History News Network

On November 22, a little more than two weeks after the Newsweek article [a derogatory profile on Dylan], John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. On December 13, Bob Dylan received an award from the Emergency Civil Rights Committee. Things did not go well.

Problems arose when Dylan, who had been drinking throughout the ceremony, gave a rambling acceptance speech that reads more as an out-loud, unfiltered internal monologue, rather than a thought-through statement of views, let alone the expected thank you at an awards ceremony. In part, he said:

So, I accept this reward — not reward [laughter], award on behalf of Phillip Luce who led the group to Cuba which all people should go down to Cuba. I don’t see why anybody can’t go to Cuba. I don’t see what’s going to hurt by going any place. I don’t know what’s going to hurt anybody’s eyes to see anything. On the other hand, Phillip is a friend of mine who went to Cuba. I’ll stand up and to get uncompromisable about it, which I have to be to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where — what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too — I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it would have gone — I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me — not to go that far and shoot. [Boos and hisses]...

Other than being able to string a sentence together, empathy is the most important quality in a speechwriter. The ability or at least the attempt to understand your audience, to walk in their shoes for a little while, even if empathy will never be a perfect match for experience.—Cody Keenan, Grace

Ten days in June 2015 were some of the most intense during the presidency of Barack Obama. The president was awaiting US Supreme Court decisions on the fate of the Affordable Care Act and marriage equality. And, on June 17, a hate-fueled white supremacist shot to death nine African American worshippers at a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Chief White House speechwriter Cody Keenan focuses on this extraordinary period in his revelatory and lively new book Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America (Mariner Books)....

In July 1943, former Hollywood screenwriter Ayn Rand was still tracking responses, critical and commercial, to her first major novel, The Fountainhead. It had been published two months earlier by Bobbs-Merrill after being rejected by a dozen other companies. Rand had written two previous novels, along with two stage plays, none of which proved successful. Now The Fountainhead was off to a slow start with audiences and reviewers.

While this was transpiring, Rand received in the mail a set of galleys for the memoir (eventually titled Boot Straps) by Tom M. Girdler, chairman of Republic Steel, which operated several massive plants in the Midwest and Pennsylvania. Many Americans had probably already forgotten the most tragic incident that Girdler was associated with, almost exactly six years earlier. If Rand was among them, her memory (and high estimate of Girdler) was surely revived in reading those galleys. Soon she would model a key character in her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, partly on Girdler.

Near the end of May 1937, workers who had been on strike for several days at Republic Steel in Southeast Chicago had called for a Memorial Day picnic on the wide open field several blocks from the plant entrance to build support. Tom Girdler wouldn’t even recognize the union, famously vowing that he would retire and go back to growing apples before he’d do that. At least 1500 workers and family members, including many women and children, turned out for the picnic. After the festivities, organizers called on the crowd to march to the gates of the plant where they might establish a mass, legal, picket. ...

If someone ever managed to copyright the word “resentment,” the owner would enjoy a steady stream of revenue, especially from columnists and opinion writers. Take those of the venerable New York Times. “The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party is Not Coming from the Suburbs,” reads the headline of a Thomas Edsall column from earlier this year. (January 25, 2023) Just a day later, Edsall’s Times colleague Paul Krugman declared, “Rural resentment has become a fact of American politics.” (January 26, 2023). Earlier that month, Bret Stephens wrote, in a colloquy with David Brooks, “The problem is that Trump turned the [Republican] party into a single-purpose vehicle for cultural resentments,” adding: “It doesn’t help that coastal elites do so much on their own to feed those resentments.” (Jan. 15, 2023) And in August of last year, Jamelle Bouie struck the same chord: “Republicans would like to offer you some resentment.” (August 22, 2022)

Given these assertions, it is no surprise to discover that the rush to evoke resentment coincided with the election of Trump in 2016. It quickly became an off-the-shelf explanation for a political phenomenon that defied all rational expectations. David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, vilified the victorious candidate as a “slick performer” who essentially duped his followers by being “more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury, their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests.” And days after the election, Leon Wieseltier, writing in the Washington Post, seized upon it as the apt word to describe the present moment: “Resentment, even when it has a basis in experience, is one of the ugliest political emotions, and it has been the source of horrors,” he declared. Others followed suit.

What are we to make of the place of “resentment” in the echo chamber of a significant segment of the commentariat? Does its frequent, casual, sometimes unthinking deployment really offer any insight into the motivations and values of the millions of Americans who voted the former president into office and support him still? It’s like inflation: when we use something too frequently its value is diminished. Might it be time to place a moratorium on “resentment?”...

“MR. PRESIDENT WOULD YOU PLEASE SUGGEST THAT MRS. ROOSEVELT CONFINE HER DUTIES MORE TO THE WHITE HOUSE.”

The couple from Atlanta who sent the demanding telegram to President Franklin D. Roosevelt weren’t alone in their criticism of the First Lady.

From the time Eleanor Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, she sharply divided public opinion. Traditionally, First Ladies were supposed to be discreet figures in the presidential background. They stayed close to the White House, primarily overseeing social functions, and took no active part in public life. When Eleanor stepped into the role, she was well established as a writer, educator, political advocate, and traveler. And yet even she, a daring early advocate of commercial air travel and a frequent flier who wanted to become a pilot, was expected to stay grounded at the White House....