Was the Civil War an Evangelical Crusade?

Joan Walsh reviews David Goldfield's new Civil War book, "America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation.", at Salon:

Whether or not you accept that premise – more on that later – Goldfield shows definitively that Northern evangelical Protestants were the moral force behind the war, and once they turned it into a religious question, a matter of good v. evil, political compromise was impossible. The Second Great Awakening set its sights on purging the country of the sins of slavery, drunkenness, impiety -- as well as Catholics, particularly Irish Catholic immigrants. Better than any history I've seen, Goldfield tracks the disturbing links between abolitionism and nativism. In fact, he starts his book with the torching of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Mass., in 1834, a violent attack on Catholics which Goldfield shows was "incited" by Lyman Beecher, the father of the Beecher clan, most of whom turned out to be as anti-Irish Catholic as they were anti-slavery. To evangelical Protestant nativists, Catholicism was incompatible with democracy, because its adherents allegedly gave their loyalty to the Pope, not the president, and the religion's emphasis on obeying a hierarchy made them unfit for self-government. Also, rebellious Irish Catholics didn't show the proper discipline or deference to conform to emerging industrial America. The needs of Northern business were never far from some (though not all) abolitionists' minds.

Still, though nativism was widespread in the North, and within the Republican Party (which  absorbed some old Know-Nothing and nativist Whig party remnants), abolitionism remained at the party's fringe.

The history of anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States is an interesting tale.  I've never seen it linked with abolitionists specifically, but it was always present in the Whig and Republican parties, and was the only tenet of the Know-Nothing party.  The Prohibition/Temperance movement targeted these "foreign" elements, specifically focusing on the saloons which made up German culture, the German beer barons who provided the product and the stereotypical Irish drunk.  This movement was mainly a rural, native Protestant organization, which tried to outlaw the leisure activities of the largely urban, immigrant Catholic newcomers.  This was a major driver of the urban Democrat/ rural Republican divide which still exists today.  It is interesting to me that the strength of the Republican party since 1980 has been in combining Evangelical Protestants with the Catholics whom these Protestants often still do not trust, to unite as a family values party.  History suggests that it is a marriage of convenience.

Nostalgia-Generation X Edition

All Things Considered:

Do you have the Eight is Enough theme music burned into your brain? Do you fall into a Proustian reverie at the fizzy punch of Pop Rocks? Are you old enough to remember carrying a metal lunch box to school — and clobbering your friends with it?
Then you're the perfect age to appreciate a new book called Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes & Trends of the '70s & '80s. It's a catalogue of things designed to make you smile and say, "Oh yeah, I remember that!" Candy cigarettes, Fantasy Island, encyclopedias, and Stretch Armstrong dolls all make an appearance.
Co-author Gael Fashingbauer Cooper tells weekend on All Things Considered host Rachel Martin that she wanted to preserve bits of pop culture that slipped away without anyone noticing.

Country music has already covered this:

Going Whole Hog

Peter Smith reviews the book, Meat, Salt, Time, about an old-style salami maker (h/t Yglesias):

Tony Seichrist, a Georgia chef and development director at the Portfolio Center, put out a slim volume last year called Meat, Salt, Time.
The book is a flattering look into the life of Cristiano Creminelli, a salami maker adhering to his family's time-honored Italian tradition of curing meat. What's interesting is how Meat, Salt, Time blends design with its subject matter: slow food and do-it-yourself charcuterie instruction. This instructive chart of a pig's muscle and skeletal lines reflects technique, Seichrist told me:

A breakdown for a salumi hog is different than a breakdown for a fresh meat hog, a bacon hog, or a larding animal. That flexibility should inspire confidence to dig in and to get cutting but it more often has the opposite effect.

I didn't know that.  Anyway, I liked the chart.  It kind of reminds me of the beef chart which used to be on the wall in my cubicle.

More on Blowing Up Levees

The Army Corps does this more often than I thought:

Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh — the man ultimately responsible for the decision to go through with the plan- has indicated that he may not stop there if blasting open the levee doesn't do the trick. In recent days, Walsh has said he might also make use of other downstream "floodways" — basins surrounded by levees that can intentionally be blown open to divert floodwaters.

Among those that could be tapped are the 58-year-old Morganza floodway near Morgan City, La., and the Bonnet Carre floodway about 30 miles north of New Orleans. The Morganza has been pressed into service just once, in 1973. The Bonnet Carre, which was christened in 1932 has been opened up nine times since 1937, the most recent in 2008.

"Making this decision is not easy or hard," Walsh said. "It's simply grave — because the decision leads to loss of property and livelihood, either in a floodway or in an area that was not designed to flood."

Officials in Louisiana and Mississippi are warning that the river could bring a surge of water unseen since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

The corps has said about 241 miles of levees along the Mississippi River between Cape Girardeau, Mo., and the Gulf of Mexico need to be made taller or strengthened.


George Sills, a former Army Corps engineer and levee expert in Vicksburg, Miss., said the volume of water moving down the river would test the levee system south of Memphis into Louisiana.

"It's been a long time since we've seen a major flood down the Mississippi River," Sills said. "This is the highest river in Vicksburg, Miss., since 1927. There will be water coming by here that most people have never seen in their lifetime."

The 1927 flood is featured in the book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America.  It features a lot of history of New Orleans and Mardi Gras, a lot about hydraulics and hydrology of the Mississippi River, a lot about the history of the Army Corps and levees, and a good bit about race relations in the Mississippi Delta.  Herbert Hoover makes an appearance, and a levee is blown up to save New Orleans.  It is a great book, and I highly recommend it.

Why Do Christian Conservatives Like Ayn Rand

In his review of the box office failure of Atlas Shrugged, Mark Howard asks the same question (h/t naked capitalism):

The affinity for Ayn Rand by the Tea Party has always been a bit of a mystery. Sure, there is a shared hostility for government, particularly when it endeavors to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to provide for the general welfare. Both Rand and the TP’s despise efforts to aid society’s less fortunate, whom they believe deserve to suffer. But how do predominantly Christian, patriot, Tea Partyers justify their idolization of an anti-American, atheist who regards compassion as evil and selfishness as the pinnacle of human values?

Ironically, a key theme of the book and the film is the rejection of society by the wealthy business class who mysteriously disappear. There is a correlation to that plot point in contemporary America as we have already witnessed the disappearance of business luminaries like Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff, Dennis Kozlowski, Bernard Ebbers, and John Rigas, to name a few. It doesn’t appear that society has suffered from their absence. Yet there is another industrial titan who not only hasn’t vanished, he is masquerading across the airwaves as a presidential candidate. I’m not sure Ayn Rand would approve of this, however, the popularity of Donald Trump at Tea Parties is perfectly understandable. He is the ultimate manifestation of Randian politics: a greedy, conceited, selfish bully. But for every Tea Party supporter there are probably twenty other Americans who wish that Trump would “go Galt.”

It would be nice if the Tea Party were to go Galt.  Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to cut it on their own, they depend way too much on government support.

Was President Bush Curious?

Daniel Larison:

But I think people caricatured the president, and the only thing that I couldn’t understand is why this man with such a curious mind, who in briefings always asked the question you wish you thought of, why that quality didn’t come across. And I fully admit that it didn’t come across. ~Condoleeza Rice

I suppose it’s possible that George W. Bush could have had “such a curious mind” and still made all the terrible decisions that he did, but one of the reasons that he received a reputation for being incurious is that he overlooked such obvious, glaring flaws in his administration’s policies that someone with “such a curious mind” should have noticed. He wasn’t very good at demonstrating that he knew or cared to know very much about things. If Bush were as curious as Rice claims, he did an amazing job of hiding it.

I would have to side with Daneil.  Bush didn't strike me as a person who wanted to hear what the other side of the issue was, and consider whether his opinion might not be correct.  He seemed to me to consider rather who the person holding the other opinion was, and if it was somebody he already didn't care for, he'd dismiss it out of hand.  His circle of advisors gave him his information, and nobody else could break through that.  We only got decent policy discussions when his advisors didn't agree, and he had to choose between them.  Sometimes he chose well, (Rice versus Cheney and Rumsfeld in his second term) and sometimes poorly (Cheney and Rumsfeld versus Powell on troop levels to invade Iraq).  I guess at times I can dismiss an argument out of hand, but I try to read opposing views on occasion.  For instance, I want to read Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, to take a look at her attack on the success of the New Deal, but I don't really want her to benefit, so I'll probably get it at the library.  I flipped through it at the library the other day, but I just couldn't put that money in her pocket.  I mad that mistake with Larry Schweikart's A Patriot's History of the United States, and I won't make that mistake again.

Making Medicine Better

Ezra Klein reviews Atul Gawande's book, Better:

The chapter on treating injuries of war makes this point nicely. In the Revolution War, 42 percent of the injured died. In the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, 24 percent died. But in the current wars, only 10 percent have died. And those gains have come “despite having no fundamentally new technologies or treatments since the Persian Gulf War.” The difference has been the application of things we already knew, not the development of treatments Gulf War-era doctors could never have imagined.
The chapter on childbirth that makes a similar point: “Doctors in other fields have always looked down their noses at their obstetrical colleagues,” Gawande writes. “They didn’t think they were very smart — obstetrics had long had trouble attracting the top medical students to their profession — and there seemed little science or sophistication to what they did. Yet almost nothing else in medicine has saved lives on the scale that obstetrics has ...do those of us in other fields of medicine use these measures anywhere near as reliably and as safely as obstetricians use theirs? We don’t come close.”
One other plug for Gawande: He’s enormously good at explaining why things that seem simple don’t happen the way they theoretically should. The fact that doctors don’t wash their hands enough, despite the fact that doing so could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars, seems insane. But it makes more sense if you understand that washing their hands “enough” would mean “a third of staff time spent just washing hands” — and that’s assuming a swift, minute-long cleanse. Similarly, the fact that cesarean sections don’t show better results than forceps makes the reliance on cesarean sections seem insane. But it makes more sense when you read Gawande’s explanation of how few people are actually able to use forceps effectively, versus how many doctors are capable of performing a cesarean.