Dad's columns still make good reading. In the tradition of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken, he treated the World's Greatest Deliberative Bodies with all the respect they deserve. "Politicians who could not thread a needle without stabbing themselves talk sagely of industrial problems ... The congressional committees move fast to endorse [Roosevelt's] bills - so fast that they jerk by our field of vision like Mack Sennett cops in an old silent film. One of them had to meet a second time, because it put through a navy bill so hastily it left out half the fleet."
More an Eleanor than a Franklin Roosevelt liberal, he believed as long as he lived that "the right to the pursuit of happiness includes the right to a pair of shoes to pursue it in." Reactionaries and isolationists at home, and appeasers and collaborators abroad gave him a target-rich environment, and he put in long, happy days demolishing some of the best enemies anyone could hope for, from Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to Martin Dies and the State Department. He especially enjoyed mocking those on the right when they flew into one of their periodic fits of moral indignation: "See how red their faces are, how the cords stand out on their necks." If anything, my father's commitment to democracy and liberalism made him more, not less, sensitive to the errors committed by his own side. He denounced the legendary New Deal and war leaders, Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia, as often as their opponents, especially when they violated their own principles.
My father's criticism regularly infuriated those in power - just as journalistic criticism does now. But they didn't respond in quite the way we're used to now. LaGuardia summoned him to City Hall, threw him an immense ring of keys and said: "Here, if you're so smart, do it better. I'm leaving." Roosevelt denounced him, twice, at press conferences. Each time, the phone rang at my father's desk the next day, and a familiar voice said, "You're perfectly right, of course. Come to lunch." He went, too, but he never climbed on anyone's tire swing.
I've been thinking a lot about my father's writing. I keep remembering the column he published after waking up to discover that Dewey hadn't beaten Truman, with its wonderful declaration, "I am in love with the American people all over again." He would certainly have gone to bed a happy man Nov. 4.
What, I've been wondering, would he have thought of how our media covered the campaign? On some points, I know for certain. He knew and despised talk radio and cable television, with their cycles of passionate attention to meaningless trivia. On others, I'm less sure. He would have been sorry, I'm sure, to see newspapers in their current predicament, leaking readers and money and hoping that they can somehow restore their health by cutting staff and coverage. But I can't help thinking that he might have found one segment of the media not only more valuable, but also more familiar, than television or newspapers.
In many ways, what he and his colleagues did has more in common with blogging than it does with what most pundits do nowadays. They never pretended to be impartial, though they tried to get the facts right. They never hesitated to question conventional wisdom. And they covered events as they happened: My father and his colleagues produced six columns a week, something like 220,000 words a year. If he had lived to see the blogosphere, left and right, I think he would have appreciated bloggers' independence, their vivid language and their effort to capture, respond to and shape the flow of events, hour by hour. I believe he'd have seen the blogosphere - like the recent election in which it played so big a role - as a new birth of democracy, an enterprise more like journalism as he knew it than most of what the mainstream media now offer. And I'm sure he'd have wondered if we can find some politicians who, like the prewar ones, can live with and learn from real criticism.
Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.
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