Category: US GOV: Pol Culture

One Nation Under God?

The words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase “In God we trust” on the back of a dollar bill haven’t been there as long as most Americans might think. Those references were inserted in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, the same decade that the National Prayer Breakfast was launched, according to writer Kevin Kruse. His new book is One Nation Under God. Here is an interview with Kruse from Fresh Air.
And here is Kruse in a KCRW debate with: 

Kevin Kruse, Princeton University

Gary Smith, Grove City College

Alan Cooperman, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

Mary Ellen Sikes, Secular Majority

Mudslinging in 1800 and Beyond

I want to push back a bit on the Diehl-Rocks thesis that the election of 1828 is the genesis of dirty campaigning. Thomas Jefferson supporters accused Adams of being a hermaphrodite with “neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” In response, the Adams campaign accused Jefferson of being the son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a mulatto father.

Of course the election of 1800 is just the beginning. One of my favorites was in 1876 when Democrats accused Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes of shooting his own mother and stealing the pay of dead soldiers while he was a Union general.
None of the above had to show their original long form birth certificate.

T.R. Reid: Looking Overseas For 'Healing Of America'

Journalist and author T.R. Reid set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors’ offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.

Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post — in whose pages he recently addressed five major myths about other countries’ health-care systems — and the former chief of the paper’s London and Tokyo bureaus.

Listen to this Fresh Air Episode

Political Culture

Consider the following news headlines from across the globe:

  • The Russian president proclaims that he will appoint hundreds of political officials who until then had been elected by the people, and no one in the country seems to object.
  • The Chinese government sends troops to arrest farmers who refuse to give up their land to state-sponsored developers as China continues to bolster its market economy.
  • The citizens of Mexico vote the one-party system out of its 75-year rule by selecting a president from a party on the right in 2000, but now seem to be leaning toward a leftist president candidate for 2006.
  • Almost every week, the British prime minister faces the opposition party leader toe to toe in a “question hour” that encourages even members of his own party to hurl insults at him.

How do we make sense of the actions that we read about in the news? Start by reading this