December 1st 2008
The Lies They Teach - #16 And #17
H
ere we go, with two more chapters of Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) - which C-SM hopes will lead to you purchasing a copy of the book for yourself and any college-age kids in your acquaintance - and two more lies liberal history profs are teaching to pollute the minds of the next generation.
Lie #16 - Prohibition Was Unpopular From The Beginning And Failed In All Its Objectives
Prohibition … offered another example of reforming zeal channeled into a drive for moral righteousness and conformity . … The Anti-Saloon League [mobilized] Protestant churches behind its single-minded battle to elect “dry” candidates. - George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History
My grandmother was an prohibitionist and a staunchly conservative Methodist, and I thought it positively odd that my great aunt and uncle would lower their kitchen shade so grandmother wouldn’t look across the alley and see them drinking a beer with their Sunday night sausage and sauerkraut.
Be that as it may, prohibition is now offered up as a precursor to the moral battlegrounds of today - first abortion and drugs, now gay marriage - as history profs have hayseed hicks and ignorant fundamentalists battling the enlightened forces of coolness. It’s also used as an immigration lesson, with prohibition seen as the white majority forcing its will on the (then-white) immigrant populations (those drinking Irish and Italians!). And ultimately, prohibition serves as the foundation of teaching that “you cannot legislate morality.”
Temperance, in fact, was a longstanding thread leading up to prohibition. Abraham Lincoln ran on a “temperance” platform and most states had restrictions on alcohol before prohibition. Why? Because alcohol had become a huge social problem. Prohibition helped quell it, as arrests for public drunkenness and incidents of hospitalization for alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver declined during Prohibition.
Saloons - which often offered up prostitution in addition to booze - were thought by many doctors to be the source of syphilis outbreaks and the Mann Act was passed to stop white slavery that was thriving in the saloons.
So drinking wasn’t just a nice passive pastime; it was a big social problem (as it remains today), leading to wide support for Prohibition not only among conservative Protestants, but among much of America, both urban and rural, lower class and upper.
To Schweikart’s view, Prohibition failed primarily because sufficient enforcement was never funded, and because the media turned against it, followed by … sound familiar? … the intellectual elite in NY and DC. And finally, it was the desire for those lucrative liquor tax revenues during the Depression that ended the social experiment.
I’m not a fan of heavy-handed government policies like Prohibition, but I am a fan of having them taught in the proper context and not misused. If historians used Prohibition as a lesson about America’s strong and ongoing moral fiber, and against over-reaching regulation, that would be fine with me.
#17 - Sacco And Vanzetti Were Innocent And Wrongly Executed
The excesses of the fundamentalists, the xenophones, the Klan, the red-baiters, and the prohibitionists disturbed American intellectuals profoundly. … Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists and Italian immigrants. Their trial was a travesty. Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, American Destiny.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti may be lost in the mist of time to most readers, so the easiest way to put them into perspective is to consider that the anarchists of the early 20th century were akin to the terrorists of our time. Their act of violence - killing a guard and paymaster in the midst of a robbery - was just another of anarchist actions against America: They had assassinated President William McKinley, had nearly killed a Carnegie Steel exec in his office. They shot people, made bombs, and blew things up, all in the name of bringing down all government.
From the 20s until they were replaced by the Rosenburgs in the 40s, Sacco and Vanzetti were the cause clebre of the American left. Future SCOTUS Felix Frankfuter wrote a book calling for a new trial, socialist author Upton Sinclair took up their cause, and as recently as 1977, then-Governor Michael Dukakis of MA called S&V innocent, saying “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.” Says Schweikart of that proclamation:
Unfortunately for Dukakis, a firearms panel would meet only a few years later and virtually reattach the disgrace to the names of the two murderers.
But long before recent forensic tests put this issue to rest, a fair jury did the same based on overwhelming evidence that the Left would have you ignore. Nine eyewitnesses ID’d Sacco as being at the scene; four ID’d Vanzetti. Both defendants were caught in lies on the witness stand. Alibi witnesses proved not to be credible.
As recently as 1985, liberals have published books coughing up “new evidence” to show S&V were good guys put down by an evil system. But the evidence against this view is overwhelming: Forensic tests have proved Sacco’s revolver fired the shot that killed one of the victims, that defense arguments that bullets were switched are specious, that Sacco was a participant, and separate from these tests, that Vanzetti also was guilty. This has long been proven to such an extent that even Upton Sinclair admitted as much, saying he was “completely naive about the Sacco-Venzetti case, having accepted the defense propaganda completely.”
But some Leftist profs continue to profess their innocence, and they can no longer be called merely naive.
The Lies They Teach: #13 - #15
The Lies They Teach #11 And #12
The Lies They Teach: #9 And #10
The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3
Posted in America, Higher Education, Uncategorized | 9 Comments » | 
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December 1st, 2008 at 2:26 pm
December 4th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Comments
December 1st, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Your notions about Prohibition are off base.Among other things, Prohibition was the engine that fueled the rise of the organized criminal underworld, which grew very rich on it. For another thing, criminal gangs had not previously had the wherewithal to corrupt any large fraction of American law enforcers; Prohibition made that possible both morally and financially. For a third thing, thousands of people started drinking <b><i>because</i></b> of Prohibition — it made that a mildly rebellious pastime, adding the thrill of safe lawbreaking to the pleasure of imbibing.Why on Earth do you think the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed? And why do you think the most vocal and determined forces <b><i>against</i></b> its repeal were the gangland lords who profited from it?Finally, there is absolutely no relationship between Prohibition, which criminalized an activity that harms no non-consenting person, and abortion, which kills a defenseless child. Such comparisons do great violence to the most important cause of our time.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Most of your issues are addressed by Schweikart, Francis. I’ll summarize quickly here.
Criminologists Edwin Sutherland and C.H. Gehlke found “no evidence here of a ‘crime wave,’ but only of a slowly rising level,” - and that was in urban areas only, and NOT adjusted for population increases. The homicide rate rose steadily from 1910, before Prohibition, plateaued in the late 20s and did not begin dropping until 1936, three years after Prohibition ended. Still, by definition crime had to increase because a whole new type of crime - liquor-related - was on the books.
As for consumption, Schweikart shows that slightly less alcohol was consumed per capita in America at the end of Prohibition than before - hardly a sterling endorsement, but a rebuttal of sorts to your point, although I agree that thousands of people started drinking because of the added thrill of Prohibition. It’s just that a few thousand more apparently quit.
Prohibition was repealed primarily because the media railed against it and because the liquor industry lobbied heavily for its repeal. Technically speaking, the liquor industry was a criminal element because of Prohibition, but it was they, not the “gangland warlords,” that primarily funded the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, which led the battle for repeal.
The only relationship between liquor and abortion that I made was stating that professors make an association between Prohibition and efforts to end “choice.” Otherwise, I couldn’t agree more with that portion of your comment.
I make this defense as no defender of Prohibition; I’m not. I’m just summarizing Schweikart’s very interesting and important book.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:55 pm
The “important” book by Schweikart has a very skewed history of Sacco and Vanzetti. While not perfect, even the Wikipedia entry does a better job of summarizing the facts that prove and cast doubt on the innocence or guilt of the two men (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacco_%26_Vanzetti). More importantly, while you and the author criticize Dukakis for claiming their innocence, the former Governor of Massachussetts actually was equivocal on this point and instead publicly stated regret for the myriad problems and injustices that occurred during the trials and prosecution of these men. The exact quote is also found on the Wikipedia entry. The credibility of “important” conservative books is greatly undermined when falsehoods and stilted accounts are presented in lieu of actual scholarship. This treatment of S&V, like nearly all of the entries you’ve summarized here (and thank you, Francis, for highlighting the similar weaknesses on the Prohibition era), are deeply troubling because they present only one side of the facts in an attempt to make an ideological point rather than attempting to achieve an historically or legally or politically accurate treatment of an important issue or event. Surely, there are better conservative thinkers out there to learn from than Schweikart. The Economist, a fairly conservative English magazine, referred to the GOP as the “stupid party” just last week. Posts like this one do little to shed that unfortunate image…
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Wikipedia is widely regarded as a left-leaning compilation of data, dg. This is evident in the “second trial” and “later investigations” sections, which I skimmed. The first brings up one prosecution witness whose testimony was challenged, but doesn’t mention any of the other eight eye witnesses. The second section brings up the chain of evidence issues (the alleged but unproven switching out of the barrel of Sacco’s gun) that are used to call into question the later forensics tests, but doesn’t mention that blame for the reputed switch has been laid at the feet of the defense attorneys. A damaged source indeed.
And you’re smart enough, dg, to not call this stupid. The premise of Schweikart’s book is that leftist historians are pursuing revisionist history; it is not his purpose to re-present that revisionism, but only to disprove it. He does present the revision position briefly at the start of each chapter and I don’t generally pick up these portions of the book in my reviews. That said, given the shameful management of the 2008 campaign, I can’t disagree with the Economist’s statement about the Republican PARTY - but be careful if you extrapolate that to all Republicans, dg, or your bigotry will be showing.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Don’t put words in my mouth. As I said, please give me the smart conservatives view of these issues rather than Schweikart, who strikes me as a rather shallow scholar. The Wikipedia piece is not meant to be real scholarship, but it is good enough to cast doubt on Schweikart’s claims (at least, as you’ve distilled them). On the eye witnesses, one of the key controversies was the fact that the prosecution coerced those witnesses and all of them showed inconsistencies in their testimony. The key point, which you and Schweikart miss, is not the guilt or innocence of these men, but the horrific conditions under which the trial proceeded. This is the reason why we remember this case as being more than the mere prosecution of a couple of bankrobbers. Finally, my “bigotry” cannot be showing if I am not a bigot. Be careful what you accuse people of when you don’t know them. You can question my facts and logic, but not my character, ethics or integrity. You come close to the line…
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:12 pm
“Horrific” is relative and subjective. You shouldn’t judge a 1920s trial by 2008 standards.
As for your bigotry or lack thereof, here’s what you said: “The Economist, a fairly conservative English magazine, referred to the GOP as the “stupid party” just last week. Posts like this one do little to shed that unfortunate image…” Since you took it from “party” to “my post,” I somehow got the sense you thought I was stupid for holding Republican views. Get it?
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:42 am
Laer, to be clear, a bigot is someone who is intolerant of differing views. I am open to them and have called for citation of intelligent conservatives to elicit such views. I am, however, intolerant of poorly argued views that do not comport with the facts or sound logic. This is not bigotry, but intelligence…and a personality that does not suffer fools gladly. Unfortunately, Schweikart’s analysis, and your posts summarizing that analysis, looks rather foolish in many cases, not due to the views cited but the analysis used to defend those views. Get it?