Are We All Progressives Now?
over the past decade, politicians and pundits have increasingly sought authority for their actions and ideas in the Progressive Era. After Newt Gingrich became speaker in November 1994, he compared himself to William McKinley’s campaign manager Mark Hanna and declared that a new progressive era was at hand. The Hudson Institute, known for founder Herman…
Photo Finishes
In California’s 27th district, in suburban Los Angeles, Republican incumbent James Rogan is especially vulnerable this year because he acted as House prosecutor during President Clinton’s impeachment trial. But his seat was never very secure to start with. Although Rogan has won two terms (his last with only 51 percent of the vote), his district…
Post-Zionist Israel
Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University, and Avi Shlaim, a professor of history at Oxford, have come to be thought of as mainstays among Israel’s New Historians, a term reminiscent of America’s Revisionist school, which came into its own during the late 1960s. Back then, William Appleman Williams particularly captured the imagination…
Targeting House Managers?
Poor Jim Rogan. The two-term congressman from California, it seems, is the focus of a dastardly campaign by Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party to take down the heroic House impeachment managers of yore. “I have been targeted for defeat,” Rogan wrote in a recent four-page, tersely syntacted National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) letter. “They’re…
The Taxonomist
Voodoo Tax Calculator George W. Bush’s Web site includes a “Bush For President Tax Calculator” that ostensibly lets taxpayers “See How Governor Bush’s Tax Plan Helps Working Americans.” But the calculator often simply doesn’t work. If you type “single, two kids, making $22,000,” for example, you’ll be told that your current income tax is $110…
The Money Chase
Visit the Web site of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and you’ll be greeted by an animated banner ad blaring: “Contribute! In the ’98 elections, Democrats were outspent 3 to 1.” Fair enough. As a whole, Republicans routinely outraise and outspend Democrats, and that’s been especially so since Democrats lost control of Congress in…
Thy Kingdom Dot Com
The rise of the new economy and skyrocketing prices of Internet stocks have caused a certain discomfort and ambivalence among older Americans, which in this case generally means anyone over 26. There is, of course, due acknowledgment of the great promise of e-commerce and even some national pride about the phenomenon (only in America!). But…
Our Ford
Last September AT&T approached the financially struggling First Christian Church in Alexandria, Virginia, with this bargain: In return for letting the company erect a 130-foot-tall cross doubling as a cellular phone tower, the congregation would receive $18,000 annually. Residents were split: Was the money–in the words of the Reverend Tim Mabbott, who supported the idea–a…
The Great Divide
Dot-com billionaires are sprouting like spring crocuses, and their money is trickling down through the rich topsoil of America. The average pay of chief executives of major companies rose 18 percent in 1999, to $12 million. (Back in 1990, it was a modest $1.8 million.) Fearful of the dot-com brain drain, big law firms just…
Conspiracies for Fools for Scandal
The New York Times is known for its scrupulous approach to assigning book reviews, frequently disqualifying reviewers who have even the most tenuous personal or professional links to a book’s author or authors. It was surprising, then, when the Times assigned Neil Lewis, a well-regarded political reporter at the paper’s D.C. bureau, to review Joe…
Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong
Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, by James W. Loewen. The New Press, 480 pages, $26.95. In Lies Across America, James Loewen offers 100 short essays, each one discussing an individual monument or historic site and the inaccuracies in its portrayal of the past. He criticizes the way the birthplace of Helen…
The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution
The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution, by Alfred F. Young. Beacon Press, 288 pages, $15.00. Alfred F. Young seeks to illuminate the American Revolution by examining the life of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a rank-and-file tradesman whose name appears with peculiar frequency in early American documents. What led a poor…
That ’70s Decade
The American Prospect Volume 11, Issue 12. May 8, 2000 Care, Charity, and Profit Robert Kuttner Thy Kingdom Dot Com Paul Starr Devil in the Details: scandalous book reviews; for God and Ford; The Taxonomist; those poor…
Alexander Hamilton, American and Duel
On the Mount Rushmore of our collective memory, the faces of many of the nation’s founders loom as large weathered archetypes–unchanging men of granite who shaped the American Revolution and the new republic. In reality, of course, these individuals were complicated and sometimes less than admirable. Gore Vidal, in his novel Burr, famously capitalized on…
How We Got Here and The Seventies
Accustomed as we have been to periodizing history into decades, we’re in for some confusion now: What are we supposed to call this decade? The zeroes? The Os? The aughts? We have no precedents to guide us, since nobody in the past century seems to have spoken in terms of decades until the 1920s, or…
Psychic Friends Network
Aliens are still poking around on television, though by now you’d think they’d have found what they were looking for, and God has certainly been holding His own on TV lately, what with angels and miracles and the like. But now, finally, dead people are making something of a play–or, rather, the people that dead…
Roar of the Crowd
My son Paul and I watched the fourth game of the 1998 American League Divisional Series from seats between home and first that had been provided by my other son, Theo. At the start of the eighth inning, with the Sox clinging to a 1-0 lead, Jimy Williams decided to replace Derek Lowe, who had…
Caveat Lector
Remember the Beardstown Ladies? Their “common sense” investment guide became a best-seller in the mid-1990s. The story of these 16 small-town women who formed an investment club in the early 1980s and reportedly beat the market over a 10-year period titillated middle-class consumers eager to share in the bull market, while vindicating a mistrust of…
Word of Mouth
A decade after Abbie Hoffman had first set the hairstyle for a generation, he showed up on a television talk show with a radically short haircut and the explanation that, once Tab Hunter was wearing his hair long, Hoffman knew it had come time to cut his own. By this logic, now that an off-Broadway…
Comment: Care, Charity, and Profit
Our cover story this issue is an investigation of ResCare, a national corporate chain that runs group homes for the disabled and the mentally retarded. As Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn document in sometimes gruesome detail, deinstitutionalization has come full circle, from notorious state-run warehouses like Willowbrook, to community institutions run by nonprofits, and now,…
After Anthrax
Poking my head down, looking into the abyss of a four-story-tall, 20,000-liter fermenter, which was one of 10 there to produce anthrax for weapons, made me shudder. It made me wonder, what were they thinking? This was a big facility, [with] just an awesome capability to destroy life. In a mobilization period, it was going…
Kids First?
With clinical trials now underway, it is natural to expect that a safe and effective vaccine against HIV will soon spell the end of AIDS in this country. But consider a more likely scenario: Immediately after the Food and Drug Administration licenses the vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend the immunization…
Red, White and Blue
ACROSS: 1 I(M)PLICATION (politician anag.); 8 TREASON (anag.); 9 LOWER (2 defs.); 10 OMANI (hidden); 11 A + TONING; 12 RE + SIGN; 14 SPIRAL (L.A. + rips rev.); 17 G + REATLY (realty anag.); 19 (m)ORGAN; 22 TAINT (2 defs.); 23 TI(E RA)CK; 24 F(ELICIT)ATED DOWN: 1 INT(R)O; 2 PIE + TA (at rev.);…
Rx for a Planetary Fever
As the earth’s temperature rises faster than at any time in the past 10,000 years, the efforts of the world’s policy makers to deal with global warming are withering into paralysis. With our oil and coal burning and the resulting carbon emissions in the atmosphere, we have heated the deep oceans. We have altered the…
Neglect for Sale
On April 14, 1998, two days after Easter, Janice Lacy called the Appleridge group home in Houston, Texas, to see how her sister Trenia had spent the holiday. “They told me she’d had a nice Easter and was asleep,” says Janice, recalling her conversation with a caregiver at the home where Trenia…
