David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington.  Together with Kevin Coe he wrote The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by Domke and Coe click here. In the post below Domke examines the role of race in the Presidential election.

The consensus among political journalists and pundits is that if race becomes a salient matter in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama is in trouble. The thinking goes something like this: if white voters are reminded that Obama is black, or start to think through a racial prism, the nation’s first African American major-party presidential candidate will lose.

In the words of NBC News political director Chuck Todd: “Anytime race is THE topic du jour in the campaign, it’s a bad day for Obama. Period.”

I disagree.

Let’s review the three most racialized moments in the campaign.

First there was the tit-for-tat in late January, as the Democratic Party approached the South Carolina primary. Obama had won the Iowa caucuses, Clinton had won in New Hampshire and Nevada, and in the days before the Palmetto State’s voting, the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns traded accusations that each was bringing up race for political advantage. When Obama won a landslide victory, Bill Clinton dismissed it as Jesse Jackson redux, drawing significant criticism for the comparison. Was Obama damaged by all of this? Not hardly. Bill Clinton, however, has yet to recover.

Next there was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright remix of God bless America, in which Wright presented an image of an angry-at-America, angry-at-whites black man. The political and media punditry quickly sounded the death knell for Obama’s candidacy, and indeed Obama sank in the polls. The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll in mid-March showed him leading Hillary Clinton 50% to 44% before the Wright videos emerged, and five days later it was Clinton up 49% to 42%. But within days Obama was back in the lead, following his profoundly adult speech on race in Philadelphia.

Most recently we had the he said-he said showdown between John McCain’s and Obama’s campaigns, beginning with McCain’s “Celebrity” advertisement linking Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Some say that tying Obama to young, sexualized white women was an attempt to prime racial stereotypes about black men. For his part, Obama said that the McCain campaign was trying to tell everyone that Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The Obama side later acknowledged it was a ham-handed attempt to highlight race without saying so explicitly.

The McCain camp immediately jumped on it, saying that it was the Obama camp who was playing the “race card.” Sensing an advantage, the McCain campaign has subsequently gone all-in with its advertising strategy, and has now released a web advertisement that declares “Hot chicks love Obama.” ABC News’ Jake Tapper put the count of white women at a minimum of 4. Subtle it ain’t.

Since the McCain-Obama back-and-forth began, the Gallup Daily Tracking poll has shown an interesting pattern. On July 30, when the Celebrity ad was released by the McCain campaign, Obama led McCain 45% to 44%. On each of the following two days the candidates tied at 44%, but nearly every day since Obama has gained ground—and as of Wednesday he led, 48% to 42%. If Obama was hurt by the racial dynamics, these numbers don’t show it.

So how to explain all of this?

I’ll offer two lines of argument.

1. Obama is hurt by race when it is a below-the-radar subtext, but he benefits when it is brought explicitly into the light of day. This is exactly what research in political psychology suggests: that only subtle, implicit racial messages work in today’s U.S. politics. The evidence suggests that most Americans don’t want to act upon their embedded racial prejudices, so when these biases become apparent to them, voters take intentional steps to act differently.

In South Carolina, Bill Clinton’s claims that Obama’s race helps him among black voters and Clinton’s reference to Jesse Jackson made race explicit, and subsequently Obama benefited. With Jeremiah Wright, Obama was hurt in polls when people simply saw Wright’s rants, but then Obama bounced back after his “More Perfect Union” speech directly addressed racial divisions. And in the aftermath of the salvos with the McCain camp two weeks ago, the news media are now giving closer scrutiny to the racial dynamics of the campaign. Such scrutiny, this pattern suggests, will help Obama.

2. There are two political groups that are determined that Obama will not suffer the same fate as Democratic Party nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988, when the George H. W. Bush campaign rode the infamous “Willie Horton” ad to victory.

The first are African American voters, whose support for Obama is at unprecedented levels for a Democrat. In response to the Wright flap, for example, media reports suggested that blacks often rallied to Obama’s side.

Second, the “swiftboat” experiences of John Kerry in 2004 has put the Obama campaign and supporters on high-alert against what it considers unfair criticisms, subtle or otherwise. The Obama campaign launched its site in June, “Fight the Smears,” and on Wednesday Kerry himself launched a site, “Truth Fights Back.” Both of these sites, ironically, draw upon Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign’s war-room approach of instant responses. These kinds of tactics ensure that the Obama campaign will weigh in quickly with its viewpoints, and can go on the offense whenever race comes up. That makes certain that they’re significant players in defining the debate.

These factors have made race a complex factor in this presidential campaign—which is as we might expect, given its deep, embedded, and often-contradictory positioning in American culture at large. The evidence simply doesn’t suggest that Obama is always hurt when race is part of the campaign. In fact, it appears to be exactly the opposite, so far.

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Paul M. Collins, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. He is author of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making. In this article, Collins discusses interest group participation in the recently decided U.S. Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller and the future of Second Amendment litigation.

It is fair to say that one or two cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court stand out each term. I think it is evident that this term’s most salient case is District of Columbia v. Heller. In that 5-4 decision, the Court struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on the possession of privately owned handguns within District limits. In so doing, the Court clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment for the first time in almost 70 years by endorsing an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Aside from its significance in partially resolving the meaning of the Second Amendment, this case is notable as a means to illustrate the role of interest groups in the courts. Like many seminal constitutional decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, the Heller decision originated as a test case. Test cases operate as a type of quid-pro-quo. An interest group uses the case in an attempt to etch its policy preferences into law. In exchange, the group finances the case for the litigant named in the suit by providing that litigant with attorneys, performing legal research, and paying court fees. Robert Levy of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, began the case in an attempt to get the Supreme Court to clarify the meaning of the Second Amendment. Dick Heller was handpicked by Levy as an ideal litigant: Heller was a security guard who carried a gun at work, but could not possess his handgun at home as a means of self defense. The idea was that Heller, as a law abiding citizen with a connection to the law enforcement community, would be a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the courts. Evidently, this was a good choice as the Court ruled in favor of Heller in nullifying the District of Columbia’s ban on the private possession of handguns.

In addition to providing an excellent example of a test case, the Heller decision is also significant for understanding the primary method of interest group litigation: the amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief. These briefs provide a means for organized interests to furnish the courts with legal argumentation in an attempt to persuade the justices to accept their interpretations of the law. A total of 67 amicus briefs were filed from a wide variety of interests, ranging from academics to civil rights and liberties organizations to gun advocacy groups. These amici illustrated the reality that the Supreme Court is a public policy battleground in which organized interests clash in their attempts to manipulate the law to further their own agendas. The interest groups highlighted to the justices the broad policy significance of the case, discussing a wide assortment of issues, including matters of children’s safety, racial discrimination, and federalism, in addition to their primary focus on the Second Amendment. While most of the amicus briefs focused on the legal and historical interpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, several amicus briefs provided the Court with social scientific evidence, reading more like statistical analyses than standard legal briefs.

47 amicus briefs were filed supporting Heller, representing a wide assortment of organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality, Disabled Veterans for Self Defense, the Foundation for Free Expression, and the National Rifle Association. 20 amicus briefs supported the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Bar Association, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and National Network to End Domestic Violence. These amicus briefs appeared to influence the justices’ decision making. Indeed, the Court’s majority and dissenting opinions cited more than 15 separate amicus briefs and Justice Breyer was particularly attentive to the arguments raised by the amici. Although the number of amicus briefs supporting a particular litigant is not necessarily determinative of the outcome of cases, the Court nonetheless tends to side with the litigant supported by the largest number of briefs, consistent with the Heller decision.

A particularly important point is what the Supreme Court did not do in the case. That is, the Court did not address the issue of incorporation: whether the Second Amendment applies to the states. While the Bill of Rights was originally intended to protect individuals from the actions of the federal government, over time the Supreme Court has extended most, but not all, provisions in the Bill of Rights to the states. However, in Heller, the court did not extend the Second Amendment to the states. What this means in practice is that we will see a surge of Second Amendment cases percolate throughout the federal court system for decades to come. To be sure, most of these cases will be brought by interest groups seeking to both incorporate the Second Amendment and have the courts clarify exactly what restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms are permissible under the Constitution. Thus, Heller should be viewed as a starting point for the contemporary understanding of the Second Amendment, rather than the final word on the subject.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the Presidential candidates.  See his previous OUPblogs here.

We like to think that we are agents of our will, autonomous individuals with the power to make our mark on and even write history. Political campaigns operate under the assumption that strategy matters. A wrong word, a lapel pin, a mole on the face, a former pastor, a wife’s comment, even the use of a laptop - any of of these can make or break a candidate.

And so, looking at the polls today, we might conclude that Obama has run a near-flawless campaign, and McCain has made one one mistake after another and has had the worst luck.

But elections are about fundamentals, and the life cycles of political regimes. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter could have been consummate politicos in 1932 and 1980, but voters were just not prepared to give these men and the parties they represented a second chance.

The truth is not everything has gone Obama’s way this year. He had to deal with Jeremiah Wright’s, Michelle Obama’s, and Jesse Jackson’s poorly worded comments, for instance. Right now, he is still working on finding a cogent equivocation for how the “surge” in Iraq worked but that he opposed it when it was first proposed. But the point is that he nevertheless appears to have cruised through these problems.

I don’t think the fact that Obama is probably a more artful politician than McCain explains the striking contrast in their fortunes as they now stand. It almost seems like McCain stumbles at every turn, and Obama can do no wrong. Even when it comes to justifying his initial opposition to the “surge,” it seems like Obama’s anti-war supporters have already decided that the good news came too little and too late. (As was Herbert Hoover’s decision only in 1931 to provide direct government assistance to thousands of Americans without work; as was Carter’s anti-inflation program in 1978. Incidentally, both Hoover and Carter,
like McCain, were characterized as having been really unlucky too.)

In every election in which the electorate collectively sighs, “too little, too late,” and the standard bearer of the incumbent party keeps running into what appears to be a string of bad luck, then his / their time is up. The question is, will 2008 be the last hurrah of the conservative regime founded by Ronald Reagan that is rapidly losing its legitimacy (as were the election years of 1928 and 1976 were for the regimes respectively founded by Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt), or is the country unequivocably ready to move on? Every political regime, liberal or conservative, like every empire, has its rise, its crest, and its demise. The relevant question is where does 2008 fit in the life cycle of the current conservative regime.

Strategic blunders may not have as much explanatory power as we think. After all, we are usually more forgiving of the boy who cried “wolf” once than when he did it thrice - the political impact of a blunder depends on whether or not our patience has been worn thin. Luck is the error term we put in an equation to explain what will and actions fail to explain. What precedes both will and luck are electoral fundamentals and the life cycle of political regimes.

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Peter J. Spiro teaches law at Temple University and is the author of Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization which charts the trajectory of American citizenship and shows how American identity is unsustainable in the face of globalization.  The article below looks at citizenship in the light of July 4th.

As happens every July 5th, tomorrow’s newspapers will carry reports of attractively diverse groups of immigrants naturalizing as U.S. citizens in uplifting ceremonies, flags waving, with predictable but heartfelt welcomes from judges and elected officials. This Independence Day ritual is perhaps the only public relations play of the federal government’s immigration agencies that seems to work. It bears out all our longings that citizenship hold a sacred place as a source of national pride and renewal.
But the veneers of citizenship are wearing thin.

Start with the naturalization ceremonies themselves. The uplifting July 4th ceremonies are not the norm. More than half of all naturalizing immigrants take their oaths of citizenship in administrative procedures at local offices of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, successor to the old INS.

The surroundings are drab, often on the same hallways as hearing rooms in which less fortunate immigrants fight deportation. Low-level USCIS bureaucrats preside. As applicants stand in line to finalize their paperwork (after which they receive a 102-page pamphlet on U.S. history and a cheaply-produced American flag, apparently not made in China), the space takes on the feel of a waiting room. President Bush delivers a taped welcome via outdated technology along with a cloying version of “America the Beautiful.” The backdrop has all the transformative feel of a DMV.

Which it might as well be, for many of the participants. In their Sunday best and accompanied by families, the event has clearly retained its traditional significance for some. One has to feel a little sorry for these citizens-momentarily-to-be, given the tawdriness of the official reception.

But others by all appearances might as well be signing up for their drivers licenses. And who can blame them. The application process leading up to this day is slow and expensive. Application backlogs now stretch out as long as two years. In August 2007, the application fee almost doubled, to $675. For an immigrant family of four, that’s more than $2500. Those July 4th ceremonies would look a lot less dignified with money orders in the picture.

It doesn’t buy you all that much. The rights of citizenship are vanishingly small. In this presidential election year, those stories tomorrow will include quotes from new citizens looking forward to casting ballots in November. But studies consistently show that naturalized citizens are less likely to register and vote than their native-born counterparts. In 2006, for instance, only 37% of naturalized citizens voted, compared to 49% of native citizens. Voting rights can’t be motivating many naturalization applicants.

The recent spikes in naturalization applications have more prosaic explanations. Some rushed to file under the wire of the fee increase. Since a harsh 1996 rewrite of the immigration law and more so since 9/11, many immigrants have acquired citizenship on a defensive basis, to insulate themselves absolutely from deportation.

Others are looking for the advantages that citizens have in securing the admission of relatives. Permanent resident aliens can’t petition for the admission of their parents, for example. Citizens can.

Some applicants are even becoming citizens by way of an exit strategy. Citizens are free to come and go from the United States. Not so green-card holders, who may lose their permanent residency status after absences as short as six months. A growing number of aliens have been acquiring U.S. citizenship so that they can return to their homelands, secure in their travel privileges in and out of the U.S. to visit family and friends or to take advantages of retirement and other public benefits.

And a significant majority of naturalization applicants are holding on to their native citizenship even as they acquire American nationality. Nineteen out of the top twenty source countries for immigrants to the U.S. now accept dual citizenship. U.S. citizenship can play a sort of add-on function, subordinated to homeland ties.

So naturalization applicants may not be acting on sentimental attachments in becoming American citizens.

None of which is to say that naturalization for instrumental purposes should be policed, or in any event that it could be. But citizenship as an institution looks thinner after one brings into view those applicants who are not waving any flags against the backdrop of those dreary immigration agency offices.

Recent debates on immigration reform have been unthinkingly framed in terms of “a path to citizenship,” as if citizenship’s meaning were clear. But it’s time to get beyond our July 4th renderings of citizenship. The move might supply a focal point for revisiting the disasters of our immigration policy. It might also lead us to a new understanding of what membership in the national community does, and does not, stand for going forward.

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Author Kevin J. Hayes has been very busy writing American Literature: A Very Short Introduction, but he needs your help. Find out what you can do below. Check out his past posts here.

My previous blog took for its topic the genre of autobiography, which will be the subject of Chapter 3 in my forthcoming book, American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. This topic generated less comment than my earlier blogs, which surprised me somewhat. To me, autobiography is an exciting genre for critical exploration. I still welcome comments on autobiography, but for this new blog I am moving on to the subject of my fourth chapter: the short story. And I have come up with a question certain to generate some lively discussion: what are the five greatest short stories in the history of American literature?

Before anyone answers that question, perhaps I should establish one or two ground rules. Were I to answer it myself, the top five short stories in American literature might all be stories by Edgar Allan Poe. No doubt others feel the same way, too. But if all of you submit lists consisting solely of Poe stories, your responses will not really help me very much. Let’s make the following rule: only one story per author allowed in the list.

Top five and top ten lists have been around for a long time. In 1928, as I noted in The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville, Edward O’Brien made a list of the top fifteen short stories of all time, putting Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” at the top of the list and claiming that it was “the noblest short story in American literature.” Does O’Brien’s claim hold up eighty years later? The short story is a product of the nineteenth century, and many of the best writers of short fiction in American literature emerged then. But what impact did the twentieth century have on the development of short fiction? Have there been any good short stories in the twenty-first century? I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

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It’s Tony season and who better to educate us about the wonderful world of theatre than Thomas S. Hischak, author of The Oxford Companion To The American Musical: Theatre, Film and Television. Hischak is a Professor of Theatre at the State University of New York College at Cortland. He is the author of sixteen books on theater, film, and popular music as well as the author of twenty published plays. In The Oxford Companion To The American Musical Hischak offers over two thousand entires on musicals, performers, composers, lyricists, producers, choreographers and much more. Below are the answers to this morning’s quiz. Be sure to check back next week on Tuesday for another quiz about the Tonys.

1. The musical Passion (1994) ran only 280 performances, the shortest run on record for a Best Musical winner. Hallelujah, Baby! (1967) ran only two weeks longer but it had closed before it won the Tony so the award could not help business.

2. Poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) won when his light verse was set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber for Cats (1982).

3. Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Mostel won for the original 1962 production, Silvers and Lane won for the 1972 and 1996 revivals, and Alexander won when he played Pseudolus and other roles in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989).

4. The Threepenny Opera (1954). In 1956 the American Theatre Wing gave a special Tony to the long-running Off Broadway musical.

5. It was their Broadway debut. Bosley in Fiorello! (1959), Smith in Follies (1971), Holliday in Dreamgirls (1981), Martin in My Favorite Year (1992), McDonald in Carousel (1994), Heredia in Rent (1996) and Foster in Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002).

6. Chicago. The 1997 production won the Revival Tony and is still running.

7. Ethel Merman lost to Mary Martin in The Sound of Music in 1960. Bernadette Peters lost in 2004. Angela Lansbury won in 1975, Tyne Daly in 1990. Will Patti LuPone follow suit?

8. Frankie Michaels as Young Patrick in Mame and Daisy Eagan as Mary Lenox in The Secret Garden.

9. Both Mary Martin and Robert Preston were nominated for “I Do! I Do!.” Preston won.

10. Tommy Tune. He has Tonys for Best Leading Actor in a Musical, Best Featured Actor in a Musical, Best Director of a Musical, and Best Choreographer. Harvey Fierstein has also won Tonys in four different categories but half were for nonmusicals: as author of Best Play, Best Actor in a Play, Best Actor in a Musical, and Best Book for a Musical.

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It’s Tony season and who better to educate us about the wonderful world of theatre than Thomas S. Hischak, author of The Oxford Companion To The American Musical: Theatre, Film and Television. Hischak is a Professor of Theatre at the State University of New York College at Cortland. He is the author of sixteen books on theater, film, and popular music as well as the author of twenty published plays. In The Oxford Companion To The American Musical Hischak offers over two thousand entires on musicals, performers, composers, lyricists, producers, choreographers and much more. In the quiz below Hischak questions your Tony knowledge. Post your answers in the comments section. We will post the answer sheet later today. Be sure to check back next week on Tuesday for another quiz about the Tonys.

1. The Phantom of the Opera is the Tony-winning musical that has run longer than any other Broadway show. What Sondheim-scored Best Musical Tony winner had the shortest run?

2. Russian composer Alexander Borodin had long been dead when he won a Tony for Best Composer for Kismet (1953). What lyric writer and modernist poet won a Tony for Best Score eighteen years after he died?

3. Nathan Lane, Phil Silvers, Jason Alexander and Zero Mostel all won Tonys for Best Actor in a Musical for the same role. What was it?

4. What is the only Off Broadway musical production to win a Tony Award without transferring to Broadway? A 2006 revival starred Cyndi Lauper and Alan Cumming as two less-than-reputable Londoners.

5. Tom Bosley, Alexis Smith, Jennifer Holliday, Andrea Martin, Audra McDonald, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, and Sutton Foster all won Tony Awards for their performances in musicals. What did each in have in common with the others?

6. The longest running Broadway musical to win the Tony for Best Revival did not win the award when it was first produced—it had the misfortune to open the same year as A Chorus Line. What musical was it?

7. Every actress who has played Mama Rose in Gypsy on Broadway has been nominated for the Tony. Can you name the two winners and the two losers? Hint: Both losers played Annie Oakley on Broadway.

8. Who are the youngest boy and girl to win Tony Awards for musicals? Hint: he had an aunt and she had a garden.

9. In what Broadway musical was every cast member nominated for a Tony Award? Hint: There were only two performers in the show.

10. Which alliterative actor, choreographer, director and dancer is the only person to have won Tony Awards in four different musical categories?

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In the post below David D. Perlmutter, a professor in the KU School of Journalism & Mass Communications, and author of Blogwars, reflects on the changing nature of newspapers. Read other blog posts by Perlmutter here.

For years, journalists have speculated when newspapers would give up the print ghost and convert to a purely online and digital presence. The news business is abuzz with the first real example of such a transference. The New York Times reports that the 90-year-old newspaper of Madison, Wisconsin, The Capital Times, “stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web.” The editor of the paper was quoted as explaining, “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.”

The question is when a trend will become a flood–or a collapse. Newspapers are caught in quandary. The “print” business is their cash cow. Online revenues, while growing, fail to match what papers can change advertisers for print space and subscribers for copies. Online paper subscriptions rarely work or work well. There is a longstanding resistance by consumers to paying for a digital newspaper. And people are turning to many other sources of news besides papers, online or otherwise. Even old revenue standbys like classified ads are being taken over by outsiders like Craig’s List.

But the sheer costs of the print model are straining the news budget: The headlines in trade papers of the news business are about a time of confusion, retrenchment, uncertainty. You hear the same from journalists themselves: There doesn’t seem to be many happy and contented newspaper reporters.

Obviously, blogs and other social and interactive media are crucial venues for the traditional news business to explore and exploit. Going digital means more than changing platforms. Already one sees many papers trying different models, from adapting YouTube to their Web pages to creating interactive blogs for their staff.

However, it is unlikely that print will die out in all forms. Human beings still need it.

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Daniel Walker Howe is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize, a finalist in 2007 for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and winner of the Silver Medal for Non-Fiction, California Book Awards. Clearly his book, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, which looks at the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, is a must-read. The book celebrate the invention of the telegraph which was first used on May 24, 1844. Below is an excerpt from What Hath God Wrought about the invention of the telegraph.

Communication has always been a priority for empires, including the Roman, Chinese, and Incan. The messengers of the ancient Persian empire inspired the famous encomium of Herodotus, “Neither rain, nor snow, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The first postal system available for public use was created in the fifteenth century by the German Emperor Maximilian I. In the 1790s, the French Revolutionary government originated, and Napoleon subsequently expanded and perfected, the fastest and most efficient communication network the world had yet seen: a system of what we would call semaphores placed about six miles apart, capable of relaying signals whenever visibility permitted. Besides facilitating political control and military operations, it typified the Enlightenment ideal of rationality. Other countries imitated the system on a smaller scale.

To describe long-distance optical signaling, the word “telegraph,” meaning long-distance written communication, came into the European languages. Americans too employed optical signals of various kinds, though seldom in relays; they are commemorated in innumerable “telegraph hills” and “beacon hills.” …by 1840, an optical telegraph line functioned between New York and Philadelphia, though only its owners were allowed to use it.

In May 1844, politicians in Washington felt eager to learn news from the party conventions taking place in Baltimore, forty miles away. Help was at hand, for in March 1843 Congress had finally passed, after years of earnest lobbying, an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars for a Professor Samuel Finley Breese Morse (Finley to his family) to demonstrate an electromagnetic telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Morse and his team first tried laying the wire underground, but insulation problems forced them to string the lines on poles aboveground.

When the Whig National Convention met on May first, the wire still stretched only about halfway to Baltimore. But Morse’s associate Alfred Vail got the news from the train at Annapolis Junction and telegraphed it ahead to Washington. The information that the Whig Party had nominated Henry Clay for president and Theodore Frelinghuysen for vice president arrived an hour and fifteen minutes before the train did. By the time of the formal opening of the telegraph all the way to Baltimore on May 24, no doubt existed that it would work. From the chambers of the United States Supreme Court, Morse transmitted to Vail the famous message, WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT. When the Democratic convention began three days later, some privileged politicians huddled around Morse receiving up-to-the-minute reports, while hundreds of others outside (many of them members of Congress) tried to gain entrance or at least view the information he posted on the door. “Little else is done here but watch Professor Morse’s Bulletin from Baltimore, to learn the progress of doings at Convention,” a reporter for the New York Herald told his paper. The Democratic convention used the telegraph to offer the second spot on its ticket to Martin Van Buren’s friend Silas Wright; he declined it via the same medium, and the party then turned to the Pennsylvania doughface George Dallas.

Professor Morse seemed an unlikely inventor. He was not a scientist, engineer, or mathematician but a professor of fine arts at New York University. A distinguished portrait painter, he had aspired to nurture American nationhood and shape public taste through painting historical panoramas and founding the National Academy of Design.82 When in 1837 Congress denied him a commission to paint a historical mural for the Capitol Rotunda, Morse felt so bitterly disappointed that he gave up painting and turned his energies instead to developing an electric telegraph, a project that had engaged his attention off and on since 1832.

Morse’s surprising combination of artistic and technological creativity has caused him to be labeled (somewhat hyperbolically) “the American Leonardo.” But two important themes provide continuity between Morse’s art and telegraphy: his Calvinistic Protestantism and his American imperialism. Both of these preoccupations he had inherited from his father, Jedidiah Morse, Congregational minister and famous geographer, who prophesied that America would create “the largest Empire that ever existed.” If Finley Morse could not serve America’s providential destiny through painting, he would help fulfill it with electromagnetic current.

A series of international scientific advances paved the way for Morse’s demonstration. Alessandro Volta had invented the electric battery in 1800; Hans Christian Oersted and André Marie Ampère researched electromagnetic signals; William Sturgeon devised the electromagnet in 1824; and in 1831 the American physicist Joseph Henry announced his method for strengthening the intensity of an electromagnet so that the current could be transmitted across long distances… The Jackson administration, ever mindful of the Southwest, had taken an interest in the possibility of an American counterpart to the French optical telegraph to speed communication with New Orleans. The Van Buren administration continued this interest. In September 1837, Morse wrote Secretary of the Treasury Levi Woodbury describing his own plan for a new kind of telegraph, based on electricity… Secretary Woodbury was impressed, but to secure financial aid from the government, Morse needed an act of Congress. When he took his project before the House Commerce Committee, chairman Francis Smith, a Maine Democrat, insisted on being made another partner in Morse’s enterprise. Morse reluctantly consented, whereupon Smith enthusiastically recommended the project to Congress, making no mention of his own interest in it. It proved a bad bargain. The favorable committee report did not win congressional approval for the grant, and in the years ahead Smith’s shameless self-seeking would make trouble for Morse.

…Not until the Whigs controlled Congress did the Democrat Morse get his grant approved in 1843. It carried in the House only narrowly, 89 to 83, with many abstentions. Very likely Morse’s vociferous anti-Catholicism, unpopular with Congress, contributed to both his failure to get the painting commission in 1837 and the later political reluctance to endorse his invention. Morse assumed that the federal government should control the electric telegraph. “It would seem most natural,” he declared, to “connect a telegraphic system with the Post Office Department; for, although it does not carry a mail, yet it is another mode of accomplishing the principal object for which the mail is established, to wit: the rapid and regular transmission of intelligence.”…

In the United States, decades of long-term economic expansion only temporarily reversed by downturns after 1819 and 1837 encouraged the business community to accord the electric telegraph an enthusiastic reception. Investment bankers had always prized quick news. The Rothschilds in London had used carrier pigeons to learn of Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo before anyone else did; they bought British government bonds and realized a quick profit when their value rose once the victory became widely known. Following Morse’s demonstration, telegraph lines appeared rapidly in North America, chiefly in order to transmit the prices of stocks and commodities. They helped integrate financial markets so borrowers and lenders could find each other more easily. Accordingly, they first connected commercial centers: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, Toronto. The Philadelphia North American welcomed the telegraph with the pronouncement: “The markets will no longer be dependent upon snail paced mails.” Remarkably, the wires reached Chicago by 1848, enabling the Chicago Commodities Exchange to open that year.

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Today we are proud to bring you E.J. Dionne, Jr. (who just published Souled Out) in conversation with Mickey Edwards(frequent OUPblog contributor and author of Reclaiming Conservatism). This is the third and final part of this series.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right, which was published in January by Princeton University Press.

Mickey Edwards is a former Republican Congressman, founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation, and national chairman of the American Conservative Union. He is the author of Reclaiming Conservatism: How A Great American Political Movement Got Lost- and How It Can Find It Way Back

Email Three

Dear Mickey,

Once again, many thanks for your thoughtful reply. I do think you provide a model for other conservatives to emulate: You take seriously both the need for markets and the need for rules to govern those market; you take seriously social needs as well as individual needs; and you take seriously the fact that markets all by themselves will not always provide the goods we need (for example, health insurance for the elderly and the chronically sick). Your reply suggests that in the next era – whether we call it liberal or not — our country will have a rendezvous with problem solving, not problem avoidance.

Now I don’t want you to shudder and think, “My gosh, the last thing I need is for liberals to accord me that ‘strange new respect’ they always offer apostate conservatives.” So I want to close this exchange by taking your conservatism seriously, which everybody should.

Let me begin with progressive taxation. The case for higher taxes on the wealthy is straightforward: The wealthy have enjoyed the vast majority of the gains in wealth and income over the last seven years – and inequality has been growing for three decades. We have not had this level of inequality since 1929, a rather ominous fact when you think about it.

Permit me to cite some findings from my friends at the Economic Policy Institute. They noted recently that “median family income — income earned by families in the middle of the income distribution, with half of all families poorer and half richer — in the latest recovery has failed to recover the losses of the previous recession. This marks the first time this has happened since World War II in a business cycle lasting anywhere near as long as the most recent cycle.”

Another finding: “While productivity is up nearly 20% since 2000, the real median hourly wage is up 3% overall and 1% for men, with none of this growth occurring over the three-and-a-half years since 2003. At the top of the wage scale — at the 95th percentile — real wages are up 9%.” Finally, this: “After rising quickly in the second half of the 1990s, most workers real wages have been stagnant in the 2000s, especially since 2003. This result holds for a wide variety of wage and compensation measurements, including those that add the value of fringe benefits.”

The Bush Administration’s tax cuts have showered benefits on the wealthiest Americans at the very moment when their share of the economy is already going up. We need to offset inequalities with different tax policies and different social policies (notably universal health care) not just because that is just, but also because rising purchasing power across the economy is an essential component of growth and prosperity. A rising tide that actually does lift all boats tends to lift everybody’s boat faster and higher – including, by the way, the boats of the wealthy.

That’s also why I mention unionization. It’s clear that unions played an essential role in creating a broad middle class in our country by increasing the bargaining power of average workers. Our current low rates of private sector unionization are one reason for rising inequality.

Of course I agree with you that it’s a mistake to hold people harmless for foolish investments. But it’s striking that the Fed bailed our Bear Stearns even as we have done little to help homeowners caught in a mortgage mess that was in part created by deceptive practices on the part of lenders. I do not fault Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke for preventing a market meltdown. He did what was necessary. Still, it’s odd how even bailouts these days are unfair. And it’s also striking how many wealthy friends of the market and supporters of deregulation welcomed big government in this case. I quoted John Kenneth Galbraith on this phenomenon in a recent column. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted of the era leading up to the Depression, “The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great — a little understood thing.”

I still miss Galbraith. But, for that matter, I also miss his friend Bill Buckley. Buckley provided conservatism with inspiration at a moment when liberals were still on the rise. You have taken on an even more difficult task: to inspire conservatives as a moment of decline. I hope you enjoy success – though, honestly, not too much success. There is a good deal of common sense in what you have to say, a lot of practical wisdom, and a refreshing willingness to think outside the narrow range within which Washington-based conservatism is currently trapped. We need more Edmund Burke and Robert Nisbet, and less of an ideology that has all the thoughtfulness of a direct mail piece. Godspeed in your effort to provide us with a considered, practical contemporary conservatism worthy of a great tradition.

Thanks, E.J

Mickey

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