and fishing holes will disappear. The wealthy, on the other hand, will
make money from global warming as they always do from scarcities and
disasters. Then all of us may face corporate logos pasted on everything.
Like the Inness painting of a train steaming across the landscape, the SUV
on the monolith represents a symbol of our uneasiness over our times. In the
nineteenth century, as Leo Marx points out, people like Thoreau worried
about what the machine was doing to the garden. In our own times faced
with the SUV on the monolith, people have attacked the symbol but not
what lies behind it. We face a more serious environmental crisis that rivals
even global warming. Media manipulation and the manipulation of the
suburban landscape represent an attempt to remake the American social and
intellectual environment. Putting corporate logos on football stadiums,
police cars, and in school hallways plus the obliteration of unique en-
vironmental communities and the falsification of media images makes in-
dividualism, truth, and intellectual freedom as much endangered species as
the spotted owl or the snail darter. The landscape we stand to lose becomes
not only local ecological communities but the unique trails and spiritual
monuments of the human mind.
The Counterrevolution with its focus on inequality stands to gain im-
mensely from this, for in a world where nothing is real only raw, naked
power triumphs. The unique idea that sparkles with the singularity of a
wilderness mountain stream or the insights of a high-flying eagle eye may
become as scarce as those natural treasures. How can one know if the
playing field remains level if the very perspective has become distorted and
the playing field an illusion?
From the Southern Strategy through the Reagan years up to the present
administration, the GOP succeeded in literally turning the country upside
down. It now resembles a political Wonderland where language and
meaning have become so twisted that like Alice we ask, ‘‘I wonder if I have
been changed in the night?’’ Think how support for something as basic as the
progressive income tax has become ‘‘class warfare.’’ And, of course, there is
the centerpiece of this linguistic sleight of hand, turning ‘‘liberal’’ into a
four-letter word.
Meanwhile the Democrats putter with gun safety and CAFTA even as the
very political environment on which they stand consists of fragile strips of
celluloid and free-roaming pixels governed by some quantum-like imper-
ative that has the party bouncing with the apparent randomness of suba-
tomic particles in a cloud chamber. Politicians have not seriously addressed
media manipulation any more than they fully recognize what the trial of
Martha Stewart or the travails of the Dixie Chicks represent. The world has
shifted under the Democrats, sending them into a free fall. They descend
without even a scream.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that what may be the most divisive issue
of our times—the Iraq War—should center on information and media ma-
nipulation. American wars over at least the last hundred-plus years have
raised issues of manipulation, but Iraq may be unique in that it forms a
perfect storm for the Counterrevolution. Maybe that is why it inspires such
strong opinions in this Era of Bad Feelings. There is little question the human
cost is falling disproportionately on the lower and middle classes and the less
educated in terms of both American and Iraqi lives. The issue of human
rights has also entered the picture as people ask how far this administration
has gone in terms of denying civil liberties. As for voting rights, Iraq is yet
another undeclared war that has left the American people without a clear
vote on whether we are truly at war or not.
The partners in the Counterrevolution also figure in the whys of the war.
Allegations of contractors profiteering from their work in Iraq echo similar
questions from past wars. Not since the Spanish-American War of 1898,
however, has the issue of American imperialism been raised with such for-
cefulness. Contemporary critics wonder whether we would be in Iraq if that
country were not a large oil producer. The support for dispensationalism by
GOP leaders such as Tom DeLay outlined in the ‘‘Devil’s Bargains’’ chapter
asks to what extent fundamentalist doctrine has influenced Middle East
policy. Finally the support for the war by politicized media like Fox and
Clear Channel raises an issue we have not faced for some time: Are certain
media outlets beating the war drums too loudly?
These examples have made the Iraq War a battle of analogies as partisans
on both sides trot out Adolf Hitler, Munich, and Lyndon Johnson to lend
support to their positions. We will probably never know the degree to which
the Iraq War is the result of media manipulation, but the fact that the
question is being raised in this time when reality itself no longer seems
certain and the current administration already stands convicted of manip-
ulating the media, seems especially troubling. Instead of chasing Osama bin
Laden and Saddam Hussein, are we chasing our own media tales?
14 Conclusion: Shifting Winds
Elemental. It is an apt description of a simulator’s portrayal of a monster

hurricane. The screen opens in pastel blues and greens that recall a peaceful
tropical lagoon with sugar sand and the sleep-inducing sound of gently
breaking waves. Then the green takes on that ominous, sickly color the sky
does before unleashing its furies, a color that, if you have ever seen it
standing vulnerably alone in a wilderness, you never forget along with the
plummeting air pressure sucking at your guts. A riot of color breaks out—
yellows, oranges, violet, pink—echoing the cacophonous sounds, winds, and
smells that accompany a storm. Blood red washes over everything so quickly
you know no one has time to retreat. It is as if the land has suffered a
grievous wound and bleeds uncontrollably.1
During the summer of 2004, while most of us endured campaign ads, more
than 250 federal, state, and local officials representing fifty agencies including
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the states of Mis-
sissippi and Louisiana gathered to watch those changing colors model a hur-
ricane hitting New Orleans. The simulation data told the toll of the storm they
named ‘‘Pam.’’ Packing 120-mph winds and dropping twenty inches of rain,
Pam destroyed half a million buildings, leaving in its wake 30 million tons of
debris and 237 cubic yards of hazardous waste. The human toll ranged from
25,000 to 100,000 deaths. Half the population became trapped in attics, on
rooftops and in makeshift refuges.2 As they watched Pam unfold, the partic-
ipants concluded evacuation would be a major problem since an estimated
100,000 households in the area did not have cars. The survivors would need
1,000 shelters to remain open for months before it might be safe to rebuild.
206 & Conclusion
Search-and-rescue operations would require 800 searchers. One participant

asked, ‘‘How many caskets and carcasses are going to be floating through the
streets?’’3 As the Pam exercise concluded, Colonel Michael L. Brown of the
Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness stated,
‘‘Hurricane planning in Louisiana will continue, over the next 60 days, we will
polish the action plans developed during the Hurricane Pam exercise. We have
also determined where to focus our efforts in the future.’’4
That summer experts from Louisiana State University, who participated
in the Pam exercise, were also advising the media about the potential impact
of a Gulf Coast hurricane. National Geographic drew on their knowledge
for an October 2004 article with the following scenario, ‘‘Thousands
drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and
industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished
from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued.’’5 FX also drew
on the researchers’ expertise, which it used for the June 5, 2003, docudrama
‘‘Oil Storm,’’ which had residents congregating in the Superdome.
On August 29, 2005, America confronted the real thing as Hurricane
Katrina carved a path similar to Pam. ‘‘It’s eerie how close it is,’’ said Madhu
Beriwal, president of Innovative Emergency Management Inc., the firm that
led the Pam simulation team.6 As Katrina’s devastation unfolded according
to Pam’s script, the 250 people who participated in the Pam exercise appeared
paralyzed. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter who called FEMA to ask
about Pam, noted ‘‘FEMA representatives did not return phone calls for this
story.’’7 Juxtapose quotes from FEMA officials after Pam with those after
Katrina and you wonder which hurricane was real. At the end of Pam, FEMA
regional director Ron Castleman commented, ‘‘We have made great progress
in our preparedness efforts. Disaster response teams developed action plans in
critical areas such as search and rescue, medical care, sheltering, temporary
housing, school restoration and debris management. These plans are essential
for quick response to a hurricane but will also help in other emergencies.’’8
When Katrina struck, FEMA head Michael Brown told Larry King, ‘‘Hurri-
cane Katrina caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we
planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this
year, we’re implementing it.’’9 Shortly after the interview, Brown resigned.
A sense of things turned upside down appeared common during the early
days after Katrina blew otherworldly scenes into our living rooms. As audi-
ence and reporters asked similar questions, we sensed something in America
had snapped, something a great deal more critical than what snapped after
9/11, for 9/11 was done to us and the failure to respond to Katrina was
something we had done to ourselves. There is something in Katrina of the
Conclusion & 207
disaster that hit New Orleans in 1867, when a mob of racists, including
some police, massacred a group of whites and African Americans who had
gathered to convene a constitutional convention. The riot shocked America,
helping to provoke the Reconstruction Acts and the impeachment of An-
drew Johnson.
For Katrina, the finger pointing will continue long after the official in-
vestigations conclude, for the very immediacy of Katrina made us all re-
porters and investigators. The very nature of our questions suggested we
knew this went beyond the bureaucrats who had forgotten Pam, beyond a
system that had functioned poorly, into the rarified atmosphere of values.
Almost a century ago people in rural American communities like Lincoln,
Colorado, found a way to take care of people in need, but in 2005 America
could not take care of people begging for help on our television screens. This
point received further reinforcement when a few weeks after Katrina, the
government evacuated and rescued those threatened by hurricane Rita.
In Katrina all the pieces this book has explored came together to create a
hellish mirror that reflected the realities of life under the Counterrevolution.
The grim conditions we agonized over did not appear overnight. They had
festered over the years until like a particularly large and aching infection
they burst over the country. Katrina not only leveled houses across the Gulf
Coast, it blew away the misperceptions, distortions, and confusion that had
been erected around Liberal America, leaving standing in plain sight the four
cornerstones—economic justice, voting rights, educational equity, and me-
dia fairness. Like the damaged structures left behind by Katrina, we could
see that the Era of Bad Feelings had left those cornerstones in a precarious
position. As people fanned out across Louisiana and Mississippi to ponder
what they could salvage and rebuild, we also need to ask how much of
Liberal America we can salvage and rebuild.
While Pam exposed incompetent and callous officials who claimed they
had no idea of Katrina’s potential force, another forecast made that same
summer of 2004 provided the broader understanding needed to place the
entire wretched mess in perspective. The task force that submitted it did not
compose any meteorological forecasts or serve as disaster relief experts,
but it formed a point of view that helps us see how this country could pro-
duce scenes like those of Katrina. In a sense the report they issued explains
the larger reasons for the disaster and like one of those enhanced satellite
weather photographs allows us to perceive how the trends this book has
explored come together in a perfect political storm, the likes of which we
have not seen for some time. In the words of that report lay an analysis as
devastating as Pam and as accurate.
208 & Conclusion
A month before the conclusion of the Pam simulation, a task force of dis-
tinguished academic researchers representing the American Political Science
Association (APSA), released American Democracy in an Age of Rising In-
equality, a sobering document with ominous conclusions. One statement
particularly evoked comments many made about Katrina as well as the
fundamental value of Liberal America. In the section ‘‘The Uneven Playing
Field,’’ the task force wrote, ‘‘Government is expected to help insure equal
opportunity for all, not tilt toward those who already have wealth and
power.’’10
As a detailed examination of the health of the level playing field, the APSA
report stands as a noteworthy analysis of what the Era of Bad Feelings has
cost America. The report’s opening pages read like a doctor’s diagnosis,
‘‘Our country’s ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government may
be under growing threat in an era of persistent and rising inequalities.
Disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more
sharply in the United States than many other nations, and gaps between
races and ethnic groups persist. Progress toward realizing American ideals of
democracy may have stalled, and in some areas reversed.’’11 In essence the
APSA report represents a monitor of the nation’s heart, its statistics and
graphs tracing the health of our democracy like a medical chart. An espe-
cially compelling graph that resembles a national EKG compares income
distribution over the last century in America, Great Britain, and France. It
shows that differences in the proportion of income held by the top 1 percent
of families stayed remarkably similar in all three countries. In the 1980s the
lines diverge until ‘‘by 1988, the share of income held by the very rich was
two or three times higher in the United States than in Britain and France.’’
The authors go on to observe in a statement that echoes Katrina’s wake-up
call, ‘‘disparities of income are particularly striking when it comes to com-
parisons across races.’’12
Perhaps that explains why the images from New Orleans hit so hard, for
we had become so accustomed to images carefully edited—even altered—
that when we actually saw unedited reality staring us in the face it almost
became too much. Echoing the speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer and Winona
LaDuke, we saw poverty stripped as raw as that scene where the Ghost of
Christmas Present pulls back his cloak for Ebeneezer Scrooge to show him
two starving children. The Superdome seemed to function like a giant
magnet of truth, sucking into one place the poverty that stalked those streets
of New Orleans that the tourists did not visit.
Had the correspondents had the guts to come to New Orleans—or any
other American inner city or failing rural town—earlier, they could have
Conclusion & 209
shot scenes every bit as compelling as those of Katrina. ‘‘Apparently none of

these ace reporters has ever set foot in Washington’s Anacostia district, or
South Central Los Angeles, or the trailer parks of rural Arkansas,’’ Rosa
Brooks wrote in the Los Angeles Times.13 It took Katrina to bring New
Orleans’ dismal statistics to people across the world: two-thirds of the city is
African American with a median household income of $27,133 and 40
percent of the city’s children live below the poverty level.14 The growing
inequality in America is hardly an open secret, but Katrina accomplished
what over a decade of articles, books, and statistics cited in previous
chapters had seemed unable to accomplish—it put human faces on the
Counterrevolution’s lack of economic justice. Howard Kurtz wrote, ‘‘A
Sept. 12 Washington Post story was headlined ‘Katrina Pushes Issues of
Race and Poverty at Bush.’ An equally apt headline would have been, ‘Ka-
trina Pushes Issues of Race and Poverty at a Media Establishment That Has
Largely Ignored Them.’ ’’15
Suddenly the faces of poverty stared from the front page. A crowd of
African American women huddle around a slumped figure with a white sheet
draped over her shoulder. A woman in a head scarf and striped t-shirt
extends a hand in comfort, trying to assure the exhausted and overheated
victim all will be OK. Behind her another woman holds her hands to her
mouth in a mixture of shock and grief while a man near tears watches with
two boys whose faces betray their anxiety and confusion. A second photo-
graph: a large man holding a tiny baby over the shoulder of his football
jersey pulls back a blanket to reveal the corpse of an old man as thin as a
concentration camp victim slumped in a chaise lounge. Behind him lies the
Superdome crowd that became a symbol for this disaster. To the side of the
picture a woman walks toward the camera as she shouts at the photographer
in frustration. There are no white faces anywhere. A third picture: an Af-
rican American woman with her dress draped over her shoulder swims
through water colored like a stained glass window by oil, dragging an
overnight bag and bottles of water. A fourth: a young man with his foot in
bandages lies on a cot clutching a bottle of water as vehicles drive by without
even acknowledging him.
Then we see picture after picture of the crowds. Some huddle on bridges
and overpasses that remain above the water, waiting for the rescue that is
not coming. Others who have been fortunate to escape lie in makeshift
camps that eerily resemble the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. At
times it seems more reporters and celebrities can get into the city than aid
workers. Somehow they manage to bring Harry Coniff to the Superdome
but they cannot get anyone out. As rescue plans stall somewhere in the
210 & Conclusion
ether, the Superdome becomes a perverse tourist attraction for media

photographers who fly over it and drive around it, but take no one out
with them. Treated worse than zoo animals the people make their anger
known.
When George Bush announced he would do something to end the endemic
poverty in the areas hit by Katrina, you did not know whether to laugh or
cry. Forget the fact that his tax cuts and budget cuts coupled with the South’s
notoriously stingy public services helped to sustain this poverty. Instead
remember the basic thrust of the Counterrevolution dating back to the al-
liance with Strom Thurmond. As it systematically undermined Liberal
America’s cornerstones, the Counterrevolution put in place substitutes:
economic elitism, discriminatory voting, ideological education, and partisan
media. Confirmation that Bush’s rhetoric may rank as one of the more
cynical remarks made by an American president came not long after the
speech when the Counterrevolutionary Congress predictably balked at
the price tag, prompting Bush to reassure his allies he would not raise taxes.
As America continues to absorb the largest forced migration since the Dust
Bowl, some wonder whether it will create a similar economic crisis. As for
those physically- and psychologically battered survivors—whom the press
kept calling ‘‘refugees’’ as if they came from another country—the Okies
wrote what could be their script seventy years ago, wandering aimlessly
trying to find work and confronting what Woody Guthrie called ‘‘vigilante
men’’ determined to send them away.
Yet blaming the Counterrevolution alone seems too simplistic, for the
Democrats have played their part. Over the last three decades in some primal
act the party had poked out its own eyes and now wanders aimlessly across
an increasingly hostile landscape, where the very earth itself has become an
uncertainty, and the one infallible tool it needs to navigate through this Hell
of its own making—its moral compass—has been carelessly dropped on the
ground. Pick the bill of your choice from budget cuts to the Iraq War. The
bankruptcy of the Democrats’ ideas lay on full display when Bill Clinton
discussed Katrina with CNN’s Larry King and could only suggest maybe
we needed to reorganize FEMA. Talk about rearranging the deck chairs on
the Titanic. Today Democrats reminisce wistfully about the last time they
held the reins of power, but 2004 made it clear William Jefferson Clinton
locked the party into a strategy of trying to walk down the middle of the
road, where to observers it resembles nothing so much as a drunk desper-
ately trying to pass a sobriety test as he wobbles uncertainly between the
straight and narrow and the threat of landing unceremoniously on his back-
side. French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, who filed a series of Tocqueville-
Conclusion & 211
like reports with the Atlantic, likened the Democratic Party to a ‘‘black
hole,’’ where ‘‘these brilliant pioneers who were supposed to set down the
cornerstones for the people’s house of tomorrow had only one idea, one
obsession, and, fundamentally, one watchword: how, in four years, to fight
the Republicans on the battlefield of fundraising.’’ As a consequence he
notes the Democrats are ‘‘in the process of losing [their] footing on the
ground of ideas, and thus of losing, period.’’16
Maybe the Democrats were watching during one especially long night on
CNN, when Aaron Brown asked, ‘‘Don’t these people vote?’’17 Had Brown
read the APSA report, he would have found his answer in statistics dem-
onstrating how the wealthy beneficiaries of the Counterrevolution have
placed their weighty thumbs on the scale of democracy, tilting it dramati-
cally. According to the report, 90 percent of the wealthy vote versus only 50
percent of those making less than $15,000. Ninety-five percent of the donors
who made substantial political contributions had incomes over $100,000.
Three-quarters of the wealthy participate in some kind of political organi-
zation versus only 29 percent of the least affluent. Those in the top income
brackets ‘‘appear to have had almost three times more influence on their
senator’s votes than those near the bottom.’’18 CNN’s 2004 exit poll results
suggest that the APSA task force conclusions may be understated. One-third
of those who voted had a household income of over $75,000—a figure that
gives us all cause to reflect on America’s future. CNN pointed out that only a
little over a quarter of those who voted had a high school education or less,
while those with postgraduate study accounted for 16 percent of all voters.19
Perhaps the most fascinating finding is that in 2004 the suburbs accounted
for almost half the total presidential vote—45 percent.20
The APSA task force detailed this tilt of the playing field as surely as the
hurricane simulator portrayed Pam. Echoing the chapter on clustering,
members noted that the ability to identify what the APSA calls a ‘‘precise set
of voters’’ has produced artificial districts with ‘‘very peculiar boundaries . . .
becoming the norm.’’ As a result, ‘‘when ‘class warfare’ proceeds in the
cloistered confines of government offices, the rich generally win.’’21 As we
have seen, this creates an abundance of safe seats for those who draw maps
like the one on Tom Delay’s Texas restaurant napkin. Perhaps Aaron Brown
should have checked the Louisiana map.
The impact on potential voters can be substantial. The APSA task force
observed that between 1960 and 1980 the proportion of people who felt
‘‘the government is run by a few big interests looking out only for them-
selves’’ has nearly doubled. Evoking a root cause of the Era of Bad Feelings
they note this creates a ‘‘negative spiral’’ in which Americans ‘‘become in-
212 & Conclusion
creasingly discouraged about the effectiveness of democratic governance,

spreading cynicism and withdrawal from elections and other arenas of
public life.’’22 As the less affluent withdraw, the affluent gain more power,
putting in place even stronger measures that tilt the playing field until many
come to feel democracy has become like a Las Vegas casino where the odds
favor the house. As Winona LaDuke observed, America’s largest party is the
nonvoters. In Bowling Alone Robert Putnam details that not only has voting
dropped but also participation in civic activity. He notes that polls show
since 1973 the number of Americans who report that ‘‘in the past year’’ they
have ‘‘attended a public meeting on town or school affairs’’ has fallen by
more than a third.23
Discouraged citizens took center stage during Katrina. ‘‘It’s a known fact
that we have twice as many African Americans registered to vote [as white
people], but when it comes down to voting, the white population generally
outvotes them,’’ said Louis Keller, Sr., the registrar of voters in Orleans
Parish.24 Perhaps one explanation comes from a 2004 voting scandal. While
most of the nation focused on voting irregularities in Ohio and other states
during the presidential election, New Orleans in the words of Cindy Cohn,
legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ‘‘wins the award for the
worst voting situation in the country when it comes from electronic voting
machines.’’25 In an eerie presaging of the inability to get aid to Katrina
victims, Louisiana officials experienced major problems getting electronic
voting machines to New Orleans.
That the largely African American New Orleans was the major location in
Louisiana facing this problem in the midst of a contentious presidential and
senate race should have people rolling their eyes at this replay of 2000. At
ten A.M. on Election Day, New Orleans station WWLTV reported a long list
of voting problems called in by viewers including, missing voting machines,
malfunctioning voting machines, and missing provisional ballots. Voting of-
ficials even lacked keys for some machines.26 Based on this incompetence,
Katrina should not have surprised anyone. In an interview, Barbara Arnwine,
Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law, all
but identified the New Orleans voting scandal as a major reason for the
election of Republican senator David Vetter. ‘‘No one is talking about what
went wrong in New Orleans,’’ she said, ‘‘and how that affected what every-
one’s been talking about instead, which is the . . . overwhelming unexpected
victory for the . . . Republican senatorial candidate there. I think that has
something to do with the fact that New Orleans had most of their polls down
for a good part of the day.’’27 Behind all this lay yet another Louisiana
scandal, in which two officials of the Sequoia voting machines company,
Conclusion & 213
which supplied the New Orleans machines, were indicted in 1999 for bribing
Louisiana elections commissioner Jerry Fowler with $8 million.28
As the Civil Rights Commission investigation into the 2000 Florida vote
demonstrated, the South has always found creative ways to discourage Af-
rican Americans from voting. Louisiana has a few interesting tactics. One
revolves around photo IDs. New Orleans ACORN organizer Stephen
Bradbury notes, ‘‘The print material that’s made available says you need a
photo ID to vote. And it goes on to list a number of things, and the very last
thing it says is you can sign an affidavit if you don’t have a photo ID. Most
people don’t get down that far in the list; they see the first item and think
they can’t vote without one. Some of the commissioners at voting sites will
tell people they need to have ID. That is one way to dissuade people from
voting.’’ Bradbury also pointed out an even more insidious practice, the so-
called ‘‘inactive voters list.’’ When the New Orleans Times-Picayune pub-
lished the list of 44,000 plus inactive voters in the summer of 2004, many
people assumed it meant that if your name appeared on the list, you could
not vote. According to Bradbury, ‘‘A significant percentage of people on that
list . . . believe they may not vote. Some of them have told us they thought
they would be arrested if their names are on that list! These are people who
are not even going to try.’’29
Aaron Brown’s question leads us back to Katrina, for the systematic ex-
clusion of New Orleans’ African Americans from the polls not only recalls
the Counterrevolution’s previous attempts to discourage voting but also
reminds us that people who do not receive the tools to vote may also find
themselves deprived of what they need to live. The logical consequences of
those missing voting machines turned out to be thousands of people huddled
around the Superdome. The APSA task force identified one reason why they
came. In a section titled ‘‘Congress Favors the Organized,’’ the APSA report
observes that congressional pork now feeds relatively narrow factions:
‘‘Members of Congress have directed government funds coming into their
districts to specific geographic areas that vote at higher rates and provide
their greatest support.’’30
Inundated by scenes such as those at the Superdome, the media’s response
ranks among the most hard-hitting this country has seen in a long time. On
the Friday after Katrina struck, CNN’s Aaron Brown settled in to his usual
post for special coverage of the disaster. At some point during that evening
as he took what amounted to a trip through the beleaguered city, Brown
symbolically threw away his script and began to show visible shock and
anger. Viewing one particularly horrific scene he said, ‘‘Time after time in all
of this you see moments that take your breath away. You keep thinking there
214 & Conclusion
must be some explanation, but I can’t imagine what it is.’’ During another
segment he interviewed an obviously drained reporter who looked as though
he had not shaved in several days. Standing in front of a public hospital, the
reporter related how the nearby private Tulane Medical Center had been
evacuated earlier, but the public facility still had hundreds of patients and no
one had come to their rescue. The obvious contrast moved Brown to remark,
‘‘You do get the opinion that poor people get shafted.’’ Later that week
workers would find the bodies of forty patients who didn’t make it. As the
evening wound on with image after image of despair, Brown expressed
frustration with the entire rescue effort, ‘‘You have to wonder what planet
are you people on?’’31
Brown was not alone. The networks and their anchors asked similar
questions, all of them unintended variations on Fannie Lou Hamer’s, ‘‘Is this
America?’’ New Orleans was compared to a third world country. The rescue
response was contrasted with that of 9/11 and the Asian tsunami. Reporters
who had maintained stiff neutrality about the deteriorating Iraq War won-
dered whether the deployment of Louisiana National Guard troops half way
around the world had hampered rescue efforts. Most of all, some used the
‘‘R’’ word—racism—to refer to the treatment of those imprisoned in the
Superdome. Newsweek’s cover story said it all, ‘‘A National Shame.’’
In contrast, the voices of the Raucous Right seemed to literally come
unhinged when confronted with images their pinched view of reality seemed
unable to accommodate. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly resembled one of those people
in a leaky boat using makeshift boards to paddle. The best he could do was
to literally bring William Graham Sumner back from the dusty, moldy shelf
where most people consigned him a century ago. Interviewing Newt Gin-
grich on September 7, O’Reilly editorialized, ‘‘I don’t think the government
is equipped in any way, shape or form to solve anybody’s problems and to
get them out of harm’s way at all. Some things government does well.
Military. Our military’s the best in the world. Our capitalistic system pro-
vides opportunity for many more people than anywhere else in the world.
But the government cannot help you personally.’’32 The Counterrevolution
has always wanted to turn back the clock, but O’Reilly wanted to turn it
back to the Middle Ages. What would the millions of Americans who have
been helped by government dating back to Big Meadow and those Colorado
counties make of such a remark? Even Herbert Hoover favored government
aid during the Great Depression.
Commenting on Katrina’s aftermath, Rush Limbaugh blamed the devas-
tation on ‘‘the welfare and entitlement thinking of government.’’ According to
Limbaugh, ‘‘What do you expect when you have a welfare state mentality as
Conclusion & 215
your city government? I mean, I’m not even being critical. I’m just trying to
point out something obvious here! That—talking about this for 18 years,
folks—socialism versus capitalism; entrepreneurialism and self-reliance versus
the entitlement mentality—so much on display here. That’s what nobody’s got
the guts to say.’’33 In another diatribe he began spouting opinions Theodore
Bilbo would have smiled at. ‘‘The non-black population was just as devas-
tated, but apparently they were able to get out, and the black population
wasn’t able to get out. Maybe New Orleans has a half decent mass transit and
some of these people don’t need cars.’’34 These diatribes resembled the ending
of Inherit the Wind where William Jennings Bryan literally comes unglued
and even his supporters can only turn away in embarrassment.
This brings us to the most disturbing and controversial aspect of Katrina—
the reports of lawlessness that had reporters intimating the city had gone
mad. Rumors ran rampant about the depredations of gangs who prayed on
the helpless, shooting people to steal boats and food and at night looting,
killing, and raping those imprisoned inside the Superdome and Convention
Center. The real story emerging seems to be that it was not so much gangs
that went wild as reporters. New York Times reporter David Carr tracked
down some of the sensationalistic reports and found that as of September 19,
the coroner reported seventeen dead at both the Superdome and the Con-
vention Center, most from natural causes. Captain Jeffery Winn, the head of
the city’s SWAT team, stated one person at the convention center died from
multiple stab wounds and one National Guardsman was shot in the leg. The
head of the city’s sex crimes unit had reports of two attempted rapes at the
Superdome, although Carr notes rape is notoriously underreported. Carr
concludes, ‘‘Many of the urban legends that sprang up—the systematic rape
of children, the slitting of a 7-year-old’s throat—so far seem to be just
that.’’35
Los Angeles Times reporters Susannah Rosenblatt and James Rainey con-
firmed Carr’s story, adding additional information. National Guard spokes-
man Major Ed Bush observed that the Superdome ‘‘just morphed into this
mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done.’’ New
Orlean Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss saw something more insidious at
work, ‘‘If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of
middle class white people,’’ Amoss said, ‘‘it would not have been a fertile
ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.’’ Rosenblatt and Rainey also
confirmed Carr’s death reports, noting that Bob Johannessen, spokesman for
the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, stated that of the 841
recorded hurricane-related deaths in Louisiana, four were identified as gun-
shot victims.36
216 & Conclusion
The story behind the story should give us all pause as we recall the fears of
media manipulation raised in earlier chapters. In New Orleans the unreal
became real. Carr’s investigation notes that on September 1, coverage dra-
matically changed, tracing this shift in tone squarely back to Fox News.
According to Carr, ‘‘The Fox News anchor, John Gibson, helped set the
scene: ‘All kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at
rescue crews. Thousands of police and National Guard troops are on the
scene trying to get the situation under control. Thousands more on the way.
So heads up, looters.’ ’’ In a conversation with a Fox reporter on the scene,
Gibson admitted, ‘‘We have yet to confirm a lot of that.’’37 Later that
evening MSNBC followed Gibson’s lead and after that rumors mush-
roomed. Rosenblatt and Rainey also note Fox was the first to lead with what
they termed ‘‘hyperbolic reporting.’’38 To be fair to Fox they were not the
only media outlet doing this kind of reporting. In fact New Orleans mayor
Ray Nagin helped to fan the fires by painting a few hyperbolic scenarios in
various interviews. This raises an interesting question: Did the hurricane
wipe out media fairness along with all those buildings?
Curiously one place the media did not venture during and shortly after
Katrina was into New Orleans’ public schools, for like their usual coverage
of public events, New Orleans hurricane coverage said little about educa-
tion. Perhaps the answer to this curious omission lay in the sorry state of the
city’s public schools, which in a large sense had already endured the
equivalent of Katrina before the real storm. Although someone has yet to
undertake it, New Orleans represents a classic case study of what could
happen if the nation embarks on a program to privatize education. New
Orleans schools are divided between the largely minority public schools and
the largely white private schools. The duality of this system represents yet
another unnerving parallel with Katrina since we know those who got out
before the levies broke were largely white and affluent and those left behind
black and poor. It also provides testimony to the success of the Southern
Strategy, which essentially allowed the South to circumvent Brown v. Board.
In justification for providing federal aid for private schools after Katrina,
the federal Department of Education noted, ‘‘These significantly impacted
Louisiana communities averaged 32% of students attending private K–12
schools—much higher than the 11% national average of private school
students.’’39 According to reports, tuition in these schools ranges from
$4,000 to $10,000 per year, amounts hardly within the reach of those at or
below the poverty level.40 In New Orleans, the number of private schools
and the hefty tuition has apparently created a tidy business for banks and
others making loans with rates as high as 10 percent to parents. Maybe
Conclusion & 217
that’s why they call the city the ‘‘Big Easy.’’ While the area is heavily
Catholic, given the South’s history of ‘‘white flight’’ to private schools it does
not take much imagination to picture the student bodies of these private
schools. Actually the data for them, like much else, can be found on the
Internet. It shows a curious duality, for a few private schools are almost 100
percent African American while the majority are from 70 percent to 93
percent white with figures around 80 percent not unusual.41 Although the
data do not show this, it is probably a good bet these schools do not include
many students with learning problems, disabilities, or other issues. By virtue
of their ability to choose students, private schools can bleed the public system
of high-achieving children. With a significant number of students in private
schools, support for the public system erodes.
Shortly before Katrina hit, a press release announced that after years of
scandals and corruption (which earlier that year had the district declaring
bankruptcy), state and federal authorities had pressured the school board to
put the district under the control of Alvarez and Marsal (A&M), a firm
specializing in reviving failing businesses. A&M noted that the district did
not even know how many employees it had.42
If New Orleans’ schools are failing financially they also are failing aca-
demically. Only one high school in the entire city earned a five-star rating in
Louisiana’s report card system—and almost 60 percent of the students in
that school are white! An astounding 47 percent of the schools are classed as
‘‘Academically Unacceptable.’’43 According to Louisiana Department of
Education data, dropout rates range as high as 28.4 percent at Clark High
School and 25.1 percent at Booker T. Washington. Attendance in some
schools is as low as 78 percent at Cohen High, 71.4 percent at Frederick
Douglass High, and 62.1 percent at Augustine Middle School.44 Only 32
percent of the district’s teachers have a master’s degree or better. The pov-
erty levels of students in New Orleans schools is indicated by the fact that
51,271 of 67,922 students are on free/reduced lunch.45
The administration’s decision to award Katrina funds to private schools
represents—as far as I know—the first time the federal government has di-
rectly aided religious schools. Challenging this administration’s decision will
prove difficult, since anyone who raises questions will be accused of ‘‘in-
sensitivity.’’ Most insidiously the decision institutionalizes New Orleans’ dual
system and, of course, bleeds much-needed funds away from the already-
starving public system. Katrina may have provided the Counterrevolution
with the opportunity it has long sought—a chance to turn public schools into
private ones. It also stands as a monument to Strom Thurmond, institution-
alizing the dual race system in the South. Maybe they should name the bill
218 & Conclusion
after him. The interesting question becomes how long public dollars will flow
to those private academies.
The most frightening part of Katrina is that one partner in the Counter-
revolution had an entirely different view of the devastation than most of us.
As any reader of the Left Behind series knows, plagues and pestilence are
prominent features of the Last Days. They do not mark the failure of a
system or a tilting of the playing field or even an inexplicable disaster, but
instead signal that time when true believers shall be saved while the rest of us
will be consigned to eternal damnation. In Katrina’s wake some funda-
mentalists proclaimed that the storm represented God’s punishment. Hal
Lindsey, who has written about Bible prophecy, stated, ‘‘It seems clear that
the prophetic times I have been expecting for decades have finally arrived.
And even worse, it appears that the judgment of America has begun.’’
Charles Colson commented, ‘‘ ‘Did God have anything to do with Katrina?,’
people ask. My answer is, he allowed it and perhaps he allowed it to get
our attention so that we don’t delude ourselves into thinking that all we
have to do is put things back the way they were and life will be normal
again.’’46
Had those helicopters swooping over New Orleans been hovering over the
rest of the nation, they might have been able to show how this local per-
spective comprised part of a larger canvas. The continued assault on voting
fairness, the increasing distortions of the media, the disconcerting increase in
economic inequality and the assault on public education add up to the tilted
playing field the APSA report warns is damaging our democracy. Take a
mental level and lay it on democracy’s foundation to see how far the bubble
marking the level of the playing field moves off center. Then ponder the
consequences. The interesting thing about a tilted playing field is that it
constantly drums an incessant ‘‘why’’ into everyone on its slippery slopes.
Katrina’s death toll has seared itself into our memories, but we still face
the spiritual death occurring as the playing field continues to tilt. The
Raucous Right that has so deftly inflamed the Era of Bad Feelings likes to
think the anger expressed in acts of symbolic road rage represents a vote of
confidence in their agenda. But even they must know they are riding a tiger
and everyone knows tigers do not like to be ridden.
Ultimately, behind everything from the Era of Bad Feelings to Katrina lie
two contrasting views of human nature dueling for this nation’s future. On
one side lies the belief forcefully propounded by religious fundamentalists
that human beings are by nature sinful creatures without grace who will
wallow in degradation, perversity, and depravity. This view is also not un-
familiar to closet Dixiecrats who believe in the inequality of races and
Conclusion & 219
corporate fundamentalists who view consumers as weak-minded addicts

with fixations on everything from lipstick to plasma television sets.
This nation faces nothing less than an iron curtain of dogma that threatens
to implacably divide us into the equivalent of the Cavaliers and Roundheads
who spread blood across the soil of England. The stakes in this civil war have
become nothing less than the fate of succeeding generations, for if the
playing field tilts too far it will become extremely difficult to level it without
drastic action or a replay of the Great Depression.
The most disturbing aspect of the rhetoric of the Raucous Right lies in a
thinly veiled contempt for not only their ideological opposites, but also for
all Americans. A telling portrait in the April 2005 Atlantic caught right-wing
broadcaster John Ziegler in a rare moment of candor. His words appear at
length because they reveal the true feelings these purveyors of venom hold
for the rest of us:
The vast majority of people are much, much dumber than you have ever been
led to believe. Never forget this. And just like people are far dumber than you
have been led to believe, they are also far more dishonest than anyone is
seemingly willing to admit to you. Do not trust anyone unless you have some
sort of significant leverage over him or her and they know that you have that
leverage over them.47
From the premise that people with opposing beliefs are not worthy of respect
it is easy to conclude that one can do whatever they want with those they
hold in contempt, the way a certain political movement used to deal with
people who wore stars on their chests. As Tom DeLay noted, sometimes
sinners need the sword to keep them in line.
In contrast to this vision stands the core belief of Liberal America that
people will do the right thing if only given help to overcome the occasional
bad luck that befalls them, education to cope with those who would take
advantage of them, information that is predicated on fairness, and the right
to cast their vote and have it fairly counted. Democracy is, by nature, a
liberal institution, for it is founded on the notion that the collective wisdom
of the people serves as a force for good. The level playing field depends on
this view. If you believe people are by nature good then you believe they
should all have an equal chance.
For all of us pondering Katrina, the question of our future reverberates.
Evidence suggests we neither yearn for a laundry list of programs, nor do we
support a tilt of the playing field. Instead Americans deserve a simple and
forceful affirmation of economic justice, media fairness, educational equity,
220 & Conclusion
and the right to vote. This country needs leaders who will judge each bill and
program with those fundamental values.
This is true for both parties. The Democrats have squandered the trust of
Liberal America, becoming a party that seemingly stands for nothing. The
Republican Party has been hijacked by the Counterrevolution. Many Re-
publicans I know still hold what I would term ‘‘true Conservative values,’’
but find themselves confused, even angry at losing their party to Strom
Thurmond, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Tom DeLay, and the likes of Enron.
Business owners and corporate CEOs are frankly embarrassed by the self-
ishness of the Counterrevolution. These traditional Republicans worry that
the agenda of Christian and corporate fundamentalists has become the
agenda of their party.
Despite the clouds looming overhead, there remain signs of a more hu-
mane and optimistic America. The prodigious energy spent by customers of
Home Depot and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and the insatiable
appetite for the nostalgia of the ‘‘greatest generation’’ suggests that Amer-
icans feel frustrated because they long for a larger purpose for their lives.
People want to make a difference, and, while psychologists may not agree, it
is a fundamental human characteristic to want to make a difference for the
common good. Why else do we resonate with incredible stories of ordinary
people doing extraordinary things? In the end the final irony may be on us,
for the Era of Bad Feelings may ultimately be about good feelings, about
cries for meaning and community at a time that seems to have discarded
them like worn clothing.
America has stood at this place before, so if history serves as any guide,
sooner or later the frustration will turn in a positive direction. Throughout
American history political parties and movements have rallied people
around the idea of the level playing field—so if the present political parties
no longer stand for this value, another group will. Working on your bath-
room seems a poor substitute for working for the community; making place
mats appears a poor alternative for working with your neighbors.
In the aftermath of Katrina some will treat it as an isolated natural disaster
made worse by bureaucratic bungling. First Lady Laura Bush offered an
explanation that could stand as the motto for two decades of Counterrev-
olutionary government bashing. She told reporters during a visit to a New
Orleans school ‘‘Well, I know that’s it’s very, very slow. And of course,
that’s how government always is.’’48 The First Lady’s remarks reveal that
the failed response to Katrina is the result of two decades of leadership from
a party that has denigrated government. To paraphrase an old saying, we get
the government they think we deserve.
Conclusion & 221
What Mrs. Bush did not acknowledge was that over the last decade or so
the equivalent of Katrina has pummeled the United States. This disaster has
packed Counterrevolutionary winds that have radically altered income
distribution in this country, blasting away the jobs and the hard-earned
wages of millions of Americans. As surely as Katrina blew away homes and
businesses, this Counterrevolutionary storm has also cost us an unnerving
number of homes lost to foreclosure and the closing of millions of family
businesses that have lost out to national chains. This disaster also packs a
storm surge that has inundated our public schools with unfunded mandates
and increasing debt, drowning administrators and teachers in paperwork
and befouling public schools with religious orthodoxy. Along with these
have come torrents that threaten to wash away one of the most important
Liberal American cornerstones—voting rights. Finally we view tangled piles
of debris generated by an increasingly politicized media and a decreasing
certainty that what we see and hear is real.
In a way the equivalent of many New Orleans already exist, their damages
just as real and devastating. New Orleans is not the only city to face eco-
nomic injustice, voting irregularities, deteriorating schools, and media ma-
nipulation. You need only drive through certain sections of our nation’s
largest cities or through dying rural towns and Native American reservations
to see sights reminiscent of Katrina. The big question plaguing America
is whether this very real Counterrevolutionary hurricane will spur the same
bureaucratic bungling and indifference that accompanied Katrina. Will
Katrina provide yet another example of the already heavy thumb the
Counterrevolution presses on the scales of economic justice or will the
Counterrevolution give way to a ‘‘new birth of freedom,’’ as Lincoln said at
Gettysburg?
Americans have been hearing Republican propaganda for so long that
castigates the New Deal, that you begin to wonder yourself if maybe the
New Deal was an aberration. But more crucially is what these statements say
about the American people. Is it true people really do not want to use
government to help one another, that in fact Sumner and O’Reilly are right?
Is it survival of the fittest?
The response of the American people to Katrina provided testimony to
the nation’s moral strength as great as anything since the Great Depres-
sion. The amount of aid collected for Katrina now stands as one of the
most massive voluntary contributions to a disaster in American history. The
outpouring of generosity continues to be staggering, suggesting what is
truly possible in America. All of us have our personal favorites among the
thousands of examples of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to
222 & Conclusion
help Katrina’s victims. For me a touching photo symbolized it all. It showed

a small black child guiding the wheelchair of an elderly white woman. Their
hands touched one another in a way that said legions about the American
people. So as the experts pondered the damage to Liberal America’s cor-
nerstones, the American people spoke for a need to not only retain but also
shore up those cornerstones. You wonder how this could invigorate a
country if only our leaders truly understood it. The synopsis of the FX
movie featuring a New Orleans hurricane ends, ‘‘Something nobler comes
to pass. We are now amid a great shift into the future, a future filled with
renewed purpose and renewed exploration of all means at our disposal for
survival in a world that is not the world of our parents, but the world of our
children.’’49
New Orleans could provide a perfect laboratory to test whether the ideals
of Liberal America can rebuild a city. Harry Hopkins would know what to
do. The man who put half a million people back to work in a single day would
create another alphabet soup of agencies to raise New Orleans out of the
muck. Local residents could sign up for jobs to clean up debris left by Katrina,
others could begin working to put the city’s infrastructure back on line. Finally
an urban corps could start constructing replacement homes and businesses.
In exchange for this needed public work, residents could receive food, shel-
ter, and vouchers they could use to reconstruct their homes, Habitat-for-
Humanity style in the largest barn-raising ever held in America. Others could
sign up for a health corps and a teacher corps to help restaff hospitals and
schools in exchange for a promise to stay there for four years. Perhaps Con-
gress will give us another Halliburton boondoggle, but that will not kill the
idea.
In the end shifting winds blew over the wreckage left behind by Katrina
and the Counterrevolution, winds that promised hope. Hope represents the
cement that holds those four cornerstones together. In the end it really is quite
simple—a level playing field promises a better life for all. For, as Fannie Lou
Hamer, Martha Stewart, Winona LaDuke, and Sammy Sosa testify, you
never know where or when a great talent will arise. In his book The Con-
science of a Liberal, the late Paul Wellstone wrote, ‘‘Politics is not about left,
right and center. It is about speaking to the concerns and circumstances of
people’s lives. People yearn for a politics that speaks to and includes them.’’50
To quote Winona LaDuke, ‘‘We are all ultimately interconnected.’’51 As
these people testify, the story of Liberal America is not one of pessimism but
optimism. From the Dover, Pennsylvania, voters who rejected turning their
schools into religious academies to the thousands who mobilized for the
Magical Mystery Tour, Americans have shown that when the cornerstones
Conclusion & 223
are at stake and the issues clearly drawn, they will reject the Counterrevo-
lution’s arguments. Perhaps Katrina did send a message, one that said the Era
of Bad Feelings was ending. The story of those stormy days tells us that if we
lose faith in the values of Liberal America we lose faith in ourselves, our
institutions, and our country. If Liberal America dies, something vital dies
with it.
Afterword
On April 5, 2006, the day Tom DeLay’s decision not to run again made
the coveted central, above-the-fold position on the front page of the New
York Times, the general tone of the coverage seemed to celebrate the slaying
of an ogre, ending the Era of Bad Feelings. In this age of hyper-history, few
recalled that similar sentiments were voiced when Newt Gingrich fell on his
sword. Borrowing from an old script, the pundits predicted the end of en-
mity, forgetting that the bad feelings have been driven by a movement, not a
former Texas bug spray entrepreneur.
That the Counterrevolution still lived could be seen in other stories ap-
pearing in the Times’ front section that day, stories that provided ample
evidence that the Hammer’s departure did not signal an end to the ongoing
assault on Liberal America’s four cornerstones. Several stories concerned
social and economic justice. Below the fold, a front page article announced
what most of us suspected: Bush’s latest tax cut on investments heavily
favored the wealthy, reducing taxes on those who made over $10 million by
an average of $500,000. Buried inside were stories about continuing Con-
gressional wrangling over immigration policy and attempts by both the GOP
and the Democrats to spin what was termed an ‘‘altercation’’ between a
Capitol police officer and Georgia representative Cynthia McKinney, who is
African American. The Times’ education page highlighted a new debate over
public and private schools and yet another problem caused by No Child Left
Behind. As for media fairness, the question of the day seemed to be the future
employment of Katie Couric as the next network news reader. Maureen
Dowd, whose radar seems particularly attuned to media imagery, wrote
about the bizarre coverage of the Middle East journey made by Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign secretary Jack Straw, coverage
about who slept where and said what that evoked the media circus sur-
rounding Martha Stewart’s trial and the Dixie Chicks’ criticism of President
Bush. There was also more about the tangled media reality that is the war in
Iraq. As for voting rights, this cornerstone kept its usual low profile, ap-
pearing only in references to DeLay’s infamous redistricting.
224 & Conclusion
Meanwhile, few paid much attention to the forces allayed against the
cornerstones, choosing to concentrate on DeLay’s lobbying and financial
troubles while ignoring his support for the Religious Right. The aftermath of
Katrina continued to fester as residents of a gated New Orleans neigh-
borhood killed plans for nearby trailer housing à la the Woody Guthrie
Depression-era ‘‘vigilante men.’’ Oh yes, there was still the Enron case.
Yet there was a sense that DeLay’s departure did provide an indication
of how fed up people were with the Era of Bad Feelings and all the shady
activities that characterized it. What remained was the need to come to
grips with what DeLay had personified, with the people who saw him as the
‘‘pizza delivery man’’ for their Counterrevolutionary agenda of a Sumner-
like ‘‘survival of the fittest,’’ private ayatollah academies, concentrated,
politicized and distorting media, and the erosion of voting rights. In what
may be the single greatest sentence written in the last century, Martin Luther
King, Jr., wrote from his Birmingham jail cell, ‘‘We are caught in an in-
escapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.’’ When
we truly realize that vision then the Era of Bad Feelings can be said to be
over.
Notes
This book is intentionally designed to make as many sources as possible available

through the Internet so the reader can check the source. Readers should note that some
sites require a user to register before accessing a particular page or may require the user
to be a subscriber to a particular publication. In other cases a user may see only select
parts of a larger publication that is only available through registration or fee payment.
Because the Internet is constantly changing, some links may have been modified. A few
that are marked are no longer in service. For those sources that do not link, usually
entering the author and article title in a search engine can locate the new URL. As a
researcher I use a page-saving program, Meta Products Inquiry, to save the exact
source at the time it was viewed for fact-checking documentation. Perhaps some day
these can be published as a companion CD.
Preface
1. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, New York: Oxford,
1966, pp. xii–xiii.
2. Wallace Stegner, ‘‘Bernard DeVoto,’’ A Literary History of the American
West, Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1998. http://www2.tcu.edu/
depts/prs/amwest/html/wl0899.html
Chapter 1
1. Thomas Krainz, Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Social Welfare
in the American West, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005,
pp. 1, 232–236.
226 & Notes
2. Hubert Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man, Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, 1976, p. 50.
3. Paul Wellstone, ‘‘A New American Century of Justice,’’ Prepared Remarks
before the Iowa AFL-CIO Convention, Waterloo, Iowa, August 12, 1998. http://
www.geocities.com/~demcrat/newcentury.html
4. Thomas Evan and Stuart Taylor, Jr., ‘‘Center Court,’’ Newsweek, July 1,
2003, p. 49. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmnew/is_200307/ai_kepm
308664
5. ‘‘A Divided Nation: Background,’’ Newshour, November 6, 2003. http://www
.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec03/divided_bg_11-06.html
6. David Broder, ‘‘Can Nation’s Values Bridge a Growing Divide?’’ The Wash-
ington Post, November 26, 2003, A25. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-
dyn?pagename¼article&contentId¼A14636-2003Nov25&notFound¼true
7. William Novelli, ‘‘Where Are Our Leaders?’’ AARP Bulletin, June, 2005,
p. 24.
8. ‘‘Politics as Warfare,’’ The Economist Survey on American Exceptionalism,
The Economist, November 6, 2003. http://economist.com/surveys/displayStory
.cfm?Story_id¼2172066
9. Juliette Eilperin and Albert B. Crenshaw, ‘‘House Democrats Storm Out of
Ways and Means Committee,’’ washingtonpost.com, July 18, 2003. http://www
.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11104-2003Jul18?language¼printer
PART ONE
Chapter 2
1. Amy Geier Edgar, ‘‘Thurmond’s Hometown Mourns Former Senator’s
Death,’’ The State.com, June 27, 2003. http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/
6180540.htm
2. Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–
1968, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Frederickson presents a strong
case for Thurmond as a moderate. http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/frederickson
_dixiecrat.html
3. Jeanne Meserve, Bruce Morton, and Matt Smith, ‘‘Longtime Senator Left
Larger-Than-Life Mark on South, Congress,’’ CNN.com Special Report. http://
edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/special.strom.thurmond/stories/bio/
4. Hubert Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man, Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1976, p. 459.
5. Robert Ferrell, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, New
York: Harper, 1980, p. 142.
6. John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, ‘‘Platform of the States Rights Democratic
Party,’’ The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showplatforms.php?platindex¼SR1948
Notes & 227
7. Juan Williams, ‘‘The Many Masks of Thurgood Marshall,’’ The Masks

of Thurgood Marshall. http://www.thurgoodmarshall.com/speeches/masks_article
.htm
8. ‘‘Thurmond Holds Senate Record for Filibustering,’’ Fox News.com, June 27,
2003. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,90552,00.html
9. Meserve.
10. Jonathan Bean, review of Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy by
Dean Kotlowski, Business History Review, Summer, 2002. http://64.233.167.104/
search?q¼cache:Wxe8Irh9jN0J:www.hbs.edu/bhr/archives/bookreviews/76/2002sum
merjbean.pdfþsouthernþstrategyþnixon&hl¼en; Pat Buchanan, ‘‘The Neocons and
Nixon’s Southern Strategy,’’ The American Cause.org. http://www.theamericancause
.org/pattheneoconsandnixons.htm
11. Wayne Washington, ‘‘Dent Abandoned Politics and Embraced Religion,’’ The
State.com, January 23, 2005. http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/
10712139.htm
12. ‘‘GOP Leader Under Fire,’’ Newshour, December 12, 2002. http://www
.pbs.org/newshour/bb/congress/july-dec02/lott_12-12.html
13. Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans, Cambridge,
MA: Belknap, 2002.
14. Ronald Reagan, ‘‘Inaugural Address: January 20, 1981,’’ Ronald Reagan’s
Major Speeches, 1964–89, The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. http://www
.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1981/12081a.htm
15. James Walls, ‘‘Testimony,’’ 38th Congress, 1st Session, House of Represen-
tatives Report No. 65. http://www.adena.com/adena/usa/cw/cw130.htm
16. The Southern Manifesto, Congressional Record, 84th Congress Second Ses-
sion. Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956). Washington, DC: Governmental Printing
Office, 1956, 4459–4460. http://www.strom.clemson.edu/strom/manifesto.html
17. Frederickson.
18. ‘‘Government for the People,’’ Republican Platform 2000, CNN.com. http://
www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/conventions/republican/features/platform.00/
19. ‘‘Judicial Reform: Courts That Work, Laws That Make Sense,’’ Republican
Platform 2000.
20. William Graham Sumner, ‘‘On a New Philosophy: That Poverty is the Best
Policy,’’ What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, University of Virginia Xroads.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/sumner1.html
21. ‘‘Quotes by John D. Rockefeller,’’ Said What? http://www.saidwhat.co.uk/
quotes/j/john_d_rockefeller_2366.php
22. Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘‘Dissenting,’’ Lochner v. New York, ’Lectric Law
Library. http://www.lectlaw.com/files/case37.htm
23. Richard Hofstader, Social Darwinism in American Thought, Boston: Beacon
Press, 1992, p. 172.
24. Manifesto.
25. Frederickson.
228 & Notes
26. ‘‘Middle Class Squeeze,’’ Now, December 13, 2002. http://www.pbs.org/now/

politics/middleclass.html
27. Paul Krugman, ‘‘For Richer,’’ The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive, origi-
nally published in The New York Times, October 20, 2002. http://www.pkarchive
.org/economy/ForRicher.html
28. ‘‘Middle Class Squeeze.’’
29. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, eserver.org. http://
eserver.org/18th/burke.txt
30. Manifesto.
Chapter 3
1. Billy Pison, ‘‘Trends in Baptists Policy,’’ Baptist History and Heritage Society.
http://www.baptisthistory.org/contissues/pinson.htm
2. James Heflin, ‘‘Wonder-Working Power,’’ Information Clearing House, April
18, 2003. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2993.htm
3. ‘‘The Baptist Faith and Message,’’ SBC.com. http://www.sbc.net/bfm/bfm2000
.asp
4. Ibid.
5. ‘‘The Baptist Faith and Message.’’
6. Greg Warner, ‘‘Jimmy Carter Says He Can No Longer Be Associated with the
SBC,’’ Baptist Standard, October 23, 2000. http://www.baptiststandard.com/2000/
10_23/pages/carter.html
7. ‘‘Land Says His Exclusion Proves CNN Is ‘Slanting the News’ on SBC,’’
Baptist Standard, June 23, 1999. http://www.baptiststandard.com/1999/6_23/pages/
land.html
8. Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative
Crusade, New York: Touchstone, 2000.
9. Joel Spring, Political Agendas for Education from the Christian Coalition to
the Green Party, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997, questia.com.
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?action¼getPage&docId¼28594419&offset¼1
10. Grover Norquist, ‘‘Dobson and the GOP,’’ Americans for Tax Reform, July,
1988. http://www.atr.org/press/editorials/tas/tas0798.html
11. ‘‘Independent Ads: The National Security Political Action Committee ‘Willie
Horton,’ ’’ InsidePolitics.org. http://www.insidepolitics.org/ps111/independentads
.html
12. Norquist.
13. Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission,
Supreme Court of the United States, 395 U.S. 367, Electronic Privacy Information
Center. http://www.epic.org/free_speech/red_lion.html
14. ‘‘Republican Contract with America,’’ www.house.gov. http://www.house
.gov/house/Contract/CONTRACT.html
15. Ibid.
Notes & 229
16. ‘‘A ‘Contract with the Family.’—Includes Related Information on the Contract
with the American Family,’’ Christian Century, May 24, 1995. http://www.24hoursch
olar.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n18_v112/ai_16997239#continue
17. Spring.
18. ‘‘Winning the Future,’’ NEWT.ORG. http://newt.org/index.php?src¼news&
prid¼882&category¼Winning%20the%20Future
19. Gail Sheehy, ‘‘The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich,’’ Vanity Fair, September
1995. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newt/vanityfair1.html
20. ‘‘Representative Tom DeLay (R-Texas),’’ Online NewsHour. http://www
.pbs.org/newshour/108th/bio_delay.html
21. Ibid.
22. Paul Krugman, ‘‘Some Crazy Guy,’’ The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive.
http://www.pkarchive.org/column/061303.html
23. Robert Dreyfuss, ‘‘DeLay, Incorporated,’’ The Texas Observer, February 4,
2000. http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID¼142
24. Ibid.
25. ‘‘Two Heads of Tom Delay,’’ Religious Freedom Coalition of the Southeast.
http://www.tylwythteg.com/enemies/tom.html
26. Ibid.
27. ‘‘Rep. DeLay Calls Faith-Based Initiative an Opportunity to ‘Rebuke Church-State
Separation,’ ’’ Americans United for Church and State.org. http://www.au.org/site/News2
?page¼NewsArticle&id¼6045&abbr¼pr&security¼1002&news_iv_ctrl¼1381
28. Tom DeLay, ‘‘Be Not Afraid,’’ National Review Online, July 30, 2003. http://
www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-delay073003.asp
29. Jan Jarboe Russell, ‘‘DeLay Poisons Mideast Peace Process,’’ Seattle Post
Intelligencer, August 14, 2003. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/134877_
russell14.html
30. ‘‘Christian Zionist DeLay’s Foreign Meddling,’’ Los Angeles Times, August 2,
2003. http://www.sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/08/1632098.php
31. ‘‘Education and Opportunity: Leave No American Behind,’’ Republican Plat-
form 2000, cnn.com. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/conventions/republican/
features/platform.00/#12
32. Ibid.
33. George W. Bush, ‘‘The State of The Union 2003,’’ whitehouse.gov. http://
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html
34. ‘‘Evolution Revolution,’’ Evolution: Religion, PBS.org. http://www.pbs.org/
wgbh/evolution/religion/revolution/1990.html
35. The Sword of the Lord, October 11, 2002. http://www.swordofthelord.com/
sword.pdf
36. John R. Rice, ‘‘What Was Back of Kennedy’s Murder?’’ Sword of the
Lord Publishers, 1968. http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/history/wc_period/Pre-WCR_
reactions_to_assassination/Pre-WCR_reactions_by_the_right/Rice—What_was_back_
of.html
230 & Notes
37. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, ‘‘The Falwell Follies,’’ www.
Au.org. http://www.au.org/site/News2?page¼NewsArticle&id¼5839&abbr¼cs_
38. ‘‘Sermons,’’ baptistfire.com. http://www.baptistfire.com/gospel/pressler.shtml
39. Vanessa Gezari, ‘‘Rural Pa. Town Latest Battleground in Evolution Debate,’’
Arizona Daily Star, October 9, 2005. http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/
96955.php
40. Dover Area School District, ‘‘Biology Statement.’’ http://www.dover.k12
.pa.us/doversd/site/default.asp
41. Laurie Goodstein, ‘‘Evolution Slate Outpolls Rivals,’’ The New York
Times, November 9, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/national/09dover
.html
42. ‘‘Therapy of the masses,’’ The Economist Survey on American Exception-
alism, The Economist. http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?
Story_id¼2172112
Chapter 4
1. Bob Costantini, ‘‘inDecision 2000: Bush v. Gore Disorder in the Court,’’
evote.com. http://www.evote.com/features/2000-12/campscotus.asp
2. Jamin Raskin, ‘‘Bandits in Black Robes,’’ Washington Monthly, March 2001.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0103.raskin.html; Vincent Bugliosi,
‘‘None Dare Call It Treason,’’ The Nation, February 5, 2001. http://www.thenation.com/
doc/20010205/bugliosi
3. ‘‘The Florida Election Cases,’’ United States Supreme Court, p. 32 of the PDF
file. http://www.supremecourtus.gov/florida.html
4. ‘‘Bush v. Gore Commentary,’’ The Brookings Institution. http://www.brookings
.edu/dybdocroot/press/companion/bushvgore/other/excerpts.htm
5. ‘‘The Florida Election Cases,’’ pp. 11 (PDF 24), 1 (PDF 24), and 7 (PDF 32).
6. Al Kamen, ‘‘Miami ‘Riot’ Squad: Where Are They Now?’’ The Washington
Post, January 24, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31074-
2005Jan23
7. Tim Padgett, ‘‘Mob Scene in Miami,’’ Time, November 26, 2000. http://www
.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,89450,00.html
8. ‘‘Florida Recount,’’ Democrats.com. http://archive.democrats.com/preview
.cfm?term¼Florida%20Recount
9. McLaughlin Group, December 23–24, 2000. http://www.mclaughlin.com/
library/transcript.asp?id¼186
10. Robert Parry, ‘‘Bush’s Conspiracy to Riot,’’ consortiumnews.com. http://
www.consortiumnews.com/2002/080502a.html
11. Ibid.
12. Go to the IRS website then enter Bush Chaney Recount Fund. The par-
ticular form is 8872. http://www.irs.gov/charities/political/article/0,,id¼109644,00
.html
Notes & 231
13. John Lantigua, ‘‘Miami’s Rent-a-Riot,’’ salon.com, November 28, 2000.

http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/28/miami/; Gigot Paul, ‘‘Miami
Heat,’’ WSJ.com, November 23, 2000. http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/
pgigot/?id¼65000673
14. Gigot.
15. Lantigua.
16. Gigot.
17. Ibid.
18. Lantigua.
19. Ibid.
20. Gigot.
21. Parry.
22. ‘‘Rights Commission’s Report on Florida Election,’’ washingtonpost.com, June
5, 2001. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/ccrdraft060401
.htm
23. E. J. Dionne, Jr., and William Kristol, Bush v. Gore, Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press, 2001, p. 97.
24. Gigot.
25. Lantigua.
26. ‘‘Voting Rights,’’ WomenMatter.net. http://www.womenmatter.net/voting_
whatstheproblem.htm
27. Kamen.
28. ‘‘Rights Commission’s Report on Florida Election.’’
29. Greg Palast, ‘‘The Great Florida Ex-Con Game,’’ Harpers Magazine, March
1, 2002. http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid¼122&row¼1
30. ‘‘Bush v. Gore Commentary.’’
31. ‘‘The Florida Election Cases,’’ pp. 4–5.
32. Bev Harris was among the first to raise the issue. See her website: http://www
.blackboxvoting.org/ The issue of voting machine irregularities is also discussed at:
http://www.bradmesser.com/J2_BonusPages/VoteProbsSalon.html; and http://www
.verifiedvoting.org/index.php
33. ‘‘Resolution on Electronic Voting,’’ verifiedvotingfoundation.org. http://www
.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id¼5028
34. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/index.php
35. ‘‘The 2004 Scientific American 50 Award: Policy Leaders,’’ Scientific Amer-
ican, November 11, 2004. http://sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID¼000E616F-
D6AD-118F-91DD83414B7F0000
36. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
37. Sandeep S. Atwal, ‘‘How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election,’’
Scoop Independent News. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00147.htm
38. ‘‘Bush v. Gore Commentary.’’ http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/press/
companion/bushvgore/other/excerpts.htm
39. Dionne and Kristol, pp. 302, 305.
232 & Notes
Chapter 5
1. Michael Fitzgerald, ‘‘Dixie Chicks Axed by Clear Channel,’’ Jacksonville
Business Journal, March 18, 2003. http://jacksonville.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/
stories/2003/03/17/daily14.html
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Breuse Hickman, ‘‘Dixie Chicks Get Last Laugh,’’ Florida Today. http://
www.politicscafe.com/forum/index.php?board¼5;action¼display;threadid¼930
5. ‘‘Corporate: Know the Facts,’’ Clear Channel. http://www.clearchannel.com/
Corporate/corporate_ktf.aspx
6. ‘‘Tears on TV: Dixie Chicks Explain Bush Bashing,’’ Drudge Report, April 23,
2003. http://www.drudgereport.com/dixie.htm
7. ‘‘Apology from Natalie Maines,’’ The Dixie Chiks. http://www.thespeciousre
port.com/2003_dixiechicks.html
8. Wayne Barrett, ‘‘Bush’s Voice of America,’’ The Village Voice Online. http://
www.villagevoice.com/issues/0314/barrett.php
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Michael Copps, ‘‘Copps Statement on Commission Proposal of Statutory
Maximum Forfeiture against Clear Channel Communications,’’ fcc.gov. http://www
.fcc.gov/commissioners/copps/statements2004.html
12. Brooks Boliek, ‘‘Dixie Chicks’ Radio Ban on Senate Panel Hit List,’’ Holly
woodReporter.com, July 9, 2003. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_
display.jsp?vnu_content_id¼1930521
13. James Fallows, ‘‘The Age of Murdoch,’’ The Atlantic, August 2003. http://
www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/09/fallows.htm
14. Ibid.
15. David Walsh, ‘‘Fox News Chief Doubled as Political Adviser to Bush,’’ Rense
.com. http://www.rense.com/general32/fox.htm
16. Fallows.
17. ‘‘Independent Ads: The National Security Political Action Committee ‘Willie
Horton,’ ’’ insidepolitics.org. http://www.insidepolitics.org/ps111/independentads
.html
18. Robert Greenwald and Alexandra Kitty, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War
on Journalism, New York: Disinformation, 2005. http://www.outfoxed.org/
19. ‘‘Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,’’ The PIPA/Knowledge Networks
Poll. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/primarysources.htm; and http://www
.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf
20. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, ‘‘News Audiences
Increasingly Politicized,’’ June 8, 2004. http://people-press.org/reports/display
.php3?ReportID¼215
21. Ibid.
Notes & 233
22. Fallows.
23. Ibid.
24. United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (1948), Hollywood
Renegades Archive. http://www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/paramountdoc_1948
supreme.htm
25. Ibid.
26. ‘‘List of Songs Deemed Inappropriate after September 11 by Clear Channel,’’
Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_deemed_inappropriate_
after_Sept._11_by_Clear_Channel
27. ‘‘The Doors in History: 26 February.’’ http://history.waiting-forthe-sun.net/
Pages/February/26_february.html; Eric D. Nuzum, Parental Advisory: Music Cen-
sorship in America. http://ericnuzum.com/banned/incidents/50s.html
28. ‘‘House approves roll back of new media ownership rule,’’ Online News-
Hour, July 23, 2003. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/media_watch/july-dec03/
fcc_7-23.html
29. Jonathan Adelstein, ‘‘Citizen Kane for the 21st Century? The Defining Mo-
ment for Media Ownership,’’ fcc.gov. http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners/adelstein/;
and http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Digest/2003/dd030502.html (DOC-
234045A1.pdf)
30. Ibid.
31. Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission,
Supreme Court of the United States, 395 U.S. 367, Electronic Privacy Information
Center. http://www.epic.org/free_speech/red_lion.html
32. Adelstein, ‘‘Citizen Kane for the 21st Century?’’
33. Jonathan Adelstein, ‘‘Big Macs and Big Media: The Decision to Supersize,’’
The Media Institute. http://www.mediainstitute.org/Speeches/adelstein_speech
.html
34. Michael Copps, ‘‘Copps Statement,’’ fcc.gov. http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/
documents.html
35. Michael Powell, ‘‘Powell Statement,’’ fcc.gov, p. 2. http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/
documents.html
36. ‘‘Powell Statement,’’ p. 4.
37. Report and Order,’’ fcc.gov, p. 13. http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/documents
.html
38. ‘‘Copps Statement,’’ fcc.gov, pp. 1, 3. http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/documents
.html
39. ‘‘Adelstein Statement,’’ fcc.gov, pp. 1, 5. http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/
documents.html
40. William Safire, ‘‘Regulate the FCC,’’ The New York Times, June 16, 2003,
p. A-23. http://www.nrcdxas.org/articles/FCC061703a.html
41. ‘‘Congress moves to overturn new media ownership rules,’’ Online News-
Hour, July 16, 2003. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/media_watch/july-dec03/
fcc_7-16.html
234 & Notes
42. ‘‘Stop the FCC, Read Below,’’ RGTV Home. http://www.roguetv.org/

News.asp?NewsID¼12
43. Frank Ahrens, ‘‘Senators Move to Block New Media Ownership Rules,’’ The
Washington Post, July 16, 2003, p. E01. http://www.orbicom.uqam/ca/in_focus/
news/archives/2003_juillet/16_juil_2003.html
44. Katy Boss, ‘‘FCC Deregulation Attracts Criticism,’’ Grand Valley Lanthorn,
August 8, 2003. http://72.14.203.104/search?q¼cache:3TmDVdsPmT8J:owa.benton
.org/listserv/wa.exe%3FA2%3Dind0308%26L%3Dbenton-compolicy%26F%3DI
%26S%3D%26P%3D810þ%22katyþbossþ%22þgrandþvalleyþlanthorn&hl¼
en&gl¼us&ct¼clnk&cd¼1; and http://marx.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-1/2003w33/
msg00068.htm
PART TWO
Chapter 6
1. Michael Silverman, ‘‘Pedro: Racist Press Bashes Sosa,’’ Boston Herald, June 6,
2003. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/bostonherald/344605241.html?did¼344605241&
FMT¼ABS&FMTS¼FT&date¼Junþ6%2Cþ2003&author¼MICHAELþSILVER
MAN&pub¼BostonþHerald&desc¼BASEBALL%3BþPedro%3AþRacistþpressþ
bashesþSosa
2. Jose de Jesus Ortiz, ‘‘An Issue of Interpretation,’’ Houston Chronicle, June 14,
2003. This is a textbook example of why media diversity matters. http://www
.chron.com/content/archive, then search for author and title.
3. Hal McCoy, ‘‘Language Can Be an Unfair Barrier,’’ The Cincinnati Post, June
23, 2003. http://www.cincypost.com/2003/06/23/mccoy06-23-2003.html
4. Neil Hayes, ‘‘Steroids Era Has Distorted Baseball Numbers,’’ MSNBC.com,
August 1, 2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7783162/
5. T. J. Mathews, Dr. Fay Menacker, and Marian F. McDorman, ‘‘Infant
Mortality Statistics from the 2002 Period Linked by Birth/Infant Death Data Set,’’
National Vital Statistics Reports, vol. 53, number 10. November 24, 2004, pp. 1, 4.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr53_10.pdf
6. ‘‘Infant Mortality and Life Expectancy for Selected Countries, 2005,’’ in-
foplease, September 8, 2005. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html
7. ‘‘Annual Demographic Survey: 2002,’’ Current Population Survey, Bureau of
Labor Statistics and Bureau of the Census. http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032003/
hhinc/new03_000.htm
8. ‘‘U.S. Unemployment rates by Selected Characteristics, 1960–2002,’’ The
World Almanac and Book of Facts 2003, New York: Almanac Books, 2003, p. 143.
9. C. Lewis Kincannon, ‘‘United States Population,’’ Almanac, p. 395.
10. Minnesota Department of Education, 2004 MARSS Manual, Appendix D.
11. ‘‘Memorable Quotes from Gangs of New York,’’ IMBd.com. http://us
.imdb.com/title/tt0217505/quotes
Notes & 235
12. http://www.ellisisland.com/
13. Emma Lazarus, ‘‘The ‘New Colossus,’ ’’ nps.gov. http://www.nps.gov/stli/
newcolossus/index.html
14. ‘‘Stalkers Guide to International Migration,’’ pstalker.com. http://pstalker
.com/migration/mg_immig_1.htm
15. George J. Borjas, ‘‘The Economics of Immigration,’’ Economic Literature,
December 1994, pp. 1667–1717. http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~.GBorjas.Academic
.Ksg/publications_for_download.html
16. ‘‘5 Immigration Myths,’’ xoom.it. http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/broccad
2000/immigrazione/foschi/miti.htm
17. Nick Anderson and Peter M. Warren, Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1997.
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/grads/macswan/LAT30.htm
18. Pat Kossan, ‘‘Activist for English Immersion Injects Feud into Arizona Race,’’
Arizona Republic, July 16, 2002. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/
JWCRAWFORD/AR11.htm
19. Phyllis Schlafly, ‘‘A Conservative Agenda For 2001,’’ eagleform.org. http://
www.eagleforum.org/column/2001/jan01/00-01-10.shtml
20. Jim Boulet, Jr., ‘‘GOP Draft Platform: Kids Lose,’’ National Revue Online.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment072800d.html
21. ‘‘Klingon Interpreter,’’ snopes.com. http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/
klingon.asp
22. Nancy Roman, ‘‘Gingrich Lays Out Goals to Reform Government,’’ The
Washington Times, January 6, 1998, p. A-1. http://www.englishfirst.org/be/newt&
be198.htm
23. ‘‘The ‘Hispanization’ of America,’’ Multicultural Associates.net. http://www
.mculture.net/articles/article_hispanization.html
24. Loui Olivas, ‘‘Hispanic Demographics,’’ a presentation to ASU COD, De-
cember 9, 1999. http://courses.ed.asu.edu/glass/olivas/index.htm
25. ‘‘Texas Redistricting Map.’’ http://www.comdig2.de/test/images/planC01151_
MAP1928356439before.jpg
26. ‘‘Survey Finds Hispanics Optimistic about Direction of the Country and Their
Future,’’ LULAC. http://www.lulac.org/programs/civic/voter/univpres.html
27. Ann W. Clutter and Ruben D. Nieto, ‘‘Understand Hispanic Culture,’’ Ohio
State University Fact Sheet, HYG-5237-00. http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/
5237.html
28. Tom Knott, ‘‘Sosa Whining: Put a Cork in It,’’ The Washington Times. http://
washtimes.com/sports/20030609-122704-6367r.htm
29. Ira Simmons, ‘‘The Fraud Of Sammy Sosa,’’ Chronwatch, June 7, 2003. http://
www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid¼3000&catcode¼13
30. King Kaufman, ‘‘Sammy Sosa’s Sanity,’’ salon.com, June 5, 2003. http://
www.salon.com/news/sports/col/kaufman/2003/06/05/sosa/index_np.html
31. Geoffrey Norman, ‘‘Put a Cork in It,’’ National Review Online, June 10,
2003. http://www.nationalreview.com/norman/norman061003.asp
236 & Notes
32. ‘‘Our Plan for America,’’ JohnKerry.com. http://www.johnkerry.com/plan/

33. Donald Lambro, ‘‘Republicans draw Hispanic voters from Democrats,’’
hacer.org. http://www.hacer.org/current/US017.php
34. Jorge Ramos, The Latino Wave: How Hispanics Are Transforming Politics in
America, New York: HarperCollins, 2005, p. 1.
35. Domenico Maceri, ‘‘Bush’s Español: Not Good, but Pleases Latino
Audiences,’’ hispanicvista.com. http://www.hispanicvista.com/html/091602maceri.
htm
36. Ibid.
37. ‘‘2000 Democratic Platform Supports Bilingual Education and English as
‘Our’ Common Language, Self-Determination Based on Federally Defined Status
Options,’’ Puerto-Rico Herald. http://www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/vol4n33/
DemPlatform-en.shtml
38. Ramos, p. 2.
39. Ceril Shagrin, ‘‘Why Hispanics Prefer Spanish-Language Television,’’
marketingymedios.com. http://www.marketingymedios.com/marketingymedios/search/
article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id¼1000944718
40. Don Wade, ‘‘Different Standard Does Exist,’’ GoMemphis.com, June 8, 2003.
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product¼CA&p_theme¼ca&p_
action¼search&p_maxdocs¼200&p_text_search-0¼Don%20AND%20Wade,%
20AND%20Different%20AND%20Standard%20AND%20Does%20AND%20
Exist,&s_dispstring¼Don%20Wade,%20Different%20Standard%20Does%
20Exist,%20AND%20date(all)&p_perpage¼10&p_sort¼YMD_date:D&xcal_use
weights¼no
Chapter 7
1. Winona LaDuke, ‘‘Indigenous Mind,’’ resurgence.org. http://www.resur
gence.org/resurgence/articles/laduke.htm
2. Gerald Vizenour, anishinabe adisokan, Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1970, p. 10.
3. ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Ralph Nader’s Candidacy,’’ StopNader.com. (site no
longer active) http://www.stopnader.com/
4. Elizabeth Schulte, ‘‘Are Nader Voters to Blame for Bush?’’ Socialist Worker
Online, December 2, 2002, p. 7. See: http://www.socialistworker.org/2002-2/432/
432_07_Nader.shtml
5. Robert Kuttner, ‘‘Al Gore, the Populist,’’ The American Prospect, July 24,
2000. http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2000/07/kuttner_r_07_24.html
6. ‘‘Liberal vs. Liberal,’’ Online NewsHour, October 24, 2000. http://www
.pbs.org/newshour/bb/election/july-dec00/nader_10-24.html
7. Winona LaDuke, ‘‘Buying the Presidential Debates (2000),’’ The Winona
LaDuke Reader, Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, 2002, p. 258.
8. Ruy Teixeira, ‘‘America’s Forgotten Majority,’’ Speakout.com. http://speakout
.com/activism/opinions/4494-1.html
Notes & 237
9. Winona LaDuke, ‘‘Winona LaDuke’s Acceptance Speech for the Green Party’s
Nomination for Vice President of the United States of America (2000),’’ The Wi-
nona LaDuke Reader, pp. 267–273. http://gos.sbc.edu/l/laduke.html
10. ‘‘White Earth Land Recovery Project,’’ onaway.org. http://www.onaway.org/
indig/ojibwe.htm; The White Earth Land Recovery Project site: http://www.native
harvest.com/
11. Winona LaDuke, ‘‘Namewag,’’ Recovering the Sacred, Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 2005, p. 227.
12. Phyllis Schlafly, ‘‘What’s Wrong with Outcome-Based Education?’’ eagle
forum.org. http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/1993/may93/psrmay93.html
13. Jon Reyhner, ‘‘American Indian/Alaska Native Education: An Overview,’’
American Indian Education. http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/AIE/Ind_Ed.html
14. National Indian Education Association, ‘‘Education Facts and History,’’
niea.org. http://www.niea.org/history/
15. Ibid.
16. National Indian Education Association, ‘‘Bush Administration Blasted on Indian
Education,’’ niea.org. http://www.niea.org/media/news_detail.php?id¼18&catid¼
17. Office of Indian Education Programs, ‘‘BIA Annual Report Card: 2003–
2004.’’ Bureau of Indian Affairs. http://www.oiep.bia.edu/
18. ‘‘National Educational Statistics and Other Equity Indicators,’’ The Mid-
Atlantic Equity Consortium. http://www.maec.org/natstats.html
19. Reyhner.
20. LaDuke acceptance speech.
21. LaDuke, ‘‘The Indigenous Mind.’’
22. ‘‘An Interview with Rose von Thater-Braan: Nourishing a Science for the 21st
Century,’’ Leverage Points, October 28, 2005. http://www.pegasuscom.com/lev
points/RvTBint.html
23. Donella Meadows, ‘‘Whole Earth Models and Systems,’’ Co-evolution
Quarterly, Summer 1982, pp. 98–108.
24. Donella Meadows, ‘‘System Dynamics Meets the Press,’’ context.org. http://
www.context.org/ICLIB/IC23/Meadows.htm
25. ‘‘An Interview with Rose von Thater-Braan.’’
26. LaDuke, ‘‘Namewag,’’ p. 228.
27. ‘‘Christ-Centered Curriculum,’’ JOY Center of Learning. http://www.joy
center.on.ca/menujs.html?schools.htm
28. ‘‘An Interview with Rose von Thater-Braan.’’
29. Jay Walljasper, ‘‘The Party Crasher,’’ City Pages, October 11, 2000. http://
www.citypages.com/databank/21/1036/article9043.asp.
Chapter 8
1. Robert Johnson, ‘‘Hellhound on My Tail.’’ http://www.luckymojo.com/blue
shellhoundjohnson.html
238 & Notes
2. Neil McMillen, ‘‘An Oral History with Fannie Lou Hamer’’ Ruleville, Mis-
sissippi, April 14, 1972. Mississippi Oral History Program, the University of Southern
Mississippi. http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/oh/hamertrans.htm
3. Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, 1-104-0-10-1-1-1. These docu-
ments are available online. Documents from this source are referred to as MSC with
the document number. A note to those entering this somewhat confusing realm: the
best way to find the Hamer documents is to enter her name in the name search. To
find the right number in the long list, use the ‘‘find’’ feature on your browser to enter
the number, since the numbers on the page are not in numerical order. http://
www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/archives.html
4. Fannie Lou Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, Jackson, MS: KIPCO, 1967, p. 21.
5. ‘‘Fannie Lou Hamer,’’ SNCC: 1960–1966. http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/hamer
.html
6. McMillen.
7. MSC 10-60-0-32-8-1-1.
8. ‘‘Fannie Lou Hamer: 1917–1977,’’ Minerva Computer Services. http://www
.beejae.com/hamer.htm
9. Ibid.
10. Doc Carney, ‘‘The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission in Its Own
Words . . .’’ patriotnews.com, May 21, 2003. http://country-liberal-party.com/pages/
The_Mississippi_Sovereignty_Commission.htm
11. Ibid.
12. Kevin Sack, ‘‘Mississippi Unseals Files of Agency That Fought Desegrega-
tion,’’ The New York Times, March 18, 1998. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/
projects/ftrials/price&bowers/SovereigntyCommission.html
13. MSC 2-44-2-25-2-1-1.
14. MSC 2-165-5-2-2-1-1.
15. MSC 7-0-8-169-1-1-1.
16. MSC 1-104-0-2-1-1-1.
17. MSC 4-0-4-55-2-1-1.
18. MSC 3-14A-2-105-9-1-1.
19. MSC 1-71-0-7-12-1-1, 13-0-5-28-5-1-1.
20. MSC 2-165-5-23-1-1-1.
21. MSC 6-45-1-20-2-1-125. MSC 2-165-1-6-1-1-1.
22. MSC 2-165-1-49-1-1-1.
23. MSC 2-165-1-49-1-1-1.
24. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, New
York: Penguin, 1994, p. 121.
25. MSC 2-165-1-30-1-1-1.
26. Mills, p. 129.
27. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1999, p. 95.
28. Ibid., p. 94.
Notes & 239
29. Mills, p. 125.

30. MSC 2-165-4-60-6-1-1 and Congressional Record 23394.
31. MSC 2-165-1-44-1-1-1.
32. MSC 2-139-0-47-1-1-1.
33. MSC 2-165-4-95-1-1-1.
39. McMillen.
40. MSC 1-104-0-25-1-1-1.
41. MSC 9-31-10-34-1-1-1.
42. McMillen, The Fannie Lou Hamer Project was created to continue her legacy.
Those interested in learning more can get in touch at http://www.flhp.org
43. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, New York: Bantam,
1987, p. 161.
44. Tom Piazza, ‘‘Wynton Marsalis,’’ Smithsonian, November, 2005, p. 32.
Chapter 9
1. ‘‘Martha Stewart: Biography,’’ Food Network.com. http://www1.foodtv.com/
celebrities/stewartbio/0,3405,,00.html
2. Ed Vuillamy, ‘‘The Flawed Goddess,’’ The Observer, June 23, 2003. http://
observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,742285,00.html
3. ‘‘The Two Faces of Martha,’’ The Economist, April 18, 2002.
4. ‘‘Anti-Martha,’’ FreeMartha.org. http://freemartha.org/links.php?category¼
Anti-Martha&page¼2
5. Donna Lypchuk, ‘‘Martha Stewart Disease,’’ eye weekly, May 11, 1995.
http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_05.11.95/NEWS/nec0511.htm
6. ‘‘Gothic Martha Stewart.’’ http://www.trystancraft.com/martha/
7. ‘‘Cakes Across America Is August 3rd: Sign Martha’s Birthday Card Now,’’
SaveMartha!.com. http://www.savemartha.com/cakes6.html
8. Caitlin Flanagan, ‘‘How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,’’ review of
The Equality Trap by Mary Ann Mason, The Atlantic, March 2004. http://
www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/03/flanagan.htm
9. Mary Ann Mason, ‘‘The Equality Trap,’’ Mary Ann Mason Online. http://
www.grad.berkeley.edu/deans/mason/Eqaulitytrapintro.shtml
10. Micki Moore, ‘‘Marvelous Martha: She’s a Good Thing,’’ Transcribed by
Andrew Ritchie, SaveMartha!.com. http://savemartha.com/indexþ18.html
11. ‘‘Case Study: The European Witch-Hunts, c. 1450–1750,’’ www.gendercide
.org. http://www.gendercide.org/case_witchhunts.html
12. Ibid.
240 & Notes
13. ‘‘ImClone Founder’s Dad in Trouble,’’ CBSNEWS.com, October 10, 2003.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/03/national/main556695.shtml
14. ‘‘United States v. Martha Stewart and Peter Bacanovic, Defendants’’ (referred to
as ‘‘Stewart Indictment’’) CBSNEWS.com. http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/
stewart060404.pdf; http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/03/national/main556
695.shtml
15. Susan McDougal, ‘‘Prison Advice for Martha,’’ ‘‘Imagining Martha’s Prison
Life,’’ the early show, March 8, 2004. http://cbsnews.cbs.com/stories/2004/03/08/
earlyshow/living/main604606.shtml
16. ‘‘The Martha Stewart Scandal: Tempest in a Cuisinart . . . ,’’ SaveMartha!
.com. http://www.savemartha.com/martha_stewart_trial_why.html
17. ‘‘Martha Stewart,’’ Wikipedia.org. The website: http://www.marthatalks
.com/ closed on Stewart’s release. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Stewart
18. Andrew Cohen, ‘‘Prosecuting Martha,’’ CBS News Online edition, June 4,
2003. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/04/news/opinion/courtwatch/main
557026.shtml
19. ‘‘Martha Stewart,’’ ‘‘Campaign Contribution Search: Hall of Fame, Business
Executives,’’ NEWSMEAT.com. http://www.newsmeat.com/ceo_political_donations/
Martha_Stewart.php
20. Oliver North, ‘‘The Democrat Road Map to Peace,’’ townhall.com, June 6,
2003. http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ollienorth/on20030606.shtml
21. Ann Coulter, ‘‘More Slander,’’ Jewish World Review Insight, July 11, 2002.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter071102.asp
22. Thomas Mulligan, ‘‘ ‘Liar’ Stewart Took Advantage of Share Tip-off, Court
Told,’’ theage.com, January 29, 2004. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/
28/1075088087974.html?from¼storyrhs
23. Christine Hauser, ‘‘Opening Arguments Begin at Martha Stewart Trial,’’
The New York Times: Business, January 27, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/
27/business/27CND-MART.html?ex¼1138683600&en¼acacda72c17163bb&ei¼
5070
24. Robert G. Morvillo, ‘‘Opening Argument on Behalf of Martha Stewart’’ (site
closed). http://www.marthatalks.com/trial_update/opening_argument_2.html
25. ‘‘E-Mails Describe Stewart as Quick-Tempered,’’ MSNBC.com, February 6,
2004. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4178853/
26. Henry Blodget, ‘‘What Martha Learned in Prison,’’ Slate, March 3, 2005.
http://www.slate.com/id/2114312/?nav¼navoa
PART THREE
Chapter 10
1. ‘‘Do It Yourself.’’ http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,1101540802,00
.html
Notes & 241
2. Home Depot, ‘‘About Our Products,’’ The Home Depot, Inc. http://www.home
depot.com/HDUS/EN_US/corporate/about/our_products.shtml
3. Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘‘Union Members in 2004.’’ http://www.bls.gov/
news.release/union2.nr0.htm
4. ‘‘Election 2004,’’ CNN.com. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/
results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
5. ‘‘Union Members in 2004.’’
6. ‘‘Great Depression,’’ Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Dep
ression
7. ‘‘Great Depression Narratives,’’ Palo Alto College, San Antonio, Texas. http://
www.accd.edu/pac/history/hist1302/OralHistoryGD.htm
8. ‘‘Great Depression Narratives.’’
9. Studs Terkel, Hard Times, New York: Avon Books, 1970, pp. 67–68.
10. ‘‘Bill Branch,’’ American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’
Project, 1936–1940, Library of Congress. Enter ‘‘Great Depression’’ or ‘‘unemploy-
ment’’ in search for some fascinating materials. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/
D?wpa:1:./temp/~ammem_iHBY::
11. Terkel, pp. 263, 485.
12. ‘‘The Bonus March,’’ MacArthur: The American Experience, pbs.org. http://
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX89.html
13. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1948, p. 66.
14. Terkel, p. 295.
15. Sherwood, pp. 81, 83.
16. Sherwood, pp. 20–21.
17. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, ‘‘Economic Inequality in the United
States,’’ FRBSF Economic Letter, 97-03, January 31, 1997. http://www.frbsf.org/
econrsrch/wklyltr/el97-03.html
18. ‘‘2004 Gini Coefficients in Selected Countries,’’ Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia
.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#Development_of_Gini_coefficients_in_the_US_over_time
19. ‘‘Downward Mobility,’’ Now, October 24, 2003. http://www.pbs.org/now/
politics/executive2.html
20. Ibid.
21. Sherwood, p. 926.
22. Nicholas Johnson, Jennifer Schiess, and Joseph Llobrera, ‘‘State Revenues
Have Fallen Dramatically: Tax Increases So Far Have Failed to Fill the Gap,’’ Center
on Budget and Policy Studies, November 28, 2003. http://www.cbpp.org/10-22-
03sfp.htm
Chapter 11
1. Lewis Mumford, The City in History, New York: Harcourt, 1961,
p. 494.
242 & Notes
2. John C. LaRue, Jr., ‘‘Three Church Growth Myths,’’ Leadership Journal.net,

February 21, 2001. http://www.christianitytoday.com/leaders/newsletter/2001/cln
10221.html
3. Randall M. Miller and William Pencak, ed., Pennsylvania: A History of the
Commonwealth, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002. http://www
.psupress.org/Justataste/samplechapters/justataste_miller-pencak6.html
4. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 21.
5. ‘‘Your Reliable Conservative Choice on Public Schools,’’ Citizens for Excel-
lence in Education. http://www.nace-cee.org/ceehome.htm
6. Ann Bradley, ‘‘Requiem for a Reform,’’ Education Week, June 1, 1994. See also
Regie Routman, ‘‘Littleton, Colorado: A Conflict in Beliefs and Values,’’ Literacy at
the Crossroads, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996. http://www.edweek.org/ew/arti
cles/1994/06/01/36little.h13.html?querystring¼ann%20bradley%20Requiem%20for
%20Reform
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Abby Weizltraub, ‘‘School for Stealth Candidates,’’ Westchester Coalition for
Legal Abortion. http://www.choicematters.org/95-summer/su95-11.html see also
Mozzochi, Jonathan, Gillian Leichtling, and Steven Gardiner, ‘‘Stealth: The Chris-
tian Coalition Takes San Diego.’’ http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/FTR/stealth.html
11. ‘‘Your Reliable Conservative Choice on Public Schools.’’
12. Bradley.
13. Routman, p. 29.
14. Ibid., p. 26.
15. Bradley.
16. Routman, p. 29.
17. Thomas Jefferson, ‘‘Letter to Richard Price, Paris, January 8, 1789,’’ Jefferson,
Thomas, 1743–1826. Letters, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id¼JefLett.sgm&images¼images/modeng
&data¼/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag¼public&part¼73&division¼div1
18. ‘‘Mission Statement,’’ Jerry Falwell Ministries. http://www.falwell.com/?a¼
about
19. Jerry Falwell, ‘‘How to Live a Successful Christian Life,’’ Falwell.com. http://
www.falwell.com/?a¼howto&chapter¼10
20. Ehsan, ‘‘Gnostic and Spiritual Aspects of Imam Khomeini,’’ AhlulBayt Dis-
cussion Forum, April 1, 2003. http://www.shiachat.com/forum/lofiversion/index
.php/t7338.html
21. Falwell.
22. Ehsan.
23. ‘‘Joycelyn Elders and Jerry Falwell Debate Role of Schools, Parents in Sex
Education on CNN’s ‘Crossfire,’ ’’ Kaiser Daily Reproductive Health Report,
Notes & 243
www.kff.org. http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/print_category.cfm?dr_
cat¼2&dr_DateTime¼04-25-01
24. Tom DeLay, ‘‘Why Kids Murder Kids,’’ GOPtoday.com, originally appeared
in The Washington Post, March 27, 2000. http://www.gopwhip.org/html/news
article1.cfm?news_id¼21
25. Charles Colson, ‘‘Why Tolerance Turns to Intolerance,’’ PCANews.com.
http://new.crosswalk.com/news/1138342.html
26. ‘‘Real Education Reform: Strengthening Accountability and Empowering
Parents,’’ 2000 Republican Platform, CNN.com. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/
2000/conventions/republican/features/platform.00/#13
27. Council for American Private Education, ‘‘Private School Enrollment Con-
tinues to Climb,’’ Facts and Studies. http://www.capenet.org/facts.html
28. ‘‘About ACSI,’’ ACSI.org. http://www.acsi.org/web2003/default.aspx?ID¼
1609
29. ‘‘State of Connecticut and the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut,
Plaintiffs v. Margaret Spellings, in Her Official Capacity as Secretary of Educa-
tion, Defendant,’’ npr.org. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId¼
4810586
30. Diane Orson, ‘‘Connecticut Challenges ‘No Child Left Behind,’ ’’ npr.org.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId¼4810586
31. Ibid.
Chapter 12
1. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, New York: Oxford University Press,
1985, pp. 283–284.
2. ‘‘A Nation Apart,’’ The Economist, ‘‘Survey on American Exceptionalism,’’
The Economist, November 6, 2003. http://economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?
Story_id¼2172066
3. Lewis Mumford, The City in History, New York: Harcourt, 1961, p. 486.
4. Jackson, p. 233.
5. Ibid., p. 293.
6. Ibid., p. 215. See his chapter, ‘‘Federal Subsidy and the Suburban Dream,’’ for
an excellent discussion of how government policy molded suburban growth.
7. Ibid., pp. 213–214.
8. Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN),
‘‘Predatory Lending in Arizona: The Exclusion of Low-Income and Minority
Neighborhoods from the Economic Mainstream.’’ ACORN.org. http://www.acorn
.org/index.php?id¼94
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. William Schneider, ‘‘The Suburban Century Begins,’’ The Atlantic Monthly,
July 1992. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ecbig/schnsub.htm
244 & Notes
12. Schneider, pp. 36, 38.

13. ‘‘A Nation Apart.’’
14. Jacob Weisberg, ‘‘Soccer Mom Nonsense,’’ slate, October 12, 1996. http://
slate.msn.com/id/2255/
15. Ibid.
16. American Demographics, January 1989, p. 21.
17. ‘‘Cluster Analysis Examples,’’ Clustan. http://www.clustan.com/clustering
_examples.html
18. David W. Stockburger, ‘‘Cluster Analysis,’’ Multivariate Statistics: Concepts,
Models, and Applications. http://cheval.vet.gla.ac.uk/kvass/stats/InetPub/wwwroot/
MultiBook/mlt04m.html
19. Amy Kanerva, Kevin Keeker, Kirsten Risden, Eric Schuh, and Mary Czer-
winski, ‘‘Web Usability Research at Microsoft Corporation,’’ research.micososft
.com. http://research.microsoft.com/users/marycz/webchapter.html
20. QEV Analytics, ‘‘What Is . . . QEV?’’ qev.com. http://www.qev.com/what
isqev.PDF
21. ‘‘Zip Code 55303,’’ MyBestSegments.com. http://www.clusterbigip1.claritas
.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp
22. ‘‘Country Squires,’’ MyBestSegments.com.
23. Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, ‘‘Old Labels Just Don’t Stick in 21st
Century,’’ USATODAY.com, December 17, 2003. http://www.usatoday.com/news/
nation/2003-12-16-who-we-are_x.htm
24. Ibid.
25. Robert Scheer, ‘‘A New Low: Pandering to ‘Soccer Moms,’ ’’ The Los Angeles
Times, October 8, 1996. http://www.robertscheer.com/1_natcolumn/96_columns/
100896.htm
26. ‘‘10 Who Made a Mark on Marketing,’’ Advertising Age, December 20, 2004.
http://www.adage.com/paypoints/buyArticle.cms/login?articleId¼47124&auth¼
27. ‘‘Dubious Democracy 2003–2004,’’ fairvote.org. http://www.fairvote.org/
dubdem/overview.htm
28. Dana Milbank and Helen Dewar, ‘‘Cheney Defends Use of Four-Letter
Word,’’ washingtonpost.com, June 26, 2004, p. A04. http://www.washingtonpost
.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6025-2004Jun25.html
Chapter 13
1. Performance Research, ‘‘AT&T Win Official Race With Sprint,’’ performancere
search.com. http://www.researchsponsorship.com/olympic_sponsorship_barcelona.htm
2. John Cleary, ‘‘If Christ Came to the Sidney Olympics . . . Part 4,’’ The Religion
Report. Radio National. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s195324.htm
3. ‘‘Towns Ought to Pass on Vehicle Sponsorship Plan,’’ Blethen Maine News-
papers, July 16, 2003. http://www.centralmaine.com/view/editorials/030716wed_
clin.shtml
Notes & 245
4. Giselle Sotelo, ‘‘Welcome to Mojito, NJ—Buena Vista to Get $5K for Des-
ignation,’’ Vineland, NJ, Daily Journal, April 29, 2004. http://www.thedailyjournal
.com/news/stories/20040429/localnews/315330.html; http://www.buenavistatowns
hip.org/mojito.htm
5. Giles Coren, ‘‘Magazine’s Mutilated Winslet Is One for the Boys,’’
timesonline, January 11, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/2645341.
stm
6. John Long, ‘‘Ethics in the Age of Digital Photography,’’ nppa.org. http://
www.nppa.org/professional_development/self-training_resources/eadp_report/eadp
txt.html
7. ‘‘Humor Is Dead Officially One Millionth Website to Feature Bush Head on
Wrong Body Gag,’’ humorisdead.com. http://www.humorisdead.com/news/bush
head.html
8. Jack Karp, ‘‘Worth a Thousand Lies,’’ TechTV. http://www.g4tv.com/tech
tvvault/features/33784/Worth_a_Thousand_Lies.html
9. ‘‘Army Counters Statement on Saddam,’’ msnbc.com, October 14, 2003.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/934483.asp?0si¼-&cp1¼1
10. ‘‘WTC Guy,’’ ‘‘America’s Mad as Hell Humor Page.’’ http://www.almosta
proverb.com/wtcguy.html£wtcguy
11. ‘‘Photo Gallery,’’ snopes.com. http://www.snopes.com/photos/photos.asp
12. Ken Light, ‘‘The Real Fake,’’ The Digital Journalist.com, March 2004. http://
www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0403/dis_light.html
13. Bill Moyers, ‘‘Address to the National Conference on Media Reform in St.
Louis, Missouri, May 15, 2005.’’ http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid¼05/
05/16/1329245
14. Stephen Labaton, ‘‘Broadcast Chief Violated Laws, Inquiry Finds,’’ The New
York Times, November 16, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/politics/
16broadcast.html?pagewanted¼all
15. Jonah Goldberg, ‘‘Goldberg Variations,’’ The National Review Online,
December 3, 2001. http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg120301.shtml
16. Tom Shales, ‘‘Ex-newsman’s Case Full of Holes.’’ http://www.totalobscurity
.com/mind/news/2002/bias-bashing.htm
17. Greg Toppo, ‘‘Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law,’’ USA
Today, January 17, 2005. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-06-
williams-whitehouse_x.htm
18. Mark Memmott and Jim Drinkard, ‘‘Election Ad Battle Smashes Record in
2004,’’ USA Today, November 24, 2004. http://medialit.med.sc.edu/election_ad_
battle_smashes_record.htm
19. Ibid.
20. Martin Kaplan, Ken Goldstein, and Mathew Hale, Local News Coverage of
the 2004 Campaigns: An Analysis of Nightly Broadcasts in 11 Markets, Los An-
geles: Lear Center Local News Archive, 2005, pp. 19, 10. http://www.learcenter.org/
html/projects/?cm¼news
246 & Notes
21. Martin Kaplan, ‘‘Opening Statement, Lear Center Local News Archive,’’
February 15, 2005. http://www.learcenter.org/pdf/Kaplan021505.pdf
22. Seth Borenstein, ‘‘Alaska Called ‘The Melting Tip of the Iceberg’ GLOBAL
WARNING: State’s Rising Temperatures Are Only a Taste of What’s Coming,’’
Anchorage Daily News, August 30, 2003. http://climateark.org/articles/reader
.asp?linkid¼25313
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
Chapter 14
1. ADCIRC Development Group, ‘‘Example: Hypothetical Hurricane Pam.’’
http://www.nd.edu/~adcirc/pam.htm
2. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), ‘‘Hurricane Pam Exercise
Concludes,’’ FEMA Region 6. http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id¼
13051
3. Louisiana Homeland Security and Preparedness, ‘‘In Case of Emergency.’’
http://www.ohsep.louisiana.gov/newsrelated/incaseofemrgencyexercise.htm
4. ‘‘Hurricane Pam Exercise Concludes.’’
5. Joel K. Bourne, Jr., ‘‘Gone with the Water,’’ National Geographic, October
2004. http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/
6. David R. Baker, ‘‘Thousands Dead, 1 Million Evacuated. Katrina? No, Pam,’’
SouthCoastToday.com, September 12, 2005. http://www.southcoasttoday.com/
daily/09-05/09-12-05/a03wn719.htm
7. Ibid.
8. ‘‘In Case of Emergency.’’
9. Justine Redman, ‘‘Agencies Drilled for ‘Worst-Case Scenario,’ ’’ CNN.com,
September 2, 2005. http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/02/hurricane.drill/
10. Lawrence Jacobs, chair, American Political Science Association Task Force on
Inequality and American Democracy, American Democracy in an Age of Rising
Inequality: Summary Report, p. 4. http://www.apsanet.org/section_256.cfm
11. Ibid., p. 1.
12. Ibid., p. 3.
13. Howard Kurtz, ‘‘Wiped Off the Map, and Belatedly Put Back on It,’’ wash-
ingtonpost.com, September 19, 2005, p. CO1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/18/AR2005091801265.html
14. Cecil Picard, ‘‘District Composite Report 2003–2004: Orleans Parish,’’
Louisiana Department of Education, April 2005. http://www.doe.state.la.us/lde/
pair/1613.html
15. Kurtz.
16. Bernard-Henri Lévy, ‘‘In the Footsteps of Tocqueville (Part V),’’ The Atlantic
Monthly, November 2005. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/bhl-road-trip
17. ‘‘Hurricane Katrina,’’ CNN Special, September 2, 2005.
Notes & 247
18. Jacobs, pp. 6, 7, 8, 14.

19. ‘‘U.S. PRESIDENT/NATIONAL/EXIT POLL,’’ Election Results 2004. http://
www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
20. Ibid.
21. Jacobs, p. 13.
22. Ibid., p. 15.
23. Robert Putnam, ‘‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,’’ Uni-
versity of Virginia Xroads. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/assoc/
bowling.html
24. Eileen Loh Harrist, ‘‘Silver Ballot,’’ Gambit Weekly, August 10, 2004. http://
www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-08-10/news_feat.html
25. ‘‘New Orleans Beset with Voting Snafus,’’ FoxNews.com, November 3, 2004.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137443,00.html
26. ‘‘Parish by Parish List of Voter Machine Problems Called in by Viewers,’’
WWLTV, November 2, 2004, 10:27 A.M. http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/
wwl110204electionmishap.18e9b314.html
27. ‘‘Election 2004: Shoplifting the Presidency?’’ Democracy Now!, November 3,
2004. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid¼04/11/03/1520249
28. Gary Ashwill and Chris Kromm, ‘‘Who Counts the Votes?’’ southern
studies.org. http://www.southernstudies.org/reports/votingmachines-new.htm
29. Harrist.
30. Jacobs, p. 13.
31. The quotes are taken from CNN coverage on Friday, September 2, 2005.
32. ‘‘The O’Reilly Factor,’’ broadcast September 7, 2005.
33. ‘‘Limbaugh Linked New Orleans Humanitarian Disaster to ‘the Welfare and
Entitlement Thinking of Government,’ ’’ Media Matters for America, September 6,
2005. http://mediamatters.org/items/200509060008
34. ‘‘Limbaugh Blames Katrina Victims,’’ Blogcritics.org, September 4, 2005.
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/04/175733.php
35. David Carr, ‘‘More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports,’’ NYTimes.com, Sep-
tember 19, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/19/business/media/19carr.html?
pagewanted¼all
36. Susannah Rosenblatt and James Rainey, ‘‘Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth,
News Accuracy,’’ latimes.com, September 27, 2005. http://www.latimes.com/news/
nationworld/nation/la-na-rumors27sep27,0,5492806,full.story?coll¼la-home-head
lines. The snopes.com urban legends site has over fifty ‘‘urban legends’’ about
Katrina.
37. Carr.
38. Rosenblatt and Rainey.
39. ‘‘President’s Hurricane Recovery Plan Includes Help for Private School
Families,’’ CAPE.org, September 15, 2005. http://www.capenet.org/new.html
40. Kandace Power Graves, ‘‘Educated Choices,’’ Gambit Weekly, September 30,
2003. http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2003-09-30/feat.html
248 & Notes
41. ‘‘Orleans County Private Schools,’’ Private School Review. http://www

.privateschoolreview.com/county_high_schools/stateid/LA/county/22071
42. Kevin McGill, ‘‘New Orleans Schools Open as Private Firm Tries to Tame the
Tumult,’’ A & M in the News, August 18, 2005. http://www.alvarezandmarsal.com/
en/in-the-news.asp?id¼712
43. Picard.
44. Louisiana Department of Education, ‘‘2003–2004 Attendance and Dropout
Rates, Indexes, and Points for 2004–2005 School Accountability,’’ ATTDROP0304
.xls. http://www.doe.state.la.us/lde/pair/2198.asp
45. Picard.
46. ‘‘Religious Conservatives Claim Katrina Was God’s Omen, Punishment for
the United States,’’ Media Matters for America, September 13, 2005. http://media
matters.org/items/200509130004
47. David Foster Wallace, ‘‘Host,’’ The Atlantic, April 2005. http://www.the
atlantic.com/doc/prem/200504/wallace
48. Laura Bush, ‘‘Mrs. Bush’s Remarks after a Visit to St. Bernard Unified
School,’’ First Lady’s Home Page. http://www.whitehouse.gov/firstlady/
49. ‘‘Oil Storm Synopsis,’’ fxnetwork.com. http://www.fxnetwork.com/shows/
originals/oilstorm/main.html
50. Paul Wellstone, The Conscience of a Liberal, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001, p. 29.
51. Winona LaDuke, ‘‘Namewag,’’ Recovering the Sacred, Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 2005, p. 228.
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General
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The Republican Platform 2004. www.gop.com/media/2004platform.pdf
‘‘Rights Commission’s Report on Florida Election.’’ http://www.washingtonpost
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The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/
The Southern Baptist Convention. http://www.sbc.net/default.asp
The Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs. http://www
.strom.clemson.edu/strom/manifesto.html
Sumner, William Graham. ‘‘On a New Philosophy: That Poverty Is the Best Policy.’’
What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, University of Virginia Xroads.
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The Sword of the Lord Publishers. http://www.swordofthelord.com/
United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. http://www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/
paramountdoc_1948supreme.htm
United States Supreme Court. ‘‘The Florida Election Cases.’’ http://www.supreme
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The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive. http://www.pkarchive.org/
verifiedvotingfoundation.org. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/index.php
The White House. http://www.whitehouse.gov/
WomenMatter. http://www.womenmatter.net/index.shtml
Part Two
American Indian Movement. http://www.aimovement.org/
Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Indian Education Programs. http://www.oiep.bia.edu/
Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of the Census. Current Population Survey.
http://www.bls.census.gov/cps/cpsmain.htm
Democratic Platform 2000. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/election/july-dec00/

dem-platform1.html
Eagle Forum (Phyllis Schlafly). http://www.eagleforum.org/
Ellis Island. http://www.ellisisland.com/
English First. http://www.englishfirst.org/
The Fannie Lou Hamer Project (excellent links). http://www.flhp.org
Hispanic Center for Economic Research. http://www.hacer.org/index.php
HispanicVista.com. http://www.hispanicvista.com/html/..%5Cindex.asp
The Internet Movie Database. http://us/imdb.com/
‘‘An Interview with Rose von Thater-Braan: Nourishing a Science for the 21st
Century,’’ Leverage Points, October 28, 2005. http://www.pegasuscom.com/
levpoints/RvTBint.html
JOY Center of Learning. http://www.joycenter.on.ca/menujs.html?schools.htm
The Kerry-Edwards Plan for America. http://www.johnkerry.com/plan/
LaDuke, Winona. ‘‘Indigenous Mind.’’ resurgence.org. http://www.resurgence.org/
resurgence/articles/laduke.htm
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). http://www.lulac.org
Marketing y Medios (Marketing to U.S. Hispanics and Latin America). http://
www.marketingymedios.com/marketingymedios/index.jsp
Martha Stewart. http://www.marthastewart.com/
McMillen, Neil. ‘‘An Oral History with Fannie Lou Hamer.’’ http://www.lib.usm
.edu/~spcol/crda/oh/hamertrans.htm
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/arc
hives.html
Multicultural Associates. http://www.mculture.net/
National Center for Educational Statistics. http://nces.ed.gov/
National Council of La Raza. http://www.nclr.org/
‘‘National Educational Statistics and Other Equity Indicators.’’ The Mid-Atlantic
Equity Consortium. http://www.maec.org/natstats.html
National Indian Education Association. http://www.niea.org/
SaveMartha!.com. http://www.savemartha.com/
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). http://www.ibiblio.org/
sncc/
Texas Redistricting Map. http://www.comdig2.de/test/images/planC01151_MAP
1928356439before.jpg
‘‘United States v. Martha Stewart and Peter Bacanovic, Defendants.’’ http://www
.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/stewart060404.pdf
The White Earth Land Recovery Project. http://www.nativeharvest.com/
Part Three
ADCIRC Development Group. ‘‘Example: Hypothetical Hurricane Pam.’’ http://
www.nd.edu/~adcirc/pam.htm
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-
OWI: 1935–1945. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–
1940. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html
Association of Christian Schools International. http://www.acsi.org/web2003/de
fault.aspx?ID¼1609
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). http://
www.acorn.org/
Borenstein, Seth. ‘‘Alaska Called ‘The Melting Tip of the Iceberg’ GLOBAL
WARNING: State’s Rising Temperatures Are Only a Taste of What’s
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Bourne, Joel K., Jr. ‘‘Gone with the Water.’’ National Geographic, October, 2004.
http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/
Bradley, Ann. ‘‘Requiem for a Reform.’’ Education Week, June 1, 1994. http://
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%20bradley%20Requiem%20for%20Reform
Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/
The Center for Voting and Democracy (fairvote.org). http://www.fairvote.org/
?page¼1
Citizens for Excellence in Education. http://www.nace-cee.org/ceehome.htm
Claritas (Cluster Site). MyBestSegments.com. http://www.clusterbigip1.claritas.com/
MyBestSegments/Default.jsp
Council for American Private Education. http://www.capenet.org/
DeLay, Tom. ‘‘Why Kids Murder Kids.’’ GOPtoday.com. http://www.gopwhip.org/
html/newsarticle1.cfm?news_id¼21
Ehsan. ‘‘Gnostic and Spiritual Aspects of Imam Khomeini.’’ AhlulBayt Discussion
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t7338.html
‘‘Election 2004.’’ CNN.com. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/
states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
The Electronic Frontier Foundation. http://www.eff.org/
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). ‘‘Hurricane Pam Exercise Con-
cludes.’’ FEMA Region 6. http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id
¼13051
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. ‘‘Economic Inequality in the United States.’’
FRBSF Economic Letter, 97-03, January 31, 1997. http://www.frbsf.org/
econrsrch/wklyltr/el97-03.html
‘‘Great Depression Narratives.’’ Palo Alto College. San Antonio, Texas. http://
www.accd.edu/pac/history/hist1302/OralHistoryGD.htm
Jacobs, Lawrence, chair. American Political Science Association Task Force on In-
equality and American Democracy. American Democracy in an Age of Rising
Inequality: Summary Report. http://www.apsanet.org/section_256.cfm
Jerry Falwell Ministries. http://www.falwell.com
Johnson, Nicholas, Jennifer Schiess, and Joseph Llobrera. ‘‘State Revenues Have
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Center on Budget and Policy Studies, November 28, 2003. http://www.cbpp
.org/10-22-03sfp.htm
Karp, Jack. ‘‘Worth a Thousand Lies.’’ TechTV. http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/
features/33784/Worth_a_Thousand_Lies.html
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law. http://www.lawyerscomm.org/
Light, Ken. ‘‘The Real Fake.’’ The Digital Journalist.com, March 2004. http://www
.digitaljournalist.org/issue0403/dis_light.html
Long, John. ‘‘Ethics in the Age of Digital Photography.’’ nppa.org. http://www.nppa
.org/professional_development/self-training_resources/eadp_report/
eadptxt.html
Louisiana Homeland Security and Preparedness. ‘‘In Case of Emergency.’’ http://
www.ohsep.louisiana.gov/newsrelated/incaseofemrgencyexercise.htm
Media Matters for America. http://mediamatters.org/
O’Reilly.com. http://www.billoreilly.com/
Picard, Cecil. ‘‘District Composite Report 2003–2004: Orleans Parish,’’ Louisiana
Department of Education, April 2005. http://www.doe.state.la.us/lde/pair/
1613.html
Schneider, William. ‘‘The Suburban Century Begins.’’ The Atlantic Monthly, July
1992. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ecbig/schnsub.htm
‘‘State of Connecticut and the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut, Plain-
tiffs v. Margaret Spellings, in Her Official Capacity as Secretary of Educa-
tion, Defendant.’’ npr.org. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?st
oryId¼4810586
‘‘U.S. PRESIDENT/NATIONAL/EXIT POLL,’’ Election Results 2004. http://www
.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
Index
AARP, 8 Alliance for Better Campaigns, 198

Abramoff, Jack, 33 All the President’s Men (film), 40
Abrams, Charles, 176 Al-Qaeda, 195
ACORN. See Association of Alvarez, R. Michael, 57
Community Organizations for Alvarez and Marsal (A&M) Company,
Reform Now (ACORN) 217
Adams, Henry, 158 Amateur WebMaster Association, 195
Adams, John Quincy, 46 America Can Be Saved! (Falwell), 42
Adelstein, Jonathan, 67, 68, 69, 71 American Democracy in an Age of
Advertising, 189–90, 190–91, 193–94, Rising Inequality (APSA), 208
198. See also Marketing techniques, American Demographics magazine, 180
political campaigns and American Dream, the, 1–2
Advertising Age, 186 American Enterprise Institute, 39
African Americans: Democratic Party American exceptionalism, 43, 173
and, 97–98; economic forces and, American Indian Movement, 81
81–82; education and, 102–3; American Indians. See Native
housing discrimination and, 176; Americans
Hurricane Katrina and, 209–10; American Political Science Association
income disparity and, 82; suburbs (APSA), 208, 211–12
and, 183; voting rights and, 53–54, American Prospect, 48
110–11, 114–24, 212 Americans for Tax Reform, 33, 35
Agriculture, global warming and, 201 America’s Forgotten Majority (Teixeira
Ailes, Roger, 64, 66, 73 and Rogers), 97
Alaska, global warming and, 200–201 America: What Went Wrong
All-American Boys, 27 (Barlett and Steele), 25
258 & Index
Amish people, 29 Bias (Goldberg), 197

Amoss, Jim, 215 ‘‘Big government,’’ 18
Anchorage Daily News, The, 200–201 Bilbo, Theodore, 122
Anishinaabeg people, 94 Bilingual education, 85–87, 90
Annenberg School of Communications, Bin Laden, Osama, 195, 203
68 Birth control, 43
Anti-government rhetoric, 18 Birth of A Nation, The (film), 19
Armey, Dick, 37 Black, Earl, 18
Armstrong, Louis, 66, 67 Black, Merle, 18
Arnwine, Barbara, 212 Black colleges, 112
Ashcroft, John, 132 Blank, Arthur, 142
Asian Americans, 183 Blodget, Henry, 138
Association for Improving the Blues music, 109, 124
Condition of the Poor, 152 Boarding schools, Native Americans
Association of Christian Schools and, 101–2
International (ACSI), 168 ‘‘Boiled Frog Parable,’’ 44
Association of Community Bonfire of the Vanities, 42
Organizations for Reform Now Bonus March, 151–52
(ACORN), 176, 213 Borenstein, Seth, 200–201
Atwal, Sandeep S., 57 Borjas, George J., 85
Austin, Gail, 62 Born-again experiences, 164–65
Boulet, Jim, Jr., 87
Bacanovic, Peter, 132, 135 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 212
Bacardi Corporation, 193 Boxer, Barbara, 66
Bagdikian, Ben, 69 Bradbury, Stephen, 213
Bait and Switch (Ehrenreich), 25 Bradley, Ann, 160, 162
Ball, Lucille, 177 Branch, Bill, 151
‘‘Bandits in Black Robes’’ (Raskin), 46 Brethren in Christ, 29
Bankhead, Lee, 114 Breyer, Stephen G., 49
Banks, 176, 216–17 Brinkley, Alan, 48
Banks, Dennis, 81 Broder, David, 8
Baptist Church, 30–32, 40, 41–42 Brooks, Rosa, 209
Barkley, Charles, 191 ‘‘Brooks Brothers Riot,’’ 49–52, 59
Barlett, Donald, 25 Brown, Aaron, 211, 213–14
Barone, Michael, 50 Brown, Michael, 206
Barrett, Wayne, 62 Brown, Michael L., 206
Baseball, 77–80, 83 Brown, Tina, 133
Beaulieu, David, 102 Brown v. Board of Education of
Begich-Boggs visitor center, 201 Topeka, Kansas (1954), 20–21, 216
Bellecourt, Clyde, 81 Bryan, William Jennings, 21, 30
Beriwal, Madhu, 206 Bryant, Kobe, 132
Bias, in the media, 64, 65–66, 69–70, Bubba the Love Sponge, 63
196–98 Buckley v. Valeo (1976), 34, 36
Index & 259
Budget deficits, 146–47 Chiarello, Chuck, 193

Bugliosi, Vincent, 46 Chicago Tribune, 154
Burke, Edmund, 26 Chick flicks, 130
Bush, Barbara, 220, 221 Children, suburbs and, 157–58
Bush, Ed, 215 Chippewa people. See Anishinaabeg
Bush, George H. W., 17 people
Bush, George W.: bilingual education ‘‘Christ-Centered Curriculum,’’ 106–7
and, 86; Hispanic Americans and, Christian Coalition, 32, 33, 35, 39, 161
90; Hurricane Katrina and, 210; Christian education, 31
Religious Right and, 33, 40; religious Christian fundamentalists. See Religious
views of, 3; Strom Thurmond and, Right
18; taxes and, 146–47 ChronWatch organization, 89
Bush, Jeb, 54 Church and state, separation of, 39
Bush Cheney Recount Fund, 50–51 Citizens for Excellence in Education
Bush (George W.) administration, 82, (CEE), 160
102, 197, 198 Civil liberties, 203
Bush v. Gore (2000). See 2000 election Civil Rights Act (1957), 15
Business ownership, 63–64, 66, 80, 126, Civil Rights Commission, 54, 110
127, 142. See also Corporations Civil rights movement: communism
Byron, Christopher, 126 and, 113–14; decline of, 120–21;
Democratic Party and, 15, 123;
Calhoun, John C., 20 education and, 81; elections and,
Campaign financing, 34, 133, 211 118–20; Religious Right and, 41–42;
Capitalism, government regulation and, Southern Strategy and, 16–17; voter
22–23 registration and, 110–11
Carnegie, Andrew, 26, 66 Civil War, 19
Carr, David, 215 Claritas Corp., 180, 183
Carr, Woodley, 112 Class warfare, 155
Carter, Jimmy, 18, 32 Clay, Henry, 36, 46
Cash, W. J., 24 Clear Channel Communications,
Castleman, Ron, 206 62–63, 67, 68
Castro, Estefana, 148–49 Clinton, Bill, 90, 133, 184, 210
CBS network, 67, 195 Clinton, Hillary, 89, 126, 133
Censorship, 67 Clinton administration, 82
Census data, 181 Cluster analysis, 180–86
Center for Voting and Democracy, Cohen, Andrew, 133
The, 186 Cohn, Cindy, 212
Centers for Disease Control, 82 Colmer, William, 120
Chaney, James, 114, 117 Colson, Charles, 218
Charge to Keep, A (Bush), 40 Columbine High School shootings, 41
Chavez, Cesar, 81 Communism, civil rights movement
Chavez, Cile, 160, 161, 161–62 and, 113–14
Cheney, Dick, 187 Community service, 212, 221
260 & Index
Computer Age, 145 Davis, Eric, 91

Computer imaging, 193–94 Debates, presidential, 96
Confessore, Nicholas, 48 DeLay, Tom: ‘‘Brooks Brothers Riot’’
Congress, U.S., 72–73, 119–20, and, 49; education and, 164, 172;
186–87, 213. See also Elections lobbyists and, 38–39; redistricting
Coniff, Harry, 209 and, 88, 186; religious views of, 41,
Connecticut, No Child Left Behind Act 166, 219
(2001) and, 169, 170 Delivering Aid: Implementing
Conscience of a Liberal, The Progressive Era Social Welfare in
(Wellstone), 222 the American West (Krainz), 2
Conservatism, 153–54, 214–15. DeMint, Jim, 49
See also Republican Party Democratic Party: 2000 election and,
Construction industry, 145 46, 95–96, 97; African Americans
Contract with America (Gingrich), and, 97–98; campaign financing and,
36–37, 180 34–35, 133; changing demographics
Contract with the American Family and, 187; civil rights movement and,
(Reed), 37, 40 15, 115–16; education and, 103,
Cooper, Rory, 49 171–72; environmentalism and, 200;
Copps, Michael, 63, 67, 69, 71 Hispanic Americans and, 90–91;
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, labor movement and, 145; Newt
196–97 Gingrich and, 36–37; platform of,
Corporations: Clear Channel 89–90, 90–91; political ideology
Communications and, 62–63; of, 97, 106, 202–3, 210–11, 220;
corporate sponsorship and, 190–92, redistricting and, 88; southern states
202; education and, 170; laissez and, 122–23; taxes and, 147–48
faire economics and, 22–23; war Demographic data, market research
profiteering and, 203 and, 181–82, 183–84
Cosey, Mildred C., 115 Dent, Harry, 17
Coulter, Ann, 70, 133–34, 197 Deregulation, media and, 69
Council for American Private School Devine, Annie, 117, 119, 122
Education (CAPE), 168 Deyhle, Donna, 103
Crabgrass Frontier ( Jackson), 143, Diebold company, 57
175, 176 DiFranco, Ani, 63
Creationism. See Evolution, Digital artists, 194
teaching of Dill, David, 56
Crime, Hurricane Katrina and, 215 Diller, Barry, 68
Cuban-Americans, 51, 52 Dionne, E. J., 55
Cultural identity, Native Americans Dispensationalism, 39
and, 101–2 Distant Mirror, A (Tuchman), 14
Diversity, 83–84, 104–6
Dalponte Farms, 193 Diversity, of viewpoints. See Opposing
Darrow, Clarence, 30, 40 viewpoints, media and
Daschle, Tom, 67 ‘‘Diversity Index,’’ FCC, 70–71
Index & 261
Dixie Chicks (band), 61–62, 63, schools, 167–68; public schools, 221;
73, 74 public schools and, 163–64, 165–67;
Dixiecrats, 14, 15, 21 Religious Right and, 31, 37–38,
Dole, Robert, 120, 184 105–7, 158–59, 165–66; sharecrop-
Dorgan, Byron, 65, 72–73 ping and, 110; southern states and,
Douglas, William O., 66, 69, 70 25; student languages and, 83
Dover, Pennsylvania, 29, 41, 42–43 Education Week, 160
Drug use, 144 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 25
‘‘Dubious Democracy 2003–2004’’ Einstein, Albert, 85
(The Center for Voting and Elections: 2000 election, 46–59, 94,
Democracy), 186 95–96, 123, 124; campaign financing
Du Pont, Pete, 179 and, 34–35; civil rights movement
Dust Bowl, the, 149 and, 117–18, 118–20; Hispanic
Americans and, 87, 90; landslide
Eagle Forum, 73 elections, 186–87, 211; New Orleans,
Eastland, James, 113 Louisiana and, 212–13; presidential,
Easton, Nina J., 33 15, 16–17, 18, 57, 118, 184; school
‘‘Economics of Immigration, The’’ boards, 160–61, 167; stealth
(Borjas), 85 candidates, 161. See also Voting
Economist, The, 8–9, 43, 126, 173 rights
Economy, the: Democratic Party and, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 212
90; free-market fundamentalism, Ellis Island, 84
22–24; Great Depression and, El Nasser, Haya, 183
148–52; Home Depot and, 141–42, Emergency communications, 68
155–56; immigration and, 84–85; Employment, 141–42, 142–43,
income disparity, 25–26, 80–83, 155, 144–45
208, 209, 211, 221; labor movement, English First, 87
142, 144, 145, 187; liberalism and, English-only movements, 85–86, 87
5; middle class and, 97, 147; Repub- Enron Corporation, 33, 51, 132
lican Party and, 82; roles of women Environmentalism, 100, 199–202
and, 128; suburbs and, 143–45, Ephrata Cloister, 29
154–55 Equality Trap, The (Mason), 128
Edgefield Country, South Carolina, 13 Era of Bad Feelings. See Incivility,
Education: bilingual education, 85–87; in public life
corporate sponsorship and, 191–92, Erie and Lackawanna RR, The (Inness),
202; Democratic Party and, 171–72; 189
diversity in, 104–6; evolution and, Ethnicities, 83–84
29–30, 34, 40–41, 42–43; Hurricane Europe, Religious Right and, 43
Katrina and, 216–18; liberalism Evangelical Christians, 159, 168.
and, 6; Littleton, Colorado schools, See also Religious Right
159–62; Native Americans and, Evers, Medgar, 111
100–104, 107; No Child Left Behind Evolution, teaching of, 29–30, 34,
Act (2001), 168–69, 170–71; private 40–41, 42–43
262 & Index
Exit polling, 47 Frederickson, Kari, 21

Extreme sports, 80 Freedom Ballots, 117–18
Freedom Farms, 121
Fairness Doctrine, 6, 35–36 Freedom Summer of 1964, 114,
Faith-based initiatives, 39, 40 115, 117
Fallows, James, 64 Free-market fundamentalism, 22–24
Falwell, Jerry, 32, 35, 42, 164, 165, 166 Free Martha (website), 127
Family life, 31, 88, 97, 101–2 Frontier, the, 174
Faneuil, Robert, 135, 136 Funding, for schools, 168, 169, 216–17
Farm Holiday movement, 151
FCC. See Federal Communications Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the
Commission (FCC) Conservative Crusade (Easton), 33
Fear of Falling (Ehrenreich), 25 Gangs of New York (film), 83–84
Federal Communications Commission Geller, Joe, 51
(FCC): Clear Channel Gerrymandering. See Redistricting
Communications and, 63; Fairness GI Bill, 175
Doctrine and, 35–36; Martha Stewart Gibson, Duane, 49
and, 138; media ownership and, Gibson, John, 216
67–68, 70–71, 72–73, 74, 197; Gigot, Paul, 51
Religious Right and, 34; Roger Gilbert, Cass, 45, 58
Ailes and, 64 Gingrich, Newt, 14, 36–37, 37–38, 87
Federal Emergency Management Gini index, 155
Agency (FEMA), 205–6, 210 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 49
Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Gitlin, Todd, 123
175, 176, 187 Glaciers, 200, 201
Federal Writer’s Project, 148, 151 Globalization, immigration and, 85
Felons, voting rights and, 55 Global warming, 200–201
Fiction, suburbs and, 177 Goals 2000, 37, 161
Filibusters, 15–16 Goldberg, Bernard, 197
‘‘5 Myths of Immigration’’ (website), 85 Goldberg, Jonah, 197
Flanagan, Caitlin, 128 Goldwater, Barry, 16, 118
‘‘Flawed Goddess’’ (Vuillamy), 126 Gonzalez, Elian, 51
Fonda, Jane, 196 Goodman, Amy, 63
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Goodman, Andrew, 114, 117
132 Gore, Al, 46, 48, 90, 96, 97, 123, 133.
Ford, Gerald, 120 See also 2000 election
Ford, John, 189, 190 Gould, Jay, 35
Foreign policy, Religious Right and, Government: anti-government rhetoric,
39, 43 18; bureaucracy and, 145–46;
Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 19 capitalism and, 22–23; corporate
Fortas, Abe, 15 sponsorship and, 192–93, 202; the
Fort Pillow massacre, 19 New Deal and, 152–53, 154; public
Fox News, 64–65, 67, 214, 216 assistance and, 2; public opinion and,
Index & 263
211–12, 221–22; role of, 4, 5, 7–8, Hoover, Herbert, 214

21, 26, 208, 214–15, 221; suburbs Hoover, J. Edgar, 113
and, 174–75 Hoovervilles, 149–50
GQ magazine, 194 Hopkins, Harry, 152, 153, 154, 156, 222
Gramm, Phil, 37 Houses, mass-produced, 143–44
Grapes of Wrath, The (film), 150 How to Live a Successful Christian Life
Gray, Victoria, 117, 119, 122 (Falwell), 164
Great Depression, 4, 5, 148–52 Hudson Institute, 179
Green Party, 94, 95–96 Human rights, 203
Griffith, D. W., 19 Hume, Brit, 64
Gross domestic product (GDP), 85 Humphrey, Hubert, 4, 15, 17, 116, 118
Guillen, Ozzie, 78 Hurricane Katrina, 206–7, 208–10; aid
Guthrie, Woody, 148, 149, 152 for victims of, 221–22; education
and, 216–18; media, the and, 213–16
Hamer, Fannie Lou, 109–24, 187 Hurricane Pam exercise, 205–6
Hannity, Sean, 64 Hussein, Saddam, 64, 195, 203
Hard Times (Terkel), 148 Hymns, Christian, 40
Hargis, Billy James, 35
Harris, Bev, 56–57 ImClone, Inc., 132
Harris, Katherine, 54 Immigration, 83–85
Harrison, Patricia, 197 Imperialism, 203
Hayworth, Rita, 136 Inactive voters, 213
Health care, 25, 82 Incivility, in public life, 7–9, 79–80
Hearst, William Randolph, 65 Income disparity, 25–26, 80–83, 155,
Henry, Aaron, 117–18, 122 208, 209, 211, 221
Hickman, Breuse, 62 Indian Reorganization Act (1934), 102
Higher education, 163 Individualism, liberalism and, 177–78
Hightower, Jim, 96 Industrialization, attitudes toward,
Highway construction, 175 189–90
Hispanic Americans: baseball and, 83; Industrial Revolution, 84
Bush, George W. and, 90; education Infant mortality, 82
and, 103; income disparity and, 82; Infernalpress.com website, 57
political parties and, 87, 88, 90–91, Inherit the Wind (film), 29–30, 40
187; suburbs and, 183 Inness, George, 189
HispanicVista.com (website), 90 Innovative Emergency Management,
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 23 Inc., 206
Holocaust in Historical Context, The Inquisition, the, 131–32
(Katz), 131 Insider trading, 132, 134–37
Home Depot, 141–43, 144–45 Intelligent design, 34, 40, 42–43, 161
Home-improvement projects, 141–42, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 34, 50–51
143–45, 221 Internet, the, 175, 196; altered
Homeland Security, Department of, 88 photographs and, 194–95; incivility
Home loans, 175 and, 9; Martha Stewart and, 127
264 & Index
Intimidation, political, 52–53 Kuttner, Robert, 96

Iraq War, 64–65, 203 Kyoto Treaty, 200
IRS. See Internal Revenue Service
(IRS) Labor movement, 142, 144, 145, 187
Israel, Religious Right and, 39 Labor Statistics, Bureau of, 144, 145
Izaguirre, Raúl, 91 LaDuke, Winona: Democratic Party
and, 187; education and, 103–5, 106,
Jackson, Kenneth, 143, 175 172; Green Party and, 94, 95; Native
Jackson, Phil, 61 Americans and, 121; political opti-
Jefferson, Thomas, 7, 84, 163, 172 mism of, 107, 222; poverty and, 98;
‘‘Jesus Christ’’ (Guthrie), 152 voters and, 97, 212; White Earth
Joan of Arc, 131 Land Recovery Project (WELRP) and,
Johannessen, Bob, 215 99–100
Johnson, Lyndon B., 16, 17, 115, Laissez faire economics, 22–23
116, 118 Land, Richard, 32–33, 34
Johnson, Magic, 191 Land ownership, Native Americans
Johnson, Robert, 109 and, 94, 99–100
Johnson-O’Malley Act (1934), 102 Landslide elections, 186–87
Jordan, Michael, 191 Language, fairness and, 77–78
Juday, Glenn, 201 Languages, 83, 85–87, 90–91
Lantigua, John, 51
Kahn, Roger, 78 Latino Wave, The (Ramos), 90
Kaplan, Martin, 198 Law enforcement, 111, 112, 132, 133
Karlan, Pamela S., 58 Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
Karp, Jack, 195 under Law, 212
Katz, Stephen, 131 Lay, Ken, 132
Keller, Louis, Sr., 212 Leahy, Patrick J., 187
Kennedy, John F., 3, 17, 41 Lear, Norman, 68
Kerry, John, 90, 91, 169, 196 Lear Center, 198
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 26, 81, 123 Lee, Robert E., 19
Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School Left Behind series (LaHaye and
District (2005), 42–43 Jenkins), 218
Klingon language, 87 Legal Realism, 58
Knott, Tom, 89 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 210–11
Kohut, Andrew, 8 Lewis, John L., 145
Konz, Kenneth, 197 Liberalism: environmentalism and, 200;
Kostyra, Martha. See Stewart, Martha future of, 222–23; Hurricane Katrina
Krainz, Thomas, 2 and, 207; ideals of, 2–6, 121, 122,
Kramer, Stanley, 29, 30, 40 137, 219; the media and, 197; Strom
Kristol, William, 48, 64 Thurmond and, 14. See also
Krugman, Paul, 25, 38 Democratic Party
Ku Klux Klan, 19 Light, Ken, 196
Kurtz, Howard, 209 Lighthouse Baptist Church, 41, 42
Index & 265
Limbaugh, Rush, 62, 64, 68, 70, 146, McMillen, Neil, 109
214–15 Meadows, Donella, 105
Lincoln, Abraham, 7 Means, Russell, 81
Lindsay, John, 120, 122 Media, the: 2000 election and, 47–48,
Lindsey, Hal, 218 50; advertising and, 186, 189–94;
Listening skills, politics and, 95, 107 altered photographs and, 194–95;
Literacy laws, 110 bias in, 64, 65–66, 69–70, 196–98;
Littleton, Colorado schools, 159–62 diversity of viewpoints and, 61–64;
Lobbyists. See Political action Hurricane Katrina and, 213–14,
committees (PACs) 213–16; Iraq War and, 203;
Lochner v. New York (1905), 23 liberalism and, 6; Martha Stewart
Logos, corporate, 190–91 and, 125–30, 132–38; media
Lord of the Rings (films), 195, 199 ownership and, 67–74, 137, 197;
Los Angeles Times, 39, 209, 215 movies and, 130–31; political
Lott, Trent, 17, 51, 72 campaigns and, 198–99; poverty and,
Lotteries, 81 208–9; television and, 127, 177, 178
Louisiana State University, 206 Media Monopoly, The (Bagdikian), 69
Lynching, 15 Media ownership, 67–68, 69, 70–71,
Lypchuck, Donna, 127 72, 73, 74, 137; Federal Communi-
cations Commission (FCC) and, 197
Maceri, Domenico, 90 Methamphetamines, 144
Machine in the Garden, The (Marx), ‘‘Miami Heat’’ (Gigot), 51
189 ‘‘Miami’s Rent-a-Riot’’ (Lantigua), 51
Magical Mystery Tour, 67–68, 73, 137 Middle class, the: Democratic Party
Maines, Natalie, 61–62 and, 90; the economy and, 81,
Malphrus, Garry, 49, 51, 52 154–55; government aid for, 175;
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The income disparity and, 25–26; roles
(film), 163 of women and, 128; taxes and,
Maps, cluster analysis and, 183 146, 147
Marcus, Bernie, 142 Minot, North Dakota, 61, 68, 73
Marketing techniques, political Mississippi Election Commission,
campaigns and, 180–86 117, 119
Markey, Edward J., 72–73 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
Marsalis, Wynton, 124 (MFDP), 114–15, 117, 122
Marshall, Thurgood, 15 Mississippi Sovereignty Commission,
Martinez, Pedro, 77–78, 91 111–12, 114–15, 118–19, 121
Martin Luther King Day, 123 Mondale, Walter, 34
Marx, Leo, 189–90, 199, 202 Monopolies, business, 66
Mason, Mary Ann, 128 Monument Valley, 189, 190
Matrix, The (film), 195, 199 Moore, Micki, 129
McCain, John, 18, 63, 72, 102 Moral Majority, 32
McGirr, Lisa, 159 Moral values, 53
McGwire, Mark, 79 Mortgage insurance, 175
266 & Index
Mortgage loans, 176 New Deal, the, 5, 14, 15, 148,

Morvillo, Robert, 134–35, 135–36 151–54, 221
Movies, 130–31 ‘‘New Low: Pandering to ‘Soccer
Moyers, Bill, 25, 196, 197 Moms,’ A’’ (Scheer), 184
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington New Orleans, Louisiana, 208–10,
(film), 16 212–14, 215–17
MSNBC network, 216 New Orleans Times-Picayune, 213, 215
Mt. Rushmore, 192 New Republic, 48
Mumford, Lewis, 158, 173–74 News Corp., 67
Murdoch, Rupert, 63–64, 65–66, Newsweek magazine, 8, 214
73, 138 New York Times, 48, 58, 72, 215
New York Yankees, 80
Nader, Ralph, 94, 95, 96 Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich), 25
Nagin, Ray, 216 Nike Corporation, 191
National Association of Christian Nixon, Richard, 5, 16–17, 46
Educators, 160 No Child Left Behind Act (2001), 102,
National Center for Education 168–69, 170–71, 198
Statistics, 103 ‘‘None Dare Call It Treason’’
National Conference on Media Reform, (Bugliosi), 46
196 Norman, Geoffrey, 89
National Council de La Raza, 91 Norquist, Grover, 33, 35
National Farmers Union, 151 North, Oliver, 133
National Geographic magazine, 206 Novelli, William, 8
National Indian Education Association Now (TV series), 25, 155
(NIEA), 102
National Organization for Women Obey, David, 72
(NOW), 73, 81 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 8
National Press Photographers ‘‘Oil Storm’’ (TV show), 206
Association, 194 Ojibway people. See Anishinaabeg
National Public Radio (NPR), 65 people
National Review, The, 197 ‘‘Old Labels Just Don’t Stick in 21st
National Rifle Association (NRA), Century’’ (USA Today), 183
68, 73 Olympic Games, 190–91
‘‘National Shame, A’’ (Newsweek), 214 Opposing viewpoints, media and,
Nation at Risk, A, 170 61–62, 65, 68, 69, 70–71
Native American Academy, 105 Oral traditions, 94, 95
Native Americans, 82, 93–95, 121; O’Reilly, Bill, 64, 214
education and, 100–104, 107; global Organization for Economic
warming and, 201; land ownership Cooperation and Development
and, 99–100; poverty and, 98–99 (OCED), 155
Natural resources, 199–202 Ornstein, Norman, 39
Nazi Party, 52, 53 Outcome-Based Education, 100–101,
Nelson, Don, 83 160, 170
Index & 267
Outfoxed (Greenwald and Kitty), 64 Poverty: Great Depression and, 148–51;

Overberg, Paul, 183 Hurricane Katrina and, 208–10;
Native Americans and, 98–99; voters
PACs. See Political action committees and, 211
(PACs) Powell, Michael, 67, 70
Paige, Rod, 86, 198 Presley, Elvis, 66, 67
Palast, Greg, 55 Private schools, 34, 167–68, 216–17.
Panetta, Leon, 17 See also Education
Parks, Rosa, 81 Privatization, 192, 217
Patriot Act (2001), 88 PRIZM. See Potential Rating Index
PBS. See Public Broadcasting System for Zip Markets (PRIZM)
(PBS) Profiteering, Iraq War and, 203
Pearl Jam, 68 Program on International Policy (PIP),
Peltier, Layna McConkey, 50 64–65
Pena, Zacarias, 150 Protests, 46, 49–52, 59
Permafrost, 201 Public affairs, knowledge of, 64–65
Petty, Tom, 68 Public assistance, 2
Pew Research Center, 8, 65 Public Broadcasting System (PBS), 25,
Phillips. Sam, 66 40–41, 65, 155, 196–97
Photographs, altered, 194–95, 196 Public hearings, media ownership and,
Photo ID, voting rights and, 213 67–68
Plan for America (Kerry and Edwards), Public opinion: community service
90 and, 220; Federal Communications
Political action committees (PACs), Commission (FCC) and, 73; of
34–35, 39, 64 government, 211–12, 221–22;
Political Agendas for Education: From liberalism and, 98
the Christian Coalition to the Green Public schools. See Education
Party (Spring), 34 Public services, taxes and, 155
Political campaigns, 34, 133, 182, Putnam, Robert, 212
184–87, 198, 211 Pyle, Tom, 49, 51
Political ideology, 179–80, 200. See also
Conservatism; Liberalism Race, education and, 216–17
Political parties, 8–9, 21, 97. See also ‘‘Race records,’’ 66
Democratic Party; Republican Party Racial discrimination, in housing,
Political polarization, 8, 65 176–77, 187
Political rallies, 49–52, 59, 63 Racism: English-only movements and,
Poll taxes, 15 86; ‘‘playing the race card’’ and, 89;
Popular culture, 126, 127, 128–29, social Darwinism and, 23; Strom
130–31, 137–38 Thurmond and, 14–15
Pornography, 194–95 Radicalism, Great Depression and, 151
Portage Glacier, 201 Radio stations, 62–63, 67, 68
Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets Rainey, James, 215, 216
(PRIZM), 180 ‘‘Rally for America’’ events, 63
268 & Index
Ramos, Jorge, 90 conservatives and, 220. See also Bush,

Rankin, Jeanette, 2 George W.; DeLay, Tom; Thurmond,
Raskin, Jamin, 46 Strom
Rather, Dan, 197 Rhodes, Tom, 51
Rauch, Jonathan, 48 Rice, John R., 41, 42
Reagan, Ronald, 17, 18, 32, 34, 36 Richards, Ann, 194
Reagan administration, 102 Richland, New Jersey, 193
Reality TV, 70, 178–79 Rise of Southern Republicans, The
Reconstruction Era, 19–20, 120, 207 (Black and Black), 18
Recount, of Florida ballots, 50. See also Road rage, 7–8
2000 election Robertson, Pat, 33, 35, 36
Redistricting, 38, 88, 186 Robinson, Jackie, 78, 115–16
Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC (1969), Rockefeller, John D., 22–23, 35, 66
35, 69, 70 Rodriguez, Alex, 80
Red state/blue state analogy, 179–80, Rogers, Adrian, 31, 42
183–84 Rogers, Joel, 97
Reebok Corporation, 191 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 152
Reed, Ralph, 33–34, 35, 36, 37 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 151, 152–53,
Rehnquist, William, 49 154–55
Reinking, Bernadette, 43 Roosevelt, James, 120
Religion, 26, 30–32, 152 Roosevelt, Theodore, 21
Religious Right, 30–43; education and, Rosenblatt, Susannah, 215, 216
86, 104, 105–7, 158–59, 160–62, Ross, Elizabeth, 51
165–66; Hispanic Americans and, 88; Rove, Karl, 51, 185–86
Hurricane Katrina and, 218; political Royal, Chuck, 49
ideology of, 218–19; theology of, Russell, Jan Jarboe, 39
164–65 Rustin, Bayard, 116
Religious schools. See Private schools Ruth, Babe, 78
‘‘Report on American Exceptionalism,’’ Ryan, William Fitts, 119
173
Republican Party: 2000 election and, Safire, William, 72
21, 46, 50–52, 53; bilingual educa- Salon.com (website), 51
tion and, 86–87; campaign financing Sanchez, Carl, 195
and, 34–35; cluster analysis and, Sanders, Bernie, 46
185–86; economic forces and, 82; Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific
Fox News and, 65; individualism and, Railroad Company (1886), 23
177–78; political ideology of, 202; Santorum, Rick, 43
redistricting and, 88; Religious Right SaveMartha!.com (website), 132–33
and, 34, 36, 40; role of government Savonarola, Girolamo, 42
and, 18, 26; southern states and, Sawyer, Diane, 62
20–25, 122; Southern Strategy and, Scalia, Antonin, 49
16–17, 167, 176–77; suburbs and, Scheer, Robert, 184
179; taxes and, 145–47; traditional Schlafly, Phyllis, 87, 100–101, 160
Index & 269
Schlapp, Matt, 49, 51, 52 Republican Party and, 20–25, 122;

Schneider, William, 179 Strom Thurmond and, 13–19
School budgets, 167 Southern Strategy, the, 16–17,
School choice, 37, 40, 167 176–77, 216
School prayer, 34, 167 Spanish-language television, 91
Schulte, Elizabeth, 96 Spencer, Herbert, 22
Schwerner, Michael, 114, 117 Sports, 77–80, 83, 190–92
Schwerner, Rita, 112 Spring, Joel, 34
Science, Native Americans and, 105 Standardized testing, 163, 170
Scientific American magazine, 57 Stanford University, 68
Scranton, William, 43 States, budget cuts and, 155
Segregation, 24, 34 States’ rights, 21, 24
Selker, Ted, 57 States Rights Party. See Dixiecrats
Service economy, Home Depot and, Stealth candidates, 161
144–45 Steele, James, 25
Sex education, 161 Steinem, Gloria, 81
Seymour, Karen Patton, 134 Stennis, John, 113
Shagrin, Ceril, 91 Stern, Howard, 63
Shales, Tom, 197 Sternberg, Betty, 170
Sharecropping, 109–10 Steroid use, baseball and, 79
Sheppard-Towner Bill (1921), 2 Stevens, John Paul, 46, 49
Shock jocks, 63 Stewart, James, 16
Silicon Graphics, 194 Stewart, Martha, 89, 125–38, 143
Simmons, Ira, 89 Stock prices, insider trading and, 132
Simpson, John, 151 Stopnader.com (website), 96
Simpson, O. J., 195 Stouse, Dennis, 62
Sitcoms, 177, 178–79 Strict constructionism, 58
Skilled labor, 141–42, 142–43, 144–45 Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Slate magazine, 48 Committee (SNCC), 81, 110,
Smith, Adam, 22 111, 114
Snopes.com (website), 195 Suarez, Ray, 8, 38
Soccer moms, 179–80 ‘‘Suburban Century Begins, The’’
‘‘Social Agenda,’’ of the Religious (Schneider), 179
Right, 33 Suburban Warriors (McGirr), 159
Social Darwinism, 22–23 Suburbs: children and, 157–58; cluster
Socialism, 154 analysis and, 180–86; economic
Social programs, 23, 25, 26 stability and, 154–55; education and,
Sosa, Sammy, 77, 79, 80, 89 159; the environment and, 199–200;
Southern Baptist Convention, 30–32 government policy and, 174–75;
Southern Manifesto, 20–21, 23–24, 26, housing discrimination and, 176–77;
27, 176–77 labor and, 143, 145; Lewis Mumford
Southern states: Democratic Party and, on, 173–74; political ideology and,
116–17, 122–23; education and, 167; 179–80
270 & Index
Sumner, William Graham, 22, 214 Tuchman, Barbara, 14

Sunday Times (London), 51 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 174
Superdome, New Orleans, 206, 209–10, Turner, Ted, 68
214, 215 Turow, Scott, 58
Supreme Court: 2000 election and, 46, Twain, Mark, 192
49, 57–58; building, 45; laissez faire 2000 election, 46–59, 94, 95–96,
economics and, 23; monopolies and, 123, 124
66; nominations to, 15; Southern
Manifesto and, 20–21; Strom Ueberoth, Peter, 191
Thurmond and, 17 Unemployment, 82, 148
SUVs, 189–90 Unfunded mandates, 169, 221
Sweeney, John, 51 United Farmworkers, 81
Swing voters, 184–85 United States v. Paramount (1948),
Sword of the Lord organization, 41–42 66, 70
System dynamics, 105 University of Idaho, 195
University of Wisconsin, 195
Tate, Randy, 39 Unz, Ron, 85–86
Taxes: Great Depression and, 152; UPN network, 67
Hurricane Katrina and, 210; USA Today, 183
immigration and, 85; the middle class
and, 155; Republican Party and, Vermont, 45–46
145–47 Vetter, David, 212
Tax Increment Financing, 175 Viacom, Inc., 67
Teixeira, Ruy, 97 Vila, Bob, 142, 143
Televangelists, 35 Violence, racial, 111, 114
Television, 127, 177, 178, 189–90, Vizenor, Gerald, 94, 95
193–94 Volunteering, 212, 220, 222
Terkel, Studs, 148 Voting rights: cluster analysis and,
Terry, Peggy, 150 180–86; Democratic Party and,
Texas Monthly magazine, 194 115–17, 118–21, 122–23, 187–88;
Thater-Braan, Rose von, 105, 106, 107 discouraging voters and, 54–55,
‘‘The Great Divide’’ (ACORN), 176 211–13; liberalism and, 6; Mississippi
Theology, Christian, 164–65 Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP),
Thomas, Clarence, 17, 49 114–15, 117–18; political parties
Thompson, Ruth, 67 and, 97; redistricting and, 88;
Thoreau, Henry David, 202 Republican Party and, 53–54; voter
Thurmond, Strom, 13–19, 21, 26–27, registration, 110–11, 117, 212;
176–77 voting machines, 54, 55–57, 59,
Tomlinson, Ken, 196, 197 212–13. See also Elections
Touch-screen voting machines, 56–57 Voting Rights Act (1965), 6, 55,
Treaties, Native Americans and, 99 119, 122
Trickle-down economics, 146 Voucher programs. See School choice
Truman, Harry S., 15, 21–22 Vuillamy, Ed, 126
Index & 271
Wade, Don, 91 White flight, 167

Wages, 128. See also Income disparity Whitten, Jamie, 117, 120
Waksal, Sam, 132 Whittle, Chris, 191–92
Wallace, George, 17 Widows’ pensions, 2
Wall Street Journal, 48, 51 Wiesberg, Jacob, 180
Walters, Barbara, 133 Williams, Armstrong, 198
Warren, Earl, 15 Wilson, Woodrow, 21
Washington Post, 52 Winfrey, Oprah, 126
Washington Times, 89 Winn, Jeffrey, 215
Wealthy, the, 146–47, 211, 212 Winslet, Kate, 194
Websites. See Internet, the Witchcraft, 131–32
Welfare benefits, 2, 85, 146 Women, roles of, 126, 127, 128,
Welles, Orson, 136 129–30, 131–32
Wellstone, Paul, 4–5, 10, 96–97, 222 WomenMatter website, 53
Weyrich, Paul, 34 Works Progress Administration, 153
White Earth Land Recovery Project Wright, Frank Lloyd, 200
(WELRP), 99–100
White Earth Reservation, 93, 94, 99 Ziegler, John, 219
About the Author
RALPH BRAUER is Executive Director of the Transforming Schools Con-

sortium, a national group of school districts dedicated to public education,
one of the liberal ‘‘four cornerstones’’ that make up the meat of his analysis
in this book. He has also worked as a consultant, designing leadership
programs for legislators, and with the American Association of Higher
Education, among other organizations. An award-winning writer, he has
seen his work published in the New York Times Magazine, the Nation,
Newsweek, and other periodicals.

(Ralph Brauer) The Strange Death of Liberal America

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The Strange Death of

The paper used in this book complies with the

To Donna and Max

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Part One: The Counterrevolution 11

Part Two: Civil Rights Revolutions Raise Questions 75

Part Three: The Suburban Uprising 139

12 Voting Rights: Red and Blue Lemmings 173

14 Conclusion: Shifting Winds 205

device is to open each chapter by describing a local setting. This grounds

colleagues at Transforming Schools Consortium who have contributed ideas

A generation later Humphrey’s successor, Paul Wellstone—who may have

Because of you, families have more bread on the table.

The second cornerstone is educational equity. Next to the Constitution,

impeachment or the recall of Governor Gray Davis of California. It is no

Today it is impossible to turn on the radio, watch television, or pick up a

A stunning photograph shows a rutted dirt road splitting rows of blooming

than anyone else, through the terms of eighteen presidents. He participated

bathroom break during his record-setting filibuster—aide and later Nixon

In 1976, Thurmond temporarily seemed to lose his grip on the South, as

Constitution.’’16 These words espouse entirely different values than those

advantage when he ran against the Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress. In this

This section of this book is titled ‘‘The Counterrevolution’’ because the

who hung out in the backcountry of the American consciousness, a view

reportedly told the Republicans, ‘‘No more engagement. We want a wed-

operatives to move seamlessly between the three worlds of politics, religion,

In 1987, an FCC packed with commissioners appointed by Ronald Reagan

against him, demonizing Gingrich so effectively they had America believing

is education policy. Gingrich’s plan for ‘‘winning the future’’ specifically

cemented these connections through a Byzantine web of PACs and corpo-

DeLay, a fundamentalist Christian who is by definition unreasonable, is not

An August 1, 2003, Los Angeles Times editorial echoes this view:

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence

In December 2004, eleven parents filed a lawsuit against the district

Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District represents a skirmish in a

To Europeans, religion is the strangest and most disturbing feature of Amer-

Bernie Sanders, is now the longest-serving independent in the House. Not

In the end, I suppose, we have to concede that there is no way to get

Red,’’ is Layna McConkey Peltier, a former congressional aide who was at

Confirmation that voting irregularities took place in Florida—some of

Restrictive statutory provisions, wide-ranging errors and inadequate and un-

[Their] lack of leadership in the important area of protecting voting rights

The failings outlined included placing a disproportional number of anti-

These problems echo a persistent theme in the Era of Bad Feelings—nothing

Minot, North Dakota, is nicknamed the ‘‘Magic City,’’ because it seemed to

following surreal exchange between Murdoch and California Senator Bar-

BOXER: What if you owned everything?

Interestingly Murdoch is not the first media mogul to become enamored

This raises fear of an America where whole towns can be figuratively

Rush Limbaugh, making him appear downright respectable next to the

At issue is whether a few corporations will be ceded enhanced gatekeeper

Commissioner Adelstein followed:

At the conclusion of the testimony the commissioners filed out of the

Cutting: At my challenge, by the ancient laws of combat, we are met at this

Give me your poor,

As a first-generation American, the words have special meaning to me, for

computer age. Einstein chose to come to America as have thousands who

in Arizona, Massachusetts, and Colorado. All but the Colorado initiative

days of the past (remember the famous morning-in-America commercial for

Whites have always looked down their noses at oral traditions, as if

version of the Dixiecrats—wild-eyed ideologues needing a strong dose of

By then, so many opportunities had been squandered that Gore’s pleas