Christmas in America: European Inheritances

From Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996):

"Shall we have Christmas?" was the way one Pennsylvanian asked the question in 1810. Throughout their colonial history and well into nationhood, not only the matter of "shall" but of "how shall" Christmas be celebrated challenged Americans. Their search for answers to these two difficult and sometimes divisive issues can be found in a chronicle of evolving customs, cultural discord, and striking invention. It begins with the first European emigres, who brought to America an ambiguous legacy concerning the holiday that was almost as old as the Christian Church itself.

Christians had wrestled for centuries with questions of if, when, and how to celebrate Jesus' birth. As a commemoration of the miracle that established the Godly paternity of Jesus, Christmas was a celebration of the event upon which the existence of Christianity depended. At the same time, the festival functioned from its inception as an end-of-year substitute for pagan rites and quickly absorbed many profane elements, ones that remain among its most attractive features. As the observance of Christmas spread, the details of its celebration became as varied as the cultures that kept it and as changeable as the history of those cultures. But the radically paradoxical mix of both the sacred and the profane remained.

The earliest Christians gave little attention to Jesus' birth. They expected the Second Coming any day, and in any case viewed birthday celebrations as heathen. As the possibility of his imminent return faded, the faithful

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took a more historical perspective and began to search for evidence of the day or even season of Jesus' birth. They found no clues in the Gospels. Nor could they locate any other reliable sources to pinpoint his nativity. Undeterred, some placed his birth on May 20 and others on April 19 or 20. Clement, Bishop of Alexandria (died c. 215), nominated November 18. Hippolytus (died c. 236) calculated that Christ must have been born on Wednesday, the same day God created the sun. The De Pascba Computus, written anonymously in North Africa about 243, posited that the first day of creation coincided with the first day of spring, on March 25, and contended that Jesus' birthday fell four days later, on March 28.

Sometime in the fourth century of the Common Era, the Roman Church began to celebrate a Feast of the Nativity and to do so on December 25. A variety of issues influenced the decision. Internally, heresies plagued Church authority. Arianism, one of the most threatening, regarded Jesus as a solely human agent of God. The Church insisted on his divinity. By assigning him one human quality -- a birthday -- it appropriated some of Arianism's appeal, but sustained Jesus' place in the Holy Trinity.

The Church had also grown concerned about the increasing popularity of pagan religions and mystery cults in Rome. Each year beginning on December 17, the first day of Saturnalia, and continuing through Kalends, the first day of January, most Romans feasted, gamed, reveled, paraded, and joined in other festivities as they paid homage to their deities. The Church's alarm deepened when Emperor Aurelian, noticing that the pagan rituals had begun to converge around Mithras, the solar god, decreed in 274 C.E. that December 25, the winter solstice on the Julian Calendar, be kept as a public festival in honor of the Invincible Sun. Rome's Christians challenged paganism directly by specifying December 25, rather than some other date, as the day for their Nativity Feast.

Exactly when the Church of Rome began to keep Christmas, however, is not known. The first extant reference to the Feast of the Nativity may be as old as 336, in the earliest list of martyrs of the Roman Church. Perhaps Christmas was celebrated even earlier. Some scholars believe that Emperor Constantine (ruled 312-337 C.E.), who had converted to Christianity and built the Vatican atop the hill where the Mithras cult worshipped the sun, may have instituted the festival.

In any case, by the middle of the fourth century, the Church had boldly declared its Nativity holy day to be observed on the same day as the winter solstice. The concurrence of the two celebrations gave the Church an opportunity to turn elements of the Saturnalia itself to Christian ends. For

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example, it used the creation of the sun, the center of the Saturnalia, to reinforce and symbolize frequent scriptural and doctrinal imagery of God as the sun, and of Jesus' role as Son of God. The creation of Christmas was thus a measure of Christianity's growing power, challenging the crowds enjoying Saturnalian revelry to join the once secretive Christians in a celebration not of the birth of the sun, but rather the birth of Jesus, the Son of God.

The overlapping of Saturnalia and the Feast of the Nativity set the terms of all future debate over the Christmas festival. Its Christian aspects, at least in their most intense form, emphasized heavenly afterlife. The heathen elements absorbed into the festival affirmed life and exalted its annual renewal. The Church made no clear separations between the two perspectives. Instead, it layered profane activities with sacred ends to answer the needs, spiritual and physical, of the total person. This combination of sacred and profane made some religious leaders uncomfortable. For example, Gregory of Nazianzen (died 389) urged that "the celebration of the [Christmas] festival [be conducted] after an heavenly and not after an earthly manner" and cautioned against "feasting to excess, dancing and crowning the doors." Indeed, the paradox of purpose forged an enduring Christmas reality. As one historian succinctly characterized it: "The pagan Romans became Christians -- but the Saturnalia remained."

The custom of honoring Jesus' birth on December 25 quickly spread to the Eastern Church. By 380, Christians in Constantinople honored it as "Theophany or the Birthday." These Christians had once observed Epiphany, January 6, as a joint Feast of the Nativity and Baptism. This was the same date that popular legends held pagan gods made themselves known to humans. "Deep in the tradition of the Church's spirituality," writes John Gunstone, "was the idea that Christ's appearance in flesh was the consummation of all epiphanies." During the Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the celebration of Epiphany spread westward, but the Roman Church, with its celebration of the Nativity set in late December and its emphasis on Jesus' incarnation and divinity, recast it to commemorate the adoration of the Magi. In Constantinople, Epiphany continued to consecrate Jesus' baptism, but the Eastern Church began to mark December 25 as the day of his birth. The dual celebration, that of birth and baptism, that had defined the old holy day ceased to exist.

Over the next thousand years, the observance of Christmas followed the expanding community of Christianity. By 432, Egyptians kept it. By the end of the sixth century, Christianity had taken the holiday far northward

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and into England. During the next two hundred years in Scandinavia it became fused with the pagan Norse feast season known as Yule, the time of year also known as the Teutonic "Midwinter." Sometime around the Norman incursion in 1050, the Old English word Christes maesse (festival of Christ) entered the English language, and as early as the twelfth century "Xmas" had come into use. From the thirteenth century on, nearly all Europe kept Jesus' birth.

The tension between the folk and ecclesiastical qualities of the holy day did not ease with the advance of Christmas-keeping. Documents of the Middle Ages, Tristram Coffin has noted, were "fat with decrees against the abuses of Christmas merriment," an indication "that people at large [were] doing just what they ha[d] always done and paying little attention to the debates of the moralists." Some clergy stressed that fallen humankind needed a season of abandon and excess, as long as it was carried on under the umbrella of Christian supervision. Others argued that all vestiges of paganism must be removed from the holiday. Less fervent Christians complained about the unreasonableness of Church law and its attempts to change custom. Yet the Church sustained the hope that sacred would eventually overtake profane as pagans gave up their revels and turned to Christianity.

These conflicts continued during the Protestant Reformation, but with little promise of resolution. In England, the Anglican Church repeatedly, but with little success, tried to gain control over the day. Its custom had been to begin Christmas on December 16 (known as "O Sapientia") and celebrate for nine days. But during King Alfred's reign (871-899 C.E.), a law passed extending the celebration to twelve days, ending on Epiphany.

Celebrants devoted much of the season to pagan pleasures that were discouraged during the remainder of the year. The annual indulgence in eating, dancing, singing, sporting, card playing, and gambling escalated to magnificent proportions. By the seventeenth century, under the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts, the Christmas season featured elaborate masques, mummeries, and pageants. In 1607, King James I insisted that a play be acted on Christmas night and that the court indulge in games. One account of an evening's "moderate dinner" noted a first course of sixteen dishes. In 1626, the Duke of Buckingham found that the captains, masters, boatswains, gunners, and carpenters of three ships had abandoned their service in favor of Christmas revels, leaving their vessels prey to any enemy. In

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1633, the four Inns of Court presented a masque, The Triumph of Peace," at a cost of £20,000.

It fell to Puritan reformers to put a stop to the unholy merriment and to bend arguments over the proper keeping of Christmas into an older and more basic one -- whether there should even be an observance of the day. Defying the decision of the Anglican Convocation of 1562 to maintain the church calendar, the Puritans struck Christmas, along with all saints' days, from their own list of holy days. The Bible, they held, expressly commanded keeping only the Sabbath. That would be their practice as well.

In taking the offensive against Christmas-keeping, Puritans distributed colorful diatribes against the excesses of the holiday. Philip Stubbes's Anatomy of Abuses (1583) condemned revelous celebrants as "hel hounds" in a "Deville's daunce" of merriment. William Prynne's Histriomastix (1633) inveighed against plays, masques, balls, and the decking of houses with greens. "Into what a stupendous height of more than pagan impiety. . . have we not now degenerated!" he lamented. Christmas, he thought, ought to be "rather a day of mourning than rejoicing," not a time spent in "amorous mixt, voluptuous, unchristian, that I say not pagan, dancing, to God's, to Christ's dishonour, religion's scandal, chastities' shipwracke and sinne's advantage."

Even as Puritan condemnation of Christmas intensified, the economic and social upheaval of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had begun to alter English life. The standing social order, along with the paternalism of its manor system, was crumbling. Christmas, in its role as a part of the old structure, could not escape unscathed. In some years, the lavish celebrations lapsed. In many cases, the emphases of the holiday changed. It transformed, in the words of J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, into "a symbol for hospitality towards the poor, an understanding between the different levels of society, and happier and more prosperous times in now neglected villages." King Charles I (1625-1649) went so far as to direct his noblemen and gentry to return to their landed estates in midwinter in order to keep up their old style of Christmas generosity.

The rise of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Commonwealth dealt another staggering blow to England's Christmas celebrations. Parliament outlawed seasonal plays in 1642. It ordered that the monthly fast, which coincidentally fell on Christmas in 1644, be kept. Parliament purposely met on every Christmas from 1644 to 1652. In 1647, it declared Christmas a day of penance, not feasting, and in 1652 "strongly prohibited" its observance.

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Ministers who preached on the Nativity risked imprisonment. Churchwardens faced fines for decorating their churches. By law, shops stayed open on Christmas as if it were any regular business day.

Yet resistance was not uncommon. One year, protesting Londoners decorated churches and shops with swags of bay, rosemary, box, holly, privit, and ivy, only to watch the Lord Mayor and City Marshal ride about setting fire to their handiwork. The populace "so roughly used" the merchants who ventured to open shop in 1646 that the shopkeepers petitioned Parliament for protection. In Canterbury, when the Lord Mayor ordered that the markets be kept open that Christmas, a "serious disturbance ensued . . . wherein many were severly hurt."

It was within this particularly turbulent era that English Christmas customs entered early Virginia and New England. Most settlers and adventurers arriving in the New World welcomed Christmas as a day of respite from the routines of work and hardship. Some observed it, at least in part, as a holy day. Others attempted to feast. On Christmas, 1608, Captain John Smith and his men, having endured for "six or seven dayes the extreame winde, rayne, frost and snow" as they traveled among the Indians of Virginia colony, "were never more merry, nor fed on more plentie of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-foule, and good bread; nor never had better fires in England." Maryland-bound passengers aboard the Ark in 1633 "so immoderately" drank wine on Christmas that "the next day 30 sickened of feve[r]s and whereof about a dozen died afterward."

Only Dissenters tried to ignore the holiday. The Mayflower Pilgrims, who arrived at Plymouth in December 1620, spent Christmas building "the first house for commone use to receive them and their goods." Within a year, however, the Pilgrims themselves had to face dissent. On the morning of December 25, 1621, less reform-minded newcomers to the colony "excused them selves and said it wente against their consciences to work on that day." Governor William Bradford allowed the "lusty yonge" Englishmen to rest, saying he "would spare them till they were better informed." But at noon he found them playing games in the street. Angered, Bradford told the frolickers that it ran against bis conscience that they should play while others worked. If they desired to keep Christmas as a matter of devotion they should stay in their houses, he said, "but ther should be no gameing or revelling in the streets." Nor did the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony observe Christmas. Governor John Winthrop

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entered nothing in his diary on his first Christmas in America in 1630, and in succeeding years he attempted to suppress the holiday.

In the early non-English settlements, sparse evidence points to a more traditional attitude toward the holiday. In 1604, for instance, French settlers of St. Croix Island, off the coast of Maine, held religious services and spent the remainder of Christmas Day playing games. In 1686 LaSalle's French colony on Garcita Creek celebrated what was probably the first Christmas in Texas. "[W]e first kept the Christmas Holy-Days. The Midnight Mass was sung, and on Twelve-Day, we cry'd The king drinks . . . tho' we had only Water...."

As the first settlements grew into more established communities, patterns of Christmas celebration peculiar to the colonies began to appear. Geographic separation from European homelands, the proximity of disparate religious and ethnic groups to each other, and the hardship of new beginnings disrupted old habits and holidays. In Dutch New Amsterdam, early in the seventeenth century, eighteen languages could be heard among the 500 or so inhabitants. Numerous Christmases abounded, persisting as an expression of individual heritages. In large towns, where various groups lived close together, the common ground for celebration could often be found in public and secular rather than in potentially divisive religious areas. Thus, Christmas, although widely celebrated, retained little importance in society as a whole precisely because of religious and cultural diversity.

Particularly in the middle colonies, a wide range of ethnicities and religions prevented a shared ecclesiastic and religious holiday. Pennsylvania Quakers scorned Christmas as adamantly as Puritans did. Huguenots, Moravians, Dutch Reformed, and Anglicans, who also lived in the colony, all kept Christmas in their own way. Shortly after Americans had won their independence, Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker herself, divided Philadelphians into three categories. There were Quakers, who "make no more account of it [Christmas] than another day," those who were religious, and the rest who "spend it in riot and dissipation."

"Frolicking," the name many gave to this sort of boisterous Christmas and New Year's fun, could be found throughout the colonies. In the New England countryside, revelous intruders entered houses with a speech and swords at Christmas time. Far into the eighteenth century, masked merrymakers roved Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley "making sport for everyone." Southerners shot guns, a custom similar to one practiced in northern England.

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The antecedents to this seasonal phenomenon have been traced to Roman times, when early Christians, seeking to ridicule pagan superstition and the Roman custom of masquerading, masked themselves on New Year's Day. Many, however, flagged in their intent and joined in the heathens' frolics. Church officials attempted to persuade members to desist, but failed. In time, even clergy could be found in full disguise, taking part in miracle and mystery plays performed during the Christmas season.

The convention of disguising, or mumming, and performing plays and skits dispersed throughout nearly all European countries. In England, beginning under the reign of Edward III (1327-1377), it became a form of royal entertainment. It peaked in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when elaborate dress and formal presentations, such as Ben Johnson's Masque of Christmas and that in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, were the order of the season. Enthusiasm for court masques diminished thereafter, dampened by the Puritan Directory. But the tradition of masquerading and mumming continued to thrive in more rustic forms. In parts of England, householders, family, guests, and servants donned masks and painted their faces or darkened them with soot to become "guisers," "geese-dancers," or "morris dancers." Often they dressed as animals. Sometimes men and women exchanged clothes with each other. Disguised, they played crude tricks on one another, or went from house to house and entered without permission. There they might dance, sing, feast, and act "a rude drama," mocking propriety and challenging the social order.

American colonists engaged in similar antics, though usually without the performance of even a rudimentary play. They concentrated instead on disguises, noisy good humor, and chaotic peregrinations through neighborhoods. Across the land, revelers, almost always males, gathered to shoot off firecrackers and guns, paraded with musical instruments, call from house to house in garish disguise, and beg for food and drink on December 25 and, in some places, on New Year's.

Such frolics, drawn from the custom of English Anglicans, as well as those of Swedish, German, and other settlers, were especially prominent in New York and Pennsylvania. Samuel Breck remembered maskers from his Pennsylvania childhood in the late eighteenth century. "They were a set of the lowest blackguards," he wrote, "who, disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces, went from house to house in large companies, . . . obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen, [and] would demean themselves with great insolence." As the elder Breck and his friends

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played cards, Samuel had watched the mummers "take possession of a table, seat themselves on rich furniture and proceed to handle the cards, to the great annoyance of the company." He could only get rid of them by "giv[ing] them money, and listening) patiently to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them . . ."

Usually an informal code regulated the mummers' reception. According to one set of rules, "the proper custom" had been to ask the uninvited guests "into the house and regale them with mulled cider, or small beer, and home-made cakes," or "give the leading mummers a few pence as a dole, which . . . they would 'pool,' and buy cakes and beer." One never "address[ed] or otherwise recognize[d] the mummer by any other name than the name of the character he was assuming.

In New York, the calling ritual varied slightly. Men had gone from house to house, firing their guns, on New Year's Day since "time immemorial." At each place, after being invited in for food and drink, the men of the household joined them. "[T]hus they went on increasing their numbers until the whole neighborhood had been saluted and visited. . . . " The remainder of the day the shooters engaged in contests of marksmanship and other sports. At least one, the "very barbarous amusement" of "Shooting Turkeys," required a keen eye and sharp betting skills.

The southern colonies, largely rural and unhampered by Quaker and Puritan dissenters and whose white population was comparatively less diverse, cultivated Christmases of a very different sort. Decentralized living, a dearth of women, and a high death rate kept the holiday at bay during the first decades of settlement. As social and political conditions stabilized, southerners began to look to England for models of dress, manner, and social behavior. Their Christmas, like that of the English manor, evolved as an interval of leisure rather than a set of rituals assigned to one particular day. During the season, Virginians, Carolinians, and Marylanders especially enjoyed dancing, but also engaged in card playing, cock fighting, nine-pins, and horse racing. Anglicanism, the established religion in most of the planting colonies, did not pressure its members into sacred observance.

While southerners may have aspired to recreate a sense of the English Christmas, its authentic reproduction eluded them. No pre-Revolutionary account mentions boars' heads or wassail bowls, mummers or waits. In England those traditions had been on the wane when John Smith first ventured through Virginia, and by the 1650s had been mortally threatened

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by Cromwell's Parliament. A French traveler, who along with his entourage of nearly twenty stopped unannounced at the Virginia home of Colonel William Fitzhugh in 1680, left one of the few accounts from the seventeenth century. "[T]here was good wine and all kinds of beverages, so there was a great deal of carousing," the visitor wrote. For entertainment, Fitzhugh provided "three fiddlers, a jester, a tight-rope walker, and an acrobat who tumbled around." When the travelers left the next day, Fitzhugh sent wine and punch to the river's edge for them and then lent them his boat.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, tales of Virginia Christmases had spread back to England and began to create an aura of romance around the South. "All over the Colony, a universal Hospitality reigns," London Magazine reported in 1746; "full Tables and open Doors, the kind salute, the generous Detention, speak somewhat like the old Roast-beef Ages of our Fore-fathers. ... Strangers are fought after with Greediness, as they pass the Country, to be invited."

Evidence of eighteenth-century Christmas celebrations is nearly as scarce as for the seventeenth. Best known is the Christmas chronicled by Philip Vickers Fithian, a Presbyterian tutor from New Jersey. Fithian spent a single Christmas season, in 1773, at Nomini Hall, a plantation owned by Robert Carter, one of the wealthiest Tidewater planters. The first sign of the season he recorded occurred on Monday, December 18; students barred one of Fithian's colleagues from teaching school until "twelfth-day" (January 6), a custom known throughout the British Commonwealth. However, Fithian continued to teach, noting proudly that his "scholars are a more quiet nature, and have consented to have four or five Days now, and to have their full Holiday in May next. . . . "

Excitement built as the holiday approached. "Nothing is now to be heard of in conversation, but the Balls, the Fox-hunts, the fine entertainments, and the good fellowship . . . ," Fithian wrote on the 18th. His entry for Christmas Day began, "Guns fired all round the House," after which the various "Servants" who regularly attended him greeted him with "Joyful Christmas." He rewarded them with the expected small change and a donation to a "Christmas Box." As for Christmas dinner, Fithian noted that it "was no otherwise than common yet as elegant" as any he had ever attended. Not until the following Sunday, December 26, did he and the Carters go to church. The minister "preach'd from Isaiah 9.6 For unto us a child is Born &c. his sermon was fifteen Minutes long! very fashion-

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able—," but few attended. Fithian reopened his school the following Wednesday, December 29. The holidays at Nomini Hall had ended.

Not all southerners partook of the sumptuous Christmases reported in London or witnessed by Fithian. Neither ritually exacting nor regularly held, the holiday on each plantation seemed to have its own style of celebration. In 1709, William Byrd began Christmas by attending church, where he "received the sacrament with great devoutness." Afterward, he dined on roast beef with friends and "in the evening we were merry with nonsense and so were my servants. . . . " The following year he spent Christmas quite differently, reading a sermon and dining alone. Thomas Jefferson rarely mentioned Christmas. George Washington frequently spent his holiday hunting and settling such year-end financial matters as renewing the terms of indenture for his servants, and attending church.

Perhaps, as Julian Boyd has suggested, the Enlightenment, which uprooted superstitions and redefined social classes, prevented a precise duplication of an English Christmas. Indeed, there may even have been some attempt to rationalize the Christmas festival. In December 1739, the Virginia Gazette briefly recounted a history of the holiday, noting that some Christians "celebrate this Season in a Mixture of Piety and Licentiousness," others "in a pious Way only," others "behave themselves profusely and extravagantly alone." The last category was comprised of the many who "pass over the Holy Time, without paying any Regard to it at all." The writer concluded that "On the whole, they who will be over-religious at this Time, must be pardoned and pitied; they who are falsely religious, censured; they who are downright criminal, condemned; and the Little Liberties of the old Roman December, which are taken by the Multitude, ought to be overlooked and excused, for an Hundred Reasons. . . . "

This broadly permissive approach to Christmas contrasted sharply with prevailing attitudes in New England. Like their forebears in England, the Puritan leaders of New England sought to expunge the holiday altogether. Their struggle betokened a broader battle against growing numbers of non-Puritans in the region and periodic intervention in religious affairs on the part of the Crown.

The entry of non-Puritans began at the founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and increasingly presented a problem as displaced English workers, many of them Anglican, bolstered the labor-short economies. At first, Puritans relied on what one historian called the "infor-

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mal pressure of like minded co-religionists" to quell the observance of Jesus' birth. But this strategy proved inadequate. In 1659, in an atmosphere of tension over Anglicanism, other heresies, new trade, and general disarray, the Massachusetts Bay General Court banned the keeping of Christmas by "forebearing of labour, feasting, or any other way." The law aimed to prevent the recurrence of further, unspecified "disorders" which had apparently arisen in "seurerall places ... by reason of some still observing such Festiualls," and provided that "whosoeuer shall be found observing any such day as Xmas or the like . . . " would be fined.

Pressure from England contributed to the troubled atmosphere. All of the once forbidden holiday rites had begun to be practiced once again during the Restoration in Britain, in forms more extreme than before. As early as 1665, Charles II demanded that Massachusetts rescind its anti-Christmas law to reflect these changes. Finally in 1681, Massachusetts issued a repeal, citing as a reason that a ban on Christmas would be a derogation of the King's honor. Still, in 1686, Puritan militants barred newly appointed English Governor Andros from holding his Christmas services in their meeting house and forced him to move to the Boston Town Hall.

The renewed English fervor for the raucous excesses of Christmas began to wane almost as rapidly as it had revived, while New England's Puritan leadership gave little indication that it had gained much tolerance for the holiday. "[M]en dishonour Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides," wrote Increase Mather in his diary. He reiterated the case against Christmas in A Testimony Against Several Profane and Superstitious Customs Now Practiced by Some in New England, a tract published in England in 1687. "In the Apostolical times," Mather wrote, "the Feast of the Nativity was not observed. ... It can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25. ... The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day. ... It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonourable to the Name of Christ."

Increase's son Cotton escalated the rhetoric against the holiday by making more explicit the fearful connection between Christmas and sin. He even linked it to Salem's witchcraft. "On the twenty-fifth of December it was," he wrote, "that Mercy [Short] said, They were going to have a Dance; and immediately those that were attending her, most plainly Heard and Felt a Dance, as of Barefooted People, upon the Floor. . . . " Mather

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later denounced the holiday in more general terms. "I hear a Number of people of both Sexes, belonging, many of them to my Flock, who have had on Christmas-night, this last Week, a Frolick, a revelling Feast, and Ball, which discovers their Corruption, and has a Tendency to corrupt them yett more, and provoke the Holy One to give them up into eternal Hardness of Heart."

Despite his strong tone, Cotton Mather did not forthrightly condemn Christmas itself. Like Bradford, who in 1621 had stopped the newcomers' street revelry, he expressed more concern for the liberties taken during the celebration of Christmas than for the fact of celebration. Calling the merrymaking an "affront unto the grace of God," he tacitly turned the question of "should" to one of "how" to hallow Jesus' birth. "Can you in your consciences think that our holy saviour is honored by mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude revelling, by a mass fit for none but a Saturn or a Bacchus, or the light of Mahametan Romandon?" he asked. "Shall it be said that at the birth of our Saviour ... we take the time to please the hellish legions and to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?"

In all, Christmas became a point at which Puritan piety and autonomy grated against English custom, British authority, and Anglican influence. Bostonians, for example, openly repudiated Anglicanism by refusing to close their businesses on Christmas. "Carts come to Town and Shops open as is usual," Judge Samuel Sewall noted on December 24, 1685 (and nearly every year after). That same year Sewall smugly noted that he thought the British colonial officials were "vexed . . . that the Body of the People profane it [Christmas]," and thanked God that there was "no Authority yet to compell them [i.e. Puritans] to keep it." The Crown-appointed governor twice took Sewall aside in 1722 to discuss recessing the General Court on Christmas. Sewall opposed adjournment, but suggested (after a discussion with Cotton Mather) that the matter be voted on by the Council and Representatives. The governor took the opposite side, arguing that "All kept Christmas" except the Puritans. Provoked, Sewall responded: "the Dissenters came a great way for their/Liberties and now the [Anglican] Church had theirs, yet they could not be contented, except they might Tread all others down." Ultimately, the governor ignored Sewall's entreaty and closed the court on Saturday until the following Wednesday, December 26.

Others besides the British government challenged the Puritans on Christmas. Holiday rituals in observing churches attracted a fair number of

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putative Calvinists at Christmastide. Ebenezer Miller, graduate of Harvard but recently ordained an Anglican, Sewall noted in 1727, "keeps the day in his New church at Braintrey: people flock thither." On another occasion he spoke to a Mr. Newman "about his partaking with the French church on the 25th of December, on account of its being Christmas, as they abusively call it." Congregational ministers countered by ordering fasts on Christmas Day and tried in other ways to show their disregard for the festival. One spent the Sunday preceding Christmas outlining his proof that the celebration of Jesus' birth was "Popery and prelatic tyranny, a destroyer of consciences."

In the end, whether slowly in New England or more rapidly in the middle colonies and the South, the forces of pluralism and the need for social harmony shaped and encouraged Christmas celebration. Yet its status as a holiday remained haphazard and varied widely. Like the colonies in general on the eve of the Revolution, regions and communities were as notable for their different approaches to the holiday as for their commonalities. It would take the project of nation-building in the wake of the Revolution to begin to define an American conception of Christmas.

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How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine

Brit nationalist blogger John of Gwent has written about the situation in Britain of ethnic minorities needing more organs for transplant than they provide to the organ bank, yet another subsidy we provide for the parasite groups. Unsurprisingly, the situation in America is the same, and yet still there is the complaint that Blacks suffer discrimination in the organ donor process, an issue reported on in Sally Satel, P.C. M.D. : How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine (New York, Basic Books, 2000), chapter 6, ‘Race and Medicine’:

According to new conventional wisdom … [a] mismatch in race between doctor and patient - especially when the doctor is white and the patient is not - may be enough to trigger subtle, or not so subtle, biases that result in second-rate medical treatment and poorer health. “It is increasingly evident that African-Americans and other minority patients have strong grounds for doubting both the goodwill and the color-blindness of White medical practitioners,”

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writes Kenneth DeVille of the Department of Medical Humanities at the East Carolina University School of Medicine. No less authoritative a voice than the American Medical Association’s official newspaper has claimed that “growing body of research reports that racial disparities in health status can be explained, at least in part, by racism and discrimination within the health care system itself.” This is why, according to the Reverend Al Sharpton, health will be the “new civil rights battlefront,” a prediction echoed by other black leaders, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, NAACP chairman Julian Bond and the Congressional Black Caucus.

In a 1998 radio address delivered during Black History Month, President Clinton spoke of race and health, “Nowhere are the divisions of race and ethnicity more sharply drawn than in the health of our people.” It is indeed true that black Americans are less healthy than whites and Asians on a number of measures, such as life expectancy, infant mortality and death from cancer. This often remains true even when insurance coverage is taken into account. Beyond these facts, the president could only speculate when he said that perhaps one of the reasons for racial disparities is “discrimination in the delivery of health services.”

Given the history of systematic racial discrimination and segregation in the health care system, lingering bias seems, at first, plausible. Black patients were treated in separate and inferior hospital wards - a policy that persisted at many hospitals in the Deep South until the late 1960s. Once routinely barred from joining hospital staffs and medical societies, black physicians started their own institutions to treat other blacks who were denied adequate care by the white-controlled medical facilities. As late as the mid-1960s several medical schools had restrictions against admitting black students.

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[…] Decades later however, accusations of medical bias still linger… In the fall of 1999 the US. Commission on Civil Rights informed Congress and the White House that “racism continues to infect the health care system.” Earlier that year an official of the Association of American Medical Colleges commented on physicians’ unwitting biases. “Most doctors think they are fair,” he told the Boston Globe. “That they carry bias is very hard for them to think about.”

For her part, Leslie Pickering Francis, a medical ethicist at the University of Utah, prefers to believe that “racism [is] the presumptive cause of health care problems minorities face” until there is evidence to the contrary. This view is increasingly common - not too surprising considering the habit nowadays of presuming that discrimination inevitably lies beneath the surface of any race-related difference in social outcome. But evidence suggests that many race-related differences in health are not what they seem to observers like Professor Francis, Reverend Sharpton and the Commission on Civil Rights.

The charge of physician bias against minority patients is often made reflexively, overlooking the myriad complicated reasons for differences in care. In this chapter I present evidence that supports other interpretations of “health disparities” as they are often called. As we will see, the race-related differences that do exist in both access to health care and in health status are better understood - and remedied - from the vantage points of clinical need and health care financing - not race politics.

Do Physicians Treat Minority Patients Differently?

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999 described differences in the treatment of lung cancer between black and white patients who were beneficiaries of Medicare insurance. In a careful analysis, Peter B. Bach and his colleagues cat Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City looked at the records of more than ten thousand patients who received diagnoses of operable lung cancer. Seventy-seven percent of the white patients underwent surgery compared with 64 percent of the black patients. Five years after diagnosis, only one-quarter of black patients were still alive compared to one-third of whites.

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What accounts for the different rates of surgery? Did doctors not suggest the treatment as often to their black patients, or did these patients more often refuse the recommendation for surgery? Were the black patients more likely to have poor lung function, such as more carbon dioxide build-up, or other problems that would have prohibited surgery or contributed to earlier demise? Details like these are crucial in explaining why surgery was used less for black patients and why death rates differed, but those were not the questions that Bach and his colleagues set out to answer. Indeed, the authors themselves said they could not offer an explanation for different rates of surgery based on the kinds of data they collected.

Other physicians, however, were ready with hypotheses. “Possibly, physicians are treating cancer patients not just based upon their illness and recommended treatment, but on the basis of their race,” suggested Dr. Hugh Stallworth of the American Cancer Society. A more emphatic reaction greeted a report in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that 74 percent of white patients with fractures of the extremities received pain medication in the emergency room compared with 57 percent of black patients. “I think it’s racism, flat out,” said Dr, Lewis Goldfrank, director of emergency services at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

Responses like these would probably not surprise John Landsverk of Children’s Hospital in San Diego. As he observes: “The usual implication of such disparities (in treatment rates) is that the health care system is biased against persons of the ethnic minority group and that the bias is likely to be found even in professional clinicians’ perceptions of clinical problems and (referrals for) clinical procedures.”

In light of this, Landsverk is especially enthusiastic about one study led by a group of doctors from the University of Pittsburgh that found no race-related differences in the treatment of children with behavioral problems. Their report appeared in the journal Medical Care one month after

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Bach’s study that attracted little public attention. It should have: it was “an important nonfinding,” as Landsverk notes in an accompanying editorial in the same journal. Not only did the Pittsburgh study include a very large sample - almost fifteen thousand children treated in clinics across the country and Canada - but most important, the researchers interviewed the parent and doctor of every patient. The results: the race and ethnicity of the child had no relationship to clinician patterns of drug prescribing, referral or diagnosis of behavioral problems. The clinicians also reported spending slightly more time with minority children than with their white counterparts.

The handful of studies just discussed gives a taste of the challenges inherent in interpreting health disparities data. First, the vast majority of treatment disparity studies are what scientists call “retrospective.” That is, the raw data already exist in hospital records, and researchers use them (in retrospect) to explore a specific question. (For example, are there more visits to emergency rooms on nights with a full moon?) The disadvantage of this approach is that key questions cannot be asked directly of the very people being studied: for example, in the case of the lung cancer study, did subjects want or refuse a specific treatment? Did their physicians offer it, and if not, why? Second, as Landsverk’s reaction to the University of Pittsburgh study suggests, the absence of alleged racial bias does not make news. Consider the following example of a study that made a media splash the first time around.

A Misdiagnosed Case of Physician Bias

Cardiac catheterization is a procedure used to discern whether there is blockage in the coronary arteries - the vessels that feed blood to the heart itself - and thus whether the patient is at risk for a heart attack. The delicate process involves introducing a catheter into an artery in the leg and threading it upward toward the heart. When it reaches the point near the apex of the heart where the coronary arteries branch off, dye is squirted in, and the arterial patterns show up on a real-time X-ray. This is generally the first step in determining whether the vessels can be opened wider

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using a tiny balloon (balloon angioplasty) or whether some or all of the vessels must be replaced in a bypass operation.

Struck by the observation that black patients undergo catheterization less often than whites, Dr, Kevin A. Schulman and others at Georgetown University Medical Center wanted to examine how doctors make their decisions to refer patients for the procedure. The researchers recruited 720 general internists at medical conventions and asked them to participate in a study of clinical decision-making. The internists were not told that a primary purpose of the study was to explore how the race and sex of the patient might affect those decision, or that the researchers expected to find that African Americans (and women) would be referred for cardiac catheterization less frequently than white men.

The doctors watched a video of actors wearing hospital gowns and answering questions posed to them by an interviewer who elicited their complaints about chest pain and other relevant medical and personal history. The viewing doctors were informed of the actor-patients’ insurance types and their occupations. All the questions asked of the actors and their responses, down to the gestures they used in describing their symptoms, were scripted to minimize inconsistencies. As a group, the doctors, most of whom were white, viewed 144 different videotapes, one for every possible combination of race (black or white), sex (male or female), and age (fifty-five and seventy years old), and including different clinical variables, like the nature of the chest pain and EKG and stress test results. Individual doctors were shown one randomly selected video.

Next, the physicians were asked whether the patients’ complaints appeared to reflect heart disease or another kind of distress, such as indigestion, and to rate the likelihood that the pain was indeed heart-related. As it turned out, all eight actor-patients received similar ratings from the doctors, leading the authors to assume the doctors would refer the catheterization at similar rates as well. Yet this did not happen; according to Schulman, “women and blacks [in the study] were less likely to be referred for cardiac catheterization than men and whites.” Doctors did not refer white men about 9 percent of the time, while the black actor-patients

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and women of both races did not get referred 15 percent of the time. If representative of actual clinical outcomes, Schulman told the media, this would mean that blacks are “40 percent less likely to be referred for cardiac catheterization compared to whites.” He misspoke, however; what it really would mean is that white patients have a forty percent lower chance of not being referred. Quite a difference, as we will see.

These findings were presented in an article titled “The Effect of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Recommendations for Cardiac Catheterization,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 1999. Schulman and his associates speculate:

Our findings that the race and sex of the patient influence the recommendations of physicians independently of other factors may suggest bias on the part of the physicians. However, our study could not assess the form of bias. Bias may represent overt prejudice on the part of the physicians, or, more likely, could be the result of subconscious perceptions rather than deliberate actions or thoughts. Subconscious bias occurs when a patient’s membership in a target group automatically activates a cultural stereotype in the physician’s memory regardless of the level of prejudice the physician has.

The study was a media sensation. On ABC’s World News This Morning, Juju Chang told viewers, “How your doctor treats your heart may depend on the color of your skin … The bias shows up in the diagnosis and the doctors don’t even realize it.” Peter Jennings predicted that the study would make “political waves” because it showed that “prejudice among doctors causes a gap in the quality of health care between blacks and whites.”

On Nightline, Ted Koppel set up the story like this: “Last night we told you how the town of Jasper, Texas, is coming to terms with being the place where a black man was dragged to his death behind a truck by an avowed racist. Tonight we’re going to focus on [doctors] … who would be shocked to learn that what they do routinely fits quite easily into the category of racist behavior.” Newspaper headlines echoed the theme:

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“Cardiac Testing: Study Finds Women, Blacks are Being Shortchanged,” the Chicago Tribune said. “Health Care: It’s Better if You’re White,” announced The Economist. And all the articles repreated Schulman’s claim that blacks were forty percent less likely to be referred.

Some of the most intense - indeed, self-flagellating - reactions came from the medical profession itself. An editorial in the Lancet, Britain’s foremost medical journal saw the findings as being “as close to a definition of institutional racism as doctors and health-care providers may dare to get.” Aubrey Lewis, a Long Island cardiologist warned on Nightline that “if this [physician bias] continues on, you’re looking at literally a decimation of the African American population.”

No-one seemed to notice another article, published earlier that same February, in the Annals of Internal Medicine by the Harvard researcher Lucian L. Leape and his colleagues. In their evaluation of thirteen New York city hospitals. Leape’s group found that African American patients are as likely to undergo cardiac bypass or balloon angioplasty as whites and Hispanics, and in some hospitals more likely to receive a recommendation for these procedures.

A Second, Sober Look at Schulman’s Study

A careful look at the work of Schulman and his colleagues reveals a number of intriguing things. One is the doctors’ impressions of the subjects: one might be surprised to find that they found the white actor-patients to be the least agreeable. When asked, for example, to rate their impressions of the subjects’ personal characteristics, the doctors rated the white men as more “hostile” and gave them the lowest ratings on scales that ranged from “ignorant” (lowest score) to “knowledgeable” highest score” and from “poor communicator” to “good communicator.” Similarly, doctors judged white men to be more “dependent” than their black counterparts, more “sad,” more “negative” in disposition, more “worried” and more “likely to over-report symptoms.”

Finally, the white males were judged “most likely to sue.” With such a litigious profile, one might have expected white men to be over-referred by physicians in order to avoid malpractice lawsuits.

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The second revelation came six months after the Schulman study appeared, when the New England Journal of Medicine itself published a powerful rebuttal. Lisa M. Schwartz, Steven Woloshin and H. Gilbert Welch, all physicians at the White River Junction Veterans Administration Hospital in Vermont, reanalyzed Schulman’s data and showed that the actual referral rates for three of the four groups were in fact the same. White men, white women and black men were all referred by nine in ten doctors. Only black women, for reasons that remain unclear, had a lower referral rate: about eight in ten. Put another way, the black women were eighty-eight percent as likely as white women and men of both races to be referred for catheterization in the actor-patient study.

The doctors from White River Junction also expressed dismay at what might be called the statistical sleight-of-hand that Schulman and his colleagues used to support their hypothesis of physician referral bias in favour of white men. It was only because Schulman and colleagues combined the referral rates for black men (91 percent) and black women (79 percent) to yield an 85 percent black referral rate that they could conclude that the racial differences were so marked. This maneuver led to the “mistaken impression that blacks had a forty percent lower probability of referral than whites, whereas, in fact, the probability of referral for blacks was 7 percent lower,” wrote the White River Junction doctors. “These exaggerations serve only to fuel anger and undermine the trust between physicians and their patients.” Schwartz and her colleagues were not alone in expressing concern; the NEJM editors published a note in the same issue regretting that they had not required the authors to use more straightforward statistical measures. “We take responsibility for the media’s overinterpretation of [this] article … The evidence of racism and sexism in [the Schulman] study was overstated,” the editors wrote.

Nevertheless, even after seeing how his findings had been interpreted by the press and used to goad racial resentments, Schulman wouldn’t budge. “Our study … will encourage the medical profession to seek ways to eliminate unconscious bias that may influence physicians’ clinical decision,” he maintained. Schulman also met with the Congressional Black Caucus at its invitation and briefed the members on bias in the health care

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system. Also sticking with Schulman’s interpretation was Paul Douglass, a cardiologist at Morehouse school of medicine. “You can argue with statistics all day,” he told USA Today. “We have to face the reality of our situation: there is a gender and racial bias.” Compared with the tidal wave of coverage triggered by the Schulman study, the article by Schwartz and her colleagues generated a mere trickle of media interest, as noted by the columnist John Leo and the media magazine Brill’s Content.

Alternative Explanations for Differences in Treatment

Less eye-catching than accusations of bias are the everyday aspects of clinical care that account for many of the recorded disparities. For example, one reason procedure rates differ is that medical problems do not necessarily occur with the same frequency across races. [..] Consider these facts: uterine fibroid tumors, and thus hysterectomies, are more common in black women than in whites, while osteoporosis-related fractures, and thus hip-replacement are rarer. Limb amputation is more common among black patients, typically because thicker atherosclerosis of the blood vessels in the leg makes it harder to perform limb-saving surgery.

African Americans suffer stroke at many times the rate of whites yet undergo a procedure to unclog arteries in the neck (endarterectomy) only one-fourth as often. Racism? Unlikely. Some studies have documented a greater aversion to surgery and other invasive procedures among African American patients, but the more substantial reason, in the case of endarterectomy, is clinical. It turns out that whites tend to have their obstructions in the large, superficial carotid arteries of the neck region, which are readily accessible to surgery. Blacks, by comparison, tend to have their blockages in the branches of the carotids. These smaller vessels run deeper and further up into the head where the surgeon cannot reach them.

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Thus, even without financial obstacles, an African American patient at high risk for stroke is far less likely than a white counterpart to undergo endarterectomy. Yet indoctrinologists like David R. Williams, a sociologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, are quick to turn this disparity into evidence of bias. After all, they argue, if money is not an issue, then the difference in treatment must represent bias on the part of the doctors. American Medical News, the newspaper of the American Medical Association, gives voice to this view: “National studies, such as the one that examined care at Dept. of Veterans Affairs medical facilities - where all of the patients have comparable insurance coverage - suggest ‘racial disparities in the quality of medical care do not merely reflect the behavior of a few bad apples,’ Dr. Williams said. ‘The evidence is too overwhelming and the pattern is too pervasive.’ ”

Williams seems not to consider a different interpretation: the patients’ clinical needs rather than the doctors’ personal biases are dictating the care. Think about it. If not for concern about the patient (many of whom are treated in private hospitals and have medical insurance), why wouldn’t physicians perform a reimbursable procedure?

Another consideration in performing procedures is the clinical condition of the patient. Does he have other medical problems that alter the risk-to-benefit ratio of a procedure and make the outcome less favorable? The treatment of heart disease, for example, often needs to be modified in the presence of uncontrolled high blood pressure and diabetes - conditions more typical of black patients with heart disease than of their white counterparts.

Then there is the site of care itself. Some hospitals simply do not offer certain cardiac procedures, such as bypass grafts or balloon angioplasty. Examining a sample taken from New York City hospitals, Dr. Lucian L. Leape of the Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues found that about one-fifth of all patients needing these procedures do not get them, largely because those hospitals do not offer them. Leape found that failure to recommend these procedures - and hence to transfer a patient to a hospital where it could be performed - is equal across all groups of black, white and Hispanic patients. Conversely, when medical care is readily available for special patient populations (for example the veterans’

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affairs medical centers or the military service), racial differences in treatment and outcome can melt away. For example, veterans with colorectal and prostate cancer show no race-related differences in treatment availability, treatment methods or survival rates.

Fairness and Kidney Transplantation

Patients’ attititudes toward illness and care also play a role in determining the treatment they receive. The nature of their belief in their personal susceptibility to disease, the seriousness with which they perceive disease, their confidence that the treatment will work - and even that the medical system is benign - are all relevant. Differences in health benefits account for some of the reluctance in the African American community to donate (and sometimes receive) kidneys, according to Dr. Clive O. Callender, head of transplant surgery at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, DC.

Callender tells me that, compared to whites, African American patients are less trustful that they will be well cared for, whether as a living relative undergoing surgery to donate a kidney or as a patient undergoing transplant surgery to receive one. Some fear that signing a donor card will lead to premature declaration of death. Others express concern that a deceased donor will either be disfigured or unable to get into heaven without all his body parts. A potential recipient ay also object on religious grounds to having the tissue of a dead person in his body. Moreover, blacks are not as likely as whites to believe that people who get transplants gain additional healthy years of life.

To enhance recruitment of African American donors and dispel the myths surrounding donation, Clive Callender directs the national Minority Organ Tissue Transplantation and Education Program (MOTTEP), which operates in over a dozen cities. Understanding patients’ objections to donation and demystifying the process is critical because severe (or “end-stage”) renal disease is about four times as common in blacks than in whites and , as we will see, there are considerable benefits to receiving a kidney from a living donor of the same race.

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To create incentives for organ donation and expand the black organ donor pool, Wayne B. Arnason, a minister writing in the Hastings Center Report, has proposed an experimental protocol that would try to pair a black donor kidney with a black recipient, some African Americans have expressed a desire that their organs be earmarked for black recipients. Arnason’s proposal addresses the fears of some black patients that they are being discriminated against in the kidney transplantation process, fears stoked by observers like David Barton Smith, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, who asserts in his 1999 book Health Care Divided: Race and Healing a Nation: “The assumptions that served as justification for the Tuskegee Study remain in evidence among those providing health services to [the black] population . . . Blacks have lower rates of kidney transplants . . . even where no differences in insurance or ability to pay exist.”

This matter has attracted the attention of a wide spectrum of advocates, from the Reverend Louis Farrakhan (who has said that whites condone black-on-black killing as a source of transplantable organs) to law professors who propose suing the federal government for violating civil rights laws in the allocation of organs. The US Commission on Civil Rights has also weighed in: “Black patients remain less likely than other minorities and whites to receive a kidney transplant,” it reported in 1999, calling this “an aspect of health care inequality that thus far seems to have eluded the [HHS’s] Office of Civil Rights.”

To assess the fairness of the charges levied by the Commission on Civil Rights and others we must first walk through the steps involved in donating and receiving a kidney. The road starts at renal dialysis. Every two or three days patients with end-stage kidney disease undergo a process called renal dialysis while they wait far a kidney to become available. During the three-to-four-hour dialysis process, patients are hooked up to a machine that acts as an external kidney, removing the fluid and metabolic by-products that are normally cleared by the kidney and excreted as urine. For unclear reasons, black patients, on average, tolerate dialysis better than white patients - who are more likely than black patients to die while on the waiting list - and blacks can be

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maintained longer in a healthy state before transplantation. Just the opposite is true, however, once the operation has taken place: black patients, on average, do not tolerate the transplant organ as well as whites, and they must return to dialysis support sooner and more frequently.

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[…] Another key aspect of the transplantation process is the patient’s interest in receiving a kidney. United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) data suggest that African American patients decline the procedure more often than do whites. Reports have documented that black transplant candidates were more often undecided, more apt to decline the transplant operation at the last minute, more often unavailable owing to illness and more likely to be unlocatable when a kidney became available.

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[…] [T]he remedy for recruiting more organ donors is better education of both medical personnel and the public.

[…] Combining these principles - with better education for the public through a program like Clive Callender’s MOTTEP seems most promising. Simply getting more people to have a family discussion about donation is important because families are more likely to agree to the donation process if they know the deceased had previously expressed a desire to give his organs. The MOTTEP program also involves explaining the biology of matching and the nature of the surgical procedure, and working with churches to dispel religion-based myths. Callender’s results are encouraging: by the late 1990s 45 percent of kidneys transplanted at Howard University (a predominantly African American institution) were from black donors; a decade earlier the figure had been under 20 percent.

Fairness Continued

Now let us turn to the clinical aspects of transplantation. A crucial dimension is tissue compatibility. Without a good “match” the donor kidney will provoke the recipient’s immune system to attack or “reject” it. The better the match on biological variables, the better the outcome, Accord-

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-ing to a report issued by the UNOS Histocompatibility Committee, black patients in need of a transplant wait longer owing to factors such as blood type, sensitization and some antigens. Similarly, Rand researchers found that “once a patient is on the waiting list, biological factors may predominate” in explaining his lower chances of receiving a kidney.

A technique called antigen matching is used to test for different combinations of six major antigens, or proteins, found on the surface of tissues. A perfect six-out-of-six match is the ideal condition for compatibility between donor and recipient. A complete match is far less common in African American transplant candidates than in whites because they have more possible antigen combinations than whites do, and some of those antigens are very rare in the general population. Scientists are still debating the precise physiology of organ rejection, and particularly the extent to which the organ is jeopardized by less-than-perfect antigen matching. What they do know is that black transplant recipients are more likely to reject their new kidneys. Possible reasons include poor control of hypertension or a more vigorous immune response. Even well-matched transplants can be lost to rejection, suggesting that the standard antigen-matching system may be too simplistic.

[…] To circumvent some of the biological constraints, physicians encourage donation of a kidney from a living relative so that the chance of a match will be enhanced. Living donation is also promoted even if the donor is not related and not of the same race because there is so much

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added benefit from getting a fresh kidney - one that goes straight from the operating room of a healthy donor to the operating room of the recipient without spending too much time on ice. In fact, along with tissue compatibility and the clinical condition of the recipient, the amount of time spent in “cold storage” is one of the most important factors in the successful functioning of a transplanted organ.

Getting a live kidney has little to do with the medical establishment and a great deal to do with the health and attitude of one’s family and others of one’s own race. Unfortunately, the black donation rate from living individuals is very low relative to need. In 1998, for example, 438 living kidneys were donated by African Americans, but 14,923 African Americans needed a kidney (a ratio of 3 donated per 100 needed), while 2,559 whites gave live kidneys and 20,616 were in need (a ratio of 12 per 100). In addition to personal reluctance and wariness of the system, the low rate of black live donations relative to need is due in part to the fact that so many potential donors are not eligible to give a kidney because they suffer from hypertension or diabetes, conditions that diminish the health of their kidneys. UNOS data show that in 1998 almost one-third of all transplant candidates received a living kidney: 73 percent of those kidneys were given by white individuals to their relatives or friends, and 13 percent by African Americans to theirs.

Most patients on dialysis, especially black individuals, receive an organ from a deceased donor; a so-called cadaveric donor. Once on the waiting list, how do black patients fare in the allocation of kidneys from cadavers? In 1998 African Americans represented 36 percent of the waiting list for kidneys; as a group, they donated 11 percent of all cadaveric kidneys (proportionate to their representation in the general population) and received 27 percent of all donated kidneys.

Thus, more than half of all cadaver kidneys received by black transplant recipients came from donors of other races (predominantly white). As Maritza Rozon-Solomon and Dr. Lewis Burrows of the Department of Surgery at Mount Sinai School of Medicine observe: “African-Americans have historically donated significantly fewer cadaver kidneys than they have received. They have benefitted from Caucasian organ donation.”

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Donation is a gift of life that transcends racial score-keeping, but it is still important to look closely at the numbers when bias in the allocation of kidneys is alleged.

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Iraq Replay I

An obvious topic I would have covered during the break is the lunatic war party’s ramping up of propaganda for war on Iran. It all sounds so much like the lies we were subjected to in preparation for the invasion of Iraq that a review of some key texts relating to that ongoing debacle seems due. This is the first of three posts of excerpts from books I would highly recommend detailing the identity and motives of the people responsible for selling that disastrous war to a wilfully blind Western public. This particular post also has topical relevance because of Murdoch’s switching of support to the Conservatives and Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize award merely for continuing the policies of Bush II. Kevin Macdonald’s work on the neocons is referenced in this piece, read the shorter version here, the longer version here.

From Stephen J. Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (Norfolk, Virginia: Enigma Editions: 2008)

Chapter 3: Who are the Neocons?

Although the term neoconservative is in common usage, a brief description of the group might be helpful. The term was coined by socialist Michael Harrington as a derisive term for leftists and liberals who were migrating rightward. Many of the first generation neoconservatives were originally liberal Democrats, or even socialists and Marxists, often Trotskyites. Most originated in New York, and most were Jews. They drifted to the right in the 1960s and 1970s as the Democratic Party moved to the anti-war McGovernite left. [1]

The Jewish nature of the neoconservatives was obvious. It should be pointed out that Jews in the United States have traditionally identified with the liberals and the left, and most still do. (Liberals in the American contextrepresent the moderate left.) Liberalism seemed to allow for advancement of Jews in an open, secular society; to many Jews, conservatism, in contrast, represented traditional Christian anti-Semitism. Moreover, as political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg points out in his The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, Jews were in favor of American liberalism’s creation of the welfare state in the period between Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, which brought many Jews into power positions in the federal government apparatus. [2]

But those individuals who became neoconservatives were perceptive enough to see that in the 1960s liberals and the left were identifying with issues that were apt to be harmful to the collective interest of Jewry. As historian Edward S. Shapiro, himself of a Jewish background, points out:

Many of the leading neoconservative intellectuals were Jewish academicians who moved to the right in the 1960s in response to campus unrest, the New Left, the counterculture, the Black Power movement, the excesses of the Great Society, the hostility of the left to Israel, and the left’s weakening opposition to Communism and the Soviet Union. They became convinced, Mark Gerson, a perceptive student of the neoconservatives, has written, that the left was “distinctively
bad for the Jews.” [3]

In response to efforts to deny the neoconservatives’ Jewishness, Gal Beckerman wrote in the Jewish newspaper Forward in January 2006: “[I]t is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren.” In fact, Beckerman went so far as to maintain that “[i]f there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it.” [4]

Concern for Jews abroad and Israel, in particular, loomed large in the birth of neoconservatism. Proto-neocons adopted a pronounced anti-Soviet policy as the Soviet Union aided Israel’s enemies in the Middle East and prohibited Soviet Jews from emigrating. “One major factor that drew them inexorably to the right,” writes Benjamin Ginsberg,

was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right’s hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote democratic values (and American interests), neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel’s security. [5]

Neoconservative Max Boot acknowledged that “support for Israel” had been and remained a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” [6]

In the United States, it is sometimes taboo to say that the neoconservatives are primarily Jewish or that they are concerned about Israel, but neocons did not conceal these connections. The original flagship of the neoconservative movement was Commentary magazine, which is put out by the American Jewish Committee and has styled itself as “America’s premier monthly journal of opinion.” The American Jewish Committee pronounces as its mission: “To safeguard the welfare and security of Jews in the United States, in Israel, and throughout the world.” [7]

It was Norman Podhoretz, editor-in-chief of Commentary for 35 years until his retirement in 1995, who transformed the magazine into a neoconservative publication, offering writing space to many who would be leading figures in the movement. Ironically, when Podhoretz first became editor, he allied himself with New Left radicals, who vociferously opposed the war in Vietnam. Murray Friedman writes in The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy that under Podhoretz’s editorship, “Commentary became perhaps the first magazine of any significance to pay serious attention to radical ideology.” However, Podhoretz started his move rightward by 1967, and by 1970, “his conversion to neoconservatism was complete.” [8] Friedman points out that Podhoretz, like most who gravitated to neoconservatism, did not dwell on Jewish interests and the fate of Israel until the latter half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, when his “sense of this own Jewishness intensified.” [9] Friedman notes that A central element in Podhoretz’s evolving views, which would soon become his and many of the neocons” governing principle was the question, “Is It Good for the Jews,” the title of a February 1972 Commentary piece. [10]

Exemplifying this greater focus on Jewish interests, Friedman observes that

Commentary articles now came to emphasize threats to Jews and the safety and security of the Jewish state. By the 1980s, nearly half of Podhoretz’s writings on international affairs centered on Israel and these dangers. [11]

Benjamin Ginsberg similarly maintains:

A number of Jews ascertained for themselves that Israeli security required a strong American commitment to internationalism and defense. Among the most prominent Jewish spokesmen for this position was Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine. Podhoretz had been a liberal and a strong opponent of the Vietnam War. But by the early 1970s he came to realize that “continued American support for Israel depended upon continued American involvement in international affairs – from which it followed that American withdrawal into [isolationism] [preceding brackets in original] represented a direct threat to the security of Israel.” [12]

Having a married daughter and grandchildren living in Israel, Podhoretz’s identification with the Jewish state transcended intellectual conviction. With the beginning of the Gulf War of 1991, Podhoretz actually went to live with his daughter in her home in Jerusalem in order to show his solidarity with Israel, which Saddam had threatened to attack by missiles, and did so to a limited extent. [13]

Podhoretz was a neoconservative of exceptional influence. As neoconservative Arnold Beichman contends, “in the ideological wars of the 1970s and 1980s, Podhoretz had become an intellectual force who by himself and through his magazine contributed mightily to the global victory against communism.” [14] Denoting Podhoretz’s significance, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, on June 23, 2004. [15]

In terms of membership, neoconservatism is not exclusively Jewish. There are gentiles who identify with the neoconservative movement – some because of its ideas but probably also because membership can be career enhancing at a time when it has been difficult for scholars, especially white male scholars, to even break into academia, where supply greatly exceeds demand and where the environment has not been hospitable to individuals of a conservative bent. For one thing, the numerous neoconservative think tanks and media outlets offer numerous jobs. “One thing that the neocons have that both other factions of conservatives and liberals don’t have,” wrote Scott McConnell, editor of the American Conservative, “is they can employ a lot of people.” [16] Work in those jobs can provide credentials for important positions outside neocon-controlled domains – government, academia, media, and the literary world. Moreover, the extensive neoconservative network can facilitate personal advancement in all parts of the establishment.

It would appear that Jewish neoconservatives seek to feature their gentile members, and use their existence to deny the Jewish nature of their movement. But the fact of the matter is that the movement has been Jewish inspired, Jewish-oriented, and Jewish-dominated. As historian Paul Gottfried, himself Jewish and a close observer of the neoconservative scene, pointed out in April 2003:

[T]he term “neoconservative” is now too closely identified with the personal and ethnic concerns of its Jewish celebrities. Despite their frequent attempts to find kept gentiles, the game of speaking through proxies may be showing diminishing results. Everyone with minimal intelligence knows that Bill Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ed Feulner, Michael Novak, George Weigel, James Nuechterlein, and Cal Thomas front for the neocons. It is increasingly useless to depend on out-group surrogates to repackage a movement so clearly rooted in a particular ethnicity – and even subethnicity (Eastern European Jews). [17]

Similarly, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy point out in their reference to the existence of non-Jewish neoconservatives that “Jews nonetheless comprise the core of the neoconservative movement.” [18]

Neoconservatives are distinguished by more than just their ideology and ethnicity; they are not simply conservative Jews. They have formed and sustained close personal connections between themselves over a long period of time. As will be discussed later, this network has been perpetuated by becoming institutionalized in a number of influential think tanks and organizations. These close ties help to explain the neocons’ great power, which far exceeds their rather limited numbers. [19]

Social anthropologist Janine R. Wedel describes the successful neocon network as a “flex group,” which she defines as an informal faction adept at “playing multiple and overlapping roles and conflating state and private interests. These players keep appearing in different incarnations, ensuring continuity even as their operating environments change.”

Wedel continues:

As flex players, the neocons have had myriad roles over time. They quietly promoted one another for influential positions and coordinated their multipronged efforts inside and outside government in pursuit of agendas that were always in their own interest, but not necessarily the public’s.

The neocon flex players

always help each other out in furthering their careers, livelihoods and mutual aims. Even when some players are “in power” within an administration, they are flanked by people outside of formal government. Flex groups have a culture of circumventing authorities and creating alternative ones. They operate through semi-closed networks and penetrate key institutions, revamping them to marginalize other potential players and replacing them with initiatives under their control. [20]

But while personal advancement is involved, the flex players pursue much more than this, being “continually working to further the shared agenda of the group.” [21] What Wedel fails to bring out, however, is that the “shared agenda of the group” involves the advancement of the interests of Israel, as the neocons perceive Israel’s interests.

The neocon network is especially solidified by the existence of relationships by blood and marriage. Norman Podhoretz is married to Midge Decter, a neoconservative writer in her own right. Their son, John Podhoretz, was a columnist for the neoconservative New York Post and Weekly Standard before being announced as the new editor of Commentary in October 2007. And their son-in-law is Elliott Abrams, who worked for Senator Robert Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D.-Wash.) and later served in the State Department during the Reagan administration, where he was involved in the Iran/Contra scandal. Abrams was director of Near Eastern Affairs in the National Security Council during George W. Bush’s first term and was promoted to Deputy National Security Adviser in the second term. [22]

Irving Kristol, who is regarded as the “godfather” of neoconservatism (though his focus tended more to domestic matters in contrast to Podhoretz’s concern for foreign policy), is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb, also a major neoconservative writer. The Kristols’ son, William (Bill) Kristol, is currently a leading figure in the neoconservative movement as editor of the Weekly Standard, which surpassed Commentary to become the major neoconservative publication. [23]

Meyrav and David Wurmser are another neoconservative couple. Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser was Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. In 2005, she became head of the Hudson Institute’s Zionism Project, which involves a two-year study to look at “the identity crisis of Israel and Zionism,” and to come up with recommendations “that can aid” in resolving it. [24] She also wrote for the Jerusalem Post and was co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute. Her husband, David Wurmser, is a leading neoconservative writer who was director of the Middle East program at the American Enterprise Institute prior to entering the Bush II administration, where he held a various positions, becoming in 2003 an adviser on Middle Eastern affairs to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Neoconservatives Richard Perle, R. James Woolsey Jr., and Paul Wolfowitz were all acolytes of the late Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley and a nuclear strategist at the RAND corporation, who now has a conference center named for him at the influential neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (sometimes referred to as Neocon Central”) in Washington, D.C. Gary Dorrien in Imperial Designs describes Wohlstetter as the “godfather of the nuclear hawks.” [25] Throughout the Cold War, Wohlstetter denigrated America’s nuclear strategy of deterrence, and instead advocated a war-fighting stance, which he held could actually best serve to deter war. He contended that other American experts grossly underestimated the military power of the U.S.S.R. and that it was essential for the United States to build up its military strength. [26]

In 1969, Wohlstetter landed Wolfowitz and Perle [27] their first Washington jobs as interns for Senator “Scoop” Jackson. Jackson was a hard-line Cold Warrior, champion of Israel’s interests, and neoconservative icon. [28] It was likely through Wohlstetter that Perle met the now-notorious Ahmed Chalabi, who would head the Iraqi exiles and play a significant role in inducing the United States to make war on Iraq in 2003. [29]

While Wolfowitz would stay only briefly with Jackson, Perle would remain for over a decade. During this time, Jackson’s office became an incubator for the incipient neoconservatives. Staff would include Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, R. James Woolsey, and Michael A. Ledeen. [30]

Many significant neoconservatives were followers of political philosopher Leo Strauss. These included Paul Wolfowitz; William Kristol; Stephen Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence in the Bush II administration; and Robert Kagan, who teamed with William Kristol at the Weekly Standard. Kagan is the son of leading Yale University Straussian Donald Kagan and brother of Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. [31]

This list of connections is far from complete (and will be developed more in other chapters) but it helps to reveal an important fact about the neoconservative movement. As political writer Jim Lobe explains it:

Contrary to appearances, the neocons do not constitute a powerful mass political movement. They are instead a small, tightly-knit clan whose incestuous familial and personal connections, both within and outside the Bush administration, have allowed them to grab control of the future of American foreign policy. [32]

It should also be emphasized that the neoconservatives are far from being an isolated group; to the contrary, they work closely with others, where common interests serve as the attraction. For example, neoconservatives have received broad support from the Christian evangelical right for most of their activities. To attract support on their particular issues, neoconservatives often have created ad hoc citizen groups, such as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Moreover, their advocacy of a strong military attracts defense intellectuals, some mainstream conservatives, and representatives from defense interests. On the other hand, the neocons find allies among various Jewish Americans, who may not support all of their hard-line militaristic positions or their more conservative domestic positions, but agree on the issue of staunchly supporting Israel and its foreign policy objectives. In this latter category are such liberal pro-Zionists as Senator Joseph Lieberman, former Congressman Stephen Solarz, Congressman Tom Lantos, the New Republic’s Martin Peretz, and representatives from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A few more traditional conservative Jews such as columnist William Safire, who pre-existed the neocons on the right, closely identify with the neoconservatives regarding Israel and American policies in the Middle East. As commentator Bill Christison, a former CIA analyst, observes: “It suffices to know . . . that the neocons and the [Israel] lobby together form a very powerful mutual support society, and their relationship is symbiotic in the extreme.” [33]

When they first emerged in the early 1970s, the neoconservatives worked primarily through the Democratic party – they sought to combat the leftist orientation that had enabled George McGovern to become the Democratic presidential standard bearer in 1972. “The 1972 campaign proved to be a watershed for the neoconservatives,” Gary Dorrien notes, “For them, the McGovern candidacy epitomized the degeneration of American liberalism. McGovern’s world view, like his slogan – ‘Come Home, America’ – was defeatist, isolationist, and guilt-driven.” [34]

McGovernites were not simply opposed to American military involvement in Vietnam, they were opposed also to the continuation of the Cold War with its global opposition to Communism and its concomitant massive military spending. The military retrenchment they sought, however, would have had negative repercussions for Israel, dependent as it was on American military assistance, and especially since it was targeted as an ideological enemy by the Communist countries and the world left. As Benjamin Ginsberg writes of that era:

Many liberal Democrats . . . espoused cutbacks in the development and procurement of weapons systems, a curtailment of American military capabilities and commitments, and what amounted to a semireturn to isolationism. These policies all appeared to represent a mortal threat to Israel and, hence, were opposed by many Jews who supported Israel. [35]

“Increasingly,” Murray Friedman maintains, neocons came to believe that the Jewish state’s ability to survive – indeed, the Jewish community’s will to survive – was dependent on American military strength and its challenge to the Soviet Union, the primary backer of Arab countries in the Middle East. [36]

Neoconservatism’s first political manifestation was as the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was formed in 1972, when most neoconservatives entertained hopes of reclaiming the Democratic Party and American liberalism. As James Nuechterlein, himself something of a neocon, notes:

Most of the leading neoconservatives were Jewish . . . and Jews found it extraordinarily difficult to think of themselves as conservatives, much less Republicans. In the American context, to be a Jew – even more a Jewish intellectual – was to be a person of the left. [37]

Murray Friedman similarly writes in The Neoconservative Revolution that at that time

neocons still associated conservatism with golf, country clubs, the Republican Party, big business – a sort of “goyishe” fraternity – and with the ideological posturing of right-wing fanatics. They viewed traditional conservatives as having little empathy for the underdog and the excluded in society. They thought of themselves as dissenting liberals, “children of the depression,” as Midge Decter declared, who “retained a measure of loyalty to the spirit of the New Deal.” [38]

In the 1970s, the neoconservatives’ political standard bearers were Senator “Scoop” Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Neoconservatives basically wanted to return to the anti-Communist Cold War position exemplified by President Harry Truman (1945–1953), which had held sway through the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1969). Anti-Communist foreign policy, however, had been widely discredited among mainstream liberal Democrats by the Vietnam imbroglio. While neoconservatives were opposed to the McGovern liberals in the Democratic Party, whom they viewed as too sympathetic to Communism and radical left causes, they did not identify with the foreign policy of mainstream Republicans. Rather, neoconservatives opposed Henry Kissinger’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union, with its emphasis on peace through negotiations, arms control, and trade, which was being pushed by the Nixon and Ford administrations. They viewed the détente policy as defeatist and too callous toward human rights violations in Communist countries.

For the neoconservatives, the human rights issue centered on the right of Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union. That right was embodied in the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which was especially the work of Jackson’s staffer Richard Perle. By requiring that American trade favors to the Soviet Union be based on the latter’s allowance of freer emigration, this amendment undercut the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente, which sought to establish better relations with the Soviets through trade. While neoconservatives were only a small minority among Jews, on this issue they were joined by the Jewish mainstream. [39]

The Jackson-Vanik amendment was a major achievement for American Jewry. “Congress had rolled over administration resistance and passed a proactive law that changed the structure of U.S.-Soviet relations,” writes J. J. Goldberg. “Whether or not the legislation helped its intended beneficiaries, the Jews of Russia, it sent an unmistakable message around the world that the Jews of America were not to be trifled with.” [40]

The neoconservatives remained loyal Democrats in 1976 and looked with hope toward the presidency of Jimmy Carter. But the neoconservatives soon came to realize that Carter did not seem to perceive a dire Soviet expansionist threat. From the neocon viewpoint, the Soviet Union was advancing around the globe while Carter appeared to lack the will to resist. Norman Podhoretz would maintain that under Carter, the United States “continued and even accelerated the strategic retreat begun under the Republicans.” [41]

Moreover, Carter pursued policies that went directly against what the neoconservatives considered to be Jewish interests, especially in his failure to provide sufficient support for Israel. The neoconservatives were alarmed by the Carter administration’s attempt to pursue what it styled an evenhanded approach in the Middle East, fearing that Israel would be pressured to withdraw from the occupied territories, with only minor border modifications, in return for Arab promises of peace. What especially caused neoconservative outrage was the media revelation that UN Ambassador Andrew Young had a secret meeting in New York with the United Nation’s Palestinian Liberation Organization observer. Reports surfaced that Israeli intelligence had recorded the diplomats’ conversation and leaked it to the American press. Negotiating with the PLO was a violation of American policy. Young was one of the pre-eminent black leaders in America and blacks made up a key part of Carter’s constituency. Faced with strong Jewish protests, Carter replaced Young at the UN. However, his successor, Donald McHenry, supported a Security Council resolution declaring Jerusalem to be occupied territory and charging Israel with extraordinary human rights violations, which led to further Jewish outrage. As a result of these activities, Friedman writes, “Carter . . . was seen by neocons as fundamentally hostile to Israel.” [42]

By the beginning of 1980, the neoconservatives had given up on the Democratic Party. According to John Ehrman, a historian of neoconservatism:

In the neoconservatives’ view, its foreign policies were firmly in the hands of the left and the party no longer opposed anti-Semitism or totalitarian thinking – indeed, they believed that these tendencies were now in the party’s mainstream. [43]

The neoconservatives gravitated to the Republicans where they found kindred spirits among that party’s staunchly anti-Communist conservative wing, which was also disenchanted with the détente policy of the Nixon and Ford administrations. It was only among the right-wing Republicans where there still remained firm support for the idea that Soviet Communism was an evil and implacable ideological enemy – an attitude that the conventional wisdom of the times looked upon as outdated and gauche. [44]

Welcomed in as valuable intellectual allies by the conservative Republicans, the neoconservatives had made their momentous shift just as the most successful right-wing Republican of the modern era, Ronald Reagan, won the presidential election of 1980.

Despite being newcomers to the conservative camp, neoconservatives were able to find places in the Reagan administration in national security and foreign policy areas, although at less than Cabinet-level status. “Reagan’s triumph in the election,” Friedman contends, “provided the neocons with their version of John F. Kennedy’s Camelot.” [45]

A fundamental reason for their success was that the neoconservatives had the academic and literary standing and public reputations, which traditional conservatives lacked. The neoconservatives had published widely in prestigious establishment intellectual journals. Some had impressive academic backgrounds and influential contacts in political and media circles. This is not to say that neoconservatives necessarily exhibited superior intellectual skills or academic scholarship compared to many traditional conservative intellectuals, but rather that they possessed establishment credentials and respectability. The fact that they had recently espoused liberal positions bolstered their credibility in the establishment. None had ever expressed rightist views that might be considered taboo from the liberal perspective. Consequently, they could not be easily ignored, ridiculed or smeared, as could many marginalized traditional conservatives. Reagan political strategists believed that neocons could serve as effective public exponents of administration policy.46 It should also be added that the more illustrious neoconservatives tended to bring in other, usually younger, neocons with negligible scholarly or public achievements. [47]

Significant neoconservatives in the Reagan administration included Richard Perle, assistant secretary of defense for international security policy; Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and later ambassador to Indonesia; Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for human rights and later as assistant secretary of state for hemispheric affairs, where he played a central role in aiding the Contras in the Iran-Contra affair, for which he was indicted; Jeane Kirkpatrick, ambassador to the United Nations (who had on her staff such neocons as Joshua Muravchik and Carl Gershman);48 Kenneth Adelman, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1983–1987; Richard Pipes, member of the National Security Council on Soviet and East European affairs; and Max Kampelman, ambassador and head of the United States delegation to the negotiations with the Soviet Union on nuclear and space arms, 1985–89. Michael Ledeen was a special advisor to Secretary of State Alexander Haig in 1981–1982, consultant for the Department of Defense (1982–1986), and a national security advisor to the president, who was intimately involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Frank Gaffney and Douglas Feith served under Perle in the Defense Department. Feith also served as a member of the National Security Staff under Richard Allen in Reagan’s first term.

In the Reagan administration, the neoconservatives allied with the militant right-wing anti-Communists and combated Republican establishment elements in order to fashion a hard-line anti-Soviet foreign policy. Neoconservatives were in the forefront of pressing for Reagan’s military build-up and de-emphasizing arms control agreements, which had been a foreign policy centerpiece of previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat. [49]

In contrast to the longstanding American defensive Cold War strategy of containing Soviet communism, the neoconservatives pushed for destabilizing the Soviet empire and its allies. They did not invent this strategic doctrine, which originated with such seminal conservative thinkers as James Burnham and Robert Strausz-Hupe. The goal behind this offensive strategy was to actually bring about the defeat of the Soviet Union, instead of just achieving stalemate, which would be the best that could be obtained by defensive containment. But while not the originators of an offensive Cold War strategy, the neocons were the first to successfully promote its implementation. [50]

In their effort to implement the offensive Cold War strategy, the neocons especially supported the provision of extensive military aid to the militant Islamic Afghan “freedom fighters” in their resistance struggle against the Soviet occupation. The military aid, which had begun in the Carter administration, had been very limited. Richard Perle played a pivotal role in equipping the “freedom fighters” with the all-important shoulder-borne Stinger missiles, which proved to be lethal to the previously invincible Soviet helicopter gunships. [51] Ironically, the neoconservatives now portray these very same Muslims that they helped to militarize as a deadly terrorist threat to America and the world.

The neocons played a significant role in the success of Reagan’s policies. Steven Hayward, an AEI fellow and the author of The Age of Reagan, maintains that “Ronald Reagan would not have been elected and would have been able to govern us effectively without some of the prominent neoconservatives who joined the Republican side.” [52] Murray Friedman writes, “The neocons reinforced Reagan’s hard-line beliefs on international communism and provided much of the administration’s ideological energy, giving the Reagan revolution ‘its final sophistication.’” [53]

In essence, the neocons did not invent a new strategy for international relations, but lent an air of establishment respectability to doctrines that had been in the repertoire of the American right from the early days of the Cold War. The related elements of sophistication and respectability contributed by the neocons were very important because the hard-line policies implemented by Reagan had traditionally been ridiculed and reviled by the liberal establishment as being completely beyond the pale. [54] The liberal establishment pedigrees of the neocon Reaganites and the power in the media exerted by such neocon instruments as Commentary magazine were able to partially deflect the liberal media criticism, preventing Reagan from being successfully caricatured as a zany right-wing warmonger, as had often been the case with previous conservative leaders. [55]

Admirers credit the neoconservatives with playing a major role in bringing about the demise of the Soviet Union. [56] “History has proved the neoconservatives largely right on the Cold War,” writes Gal Beckerman in the Forward.

Among the many factors that brought an end to the Soviet Union – already a dying animal by the 1980s – was the shove given to it by this rhetoric. By challenging the Soviet Union head on, rhetorically, in covert action and through an expensively renewed arms race, the United States managed to call the Soviet bluff. Neoconservatives provided language that depicted the Cold War as an urgent zero-sum game in which America the Good had to assert itself so that Evil Communism could be obliterated. And indeed, the Soviet Union collapsed. [57]

However, critics of the neocons point out that Reagan, during his second term, moved toward rapprochement with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union – a move that was strongly resisted by the hard-line neoconservatives – and that it was that softer approach that allowed Gorbachev to enact his reforms, bringing about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. Historian John Patrick Diggins observes that the difference between the neoconservatives and Reagan was that

he believed in negotiation and they in escalation. They wanted to win the cold war; he sought to end it. To do so, it was necessary not to strike fear in the Soviet Union but to win the confidence of its leaders. Once the Soviet Union could count on Mr. Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev not only was free to embark on his domestic reforms, to convince his military to go along with budget cuts, to reassure his people that they no longer needed to worry about the old bogey of “capitalist encirclement,” but, most important, he was also ready to announce to the Soviet Union’s satellite countries that henceforth they were on their own, that no longer would tanks of the Red Army be sent to put down uprisings. The cold war ended in an act of faith and trust, not fear and trembling. [58]

Even if Reagan’s moderation of the neoconservative hard-line anti-Soviet policy ultimately induced the voluntary unraveling of the Soviet empire, nonetheless, it seems reasonable to believe that the hard-line policies espoused and implemented by neocon Reaganites helped move the Soviet Union to that position. During the 1970s, expert opinion considered the Soviet regime quite sturdy, notwithstanding the country’s economic difficulties; no one envisioned, at the time, the regime’s inevitable collapse within the decades that followed. And this was the vision that guided American policy in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Nor was any Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev included, seeking the downfall of the Soviet system and its military machine. With all this in mind, it would seem to be a mistake to discount or deny the neoconservative contribution to the downfall of the seemingly invulnerable Soviet empire at the end of the 1980s – a downfall that, most incredibly, did not involve a major military confrontation. From the American perspective, it can be seen as a major victory.

The role of the neoconservatives in the Reagan administration is highly relevant to the thesis of this book. For if it is appropriate to perceive the neocons as influential regarding Reagan administration foreign policy, one should be able to connect them to Bush II’s war on Iraq and his overall Middle East policy. In fact, as the following pages illustrate, the neocons were far more powerful during the Bush II administration than they had been during Reagan’s time, both inside and outside of government. In the Reagan era, they were relative newcomers; by the time of the Bush II era, they had become an established, institutionalized force. Moreover, in the Reagan administration the neocons were basically implementing an anti-Soviet policy, which had long been the staple position of the traditional right and, consequently, they had extensive support from numerous administration figures of a traditional conservative bent and from President Ronald Reagan himself; in the Bush II administration, in contrast, the neocons single-handedly converted the administration to their Middle East war agenda, overcoming significant internal opposition in the process.

A fundamental point about neoconservatives, which is not always noted, is that they did not become traditional conservatives. Instead of adopting traditional American conservative positions, they actually altered the content of conservatism to their liking. Neoconservatives have been anything but the hard right-wingers that their leftist critics sometimes make them out to be. Neoconservatives supported the modern welfare state, in contrast to the traditional conservatives, who emphasized small government, states’ rights, and relatively unfettered capitalism. Neoconservatives identified with the liberal policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and even Lyndon Johnson, the bête noires of traditional conservatives, though rejecting much of the multiculturalism and group entitlements of more recent liberalism. “The neoconservative impulse,” Murray Friedman maintains, “was the spontaneous response of a group of liberal intellectuals, mainly Jewish, who sought to shape a perspective of their own while standing apart from more traditional forms of conservatism.” [59]

Gary Dorrien in The Neoconservative Mind points out that the neoconservatives “did not convert to existing conservatism, but rather created an alternative to it.” [60]

What especially characterizes neoconservatives is their focus on foreign policy. This is underscored by the fact that some who have espoused leftist views on domestic matters, such as Carl Gershman and Joshua Muravchik (who have been members of the Social Democrats USA), can be full-fledged members of the neoconservative network by virtue of their identification with neocon foreign policy positions. [61]

Although the American conservatives of the Cold War era were anti-Communist and pro-military, they did not identify with the strong globalist foreign policy, which is the sine qua non of neoconservatism, but actually harbored a strain of isolationism. Conservatives’ interventionism was limited to fighting Communism, even rolling back Communism, but not nation-building and the export of democracy, which is the expressed goal of the neocons. Conservatives were perfectly comfortable with regimes that were far from democratic. Nor did traditional conservatives view the United States as the policeman of the world. Most significantly, traditional conservatives had never championed Israel, which had largely been the position of the liberal Democrats. [62]

While traditional conservatives welcomed neoconservatives as allies in their fight against Soviet Communism and domestic liberalism, the neocons in effect acted as a Trojan Horse within conservatism: they managed to secure dominant positions in the conservative political and intellectual movement, and as soon as they gained power they purged those traditional conservatives who opposed their agenda. “The old conservatives of the eighties were being swallowed up by the alliance that they initiated and sustained,” notes historian Paul Gottfried. [63]

Neoconservatives were especially active in setting up or co-opting various right-of-center think tanks and corralling the money that funded them. “Neoconservative activists,” Gottfried observes, “have largely succeeded in centralizing both the collection and distribution of funding for right-of-center philanthropies.” [64]

The neocons would even take over that great intellectual citadel of the conservative movement, the National Review, founded by the icon of the Cold War right, Bill Buckley. As Gary Dorrien writes in Imperial Designs, “By the late 1990s even the venerable National Review belonged to the neocons, who boasted that they had created or taken over nearly all of the main ideological institutions of the American right.” [65]

The ultimate result of the neoconservatives’ maneuvering was to effectively transform American conservatism and, to a lesser extent, the Republican Party. Jacob Heilbrunn, senior editor at the liberal New Republic, would write in 2004 that neoconservatives “formed, by and large, the intellectual brain trust for the GOP over the past two decades.” [66]

Some intellectual conservatives, who eventually took on the name paleoconservatives, tried to resist this takeover from the days of the Reagan administration. [67] “Long before French protesters and liberal bloggers had even heard of the neoconservatives, the paleoconservatives were locked in mortal combat with them,” wrote Franklin Foer in the New York Times.

Paleocons fought neocons over whom Ronald Reagan should appoint to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, angrily denouncing them as closet liberals – or worse, crypto-Trotskyists. Even their self-selected name, paleocon, suggests disdain for the neocons and their muscular interventionism. [68]

In essence, the neoconservatives are not like the traditional American conservatives, whom they have effectively supplanted and marginalized. As Paul Gottfried observes, the transformation of American conservatism involved

personnel no less than value orientation . . . as urban, Jewish, erstwhile Democratic proponents of the welfare state took over a conservative movement that had been largely in the hands of Catholic, pro-[Joe] McCarthy and (more or less) anti-New Deal Republicans. That the older movement collapsed into the newer one is a demonstrable fact. [69]

The neoconservatives have done nearly the same thing in the Republican party, at least in regard to its national security policy; there they have replaced not only the traditional conservative figures, but also the more moderate establishment wing that was identified with the elder George H. W. Bush. The upshot of all this is to say the neocon influence is very substantial. As Murray Friedman writes in his The Neoconservative Revolution: “The most enduring legacy of neoconservatism . . . has been the creation of a new generation of highly influential younger conservative Jewish intellectuals, social activists, and allies.” When neoconservatism began in the early 1970s,

the movement consisted of perhaps two dozen individuals. Their numbers today [2005] have increased to hundreds of individuals threaded throughout the news media, think tanks, political life, government, and the universities . . . Their influence has been felt everywhere. [70]

None of this is to say that neoconservatism is anything like a mass movement. It has, however, ascended to the heights of power. While the grass roots conservatives and Republicans do not know, much less subscribe to, the full neoconservative agenda, the trauma of 9/11 and the “war on terror” made them largely unwitting followers of the neocon leadership. The post-9/11 success of the neoconservatives and their war agenda will be discussed at length in the following chapters.

Neoconservatives have not been unaware of their successful takeover of the conservative movement. Irving Kristol, who has championed “a conservative welfare state,” writes that

one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. [71]

In his 1996 book, The Essential Neoconservative Reader, editor Mark Gerson, a neocon himself who served on the board of directors of the Project for the New American Century, jubilantly observes:

The neoconservatives have so changed conservatism that what we now identify as conservatism is largely what was once neoconservatism. And in so doing, they have defined the way that vast numbers of Americans view their economy, their polity, and their society. [72]

Friedman, in The Neoconservative Revolution, sums up the major impact that neocons have had on conservatism, and, in so doing, is not averse to emphasizing their Jewish orientation: “This book suggests that Jews and non-Jews alike are becoming more conservative, in part because of their neoconservative guides, who have made it more respectable to think in these terms.” He suggests that the motivation of the neoconservatives derives from the beneficent impulse inherent in Judaism: “The idea that Jews have been put on earth to make it a better, perhaps even a holy, place continues to shape their worldview and that of many of their co-religionists.” [73]

A more negative result of neoconservative takeover has been presented by the rightist evolutionary biologist Kevin MacDonald, who likewise focuses on the issue of Jewishness. MacDonald contends that

the intellectual and cumulative effect of neoconservatism and its current hegemony over the conservative political movement in the United States (achieved partly by its large influence on the media and among foundations) has been to shift the conservative movement toward the center and, in effect, to define the limits of conservative legitimacy. Clearly, these limits of conservative legitimacy are defined by whether they conflict with specifically Jewish group interests in a minimally restrictive immigration policy, support for Israel, global democracy, opposition to quotas and affirmative action, and so on.

Significantly, MacDonald holds that

[t]he ethnic agenda of neoconservatism can also be seen in their promotion of the idea that the United States should pursue a highly interventionist foreign policy aimed at global democracy and the interests of Israel rather than aimed at the specific national interests of the United States. [74]

Although neoconservatives of the Reagan era were adamantly pro-Israel, the issue of Israel versus the Arab states of the Middle East did not loom large then. Israel did have a favored place in American foreign policy. Neoconservative Reaganites identified Israel as America’s “strategic asset” in the Cold War, and Israel actually helped the United States fight communism in Latin America and elsewhere. [75] J. J. Goldberg maintains that

the Reagan administration set about making itself into the most pro-Israel administration in history. In the fall of 1981, Israel was permitted for the first time to sign a formal military pact with Washington, becoming a partner, not a stepchild, of American policy. Israel and American embarked on a series of joint adventures, both overt and covert: aiding the Nicaraguan contras, training security forces in Zaire, sending arms secretly to Iran. Cooperation in weapons development, sharing of technology, and information and intelligence reached unprecedented proportions. Israel’s annual U. S. aid package, already higher than any other country’s, was edged even higher. Loans were made into grants. Supplemental grants were added. [76]

Despite its support for Israel, the United States under Reagan also relied heavily on Arab and Islamic governments to counter Soviet influence, sometimes to the consternation of neoconservatives and other proponents of Israel, as when the Reagan administration successfully pushed for the sale of early warning radar aircraft (AWACS) to Saudi Arabia in 1981. [77] On the whole, however, the issue of Israel versus other Middle Eastern countries would not move to the forefront until the end of the Cold War during the administration of President George H. W. Bush (1989–1993). But before we continue with this history of the American neoconservatives, it is appropriate to examine developments in Israel.