So long, Nelson Mandela

On June 26, 1990, Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress. The speech begins at the 13:30 minute mark in the C-Span clip. It was one of many historic events that shook the world in the short period between 1989 and 1991, creating a huge shift in the balance of power. To George H.W. Bush's credit, he chose to recognize these changes, not ignore them as many within his own Republican Party would have preferred.

The Republicans had fought hard against the Anti-Apartheid Act that passed Congress in 1986. Jesse Helms staged a filibuster against the final vote, supported by several of his vituperative Southern colleagues. Ronald Reagan vetoed the legislation, but his veto was overridden. Sometimes, the tide of history is simply too strong to be overcome.

George H.W. Bush wasn't going to make the same mistake, welcoming Nelson Mandela to the White House before the historic joint session. He like so many Americans embraced Mandela because the ANC leader represented the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement that had been ongoing in the United States and South Africa for decades.

Martin Luther King Jr. had expressly stated Gandhi and Albert Luthuli as his role models, both were born in South Africa. Gandhi would move to India. Luthuli would head the African National Congress, and eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to break down the walls of racism and injustice. These were figures both King and Mandela embraced. Few Americans seemed to understand this link, but many felt it when Nelson Mandela addressed the nation.

Having been in South Africa in 1990 when Mandela was released from Robben Island and having watched the events as they unfolded rapidly, I was greatly pleased to see the US finally renounce all its ties to the past regime and embrace the future of South Africa. There were no accompanying photographs because for years it was expressly forbidden to publish any photographs of Nelson Mandela. All people had was little more than a police composite sketch, which made him look old and haggard.

I would have liked to have seen a stronger political and economic union in the wake of Mandela's rise to the Presidency, but events in America took an unfortunate turn, and the message Mandela gave seemed lost on the new faces of the Republican Party, who took over Congress in 1994.

Mandela became President of South Africa in 1994, winning on this historic ballot (partial image). He held the nation together through a very difficult transition phase which still continues. The world has lost a moral compass.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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