History

Defenders of LBJ are less interested in history than in hagiography

This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN.

Mark Updegrove, the federal director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library & Museum in Austin, Texas, is one of the instigators of the current backlash against Selma, the widely-praised film that depicts a crucial series of events in the Civil Rights Movement. Leaving others to engage in the historical debate about the film’s portrayal of LBJ, I would like instead to examine the campaign to discredit the film based on that portrayal. Waged by those intent on protecting and promoting Lyndon Johnson’s image, the efforts are part of a larger trend to use presidential libraries in ways far outside their initial objectives and Congressional intent, and to hire “legacy managers” rather than credentialed archivists and historians to run them.

Updegrove, who also serves, ex-officio, as a trustee of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library Foundation, began the wave of criticism in an article last month in Politico (which is published by Robert Allbritton, another trustee of the LBJ Foundation). Updegrove wrote that the film’s “mischaracterization” of LBJ “matters now” because “racial tension is once again high” and that “it does no good to bastardize one of the most hallowed chapters in the Civil Rights Movement by suggesting that the President himself stood in the way of progress.”

A few days later, former LBJ White House aide Joseph A. Califano, Jr. – also a trustee of the LBJ Foundation – in an angry op-ed in the Washington Post (which is published by Politico co-founder Fred Ryan, chairman of the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation) claimed that the Selma marches actually were Johnson’s idea. While this notion has been labeled false and outrageous by, among others, historian Peniel Joseph, in an illuminating NPR piece, the clamor may harm the film’s reputation, business, and, reportedly, its chances during the upcoming awards season.

From the significant, apparently coordinated endeavors of Updegrove, Califano, and others – and the negative attention they have brought to bear on an otherwise broadly-lauded work – it would seem as if, to them, Johnson was, and is, the point. But, like the movement as a whole, Selma the movie is not, and Selma the historical events were not, about Lyndon Johnson. By trying to make them about LBJ, and by rigorously policing any negative representations of him, those entrusted with managing the legacy of our nation’s 36th president reveal the motivations of the private organizations that build, donate, and utilize presidential libraries for their own purposes.

This manufactured controversy sadly diverts proper attention from the film and its powerful message. It also underscores the main theme of my upcoming book, The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity & Enshrine Their Legacies. In the book, I explore the extent to which former chief executives, their families, supporters, and foundations go in order to, as in a campaign, present only the most positive – while ignoring all of the negative – elements of a president’s life, career, and administration. Instead of selling a candidate for office, they’re selling an image for posterity. And like a presidential campaign, image is more important than substance; the reality is more complicated – and less heroic – than the image-makers would have us believe. That doesn’t prevent them from rewriting history, and waging a concerted, and, at times, aggressive, campaign to rectify what they consider to be misrepresentations of their president.

Selling that image takes more than cheery messaging; it also requires the elimination of anything that may harm what often is a fragile narrative, based more on admiring rhapsodies than documented, historical facts. And like a campaign communications staff, members of the late president’s team feel they must hit back, hard, at criticism, negative facts, or even personal opinions that even slightly deviate from the message they have carefully crafted.

To Updegrove, the suggestion that the man whose legacy he was hired to rescue was anything less than heroic, and motivated by anything other than saintly, selfless, devotion to a just cause, is unacceptable, and swiftly must be “corrected.”

In a CNN blog post in February, 2014, Updegrove was quoted as saying, “We want people to know what this President did – what he got done and how it continues to affect us.” That’s a perfectly acceptable desire for a presidential family member or an official of a private foundation dedicated to promoting a president’s legacy to express, but not a mid-level federal employee responsible for administering a nonpartisan government archival facility.

On the January 4, 2015 edition of Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer commented on critics’ assertion that the movie was “dead wrong” on its portrayal of LBJ, asking Updegrove – as if he were a disinterested arbiter of the truth, rather than a tender of LBJ’s flame and a leader of that very criticism – “What happened here?” Updegrove answered, “Well, unfortunately, there’s no litmus test for movies that — based on history. There’s no standard that says that you got this wrong, you have got to correct that.”

Apparently, though, Updegrove believes there is such a litmus test, and that he is the one designated to administer it.

An insistence that LBJ was so central to the movement that this film “bastardizes” it conveniently ignores his earlier role in successfully blocking civil rights legislation as Senate Majority Leader – a neat trick replicated in the recently-renovated LBJ Library museum. There, in exhibits depicting his pre-presidential career, Vietnam, foreign affairs, domestic programs, and the Civil Rights Movement, the narrative is clean, simple, and undeviating: Lyndon Baines Johnson Was A Great Man Who Did Nothing Other Than Great Things And Only For Great Reasons.

The LBJ presented in the renovated exhibits – which were overseen by Updegrove – bears little resemblance to the meticulously-detailed and extraordinarily well-documented LBJ of Robert Caro’s multi-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. The museum’s adulatory portrayal differs little from those in recent presidential libraries, but it is quite different from the other mature museums in the National Archives system, which have, over time, begun to develop more thorough, balanced, and nuanced views of the men to whom they are dedicated. Instead of echoing that progress, the recent changes to the LBJ exhibits go backwards; that they are less factual and more flattering is unprecedented in the history of presidential libraries – as is Updegrove’s assertive campaigning, as a federal employee, to rehabilitate a president’s image.

Will Updegrove’s public scolding of Selma director Ava DuVernay have a chilling effect? Will future filmmakers think twice before daring to express an opinion about a former president with taxpayer-funded legacy managers to rescue their legacy? Will researchers at the Johnson Library worry the director might charge them with “mischaracterizing” Johnson? That our government now appears to be in the business not only of administering these legacy-burnishing shrines but of “correcting” others’ views of history should be unacceptable to the citizens who fund the operation of our presidential libraries.

While it would be a shame if Updegrove’s and his colleagues’ need to police and sanitize Johnson’s image deprives this transformative film of deserved accolades and awards, it would be a greater misfortune if their attempts to discredit Selma prevented it from being seen by a broad audience. It is my hope that the film and the filmmakers succeed in spite of these negative efforts, and, in the face of this latest example of the last campaign, overcome.

Anthony Clark, a former speechwriter and legislative director in the U.S. House of Representatives, was responsible for hearings and investigations of the National Archives and presidential libraries for the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in the 111th Congress.

Home attendants and aides have historically been singled out for denial of basic labor rights

Over the last year, the nation has seen a tumultuous wave of low-wage workers contesting terms of employment that perpetually leave them impoverished and economically insecure. It’s a fight in which home-care workers—one of the fastest growing labor forces—have long participated, as home attendants and aides have historically been singled out for denial of basic labor rights. Their work is becoming ever more important in our economy, with over 40 million elderly Americans today and baby boomers aging into their 70s and 80s; the demand for such workers is projected to nearly double over the next seven years. And yet, this week a federal judge is likely to put up just the latest obstacle to their receiving the minimum wage and overtime compensation granted to other workers through the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

The story of how home-care workers ended up without rights begins in the Great Depression. Home care first originated as a distinct occupation during the New Deal, and evolved after World War II as part of welfare and health policy aimed at developing alternatives to institutionalization of the elderly and people with disabilities. Prior to the mid-1970s, public agencies provided or coordinated homemaker and home-attendant services. Fiscal constraints subsequently led state and local governments to contract home care first to non-profit and later to for-profit agencies. In 1974, Congress extended FLSA wage and hour standards to long-excluded private household workers. A year later, however, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) interpreted the new amendment to exempt home-care workers, even employees of for-profit entities, by misclassifying them as elder companions, akin to babysitters. It provided no explicit reasoning for introducing this new terminology, beyond the need for uniform definitions of domestic service and employer. This exclusion became known as the “companionship rule.”

The rule was a boon for employers. Amid nursing-home scandals and an emergent disability-rights movement, demand for home-based care burgeoned, but the women actually performing the labor were invisible. A distinct home-health industry began to grow following the 1975 exemption, as the rule freed staffing and home-health agencies from paying minimum wages and overtime. Opening Medicaid and other programs to for-profit providers after 1980 led to a tenfold increase in for-profit agencies during the next half decade. By 2000, for-profit groups employed over 60 per cent of all workers. Today, the home franchise industry is worth $90 billion.

Care workers, however, were never just casual friendly neighbors; even before this expansion, home-care workers were middle-aged, disproportionately African American, female wage earners—neither nurse nor maid, but a combination of both. Despite changes in their title since the 1930s, these workers always performed a combination of bodily care work (bathing, dressing, feeding) and housekeeping necessary to maintain someone at home. They increasingly have become a trained workforce.

With the expansion of the industry, service sector unions and domestic worker associations lobbied to change the “companionship rule.” Recently, they seemed to have won: After extensive public comment, the DOL issued a new rule in September of 2013, which would have finally included home-care workers under FLSA coverage. The Obama Administration also updated the definition of domestic service to match the job as performed by nearly 2 million workers who belong to one of the fastest growing, but lowest paid, occupations, with median hourly wages under $10. It recognized aid with activities of daily living as care, and care as a form of domestic labor. Whereas companionship services had previously included even those who spent more than 20 hours engaged in care, the new rule narrowed the meaning of companionship to mere “fellowship and protection” in order to close the loophole that for-profit agencies were deploying to profit by underpaying live-in home attendants. It was to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2015, though enforcement was delayed until June.

Then, in late December, at the urging of for-profit home care franchise operators, led by the Home Care Association of America, Judge Richard J. Leon (a George W. Bush appointee) of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia struck down a key element of the revision. The decision vacated the responsibility of third-party employers (such as home-care businesses) to pay minimum wage and overtime for so-called companionship services. In his opinion, the judge charged the DOL with “arrogance,” “unprecedented authority” and “a wholesale abrogation of Congress’s authority in this area.”

A historical perspective suggests otherwise. In the 1970s, Congress never intended to enhance corporate profits by narrowing wage and hour protections; to the contrary, it expanded them. Granted, the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare refused “to include within the terms ‘domestic service’ such activities as babysitting and acting as a companion”—but it distinguished teenage sitters and friendly visitors from domestic workers by adding “casual” to those exempted from labor standards. It explicitly did not refer to “regular breadwinners,” those “responsible for their families.” Moreover, the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed the supposition that where Congressional intent is ambiguous, executive agencies—including the DOL—have leeway. In the 2007 case Long Island Care at Home, Ltd. v. Coke, a unanimous Supreme Court commended the expertise of the agency to determine the meaning of undefined phrases like “domestic service employment” and “companionship services.”

During oral argument in Coke, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg suggested that the proper way to amend the exemption was either a new rule through the DOL, which is what ended up happening, or legislation. Judge Leon reads back Congressional intent from the fact that legislative fixes have stalled in committee in the years following Coke. But there are many reasons why bills go nowhere in our gridlocked government.

The temporary restraining order from Judge Leon effectively blocked implementation of the new DOL rule in totality, setting off a ripple effect against this primarily female workforce. California, for example, instantly suspended implementation for some 80,000 workers. Then on Jan. 9, he heard oral arguments on whether to strike down the redefinition of the companionship classification. Given his prior decisions, the bet is that his next ruling on Jan. 14 will do so. Continuous litigation is in the offering, as the DOL is likely to appeal his decisions all the way to the Supreme Court.

For over 40 years, we’ve relied on cheap labor for care. The structure of home-care has exemplified a broader trend of reconfiguring work throughout the economy as casualized and low-waged, outside of labor standards and immune from unionization. But stopping the correction of this injustice means distorting history—and devaluing the care that someday most of us will need.

Eileen Boris is Hull Professor of Feminist Studies and Professor of History, Black Studies, and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jennifer Klein is Professor of History at Yale and a Public Voices Fellow. They are the authors of Caring For America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State.

Jan. 13, 2002: 'The Fantasticks' ends its off-Broadway run of 42 years and 17,162 performances

Few thought it could ever compete with the Broadway musicals.

Its tiny cast comprised eight actors and an orchestra of two — a pianist and a harpist. The set was Spartan: a small wooden platform, a bench, a trunk and a cardboard moon hung from a pole.

When The Fantasticks made its off-Broadway debut in 1960, at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, the reviews were bad enough that the show’s writer, Tom Jones (not that Tom Jones), spent the rest of the night drinking heavily and throwing up in Central Park, he later told the Associated Press.

The story itself was “slight,” according to the New York Times review, which summed up the plot thus: “A boy and a girl, who are neighbors, are in love as long as a wall separates them and they believe that their fathers disapprove. Actually, their fathers want them to marry. To create an irresistible romantic mood, the fathers arrange a flamboyant abduction scene in the moonlight.”

But the slight story, simply staged, became the little musical that could. When it closed on this day, Jan. 13, in 2002, it ended a run of 42 years and 17,162 performances, making it the world’s longest-running musical. Nothing on Broadway even comes close to its tenure: the nearest is The Phantom of the Opera, which opened in 1988 and played its 10,000th performance in 2012. The London production of The Mousetrap, now in its 63rd year, with more than 25,000 performances, is the only play to outdo The Fantasticks in longevity. The Agatha Christie whodunit is the world’s longest-running show of any kind.

Despite its dismal opening, The Fantasticks managed to get under the skin of critics and theatergoers. Five years after it opened, TIME heralded the musical as one of Broadway’s sleeper successes:

After losing money the first nine weeks, it managed to set up a love affair with its audience, kept everything cozy and intimate in a 150-seat, off-Broadway house. Fans of the show began going back again and again; one critic comes back every anniversary.

Its slow-but-steady success paid off for the 52 investors who gambled on the show in 1960. One investor, Ira Kapp, told the New York Times in 2010 that he’d only paid up in the first place because he felt guilty for nodding off during a run-through of the musical.

“That’s the luckiest investment I ever made in my life,” he said.

The show’s 2002 closing, as it turned out, was just an intermission: A revival opened four years later at the Snapple Theater Center — still off-Broadway, but now in Midtown, with the same small cast and sparse set. Tom Jones reprised the minor role he had played nearly half a century earlier, but with one tweak: the character once billed as “Actor” was listed instead as “Old Actor.”

Read TIME’s original assessment of The Fantasticks, here in the archives: Broadway: What Makes Some Run

TIME explained the Deep Web in a 2013 cover story

Ross Ulbricht’s trial for his alleged role as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the owner of the shadowy online market place Silk Road, is scheduled to begin Tuesday. Ulbricht was indicted last year for operating the site, which allowed users to buy and sell drugs anonymously. He was charged with narcotics conspiracy, engaging in criminal enterprise, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and money laundering conspiracy. As part of the indictment, Ulbricht is accused of running the website on “The Onion Router,” concealing IP addresses and hiding the locations of Bitcoin transmissions.

If all that sounds complicated, that’s because it is.

Shortly after Ulbricht’s arrest, TIME’s Lev Grossman and Jay Newton-Small profiled Silk Road and the world in which it operated. As they explained, there’s a reason the details are difficult to nail down. After all, that’s the whole point:

On the afternoon of Oct. 1, 2013, a tall, slender, shaggy-haired man left his house on 15th Avenue in San Francisco. He paid $1,000 a month cash to share it with two housemates who knew him only as a quiet currency trader named Josh Terrey. His real name was Ross Ulbricht. He was 29 and had no police record. Dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, Ulbricht headed to the Glen Park branch of the public library, where he made his way to the science-fiction section and logged on to his laptop–he was using the free wi-fi. Several FBI agents dressed in plainclothes converged on him, pushed him up against a window, then escorted him from the building.

The FBI believes Ulbricht is a criminal known online as the Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to the book and movie The Princess Bride. The Dread Pirate Roberts was the owner and administrator of Silk Road, a wildly successful online bazaar where people bought and sold illegal goods–primarily drugs but also fake IDs, fireworks and hacking software. They could do this without getting caught because Silk Road was located in a little-known region of the Internet called the Deep Web.

Technically the Deep Web refers to the collection of all the websites and databases that search engines like Google don’t or can’t index, which in terms of the sheer volume of information is many times larger than the Web as we know it. But more loosely, the Deep Web is a specific branch of the Internet that’s distinguished by that increasingly rare commodity: complete anonymity. Nothing you do on the Deep Web can be associated with your real-world identity, unless you choose it to be. Most people never see it, though the software you need to access it is free and takes less than three minutes to download and install. If there’s a part of the grid that can be considered off the grid, it’s the Deep Web.

Read the rest of the story, here in the TIME Vault: The Deep Web

The earthquake devastated a nation that was on the verge of achieving long-term economic and political stability

Five years ago on Monday, just as the Caribbean nation of Haiti was beginning to stand on solid footing, the ground beneath it shook. The tremor flattened buildings and killed more than 200,000 people, bringing to a halt the country’s slow but encouraging progress toward economic and political stability.

“Tragedy has a way of visiting those who can bear it least,” TIME’s Michael Elliott observed shortly after, reporting on the earthquake. By then, the devastation wrought by the tremor was coming into focus. The capital city of Port-au-Prince, just 15 miles from the epicenter, had been largely leveled; the National Palace and the city’s cathedral were destroyed; and aid workers were already pleading for international help with messages like this email from Louise Ivers, clinical director for Haiti for the NGO Partners in Health: “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS … Please help us.”

Support did flow in, in the form of aid workers, foreign aid, and more than $1 billion in charity. But the earthquake set back years of development work in the impoverished country. As TIME reported:

What makes the earthquake especially ‘cruel and incomprehensible,’ as U.S. President Barack Obama put it, was that it struck at a rare moment of optimism. After decades of natural and political catastrophes, the U.N. peacekeeping force and an international investment campaign headed by former President Bill Clinton, the U.N.’s special envoy to Haiti, had recently begun to calm and rebuild the nation.

Starting from scratch, the post-earthquake rebuilding process has made headway. Rubble that covered the ground and blocked transit routes, one of the most tangible signs of the country’s slow recovery in the months after the earthquake, has now largely been cleared. Infrastructure, including a new airport, has been rebuilt. And the number of people living in makeshift tent homes has dropped from some 1.5 million to 70,000, Harry Adam, head of the Department for Construction of Housing and Public Buildings told AFP.

But Haiti, which still hosts the U.N. peacekeeping force known as MINUSTAH (the French acronym for the mission), has a long path ahead. On Friday, the United Nations issued a grim warning of the risks facing the country, the poorest in the western hemisphere. “Persistent chronic poverty and inequality, environmental degradation and continuing political uncertainty threaten achievements Haitians have made over the past five years,” Wendy Bigham, the World Food Programme’s representative in Haiti, said in a statement. Meanwhile, an ongoing political crisis over long-overdue elections has slowed critical recovery efforts and threatens to devolve further. Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, largely credited with overseeing much of the nation’s reconstruction since he took office in 2012, resigned last month amid mass street protests, but his departure has failed to lead to political compromise.

In a statement Wednesday that highlighted the consequences of political instability, the U.N. called for a political compromise by the end of the week “in order to strengthen stability, preserve the democratic gains and ensure sustainable development in Haiti.” Five year’s after the earthquake, Haiti can still scarcely bear more turmoil.

Browse TIME’s special issue about the Haiti earthquake: Haiti’s Tragedy

Marie Stopes' work made another appearance on the show

Contains spoilers for Season 5 Episode 2 of Downton Abbey

In the episode of Downton Abbey that aired for U.S. audiences on Jan. 11, the name is only mentioned briefly. Lady Mary hands a book to her maid Anna and mentions the author as she sends Anna off on an embarrassing errand — but to a British woman of the early 1920s the implication was clear: the name Marie Stopes meant birth control.

Stopes is famous as the author of the 1918 marriage manual Married Love, which she was inspired to write after her own marriage was annulled. She was a scientist — an expert on plant fossils — and challenged the Victorian idea that it was improper for a woman to enjoy sex. She also wrote about contraception; in fact, she was a proponent of the belief that waiting to conceive a child would result in a stronger relationship between husband and wife. The book was a bestseller in England, though still controversial, and it was banned in the U.S. for obscenity for more than a decade.

Though Married Love made Stopes famous — and got a shout-out on Downton last season — its sequel, Wise Parenthood, published within a year of the first, is more likely to have been the book Mary turned to for help. Stopes wrote in the introduction to the sequel that she had received a deluge of inquiries for more specific information about how to actually obtain and use the contraceptive plans she advocated. In 1921, she went even further, opening the world’s first birth-control clinic, and then following that up with others throughout the country. (The item that Anna ends up buying at the pharmacy, in its nondescript paper bag, is likely to have been a cervical cap.)

Stopes wasn’t always ahead of her time — there was often an undercurrent of eugenics to her ideas on birth control, and when she died in 1958, TIME remarked diplomatically that “she got a few weird ideas” over the years. But her books helped bring women like Lady Mary into a future where their love lives didn’t have to be controlled by the ever-present threat of motherhood, and where there were alternatives to the illegal abortion to which Lady Edith was almost driven last season.

That shift, from past to future, is what Downton is all about — and Marie Stopes, as TIME wrote when she died, was right there with them:

As a Harley Street admirer put it: “In these days of family planning, female emancipation, and ideas of equality in sexual pleasure, it is easy to see Dr. Stopes and say, ‘So what?’ We have to place her in her own age, when such things were quite beyond the pale—and that was not so long ago.” The times had passed her by, but it was because she had done so much to shape them.

Read the full story here in the TIME Vault: Early Crusader

Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world on Jan. 9, 2007

On Jan. 9, 2007, Apple introduced a device that would, in the words of Steve Jobs, “reinvent the phone.”

“And we are calling it,” he said, “iPhone.”

Here are eight way to celebrate the eight years of iPhone-dom that followed — with bonus points if you’re reading them on your phone:

Read TIME’s first article about the iPhone: Shortly after Jobs’ announcement, the magazine took a look at what the future held for the device. “Apple’s new iPhone, which will be available in June, could do to the cell-phone market what the iPod did to the portable-music-player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority,” wrote Lev Grossman. “This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it’s good news for those of us who use them.” Read the story here

Take a quiz to see how well you know the iPhone: This quiz marked the seventh anniversary of the first iPhone sold, and you can still use it to see how much you know about the device. And no asking Siri for help! Take the quiz here

Explore an interactive timeline of iPhone history: Click through from the first phone sold to the millionth, and beyond. Learn more here

See why TIME named the iPhone the invention of the year: The phone had only been on the market for a few months — and much of the world remained unconvinced that it was worth the fuss — when it landed the cover of TIME under the heading “Invention of the Year.” Read the story here

Watch the iPhone evolve: See Jobs’ original announcement and track the phone’s growth though a half-dozen iterations, and from an idea to an everyday essential. Watch the video here

Discover what an iPhone is really worth: TIME’s Michael Schuman did the math, and discovered that, in 2011, countries around the world benefit economically from the existence of the iPhone. Read the story here

Browse photos of mobile-phone history: See how we got from the field telephones used in World War I to the ubiquitous hand-held devices of today. Look at the gallery here

Consider what’s up next: In a late 2014 cover story, Lev Grossman and Matt Vella consider how the Apple watch can continue what the iPhone started, bringing us into a world that’s “Never Offline.” Read the story here