Our Politics Are Turning 30

The 'Contract with America' was permanent

Welcome back to the This Day In Esoteric Political History newsletter. Each week, a member of our team (or a friend of the show) gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.

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Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…

September 26

• 1789: Thomas Jefferson is appointed America's first secretary of state

• 1960: Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy square off in the first major televised Presidential debate

• 1983: Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis holds a press conference to announce an enormous and ambitious infrastructure project to take a roadway that cut through the center of Boston and move it underground

• 1983: A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces decides that an alert about an incoming nuclear attack was, in fact, a computer glitch, likely preventing a series of retaliations by the USSR and the USA

September 27

• 1964: The Warren Commission issues a report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy

• 1986: NBA star Isiah Thomas promotes “No Crime Day” in the city of Detroit

• 1994: Republicans in the House of Representatives gather on the steps of the Capitol to announce the “Contract with America,” a plank of ten policy points that they pledged to uphold if they seized back power in the upcoming midterm elections

September 28

• 1944: Theodore Roosevelt Jr. is posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for directing troops at Utah Beach during the D-Day landings

September 29

• 1896 : A postal worker sets out to deliver the mail to ten rural towns in West Virginia. It’s the start of the Rural Free Delivery service

• 1916: American oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller becomes the world's first billionaire

• 1962: JFK authorizes use of federal troops to integrate the University of Mississippi

• 1970: The United States Senate comes six votes shy of voting for an amendment that would have scrapped the Electoral College system in favor of a much more straightforward popular vote

September 30

• 1953: Earl Warren is appointed Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court

• 1993: US General Colin Powell retires at 56

• 2004: George W. Bush and John Kerry take the stage for the first presidential debate of the 2004 election. In response to Kerry saying that very few countries supported the United State’s invasion of Iraq, Bush responded that “actually, you forgot Poland”

October 1

• 1939: Winston Churchill refers to Russia as a "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma"

• 1946: 19 Nazi leaders are found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death or prison at the Nuremberg war trials

• 1994: Russian President Boris Yeltsin is set to stop off for a diplomatic visit in Ireland. But when his plane lands on the tarmac at Shannon Airport, Yeltsin refuses to get off

October 2

• 1919: President Woodrow Wilson suffers a stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed.

• 1967: Thurgood Marshall is sworn in as the first Black Supreme Court Justice.

• 1986: The US Senate imposes economic sanctions on South Africa, defying President Ronald Reagan's wishes. It marked the first time since enactment of the War Powers Resolution in 1973 that Congress had overridden a presidential foreign policy veto

• 1999: A First Amendment battle is brewing between New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum, which is mounting a controversial exhibit Giuliani deems “sick stuff.”

In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week it’s Jacob Feldman’s turn at the typewriter.

This week our politics turn 30. Obviously Newt Gingrich and more than 300 Republican congressional candidates standing outside the Capitol to support a shared vision amidst their election campaigns only continued a trend of increasingly national and partisan political divisions. But I think that moment offers a clear dividing line, too.

• Before 1994, the Democrats controlled the House for 40 straight years (really!). It has changed hands five times since, and could flip again this year. National feelings now determine Congressional proportions more than individual races.

• The preceding five Presidents faced 31 vetoes being overridden by Congress. The last five have only had 8 vetoes undone. The executive and legislative branches are less often seen to be at odds nowadays, with fights taking place between parties and across arms of government.

• We’ve seen ‘Contract with America’ sequels attempted multiple times each by Gingrich and Trump, the true sign of a big hit!

Even if Gingrich hadn’t cooked up the idea, the national nature of modern news coverage likely would have produced similar results. We’re now seeing Democrats attempt a fairly consistent pro-democracy, pro-choice campaign nationwide. Mark Robinson’s collapse in North Carolina, meanwhile, is a national story precisely because local and national party brands have become one and the same.

The potential flipping of Senate seats in West Virginia and Montana on the other hand show a similar process playing out in that chamber, as local and state races begin to look and sound more and more like national contests. Or maybe, 30 years on, there’s really no difference at all.

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A little more esoterica

• Thanks to listener Benny, who wrote in to say how much the seemingly ancient NYC pig riots story we just discussed actually resonated with his ongoing research on the modern Great Waukesha Chicken Debate (his term). Wisconsin residents have been fighting for the right to maintain chicken pens on their property. As expected, the battle has developed racial, class, and anti-government encroachment undertones.

• An update from Statuary Hall: Johnny Cash’s bronze sculpture has officially been added to the collection, ending a multi-year effort by Arkansans to replace Confederate sympathizer Uriah Rose and white supremacist James Paul Clarke.

  

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