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      ‘They always got away with it’: new book reveals Kennedys’ shocking treatment of women

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      “The whole lot of Kennedys were lady-killers, and they always got away with it,” baseball star Joe DiMaggio, who blamed the political dynasty for the death of his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe, told his biographer. “They’ll be getting away with it a hundred years from now.”Death by air crash. Death by water. Death by suicide. These are just some of the fates of women who have associated with the Kennedys, as chronicled by investigative journalist Maureen Callahan in Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, a book published on Tuesday that explores the “real Kennedy Curse” and reads like a grisly soap opera.Just as America’s founders have recently undergone a reckoning over race, Callahan argues that the family often treated as political royalty should face a reckoning over gender. In her account, misogyny runs through the Kennedys like a stick of rock with physical and psychological abuse spanning generations. And Camelot uses its power and wealth to ruthlessly control the narrative.Callahan writes: “When a life-size bronze statue of JFK was unveiled in DC in 2021, not one bit of news coverage addressed his treatment of women. Not one journalist, essayist, political writer, or cultural critic asked whether this was a man deserving, in our new era, of such a memorial. Not one asked what kind of message his continued celebration sends to women and girls, now and in the future. Ask not, indeed.”Most topically, the book features John F Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, currently running as an independent candidate for president with a female running mate, Nicole Shanahan. It questions why he has been criticised for his anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and antisemitic statements “but not for his lifelong mistreatment of women”.Ask Not tells how Mary Richardson, a talented architect with looks evocative of Jackie Kennedy, married Robert in 1994 and had four children with him. She loved the idea of being a Kennedy but found her husband rarely present: his job did not require travel but he travelled all the time.“Gaslit. That’s how Mary felt,” Callahan writes. “The more pain she was in, the worse Bobby treated her. Some days he wanted a divorce; others, he wanted to bring another woman into their bed, an idea that left her humiliated. She rejected him outright.View image in fullscreen“One day Mary had a female friend over and Bobby sauntered in, right out of the shower, and dropped the towel around his waist, exposing himself. Mary had long suspected he was cheating on her, but he would always deny it. He’d tell her she was crazy, that she was the one destroying their marriage and driving him away. Was it any wonder he never wanted to be home?”Mary found Robert’s diaries. In the back pages were lists of women with whom Robert had had flings. The book elaborates: “He ranked them from one to ten, as if he were a teenager. Ten, Mary knew, was for full-on intercourse. ‘My lust demons,’ he wrote, were his greatest failing.“He used the word ‘mugged’ a lot – women who, he wrote, just came up to him on the street and said, How about it? If they had sex, he considered himself mugged, a passive victim of aggressive women.“There were so many – astronomical numbers, Mary said, and she knew a lot of them: The celebrated actress who came to their house and went on vacations with her family. The older model who was always around. The socialite whose husband was one of Bobby’s good friends. A gorgeous royal. The wife of a very famous man. A lawyer. A doctor. An environmental activist. All these beautiful, accomplished women. How could Mary compete?”Mary became distraught, weeping and drinking and struggling to get out of bed, the book says. Robert tried to forcibly hospitalise her, telling her that she would be “better off dead”. Callahan interviewed Mary’s therapist, Sheenah Hankin. When Robert asked for Mary to be diagnosed as mentally ill, Hankin refused, telling him: “Your wife isn’t mentally ill. She is angry and depressed, but she is not ill.”Robert began dating the actor Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David’s wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He cut off Mary’s credit card and access to cash. Broke, she had to ask other mothers for an extra $20 so she could buy petrol and groceries.Finally, she hanged herself at home. The book recounts: “Mary put on her yoga clothes and sandals, walked out to her barn, stacked three metal crates atop each other, then used a metal ladder to tie a hangman’s knot around the rafter. When she was found that afternoon, Mary’s fingers were stuck inside the rope around her neck. She had changed her mind. She had tried to save herself.”Mary’s siblings insisted that her depression had been a direct result of her husband’s cheating and neglect, his threats to take the children and leave her with nothing, “bringing the full weight of the Kennedy family to bear against her”.Robert, however, portrayed Mary to the world as a disconsolate alcoholic. In his eulogy, he took no responsibility for the anguish that his adultery had caused her. He said: “I know I did everything I could to help her.”Against her family’s wishes, Mary was buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts near Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of John F Kennedy. But, Callahan writes, “one week later, in the middle of the night, without telling Mary’s siblings or obtaining the required legal permitting, Bobby Kennedy Jr had Mary’s coffin dug up and moved seven hundred feet away … Mary was left to face traffic, no headstone marking her grave, buried alone”.The title of Ask Not is a nod to the most celebrated line from John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” America’s 35th president is shown in an unflattering light as a philanderer who exploited his position to prey on young women.View image in fullscreenMimi Beardsley was 19 and working in the White House press office when John took her to a bedroom in the private residence, pushed her on to Jackie Kennedy’s bed and took her virginity. It was the first encounter of many, Callahan writes: “Mimi would be welcomed upstairs only when the First Lady was away, and it was her job to remind him of simple pleasures: small talk, shared bubble baths, and sex, hasty though it always was.”Callahan notes that, when Beardsley published a memoir, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F Kennedy and Its Aftermath, it was pilloried by the media but became a New York Times No 1 bestseller. Robert Dallek, a Kennedy biographer, described Beardsley as “entirely credible” and told the Washington Post: “You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle anymore. This has become part of the public discourse.”John’s son, John Kennedy Jr, also features in the narrative as a serial risk-taker. With film star looks and charm, he was billed as the world’s most eligible bachelor. He began a relationship with Carolyn Bessette, director of publicity for Calvin Klein, but there were jarring ups and downs. “She was underweight and anxious all the time, using antidepressants and cocaine,” according to the book.Carolyn observed John Jr’s arrogance, thoughtlessness and reckless driving up close. “There was the time Carolyn and John got pulled over on the Massachusetts Turnpike, the car reeking with the smell of pot, a starstruck cop letting them go without even a warning.“‘There’s an unwritten rule in Massachusetts,’ John told her, ‘whereby members of my family can commit murder and mayhem’ – after all, decades earlier his uncle Ted had left a young woman to die in three feet of water – ‘and nobody bats an eye.’”Nevertheless, the couple married in 1996 after a rehearsal dinner where, the book recounts, Carolyn’s mother rose and made a stunning toast. “I don’t know if this marriage is good for my daughter,” she said. “I don’t know if John is right for her.”Three rocky years later, John Jr wanted Carolyn to accompany him to a family wedding on Cape Cod. Against her better judgment, she agreed to fly with him in the small plane he was still learning to pilot. “Carolyn said this to family members, friends, the waitress at their favorite restaurant in Martha’s Vineyard. She didn’t think her husband had the patience, the diligence, the attention span, and, really, the humility to be a good pilot.”View image in fullscreenShe was tragically vindicated. John Jr did not file a flight plan and cut off all communication with air traffic control. An American Airlines flight had to divert to avoid a midair collision. John Jr kept climbing and could soon not tell up from down.“The plane went into a graveyard spiral, falling 900 feet per minute. Carolyn and [her 34-year-old sister] Lauren would have known they were going to die. The sheer force of gravity and speed would have been terrifying as they spun at 200 miles per hour, nose first, into the ocean.”Once again, Callahan writes, the myth-making Camelot machine ensured that, in the 25 years since the crash, Carolyn has been cast as a “drug-addled harridan who made the last days of America’s prince so miserable.“And, so goes the implication: if John Jr hadn’t been so miserable he wouldn’t have been so distracted, and if he hadn’t been so distracted he wouldn’t have crashed the plane. This has become conventional wisdom, accepted as fact, and it’s left Carolyn’s sister Lauren a footnote – still more collateral damage.”One of the family’s darkest chapters unfolded in 1969 when Senator Edward Kennedy accidentally drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, an island in Massachusetts. His car flipped upside down into a pond he swam to safety. His passenger, a 28-year-old aide named Mary Jo Kopechne, died inside the water-filled car. Kennedy did not seek help at the nearest house nor report the incident to authorities for 10 hours.“At the inquest,” Callahan notes, “John Farrar, the diver who recovered Mary Jo’s body the next afternoon, testified that Mary Jo had not drowned but had suffocated to death. He said she had been alive for at least an hour in the water, maybe longer.”Kopechne could have been saved. Yet, the author argues, that criminal act was successfully transformed into “Ted’s tragedy”, a terrible accident that unfairly denied him the presidency. He became revered as the “lion of the Senate” instead. She adds: “Ted Kennedy served out the rest of his life in Congress and was given a statesman’s funeral with wall-to-wall news coverage, while Kopechne’s name was barely mentioned.”Drawing on archives, interviews with surviving family members and friends, and biographies, memoirs and contemporaneous news reports, Callahan details the stories of several more women whose lives were upended by the Kennedys. Some were involved in notorious affairs and scandals that made lurid headlines; others became tragedies that were marginalised and mostly forgotten.The New York-based author observes: “Any victims who dare to fight back will find themselves confronting the awesome power of the Kennedy machine, one that recasts any woman, no matter how wealthy or famous or powerful, as crazy, spiteful, vengeful; a drug addict, a viper, a seductress.“Whatever grievous harm a Kennedy man may have done to her, the message remains clear: She was asking for it. It was her fault. Thus Camelot, that fairy tale of Kennedy greatness and noble men, still stands.”
      Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed is out now More

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      Appeals court tells Texas it cannot ban books for mentioning ‘butt and fart’

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      An appellate court has ruled that Texas cannot ban books from libraries simply because they mention “butt and fart” and other content which some state officials may dislike.The fifth US circuit court of appeals issued its decision on Thursday in a 76-page majority opinion, which was written by Judge Jacques Wiener Jr and opened with a quote from American poet Walt Whitman: “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”In its decision, the appellate court declared that “government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree”.It added: “This court has declared that officials may not ‘remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the idea contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.’”The appellate court’s latest decision follows a federal lawsuit filed in 2022 by seven Llano county residents against county and library officials for restricting and removing books from its public circulation.The residents argued that the defendants violated their constitutional right to “access information and ideas” by removing 17 books based on their content and messages.Those books include seven “butt and fart” books with titles including I Broke My Butt! and Larry the Farting Leprechaun, four young adult books on sexuality, gender identity and dysphoria – including Being Jazz: My Life As a (Transgender) Teen – and two books on the history of racism in the US, among them Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.Other books targeted by the ban were In the Night Kitchen, which contains cartoons of a naked child, as well as It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, according to court documents.The books were removed after parents complained, with library officials referring to the books as “pornographic filth”.In its majority decision, the overwhelmingly conservative appellate court ordered eight of the 17 books to be returned, including Being Jazz: My Life As a (Transgender) Teen, Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.Wiener wrote how a dissenting opinion from the Donald Trump appointee Kyle Duncan “accuses us of becoming the ‘Library Police,’ citing a story by author Stephen King”.“But King, a well-known free speech activist, would surely be horrified to see how his words are being twisted in service of censorship,” wrote Wiener, whop was appointed during George HW Bush’s presidency.“Per King: ‘As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.’ Defendants and their highlighters are the true library police.”Wiener also said that “libraries must continuously review their collection to ensure that it is up to date” and engage in “removing outdated or duplicated materials … according to objective, neutral criteria”.In a report released last October, the American Library Association found that Texas made the most attempts in the US to ban or restrict books in 2022. In total, the state made 93 attempts to restrict access to more than 2,300 books.A wave of book banning has also emerged in Florida as part of the culture wars of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, on “wokeism,” a term meant to insult liberal values.In January, a Florida school district removed dictionaries, encyclopedias and other books because the texts included descriptions of “sexual conduct”.Meanwhile, in 2022, a Mississippi school district upheld the firing of an assistant principal after he read a humorous children’s book, I Need a New Butt, to his students. More

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      The reich stuff – what does Trump really have in common with Hitler?

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      When Donald Trump shared a video that dreamed of a “unified reich” if he wins the US presidential election, and took nearly a full day to remove it, the most shocking thing was how unshocking it was.Trump has reportedly said before that Adolf Hitler did “some good things”, echoed the Nazi dictator by calling his political opponents “vermin” and saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, and responded to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville by claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides”.The Hitler-Trump analogy is controversial. “Some of Trump’s critics – including Biden’s campaign – argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison,” the Politico website observed recently. “Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders – and even some of his more historically-minded critics – argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.”The former camp now includes Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain. The Dutchman, whose previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.In it, De Berg compares and contrasts Hitler and Trump as political performance artists and how they connect with their respective audiences. He examines the two men’s work ethic, management style and narcissism, as well as quirks such as Hitler’s toothbrush moustache and Trump’s implausible blond hair.In a Zoom interview from his office at the university campus, De Berg quotes the American comedian and actor George Burns: “The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” He adds: “The most important thing in populism is authenticity. The moment you’re able to fake that, you’re in.”De Berg, 60, happened to be renewing his study of National Socialism, and rereading Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, just as Trump was first running for the White House in 2015. “Obviously, there are massive differences,” he acknowledges. “Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died.“But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?“We tend to see Hitler as a genocidal mass murderer, which of course he was, but not so much as a populist. I thought looking at it through the perspective of Trump can help us wrap our heads around the idea as to why so many people actually supported Hitler and vice versa.”View image in fullscreenAbove all, De Berg argues, Hitler and Trump were and are political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policies – Make Germany/America great again – but know how to draw attention using jokes, insults and extreme language. In this they differ from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet autocrat who was a poor public speaker and preferred to work behind the scenes.“Their extremist statements are very deliberately meant to provoke a reaction and to get them into the press. Hitler actually writes quite openly about this in Mein Kampf and this of course is the challenge: what do you then do as a journalist or as an opposing political party when the other person makes these extreme statements?“Do you then not report these things, but then the populists will say whatever they want to say? Or do you contradict them and point out the lies and the extremism, but in that way you’re only drawing more attention to the fact that they’re running and to all they’re proposing?”Along with its headline-grabbing potential, the extremist language also plays well with many voters. De Berg says: “Most of their electorate are dissatisfied with the status quo for a variety of reasons – globalisation, automation – so they want to change the system and here you have an anti-establishment candidate who is not politically correct, who says that we will sort it, who doesn’t come up with all these ‘cowardly, rotten compromises’.”Many such voters are ready to blame a scapegoat, “the other”. Hitler blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in the first world war; Trump launched his 2015 campaign demonising immigrants from Mexico and continues to put border security front and centre. “It decomplexifies the world. Instead of abstract social structures and historical developments, you have one specific group of people that you can blame all your problems on.”One of the touchstone observations from the early Trump years came from the journalist Salena Zito. In September 2016 she wrote in a column for the Atlantic magazine that “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally”.Again De Berg is alive to rhymes with Hitler. “There were a lot of National Socialists interviewed after the war who said, well, yeah, OK, Hitler was saying all these extreme things but we realised he was a mass politician and we thought that he was just saying things that he didn’t really mean, that he was just exaggerating a little bit. Someone said the demands in Mein Kampf we took as the dogmas in the Bible – no one thought that these things would be fulfilled 100%.“The same is true, dangerously, with the things that Trump says. In his rallies he outlined a whole range of very problematic things that he would do when he was going to be president, but that doesn’t mean all people literally believe that. I don’t think they literally believed that he was going to build this big concrete wall between Mexico and the United States. Many of them thought, unconsciously, what he’s really saying is he will protect America’s traditional identity.“And that – to use a posh phrase – interpretative openness means that both the more extreme followers and the less extreme or ‘moderate’ followers can recognise themselves in the speaker’s words. That made Hitler and makes Trump so difficult.”Trump’s incoherent, meandering and zigzagging mode of speech adds to the effect. “Trump goes from the FBI to a judge to the Democrats to communists and so on. You can then say, well, clearly this guy is an intellectual nitwit, he can’t talk in a logical, argumentative way. He could but he realises that this vague way of tying all these people together actually gives different sections of the electorate different things they can identify with. Some might not like the FBI, others might not like immigrants and so on.”Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years as president, according to a count by the Washington Post. Perhaps the most egregious is “the big lie” that he, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election, only for it to be stolen due to widespread fraud. De Berg writes in his book: “The idea behind the concept of the big lie is that if an untruth is sufficiently extreme, people are likely to accept it if only because they cannot bring themselves to believe that anyone could lie in such an outrageous manner.“It was Hitler who came up with the concept, writing in Mein Kampf that ‘the great masses of the people … more easily fall victim to a big lie [große Lüge] than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others.’”View image in fullscreenThe spectacle and social glue of mass rallies is also key. In controversial comments to Playboy magazine, the British singer David Bowie once observed: “Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars … Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It’s astounding. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for 12 years. The world will never see his like again.”Trump’s rallies are typically rollicking affairs, the atmosphere part circus, part concert, part sports, bringing like-minded people together as ritualistically as church. In all weathers they share a collective sense of grievance and also find ways to have fun. In small towns that often feel left behind by big cities, they can represent the biggest event of the year and offer the thrill of live performance in an otherwise digitally saturated age.De Berg comments: “If you look at the lives of many ordinary Germans during the Weimar Republic immediately after the first world war, when the economy wasn’t doing well and there were all sorts of problems, many of them could not afford to enjoy all sorts of spectacles but they could go to a Hitler rally.“You can go to a Trump rally as well and that creates a feeling of solidarity, a community of feeling, which of course is at the same time the dangerous thing because people then identify with each other. They lose their individuality, they lose their critical capacity, and at the same time all together they identify with a political leader, so the political leader can do whatever he wants.”There is also something alarmingly familiar about the way in which the Republican party thought it could co-opt and control Trump, only to find itself capitulating and being recast in his image. One by one the party stalwarts have fallen into line, abandoning long-held principles, while dissenters have been purged.De Berg continues: “Hitler goes from 2.6% of the vote in 1928, meaning more than 97% of the electorate don’t want him, to the Nazi party becoming the biggest party in 1932. Then these conservative politicians say, OK, we’ve got this political nincompoop here but he’s a populist and he’s popular, the people like him. If we try and make this guy vice-chancellor then he can do our bidding.“Hitler says no, I’m not going to be vice-chancellor, I want to be chancellor, so eventually they give in but they still think that he is going to do what they want and push through their policies. One of these conservative politicians memorably said, ‘We’ve hired him.’ Hitler manipulated them and he becomes chancellor and from there on in it all goes disastrously wrong with German society.”He adds: “One of the most worrying things for me about Trumpism is the way he has managed to transform what you thought were very rightwing but ultimately rational politicians into people who have become basically Trumpists.“What happened was not that they manipulated Trump but Trump ended up manipulating them and then, in effect, just taking over the Republican party. All these people had to renounce all the things they used to believe in: international free trade agreements, a forward-leaning role for America in the world.”There is, the academic warns, method in Trump’s madness: the buffoonery, chaos and word salad speeches may be more calculated than they appear. “I would like people to become more aware of how incredibly consciously Trump is going about doing what he’s doing, how incredibly cunning and devious he’s been. People should absolutely not underestimate this guy.” More

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      in US Politics

      Morning After the Revolution by Nellie Bowles review – the perils of failing to toe the party line

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      Morning After the Revolution by the American journalist Nellie Bowles is a wickedly enjoyable book about the madness that seemingly began to inflame the brains of a certain cohort of the liberal intelligentsia about four years ago (its author dates the fever to the pandemic, but I think – personal information! – it began some time before then). It was a delirium that took her, as it did many people, a little by surprise, not least because she in theory belonged to this subsection herself: at school, where she was for a while the only out gay person, she ran around sticking rainbows all over the place; after college she was known to go to readings at Verso Books (“my God, I bought a tote”); when her girl Hillary was “about to win” she was “drinking with I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar”. But once she’d noticed it, she couldn’t ignore it. Her instinct was to whip out a thermometer and ask a few pertinent diagnostic questions.Asking questions, though, is (or it certainly was… things may be shifting now) verboten in the time of madness. Either you’re for the ideological buffet – every single dish – or you’re against it, and must eat at the bad restaurant where all the mean people hang out, a place that is otherwise known as “the wrong side of history”. When the insanity started, Bowles was working in Los Angeles for the New York Times, a job she’d dreamed of since childhood, and there her curiosity soon began to piss off some of her colleagues. When she went on to fall in love with a full-blown dissenter, the columnist Bari Weiss, who’s now her wife, she found herself on the outside of something, looking in. Morning After the Revolution is an account of her adventures in this topsy-turvy realm, in both the period before and after she left the NYT in 2021 (she and Weiss now run the Free Press). It comprises a series of reported colour pieces in which she touches on such things as diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes, the campaign to defund the police, trans rights and (briefly) the crystal display she noticed when Meghan and Harry did pandemic Zooms from their home in Montecito.View image in fullscreenIn the US, Bowles has already been accused of cherry picking by a furiously indignant critic in the Washington Post, which seems beside the point to me: if your subject is madness, you’re not going to go out of your way to interview the sane, are you? Her reporting doesn’t strike me as unfair; I think she sometimes errs on the side of generosity. Struck by how comical the hyper-‘woke’ sound when they’re in full flight, most of the time she doesn’t need to add anything herself; her mode, which is very effective, is death by quotation. By most people’s standards, moreover, she isn’t even particularly – or at all – rightwing (the Post’s critic, a bit desperately, likens her to Gore Vidal’s arch-enemy, the arch-Conservative, William F Buckley). Mostly, she’s just worried that the rights she takes for granted – she loves her “picket fence” life with her wife and child – are threatened by the extremities of the left, as well as of the right.But of course Morning After the Revolution plays differently here than in the US, in part because we know less than American readers about the stories she relates. I had no idea of the controversy around the handling of funds donated to Black Lives Matter in the early 00s; and I was new to the grim detail of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, a police-free utopia featuring movie nights and Marxism read-alouds that sprang up in the city in 2020. In case you are new to it, too, city leaders including Seattle’s then mayor, Jenny Durkan, loudly embraced its anti-fascist, anti-capitalist spaghetti potlucks (others, though, noticed young men with guns patrolling its borders at night). It may well be the case that the four-day-long workshop Bowles attends in 2021 isn’t a wholly typical example of a DEI programme, but this doesn’t make its existence any the less absurd, its participants furiously competing to denounce their whiteness. Among the speakers is Resmaa Menakem, a “somatic abolitionist” who has appeared on Oprah, one of whose techniques involves getting racists (ie anyone who is white and new to the game) to slap the soles of their feet repeatedly as they confess to their privilege.To poke fun at – to be alarmed by – this kind of stuff is hardly renegade, and voters in the liberal cities Bowles describes (San Francisco is another) have since made it plain they think it loopy and patronising, too. Freedom isn’t only to do with speech: a safe, well-managed city benefits those at the bottom far more than those at the top, who can pay for security and taxis and private schools. But this isn’t to say that free speech isn’t vitally important, and the groupthink that works to limit it is at the bottom of everything that happens in her book – up to and including the fact that one American university has now banned the expression “trigger warning” on the grounds it is violent language.Bowles bookends her dispatches with two accounts of a cancellation – and here she knows whereof she speaks. In the first, she participated on behalf of a close friend, enjoying the mob feeling of righteous indignation. In the second, she refused to join in, an act of resistance that brought the very same friend to cast her out. As she observes, the revolution believed, in the beginning, in a profound empathy; its ideas, many of which she loved as much as the next person, revolved around equity and kindness. But that empathy has long since gone on the run. Bowles does not expect to hear from her old pal ever again.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More

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      in US Politics

      The Year of Living Constitutionally: a man, a political plan … and a musket

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      Would you fly the Jolly Roger for Uncle Sam? AJ Jacobs tried to. For 12 months, the author and journalist became what he calls “the original originalist”, seeking to live the way the founders envisioned life under the US constitution.That life included the right to piracy on behalf of the US government. It sprang from a tradition predating the constitution, when the Continental Congress granted letters of marque and reprisal, allowing seamen to capture British ships. Noting this precedent, Jacobs brought an unconventional offer to Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, when the two met in a hotel lobby.“I said, ‘I’m following the constitution and would like to be granted a letter of marque and reprisal,’” Jacobs recalls. “He said, ‘Great, let’s make it happen.’ I explained to him what it was: basically legalized piracy. I would fight our enemies on my friend’s water-ski boat.”After that, Khanna “was a little more like, ‘Maybe this is not going to happen.’”Jacobs didn’t get his Captain Jack Sparrow moment. But he did get a book out of the experience, The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning, which has received multiple votes of approval – including from Khanna.“He did like the idea of the book: trying to explain the origins of the constitution, what it really means, what it says.”In 2007, Jacobs published the results of a similar project, The Year of Living Biblically.“They have a similar status in our society,” he says, of the Bible and the constitution. “Some people see them as sacred and try to follow them in the original meaning as it was written.”Others look to adapt the texts for a modern era. For the constitution, this has evolved into a debate between originalists and living constitutionalists. Jacobs interviewed scholars across the spectrum.View image in fullscreen“This was my favorite part. They were super-generous with me.” Some were “people who were the most liberal and progressive and saw the constitution as having no intrinsic meaning, it could be molded like Play-Doh”. Others felt that “whatever the constitution meant then is what it means now. One guy refused to capitalize the S in ‘supreme court’. In the constitution” – as in the Guardian style guide – “the S is not capitalized … It was a wide range.”The originalists have been getting the better of things lately, including on the supreme court. And it was originalism – and the Guardian – that helped nudge Jacobs toward his book idea.After the 2022 supreme court decision Dobbs v Jackson, which overturned Roe v Wade, removing the federal right to abortion, a Guardian editor asked Jacobs to cover an unexpected trend. It related not to abortion, which was suddenly up to the states, but to vasectomies, which a surprising number of American men were choosing to have.“I am the type of journalist who tries things out myself and writes about the effort,” Jacobs says. “I did not feel like getting a vasectomy. I did not know if I was the right person for that interesting storyline.”What he did feel like was exploring the originalist mindset. He came across a startling statistic: at least 60% of Americans, including himself at the time, had not read the constitution from beginning to end, despite it running just four to six pages. It was time to delve into “what it really says, what it really means, instead of getting it filtered from whatever media you happen to be partial to. Let’s read what it actually says.”When it came to the right to piracy, although Jacobs couldn’t sail the high seas he did receive an email from a Khanna staffer addressing him as “Captain Jacobs”. Then there was petitioning the government. Instead of the online approach, Jacobs brought a scroll somewhere near 200ft long into the office of Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon. Hundreds had signed the scroll. When Jacobs took some notes using his quill pen, it left ink on Wyden’s carpet. Jacobs added $50 to his taxes to foot the bill. (The subject of his petition was “Let’s have co-presidents”, a cause advocated by some founders, with Benjamin Franklin recommending 12 chief executives at once.)State laws came into the picture too. Free-speech advocates might be surprised by how much states policed what Americans said in the early republic. New York fined those who blasphemed or cursed 37 and a half cents. Jacobs did the same with his three sons, though they declined to come up with a half-cent.“It was not an easy year,” he says. “It was about as hard as The Year of Living Biblically.” That said, there were some differences. With the Bible, Jacobs “grew a huge beard. This did not involve as much facial hair.” But his appearance and lifestyle changed in other ways. He wore a tricorn hat, carried a musket, consumed an unusual amount of cloves, wrote with a quill, and woke up at the hour recommended by Franklin: 5am.View image in fullscreen“I tried to express second amendment rights the old-fashioned way,” he says. “I got a musket off ye olde internet and carried it around the Upper West Side where I live. A lot of people were crossing the street. People gave me a scowl.” When he brought it into a coffeeshop, a customer invited Jacobs to go ahead of him in line.“It’s sort of a good example of how this year went. At times, it was very strange, bizarre and awkward. But it was also, at the same time, incredibly enlightening and fascinating. I do think it gave real insight into how we should interpret the constitution.”He was particularly pleased with one custom: election cakes, meant to spur civic participation. Jacobs got volunteers representing all 50 states to bake election cakes last year. He plans to do it again.Although Jacobs appreciated the chance to adopt an 18th-century detachment from the near-constant news of today, he appreciates the progress America has made, saying: “It was terribly sexist and racist towards women, Black people and Indigenous people. I don’t want to go back to that.“Women’s rights were very constrained, especially married women, who were treated like children. They could not sign contracts. My wife owns a business. She signs several contracts a day.”Jacobs’s wife, Julie, let him take over contract-signing – then fired him after an hour.Jacobs also examined how 19th-century abolitionists saw the constitution. William Lloyd Garrison was so outraged by its stance on slavery that he advocated burning it – and did so. Frederick Douglass, who was formerly enslaved, had the same view but changed his mind and recommended Americans view the constitution as a promissory note.“Douglass says, ‘Let’s work to make America live up to the principles in the constitution.’ It becomes a very powerful way of looking at the constitution. Martin Luther King Jr talks about the constitution as a promissory note. Barack Obama gave a great speech that said the seeds of freedom were planted in the constitution … The solutions to the problems of the constitution are in the constitution itself.”
      The Year of Living Constitutionally is published in the US by Crown More

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      The Darkness Has Not Overcome: limp pro-Trump piety for a second coming

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      The Darkness Has Not Overcome is a far cry from Team of Vipers, Cliff Sims’s kiss-and-tell from 2019. Under the subtitle My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, that book sold well and spawned a brief legal spat with Donald Trump himself. But in a somewhat less stirring second outing, the Alabama son of two generations of Baptist ministers who became a reporter then a White House aide pays greatest attention to the lessons he takes from scripture and faith.Back in the Trumpian fold, this viper’s venom is distinctly diluted.Sims was cast out of Trumpworld in 2018 but returned to work as a speechwriter for Trump family members at the Republican convention in 2020. Then he landed a slot as a deputy to John Ratcliffe, a congressman turned director of national intelligence.Donald Trump Jr offers his praise for Sims’s new book, calling Sims “his friend”. The younger Trump – not noted for public displays of piety, let’s say – also laments that “American Christians are under attack every day by leftwing activists, mainstream media and liberal politicians”.Sims aches to land a punch for the team, but is reduced to trading on old glories. In his prologue, he rehashes near-verbatim a Team of Vipers story involving Trump and Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.Richmond purportedly praised the president to his face in a closed meeting, then intimated he was a bigot when the cameras rolled.“Congressman Richmond had been so sincere and complimentary of him behind closed doors, I thought he might at least be willing to say he didn’t personally believe Trump was racist. But he didn’t,” Sims writes – in both Team of Vipers and The Darkness Has Not Overcome.“‘You’d have to talk to the people who made those allegations and ask them what they would say about it,’ [Richmond told reporters]. ‘I will tell you that he’s the 45th president of the United States …’”If it had not been offered before, in greater detail – there’s no Omarosa Manigault this time – the anecdote might add a pinch of zest to a bland book. After all, Richmond now co-chairs Biden’s re-election campaign.Elsewhere, under a new, less fun subtitle – “Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power” – Sims decides to examine the legacy of Adolf Hitler, the “big lie” and the nature of tyranny. Those of a naive disposition, look away: Sims proves oddly unwilling to consider Trump’s affections for and frequent rhetorical echoes of Hitler, and his yearning to be an American strongman.“A psychological analysis of Hitler commissioned by the [Office of Strategic Services] during world war two described his obsession with lying as a way to manipulate the masses,” Sims writes.“Hitler’s policy of lies propelled him into power and ultimately played a significant role in his ability to perpetrate mass genocide. The truth matters a lot more than you might think.”So how does Trump, the man Sims backs to return to the White House and who lies as he breathes, think about Hitler?Trump reportedly kept a collection of the Führer’s speeches at his bedside.Jeremy Peters of the New York Times has captured Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, giving this judgment of Trump’s history-making escalator ride in spring 2015, to enter the Republican race: “That’s Hitler, Bannon thought.”Jim Sciutto of CNN has quoted John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, on Trump’s fondness for Hitler.Trump: “Well, but Hitler did some good things.”Kelly: “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”In the White House, relations between Sims and Kelly were sulfurous. “In the past 40 years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a subordinate whose reputation is worse than yours,” Sims quotes Kelly as saying in Team of Vipers.Now, Sims also avoids discussion of Trump’s stated intention to act as a dictator for at least a day if re-elected, and his own big lie: that the 2020 election went to Joe Biden because of electoral fraud.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust last weekend, Trump compared the Biden administration to Hitler’s Gestapo. Can you say, “projection”?Sims still has scores to settle. He luxuriates in the downfall of Robert Bentley, an Alabama governor whose affair with a campaign consultant went public. Oddly demure, Sims omits Bentley’s name while describing obtaining a damning recording from a source at midnight at a gas station, carrying a gun just in case.“The episode felt like a dramatic scene out of a spy movie … Ruger nine-millimeter pistol tucked in my waistband,” Sims writes. “I plugged the drive into my computer, opened the file and within a few minutes knew indeed that it would change the course of Alabama’s political history.”Bentley, a church deacon, resigned in the face of impeachment. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, for misuse of state funds.After reveling in the details of Bentley’s descent, Sims delivers a killer coda: he called Bentley to let him know he “had been praying for his family”.You can’t make such stuff up. But it doesn’t end there: Sims spikes the football.“Even after he had lost everything, including the powerful office to which he had violently clung, he returned to his dermatology practice and hired as his office manager, believe it or not, his former political advisor and mistress.”Bentley never mounted an insurrection or claimed immunity from prosecution. Sims, of course, doesn’t even mention January 6.He also stays mum about Trump’s alleged hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, an adult film star and a Playboy model who claimed affairs. The adjudicated sexual assault of E Jean Carroll? Nothing.The Darkness Has Not Overcome is an audition for a return trip to the White House. In that, Sims is not alone. Heck, even Ivanka wants in.
      The Darkness Has Not Overcome is published in the US by Hachette More

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      No Going Back: Kristi Noem and other Trump veepstakes also-rans

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      Donald Trump will never tap Kristi Noem to be his running mate. Indeed, she may never have had a real shot, but in the past few weeks her literary efforts have certainly helped torch whatever dreams she had of living in government housing, complete with Secret Service detail, a heartbeat from the Oval Office.Last weekend, at a vice-presidential cattle call, Trump failed to summon Noem to the stage. She reportedly left early. But at least she made it to Mar-a-Lago for a brief namecheck from Trump. Two other supposed vice-presidential hopefuls, Tulsi Gabbard and Ben Carson, failed to elicit even a mention. As it happens, like Noem, they have campaign books to sell.No Going Back, Noem’s memoir, dwells in a hell of its own, its fires stoked by her stunning story of killing Cricket, a 14-month-old dog, and an unnamed goat. The resultant controversy will be a tale for the political ages but more amazing still is that Noem simply refuses to say sorry. In her book, she writes that if elected president herself, the first thing she’d do “is make sure Joe Biden’s dog was nowhere on the grounds”, adding: “Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.” Talk about twisted.This is not the top table. In The Perilous Fight, Carson manages to argue for a nationwide abortion ban at a time when the US has never been more pro-choice, while Trump, seeking to escape a political trap, unfurls the banner of states’ rights. Way to read the runes, Dr Ben.For Love of Country is Gabbard’s bid for relevance. A former Democratic congresswoman, she is now a Fox News regular. She aims to feed the beast but may be consumed by it. Or, more likely, something worse: ignored.For unvarnished self-destruction, Noem wears the crown and will for some time to come. More than two weeks after the Guardian broke news of her cruelty toward defenseless animals and willingness to boast about it, she remains in the public eye, a punchline for daytime and late-night TV, a spectacle without a clue. On a dimwitted book tour, her attempts to sell her work double as a prolonged act of self-immolation.When you cause your seven-year-old to ask, “Where’s Cricket?” – and then print the tale in a mass-market hardback – you have a problem. But when it is revealed that in order to commit the story to print you dismissed the objections of editors and advisers, you are walking where most candidates dare not tread.A Politico headline blared: Kristi Noem’s Team Told Her to Nix the Dog Story Two Years Ago. The site added: “It would have violated the first rule of campaign memoirs: Do no harm.”Some publicity is just bad. Ask Trump about the Access Hollywood tape, about groping women, which nearly cost him the 2016 election. He also overdid the “best sex ever” gambit, regarding a New York Post headline about his extra-marital adventures. Trump now spends his days as a criminal defendant, on trial thanks to alleged affairs, passing gas and getting slapped with contempt sanctions and the threat of jail.Noem has not progressed quite that far. But with her tale of killing set to ring through the ages, when it came to a quite separate unforced error even her publisher threw her to the wolves.“At the request of Governor Noem, we are removing a passage regarding Kim Jong-un from her book No Going Back, upon reprint of the print edition and as soon as technically possible on the audio and eBook editions,” Center Street announced. “Further questions about the passage should be referred to the author.”Such questions may not get straight answers. Noem refuses to say she never met the North Korean dictator. Pro-tip: visiting England doesn’t mean you had tea with the king.View image in fullscreenCampaign trail books often come with awkward subtitles. Noem’s is: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward. Catchy. Carson is not to be outdone. Underneath his own jaunty banner – Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family – the retired neurosurgeon, 2016 Republican primary contender and former US housing secretary offers heartfelt jeremiads and dubious blurbs. Apart from that … not much to help his cause.Carson calls for a national abortion ban, writing: “The battle over the lives of unborn children is not yet finished. The practice continues in many more states.”Said differently, Carson thinks it’s time New York was more like Mississippi. Polling and election results suggest that’s not a popular stance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCarson’s book jacket is graced by Tucker Carlson and Franklin Graham. Tucker’s gonna Tucker. Billy Graham’s son has threatened Americans with God’s wrath if they criticize Trump. Mary Miller, a member of Congress from Illinois, also praises Carson, offering this nugget of wisdom: “It is important to stand strong against the woke cultural tide at work to water down the importance of the traditional family, and I applaud Dr Carson for calling attention to this issue.”It’s always worth repeating that Miller once had this to say: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”Carson dedicates his book to “the strong traditional families that provide the solid foundation of our nation”. He bashes pornography but is of course silent about Stormy Daniels, the adult film star, and Karen McDougal, the Playboy model, who claim affairs with Trump.Last and least of the three would-be VPs, Gabbard delivers an awkward mix of memoir and screed. She grew up in Hawaii and served in Iraq. Her father was a Republican until he became a Democrat. Convenience may be a family brand.In 2020, Gabbard ran against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, then endorsed him. Now she takes a cudgel to the man and a flamethrower to her old party. As to be expected, she attacks Hillary Clinton over comments about Gabbard and Russia. Once again, Gabbard gets her facts wrong. Clinton never called her a “Russian asset”.Gabbard reportedly turned down an offer to be Robert Kennedy Jr’s running mate. She won’t be Trump’s VP but a cabinet slot isn’t out of the question.Generally, campaign books endeavor to simultaneously show enough leg and sanitize a wannabe’s ambition, aiming to make a contender interesting without giving too much away. But such memoirs can still say and do plenty.Think of The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama’s profession of political faith from 2006, used to develop themes that would underlie his 2008 White House run. Promise Me Dad, Biden’s memoir, burnished his image as a warm uncle, put the memory of Beau Biden, his late son, front and center, and provided a foundation for success in 2020.Now, on the Republican side, JD Vance is a leading contender to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016, brought him to national prominence and eventually a Senate seat for Ohio. Noem, Carson and Gabbard are nowhere near that league.
      No Going Back is published in the US by Center Street
      The Perilous Fight is published in the US by HarperCollins
      For Love of Country is published in the US by Regnery More

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      Wide Awakes: the young Americans who marched the north to civil war

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      History is really the only thing I can do,” Jon Grinspan says, smiling. “I worked in restaurant kitchens, I did other things, but really history is it. If I ever have to stop, I don’t know what I could do. I got straight As in history and straight Ds and Fs and every other topic. It’s like I’m a one-use tool.”He’s being modest. But he definitely does history. A Philadelphia native who studied at Sarah Lawrence in New York and got his PhD from the University of Virginia, Grinspan is now a curator of political history at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.He’s also the author of a new book, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War, which casts a bright torchlight on to a fascinating if brief episode in 1860s America with strong echoes in the divided nation of today.The Wide Awakes were a political movement, begun in Hartford, Connecticut, around the elections of 1860, growing spontaneously and nationally as a way for young men to publicly support Republican anti-slavery candidates, most prominently Abraham Lincoln. Members wore capes, often bearing a painted eye, carried flaming torches and wore military hats and approximations of uniform as they marched in opposition to the slave-holding south.In his small Smithsonian office, after a trip to the museum stores to see a Wide Awake torch, the last coffee cup used by Abraham Lincoln and other precious relics, Grinspan describes how he found his way to the Wide Awakes.“I always looked down on the civil war as a teenager, because it seemed so cookie-cutter and kind of hokey, very un-human and dry. And then in college we started reading Eric Foner” – the dean of civil war-era scholars – “and he made the factions in 19th-century America look human, kind of tribal. I got into it from there.”As a curator, Grinspan is responsible for telling the story of US democracy – hence the giant cardboard pencil in the corner, emblazoned with the words “Write In Ralph Nader”. As it happens, the evocation of the third-party candidate who maybe cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000 points to one of Grinspan’s driving interests: turnout.When he learned how many Americans voted in 19th-century elections, particularly around the civil war, “that made me want to find more. Turnout over 80%? What’s the story behind it? And that kind of guided me into trying to find the human stories, and from there it just seemed so exciting.View image in fullscreen“Also, growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, politics seemed so dry and tame in America. Turnout was lower in the 90s than at any time since the 1920s. So looking back to the 19th century, when democracy seems so much more vibrant and engaging and conflicted, I got into this world that was completely different. And then over the last 20 years, our world has come to look much more heated, for mostly negative reasons, so it feels like I got into something really niche that has become somehow relevant.”‘Guys with torches in the night’Grinspan found the Wide Awakes “at grad school, in need of an idea for my thesis. I got so into it I essentially failed all my classes the first year. They threatened to throw me out, but I just felt the Wide Awake story wasn’t being told and I wanted to tell it.“So I got pretty fixated on it and I submitted a piece to the Journal of American History. And then, right when I was on the cusp of being kicked out, the Journal said, ‘We’re gonna run this in our Lincoln Bicentennial, which is 2009.’ From there, I had some great professors who said, ‘Just be ruthless in doing the work you want to do.’ And, pat myself on the back, it turned into a career, right?”Right. The Wide Awakes are known but they flourished briefly, before a civil war in which most were subsumed by the Union army. Grinspan has room to move.“There’s a little scene in the preface of this book where a professor turns to his computer, goes on a newspaper database, plugs in ‘Wide Awake’ and gets 15,000 hits for 1860,” Grinspan says. “And yet the group had been so neglected.“It usually gets a paragraph in good books on 1860. They’ll describe Wide Awake marches somewhere, maybe around the Chicago Republican convention in May. They’re outside. But then you’ll get 35 pages on the fight for the Republican nomination and you’ll get a biography of Edward Bates [Lincoln’s attorney general] at 15 pages. But you have this mass movement, hundreds of thousands of people? And I’m gonna get a paragraph?”Grinspan thinks some neglect of the Wide Awakes comes from “a little bit of elitism”, history focused on great leaders. But “the Wide Awakes aren’t entirely a pretty story. And after the war, it’s much easier to valorise Lincoln than to focus on the guys with torches in the night.”After the war, and Lincoln’s assassination, the Reconstruction years saw Ulysses S Grant, the general who became president, face down the Ku Klux Klan, torch-bearing night-raiders who terrorised Black people in the southern states.But the Wide Awakes had a dark side of their own. Like the Republican party, they emerged from a primordial soup of anti-immigrant feeling.“These white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans were pretty hostile to the Irish Democrats and specifically Catholics,” Grinspan says. “The Wide Awakes in the 1850s are a nativist club. They are in nativist fights in Brooklyn, in Boston. You see accounts from Irish immigrants saying, ‘We stayed away from that group over there wearing the white hats.’ Because a ‘wide awake’ hat was the symbol of the group. And then the Wide Awakes in 1860, they take the same name just four or five years later. If you had started a movement called the Tea Party in 2015, people would have had associations. It’s a lot of the same people. They’re cheered on by the same newspapers like the Hartford Courant, which is massively anti-Irish.“But they grow out of it. I think they find a better conspiracy to fight.”By 1860, the southern grip on Washington was strong. The slave-owning states resisted change through an unrepresentative Congress and a supreme court tilted their way. The parallels with Washington today are strong, though labels have changed and it is Republicans who now pursue minority rule.“You look at the behavior of the slave-owning elites and they are doing everything they can to control Congress and control the supreme court, to determine the future of the nation,” Grinspan says. “It’s kind of funny that we hate conspiracy theories, but every once in a while one is accurate.”Another feature of Grinspan’s book that echoes strongly today concerns southern reactions to the Wide Awakes, which ranged from dismissive to angry to frightened. Particularly scarifying was the presence – remarkable enough in the segregated north – of Black men among the torch-bearing marchers.“John Mercer Langston was as far as I know the first Black Wide Awake. He starts the club in Oberlin, Ohio, then later becomes a Reconstruction congressman, a really prominent figure. I knew when I started work on the Wide Awakes there were Black men involved, but I didn’t realise how compelling this story was.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“A lot were fugitives from slavery. They connect the dots to underground abolitionists in Boston, who were fighting slave catchers in the 1850s. They come out publicly with the Wide Awakes, marching in uniform, 144 African Americans with 10,000 white Wide Awakes. They’re not just claiming public space or claiming partisan identity: they’re in military uniforms, a tiny minority in a sea of white people. It’s a bold move.“And those same guys, when the war breaks out, they organise the home guard and then they organise the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the most prominent African American fighting force in the war. I see the Wide Awakes at a turning point there.“And in the south and the Democratic north, people go crazy when they learn about Black Wide Awakes. They start posting disinformation broadsides for Black Wide Awake events, real events in Pittsburgh and Chicago where we know there were no African Americans, just to gin up anger and get people to vote Democratic.”It all sounds familiar, evocative of rightwing fear and anger in summer 2020, when protests for racial justice spread and Trumpists insisted shadowy, black-clad anti-fascists, “Antifa”, threatened chaos and bloodshed.Rightly, Grinspan is wary of pat journalistic comparisons. Generously, he says the Wide Awakes were alarming to many.“After the 1850s, when there’s so much chaos in America, so much street fighting and Bleeding Kansas and the Know Nothing gangs, people marching in order, in silence, sends a political message. It’s saying, ‘We actually are the people in this republic right now who can organise things. The Democrats can’t even stay together as a party and we have matching uniforms.’ They’re not armed but it’s not a big jump from torches to muskets, as they always say.”View image in fullscreenLincoln’s victory in 1860 was followed by civil war but it also caused the Wide Awakes to fade from the scene. Members wanted to escort the new president to Washington but despite knowing of threats to his life, Lincoln turned down the offer.“If he brings a bodyguard to Washington,” Grinspan says, “if he has 5,000 or 100,000 Republicans in uniform come with him, he drives away Democrats, he drives away Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, slave-owning border states.”Prompted, Grinspan makes an apt comparison.“I mean, January 6, you can see how you can rile up your supporters,” he says, of the day in 2021 when Donald Trump sent supporters, most in what passed for Maga uniform, some in tactical gear, to attack Congress itself.“When Mussolini marches on Rome, he brings his blackshirts with him. There are so many examples of a leader mobilising people this way. And Lincoln has the self-restraint not to do that. He puts it out through John Hay, his young secretary, to the young Wide Awakes in Springfield, Illinois: ‘Go to Washington as individuals. Don’t come as a company. If you want to come to the inauguration, that’s fine.’“But there are still secret Wide Awakes in the crowd and they have the uniforms on.”‘People keep finding objects’Grinspan has ideas for his next book – which will be his fourth – and will continue to engage the public at the Smithsonian. Nonetheless, the publication of Wide Awake is a culmination, of sorts, of 17 years of consuming work.“At first I felt I discovered something no one else knew about,” he says. “And then I thought, ‘I’m done.’ But people kept coming to me with more Wide Awakes stuff. I wouldn’t have written this book five or 10 years ago but people keep finding objects. I still find references in diaries I read. And there was a sort of neo-Wide Awake movement in 2020,” around protests for racial justice.It seems Grinspan will never truly let go of the Wide Awakes. They’re part of his job, after all. Downstairs, in the conservation department, we approach another relic, spread out to be viewed with care.View image in fullscreenIt is a Wide Awake cape, owned and used by George P Holt of New Hampshire then stored in an attic for 100 years or more. Originally bright white with violet lettering, it has faded and frayed with time. But the painted eye, arranged to stare from the wearer’s breast, is as piercing as on the day it was made.
      Wide Awake is published in the US and in the UK by Bloomsbury More