You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2006.
Dan,
Good questions. I’ll answer them in one fell swoop, and I’ll do it with zeal. You asked: “How much of racial integration’s history can be credited to military expediency?” Phrasing this another way makes the issue clearer, especially with regard to the current debate on homosexuals in the armed services. Let’s ask: “What is it about the military that made its racial integration process historically peculiar?” It seems to me there are at least two factors at work. First, the U.S. military is subject to executive orders from the White House. Commanders-in-Chief reserve the right to dictate military policy without many of the checks that hinder them elsewhere; when Truman said “jump” on the racial integration issue, his generals grumbled and groaned, but they jumped nontheless. The second factor is external. The U.S. military in 1948 was an odd beast: its ranks had swelled tremendously to beat back German and Japanese aggression through 1945, then emptied quickly as America transitioned back to a peacetime economy (though not fully, as the postwar world required that a great many U.S. troops remain on foreign soil). This expansion and contraction threw the armed services’ demographics into both civilian and military spotlights–in plain speak, race in the military became an issue. The war also encouraged a nascent civil rights front at home, spurred by a vocal black press; these pressures congealed around 1948 into palpable pressure on Truman. Bolstered by his personal aversion to violence against black veterans after hostilities ended, Truman moved to kill segregation in the military.
The bad news is that the two most important causes underlying the racial integration of the military were (a) Truman’s own personal conviction to a rudimentary form of racial equality and (b) a catastrophically destructive–but socially galvanizing–world war. To replicate the second cause is a repugnant choice…no one wants a large war. To replicate the first cause is difficult but, it seems to me, possible. Clinton promised to amend the military’s rules on open homosexuals, but reneged once in office. A candidate who has both a moral aversion to the current Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy (as thinking people should) and a visible and reputable base of support for changing the rules would be well positioned to do so, especially if s/he went the executive order route. What worries me is that issuing substantive executive orders (especially ones with normative purposes, and ones that deal with issues that have been marked for death by hard-conservative interest groups) takes guts, and I’m not sure any Democrat has enough. One ray of hope remains, though: Truman’s order, made in the context of a heated presidential election campaign, was built to be combative, in part to throw the Republican Congress for a loop. I think today’s Republican Party is dominated by hard-liners to a greater extent than it was mid-century (is it?), suggesting that an aggressive move on a social issue like homosexuals in the military might make big waves. Conservatives and Christians would inevitably be incensed, but an action which was dramatic (as banning discrimination of homosexuals in the ranks would be) but limited (only a small, easily-delineated subset of the population would be affected) might restore some agency and vigor to a Democratic Party that’s systematically misspent its political capital in recent years.
So now I ask you: Is that how such an executive order would play out? Have I misread the political pulse? (One thing I haven’t considered is the possibility that a Republican president might slip his bonds and move as Truman moved. Is this a possibility in the forseeable future?)
–Morgan Hubbard
Very nice paper, Morgan. It’s well-researched, clear, and ultimately leads to the sort of conclusion most of us want: that every person should be able to serve in the armed forces. You are right, I think, in making the link between the history of racial integration in the U.S. military and the present debate over gays in the military.
For any readers who have not read the paper in its entirety, Morgan makes the comparison along four lines:
1. In both cases, the argument was made that integration would somehow erode the “unit cohesion” on which functional military operation rests.
2. The final say in both cases lay in the power of the “heckler’s veto.” In other words, any critic of integration could effectively roadblock any change.
3. Resistance in both cases was suffused with misunderstanding of the “Other.”
4. Change was, and will likely be slow because of a military aversion to any actions that might be seen as “social engineering.”
You are right in discussing first the issue of unit cohesion, because I believe this is the thrust of the debate, vis-à-vis official military stances. I think the argument is disingenuous, however. History tells us, as you noted, that integration decreases prejudice and increases cohesion. I don’t think it would be any different in the case of gay men and lesbian women.
Now I should address your question about Colin Powell’s statement. Powell was on shaky ground, to be sure, in boiling down homosexuality to its behavioral component. To me it seems as if Powell’s argument has had little weight in policy. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” seems to move beyond the issue of behavior; under its rules, any profession (no matter how innocuous) of sexual orientation is sufficient for expulsion from the service.
My question, unsurprisingly, is “what’s next?” What can history do to resolve this current debate? How can we go about creating the conditions for equality in military service? How much of racial integration’s history can be credited to military expediency? And will it take another World War, or something on its level, to create the push for integration of gays and lesbians?
–Daniel Corbett
Having received a thorough ear-boxing from Dan, I've decided that the blog is, after all, a good way to stay engaged, civically and intellectually. In that spirit, I've finally posted my paper on the "race analogy" and homosexuality in the U.S. armed forces. Look to the left…it's under the "pages" section.
Dan, some questions you might ask yourself as you're reading (and then pose to me soon after): In what ways are the two groups in question–blacks and homosexuals–actually different in the eyes of the military? Was there a grain of insight in Colin Powell's assertion that one group's unifying feature was behavioral (homosexuals) while the other's was merely phenotypical? Am I right to find Don't Ask Don't Tell insulting in the way it reduces individuals to balls of prejudices?
Hit me!
–Morgan Hubbard
While I am enjoying my graduation present– a meandering journey through Ireland. Will return with whiskey.
–Daniel Corbett
Dan, I raise my glass to you. Happy graduation, when it happens.
I've been nagged ever since graduation by a sneaking suspicion that my undergaduate education means slightly less than I have tended to think it does. Not in terms of its marketability, or even in terms of its quality: god knows I couldn't have had a more enthusiastic and sharp-minded mentor than Art Eckstein, to whom my thesis owes a great debt. No, mine is a deeper apprehension: I worry that the history I produced in writing my thesis was nothing more than an exercise, isolated and hermetically sealed by its place in the past. I worry that we, now, might not be able to draw any predictive marrow from it, or from any history at all. Actually, that's not quite accurate. More precisely, I worry that we won't draw anything from it.
To be fair, my job at the agency is rife with counterexamples. From what I've read, intel analysts (though none at my agency, who are all gloriously self-effacing) tend to fetishize aspects of military and diplomatic history in the way they cite historical examples in defense of policy advocacy pieces. But the intel business is an insular one. We in the intelligence community read/watch outside news after work, but for eight hours each day we only know what others of us know. And, needless to say, nothing classified is released until it's long irrelevant to the here-and-now.
In wider society, it seems to me, there's little market for advocacy with a historical base. All the hard-edged or quantitative books I read for my thesis were produced by and for think-tanks, agencies or policy circles, not for the general public.
This may be an oversight of mine. I don't read as much as I should, and I might have missed a lot. But in the meantime, tomorrow I'll load onto the site my attempt to address this gap: an analysis of current U.S. military policy towards homosexuals, as seen through the lens of the military's past policies on blacks.
–Morgan Hubbard
Today, I'm wrapping up my legal theory class, and with it, my college career. In the class we've covered a lot of ground: natural law, positivism, realism, and all of the critical and postmodern appendages of today's legal thought. One voice that caught my attention, maybe surprisingly, given my libertarian tendencies, was Ronald Dworkin. Something about his elegant portrayal of law's integrity, its ability to transform, to change, to better.
But Dworkin has his critics, to be sure. The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article on Dworkin, his recent book, and the perennial rose-colored glasses through which he sees the law. Carlin Romano writes:
"The pathos of Dworkin's jurisprudence is that, after several decades, its two parts don't add up. In his philosophical work, the judge not only can grasp our entire constitutional scheme, like some hotshot assistant professor who understands every nuance of Kant's system, but he must to be an adequate judge. In his New York Review pieces, no living judge — make that no conservative judge — understands what he or she is doing."
I'd like to think of law as robust, as having inner morality, but something always leads me to stop short. I think it's the messiness of law– the political exigencies that lead Dworkin and others to lambaste their political foes– that does this for me. Law is a powerful tool, but as is the case with most powerful tools, we cannot leave it uncriticized and unchecked.
–Daniel Corbett
Glen Whitman at Agoraphilia blogs about the logical maneuvering behind a popular anti-immigration argument. The argument– we've all heard it before– posits that, faced with rapid immigration, America's social welfare system would start to collapse under its own weight. In other words, there's a fixed pie, and there's simply not enough to go around.
Whitman (via Julian Sanchez) points out a dangerous assumption in the above argument: that we assume a social welfare system exactly like the one we currently have. If political institutions are fixed from the outset, change of any sort is going to be tough. So what causes people to assume political fixity? It's a case of backward induction, Whitman argues. People in intellectual circles often deal with questions of moral personhood first and then move on to political questions about rights, statuses, and entitlements. But the vast majority of people often get it upside-down: answering political questions first and then drawing up conclusions of moral worth in response to these answers.
This backward induction leads to an interesting paradox. We want to retain our well-intentioned and noble welfare state, so we assume a whole raft of rights to which people (though we haven't touched on the important matter of defining these people) are entitled. From here though, budgetary limitations, etc. (what a brilliant professor of mine has referred to as "the funkiness of life") often force us to make rather inhumane judgements such as "close off the borders."
Whitman leaves us with a powerful closing thought:
"If we wish to encourage people to regard other moral beings as equals and not enemies, we should favor social systems that foster cooperation rather than creating conflicts of interest."
–Daniel Corbett
Copyright 101 question: Dan, an aging but venerable author asks Morgan, a fellow author to help him with a book. In a correspondence, Dan says to Morgan, “Here’s a little sketch but make whatever you want.” Dan turns around to sue Morgan for infringing– er– himself?
Now take and apply it to an even more contentious arena for IP– the world of glass sculpture.
That's the story behind a recent copyright suit being brought forward by Seattle glass sculptor Dale Chihuly. Chihuly is suing a longtime collaborator for putting out glass sculptures that too closely resemble his postmodern, sea-inspired works.
There are two key problems with this suit: 1.) the quotation from the hypothetical is an direct quotation from the plaintiff to the defendant in a correspondence between the two. Chihuly stopped blowing glass 27 years ago and has since relied on other artists to carry out– obviously with varying degrees of guidance– his visions (hat tip to Prof. Michael Madison). 2.) How easy is it to declare ownership over abstracted, nautical themed glass sculptures? There is a reason copyright has been slow to show itself in the art world. As the defense attorney in the case put it: "If the first guy who painted Madonna and Child had tried to copyright it," Mr. Wakefield said, "half of the Louvre would be empty."
–Daniel Corbett
Recent Comments