Year of the Tie-Breaker

The United States, I am reliably informed, will hold presidential and Congressional elections this year. The strong partisan alignment of the American electorate, the archaic structure of the American Constitution, and the contingencies of judicial mortality and Senatorial retirement have all produced the possibility of a cascading series of stalemates that would resolve themselves in the most partisan fashion possible. This possibility is slight but real; I suggest it more as a nightmare than a prediction. But consider:

The presidential election, as we were all reminded in 2000, is resolved not by popular vote but by the Electoral College. The winning candidate, which will almost certainly be Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, needs a majority of EC votes (270). There is, however, a slight chance that the electorate will hand each major-party candidate the same number of Electoral College votes: 269. This will occur, for instance, if Secretary Clinton carries almost all of the states won by John Kerry* in 2004 - CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, NH, NJ, NY, OR, PA, RI, VT, WA – plus CO (Democratic-leaning), NM (solidly Democratic since the GOP’s white-supremacist turn), NV (potentially Democratic for the same reason), and VA, but loses Scott Walker’s WI to Trump.

In the event of an Electoral-College tie, Amendment XII provides that the U.S. House of Representatives select the president from the top three EC vote-recipients. Each state's House delegation receives a single vote in this election. While it is impossible to predict the composition of the new House of Representatives, Republicans currently dominate 33 of the 50 state delegations, and I find it unlikely that this will dramatically shift in the 2016 election. The new House of Representatives, in the event of an Electoral College tie, would almost certainly award the presidency to Donald Trump.

Democrats would, however, face an interesting scenario if they won a majority, or even a 50-50 split, in the U.S. Senate. A large number of Republican Senators are defending seats this year, and the GOP only has one likely pickup in that chamber (the seat of retiring NV Senator Harry Reid). Assuming the Democrats only lose the NV seat and pick up at least five Senate seats formerly held by Republicans, they would control the Senate during the organizational votes in early January 2017. (In case of a 50-50 split in the Senate, the Vice-President breaks ties; until 20 January that will be Joe Biden.) Democratic Senators could potentially, in case of an EC tie, elect Tim Kaine as Vice President. I think, however, that Republican Senators would probably refuse to show up for that vote altogether, and the Twelfth Amendment requires a two-thirds quorum (67 Senators) for a vice-presidential election. I am also fairly certain that our news media would blame Democrats for the ensuing vacancy (“Trump deserves his own VP choice!” “Trump/Pence carried 28 states!” etc.), and that enough Dems would break party ranks to make Mike Pence vice-president. I think they would do so even if this effectively handed control of the Senate chamber to the Republicans (50-50 split plus Pence’s vote). Perhaps the GOP would offer them some committee chairs and one or two of the nicer offices in the Senate Office Buildings in exchange for their treachery "reasonableness."

This brings me to a third stalemate: the one that has emerged in the U.S. Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia’s death earlier this year has given progressive Americans the hope of replacing him with a more liberal justice, and beginning to reverse the anti-labor, pro-corporate, authoritarian** agenda that the Court has pursued for over thirty years. The GOP-dominated Senate, however, has refused to allow President Obama to replace him, and a GOP-controlled Senate would almost certainly insist on allowing President Trump to replace Scalia with a like-minded (i.e. male, ultra-conservative, and a member of Opus Dei) jurist as soon as possible. A Democratic-controlled Senate might emulate Mitch McConnell and refuse to allow a vote on a Trump appointee, but a Senate split 50-50 with a Republican VP to break ties would almost certainly approve that appointee, and prohibit filibusters if the Dems tried one (just as the Democrats did with other court appointments in 2013).

Thus, a president chosen by the House of Representatives after a tie in the Electoral College could conceivably break a 4-4 tie between liberal and reactionary justices in the Supreme Court by appointing a justice with the consent of an evenly-split Senate whose president (the VP) would serve as tie-breaker. Isn’t that fun?

Fortunately, my Election Day predictions never come true, so I figured that I might as well come up with a crazy one. But maybe it’s not completely crazy. I don’t think an Electoral College tie is impossible, we’ve seen a 50-50 Senate split within the recent past (2000-01), and the Supreme Court is currently divided. And one of the two principal political parties in the United States is dedicated to the proposition that the federal government should not function unless it is completely in their control, so it easy enough to see them wriggling through any Constitutional rathole, or series of ratholes, that would let them take all three branches at once.

* An otherwise-weak candidate who carried all those states through sheer partisan loyalty – that, and widespread hatred of the incumbent.

** Giving the Devil his due, Scalia was notably anti-authoritarian when it came to upholding the Fourth Amendment.

(Image above via PBS.org)

The Seventies Sucked Everywhere

Including Newfoundland, it seems, though less because of economic depression (that came later) than because the island's inhabitants remained isolated and what they received of contemporary popular culture was sad and shabby. From the National Geographic*:

"In many an outport I found one establishment emblazoned 'General Store and Entertainments.'" (This should give you a good idea of what the author was in for.) In "prosperous" fishing communities, the Entertainments "consisted of a pool table and a jukebox; if not, they consisted of a couple of pinball machines." I imagine at least one of these didn't work. The other was emblazoned with clowns. Sad clowns.

Moreover, "in only two outports did I find a movie house, each of them showing a ten-year-old movie on a screen of wrinkled canvas silvered with blotchy radiator paint." The author doesn't say, but I'll bet the movie was the original Ocean's Eleven (1960). A tedious film in the best of circumstances, despite its partial redemption by Sammy Davis Jr.'s singing.

For more provincial fare, Newfoundland residents had access to TV broadcasts from all three of the island's principal towns. And "for a more riotous social life, an outport may stage an occasional net-knitting contest, while fairs may feature competitions in fish cleaning." It almost makes Indiana sound cosmopolitan by comparison. Almost.


* G. Jennings, "Newfoundland Trusts in the Sea," Jan. 1974.

The A-Number-One President

I've remarked elsewhere on my fondness for the cult movie Escape from New York (1981), and a recent viewing of the film with my petite amie, along with an email conversation with my brother regarding the director's commentary (which is quite good), got me thinking about what still makes the film compelling. There are many answers to that question, one of which is “first-rate acting.” Adrienne Barbeau turned a throwaway part into a major character; Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef, and Harry Dean Stanton showed off their decades of acting experience; Isaac Hayes brought just the right amount of eye-twitching menace to the big villain's part; Kurt Russell, fading teen-movie star, transformed himself into an action hero; and Donald Pleasence played a surprisingly convincing president.* Pleasence's chief executive was one part cipher, a blend of Nixon's charisma with Carter's effectiveness, and one part fraying victim-turned-madman, a manifestation of Pleasence's own experience as a POW in the Second World War. I think I would prefer either part to one of the major-party candidates running for president this year. So herewith I offer:

Reasons why The President in Escape from New York was a better president than Donald Trump would be:

1) Had a better hairpiece

2) Showed respect for his social betters (dukes, etc.)

3) Personal jetliner had more modest escape pod

4) At least minimal respect for those who died for their country

5) Able to pray convincingly

6) Understood that tritium creates only one one-millionth of the biological damage of iodine-131

7) Gave useful counter-terrorism advice to member of Ford family

8) Did not insult Native Americans, even when fighting them

9) Maintained a decorous distance from the Russians

10) Didn't need an escalator – could run down fifty flights of stairs.

Can Historians Contribute to Society?

A few weeks ago Patrick Johnson, vice-chancellor of Queens University in Belfast, expressed what I suspect is a view of history commonly held by Euro-American elites: “Society doesn't need a 21-year-old who is a sixth-century historian. It needs a 21-year-old who really understands how to analyze things, [and] understands...contributing to society.” He then announced the creation of an Office of Analyzing Things and Contributing to Society, and the appointment of a deputy vice-chancellor, two deans, and seven assistant deans to manage it. I'm kidding. (Sort of.)

In response to Johnson's remarks, Professor Jonathan Healey wrote an engaging defense of the formal study of history, which I commend to my readers' attention, Briefly, Healey noted that social leaders like to use historical examples to justify themselves, so society needs good history students to serve as fact-checkers; the general public loves a good story, and historians can provide content to the museums and script-writers who furnish the public with its history; the weirdness of the past obliges students to develop their analytical skills in order to study it; and that very weirdness reminds us that societies do change over time, and that our modern values and hierarchies are contingent and mutable.

Healey's clear, elegant essay makes a nice complement to Timothy Burke's 2008 HNN piece on the purposes of historical analysis. Using Burke's article, I would add that history also helps 21-year-olds more fully understand long-term processes, like human-induced environmental change, that have ongoing consequences in the twenty-first century. It lets us appreciate the importance of individuals in society, particularly obscure characters (like George Robert Twelves Hughes or Domenico Menocchio Scandella) whose lives and thoughts tell us more about the lived experience of an era than those of a Napoleon. Finally, history teaches humility, as students learn that they are not the only generation and that persons in the deep past have solved complicated problems without help from their descendants.

I suspect academic administrators, politicians, and other elites don't want ordinary college students to develop these skills. They want round pegs for round holes, not challengers of the status quo. But, as Healey points out – and as everyone over the age of 35 could attest – the status quo is fragile and as subject to change as any other human construct. We need people who appreciate this fact, who have studied change over time and who have the intellectual flexibility to respond to it. Their willingness to say this explains why history professors are almost never invited to speak at university commencements. It's probably just as well. 

(Above image, "Clio, the Muse of History," by Giovanni Baglione [1620], is in the public domain.)

The Revolutionary Monarch

I think many Americans assume that autocratic states rest exclusively on fear, that subjects of a repressive dictator or oligarchy obey only because they and their families will otherwise suffer terrible punishment. Those familiar with the history of monarchies recognize, however, that dictatorships (hereditary or otherwise) also rest on a kind of popular magical thinking, a widespread belief that supreme rulers have powers superior to those of mere mortals. Only a few centuries have passed since Britons believed their sovereign's touch could cure scrofula; only a few decades since Japan was ruled by an actual deity; and only a few years since North Koreans paid their final tribute to Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, whose sacred birth was attended by supernatural omens.

In Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1992), James Scott observes that this tendency to ascribe super-human traits or virtues to monarchs certainly applied to imperial Russia. He quotes Lenin's contempt for Russian peasants' superstitious monarchism, their tendency “naively and blindly to believe in the Tsar-batiushka [Deliverer]” and petition him for redress (p. 97). Accompanying their faith in the Tsar-Deliverer, however, was the peasantry's complementary belief that any evils done in the tsar's name were actually the work of corrupt officials. Peasants could resist those officials while retaining their loyalty to the tsar, confident that “if the tsar only knew of the crimes his faithless agents committed in his name, he would punish them and rectify matters.” The reactionary worship of a semi-divine monarch could lead to insurrectionary, even revolutionary action.

A similar dynamic drove the decade of colonial uprisings preceding the War for American Independence. Opponents of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the military occupation of Boston, the Tea Act, and the Coercive Acts assumed (or persuaded themselves) that these impositions came not from the king but from a corrupt Parliament. His Majesty was good and patriotic, but in the colonies, away from his watchful eye, his evil ministers tried to plant their boots on freeborn English colonists' backs. Thus Patrick Henry, denouncing the Stamp Act, simultaneously pledged to defend George III to his dying breath. Sons of Liberty settling in Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley gave their new townships such patriotic names as Hanover (after Britain's ruling dynasty) and Kingston. New Yorkers erected an equestrian statue of the king in 1771, well into the imperial crisis. As late as 1775, the American rebels referred to the British forces fighting them in Boston as “the ministerial army,” not the king's army.

Brendan McConville pointed out (The King's Three Faces, 2006) that American monarchism had not come over in the Mayflower, bur rather had been built by colonial and imperial elites. By putting royal images in their homes (on tea sets and objets d'art), celebrating royal birthdays, and burning the king's enemies in effigy on Pope's Day, the leaders of colonial society imbued their followers with affection for a distant and artificial* British monarchy. The colonists, however, viewed the king much as Russian peasants viewed the tsar: a benevolent father-figure who would right the wrongs perpetrated by aristocrats and officials. Rebellious slaves, for instance, invoked the king's aid against their masters, and rebellious white colonists considered their resistance to tax collectors and soldiers entirely consistent with loyalty to the king.

The big change, as Pauline Maier reported (American Scripture, 1997), came in early 1776, when colonial newspapers reported that George III had declared the colonies in rebellion and withdrawn his royal protection. The king had now publicly proclaimed himself the colonists' enemy. Common Sense, published at the same time, made it safe to discuss the superstitious absurdities that underlay devotion to a monarch, and the Declaration of Independence pointedly indicted the king (not the Parliament) for abuse of power. Later in the War of Independence, the new loyalty oaths that the rebels forced upon former royalists helped dissolve the bonds of duty that still bound many to the Hanoverians. Yet the desire to follow or at least show affection for a monarch persisted in the United States into at least the 1780s – for I agree with Forrest McDonald's argument (Novus Ordo Seclorum, 1985) that residual king-worship explains Americans' celebration of the French royal family and their naming of towns and counties for the Bourbons. Arguably, it took the “party war” of the 1790s, in which “monocrat” became a deadly epithet, and the rise of a post-Revolutionary generation to bury American monarchism for good. Until the early nineteenth century, monarchism was as American as corn cakes or witchcraft trials.

So, Happy Independence Day, and God Save the Queen.

* The Hanoverian dynasty was imposed on Britain by act of Parliament, and its first two rulers didn't speak English particularly well

What I Learned at the Constanta EAAS

In April my partner Susan and I attended the biennial meeting of EAAS, the European Association of American Studies. This academic consortium brought together several hundred scholars from four continents and half a dozen disciplines (English, history, cultural studies, etc.) for five days of presentations, coffee klatches, and intellectual exchange. Practical limitations prevented me from attending more than a handful of papers, nearly all of them in my specialty of early American history, but I thought a summary of these presentations would give a sense of the scholarship on display.

Przemyslaw Damski reminded us that the fin-de-(vingtieme)-siecle United States followed a strongly interventionist foreign policy: American officials attended the 1899 Hague conference, developed the Open Door policy, and concluded treaties with Britain, and Theodore Roosevelt brokered the Treaty of Portsmouth. (We might throw in the Spanish-American War, but point taken.)

Abigail Fagan studied the German temperance movement and its adherents' relationship with American reformers in the 1830s. Temperance in central Europe grew out of liberalism, from the belief that one couldn't have a free state with a drunken populace - and, as in the U.S., from elites' desire to police the lower classes, who preferentially drank hard liquor. (This surprised me; I assumed all Germans drank beer.) 

Elise Kammerer discussed Anthony Benezet's school for free black children in colonial Philadelphia. She observed that the Quakers, pioneers of education for African-Americans, wanted black children trained in grammar and vocational skills, but not to the same level as their own children - and not in the same schools.

Hilary McLaughlin-Stoneham studied segregated transport in New Orleans and the lower Mississippi Valley, noting that racially segregated streetcars and steamboats dated to the Civil War rather than the 1890s. This shouldn't have surprised me, but it did; my knowledge of segregation in the late nineteenth-century South derives too much from my memory of STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW.

Damian Pargas, who is working on a study of fugitive slaves in the urban South, observed that runaways didn't always head for the North or Canada. Many went instead to Southern cities, where they believed it likelier they would find free kinfolk and employment.

Jean Pfaelzer gave a preview of her book CALIFORNIA BOUND. Despite calling itself a "free state," nineteenth-century California was anything but. Chinese companies employed captive women as sex workers, Anglo-Americans imported 2,000 African-American slaves as "indentured servants," and whites could essentially enslave Native Americans under state vagrancy laws.
 
Zsolt Palotas observed that one-sixth of the early American grain trade, and much of the nation's trade in provisions, was with the Mediterranean. This made relations with the Barbary states at least as important as those with Central Europe, and tribute payments to Algiers and Tripoli correspondingly significant.

Finally, a workshop on Digital Archiving reported that the University of Salzburg is working on a searchable database of early American drama, including tags for “gender relevance:” “male vanity, hypocrisy, cowardice, female boldness, women mocking men, [and] women...performatively reproducing certain kinds of masculinity."

Since you asked, Your Humble Narrator presented a short paper on the Chickasaw students who attended Plainfield Academy, Connecticut, in the late 1840s, and Mlle.* Livingston presented on the theme of disgust in children's toys.

**

The Association held its conference in Constanta, Romania, a city and a country I never thought I would have occasion to visit. Romania is poor as European countries go, and some of my sights and experiences reminded me of the other second-world country I have visited, Cuba: run-down and semi-abandoned buildings in the capital, stray dogs in the towns, piles of trash on railroad tracks and in vacant lots, mediocre food, dodgy-looking polyclinics, and old women rationing out toilet paper at the public lavatories. Yet despite its relative poverty the country had a lot of charm. The run-down buildings were often covered with ivy, the stray dogs were obviously well-fed and enjoying themselves, the train service was smooth and fast - and I've never before taken a train where book vendors came aboard shortly before departure -  and we did manage to find a couple of good restaurants (Thalia and Pata Negra) in Bucharest. I am glad that I didn't have occasion to visit one of the clinics or hospitals, however.**

The Romanians we met were friendly, thought it was funny when we tried our few words of Romanian, and wanted to know what was up with our electorate and Donald Trump. We said that confused us too. Romania recently held its own elections and decided to reinstate its former democratic socialist government, an example we Americans would do well to follow, if only we could.

(Above photos are of Ovidius University, Constanta, and a street scene on the Calea Grivitei, Bucharest. Both taken by the author.)





* Since May 15, Dr. Livingston. 
** We did patronize one of the pharmacies a couple of times, and I will say that whatever Romanians use in place of Imodium is very powerful.

Everyone Wants to Be a Wild Man

The April issue of Archaeology Magazine features an artifact, a gold spoon finial from late medieval Europe, crafted into the form of a bearded, club-wielding humanoid of doubtful sanity. The editor identifies his visage as that of the "Wild Man," a common motif in European art and ceremonial from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. Scholar Ronald Hutton notes that the Wild Man evoked earlier pagan deities and at the same time warned Christian Europeans of the chaos that lurked at the edge of their civilization. We might add Robert Berkhofer's observation (in The White Man's Indian [1978]) that the Wild Man heavily influenced Europeans' perception of Native Americans. Early modern Europeans sometimes assumed that Indians, like Wild Men, lived on raw meat or human flesh, and referred to both groups as "woods-dwellers" or "silvani" - in English, "salvages." 

What interested me most about the article was the obvious ambivalence Europeans displayed toward Wild Men. Commoners and elites feared these mythical figures but also emulated them, the latter by including them in military heraldry and by dressing as Wild Men for pageants. The image, like that of Native Americans in later centuries, suggested strength, physical courage, and a carnivalesque suspension of social rules. (We may note that the same elites who dressed as Wild Men in the fourteenth century also dressed as Brazilian Indians in the sixteenth.) The Wild Man thus served as a precursor to the early-modern trope of the "noble savage," and a bridge between that era and the pre-Christian Europeans whom Tacitus and his Classical contemporaries admired.

The Attack Monkeys of Ningbo

I'm brushing up my knowledge of what Gary Brecher calls “the Teflon Empire” by reading Julia Lovell's clear-eyed, balanced history of the First Opium War, the event that Chinese nationalists consider the founding episode (founding atrocity, if you prefer) of modern Chinese history. Like most military conflicts, this one had few redeeming features. It doesn't even bear a very accurate name. Qing officials did destroy a lot of English opium in 1839, but the British government did not go to war as payback; rather, it wanted to humiliate the decadent government of an allegedly inferior nation. Humiliate China it did: the war proved hopelessly, tragically one sided, with thousands of demoralized Chinese troops crushed in their indefensible forts and drowned in their obsolete junks. British casualties numbered in the low hundreds. Like the Falklands War, the Opium War was (to quote Ricky Gervais) “basically a range war...the equivalent of holding a midget at arm's length...[while] you're just kicking him in the bollocks.”

There's not much levity in Lovell's book, but she does have an eye for colorful details. I particularly enjoyed her account of one of General Prince Yijing's attempts at unconventional warfare: "Before the [Chinese] assault on [British-held] Ningbo, Yijang had made room in the budget to buy nineteen monkeys: the idea was to tie firecrackers to their backs then fling them onto English ships moored nearby.”* None of the general's subordinates, however, would volunteer for monkey-tossing duty, so Yijing's simian attack force went unused. I regret to say the monkeys' attendant eventually abandoned them to starve. The ministrations of Mars are often cruel.

* My petite amie suggests that General Yijing had read of the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman, who ignited enemy buildings with his tail.

Above image: Japanese (not Chinese, but certainly East Asian) macaques frolicking in the snow. Taken by the author, Dec. 2014.

La Tortue Revient

My blog for H-AMINDIAN has, since my last update here, addressed the subjects of Indian slavery, land allotment, Inuit relations with the Norse and Danes, and the perennially relevant issues of sovereignty and agency. Ethnohistorians Bryan Rindfleisch and Kristalyn Shefveland have enriched the weblog, or rather some of my entries thereon, with their research findings and insights. (And Prof. Shefveland will join us with a guest post this summer.) Here's what the Turtle has been reading:

Norse and Inuit: The longue duree of Scandinavian relations with the Inuit, from the eleventh century CE to the twenty-first.

A Settler-Colonialist Interlude: Links to essays on everyone's favorite new interpretive framework, written by Bryan Rindfleisch and The Tattooed Professor.

Sovereignty in Unlikely Places: When is a land-cession treaty an assertion of indigenous sovereignty?

Mrs. Town Destroyer's Ill-Gotten Fortune: Indian slavery in colonial Virginia, and a surprising detail about the sources of Martha Washington's wealth.

Agency, Culpability, and the Fox Wars: Indian slavery and France's moral culpability for the destruction of the Mesquakies.

*

There's some exciting material coming up in the near future, including my thoughts on the Mohawk prophetess Coohcoochee and a post by Prof. Julie Reed on Cherokee institution-building.

Pride, Prejudice, and Presidents

Last month Your Humble Narrator's university had the privilege of hosting Sarah Vowell, NPR essayist and voice of Violet Incredible. Ms. Vowell gave a talk on her new book, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, which I am reading in an audiobooks edition because it's hard to beat Patton Oswald as the voice of Thomas Jefferson.* Before her public appearance, Vowell was kind enough to meet with a dozen history students and faculty and talk about her work, specifically her research techniques (site visits, lots of reading, lots of notecards) and the themes, like family and memory and democratic debate, with which she regularly engages. In response to a question from YHN, Vowell attributed the shortage of women in the history bestseller lists to publishers' marketing of histories to “Republican dads” and focus on “serious,” male topics. She found this amusing, because “there is nothing funnier than a self-important man.” Probably so.

Perhaps the most memorable moment of Vowell's visit (for me, anyway) came at the reception before her talk, when one of my colleagues' sons asked her advice for a school paper on James Buchanan. Vowell had nothing specific to offer about Buchanan, but did share a general suggestion: try to find something about your subject, even if s/he is an obscure politician or president, that makes him/her appealing to you. Recalling her research for Assassination Vacation, Vowell described plowing through James Garfield's dreary memoirs, choc-a-block with mundane details of a legislator's life, and seeing that he only “came alive” when he wrote about the novels he read for pleasure. Thinking of the future president sneaking off to the Library of Congress to read Jane Austen made him appealing to Ms. Vowell, and I daresay to all of us who heard her account. Since Garfield's presidency was cut short by an assassin's bullet, and he spent much of it dying on a sick bed while doctors futilely tried to save him, one can't know much about the twentieth president except by studying his pre-presidential life. It is affecting to think of him reading novels in secret, or “writ[ing] Greek with one hand while writing Latin with the other,”** and to imagine Garfield doing so from the White House, if only he had avoided his encounter with Charles Guiteau.

* Although Fred Armison, as the voice of Lafayette's teen-aged wife, comes close.

** From Joe Queenan's Imperial Caddy (1992), 117.

Presidents' Day (belated): Zachary Taylor

Early in his career, Zachary Taylor was a neighbor of mine, more or less. He commanded Fort Harrison on the Wabash River, and organized its successful defense against the Lakes Indian warriors who attacked it in September 1812. Taylor managed to avoid embarrassing himself in that most embarrassing of early American conflicts, the War of 1812, and stayed in the Army for most of the rest of his life. During the Second Seminole War he distinguished himself at the Battle of Lake Okeechobee* and won from his troops, or perhaps his spouse, the nickname “Old Rough and Ready.” Taylor reached the zenith of his career during the Mexican War, when he took the city of Monterey and defeated a vastly larger Mexican force at the Battle of Buena Vista (February 1847). Taylor benefited, in the latter case, from his adversary’s decision to force-march his army across the desert before the battle, but at the end of the engagement the American general held the ground and won the glory. A year later he accepted the Whig Party’s nomination to the presidency, and a factional division in the rival Democratic Party helped him win the election.

As president, Taylor chiefly distinguished himself by dropping dead less than halfway through his term. Doctors identified the cause of death as digestive illness exacerbated by overeating on Independence Day. Amateur historians speculated in the twentieth century that someone had poisoned Taylor, though a 1991 analysis of his remains found no trace of the likeliest poison, arsenic. More recently Jane McHugh and Philip Mackowiak suggested that Taylor contracted gastroenteritis from an open sewage field near the White House, and that the same illness could have also afflicted William Harrison and James Polk. 

Taylor’s death, as I have noted elsewhere on this blog, probably spared the nation an early outbreak of civil war. In 1849 the president demanded that Congress admit the new territories of California and New Mexico as free states – not because he opposed slavery, but because he believed free-state status would avoid friction with the local white population. He would not brook compromise on this issue, and the Compromise of 1850, which provided for a local-option admission of slavery to New Mexico, would not have passed over his veto. Moreover, Taylor nearly started a shooting war with Texas by sending troops to Santa Fe during a border dispute with the Lone Star State. If fighting had broken out, other Southern states would probably have come to Texas’s aid and gone to war with the U.S. government. When Taylor died, however, his successor approved a Congressional resolution of the dispute that gave both sides some of the disputed land and paid off Texas’s sovereign debts.

Had war between North and South broken out in 1850, it is unlikely that the Union would have been able to raise sufficient troops to overpower the slave states, and likely that a pro-peace candidate would have won the 1852 election and given the secessionists their independence. Instead, Millard Fillmore and the 31st Congress gave the United States ten more years of inter-sectional peace, followed by a bloody war that ended the Slave South. Sometimes the most influential thing a leader can do is eat a fatally large dose of cherries and iced milk.

* Distinguished himself by claiming victory in the battle, even though the Seminoles and their maroon allies actually won.

The Hussites Are Back, but Did They Bring Cookies?

The seventeenth century, that chilly, famished, war-wracked saeculum, became for many an age of extinction. The Pequot Indians, the Ming Dynasty, and the Hussite Protestants of Bohemia all succumbed to violence, enslavement, or exile in the 1600s. For human ethnic and religious groups, however, extinction need not remain permanent. The Pequots' descendants made a comeback in the twentieth century, and opened one of the most profitable casinos in the world. Ming loyalists established secret societies that survived, in the case of the Triads, into the modern era. And Czech Protestants, as I learned on a recent trip to Prague, have enjoyed a modest comeback in the past century. During the Thirty Years War the Habsburgs made a mighty effort to crush Protestantism in Bohemia, forcing the adherents of Jan Hus to convert or leave the kingdom. Some rural Protestants preserved their faith in secret, and in the eighteenth century emigrated to Germany, where they became the co-founders of the Moravian Church. Otherwise the Czech homeland remained staunchly and, it seemed, permanently Catholic.

When Czechoslovakia became independent, however, the government decided to shore up their new country's national identity by creating a national church, one independent of the Roman Church hierarchy and evocative of the old Hussite tradition. Their religious project, the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, debuted in January 1920. While the Czechoslovak Church never became a serious competitor with Catholicism – or secularism – it now has about 300,000 adherents, and runs an array of schools, senior centers, and children's homes. Like the Roman Church, the CHC recognizes seven sacraments; I assume that, at communion, both the laity and priesthood partake of the wine (as this was the original Hussites' cause celebre). It has an ordained priesthood and episcopate, though the religious head of the church is a patriarch rather than a pope, and women have been accepted as priests since 1947. Church governance follows a hybrid episcopal/presbyterian model, with decision-making power jointly vested in the bishops and local councils of lay elders. How well this works in practice I know not, but hybrid institutions always function a little awkwardly. They are no weaker for it.

(Photo of the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel, one of the Hussite Church's parishes, in Prague.)