Martin Meenagh blog

Historians of the 1920s and economists have been apt to disagree on the development of 1920s prosperity. This has been because economists have focussed on the monetary policies and implications of the period whereas historians have looked to the supply-side, or to Keynesian analyses based around employment and demand. The two professions have therefore, until recently, formed radically different perspectives on the period. To an historian, the 1920s were a period when Gross National Product rose by some $25 billion; the number of ‘radio-owning households’ rose over sixteen times, from 60000 to ten million; income tax millionaires rose eightfold, and the number of people who used airlines rose twentyfold. This speaks to a massive increase in demand, which can be associated with the growth of jobs in motor manufacturing, and in the associated industries such as tyre-making and steelworks. The automobile industry alone was by 1929 responsible for 7 % of all United States industrial...

Many historians, particularly those on the political left, tend to become confused over Al Smith. The ‘Lincoln of the tenements’, four times Governor of New York and a reformer who was personally transformed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, the consensus more or less goes, was simply bitter when he reacted against FDR’s New Deal in 1934. His rich friends in the Liberty League somehow corrupted him. Al Sold out. These underlying explanations of motive are not in fact explanations at all, but rather attempts to ‘retro-fit’ Smith’s class, background and views to the assumption that the New Deal was universally supported within the progressive centre and on the left. Though complex, Smith was in fact more consistent in his political perspective than many writers have allowed for. Smith had been a leader of the Progressive movement, and had roots in the lower East Side. He was working class, and was not a university man. He arose in the early twentieth century. His career ha...

There has been diverse but shallow commentary on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868. John F. Kennedy, for example, writing in his Putlitzer-winning Profiles in Courage , depicted the impeachment trial as an attempt to overturn constitutional government in the United States and to substitute legislative supremacy. This was a very Kennedyesque view, since the regime before the twentieth century, on a clear reading of the constitution and its context, must imply that the legislative branch was supreme.  For historians, as opposed to constitutional lawyers, opinion has been filtered through perspectives on Civil Rights. Since most commentators now generally assume that Johnson’s presidency was the one, controlling reason for the disastrous failure of Reconstruction, most tend to ground explanations of impeachment in explanations which justify his trial. There is thus a serious preliminary question to be asked and answered here, which is how the ‘regime’ interpreted imp...

Jimmy Carter’s administration has become a modern by-word for incompetence and disappointment. Such an observation is usually buttressed by the way in which, after four turbulent years, Carter was only able to gain 41% of the November 1980 vote, suffering a huge defeat in the Electoral College. This defeat has been taken as a validation of the idea that the nation was determined to pass judgement on Carter and the politics he represented. However, just as it should be remembered that Carter’s position in 1976 was actually quite weak (he was the strongest candidate the Democrats could come up with and yet a change in 9000 votes in Hawaii and Ohio would have seen Ford win), the combination of achievement and contingency which marked his administration should not be forgotten. Carter’s administration was marked by double-digit global inflation, a 12% central lending rate, 18% prime interest rates, and a second oil price shock. It also saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an Isl...

In 1972, the Democratic candidate suffered one of the worst defeats in political history. Richard Nixon’s attempt to solidify a new, post-New Deal republican coalition, which had been evident both in his 1968 ‘Southern Strategy’ and in his 1960 campaign, seemed to have borne fruit. Indeed, if one dates from 1968, a coalition based broadly on the Plains States plus the Old South, which constituted a republican base that could command a basic 106 electoral votes and 66 more if the rest of the South was counted, seems to have been established and fairly solid in 5 out of the subsequent 7 presidential elections. This made life tremendously easy for GOP candidates who could unite their base, since the addition of Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Ohio, and either a great lakes state or two western states would make them president. It follows that Jimmy Carter’s narrow victory in 1976, in defiance of this logic, was either demonstrative of the faded but not gone power of the Democracy in th...

The Constitution, which was composed in the summer of 1787 at the Philadelphia Convention does not mention slavery directly. It refers obliquely to the external slave trade in Section 9 of Article I only to emphasise that it would be taxed until 1808 and then banned. However, it does allow for representation in Congress to be based in part upon slaves and native Americans in the infamous ‘three fifths’ formulation (Article I Section 2). This allowed for the over-representation of slave-holding states in the House of Representatives, and by extension the electoral college, although of course women and non-voters were virtually represented everywhere without actually having the franchise. Both section 5, which allows for the houses of Congress to set quorum rules, and the Article V rules on amendment which require 2/3 majorities in each house and ¾ majorities in the states allow for the South to have a least a blocking number on both day-to-day and constitutional business. The Congres...