What I'm Working on, Spring 2023
Turns out--and who could have known???--Dick Morris wasn't a great guy
Hello Again!
So much going on this spring! The big news is that we are off to France for a week+. The kids have been to Paris but they were little kiddos back then. Now they can do things like walk, speak in full sentences, and roll their eyes! I joke of course—they are lovely children who would never, ever roll their eyes. We’re very excited, not least because of the lure of les boulangeries (not to be confused with its fellow travelers). Will we come back Frenchified? Quite possibly. But at the very least we’ll see one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I will get to visit one of my favorite shops in the world, Le Cave de Abbesses in the 18th. The wine selection is incredible and there is a semi-secret little bar in the back with little snacks and a few pours of said lovely wine selection. Perfection.
Here are some updates on the slavery book, the West Wing Book, Rao Enterprises, and of course, food and sport!
The Slavery Book Which Currently Lacks a Title
Here’s a question for you—and one that cuts to the heart of what I’ve been working on. Here goes, in several variations.
At what point does mass lawlessness become a law in itself?
If the mob overrides the rule of law by force, is the mob the law? Is force the law?
If the rule of law is a known by all but practiced by non, is it still the rule?
This is the framework of my chapter for my book about slave policing that concerns the KKK and other white supremacist organizations that sprang up during Reconstruction. There have been some superb secondary works on the Klan in particular that offer somewhat competing interpretations. Elaine Frantz Parsons’ brilliant book, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction (UNC, 2019) debunks a lot of the myths about the “invisible empire” that cloud historical understanding of the Klan itself. No, it wasn’t invisible. And no, it wasn’t an “empire.” Rather, Parsons dives into the contingent nature of the Klan and shows the fabrication of the Klan’s culture—and material culture—as well as the production of a very curated, ideological sense of memory that has portrayed the Klan as something it wasn’t: ubiquitous and omnipotent. On the other hand, sort of, historian Bradley Proctor’s research shows us that where the Klan was particularly potent, such as North Carolina, members had aspirations to power, and sometimes realized it. Most impressively, Proctor literally cracked the Klan’s code! Members wrote in a cryptic code to prevent prying eyes from figuring out what they were up to, but Proctor figured it out after some impressive archival sleuthing. The full story is here.
My challenge in reinterpreting the Klan has been to take to heart Parson’s injunction about not overblowing the Klan’s presence and power, while also understanding the dynamics on the ground that Proctor illustrates so well.
What I’ve found, and what I argue, is that the Klan and other white supremacist paramilitary groups in the occupied South during Reconstruction were trying to exercise the prerogatives of the state. Doing so required using violence and intimidation to shut down the legitimately constituted government, and using terror to achieve the Klan’s own ends. Chief among those ends? Scuttling the Republican Party and resurrecting the Democratic Party. Now, that in itself, is not earth shattering as far as historical discoveries go. But put together the quasi-statist aspirations of the Klan et al. with the deeply subversive, insurrectionist political motive and you get something a bit different from our typical understanding of the relationship between terrorists, the state, the aftermath of war, and the rule of law.
To cut to the chase, I wonder about the extent to which theorists of the modern American and modern liberal state have cast moments like this aside as exceptions-to-the-norm in order to give us the portrait of an ideal type of a state that works through the rule of law. In this version of the state, violence was the law, and the law was violence. The key shift is to be able to see power working through the eyes of those that experience it—who find themselves subject to it, who attempt to manipulate it, and who succeed in wielding it.
A few newsletters ago I mentioned I was knee-deep in reading social theorists like Carl Schmitt. Re-reading Schmitt in this context was eye-opening because it allowed me to see the cracks in the nature of the rule of law as espoused by champions of things like democracy and liberalism. Schmitt’s sociology of the law was a theoretical apologia for fascist law and institutions. That his same concept, in which violence, coercion, and raw power lie at the heart of the state itself, seems to fit so neatly with what was going on during Reconstruction…this is terrifying.
It is a leap, and a big one, to connect all of this with January 6, 2021, and what occurred at the Capitol (and the smaller versions that unfolded elsewhere throughout the country). Rather, I think the better question might be to see where this alternate state—this one founded on violence and power—might have wormed its way into the rule of law, and where it continues to hold sway.
The West Wing as History
Back when I was in grad school if you’d told me I’d be reading back issues of STAR Magazine…well, I’d probably have turned out a lot happier, healthier, and well-adjusted. But better late than never, right? By the way, if you’ve never had the experience of asking a university librarian to submit an ILL request for a STAR magazine article entitled “Top Clinton Aide and the Sexy Call Girl,” I really can’t recommend it enough as an experience. Really. Thanks so much, 1990s.
Why am I doing this to myself, you might ask? That is a good question, but the short answer is I simply have to do so in order to plow along writing my book on The West Wing. My latest chapter is one on presidential scandals, big and small, in modern American political history, and how the show tried to repackage them for a tv audience.
Dick Morris, for those who don’t know, was once a brash conservative political consultant and polling guy who Bill Clinton turned to whenever Clinton’s more centrist advisors weren’t making the cut. The pattern seemed to be: Clinton in trouble; Clinton starts talking to Morris; Morris tells Clinton to do some conservative stuff; Clinton does conservative stuff; Clinton gets annoyed by Morris because Morris is annoying; Clinton ghosts or fires Morris. On The West Wing, Morris is embodied in the character of Al Kiefer, who tries to get Jed Bartlet to move sharply right on issues like school uniforms and a flag burning amendment. Kiefer loses. So did Dick Morris, for whom the term loser is far too generous. In any case, the article above marked Morris’ downfall, which stemmed from an affair with a sex worker that happened to be heavily photographed. Morris soon turned on the Clintons and became a star on an emerging Rupert Murdoch tv channel called Fox News. Morris, never one known for his loyalty, now works for Fox News’ rival Newsmax.
Oh one more West Wing thing: I got to be on a panel at the White House Historical Association about the show! The theme was “The White House In Television,” and my fellow panelists were the brilliant trio of Kathryn Brownell, Trevor Parry-Giles and Eric Lesser. The Association kindly recorded the panel so here it is if you are interested!
Here’s me moving my hands too rapidly and looking awkward.
Gautham has an agent
Given what I’m working on these days, I decided I was going to try to get an agent. The slavery book is my chief concern. I could attend a dozen conferences, do lots of papers and all that jazz, and I will probably do all of these things, but I think I really want to see if I can communicate with a broader audience. I’m partly motivated out of a belief in civic responsibility. In an era of book bans and whitewashing of the past, why shouldn’t historians try to bring critical, even complicated ideas to the public? While the current President of the AHA might disagree (pace), I think there might be interest in learning about the legal order that emerged around slavery, and the possible lineages of that world today.
And so, I’ll be working with agent extraordinaire, Dani Segelbaum of the Carole Mann Agency. I’m pleased she’s brought me on board, and have already begun to benefit from her wisdom!
Sport
My favorite football player is leaving my favorite team. I’ll have a lot more to say about this soon. In the meantime, I’m remembering his genius as often as I can and wishing him the best for whatever the future holds.
New Project Ideas
What would a legal historian’s Fed Courts syllabus look like? Inspired by a brief exchange with the brilliant legal scholar and historian Matt Steilen of The University of Buffalo Law School, I started to think about this. And it just won’t go away. So I’m hoping to put something on paper for an article some time soon. The basic idea here is to discard the presentist bent of the Fed Courts, tea-leaf-reading, fetishization of the SCOTUS justices, in favor of a socio-legal, multi-causal understanding of the question of what has become justiciable in federal courts at what moments in time, and why. I’m sure many lawyers and law profs will find it much more interesting to know about what Justice Gorsuch ate for breakfast when they clerked for him, and why that will explain his originalist approach to a case about class certification, but I’m going to give this a shot anyway.
Was there a (Racist) Developmental State? I’m a lucky, lucky guy, in that my proposal for a paper for the American Developmental State conference this month in Paris, was accepted! And then I ended up on a panel that’s actually a roundtable. So I’ll be reflecting on the other papers in the conference instead of doing my own thing. And that’s totally fine (the papers are great, which helps). However, I’m fixating on this question not of whether there was a developmental state—there was—but rather whether it was forged in a racist intellectual foundry. From one vantage point the answer is yes, and so obviously so that the question loses any poignancy: the idea of economically interventionist states clearly emerged during a time of mass enslavement and settler colonialism. But I’m more interested in the self-conscious understanding of the developmental state, from roughly the Progressive Era through the present. Given what I’m working on for the slavery book, it is hard not to see the developmental vision of a “New South” without also seeing the color line and Jim Crow. If cartelism was a way to spur a corporatist developmental strategy in southern states, I’d like to understand to what extent Jim Crow was baked into this strategy. In terms of “outcomes,” to put it in Bob Gordon’s terms, the answer is pretty clear when we look at labor practices (sharecropping, contract enforcement, convict leasing). What about political economy? Geography? Competition?
Food
Nothing fancy this time and as always you can follow my kitchen adventures on the insta at @gautham_cooks. Here’s an easy but delicious recipe for a deviled avocado.
[Side note: I hate deviled eggs. Like passionately. I guess they might be tasty under very specific circumstances, but the idea of eggs getting warm with some mayo thing getting warm also…no, not for me.]
Ingredients:
1 avocado, halved and both peel and seed removed
2tsp tahini, whipped with salt,
ground black pepper,
dollop of honey,
tsp of warm water,
tsp gochujang,
chili powder
pickled red onion
Method: combine tahini, pepper, honey, water (add more if it is too thick), gochujang, chili powder (more is always better, right?). When it tastes the way you want, spoon into the avocado cavity. Top with pickled red onion. Eat.
Variation: I kind of got into this for a few weeks and started playing around with other fillings: ricotta with la bomba; peanut butter with soy sauce; chevre with paprika. All tasty.