Historical Series: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Were At The Center of the Sectional Crisis – And How Their Divides Relate to the Polarized Politics of Today

 

 

Author’s Note: Earlier this year I began what I expected to be a series on the history of the abolitionist movement and the parallels to today’s current left-wing. Other series – some of which are still unfinished – got in the way.

I have now decided to abandon it and look at the issue from a different perspective: one that looks at the parallels to both today’s far-left and far right political movements during that same period and show how both have led to much of today’s current polarization. I will be using much of the proposed material for the previous series but I will also be looking at it from a more geographic scope.

 

Introduction:

The Compromise of 1850

 

As 1850 began America was on the first of a sectional crisis. That December the vote for Speaker of the House had taken more than three weeks before a compromise had led to Howell Cobb of Georgia finally becoming Speaker. The new President Zachary Taylor had just sent a message to Congress insisting that California and New Mexico be admitted to the Union and ignored the Southern Senators who were upset that the states had been established with what seemed to be anti-slavery governments. The conflict looked certain to destroy the Union.

Henry Clay of Kentucky had proposed an eight part plan – what would be known as the Compromise of 1850. Like all compromises it had something to infuriate everybody. He had infuriated the southern wings of both parties (mostly the Democrats) by proposing to abolish the slave trade in the nation’s capital. He then followed it by agreeing to strengthening the fugitive slave act.

It was objected to strenuously by the Southern Fire Eaters, most notably the new Senator from Mississippi (and the President’s son-in-law) Jefferson Davis. The South waited to hear from John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Suffering from an illness that would kill him within a few months, he nevertheless made an appearance in the Senate. Too feeble to read the speech he had prepared, he handed it to one of his loyal followers James Mason, who delivered his argument for ‘equilibrium’ – basically that the South needed slavery to maintain its power against the North. In fact slave states had provided the nation with eight of its first twelve Presidents and the majority of both the Speakers of the House (including the current one) and of all Secretaries of State to that point in the nation’s brief history. He made it very clear that slavery was the center of the sectional crisis but as far as he and the South were concerned it was up to the North to come to them on the issue.

War seemed inevitable. Then on March 7^th, the third member of what was already known as ‘The Great Triumvirate’ Daniel Webster of Massachusetts took to the Senate floor.

His first words showed he had not lost his gift for oratory:

I wish to speak today not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but an American.

Webster’s speech was designed more to try and convince the South to get onboard with the compromise. In it he said one of the best lines I’ve ever heard in any political speech in history – and one that resonates still today:

“In all such disputes, there will sometimes be found men with whom everything is absolute; absolutely right or absolutely wrong. They deal with morals as with mathematics and they think what is right may be distinguished by what is wrong with the precision of an algebraic equation. They have, therefore, none too much charity towards others who differ from them. They are apt, too, to think that nothing is good but what is perfect, and that there are no compromises or modifications to be made in moderation of difference of opinion or in deference to other men’s judgment….They prefer the chance of running into utter darkness to living in heavenly light, if that heavenly light be not absolutely without any imperfection.”

It is telling that in a speech where Webster argued just how dangerous an absolute firmness to principles can be that he was heard by the south and not his own North. Despite the opening of his speech where he made it very clear he was speaking as an American, given their reception to his entire speech Massachusetts and the North made it very clear that they were expecting him to speak as those first and only then as an American. And its just telling that when he finished his speech – which argued that peaceful secession was impossible and that dismembering the country was unthinkable to him –  members of his Congressional delegation denounced him and one of Boston’s leading abolitionists compared him to Benedict Arnold and John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem saying among other things “the soul has fled.” And Henry Clay’s abolitionist nephew made it clear where he – and so many other abolitionists stood: “As much as the Union is to be loved, it is not to be loved more than a national conscience.”

 

There is an argument that only two states wanted the Civil War: Massachusetts and South Carolina. This is not entirely true but there is an element of truth. The most radical abolitionists of the movement operated out of Massachusetts and the spark of the secessionist movement had its greatest fire in South Carolina.

William Lloyd Garrison, creator of The Liberator, the most prominent anti-slavery newspaper during the crisis was so devoted to the eradication of slavery that he  believed only immediate eradication of slavery and full equality for blacks was the only answer. If that met dissolving the Union and shredding the Constitution, he was fine with that. In his mind God’s law superseded man’s law. He refused to even vote because ‘he didn’t want to participate in what he considered a fallen nation’, considering the Constitution which had accepted slavery as a reality of their time “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” In the very first issue of the Liberator he spoke for too many abolitionists when he said: “I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD’.

The Liberator never made much money for Garrison and there is a very solid argument that his inflamed rhetoric isolated far more people then it won to his side. There were numerous Anti-Slavery societies throughout the south in the early 1830s but by 1837, there were none left in the south. Even devoted abolitionists admitted that Garrison’s rhetoric did much to stir up acrimony and lead to the sectional crisis of 1850.

Garrison didn’t care; as far as he was concerned his word was law and even political parties that might change slavery such as the Free Soil Party, were not good enough because they weren’t willing to go far enough. That a politician by necessity could not walk the same tightrope that an activist could never seems to have crossed Garrison’s mind. The fact that his revolutionary aspect involved a resolute pacifism speaks to the real possibility that for Garrison and many of his fellow abolitionists slavery and equal rights were purely academic to them: they believed they were moral evils but were only will to call both the South and North inadequate to handle the crisis. Even as the North continued to move towards anti-slavery movement, it would never be enough for Garrison because these men were loyal to the Constitution which in his mind was pure racism.

Just as one can see the parallels with today’s left with the abolitionist movement and many of the politicians who came from it, the parallels from today’s right and those in South Carolina are more obvious. What is different from today is that by far the most adamant secessionists in that state were never able to gain political prominence because of their extreme views. What is similar is that, for many of them, the men who embraced the movement they founded were not firm enough to the cause  From the start of the movement to the actual secession even the most devoted Southerners though the absolutism of the South Carolinians was too much for them to follow.

There is a strong possibility that many of the crises we face in our political polarized society have their roots in the kind of politicians that came to power in Massachusetts and South Carolina while the Compromise of 1850 was being formed and who were the loudest voices on both sides of the issue. In both cases, it should be mentioned, the views of these extremists were always held by a minority in America over all and an argument could be made both were held even after the 1860 election.

I’m not saying, to be clear, that the Civil War was caused solely by either the abolitionists of Massachusetts or the secessionists of South Carolina. There were many other factors, not the least of which that America spent much of this critical decade lacking in formidable leadership where it needed it the most: the White House. It didn’t help that the three titans I’ve mentioned would all be dead by 1852 as well as the fractures of the political system that had begun in the 1848 election and continued well until the Civil War was truly over. Strong leadership was needed and no one from either region or any party had the ability to show it until it was too late to stop the events that had been set into motion. What is clear is that no major politician was willing to talk as an American, certainly not ones from Massachusetts or South Carolina.

And it is clear that a large factor in the crisis was in Webster’s words, that both sides believes in their positions as an absolute right and an absolute wrong and had no charity towards others than did not agree with them. That both sides were talking about the original sin of our nation doesn’t change the fact that the loudest voices on both sides believed firmly in their position and preferred the idea of it no matter what – even if it meant the dissolution of the Union. That the Civil War was inevitable can’t be denied. It also can’t be denied that, as we shall see, too many people in both these states seemed to be all but hoping that it would happen rather than facilitate their vision.

 

Accused Returns For A Brilliant Season 2

 

 

Earlier this year I mentioned that regardless of what you might think of television currently we are still living in the era of Peak Limited Series. And if you witness this September’s Emmys you are more than aware that this applies to Anthology as well. Fargo and True Detective, two of the oldest members of the franchises were among the leaders in all limited series categories and both won awards for acting. Also a major contender was the second season of Feud where Capote Vs. The Swans dominated almost every category but Limited Series.

This trend was on display last year as we saw the first season of Monster and The White Lotus (Emmy classification be damned on the latter) dominate last year’s Emmy nominations and awards. Both are likely to return to the field when the third season begins. Ryan Murphy remains a master of this genre as we have seen with his newest version of American Sports Story. His Horror Story is unlikely to go anywhere any time soon and I suspect Crime Story will come back for a fourth season.

I’ve seen all of these shows and am a huge fan of many of them – so it might come as a shock to you that I sincerely believe that the boldest one on television today is Fox’s Accused. To be clear I don’t mean it’s the best acting or has the same brilliance as all the others I’ve listed. Nor is the most consistent, the most innovative or dramatic. Just the boldest. The main reason is that it’s not airing on cable or a streaming service but network TV which even at its highest caliber today (and I’m a bigger booster of it then most of my fellow critics are) when it comes to its drama tends either to reboots, spin-offs, franchises or procedurals. By that metric Accused is one of the most radical things on television.

That could be extended to the anthologies I’ve listed above which as any devoted fan knows (and I am) follows a single serialized storyline for the course of a season. These are the two metrics of drama: serialized or procedural. Accused is bold precisely because it refuses to be categorized. There are no regular characters from week-to-week and unlike other anthology series which are almost exclusively in the sci-fi genre (Black Mirror is the most successful) this show doesn’t even truly deal with crimes. It’s not a legal drama, despite starting every episode in a courtroom. It’s not a whodunit because we know the central characters committed the crime they’re accused of – though  in most episodes it’s often a shock to learn what crime. It deals with social issues that we face today – in Season 1 alone it dealt with mass shootings, white supremacy, cancel culture, drug addiction and sexual abuse -  but even when we think we know what we’re getting, it never takes an attitude of preachiness. Its closest parallel is American Crime though it isn’t nearly at the level of that incredible anthology. There is a similar earnestness to its that makes it a different kind of boldness. There’s very little humor in what happens and it can go into some pretty dark territory as a result. But perhaps because the story is limited to a single episode it makes Accused easier to watch.

The show also has a cast of actors and directors that used to be the sole aspect of cable and streaming. Last year Michael Chiklis, Margo Martindale, Jason Ritter, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, Molly Parker, Mary Lynn-Raskjub and Keith Carradine all starred in episodes. This extends behind the camera as well: Chiklis, Billy Porter and Marlee Matlin all helmed episodes last year. Not all of the episodes are works of art, of course – this is an anthology – but when Accused is firing on all cylinders you can hear, as Stephen King once said, the ping of Waterford Crystal. I heard it on Accused many times last year – in the opening when Chiklis played a father who realized his son was psychotic but not in time to stop a tragedy; when Raskjub played a comedian who gets in the center of a toxic fight with an older comic that leads to a vicious assault; when Breslin played a former southerner who has found hope and love in an interracial lesbian relationship but when bigotry rears its head in her neighborhood is led down a path that leads to death and the loss of everything she loves.

Now after the strikes in Hollywood scuttled for all intents and purposes the 2023-2024 season Howard Gordon has brought Accused back for its second season. In a sense it has reduced its vision – Fox’s second season order was eight episodes, down from the 12 of Season 1. But watching the first two episodes I saw no signs of slack: if anything both episodes have been minor masterpieces.

The season premiere told us ‘Lorraine’s Story’ with Felicity Huffman in the lead. Huffman has always been one of the great actors of television in the last quarter-century and her best work has always been on network television, from Sports Night to Desperate Housewives to yes, three extraordinary seasons on American Crime that earned her two Emmy nominations. Here Huffman plays a medium, who claims to have a psychic gift but when we first meet her is working in a dry cleaner. In the opening she sees the story of a missing child on the news and calls the family. When she’s about to drive out to talk with them an old friend and her ex-husband (William H. Macy…yes, her husband) urges her not to go down this road again. Lorraine feels obliged too.

A long time ago Lorraine managed to find a child that many believed was dead. Since then she’s had a long history with other missing children – all of whom end up being dead when they’re found. She ends up living with the married couple – the wife has doubts, the husband clings to hope. The police has no use for her. It’s not my job to tell you the crime she ends up being accused of or the verdict because that is only occasionally the point of Accused. What I will tell you is that Huffman is wrenching in every minute, knowing the road she’s going down, unable to look away from what she sees. At one point she’s offered an opportunity to back away from what she said and in a moment of pain she tells she wishes she doesn’t have this gift: “It doesn’t give me winning lottery numbers; it shows me dead children!” And once again we’re reminded why, despite all the controversy that has surrounded her in recent years, Huffman is one of the greatest actress working in TV.

Last night’s episode ‘April’s Story’ was one of the best Accused has ever done, and a highpoint of the entire 2024 season. Taylor Schilling, an actress who I had little use for before last night, gives one of the most harrowing performance I’ve seen any actress give this year. She plays a nurse whose son is dealing with some form of autism and she is struggling to earn money to keep him in a private school, Her husband (Danny Pino) works from home and doesn’t seem to appreciate her struggles. She takes her son to school and has to deal with one of her son’s playmates refusing to pick her up. She stops to get coffee. When she goes back to her car, she’s been parked so close she can barely open the door. Edging in the car’s owner (an incredibly nasty Justin Chambers) accuses her of denting his car and shows no remorse about parking her in. Already late for work she gets in while Chambers’ character (who’s driving a BMW) demands she stay and exchange insurance and pay for the damage. He practically hangs on her window when she drives off.

Most of the episode that follows is seen from April’s car as she tries to deal with a series of incidents involving her son that continue to add her frustration. Then she finds out she’s being followed – and its by that same BMW. Schilling gives an incredible performance throughout showing a range of emotions many actors in network series never give in a full season: frustration, sorrow, fear, the sense she’s being demeaned and finally utter rage. The outcome is tragic and perhaps inevitable but even as it accelerated towards its conclusion I never felt anything but sympathy for April and little remorse for the man who tells her in no uncertain terms ‘she’s a crazy bitch’.

I don’t normally use cliches like this but the thing is I have to use it with Accused: there’s nothing on TV quite like it. And there certainly isn’t on broadcast TV. As I mentioned last week as the 2020s reaches its halfway point broadcast television still has the potential to deliver brilliant and underappreciated gems. You see it in Will Trent and Found; you see it in Elsebeth and Tracker. I have seen the possibility of it this past few weeks in High Potential and Brilliant Minds. Accused is by far the most daring of these shows (all of which have debuted in the past year and a half) and all of them have extremely high quality in acting and writing. No one can deny that network TV has been struggling immensely the last few years or that the strike has hit it harder. But the last year has demonstrated that it’s not going to go gentle. I don’t know how long a show like Accused can fit in this nebulous world of shrinking viewership. But as long as its there, I’ll keep hope alive for the battered system.

My score: 5 stars.

X-Files And Consent, Part 2: Scully's Abduction and A Different Kind of Bodily Violation

 

One of the most revolutionary things – among the many, many revolutionary things about The X-Files – was how for the lion’s share of the series Dana Scully was the more dominant character. Part of this is due to incredible work of Gillian Anderson who almost instantly figured out her character whereas David Duchovny needed most of Season 1 to figure out Mulder. But there’s also the fact that throughout the series first seven seasons  - and certainly during the series peak which I’m going to discuss in great detail in this section – Scully was a very different kind of female lead. There were no men in her life, she and Mulder did not engage in anything resembling a romantic relationship during this period and more importantly Scully was the grownup in the relationship.

Scully was almost certainly sent to debunk Mulder’s work on The X-Files and she refused to do so. However I don’t think any viewer of the show would argue that if she’d hadn’t been assigned to the unit Mulder would have been kicked out of the FBI long before it finally happened. Scully did everything in her power to keep Mulder in check  not just with her scientific theories but by bailing him out of all the trouble he got into over the years. Yes Scully was abducted by strong men more than two or three times a season but I think far more often Scully had the job of getting Mulder out of government custody. It more than balanced it out and for a series in the 1990s that was unheard of for a female character.

The backbone of the series and what transformed into one of the greatest shows of all time was Scully’s abduction. I’ve gone over this before in several previous articles but in this case I want to dive into the consequences. Scully was not violated in the traditional sense of the word. There’s an argument in fact that what was done to her was infinitely worse. And because the violation of her bodily autonomy was critical to the series – and probably led to some of the most searing moment’s in the history of the mythology I think it’s time to go over them.

As I mentioned in my previous reviews of One Breath Scully had been experimented on immensely and left in a hospital bed at the point of death. When she recovered at the end of the episode it would have been easy for Carter and his writers to just have the show leave this part of it alone. That they not only chose not to do but actually did so to go to some of the darkest territory imaginable – not just for sci-fi but almost any series in the 1990s – was one of the bravest things the writers ever did.

We first get a sense of it in the Season 2 finale Anasazi. In that episode Mulder has received access to the MJ Files which he believes has the complete history of all our government secrets involving aliens since World War II. During this episode Mulder’s credibility is being undermined in a way that involves some of the darkest machinations of the series to date. Mulder spends much of the episode in a daze, hot-tempered and angrier then we’ve seen him. He gets in a fight with Skinner during the opening that leads to his suspension from the Bureau. He gets into arguments with Scully about the initial distrust between why she was sent. By the end of the episode he is on the verge of killing Alex Krycek, the man who murdered his father and in order to save him Scully shoots him in the shoulder. By the end of the episode we learn that the water supply in Mulder’s apartment complex has been dosed with LSD in order to discredit him. This shows just how ruthless the conspiracy can be – earlier in the episode a woman murdered her husband after thirty years without any explanation.

By the end of the episode Scully has managed to translate the files which were used by Navajo in World War II. It involves a series of experiments going back to that point – and Scully’s name is in the files. The final scene of the episode takes place in a buried boxcar and the images are among the most shocking in the series to date. There are alien bodies – stacked floor to ceiling. And there are what appear to be small pox vaccination scars on each one. The metaphor to the Holocaust can’t be denied  - and rather than back away, in the first half of Season 3 the show doubles down on it. Brilliantly.

During the Season 3 premiere The Blessing Way Scully, who has been suspended from the FBI, returns to the Bureau to meet with Skinner. She sets off the metal detector both times and the second time she’s actually curious. She has an X-ray done and she finds a small implant in the back of her neck. She has it removed and its something resembling a microchip. We forget about it when Mulder reappears and what follows in the next two episodes. But rarely for the show Chris Carter has not.

Paper Clip, the culmination of the opening of Season 3, represented what might be the most daring steps in the mythology that Carter ever tried. He takes what is in fact a legitimate government conspiracy. Operation Paper Clip was in fact our deal with the devil. After World War II we gave amnesty to several German scientists in order to win the space race from the Soviets. (Werner Von Braun, the inventor of the V-2 rocket, is the most well-known of these scientists.)  In the X-Files version Mulder has a photograph of a group of men taking sometime in the 1970s. One of them is his later father. The other is a man named Victor Klemperer, who the Lone Gunmen call “the most evil of all the Nazi scientists” worse even then Mengele. Klemperer is still alive at the start of the episode (Walter Gotel, famous from many Bond films plays him) and in his one scene he makes it very clear he has no remorse for his actions.

In this episode the X-Files makes its more daring statement yet. There is no such thing as alien abductions; it’s just a coverup to experiment on humans. This may be the most frightening storyline the show ever attempts mainly because not only is it more terrifying than the idea of aliens behind everything but because its backed up by historical evidence. That Scully might not have been the victim of an alien abduction as Mulder has spent the last year believing but was in fact the victim of our government’s own personal science project is honestly more frightening than anything the series has ever tried. The X-Files was always superb when it came to dealing with the banality of evil – as I’ve mentioned Vince Gilligan was best with his very human monsters – but to do so with the mythology itself was even more unsettling. And all the more frightening because it’s now clear that Mulder’s father himself was a party to it – and that it may have been the reason Scully was taken.

The second two-parter ‘Nisei/731’ may be the most satisfying mythology two parter the show ever did. There’s great disagreement as to when the mythology fell apart exactly – no two fans have the same opinion – but everyone agrees Season 3 was the last time it was fully satisfying. Mulder spends most of this two parter following the trail of an alien autopsy video that leads him across the country and on to a train. It’s thrilling stuff and Duchovny is superb in it. But the reason its an unquestioned masterpiece is because Scully is following her own trail – and its far more terrifying because of how personal it ends up becoming.

During the episode Scully goes to the address of a MUFON meeting in Allentown, looking for a woman named Betsy Hagopian. When she rings the doorbell, the woman who answered Penny Northern looks at her with recognition. “She is one,” she tells this group of women. Scully has no memory of them (she has no clear memory of what happened to here) but all of the women in this group know her instantly.

Scully tries to deny it and then they ask her about her implant. One of the most frightening scenes in the entire series comes when one by one each of these women removed a small vial from their person, each of which contain an identical implant to Scully’s. It looks like the world’s weirdest book club – and then it takes an ever darker turn. Betsy Hagopian is in the oncology ward suffering from cancer. Northern then tells Scully matter-of-factly that they all have it. “We’re all dying,” she says. “Because of what they did to us.”

The series has basically told us in no uncertain terms what is going to happen to Scully. It’s a measure of the pace of the show that we’ll have forgotten about by the time it actually happens. (If you’ve read my first piece of Vince Gilligan’s work, you remember that they chose to reveal it to the public in an episode that aired after the Super Bowl nearly a full two years after this episode.) Scully does what she has done so often, she buries what might happen to her. But she can’t deny what she sees before her eyes.

In the midst of Mulder’s inquiry he has been told of the story of four Japanese scientists who worked during World War II in a unit called 731. This is also based in reality: Japanese scientists also engaged in the similar kind of experiments that the Nazis did during World War II. Four of these scientists were killed on American soil doing the autopsy. But then Scully looks at the picture of one still alive: Shiro Zama and she recognizes him, even though he’s been missing for twenty years. She looks at the autopsy video where he is clearly pictured – and she has a flashback to her abduction and sees him standing over her.

All of this perhaps plays out the best in 731. The teaser may be the most terrifying one in the entire roster of them, mainly because the only monsters we see are human ones. A group of military go to a camp in Virginia which is populated entirely with people suffering from facial deformities. We will learn they are all diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, formerly called leprosy. They are hauled into bused by soldiers carrying guns and driven out to the middle of nowhere where a giant pit has been dug. They are executed at gunpoint in a mass slaughter. The soldiers causally look over to make sure there are no survivors and then walk back away.

I don’t think there’s any series in the 20^th century – hell, maybe not even now – that would have dared to show what amounts to a concentration camp on American soil. (Perhaps The Handmaid’s Tale has.) But more shocking is when Scully learns about it and finds the few survivors there and what has happened to them. Later on, she meets one of the Elder’s who tells her casually: “Today the greatest nations are not built on who has the best weapons but the best scientists.” He then tells her there’s something she needs to see.

And in that episode Scully calls Mulder and tells him where she is. A boxcar where the autopsy was performed. “Only I’ve been here before. This is where they took me.” She then tells Mulder that the government has been conducting biological experiments on human subjects for the last twenty years after denying it in the 1970s. And then she says perhaps the most frightening thing possible: “What I’m saying is that there is no such thing as an alien abduction. It’s a smokescreen for tests on humans.”

This is something that would resonate more powerfully today then it did in the 1990s because we know that corporations as well as the government are more than capable of doing such insidious things to the disenfranchised and the sick. And sadly Carter didn’t have the stomach to follow through with it for the mythology. In the next mythology episode Piper Maru, we are introduced to the black oil, the first thing that makes it impossible to deny that there are aliens at the center of the series.

You can’t exactly blame Carter for it; he’d already been using aliens at the center of the show quite a few times previously and he might have figured he’d been cheating the fans had he backed away from it now. But it’s hard to pretend it wouldn’t been braver and definitely more interesting had he followed through. As has been written before the idea that aliens are behind everything is the most logical explanation for what’s going on – and by the standards of The X-Files the least interesting.

Still he deserves credit on one thing. He didn’t back away from this part of it when it came to both what happened to Scully and the consequences of it. For the next year and a half the mythology began to dive in to become increasingly alien as well as far more global in scope. While these ideas were ambitious for the show they also increasingly made the mythology unstable and harder to keep up with. The mythology was always at its best when it was personal for our heroes something that Carter had clearly forgotten by the time the series started filming in Hollywood rather than Canada. And this was driven home all the more forcefully in Memento Mori one of four episodes nominated for Best Dramatic Teleplay and the only one directly related to the mythology.

As brilliant as the episode is, it suffers from incredible burdens and I don’t just mean the purple prose that Gillian Anderson does her level best to deliver in the narration. No the problem is the fact that The X-Files had dug itself a hole with Scully’s cancer that was going to be impossible to dig out of in 1990s TV. Because while the world of television was changing (the same year of this episode Buffy the Vampire Slayer and OZ debuted) the rules were hard and fast: you didn’t kill of the lead character on a network drama unless the actor playing the role was about to leave. This might still have been plausible on another network drama but when the opening credits only had two characters the idea one would be killed off would require a suspension of belief not even most X-Files fans were willing to give into. I certainly wasn’t even at eighteen.

And the writers didn’t help themselves that much after this episode. Scully did spend several episodes clearly feeling the symptoms – the makeup team made her look increasingly pale and she went to the hospital more than once for tests  - but mostly the writers ignored the elephant in the room, which seemed impossible since she was onscreen all the time. Scully was the kind of person who often worked to escape her traumas – she went back to work after both her father’s death and her sister’s very quickly – so it was plausible that she was doing so in the face of impending death. But the decision to basically not deal with it after Memento Mori as something that needed to be solved was a bigger problem that the show never truly resolved.

That doesn’t take away from the power of how it began and ended. Memento Mori is a messy and often ponderous episode and at the same time one of the most emotionally brilliant in the entire canon. Gillian Anderson won her only Emmy for The X-Files because of this episode and while the voiceovers do her no favors, everything else in the show works for it. Duchovny matches her scene for scene, particularly in the opening when Scully tells him of her diagnosis of a tumor in her naval cavity and that there is no real chance of recovery. Mulder reacts with denial and Scully once again has to be the realist.

In order to pursue an avenue of inquiry Scully and Mulder go back to Allentown to visit Betsy Hagopian and the MUFON chapter that suffered similar symptoms. She is stunned to learn that Hagopian is dead – as are all the women save for Penny Northern who is in the final stages of her own cancer. Now Mulder has to be the strong one and tell her to face the truth of what she has in common with these women and she’s in denial, clinging to Northern being alive.

Scully goes to see her in the hospital and again brings up recognition of her during the tests, something that Scully is denying. Then she goes to see Dr. Scanlon, Penny’s oncologist and she faces a brutal fact. In a heartbreaking scene she calls Mulder and tells her to bring her bags to the hospital. “Mulder, whatever you might think the truth is in me,” she tells him.

While this goes on Mulder is following his own lead: Kurt Crawford, who we later learn has a connection to Scully. A hack into files reveals something horrifying that her name is on the list of a fertility clinic, even though he’s pretty damn sure she’s never been treated for infertility.

The scene that follows is shocking as Mulder wants Skinner to set up a meeting with the Cigarette Smoking Man. He’s asked for one before and he knows the man is behind it – but this time he’s ready to deal.

“Find another way,” Skinner pleads. “You deal with that man – you offer him anything – and he’ll own you forever.”

“He knows what they did to Agent Scully! He may even know how to save her!” Mulder shouts.

“If he knows, you can know, too” Skinner points out. “But you can’t ask the truth of a man who trades in lies. I won’t let you.”

There are many ironies of the scene above; the most immediate is that by the end of the episode Skinner himself has made a deal with a man he himself calls the devil in one of the most brilliant scenes in all of Season 4.

Mulder follows a path during the episode that is shocking – and leads indirectly to one of the more critical stories of the final two seasons. He breaks into the Lombard Facility and its there he finds Kurt Crawford – several of them. Kurt Crawford is the adult version of a male clone we’ve seen earlier this season. (The female clones were young Samantha Mulders, but I’m not going into that here.) The important part is that the Kurt’s lead him to a large stainless steel room with hundreds of drawers that contain human ova – taken from, among others, Scully.

The episode doesn’t call what happened to Scully rape either but the fact that her ova were harvested from her through high doses of radiation for the sole purpose of harvest for making these alien clones reveals just how horrible these men are. The fact that these women have been discarded once it has been done – thrown away to rot from within – is one of the most insidious things the series has discussed. To drive the point home when Mulder realizes that the Crawfords are trying to save them, one says simply: “They’re our mothers.”

The X-Files would deal with motherhood more directly in its final seasons (I’ll deal with them later) but it’s hard not to look at this particular storyline as their most direct statement of reproductive rights. It’s an inverse of the usual narrative – the women’s right to have children has been stolen from them – but the results are, if anything, far more devastating. Perhaps its understandable that the series doesn’t deal with this particular plot point for more than three seasons; the show was already dealing with heavy material with Scully’s cancer.

And while I have extreme issues with how the cancer storyline was ‘resolved’ – something I won’t spoil because the show is nebulous when it comes to saying exactly how it happened – I have to say that the season 5 premiere that resolve it – Redux II – almost makes up for the mess of the mythology that comes for most of Season 5.

We’ve learned at the end of last season that Scully’s cancer has metastasized and that she has at most days to live. Mulder has pulled Scully away from her family to pursue what appears to be another lead on extraterrestrial life and is told not only that his life’s work is a lie but that Scully was given this cancer in order to make him believe it. This is a huge burden for Mulder to bear and during the first two episodes he goes to desperate measures to find answers – and seems more than willing to make the deal with the Smoking Man in order to do so.

During this episode Bill Scully, one of Dana’s brothers, has shown up for a visit from the Navy. Dana has been hiding the truth of her diagnosis from anyone but her mother and Bill is angry when he learns what happened – through Scully’s mother.

Bill Scully is one of those characters who fans loathe just when you bring up his name because he’s always upset both with his sister and Mulder. But that’s because we’ve spent four years considering Mulder the hero of this story and while we suffer with him when he fails in the conspiracy we forgive him because he follows a noble truth. It doesn’t change the fact that this pursuit has very real consequences – and the biggest one has been his partner.

In ‘One Breath’ when Dana is lying near death he meets Melissa, the more spiritual older sister, who is compassionate during the process while Mulder spends most of the episode trying to find out what happened to Dana. “I can’t just wave my hands in the air,” he shouts at her at one point. At the climax of the episode Melissa goes to his apartment where he’s waiting in the dark to kill the two men who took Scully. Melissa tells him it could happen at any time and Mulder refuses to leave. Melissa has been remarkably calm during Mulder’s hostility but here she loses it and tells him he’s being a prick. “I expect more of you. Dana expects more of you,” she tells him. And that sinks in and he spends the night by Scully’s bedside.

Now three years later Scully again is facing death, Melissa has been killed as a result of Mulder’s search for the truth and Mulder is still essentially waving his hands in the air. Bill’s attitude may be somewhat hypocritical  - where was when either of his sisters were in comas – but his anger toward Mulder is fully justified when he calls him a piece of crap.

Mulder is initially belligerent: “Because I’m not playing by your rules? Because I’m not part of your family tragedy?”

“Because you’re causing it,” Bill says simply. “I’ve already lost one sister to your quest. Now I’m losing another. Has it been worth it? I mean, for you. Have you found what you’ve been looking for?”

And Mulder can only answer no. When he points out that he’s lost his sister and father as a result, he can’t even argue that he knows why he lost them. Bill might be stretching it when he calls Mulder one sorry son of a bitch but when the phone rings – and he responds with that as his greeting with no humor at all –  the weight of what he’s feeling on his shoulders is absolutely apparent.

And just as with One Breath Scully makes a miraculous recovery – her cancer goes into complete remission at the end of the episode and it is only mentioned in passing for the rest of the series. But in a sense while Scully’s health will not be the center of her crisis going forward her life will be – and it will start in Season 5.

In the next part of this series I’m going to deal with Scully’s first child. (No you didn’t miss that storyline. It’s more complicated than that.)

 

Gary Hart's Political Campaigns, Conclusion: Hart's Real Political Legacy

 

As I wrote when I dealt with Gary Hart many years ago and restated at the start of this series there are so many fallacies behind Hart’s fate in 1987 and beyond. In the three previous Presidential elections between Hart’s entry into Presidential politics in 1972 and his exit in 1988 Jimmy Carter had earned first the Democratic nomination and then the Presidency by being deliberately fuzzy on what positions he held. This was followed by Ronald Reagan’s two consecutive landslides involving a long career of simply making stuff up and winning the two biggest electoral victories any Republican running for President ever has. The idea that the electorate was hungering for a candidate who was both intellectual and had good ideas is inconsistent with those facts and the idea that Hart could have stemmed, much less turned the tide back towards that kind of politics is at odds with the rise of cable news that was beginning just as Hart was starting his final run for office.

But Gary Hart did leave a lasting legacy on Presidential politics that, intentionally or not, has been one of the greatest hindrances to the Democratic Party over the last half-century. And it remains genuinely unclear if the Party will ever be able to overcome it.

Hart’s role as the chief strategist behind George McGovern’s insurgent campaign for the nomination was notable for what was by far the most leftist nominee of a major political party in perhaps the history of elections. And sadly there are far too many similarities between the young members of McGovern’s campaign and so much of the young electorate of this generation. They are true believers when they are on a college setting but to the rest of the electorate, including the Democratic base, their ideas and rhetoric appeal to almost no one. They are superb at organizing in the smaller, caucus states but they can’t win in the larger more urban ones – save California and New York. They reject firmly the idea of politics as usual and argue that because they have won the primaries they have no need of the Democratic establishment to win election. On the contrary, they argue the idea of accepting the help of the establishment is anathema to what they stand for. They believe very much in diversity and representation at the expense of the rank and file Democratic politicians. And they firmly reject the blue collar voters – then represented by George Wallace and throughout the South in particular – as someone they should even talk too, much less moderate their campaign for. As I’ve stated Watergate did much to whitewash the horrible inadequacies of the McGovern campaign from the moment of the convention in Miami to every aspect of their fall campaign. All of the groundwork they might have done for future Democratic coalition doesn’t change the fact they lost 49 of 50 states and suffered the biggest loss a Democratic nominee for President has ever gone through in the history of the Republic. The Democratic Party was absolutely right to reject McGovern’s campaign strategy for the next several Presidential campaigns; they were fortunate that they were able to recover from that debacle.

Hart brought that same kind of insurgency to his run for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and showed that he had fundamentally learned nothing from it when it came to his own branding. The Hart campaign mirrors the McGovern campaign when it comes to its success: doing well in small caucus states, doing horribly in the South and the larger urban states, again with the sole exception of California. Mondale was, in my opinion, a far superior candidate than Hart both in the primaries and indeed in the general and the brand of liberalism he fought for is infinitely superior than the kind of progressivism McGovern and Hart represented – and that we see on display today. Mondale might very well have been backed by more of the establishment than Hart was but he was also a better campaigner and made almost no blunders compared to those Hart made during his run. That his brand of liberalism was destroyed in another 49 state landslide does not make Hart’s approach superior. We know only that Hart might have done better in the fall because it would have been impossible to do worse – though as history shows Hart’s last attempt to lead a campaign had in fact been rejected as soundly by the electorate as Mondale’s was. Hart could no more have won the Presidency in 1984 than Mondale could have.

Both of the campaigns Hart led may not have been that of progressive ideals but the fact that Hart chose to view them as victories for the cause shows the kind of moral fuzziness that I’ve come to expect from the left in my experience of following them over the years. In neither of those elections did Gary Hart win anything: the establishment resoundingly rejected McGovern in 1972 and primary voters did so in 1984. But Hart and his followers view them as successes because they were ‘moral victories’. As I’ve written before those are the only kind the left seems to recognize – which is to be expected since they manage so few real ones.

And the fact that Gary Hart has been so willing to embrace the mantle of martyr – a title the left prefers – may very well be why he’s held in such high regard today. It hides the very real fact that Hart resumed his campaign for the Democratic nomination after ending it and was resoundingly rejected by the Democratic voters. Regardless of what Hart says then or now, the public did have an opinion on his behavior and they made it emphatically clear to him. But just as with his previous rejections by the electorate Hart has managed to absolve himself of responsibility for his electoral defeats and place the blame on everyone else. This is part and parcel of the modern progressive and it is a different kind of election denialism which is more insidious. There wasn’t voter fraud but the voters themselves were either misinformed or not smart enough to understand what we stood for.

That kind of moral behavior stands as a stark contrast to the three Republicans who won election in all three cycles Hart was a part of – and, in case you’ve forgotten as Hart’s followers have, they didn’t win by small margins. Nixon got 60 percent of the popular vote and every state but DC and Massachusetts; Reagan just over 58 percent and every state but DC and Minnesota, and George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, the eventual winner of the Democratic nomination, with 426 electoral votes. If there is a commonality between all three Republican campaigns, it’s that in all three cases they were more than willing to make the election about character and didn’t have any problem with the high-mindedness that Democrats were willing to do. To be sure all three men campaigned with a fair amount of negative advertising and often racist rhetoric that Democrats and the left look down on to this day. But strictly looking at the results it was a strategy that worked for them and still does.

Another perhaps unintentional legacy of Hart and his followers is the frustrating high-mindedness of almost every Democratic Presidential nominee in my lifetime. Wittingly or not with the sole exception of Bill Clinton and perhaps Barack Obama, they have been more than willing to let Republican attacks on their character go unanswered, treating even engaging with it as beneath them. There’s the certainty that if we make the campaign about ideas and refuse to deal with these issues the electorate will either out of admiration or because they prefer them choose the Democratic nominee over the Republican. Well we saw how that played out with the White House between 1968 and 1988: the Republicans won the Presidency five times out of six, all but the first time in electoral landslides. And the pattern repeated itself during Al Gore and John Kerry’s run for the White House in 2000 and 2004: both times Karl Rove and the Bush campaign chose to make the election about the ‘lack of character’ of the Democrats, both times the nominees didn’t engage and both times they (narrowly) lost. (I’ve dealt with 2000 in a previous article, so express your comments there.)

This approach of winning on morality was perhaps best encapsulated in Michelle Obama’s famous line at the 2016 Democratic Convention: “When they go low, we go high.” It was met with tremendous applause – but both at the time and in hindsight, it was one of the dumbest things she could have said. How well has going high ever worked for the Democratic Party in the past? Of course the Republicans will go low. Even before Trump became their perennial nominee going low was not only their strategy but an effective one. The left has always been above politics and tends to hold itself in a kind of moral universe. But that kind of world only works if everybody plays by the same rules. The rest of the world isn’t bound to play by the rules the left does and the Republicans never will. Why should they? It works for them. You want to argue that negative campaign lowers the tenor of political discourse? Fine. I’d argue that’s basically all political discourse but you’re entitled to your opinion. But the fact remains negative and unpleasant campaigning is almost always effective. LBJ proved that point in 1964 and it helped him win a landslide. Moral victories are meaningless in a world where you have to win elected office in order to get anything done. The right has always understood this reality. The left, even after two hundred years, seems unwilling to acknowledge it exists/

Gary Hart was like so many progressive candidates over the decades: he wanted to define what his campaign was about and any other interpretation was beneath him to even acknowledge. This is a horrible approach to take even if your private life is beyond reproach; when it was messy as Hart’s was leading up to his final campaign, he was practically asking for what happened to him. And he took no responsibility for it at any point leading up to it, when he withdrew from the campaign for the first time, and decades after the fact. He didn’t fail: the system failed. It’s kind of terrifying that so many intelligent people still feel this way after nearly forty years.

And his legacy lives on in other ways that not even he could expect. When Cori Bush was elected to Congress, she took on a far left campaign and refused to do anything the establishment wanted. She proudly called her first run ‘an insurgent campaign’ and when she was elected she made it very clear after  the attacks on October 7^th that she was as radical as so many Democrats thought McGovern was in 1972. They were wrong about him, but they were right about her.

The Jewish community locally had viewed her with skepticism along with her associations with people with anti-Semitic views. But rather than engage with Jewish community leaders, Bush ignored them, meeting with them only once after four years in office. Numerous organizations made requests for her time  and Bush’s response was glib “my trick to dealing with groups with whom (I) disagree is to simply ignore their calls.” Even after Bell emerged as a challenger against her, Bush continued to double down on her rhetoric, equating the Middle East to her own actions as an activist in Ferguson. And after she was defeated in her primary by Wesley Clay, she made it very clear she hadn’t lost: “The one thing I don’t do is go away,” she said after the results were in. “They thought this would be…They thought I was radical before. I’m going to be more radical now.”

That is hardly the sound of a gracious loser. I wonder if Gary Hart sent her the same kind of letter that Nixon sent him once.

The Contrast Between the Political Histories of Jules Witcover And Theodore White Speaks Volumes About Political Journalism

 

 

You couldn’t show a more deliberate contrast on how Theodore White and Jules Witcover view covering politics then in the opening segments of what would be the last campaign each officially covered for their readers.

In the 1972 edition of The Making of the President White chooses to open his book with a prologue called ‘The Making of the Post-War World’ . The first twelve pages of his book deal with one of the most historical moments in the twentieth century: Richard Nixon’s visit to Communist China and his meetings with Chou En-Lai and Mao Tse-Tung. Nixon was the first President to visit Communist China and it was the standard of what he referred to as ‘détente’, a policy that was the first thaw in the Cold War and one that the conservative wing of Nixon’s own party as well as many Democrats, considered a betrayal. White does acknowledge the significance of what may come. He tells us that as he writes the book: two former cabinet members await trial as well as the beginning of the pursuit of Watergate which he covers extensively in the volume. But he makes it very clear that what he considers important is how much the world before him has changed since end of World War II and that there was, as of yet, no new system to replace it. He recognizes the collapse of the ideals of the Great Society and the end of the liberal order that started under FDR. And only at the conclusion does he deal with how the Presidential election ended: how Richard Nixon would defeat George McGovern by a margin of nearly 3 to 2 in the popular vote.

By contrast consider the opening of Witcover’s last volume (co-written with Jack Germond) Mad as Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992. Witcover chooses to start his narrative in the second Presidential debate, a town hall meeting involving George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. He deals with the nature of the debates and how, yet again, they have resulted in name calling and character debasement. For him the most significant problem of 1992 has nothing to do with the various problems facing society (some of which I’ll touch on below) but on how out of touch Bush seems to be with the American public. And what he considers most important is that infamous moment while he was being asked a question Bush glanced at his watch, apparently bored with the whole process.

To be clear politics had changed immensely in the twenty years that had passed between these volumes and Witcover’s approach reflected a change in the media. But it’s hard not to notice that the tonal difference. White in the prologue is trying to paint a grand picture, not merely of the political landscape but the global one and the American one. None of that is apparent in Witcover’s prologue – or indeed much of the volume that is to follow. Witcover’s view is limited only to seeing everything through a political lens. White is trying to see a much larger narrative before him. Witcover views the entire process with cynicism and barely veiled contempt. White remains objective and tries to shows respect for the Presidency even considering the scandal before it.

 And  most importantly is that concept of objectivity. White clearly is – he deals not only with the horrible scandal that will befall Nixon but everything involving him with a neutral tone and looks at McGovern’s problems in the same lens. In a way you could argue Witcover is objective as well, considering that he treats both the Democrats and Republicans the same – he clearly loathes them both equally. He shows the same contempt for the political consultants, anchormen, chief of staff and almost every aspect of the process involved. There’s an irony in that at one point Witcover remarks about Bush’s inability to have a greater vision; Witcover clearly has a front row seat to nearly as big a change as White was observing – and all he can focus on is how this affects the political landscape.

Witcover clearly has access to so many of the biggest political insiders in the Bush administration. And lest we forget during Bush’s term the world was changing even more significantly then during the era that White covers in his final book. The Berlin Wall comes down and not long after the Soviet Union collapses, ending the Cold War. There are the riots at Tiananmen Square in China that the government clamps down on before live TV. The beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of the LAPD inspires mass rioting in LA. And there’s Sadam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait that leads to the first Gulf War.

Witcover remarks on all of these significant events only through the lens of the Bush White House and only to show his contempt for how Bush handled it. As I wrote in my first article on Witcover there was a view that Bush was unsuited to be President in 1976. Twelve years later he managed to win the White House anyway. Witcover covered the rise and fall of Bush as extensively as White covered Nixon but where as White remained objective about the most polarizing figure in politics to that point Witcover never stops being contemptuous of him and everything he does. I don’t know what personal feelings Witcover has towards the 41^st President but in his writing everything that happens in the world is just a reflection on Bush and how badly he handles it. His dialogues with China, his recognition of Gorbachev’s resignation, even the riots in LA (which get a grand total of four pages) are only there to show how badly Bush is lacking. White would have devoted several pages on each one of these in order to explain the significance of them. Witcover only sees them as a mirror in which he can show how horrible the President is. Even everything involving Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas barely seems to matter to White. He acknowledges that the Senate is an ‘old boy’s club’ but he looks at the ‘Year of The Women’ which was to follow with something very close to the sexist patronizing that unfolded.

But Witcover has little use for Democrats either. It’s not just that he has very little respect for Bill Clinton (he’s another Southern governor and Witcover’s views clearly haven’t changed since Jimmy Carter wouldn’t give him and his reporters the benefit of letting him trap them into contradictions) but he doesn’t have any real use for the Democratic challengers during this period. He doesn’t think much of Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown and his opinion of Douglas Wilder (the first African-American elected Governor) is that his decision to run for President is premature. “There is no evidence the electorate in general was prepared to accept a black nominee,” he tells us with all sincerity. You really wonder whether he’s speaking for himself in that sense.

White had his own prejudices to be sure – he viewed Adam Clayton Powell, the first African-American Congressman as something of a thug – but whatever opinions he had on the candidates running for office he did his best to keep them to himself or at the very least, only talk about it in regard to their campaigns. He always had a great respect for Hubert Humphrey – in his final book America in Search of Itself, he makes it clear Humphrey would have been a great President – but he also understood the mood of the electorate. In his final book he acknowledges Humphrey will likely be considered one of the greatest Senators in history (true) but that by 1972 the young still viewed him as LBJ’s Vice President and a man of the establishment (also true). He never quite liked George Wallace but he acknowledged the phenomena and was more than willing to give him the benefit of being smarter than he appeared. And when it came to George McGovern he was more than fair. He was impressed by many things in his character and his organization but he also thought that there were flaws in both that were going to undercut him with the electorate.

Witcover by contrast doesn’t even bother to hide his contempt for everyone in the Bush White House; you’d think they were far worse than the men in Nixon’s administration who were about to go to jail. It’s not just Atwater who he views with loathing – though in his opinion Atwater’s crimes are not negative and racist campaigning but the way he ‘transparently pandered to the right’ to make Bush acceptable to them. Sununu is contemptuous, Jack Kemp a fool, Pat Buchanan a buffoon. Witcover has a real story here – the way the conservative wing of the party has decided to make it very clear how any deviance from Republican policy is betrayal – but he only sees it as a flaw of Bush himself, rather than the entire party. Witcover has a very clear problem for not only seeing the forest for the trees; he doesn’t even see the trees that well.

As far as Witcover is concerned the reason that George H.W. Bush lost was because he reneged on his pledge: “no new taxes” which caused the conservatives to turn on him, leading to Buchanan’s primary challenge. But not even the economy itself really interests Witcover that much: for him the very concept of Carville’s famous slogan – ‘it’s the economy stupid’ – is just an excuse for the vote that led to Clinton’s election and not an iconic note in political history.

There is something significant in the book which Witcover does note in his final chapter:

As a practical matter, only a handful of Americans were actually able to talk directly to the candidates. But the difference was…that people just like themselves were questioning the candidates – were in fact surrogates for the average voter. Watching Clinton, Bush and Perot in that Richmond debate, anyone could imagine being the one asking the questions and influence the process directly. It was no longer the sole province of journalists, whom they saw as part of the distant establishment rather than as their agents.

Witcover notes the  voter turnout – the largest since 1960 – as significant yet even then there seems to be a sense of pleasure in Witcover’s announcement that it pales in comparison to Western democracy. The people don’t care that much, you can see him thinking. Looking at the paragraph above I wonder if Witcover viewed this not as a positive step forward but a threat to his own livelihood.

In the mind of Witcover and Germond, he was part of that ‘distant establishment’ but it’s clear he didn’t see any connection between his attitude and part in it. As far as he was concerned all of the candidates involved were just as flawed as when he started doing his columns and by his view didn’t deserve to worthy of the Presidency. Did he think that this rebellion was a reaction to how he himself had been covering politics all these year, that his province as the gatekeeper was being threatened by the public?

I can’t say. What I know is that Witcover in all of his volumes views every aspect of the political process with more cynicism bordering on visceral contempt then Theodore White ever did. His final pages of the 1972 volume talk not of the failures of Nixon but rather the fact that this election is one of the most significant because it offers a true contrast of views of how the government should work. In his opinion the most significant he lived through were in 1932, when FDR defeated Hoover and believed in the New Deal, 1936 when FDR’s landslide confirmed its place in society and 1964 involving Goldwater and Johnson. 1972 was a similar difference in ideas. He clearly sees that Nixon’s landslide was a complete repudiation of the past forty years of Democratic Presidents and a groundswell for the new conservative order, even though it is still not fully formed. He acknowledges respect for Nixon in their final interview, which took place mere days before the Senate hearings revealed Magruder and John Dean’s role in planning it. Not long after Halderman and Ehrlichmann are forced to resign and John Mitchell is indicted. Yet even then he tries to explain how Nixon rose and fell and even then shows that even if Watergate is a repudiation of Nixon, the mandate for what he stood for will not disappear. “The Republican Party is a place where people vote when they want to go slow and I think they want to go slow now,” White quotes one of McGovern’s speechwriters. Considering the rise of Ronald Reagan, it's hard to argue with this basic concept half a century later.

White’s books are more remarkable because they also offer snapshots into some of the most significant moments in history. Sometimes White doesn’t know it yet – as in 1960 with the revelation of the U-2 program – and other times he knows what he’s witnessing. This is true not just in 1968 but when we see how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed and the fall of the Southern Democrats which White witnessed almost in real time and in 1972 when we learn the circumstance as to how and why American went off the gold standard. (Republicans should direct their blame at Nixon, by the way.) White also goes out of his way to capture both the makeup of America, using the census data available to him and the patterns of the electorate and how they were shifting – and in context, the country. It’s clear reading White that in his books he’s trying to tell a narrative about America and the race for the Presidency is just the means.

When Witcover picked up the mantle from White in 1976 he was living through a bigger change in American politics and world history. But Witcover is fundamentally uninterested in seeing any of the events that happen in the world – and even America – throughout anything other than a political lens. That would be forgivable if he could manage to maintain the tone of neutrality White does. Instead what you get are hundreds of pages of details of political campaigns which Witcover views at best as trivial and at worst read as a repudiation of every aspect of the process, including voting itself. With White you get a sense of respect of what he’s doing and its significance. With Witcover you get the feel of a cranky old man who’s fulfilling a book deal he made and doesn’t have the energy to get out of, so he takes his frustration out on the reader.

Maybe that’s the real reason why, even though I have and will continue to you use both men’s work as primary sources for my articles on history, I will always prefer reading White’s books to Witcover’s. White does seem to care about the process. With Witcover it seems like he’s  always looking at his watch, counting the minutes until he can move on to something more interesting.

 

Five Weeks Into The New Season of Jeopardy We Have Two Qualifers for The Next Tournament of Champions

 

As I mentioned quite a few times in my last article about Jeopardy while we haven’t had the super-champions that have existed in the post Alex Trebek era throughout the start of regular game play in 2024 we have had a steady stream of qualifiers for the Tournament of Champions. In the seventy-eight games of regular season play during Season 40 seven players qualified for the Tournament of Champions a remarkably consistent pattern unmatched during the last four years.

Now in only the first five weeks of Season 41, we have had back to back qualifiers for the next Tournament of Champions. In fact they’ve both qualified in just the last two weeks. To be fair only one has ‘officially’ qualified but the Jeopardy archive the online history of the game (and your humble scribes main source) says both players have qualified so for the purposes of this article I will take it as gospel.

Last Monday Ryan Manton, a systems administrator from Columbus Ohio had one of the most dominant games of the season so far: 29 correct responses and only two incorrect ones. His runaway score of $22,200 is all the more impressive because the two clues he got wrong were both Daily Doubles, each of which cost him $5000. Nevertheless he won his first game in a runaway and warmed the hearts of Jeopardy fans everywhere when he wrote down in his first Final Jeopardy: “What is I Love you Lauren?” This is heartwarming not just because he shows his love for his wife but because the then Lauren Menke appeared on Season 37 of Jeopardy in what was the last game Ken Jennings appeared on in his first stint as guest host. (Sam Stapleton who won the game went on to win two games and qualify for the finals in Champions Wildcard Spades.)

Ryan managed two more runaway victories (and each time told Lauren he loved her) and in the third game managed the narrowest of wins. (Scott Tcheng who just barely lost to him, will no doubt be invited back to the Second Chance Tournament) That  Friday he had a chance to officially punch his ticket to the Tournament of Champions. Then he ran into Mark Fitzpatrick and Anne Singleton.

In the Jeopardy round Anne seemed to have the advantage ending it with $7000 to Ryan’s $4000 and Mark’s $1800. The Double Jeopardy round that followed was the most exciting of the season. Mark shot to a big lead when he found both Daily Doubles back to back and got both of them right netting $8000 and taking a huge lead. But neither Mark nor Anne surrendered. Ryan got 20 correct responses and didn’t make a single mistake, finishing with $15,200. Anne managed an impressive third with 10,200. So even though Mark had the lead with $23,400, the game was far from out of reach for either of his opponents.

It came down to Final Jeopardy. The category was LITERARY CHARACTERS: “A fragment from a nautical tool found on a Chilean island in 2005 was likely left by the Scot who partly inspired this character.” Anne wrote down: “Who is Wallace?” and lost $5200. Ryan couldn’t come up with anything but assured us he still loved his wife. It cost him $5201 leaving him with $9999.

That left Mark. His response was revealed: “Who is Robinson Crusoe?” and that was the correct response. (For those of you who don’t know – and I suspect only true Jeopardy fans might – Robinson Crusoe was inspired by the real life exploits of a stranded Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk. Type in the line “I am the monarch of all I survey’ on Google and you’ll find the connection.) Mark had wagered $7001 to make him the new champion with an impressive $30,101.

Ryan put together an impressive run during his four games, winning $83, 179 during the course of them. This is at the level of Grant DeYoung, who qualified last year and considerably more than Amar Kakirde who ‘only’ won $55,899 in four games last May. And it is considerably more than Ben Goldstein won in five games back in Season 39 and at least four or five other players who qualified for the 2021 Tournament of Champions. Ryan will be more than up to the challenge. And given how well she played against two men who are now in the Tournament of Champions Anne Singleton will definitely be in the Second Chance Tournament and deserve to be.

Now on to Mark Fitzpatrick. Mark was a better player than Ryan in that he won more games and had two runaway victories but like Mark he struggled with Final Jeopardy, eventually getting four out of six Final Jeopardys wrong. This is not necessarily a flaw limited to Mark; Final Jeopardys have been particularly challenging for the contestants – and I must confess to me at home. Credit to the writers who have clearly upped their game as Season 41 progresses, though I shudder to think what we’ll get in the Tournament of Champions. (I may save that for a different article later on.)

A prime example would come in Tuesday’s game which he spent much of Double Jeopardy fighting off the challenge of Gino Montoya. At the end of the round he had a narrow lead with $21,200 to Gino’s $17,400. The third challenger Andrew Miller was alive with $4600.

The Final Jeopardy category was not one to inspire confidence WORLD FLAGS: “The 12 stars on its flag symbolize perfection, not geographic or political units.” Andrew guessed Australia, Mark Liberia and Gino couldn’t come up with anything. Ken admitted it was tough because “it’s not actually a nation of the world; we’re talking about the flag of the European Union, those 12 stars in a circle.” Gino lost everything. Mark lost $13,601 but that left him wit $7599, enough for his third victory.

On the game that he officially clinched his spot in the Tournament of Champions he spent a great deal of time going back and forth with Mike Obstgarten for the lead, finally pulling ahead for good when he responded correctly on the last Daily Double. He led with $18,600 to Mike’s $12,800. The Final Jeopardy category was MOVIES: “More than 25 cast members from this 1990 film drama would later appear on an HBO series with a similar theme.” Both Mike and Mark knew the correct film: “What is Goodfellas?” (For the record I knew there were a lot of actors who were in that film on The Sopranos; I didn’t know Michael Imperioli was one of them.” Mark won $25,601 to cross the $100,000 threshold.

However Friday Mark suffered from what had been his great strength to that point in his run: the Daily Double. In the previous five games he’d found thirteen of the fifteen Daily Doubles and had done extremely well on them getting eleven correct. However when he found the first one on the second clue of the Jeopardy round he was already at -$1000. The category was 18^th CENTURY HISTORY: “This North American colonial empire seen on 16^th century maps as Gallia Nova ended with the fall of Quebec and Montreal.” Like Mark I had never heard of New France. It is credit to Mark that at the end of the Jeopardy round he was on the positive side; at one point he actually had -$2600.

In Double Jeopardy it looked like he was turning things around quickly when he got the first three clues correct on the bottom of the board and jumped up to $5800. Then he found the first Daily Double and wagered everything: “You can breathe easier knowing that Terry McMillan wrote a sequel to this novel called Getting to Happy.” Mark didn’t know this referred to Waiting to Exhale and went back to zero. Around that time his challengers Eamonn Campbell and Dot White began to get hot and Mark was in a distant third with $2800 when he found the third and last Daily Double in TERRITORIAL GOVERNORS. This time he had no choice but to bet everything: “Frank Franz served as an Indian agent of the Osage Agency before becoming this territory’s last governor in 1906.” Mark knew it was Oklahoma and doubled his score.

But he couldn’t turn the tide on what had been a dreadful game: he managed fifteen correct responses but eight incorrect ones. Despite that he was still in contention at the end of Double Jeopardy with $4800 to Dot’s $10,400 and Eamonn’s $12,200.

It came down to Final Jeopardy. The category was a tough one: WORLD POLITICAL HISTORY. The clue even more challenging: William Whitelaw and John Peyton were also-rans in a 1975 leadership vote with this victor.” Mark had no clue and wrote down: “What is thanks for a fun day?” However he lost nothing, so he was still alive. Dot was next and couldn’t finish her response: “What is Washing?” But it cost her just $599. It was all on Eamonn. He wrote down: “Who is Thatcher?” That was the correct response. After Edward Heath lost the 1974 election for the Conservatives, there was a leadership vote that made Margaret Thatcher head of the Party and that set her up to become Prime Minister four years later. Eamonn was already going to win and he added $1500 to his total, making him the new champion with $13,700. Mark went home with $107,201.

That means that as of this writing nine players have officially qualified for the Tournament of Champions. (Ten if we include Lisa Ann Walter and we all know we will going in.) As of this writing Mark is exactly in the middle in terms of money won, right between Alison Betts with $121,500 and Amy Hummel with $100,994.

I think the term of the roster of the Tournament of Champions right now is solid. We’ve been spoiled the last two years by having so many super-champions that we’ve forgotten that the average Jeopardy champion is just very, very great. All six players who have won 5 games or more have won at least $100,000 which for those of us who’ve been watching Jeopardy in the last 20 years is well above the norm for most of our winners. The rosters already at the level of the 2021 Tournament of Champions (the last under the old rules) and that one only had seven contestants who’d won at least five games.

Then too there is the fact that in little more than a hundred games since the Season 40 ‘postseason’ ended we already have a very good roster of contenders and as I mentioned quite a few three game winners who will either be in the Tournament in some form, via natural or Wild Card. (We’ve actually had one more possibility join the roster but I’ll save him for later this season.)

We may not be in quite the era of Peak Jeopardy any more, in the sense that there has yet to be a contender the likes of Cris Panullo or Matt Amodio. But given the increased caliber of the writing so far this season and the listing of champions we already have, I doubt the show will start to lose fans or complain any time soon. I’ll be back when the next qualifier for the Tournament appears.