Horseshoe Curve

Thomas Dumm

Amherst College


I have just returned from a visit to Altoona, Pennsylvania, in order to see my father. While there I took a friend to see the world famous Horseshoe Curve. Many people who know my sense of humor think I am being ironical when I refer to it that way, but those who are railroad buffs know better. When it first opened, the Curve was acclaimed as one of the eight wonders of the modern world, along with such sights as the Eiffel Tower and London’s Crystal Palace. But few know of it now, and therein is a sad story.

The Horseshoe Curve came into existence in 1854, as the solution to a seemingly unsolvable engineering problem – how to build a railroad that could cross the high point of the Allegheny Mountains in order to connect Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There was an urgent need to solving the problem. New York especially was becoming the major trade route between east and west, due to the success of the Erie Canal.

At the time, the most efficient route between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia was the Portage Canal and Rail, a combination of boat – through the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers to the town of Hollidaysburg, where the boats would be hoisted onto cars, which then would be pulled by rope up a series of steep inclined planes to the top of the mountain ridge. A trip between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh took six to seven days, when the weather was favorable. And the transport of freight was just about out of the equation all together, due to the expense.

To address this problem, in 1846 the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania chartered the Pennsylvania Railroad and hired the engineers John Edgar Thomson and Herman Haupt to take charge of its construction. They decided that the most efficient route through the mountains was to follow old Indian trails along the ridges of the mountains, straight through the center of the state. This route was perfect, except for one barrier – Kittanning Gap, a spot that interrupted the path between two major ridges. To build a bridge of over two thousand feet to connect the ridges would have been impossible at the time, mainly because the degree of incline would have been close to 3%, much too steep for a locomotive to manage.

So what did they do? They imported about 400 Irish laborers, who, with only black powder, picks, chisels and wheelbarrows, created a landfill. The landfill contained more cubic footage than all of the Great Pyramids of Egypt combined, and created a ridge where there had been a valley. Around that ridge the railroad was laid, in the shape of horseshoe, at an incline of about 1.3%. The time of travel between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was cut to less than a day, and freight was able to make it through the mountains. The Pennsylvania Railroad became, for a time, the largest railroad, by almost every measure – 10,000 miles of track, three times the freight and revenue of its closest competitors – through the first half of the 20th century, and at one point was the world’s largest publically traded corporation. Indeed, for some years its revenue stream was larger than that of the U.S. government, and it still holds the record for continuous dividend payments to its shareholders, over a 100 years. At its peak, the PRR employed over 250,000 workers.

The Horseshoe Curve was such a critical national link in the transportation system that Nazi Germany targeted it for sabotage during World War II. But what the Nazis couldn’t destroy, GM and Dwight Eisenhower could. The establishment of the Interstate Highway System in 1956, pushed by Eisenhower, established a national Highway Trust Fund to build and maintain what is now the dominant form of transport in the country. Railroads immediately went into decline, though the PRR continued to be profitable, until forced by the Interstate Commerce Commission, as part of its 1968 merger with the ailing New York Central Railroad, to take on several other highly unprofitable lines. Two years later, after the U.S. government, led by Eisenhower’s former vice-president, and strapped for money because the Vietnam War, reneged on a $200 million loan guarantee, and the newly named Penn Central Railroad went bankrupt. The pieces went to first to Conrail, a court created successor to the Penn Central, and then to Northern Southern Railway, and CSX, none of which carry passengers.

I drove on the Interstate to visit Dad, and on the return trip to Amherst our car was hit by a truck. The car was totaled. Lucky for me, the airbags deployed. But I had plenty of time while waiting at the car rental in Wappinger Falls, New York, and then on the remainder of the long trip, to think about what it would have meant to have a good rail system in place. Instead of the grinding drive, a relaxing journey. Instead of the crazy drivers, wasted fuel, and butt ugly scenery, perhaps a glass of wine, a meal, and time to read. Instead of wreckage on the highway . . . well, you get the point.

One of the most interesting aspects of this story, it seems to me, is the overt and clear participation of government in the building and maintenance of transportation systems. The assumption, even for the building of the Interstate Highway, that there is a necessary role for the state to play in such huge projects that have such serious impact on the lives of the citizenry, is a shibboleth to the ideologues now in charge of Congress. John Mica (R) from Florida, currently chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has called for drastic cuts in the next round of Highway Trust Fund spending, ignoring the fact that those funds are supposed to be dedicated to transportation projects.

Compounding the misery of our trip on the highway, on our drive home we listened to Mica pontificating on C-SPAN radio, explaining how Amtrak is an abject failure and waste of money, how we can be much more efficient if we would privatize highways, with no evidence, but with a lot of conviction in his voice. When listeners called in suggesting that perhaps running two wars was even more inefficient, he blithely ignored them. Later, we heard how we need a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, one that would require, when passed, 2/3 majorities in each house of Congress to pass tax increases. And so it goes.

In the Crosshairs

Thomas Dumm

Amherst College

John Protevi goes a long way toward explaining the absurdity of the demand for billiard ball causality while tracing the influence of rhetoric and propaganda in creating an atmosphere conducive to violence, and how that may have had something to do with the assassination attempt against Congresswoman Giffords. I want to supplement his post by exploring another dimension of the mediated responses to this horror, namely, the Fox News response to the accusation of influence. 

Over the weekend Fox News repeatedly defended Sarah Palin’s cross-hairs imagery, her use of the phrase, “Don’t retreat, re-load,”as aspects of the metaphor used by all participants in American politics. You know, targeting opponents. 

A seemingly chastened Roger Ailes issued a memo to his stable of stars over the weekend, cautioning, “You know, they’re using this thing...apparently there was a map from one of Palin’s things that had her (Congresswoman Giffords) district targeted. So, we looked at the internet and the first thing we found in 2007, the Democrat Party had a targeted map with targets on it for the Palin district. These maps have been used for for years that I know of. I have two pictures of myself with a bull's-eye on my head. This is just bullshit. This goes on... both sides are wrong, but they both do it. I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.” 

Ailes seemed worried that bombast in the face of such a tragic event might backfire. Not so for his troops. 

As his way of “toning things down,” on his Monday edition of The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly suggested the following: “The New York Times, MSNBC, Paul Krugman and others, are furious that their far-left vision is falling apart, so they are using a terrible tragedy to attack their perceived political enemies. That is what this is all about, the failure of the far left agenda.” He suggested that President Obama not only call for unity, as he did, earning O’Reilly’s praise, sort of grudgingly, but urged him to go further, and “call out the left-wing thugs.” 

On his January 10th eponymously named program, Glenn Beck dug up a comment that had appeared some time earlier on the Daily Cos – “She is dead to me now,” a reader’s response to Giffords’s refusal to vote for Nancy Polosi for minority leader in the recent House vote – that was scrubbed from the website, attributing it to guilty conscience on the part of its editor. Of course he failed to note that Sarah Palin had done the same thing with her map. He also failed to note that a reader responding to an article by using a common phrase of shunning is not the equivalent of a former Vice-presidential candidate using the images she used as a front page to her website. Beck actually resurrected the map, and mockingly asked “if this map is responsible,” exemplifying Protevi’s billiard ball logic carried to its absurdist conclusion. But he failed to note that Congresswoman Giffords publicly worried about the use of that imagery immediately upon its appearance, and that that hadn’t made Sarah Palin give pause, not one bit. 

But in the main, Beck used his January 10th program to tell a larger tale, trying to reframe the story of the assassination attempt media coverage. He claimed that Loughner couldn’t be pinned down politically. In almost the next breath he noted that Loughner owned copies of both The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf (but of course didn’t note that he also had copies of some of Ayn Rand’s work). Beck fitted the entire event into his ongoing narrative about Frances Fox Piven, Van Jones, communists/fascists coming to power by scapegoating conservatives, exploiting existing tragedies to stir chaos and fear, while claiming that none of this narrative is a conspiracy theory, and what is going on in the mainstream media is an attempt to silence or discredit opposition to Obama. “My agenda is the truth,” he said. Fox, he claimed, unlike the rest of the media, did not engage in wild speculation, and a good thing, because Loughner is not a right-wing nut-job, nor a left-wing nut job, but simply a “nut-job.” He suggested that the left always refers to terrorists as individuals, acting on their own, but when it comes to the Right, there must always be the accusation of conspiracy. 

Both Beck and O’Reilly mentioned that they had security details to protect them, because of threats they receive all the time. 

Is there a pattern here? They complain about threats made to them when a Congresswoman who has previously had her offices vandalized, who as recently as the day before her assassin attacked was urging that rhetoric be toned down, when she is laying in a coma, when there are many others dead and wounded. By complaining about being threatened and scapegoated, they remake the story. It no longer is primarily about the killing and wounding, but about themselves as victims, just like Congresswoman Giffords. It is the ultimate in rhetorical jujitsu. Or perhaps it is chutzpah, as in the story of the man who murders his parents and then begs the judge for mercy, noting that he is an orphan. 

My initial response to this attempt to reframe the narrative is that it seems at best to be working at the implausible limits of extreme plausible deniability. But perhaps this move, seemingly an act of desperation, an act transparent to anyone not already among the converted to the Fox narrative of contemporary American political life, can be viewed as an experiment. “How far can we go?” may be the question they are asking themselves. 

 Or, perhaps they are so far down the narrative rabbit hole they have constructed that they believe their storyline, that as Beck put it, “My agenda is the truth.” It is just that the truth is that Frances Fox Piven is responsible, now and always, and Van Jones, and, though he didn’t mention it on this particular program, Woodrow Wilson as well, the evil Democrat founder of progressivism. 

The Terrifying Face of Liberal Fascism 

Frances Fox Piven

Or, perhaps most troubling of all, they know that the power they have at their disposal, an entire network that will endlessly repeat their story line, can turn this lemon into lemonade in the end. If that is so, then we need to think again about new ways to jam the gears of the Fox resonance machine. As Beck says, “My agenda is the truth,” though perhaps he means that in a way slightly different than he explicitly intends. In other words, he has the truth right where he wants it, in the crosshairs, only metaphorically speaking of course. 

Constitution Worship and the Tea Party

Thomas Dumm
   Amherst College

Now that some of members of the Tea Party are actually charged with governing, it will be of some interest to see how their vision of the Constitution will play out. Many of these candidates insisted on a “return to the Constitution” as a plank in their platforms, and some are now proposing legislation that would require that any proposed law identify the specific Constitutional provisions that authorize the legislation being considered. 

But one only has to look back on the moment when Christine O’Donnell (R) interrogated Chris Coons (D) during the final Senate debate in Delaware on the doctrine of separation of church and state to realize that many of these candidates are relying on something other than the Constitution as interpreted for over two hundred and thirty years as their guidepost. You will recall that when Coons cited the doctrine of separation of church and state during that debate, O’Donnell challenged him, arguing that the First Amendment authorized no such thing, asking in a voice filled with incredulity for Coons to tell her where it said that. Coons mentioned the establishment clause, and the long history of its interpretation. O’Donnell, clearly flustered – the debate was at a law school and the audience couldn’t avoid reacting in disbelieving laughter at her questions – nonetheless acted as though she would be vindicated after the debate. Of course, she wasn’t. But what is more interesting is what she claimed justified her questions to Coons. In a statement she argued that Coons couldn’t show her the language that said there is to be “a wall of separation between church and state” in the First Amendment itself. Hence, she was justified in asking, and Coons, a lawyer of long experience, was the one who didn’t know what he was talking about.

There are more inconsistencies to be found in Tea Party arguments about the Constitution. Many Tea Party members think that certain amendments ought to be repealed, a position that is paradoxical for those who argue others are tampering with it. But it may be more interesting to see which parts of the Constitution they believe need amending. In forum after forum, these have been the 14th (revision) and the 16th and 17th (repeal). The latter two amendments provide for a national income tax and the direct election of senators. Both of these were the fruits of the Progressive era, deemed by Glenn Beck as the evil origin of our contemporary woes. The opposition to the income tax is fairly obvious. After all, it funds the overblown national government, and we are all taxed too much as is, in their view. The repeal of the 17th, while initially startling, indicates their great faith in state governments to provide for the interest of the people, as they are closer to understanding their needs.

But it has been the 14th Amendment that has captured their attention the most (John Boehner, incoming Speaker of the House and Tea Party sympathizer, has already suggested hearings). The 14th is in need of revision because in section one it says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” This clause allows there to be “anchor babies,” children of undocumented residents who by birth are citizens. But it is also interesting to note something else about the 14th Amendment that has been attacked by Tea Partiers than birth citizenship, albeit much more obliquely, namely, the reaffirmation in the 14th Amendment of the rights of citizens of the United States to enjoy “the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.” In other words, this is the clause that establishes the national government as the supreme final arbiter of the rights and duties of citizens, settling all prior argument regarding that question.

There has been an interesting silence on this clause, which is also to be found in section one of the 14th Amendment. That silence could be heard during the campaign when candidates trumpet the virtues of the 10th Amendment, which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This amendment -- which provided the basis for Calhoun’s ante bellum argument for state nullification of national law -- was touted by many Tea Partiers as a necessary antidote to too much federal action. Indeed, as early as the debate concerning the national healthcare law, Tea Partiers have argued the unconstitutionality of the law on the basis of the 10th amendment.

Back in the 1950s this was what was known as the “states rights” argument, and was directly attached to the white southern resistance to the civil rights movement. Its resurrection now is less obviously racist, but as Jairus Victor Grove documents in his recent post in The Contemporary Condition, there does seem to be a greater toleration of racist arguments now than there was even two years ago.

All of this strange revisionism – ahistoricism mingled with mythic history -- is draped in reverence for the Constitution itself as a sacred document of a chosen people. The long history of Constitution worship fits quite well into the Tea Party agenda, and attaches it more closely to the Biblical fundamentalism of conservative, evangelical Christians, a key actor in the right-wing resonance machine.

The deepest irony is that one of the most famous advocates for Constitution worship was Abraham Lincoln, the agnostic who did more than any other single American in history to reshape the Constitution. The 13th amendment, which abolished slavery, the 14th amendment, which established national citizenship and insured due process, and the 15th Amendment, which put into the Constitution equal rights for the newly freed slaves, all were a direct result of the Civil War that he led and won. But here is what Lincoln argued as a young man, in his later to be famous address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, January 27, 1838. 

"Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor; --let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap--let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;--let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars."

Constitution worship never had a greater advocate than Lincoln, who not only did more to rewrite it, but who also violated it more than any president until the second half of the 20th century.

This strange religiosity, as it has from the start, operates to prevent Americans from reasonably confronting serious dysfunctionalities in a governing document that was never designed for a country of this size and power. What helped forestall a serious reexamination of the Constitution in the past was what the Constitutional historian Robert Ackerman once referred to as “Constitutional moments,” when the constituent power of a mobilized majority would be able, either through explicit amendment, or more likely by creative reinterpretation, make this creaky machine last another few thousand miles, staying alive. But as Anthony Scalia, a member of both the old and new Gang of Five says, the Constitution is not a living but a dead document. Of course it is Scalia himself who has helped kill it. Contemporary Tea Partiers hope to keep it dead – it is impossible, it seems, to worship living things.

But it may also be the case that they are forcing us to look at a document that has failed in recent decades to produce anything resembling democratic governance. If this is the case, they may be bringing forth more conflict than even they imagine. For the idea of replacing what has increasingly been a Constitution reliant on a history of interpretation – however literal these readers have been – with a new document, would suggest that the there has either been a revolution or the completion of withdrawal of consent from above, as the neo-liberalism of today bleeds into the neo-feudalism of the future.

Let The Dead Bury The Dead

Thomas Dumm
Amherst College

The controversy concerning what is now called “The Ground Zero Mosque,” even though the proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, is in many ways the product of the evangelical capitalist resonance machine. Following a path that is spookily like the Astro-turfed Tea Party movement, what was once an experiment in false outrage has metastasized into something much greater. And already, as if on cue, the faux-wise Washington commentator David Wills, on the August 22nd edition of This Week on ABC has suggested that the whole affair is overblown, a product of the August slow news cycle, and that soon voters would turn their attention to more serious stuff like the economy.

But as with the strange radicalism of the Tea Party movement, which was fueled by racial hatred, there is clear evidence that racism and religious bigotry is fueling much of outpouring of indignant rage among those who are protesting the building of Park 51. And in this case, one of the strongest claims that many protesters are making -- that the site of the Twin Towers is a sacred place that must not be defiled, a place where several thousand people died – is perhaps the most dangerous claim that can be made, because it entangles the very meaning of what it is to be a human being with a politics of exclusion.

What is a sacred place? We usually associate such a place with houses of worship, but we also include graveyards, mausoleums, and, more personally, places where we scatter the ashes of the dear departed. The site of the World Trade Center qualifies as such a place, but in a very particular and quite unusual sense. Many of the bodies of the dead denizens of Ground Zero were not recovered, but were figuratively vaporized, turned into ash or so badly crushed as to be beyond recognition, torn into scattered bits.

(Just about everyone remembers that day, 9/11, where they were, what they were doing when they heard the news. I happened to be at Brigham and Women’s Hospital with my wife, who was undergoing her monthly monitoring for the return of her cancer. We arrived there shortly after the towers were hit, and watched them collapse while waiting for her to have an MRI. Our appointment with her surgeon was cancelled shortly after that, and the hospital was put on lockdown. We later learned that Brenda’s physician was the head of the emergency response team for the hospital and had been called upon to coordinate their trip to New York to care for the wounded. But later that day, their trip was cancelled. It seemed that there were few wounded survivors, that the vast majority of people there that day either escaped physically unscathed or died on site.)

That we remember this place as sacred, then, is a consequence of our knowing that the remains of many dead people are still there. It is the oldest of religious beliefs that humans have held, that we worship our dead at the place where they are buried. Burial itself is a uniquely human activity, the very word human being etymologically connected to humus, earth, decay and dust. Indeed, as the great philosopher of history, Giambattista Vico noted long ago, burial is among very first of human institutions. Robert Pogue Harrison, in The Dominion of the Dead, notes that the very first houses that we built were not for the living, but for the dead.

So the real anger incited by those who claim the defiling of a sacred place is understandable, even though the claim itself is false. This site is sacred, but in the most ecumenical sense possible. All of the major world religions were represented among those who died, and undoubtedly some atheists, mystics, and animists as well. Their molecules mingle there. If those who wanted to preserve the site as a more exclusive place, it is already too late to do so.

But the resistance to the community center in New York has had the classic racist effect of insinuating that Muslims are less than human. Islam, the most modern of the major religions, is thus seen as the religion of a particular race. As Franklin Graham recently explained on CNN, Muslimism is transmitted by the father to the child. Once again, the question of blood transmission of religion rises as an issue in determining one’s identity. A rich irony here is that a recent Time magazine poll on tolerance of religious beliefs indicated that Americans are most tolerant of Jews and Protestants, only 13% having unfavorable views of them, followed by Catholics, at 17%, then Mormons at 29%. Muslims? 43% of Americans hold unfavorable views of Muslims. That Americans hold such a tolerant view of Jews and such an intolerant view of Muslims might suggest that a new form of anti-semitism is emerging here in the United States, with Americans disavowing the old form of anti-semitism by showing their love for Jews, thus freeing them to vent their hatred on Muslims.

In other words, while the specific issues concerning the current Ground Zero controversy may indeed fade to the background as the fall elections approach, the undercurrent of hatred that has fueled is not about to fade away, just as the Tea Party, a not unassociated movement – the August 22nd demonstration against 51 Park contained self-identified Tea Party members – is not about to fade away. It has become a matter of blood now, in more than one sense.

The Winter of Hate, Taking Tea Baggers Seriously

Thomas Dumm

Amherst College

In a recent post at the Salon website, Michael Lind asserts that the rise of the Tea Party movement is countercultural. Rather than building counter-institutions as the neoconservatives did during the high water mark of the Great Society, he suggests that Tea Partiers and their enablers at Fox News, especially Glenn Beck, are not interested in power or governance but, like the countercultural denizens of the Sixties and Seventies, are more interested in enclosing themselves in the reassuring “truths” of their radical ideology, without even trying to make any claim about what to do programmatically to advance a political cause. The counterculture of the right, like that of the left in the sixties, Lind suggests, refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the game they have lost, and finds itself in a dreamlike world. Rather than the Summer of Love, he wittily asserts, the Republican radicals find themselves engaging in the street theatre of a Winter of Hate.

As a consequence, Lind suggests, the fragile Democratic ruling coalition has been granted a reprieve, in the form of a retreat into cultural politics by their Republican opponents. After all, no one who is serious can take Beck, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity and the like seriously. They are buffoons, Abbie Hoffmans of the new millennium. 

The problem is, last I checked, Fox News was the number one cable news network, and while some may deride their claim to hegemony by pointing out that their largest audiences usually can be numbered in the hundreds of thousands as opposed to millions, it doesn’t take reading Bill Connolly on the capitalist/Christian resonance machine – though it surely doesn’t hurt – to realize how effective their politics of affect is in influencing political debate. While the Tea Party may have begun as a hollow, Astroturf movement by corporate funded right-wing institutes, it is no longer simply a product of Dick Armey’s fevered imagination. When CPAC held its annual convention last week in Washington, DC, the Tea Party was hailed by Republican members of Congress and “serious” presidential candidates. One didn’t ever see anything like that occurring in the Sixties. Indeed, the media then, as now, condemned those on the Left counterculture much more than they now condemn those on the supposedly parallel right counterculture. Moreover, back then, police brutally attacked denizens like Hoffman, shot and killed protesters, and generally suppressed them as much as they could, with the backing of Democratic establishment politicians. (Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland documents this paranoia and repression from above quite well.) We don’t see attempts to marginalize Glenn Beck on the part of the GOP. We don’t see gun-toting Tea Partiers wrestled to the ground by police outside of Presidential events. Instead, we see the politicians of the right falling all over themselves to corral the discontent of the Tea Partiers to further their corporate goals. 

The problem with analyses like Lind’s is that they minimize the importance of culture. Over and over we are told that culture is less important than politics, as though the two are separate entities. A counter-establishment, not a counterculture, he suggests. But the truth throughout American history has been that the battles of cultural differences are the crucial political battles. Culture includes economics, as is becoming clearer all the time (even to economists). Precisely because it is evoking strong claims about cultural differences, the Tea Party needs to be taken seriously for what it is – a racist, know nothing, proto-fascist movement. Those who seek to dismiss it, but especially those who attempt use it, may well find themselves with a tiger by the tail.