Have lost track of the number of times I have watched “All The President’s Men”. Would definitely recommend it as classroom fare. Some context for the students might be needed though.
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“Those are ‘phone booths’.”
The John Dean documentary starts before Watergate, with Nixon creating the “Enemies List” and just going after anyone who has slightly slighted him. Tie-ins to the Ellsberg’s Psychiatrist office break-in (needed to find dirt on Ellsberg, who sent The Pentagon Papers to the WaPo and NYTimes), and smearing Muskie enough to drop his candidacy, leaving weaker McGovern as the Dem nominee in 1972. And Nixon simply being just a petty human in the first place.
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The thing was that Nixon would probably have easily been re-elected without doing all this crap. He was so paranoiac among other personality disorders. Needless to say I did not like Nixon so was not sad at his downfall.
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Barely getting to WWII is when we went to school. Today in out HS at least they power through American history and actually get quite a bit further than I recall when I was in HS.
You need to supplement the classroom instruction with a family viewing of “All The President’s Men”? And maybe Ken Burns’ documentary on the Vietnam War? That was really well done.
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I didn’t even know that book was about Vietnam. I guess I might watch the movie again. I might watch that Ken Burns documentary. Mr aj loves Ken Burns.
lol . . .
“All the President’s Men” is just about Watergate. I only mentioned The Vietnam War as it was also an important event that should be covered in history class.
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+1
Probably the biggest lesson to learn from this conflict is the need to allow the military to do their job w/o politicians playing arm-chair generals.
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I followed the Vietnam war closely as one of my American cousins was in the first group of Marines sent in by LBJ. However I learned much new stuff from the Burns documentary.
One of the most infuriating items that came out many years after the War was how Nixon stalled the Paris Peace Talks by convincing the South Vietnamese leadership to do nothing before the US Presidential Election: Nixon was afraid that progress in the talks might have helped his Democratic opponent get elected in 1968. I can’t think of a more unconscionable action: no concern on his part over how many more people on both sides might have died as a result. Getting elected was all that mattered.
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Or maybe not cancel elections to support a right wing strong man the people don’t like when it looks like your side is going to lose the election?
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As far as lessons to learn from that conflict I’d put this pretty far down the list. Wow.
I have no idea what the high school US history gets to, but I had to cover for a 7th grade US history class during my prep hour in the week before finals (so, the last week of actual instruction). I showed them a slideshow the teacher had prepared about the Ford presidency and they wrote stuff down from it. I didn’t add any commentary of my own - largely because I don’t know anything about the Ford presidency.
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Talking about the Ford presidency is a tough assignment. The only thing I remember is that he pardoned Nixon and he was the only President in US history to never have been elected as VP or P.
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I remember
“Whip Inflation Now”.
“I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.” (Probably most people didn’t get the reference)
“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”
There are more here: Quotations: The Words of Gerald Ford - The New York Times
I had forgotten the rest of the third
“Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule. …”
Wish we could have said that in 2019 or 2021.
Just reading those quotes reminds me that common decency is a Good Thing.
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There was an earlier thread on this, one reason I challenged it. I wasn’t convinced there was much analysis, especially considering the likely alternate experience.
I was assuming that the cotton would have been grown mostly by independent farmers, that was the pattern in most of the US due to cheap land.
The only way my father was able to make a good living as a dairy farmer in the 1960’s and 1970’s was because he had four unpaid labourers (his four sons). The same story applied for previous generations when there were even more unpaid family employees. Mechanization reduced the manpower with each generation. However cotton plantations were much more labour intensive than dairy farming ever was so that type of operation would require that the farmer hire many labourers if he did not have slaves. Some types of farming like cotton plantations were less viable for independent farmers with paid employees.
I could pull up various articles to support my comment above but this excerpt is quite succinct:
“In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all US export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.”
I think there are a couple of related but different questions.
Did slavery create wealth in the US? Definitely.
Was slavery essential to the establishment of the US in the sense that there were no effective, practical alternatives for farming cotton, etc? Some argue “yes”, but i am not so sure.
If there were an effective, practical alternative to slavery, would it have been less or more effective, and how much? I don’t know. This is getting pretty hypothetical.
Mechanization was not an option. An effective mechanized cotton picker was not developed until around the Second World War despite earlier attempts to develop one. That largely eliminated the labour component but well after slavery was abolished.