The advertising above is just a source of revenue. If the ads get offensive enough, I may drop them.
Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
|
|
Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through. |
Saturday, December 28, 2002
The Last Liberal To Move To Idaho 
No, he wasn't a victim of crime. He just insisted that reality could be visualized away. Unlike California, visualizing whirled peas won't put food in front of you! Friday, December 27, 2002
Christmas Gift: A Book That I Am Not Allowed To Read Late At Night Compiled by Professor Anders Henriksson, Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students (New York: Workman Publishing, 2001). You may have seen some choice examples that Professor Henriksson has shared with the world over the last ten years; here is a compilation of side-splittingly funny sentences from student exams, both from Henriksson's students, as well as schools across North America. What adds to the humor of this is that Henriksson has merged all these uproariously painful sentences into a comprehensive history of the world. I am not allowed to read this book after my wife and son go to bed; my laughter, in any part of the house, will wake them up. A few examples: History, a record of things left behind by past generations, started in 1815. Thus we should try to view historical times as the behind of the present. This gives incite into the anals of the past.Okay, if you don't get a chuckle of those examples--perhaps it is time for a basic book on world history. But you're a smart person, or you wouldn't reading anything I wrote, right? My wife doesn't find this funny at all, because she sees a generation with such limited spelling and knowledge that they don't realize that Granola isn't the name of a city in Spain, and Mexico was never in Spain, much less the Gulf States. I take a more magnanimous view of this collection of disastrous sentences. These may be the better students: the ones that bothered to take notes in class, and who have no idea how to spell "Osiris," thus making the Egyptian god of the dead into an Irishman, and who think that some of our earliest modern ancestors must have been big guys indeed--Magnum sized, even. It is also apparent that a surprising number of North Americans believe in continental drift of heretofore astonishing velocity; many of these students believe that Australia was part of an empire with Hungary, and made war on the British Empire. At a minimum, it is a reminder that college students are now a post-literate generation, obtaining most of their knowledge about the past from radio, TV, and the spoken word. Doesn't that make you so happy? Order the book from amazon.com. Monday, December 23, 2002
Standards of Book Reviews I recently found the a book review by Robert M. Ireland in Journal of Southern History of my book Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Praeger, 1999), and as I read it, I found myself wondering if the standards for professional reviews I learned in grad school have been abandoned. In the following, quotes in bold are from the review that appeared last year in Journal of Southern History; indented quotes in italics are from my book that was being reviewed. Why did the slave states take an early lead in enacting laws governing the carrying of concealed weapons? In Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic Clayton E. Cramer purports to answer this question. He examines a number of theories, beginning with the obvious contention that the white population in the southern states used concealed weapon laws to maintain social control over free blacks. The author discards this proposition on the grounds that many of the concealed weapon statutes used race-neutral language. "In the absence of any contradictory evidence ... and if it fits the historical context," he writes, "a historian should accept the stated legislative intent as the most likely motivation" (p. 15)."Purports." "Discards." Both are loaded words. One might get the impression that the reviewer thought I was so foolish as to believe that any statement of intent given by legislators must be accepted at face value. What I actually wrote on p. 15 shows otherwise: Legislators may have also intentionally "covered their tracks" for political reasons, knowing that a law violated the state constitution. In the absence of any contradictory evidence, however, and if it fits the historical context, a historian should accept the stated legislative intent as the most likely motivation. To do otherwise turns history into polemic or conspiracy theory.If there is no contradictory evidence available to you, and there is a stated legislative intent for a law, what should you do? Do you accept stated legislative intent as the most likely motivation? Cramer rejects Elliott J. Gorn's argument that frontier violence was more a matter of class than it was of culture. He also does not believe that liquor was to blame for violent behavior in the seven slave states he studies here.Except that on p. 40, I say very directly: Alcohol appears to have been another importance influence on the development of the back country culture of violence. Nineteenth-century temperance reformers believed that alcohol played a major role "highly injurious to the peace, good order and general welfare of the community. . . ."On pp. 41-45, I quote legislative reports, memoirs, and travel accounts that directly tie the problem of back country violence to excessive alcohol consumption, and I suggest that the gap in the adoption of new concealed weapon laws from 1820 to 1837 might have been because of the improvements in the transportation system of the Mississippi River Valley, by expanding demand for grain at the expense of whiskey production. The reviewer seems to have been reading a bit too quickly. At no point do I state or even imply that I do "not believe that liquor was to blame for violent behavior...." Quite the opposite. Cramer declares rather weakly that "[w]hether the cause of back country violence was cheap and available whiskey, Scots-Irish culture, or slavery, this is undisputed: the back country culture was violent, and often over the most trivial of matters" (p. 45)."Rather weakly": meaning that based on the available data, it is difficult to say with great certainty what was the exact cause of the back country culture of violence. Perhaps I was just trained by fossils, but my understanding is that the historian has an obligation to draw conclusions, but not at the expense of oversimplifying causes, or leaving out legitimate alternative explanations. When you lack the data to nail down the exact cause (always a struggle with something as intrinsically multifactorial as culture), making a strong statement of cause is more suited to the polemicist than the historian. In the next eleven chapters Cramer details the movement in each of eight states (he includes Indiana, noting that southern culture predominated in the southern portion of this free state) to enact laws controlling concealed weapons.And as I point out, slaves were still being held in "free" Indiana when it adopted its concealed weapon law. He attempts in this state-by-state survey to prove that the reformers' cause reflected an effort to overcome popular opposition to dueling prohibitions. Cramer admits, however, that "dueling apparently was not a factor" in Louisiana (p. 69).And as I point out, Louisiana is remarkable in that its concealed weapon law did not exempt travelers from its provisions, as most of the other laws of this period did. He also writes that in Arkansas, "[u]nfortunately, we do not have enough information to draw any conclusions" (p. 96). In Georgia, Cramer finds that "there is no direct connection between anti-dueling efforts and the concealed weapon law, ..." (p. 104).What's interesting here is to read the entire sentence being quoted: While there is no direct connection between anti-dueling efforts and the concealed weapon law, the disappearance of both the Savannah Anti-Dueling Association and the [passage of the] new law in the same year certainly raises suspicions that the two reform efforts may have been linked in the same manner as in Kentucky and Indiana.As I point out in the other parts of the chapter about Georgia, there was newspaper editorial discussion of the evils of dueling at the time in Georgia papers at the time the law was passed. Like the other states that adopted concealed weapon laws at the same time, Georgia had a long history of struggling over how to suppress dueling, with dueling oaths required of legislators, and the effective dates of these provisions continually being revised to allow particular individuals to take office. At the same time, legislative intent, "to guard and protect the citizens of this State, against the unwarrantable and too prevalent use of deadly weapons," while a plausible explanation, doesn't seem warranted by the very sparse press coverage of violent crimes in Georgia newspapers. And he states that in Tennessee, "there was no direct connection between this law and attempts to control dueling" (p. 112). Cramer does find "some evidence that reformers tried to lead the population away from the practice of dueling" (p. 116) prior to passing concealed weapon laws in Virginia, but his argument overall is not compelling.And as my book emphasizes repeatedly, the connection is not direct. Attempts to suppress dueling through prohibition ran afoul of juries refusing to convict; attempts to suppressing dueling through requirements that public officials swear that they had not participated in a duel turned the stylized process of challenging someone to a duel into sudden brawling. But don't take my word for this connection. The reviewer, Robert M. Ireland, seems to have forgotten that he wrote almost exactly the same thing with respect to Kentucky's problem with concealed weapons, and I quoted Ireland in the book: When the duel was legal, men did not need to arm themselves because they knew that the formal mechanisms of the duel were available to resolve affairs of honor. Thus, sudden quarrels seldom produced immediate bloodshed because so few men habitually armed themselves. With the outlawing of the duel, cowards began to wear concealed arms since they no longer had to worry about social ostracism if they used their concealed weapons to surprise and unfairly take advantage of their adversaries. Courageous gentlemen followed suit to protect themselves from cowardly assassination.It's amazing how my claim is not compelling, when it is also his claim about Kentucky. Cramer devotes another chapter to other theories that he characterizes with the expression "That Dog Won't Hunt" (p. 127). One such argument is that concealed weapon laws came about due to the technological advances in handguns, namely Samuel Colt's 1838 revolver. Another idea stresses that at the time handguns were considered the weapons of criminals. Still another theory is that the laws were designed to protect abolitionists from mob attacks. Cramer dismisses all of these explanations. He maintains that only dueling, popular in the violent and honor-bound South, could have spawned the widespread concern that made necessary such "reform from the top" (p. 139)."Dismisses": another loaded word. I examine each of those explanations, and show why these are not particularly plausible explanations. "Dismisses" makes it sound as though I didn't take the possibility seriously. And I do not maintain "that only dueling" could have spawned this concern--in fact, I explicitly say that Louisiana's law was adopted for different reasons: We have clear evidence for Kentucky, and progressively wispier evidence for Indiana, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, and Tennessee, that attempts by reformers to end dueling caused an increase in homicides, because the back country culture of violence found dueling preferable to dishonor. (Arkansas simply lacks evidence on this subject, and Louisiana, as in so many other aspects of its history and legal system, is unusual.)I come to that conclusion, but I am careful to note the deficiencies in the evidence. That used to be called careful history, back before ideologues started winning Bancroft prizes--and then having them revoked. Throughout Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic, the reader is expected to accept the legislative intent of the laws (which Cramer includes in a brief appendix) as the basis of their motivation.Except that I am very clear that Georgia's statement of legislative intent doesn't fit the newspaper evidence. Yet Cramer seems to overlook the fact that these laws were crafted by men and women who left a great body of literature to explain their particular reform impulse. Who were the advocates of reform? Were they also leaders of the temperance movement, or participants in the Second Great Awakening? Were they native southerners? Were they, in fact, also Scots-Irish? Cramer has revealed to us a mystery, but, unfortunately, the answer remains unclear.It might be clearer, if the reviewer had read the book a bit more carefully--or at least bothered to finish some of the sentences that he carefully excerpted in his review. Lingerie Barbie The Washington Post has an opinion piece by Deborah Roffman, who "teaches human sexuality at the Park School of Baltimore. She is the author of 'Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent's Guide to Talking Sense About Sex' (Perseus Books)." She is very concerned about the fact that Mattel is selling "Lingerie Barbie," a sexually provocatively dressed version of Barbie, and what this says about the loss of innocence: A sense of clear limits is not just "nice" for children and teens, it's almost as important to them as oxygen. Limits and boundaries -- those brackets we put around our children's lives to keep them safe and healthy -- do for them what they are not yet able to do for themselves. A culture that screams "There are no limits!" at every turn puts children in great peril.If this article appeared in a Christian publication, no one would be surprised. But when the Washington Post publishes articles like this, it is a pretty good indication that the moral decay has reached a pretty serious point. |
