Facing the Future

 From 1949, when President Truman appointed my father to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Labor Affairs, to 1981, when my father retired, his career depended upon the whims of the American electorate.  When a Democrat won (Kennedy, Johnson, Carter), he received a diplomatic appointment; when a Republican won he had to find something else to do.  That understandably gave him an all-consuming interest in the outcome of the next election, and being who he was, he identified his own fortunes with those of the nation as a whole.  A Republican victory was, by definition, catastrophic both for him and for the nation. and our whole family accepted that view.  

My father's view has now been adopted by the whole intellectual elite of the Democratic Party, which had convinced itself by 2000 that it was the repository of all wisdom and virtue.  I still have never voted for any Republican presidential candidate and have no plans to do so, but I realized a long time ago that I could count on my fellow citizens to share my views.  I have also concluded over the last sixteen years or so that the Democratic Party is now beholden to certain constituencies that have advanced policies that are not only unpopular but disastrous, and that it includes woke elements that essentially reject fundamental ideas of our civilization and think they can replace it with something better.  I have explored that problem in many posts here.  For that reason I cannot regard our current political struggle as a simple battle between good and evil.  It reflects a much broader decline in our political, intellectual and cultural life--one which no one could stop. 

In the current climate anyone who--like me--is trying to accept certain imminent developments as inevitable provokes an immediate backlash.  A good liberal or progressive is supposed to believe not only that everything Trump wants to do is wrong, but that it cannot possibly succeed.  For the moment our leading newspapers are printing story after story about the insuperable obstacles that Trump is bound to confront.  No respectable historian, however--an endangered species, to be sure--can believe any such thing.  History frequently goes wrong for long periods of time.  Humanity has good and bad impulses, neither of which ever completely prevails.  The relationship between reason and emotion changes over time, and emotion has been gaining ground for the last sixty years.  Writing on the eve of a worse catastrophe than anything we have in store--the Second World War--William Butler Yeats kept his sanity by taking a very long view in one of my very favorite poems.  It is in that spirit that I now try to get a handle on what to expect in the next year or so.

Trump and his coalition, it seems to me, are poised to have a first year in office that could only be compared in recent history to FDR in 1933 and LBJ in 1964-65.  This Trump administration will be nothing like the first one, in which he tried to make use of establishment Republicans and senior military leaders.  Eight years later he has a cadre of totally devoted supporters with whom he is staffing the federal government--and make no mistake, some of them are formidable individuals. Watching some of Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi's confirmation hearing, I wondered if we would have been better off with Matt Gaetz.  Bondi is smart, attractive, charismatic, and clearly devoted to Trump.  She is not alone.  Trump's press office runs very smoothly, in sharp contrast to 2017.  And he has used a cadre of Republican intellectuals to plan his first year in great detail, as we shall discover, it seems, on Monday afternoon, as soon as he has been sworn in.  That by the way is not unique.  Biden in 2021 issued an immediate round of executive orders focusing mainly on the two issues that probably brought Trump back into the White House: immigration and DEI programs.   The New York Times also reports today that Trump has planned a massive raid designed to apprehend illegal immigrants in Chicago during his first week.  Meanwhile, Trump also is working with leaders of the tech industry, led by Elon Musk, who have their own plans for reshaping America.  They include drastic cuts in the federal work force, and the elimination of their job protections.

Trump does not, of course, dispose of Congressional majorities as large as FDR and LBJ did, but he may not need them.  Because of his role in the evolution of the Republican Party he has the absolute loyalty of just about every Republican in the House and Senate, who are just as eager as he to set the United States on a completely different path.  And few of them care, in all probability, that majorities of the national electorate oppose much of what they want to do.  Curiously enough, the election victory that may resemble Trump's most closely is John F. Kennedy's in 1960.  Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon with 303 electoral votes to 219 (and 11 for Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama.)  A number of key swing states, including Illinois, New Jersey, Minnesota, Texas, and California, were decided by very narrow margins.  Kennedy won 49.7 to 49.6 percent.  This was recognized as one of the closest elections in US history.  Trump  just defeated Harris in the Electoral College, 312-226.  All seven swing states were decided by very close margins.  He won the popular vote, 49.8 to 48.3.  Last week, however, I heard Senator John Cornyn, while questioning Pam Bondi, describe this victory as a "landslide."  It wasn't, but the slim Republican majorities are going to act as if it was.  I won't be surprised if they at least find exceptions to the filibuster rule to get some legislation through the Senate--just as Democratic leaders were suggesting they should do to pass a law codifying Roe v. Wade.  Since Newt Gingrich, more and more Republicans have adopted opposition to the status quo as their fundamental principle, and no respect for existing practices and institutions will hold them back now.

I predict that the immigration issue will create the biggest crisis of the next four years, a crisis in federal-state relations.   States like California and Illinois are prepared to do whatever they can to block large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants.  The Trump administration may use this as attempt to destroy much of their authority and discredit them completely.  I don't understand exactly how or why the Democratic Party decided to defend the millions of people who have entered the country illegally.  I certainly agree that the United States needs most of those people and that our immigration laws should be changed, but I don't think that acting as if our laws were irrelevant was the way to handle the situation--and it is clear that the Democrats have paid a huge price for that move.  Deportations may not be popular, but active state resistance to them, I suspect, will not be popular either.  The failure of the establishments of both parties to deal with the issue has led us to this point.

This administration will on some fronts do some good.  The elimination of DEI bureaucracies and programs from the federal government is not merely desirable, but necessary.  Some major corporations have begun doing this as well, and even colleges and universities may be forced to do so.  DEI wastes money promoting destructive ideologies.  Similarly, in the first Trump administration, the Department of Education rewrote the guidelines on sexual assault proceedings in colleges and universities to give the accused their basic American rights. The Biden administration rolled back those changes.  Nor do I think that DEI programs are doing anything but harm within the US military--although I cannot say of my own knowledge exactly how far they have gone there.

I cannot predict what will happen in foreign policy.  We will know one thing within a couple of months.  Pressure from Trump, which shocked many Israelis, has in fact led to the cease-fire agreement in Gaza--but the key moment will come in 40 days when stage one of the agreement is over and the Israeli government has the option to resume the war.  Trump might tell them that they cannot do so--while agreeing in return to a joint strike against the Iranian nuclear program.  There is some evidence, too, that the Russians and Ukrainians both expect to be forced into a cease-fire shortly.  What will come of Trump's blustering about the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland, remains very unclear.  And a new crisis could arise at almost any moment: China continues to escalate its military pressure on Taiwan, and Xi has just declared that reunification must take place.

The administration will try to get the government out of the business of regulating the economy--especially its newest and fastest growing sectors. That could be catastrophic.  Cryptocurrencies are likely to boom, and a bust could send us into another severe recession.  We don't know what the effect of tariffs might be.  There are areas, such as chip production, where the Biden administration took major steps down the Trumpian road towards self-sufficiency, and these will probably continue.  In short, there are serious constituencies for much of what Trump wants to do.  He has provided the emotional demagoguery and leadership--yes--to bring them into a powerful coalition, and it is already changing the United States.

A Bonus Post

I have already seen the movie A Complete Unknown and enjoyed it very much.  It took more than a week, however, for me to be reminded of one of the funniest things I have ever seen on youtube, which is highly relevant to the movie.  Enjoy.

Adams and Jefferson and us

 It was more than 40 years ago, I am sure, that I first purchased a one-volume paperback edition of the complete correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Its 614 pages are actually two very different books, separated by a brief interlude.  The correspondence begins in the midst of the outbreak of the American Revolution, but really gets going in 1786, in the time of the Articles of Confederation, when the two men took over the new nation's most important diplomatic posts, Adams in London and Jefferson in Paris.  They wrote frequently until they both returned to the United States in 1789 to become Vice President and Secretary of State in Washington's administration.  During that administration they became the leaders of the rival Federalist and Republican parties, and an unfortunate provision of the original constitution made Jefferson Adams's vice-president in 1797, after Adams had won the electoral college over him.  They did not exchange a single letter until Jefferson was about to succeed Adams in 1801, and none afterwards for nearly a dozen years.  The volume includes seven letters between Jefferson and Abigail Adams in 1804, occasioned by the death of one of Jefferson's two legitimate daughters.

When Jefferson left the White House in 1809, he, like Adams, had lost most of any popularity he had enjoyed.  Three years later, in early 1812, Adams, then 77, re-opened the correspondence by sending Jefferson a book of lectures given by his son John Quincy Adams, who was now a member of Jefferson's party and had served in the Madison administration as Minister to Russia.  Jefferson was then 68 and the correspondence continued--with Adams contributing about two thirds of the letters--until shortly before they both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Finally picking up the book recently, I decided to begin that last chapter in their correspondence, while planning to tackle the earlier periods subsequently.  They promise a fascinating account of the diplomacy of the first, deeply flawed phase of our national history from 1781 to 1789.

I have now made my way from 1812 until the middle of 1816.  The letters are fascinating, not least in what they do not discuss. They include almost nothing about the progress of the War of 1812, although Adams in 1814 mentioned that he had become deeply unpopular in Massachusetts for supporting that war, which had harmed New England very badly and led in that year to talk of secession.  They say just as little about other contemporary political controversies or elections.  Religion occupies the most space of any topic in the correspondence so far.   Both men were Unitarians in the literal as well as institutional sense: they regarded Christ's teachings as the finest guide to human behavior ever written, but they denied his divinity and rejected the authority of all the great religious institutions that had been built around it.  They shared pride in the 18th century which had tried to elevate reason over faith.  Yet between 1812 and 1815, they observed momentous developments in Europe which cast some doubt on their shared gospel of human progress.  They were delighted in 1814 by the fall of Napoleon, but distressed to see the old order reassert itself in the Congress of Vienna, which divided whole nations like Poland among the victorious conservative powers.  Jefferson also commented that there was really nothing to choose between Napoleon and the British government that had helped defeat him, since neither seemed to care about anything but their own power.  When Napoleon returned from Elba in early 1815 they thought he still enjoyed the support of the French nation, but he lasted, of course, only 100 days before Waterloo.  Then the Bourbon dynasty returned to the throne again.  The two men began to wonder where history was going, 

Jefferson on January 11, 1816, commented on the impact of the ideas of the 18th century on European politics.  "With some exceptions only," he wrote, "through the 17th and 18th centuries morality occupied an honorable chapter in the political code of nations."  He regarded the partitions of Poland as an unfortunate exception for which the "barbarous government" of Russia was chiefly responsible.  "How then has it happened," he continued in reference to the last three decades, "that these nations, France especially and England, so great, so dignified, so distinguished by science and the arts, plunged at once into all the depths of human enormity, threw off suddenly and openly all the restraints of morality, all sensation in character, and unblushingly avowed and acted on the principle that power was right? . . .Whatever it was, the close of the century saw the moral world thrown back again to the age of the Borgias, to the point from which it had departed 300 years before"--and, he might have added, with vastly greater forces at their disposal.  

Adams replied on February 2.  "I can only say it present, that it should seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human enthusiasm. . . .You ask, how it has happened that all Europe has acted on the Principle "that Power was right"  I know not what Answer to give you, but this, that Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bon[sic] Foi, believes itself right.  Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God Service, when it is violating all his Laws."

My entire life as a student of history has taught me that Adams was right, and I have seen how power can persuade itself of the justice of its aims again and again in  my own country, first in Vietnam, then in the Middle East.  With war raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and threatening over Taiwan, the noble dream of a world ruled by law, as promoted by both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and embodied now for 80 years in the United Nations.  And a parallel drama has played itself out in our domestic affairs.  It has taken half a century since the Powell memorandum for corporate America to convince itself that its power must serve the interests of all, even as its insatiable greed drains more wealth and income from the mass of the people every year.  

Yet I believe that the conflict between reason and passion is more complicated than Adams made out.  Both have a profound appeal to human nature--but neither ever wins a final victory over the other.  Reason has now been retreating for more than half a century and passion may have more terrible victories yet to win.  Eventually, however, passion's excesses, I think, will lead to a new round of restraint based upon reason--domestically, in foreign affairs, and even personally.  This has happened many times before.  That eternal conflict remains the source of what progress we have been able to make, and ensures that every victory and every defeat will always be incomplete and only temporary.  That, I have decided, is where real hope for humanity and progress must come from.

A turning point

 The probable course of history under Trump's second term is becoming clear, and it could easily turn out to be the most significant turning point in our history since the time of Franklin Roosevelt.  The media remains largely focused upon Trump's personality, the  moral deficiencies of some of his appointees, and the failure of his supporters to understand what is good for them to understand what is going on.  Trump is truly a revolutionary figure in US politics.  No one from outside the political class has ever had comparable impact, and his rise, as I have said many times, reflects the collapse of the relationship between our political elite and much of the American people.  Yet he is only part of the story, because he leads a coalition with at least two other critical elements.  Most important of all, that coalition now knows exactly what it wants to do and has identified and recruited the personnel that will do it.

The most important element of Trump's coalition is itself a coalition:  the various Republican pressure groups and think tanks that have dreamed for decades of undoing the work of the Progressive Era and the New Deal and creating a free-market utopia with no obstacles to the growth of capital.  These include the American Enterprise Institute (which produced Project 2025), the Heritage Foundation, the Koch network, several other foundations such as the Bradley and Scaife foundations, the Federalist Society which has effectively taken over our judiciary, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, and a good many more.  Many of these groups had their doubts about Trump in 2015-16 but they all appear to be full-blown supporters now.  They will staff the upper levels of the federal government and try to prune the lower levels drastically.

The other new element in his coalition, however, may turn out to be the  most significant:  the small cadre of tech billionaires who have climbed on the bandwagon, led by Elon Musk and including Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel.  While the Silent and Boom generations developed the Republican pressure groups listed above in reaction to the New Deal liberalism of their parents, these Gen Xers have never known effective government management of the economy and apparently see no need for it at all.  They also include leading players in cryptocurrency.  They believe that technology--and in particular AI--can and should disrupt and remake all our major institutions, including education, health care, and finance, and they dispose of vast resources of their own.  While I have been writing this post, Musk has used X, which he owns, to force Republicans in Congress to abandon a spending deal that would have kept the government open.  He can never be president himself, having been born a South African, but he seems determined to eclipse Henry Kissinger as our most politically powerful foreign-born political figure.  Liberals are now eagerly awaiting a falling out between Musk and Trump, but I am not at all convinced that that will happen.  Trump has evidently fallen for Musk, who is relatively young, vigorous, innovative, and as rich as Trump has always dreamt of being, but never actually came close to.  Trump clearly has less energy than he used to have at 78, and Musk seems to be moving into an unprecedented role as prime minister to Trump's chief of state, with broad effective power to reshape the federal government.  

I see some possibility that Trump might surprise us on the foreign front.  I watched his entire press conference the other day.  His affect is very different from what it was four or eight years ago, even when the words are the same.  He is a bit quieter and more relaxed, or perhaps, just worn out.  Meanwhile, he gives the strong impression that he wants to win a Nobel Peace Prize.  Stopping the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East seems much more important to him than heaping fire and brimstone on foreign enemies.  This could change, and he is certainly leaving the door open to military action against Iran together with Israel as well,  but I think it bears watching.

The domestic changes Trump plans seem most unlikely to help anyone but billionaires, particularly the young ones from the world of Silicon Valley.  Yet his appeal will remain, I think, for one simple reason that hearkens back to a brilliant line from the Showtime series Homeland.  Late in its run, as I recall it, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) was talking to President Elizabeth Keane, whose character was evidently designed on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would be president in 2017.  After surviving an assassination attempt carried out by rogue intelligence agents, Keane has locked up more than 200 intelligence operatives, including Berenson.  Now, having released them, she expresses surprise that the move seems to have been popular. "It showed balls," Berenson replies.  "They like a president with balls."

I have said many times that Trump has triumphed in two elections out of three because he understood how disaffected tens of millions of Americans were from our political establishment, which the Democrats could not face.  He shared their contempt for the old order.  In addition, he has shown again and again that he will not allow anything to get in the way of changing it.   This is not unprecedented, and the fury and frustration that it has provoked among Trump's opponents isn't either.  Southerners and some northern Democrats during the Civil War and Republicans in the 1930s felt exactly the same way about Lincoln and FDR as Democrats feel about Trump today, but those presidents had coalitions of their own that enabled them to transform the country.  I think that he will too.

Lifelong Democrats like myself now face a great challenge: to accept a very uncomfortable reality.  Most of them share a sense of their own righteousness and a feeling that somehow their side must prevail because it is right.  That is why the mainstream media write endlessly about how Trump's policies will not help his supporters, or how he will not be able to get along with Musk or other leading figures in his administration.  To anyone who dislikes posts like this one, let me simply say once again that I am simply trying to record what is happening, and that I am sure that some day, long after we are all gone, things will go in a different direction again.

An American Story

 Some weeks ago I finally got around to reading a book I learned about relatively recently--The Autobiography of John Roy Lynch.  Born a slave in Mississippi in 1847, Lynch had finished the draft of this book shortly before his death in 1939, but it was not published until the great historian John Hope Franklin brought it out in 1970.  It exceeded my expectations.  I expected it to be about slavery and the difficulty of living in the Deep South during Reconstruction.  Those topics came up, but it turns out that Lynch became one of the leading black Republicans in the South during the 1870s and remained so well into the twentieth century.  He knew all the major Republican political figures of that era, including Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley, and he describes conversations with them in great detail.  Again and again he provided perspectives on the history of the era with which I was unfamiliar.

Lynch's father  Patrick Lynch was an Irish immigrant who settled in Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from Mississippi.  His mother, one Catherine White, a relatively light-skinned beauty, was more than half white.  Their marriage was not recognized, and according to their son John, Patrick Lynch decided to normalize their status by buying his wife, a slave, and her children.  He had managed to do when he became gravely ill.  He turned their care over to a friend who promised not to sell them back into slavery with someone else, but eventually reneged in that promise and took title to them himself.  Lynch as a child spent some years as a house servant, in which he tried to navigate between a friendly master and a very sensitive mistress.  The war and emancipation freed  him.  It emerges from some anecdotes later in the book that Lynch himself was often mistaken for a white man--not surprisingly, since the majority of his ancestry was white.  Writing decades after the fact, Lynch insisted that most southern white men who had founded colored families took care of them and tried to make sure that they would inherit property from him, and left behind large numbers of mixed-race property owners.  This would come as quite a shock to those who have now concluded without evidence that every mixed-race child from slavery days was a product of rape with no rights or prospects whatsoever. Eugene Genovese--still probably our greatest historian of slavery--confirmed the genuine affection and care in many mixed-race antebellum relationships in his classic, Roll, Jordan, Roll.

Still a teenager when the war ended, Lynch secured employment as a cook and then as a photographer and printer.  Then he learned to read and write at night school, and became what we would now call a political junkie.  In 1869 the military governor of Reconstruction Mississippi, General Adelbert Ames, appointed him as a justice of the peace, the beginning of a long career in public service under the aegis of the state and later the national Republican Party.  Eventually he educated himself as a lawyer and passed the bar.

I cannot possibly go into all the details of Mississippi Reconstruction politics from this book, which would once again shock a great many people.  Beginning in 1869, when a new constitution was first adopted, the Mississippi Republican Party, Lynch shows, included a great many white men, including former Confederate officers like General James L. Alcorn, and leading businessmen and cotton planters. Alcorn became the first Republican governor in a Republican sweep.  Mississippi, along with Louisiana and South Carolina, were the only southern states with majority black populations, initially giving the Republican party a big edge. Lynch himself, while still in his twenties, was elected to the state house of representatives and became its speaker.  He defends the Reconstruction administration and insists that Mississippi politics appeared to be heading in an excellent direction, until national events changed most white attitudes.

Ulysses S. Grant had been elected--albeit with a relatively narrow popular majority--in 1868, and re-elected by a much larger majority in 1872.  The nation and the state appeared to be embarked on an era of Republican dominance and Lynch explains that an alliance of black voters and white aristocrats dominated Mississippi politics. That alliance in 1872 elected Republicans in all but one of the state's six districts for the US Congress--including Lynch himself.  In 1873, however, a great panic swept the nation, and in the following year the Democratic Party actually regained control of the national House of Representatives, winning 92 seats and emerging with a majority of 180-103, together with a significant victory in the national congressional popular vote.  As it happened, however, Lynch was re-elected to Congress as a Mississippi Republican in the same year.   In early 1875, during a lame duck session of the Republican Congress elected in 1872, some Republicans brought forth a federal elections bill designed to ensure fair balloting in 1876, but it failed, Lynch explains, due to the opposition of James G. Blaine, the Speaker of the House and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 1876.  Blaine replied that the passage of the bill would have led to a great Democratic victory all over the north.  The Democrats seemed certain to win the White House in 1876--as they might have done, but for Republican skullduggery--and white Mississippians, Lynch says, concluded that the future did not belong to them after all.  Helped by terrorism and the Ku Klux Klan, the Democrats won a majority of the Mississippi legislature in elections in 1875, by which time Lynch was in Washington.

Meeting with President Grant to discuss a patronage matter in November 1875, Lynch mentioned that the incumbent Republican governor, knowing that the violent Democratic campaign would probably carry the day in the state, had asked the federal government for assistance in order to safeguard the election, but that the request had been refused. Grant explained that he initially told the War and Justice Departments to intervene, but that he had reversed himself at the behest of a Republican delegation from Ohio that said that that critical state would be lost to the Democrats in the election taking place there if he went through with intervention.  He had yielded, he said, because of party obligation, and because he was also persuaded that he could not have saved Mississippi from a Democratic victory anyway.  Thus Lynch heard from the only Republican president who had taken Reconstruction and black rights in the south seriously that The attempt to guarantee those rights in the South was on the point of failure.  The compromise of 1876-7 a year later, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the victor in a hotly disputed election over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, guaranteed that result.  Hayes explained that when the proposal to create a 15-menber commission to decide four disputed southern states came before the House, he opposed it, understanding what it would lead to. Meanwhile, the Democrats swept all the House seats in Mississippi. 

James A. Garfield eventually defeated Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock for the presidency in 1880, and the Republicans gained control of Congress. Fraudulent vote counting initially defeated Lynch when he ran for Congress again in 1882, but the Republican House majority seated him based on the fraud.  Unfortunately a Democrat defeated him that fall.   In the most extraordinary incident of his political career, in 1884, on the eve of the Republican convention, two very young and destined to be famous Republicans--Theodore Roosevelt of New York and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts--decided to put Lynch forward as a candidate for temporary chairman of the convention in order to embarrass the favored candidacy of James G. Blaine, which they opposed. Lynch writes that he had mixed feelings about his candidacy, but that two leading Ohio Republicans, Mark Hanna and William McKinley, convinced him to let it go forward.  Lynch was elected temporary chair, but Blaine won the nomination anyway.  He lost the election by the narrowest of margins to Grover Cleveland, who became the first Democrat elected to the White House since the Civil War. Blaine had a real national following, and Lynch recounts how one white Mississippi businessman, a Democrat named Joseph Carpenter, initially agreed to serve as one of his electors in the state.  He changed his mind when he realized that he and his whole family would be socially ostracized for the rest of his life if he went ahead.

Cleveland's election led to a remarkable conversation between Lynch and Lucius Q. C. Lamar, a distinguished Mississippi Democrat and Senator whom Cleveland had just appointed Secretary of the Interior.  Recognizing that the two of them had managed to work together across party lines at times in Mississippi, Lamar offered him a position as special agent of the public lands--not in the South, where "you may have some unpleasant and embarrassing experiences," but in Dakota territory.  Lynch declined on the basis that he must remain a loyal Republican, but asked Lamar to retain some black men for whom he had secured appointments in the Pension Bureau, which was part of his department.  This Lamar agreed to do, but he added that he had a problem with two other men whom Lynch recommended, a black doctor with a white wife, and a white lawyer with a black wife. "Amalgamation" was such a hot-button issue that he could not retain the white lawyer, who was better known, and would also have to let the black doctor go if his case became controversial.  As it turned out, it never did.  Lynch pleaded for both at great length and pointed out that Lamar had defied public opinion on sensitive issues before, most notably when he eulogized the Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate.  Lamar acknowledged the strength of his arguments, but declined. 

Republican Benjamin Harrison defeated Cleveland narrowly in 1888, and promptly appointed Lynch an auditor of the Treasury Department.  During that Administration Harrison and young Senator Henry Cabot Lodge tried to pass an early version of the Voting Rights Act, to try to re-enfranchise southern black voters,  It failed because free-silver Republicans from the west, who were working with free-silver Democrats to try to increase silver coinage, would not break with their Democratic allies on this issue. Lynch had to leave the Treasury Department when Cleveland beat Harrison handily in 1892, but not before he had an interesting talk with Cleveland, who said that he wanted to appoint "colored" Democrats to office to promote the equal treatment of all. The new secretary of the Treasury offered Lynch the chance to remain in his job, but he refused out of party loyalty. After six years of Law practice, when he was still only 50 years old, President McKinley chose Lynch to be commissioned an Army major and serve as Paymaster of the Forces during the Spanish-American War.  He held that position for ten years, during which it took him around the country and the world, serving in Cuba, Hawaii, Nebraska, San Francisco, and the Philippines, all of which he describes in great detail.  He eventually retired in 1910 and lived out the remaining 28 years of his life in Chicago, where his second wife came from.

This summary will I hope convince readers that the race question in the United States was never frozen in stone and has in fact been controversial and complex from the beginning of the republic to the present day.  Lynch in his last few pages notes three other twists and turns.  First, when President Taft was inaugurated in 1909, he specifically promised not to appoint any black officials in parts of the country where they would be unwelcome.  (I had already discovered this writing States of the Union.)  Second, when the Democrats returned to power under Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson, they not only segregated the federal office buildings in Washington for the first time, but also tried to persuade northern Democrats to institute strict segregation in northern states.  That initiative, I am happy to say, got nowhere. And lastly, he noted that a substantial portion of the black vote had abandoned the Republican Party and voted for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.  This meant, he thought, that in the future black voters would be able to vote for the man, not the party, and the race question would fade in American politics.

Lynch on that point, in my opinion, was more right than he knew.  From 1936 until 1964 the black vote was genuinely in play in the North, the West, and the border states. Candidates of either party ignored it at their peril, and it was no accident, I think, that those were the greatest years of progress for black Americans and the civil rights movement.  Unfortunately the successes of the movement remade the politics of many southern states along racial lines once again, and the black vote has been overwhelmingly Democratic from then until now.  Now, however, that may be changing.  Donald Trump made measurable gains among black voters in the last election.  I learned a great deal from Lynch's book.  I think there are many fascinating books waiting to be written on the politics of race from the end of Reconstruction until the Truman administration.  There may already be some, but I am not aware of them, and I hope that some day historians will fill this gap.