Transcripts For CSPAN3 U.S. Policymaking Presidential Commissions 20240714

Panelists. Theyll introduce themselves before their presentations. Theyre each going to speak for about 10 to 12 minutes at the most about their Current Research on president ial commissions. And then the three of us will talk in conversation about the role of president ial commissions and political history. And ill reserve the last half hour at least for questions and comments from you and for us to continue talking. As you can tell, todays session is being filmed by cspan. Do with that information what you will. I am frank popper. I teach city planning rather than history, although increasely, i take a historical approach to city planning. I do that at rutgers and princeton. The reason im here is that nearly half a century ago, i wrote a small book for the 20th century fund, now the Century Foundation in new york city on president ial commissions, and its one of the very few sources i think on them, and a couple of months ago my 49yearold book was dug up and i was asked to participate in this panel. Im fairly current on president ial commissions, but i start well, i have a 49year head start, i guess is the way to look at it. President ial commissions have a long history in the United States. In the late 19th century there were a couple of them on philippines and theyve since Theodore Roosevelt had won a country life, theres been a whole bunch of others in more modern period. They all essentially work the same way. The president appoints a bunch of notables who represent different opinions on the subject in question. They meet. They hire an executive director who hires the staff. The staff writes much of the report, and eventually its released. The time spans can be as short as six months or as long as perhaps three or four years. I want to talk about president ial commissions as a form of National Literature. National literature at least to me as two kinds of meanings. One its an Overall Record of the nations running concerns and big turning points. Running concerns would be things like race, the role of women, Public Health, the organization of the federal government. A big turning point might be well, in the late 19th century, there was a filipino insurrection and eventually filipino independence and the United States had to decide how to arrange that, or work with that. And more recently in terms of big turning points, there have been commissions on pearl harbor, the kennedy assassination, the first kennedy assassination, threemile island, the challenger rocket disaster, 9 11, deep water horizon not that long ago. These commissions, these running concern commissions give you a pretty good sense of how among other things the nations elite has changed. If you look at the early 20th century commissions, there are very few women. There are very few blacks. There are very few latinos. I think the more recent ones tend to have more people from the sun belt and as the region becomes more prominent in the national politics. Very few poor people are on president ial commissions, and in truth, not that many who you would say are middle class either. Thats one kind of National Literature. Another way to look at National Literature is in the sense of National Touch points. Intensely meaningful cultural experiences that mark the generation, that mark the country forever. And here one has things like the kennedy assassination commission. The 9 11 commission. And these things are sometimes treated, not necessarily by politicians, but by people with shall we say a finer sense of the nations culture, a more refined one, if you will, as actual pieces of National Literature that are revealing in the way hamlet is revealing or the great gatsby is revealing, and so, for example, the great novelist don deluo, and in his book describes the Warren Commission as follows. Its the megaton novel that james joyce would have written if hed moved to iowa city and lived to be 100. Okay . The 9 11 commission. Likewise has occasionally gotten this sort of treatment. The great late harvard historian daniel aaron called at an epic, not in the sense of an epic hike, but in the sense of an epic narrative like bail woof. But the terrorist, and without the sort of miraculous intervention of bayo wolf to save the towers or the American People from the attack. And the lesson is very clearly the people themselves absent bay wolf, will have to come up with a response, and this is what the response should be. Like, okay, two kinds of National Literature. Most literature, most books and poems are what publishers call mid lists. That is they may not have great circulations. They may not make great impact, but they sell year in, year out. The cumulative numbers are quite impressive. Sometimes or the cumulative profits. They form the background against which the bail wolves type of commission or nonbail wolf Type Commission in the 9 11 case can stick out. Theyre the baseline. The basic processes of negotiation for the literature, researching it, actually writing it, editing it, marketing it. Our problems of a more, if you will, mechanical nittygritty sort, but theyre actually as with most literature, as with most human activities, they end with sort of unclear outcomes, but clearly some positive ones too. One basically in most of the commissions cases, comes up with the sense that they accomplish things. They accomplish important things, some of them, but they may not necessarily achieve great public acclaim or knowledge in so doing. Dove, in his description of the Income Maintenance Commission has a wonderful, wonderful description of the mechanics of how that particular commission worked, and how its politics worked from the inside, and is going to do a terrific job, i know, because he recruited me. Thats why i know. The more recent history of commissions is well, about what you would expect. Obama appointed a couple. Most notably the one on the veep water horizon disaster in the gulf. Then more recently trump made some noises about appointing Chris Christie head of an Opiate Commission to look at the nations difficulty with opiates. He also formed one with the secretary of state from kansas on Voter Suppression. The christie one never got off the ground, and the other crashed and burned pretty specifically. I forgot to say, by the way, that no president ever appoints a commission on a topic that is going well. The topic always has to be something that is not going well, where there are serious conflicts, and thats another reason why at least in my view, they resemble literature. Literature likewise would go nowhere without conflicts, and where you have conflicts, you have literature, and where you have conflicts, you have commissions and there is an overlap. As i say, the Trump Commission, or the trump experience with commissions has been as with much else with trump, rather disruptive of previous patterns, but i did notice about a year ago in the atlantic an article featured on the cover about artificial intelligence, and concluding that this is a weighty problem that requires, guess what, a president ial commission to assess in terms of its likely effects and how the nation should respond. Henry kissinger writing in the atlantic, were back to the notables of the sort who usually are on these things. When i did my research on president ial commissions, all those years ago, i discovered there was a sort of interlocking directorate. A lot of people at the time who never quite ran for political officer, at least quite yet at the time, got appointed to multiple commissions. So there are three commissions that were scored by george meany, the labor leader, g. Erwin miller. And who else . There were a couple more like that. They were very inward, and incestuous within the nations elite as a whole. Let me and, again, the d disldi dislin some day i suppose there will be a Trump Commission or commissions about his years in power. Maybe somebody in the room, although there arent that many of you, will serve on it. More likely, you, perhaps you or someone here will write about it, will chronicle it. And if you do and you want to think in terms of literature, try shakespeares approach to richard the third. Thank you. Thank you all for being here, and thank you to nicole and others who arent in the room for putting together this conference. Thank you to leah, nicole and katie for putting together this conference. I teach in research in the department of history and at the Woodrow Wilson school of government and international affairs. Im interested in the interest of political policy and social movements in the context of race and inequality. I first got interested in president ial commissions after stumbling into the avenr rooifs a 60s commission created by linden johnson. The commission has been mentioned before by scholars like the historian michael cats, but no scholar has explored this particular commission in depth. Johnson created the commission in january of 1969 and charged it with investigating, quote, any and every plan, however unconventional to meet the income needs of all American People. In announcing the creation of the commission, johnson said, quote, our challenge in the coming years is to extend human insurance and Human Dignity to persons who are not able to buy their own protection. The commission was to focus specifically on the possibility of instituting a universal basic income. The idea of universal basic income was not quite a radical idea by the 60s. In fact, there was a broad consensus from across the political spectrum behind i were lemting some form of guaranteed income. It included the likes of Martin Luther king junior and milton freeman. Much of the interest in guaranteed income in this period was driven by the realities of the historical moment. The war on poverty, four years old in 1968, focussed on the longrun creation of opportunities in employment, housing and education rather than unincome transfer programs. But that approach failed to e lil name poverty which was the expectation of Many Americans and the rhetoric johnson had used in commencing the war on poverty. Perhaps more importantly, the war on poverty had also failed to resolve a high poverty rate among minorities, especially African Americans, who in 1969 had a poverty rate of 32 compared to the white poverty rate which was under 10 . While a number of factors converged to keep African American poverty rates high, the nexus of automation and migration was one of the central culprits. Automation in rural parts of the country uprooted millions of people who migrated in search of jobs. In the cities African Americans faced unemployment prospects. Automation changed the urban labor market. At the same time employers left for the suburbs depleting the urban tax base and shrinking the job market. It has been written extensively about this phenomenon. It was concluded, for a large number of African Americans, the promise of steady, secure, and relatively wellpaid employment proved elusive. When nixon was inaugurated, he decided to keep the president s commission on income maintenance in place and provide it with more time and additional Financial Resources to complete its work. In other words, nixon pushed forward with a johnson Era Commission that focussed on poverty, poverty policy, and guaranteed income. That story is an important one. Better told, perhaps, in another session. But the connection between the president s commission on income maintenance and the Nixon Administration is an important one in the inception of my project. I came across the commission in researching Daniel Patrick moynihans involvement in a proposal introduced by the Nixon Administration in august of 1969 called the family assistance plan. The proposal never became law due to congressional opposition, but at its core was a guaranteed income. Even though nixon hesitated to call it that. As it turns out, part of the basis for this proposed family assistance plan could be found in the work of the president s commission on income maintenance. What i found most interesting about the commission, especially in thinking about methods for doing american political history, was its Investigative Approach at how it went about its work. Investigative processes have not generally been the focus of scholars who write about president ial commissions. They focussed on why president s appoint commissions in the first place and on commission recommendations. With less attention to how commissions reach their conclusions. Between january of 1968 and november of 1969, the president s commission on income maintenance visited 17 cities and towns across the country to conduct its investigation. In each location the commission cob veened local hearings and invited the poor, local officials, activists and advocates to testify about the circumstances and experience of poverty. In addition, commissioners physically visited the homes of the poor. What emerged in both of these settings in the hearings and during home visits was a set of interactions between commissioners, the poor and their advocates which were remarkable in three ways. First, given the opportunity, witnesses made a case in front of commissioners for the value of their expertise about the lived experience of poverty. While at the same time challenging the professional authorities who had often dictated poverty policy. A welfare recipient testified at hearings in new york city, for example, that any new poverty policies would, quote, have no meaning unless welfare recipients participated in the changes. The commissions chairman an industrialist from chicago, eventually argued, quote, just reading about a problem and theorizing and thinking in an office somewhere is not enough to understand the problem. That approach did not, quote, convey the bareness of poverty or the humanity and diversity of the poor. Instead, poverty policy needed to be shaped by those who had experienced poverty firsthand. Second, witnesses challenged dominant narratives about dependency and recast themselves as able selfadvocates within a system that created significant obstacles to mobility. For example, in florida in an African American tobacco farming town in the northern part of the state a witness told commissioners she was able to secure an increase in her assistant payments through a persistent Letter Writing Campaign to the welfare office. Quote, i kept after them, writing them and telling them we couldnt meet our needs and they raised my assistance level, unquote. In general, witnesses drew commissioners attention to their ability to survive even on scant resources. Third, by painting a bleak picture of the role of structures and systems in imposing the conditions that created cyclical poverty, witnesses challenged commissioners ideas that poverty was the consequence of a series of individual choices. In quincy, florida, for example, where tobacco fares were the primary industry, mostly Agricultural Workers faced sporadic unemployment due to the crops short growing season. At the same time, however, owners punished worker who is sought work where there was no crop to cultivate. As a result families had to borrow from their employers to survive during the off season. A deeken and local naacp activist testified that, quote, the poor man had to borrow the white mans money to try to keep his family alive, and this is how he keeped him tied. He is in debt. The tobacco season doesnt last long enough for him to get out of debt where he is a free man. Other obstacles were found in out of touch job training programs. Numerous other areas covered in the testimony of witnesses in all 17 cities and towns. In addition to the hearings, there was another important component of the commissions investigative strategy. Commissioners visited the homes of the poor. The conditions in which many of the poor lived exasperated commissioners and created a sense of urgency about developing a solution. One commissioner, a harvard trained economist and a member of johns ens counsel described the houses of the tobacco harvesters he visited in florida. He reported, quote, we saw these unpainted wooden shacks of three or four rooms in which 12 or 14 lived with no windows j just shutters. No indoor water. Most of them did not have inside toilets. Living conditions, cracks in windows and floors which allowed the weather to seep in, and a lack of Running Water exposed residents in quincy and elsewhere to disease and illness. The archives of the commission are full of these kinds of observations about the Living Conditions of the poor. Another discipline, sociology. Offers tools to help answer im sorry. Theres the commission poses a question. Studying the commission poses a question. How and why did the home visits and the testimony offered by witnesses at local hearings effect commissioners . Another discipline offers tools to help answer the question. A sociologist argued changing the context in which participants view a set of conditions can cause them to see the conditions differently. According to them this phenomenon plays, quote, a crucial role in determining what it is he think is really going on. Building on that idea, scholars have similarly argued that changing the framing of a particular set of circumstances can motivate new kinds of action, quote, new values are planted and nurtured and old meanings and understandingunder reframing a decision galvanizes Decision Makers to push for reform. Seeing issues face to face can have a significant impact. We can see the phenomenon play out in realtime over the course of the work of the president s commission on income maintenance. Commissioners largely realign their views with those of witnesses, especially in how they thought about the poor individuals responsibility for their own condition. When one was brought face to face with the poors Living Conditions, for example, his perspective shifted. In his own words while he was spent cal about the usefulness of the home visits, he was overwhelmed by what he saw in qui quincy. He saw poverty deeper than ever experienced in his life. It created an invaluable frame of reference. A commissioner, an insurance executive from north carolina, was also surprised by the dire conditions he observed in quincy. I thought i knew something about poverty and the condition under which people lived but what i saw, i havent seen any place else. Another commissioner, the chairman of the board of ibm, called the conditions he saw, quote, intolerable and appalling. Especially for minorities. The combination of testimony and home visits changed the meaning of poverty for commissioners. That could be seen in the commissions final report where they wrote, quote, the reason for poverty is not some personal failing, but the accident of being born to the wrong parents, or the lack of opportunity to become unpoor, or some other circumstance over which individuals have no control. That conclusion led the president s commission on income maintenance to endorse a guaranteed income without preconditions. That kind of income transfer could be implemented quickly and circumvent the structures and programs that had hindered economic mobility. How, then, does the story of the president s commission on income maintenance inform and reshape our understanding of american political history. First, the story complicates ideas about the role of ordinary citizens in shaping policy. New dynamics with were created between the nonpowerful and Decision Makers which has an effect on policy recommendations. Frameworks from other disciplines helped to illuminate exactly how those dynamics worked. I argue the president s commission on income maintenance should push us to think about where social movements begin and e end. Movements are much more ephemeral. To distinguish participants from nonparticipants is difficult. In some ways, then, as the views of commissioners became realigned with those of poor and their advocates, commissioners could be seen as becoming part of a social movement that pushed for Better Outcomes for the poor. The president s commission on income maintenance left behind a record of poverty created by those who experienced it. In a broader sense, those archives are provocative in suggesting the possibility of numerous underexplored historical sources which capture the voices of ordinary citizens and unpowerful. These have led me to ask if documenting the experiences of nonelites in american political history is more plentiful than weve acknowledged. Should we be more vigilant about tracking down the sources in order to continue to pursue the inclusion of all voices, even in administrative histories with even greater attention paid to not privileging the voices of elites. Thank you. All right. Im going to ask some very broad questions about president ial commissions. First, political president ial commissions are a very conventional political history topic. Id like to start out by having our speakers talk about how to rethink president ial commissions as we rethink political history. So some of the advantages of studying president ial commissions. As dove suggests the archives are rich. Theres reports and materials and memos. Theyre generally kept and preserved in a president ial library or at the national archives. Theres a clear start and end date. A president ial library may have done oral histories with participants and staffers after the fact. The records are there and theyre great and theyre typed. Always a plus. They can be a great statement of what what these particular set of handpicked experts thought. I will qualify that by saying it is a great statement of what the experts thought they could say or what they thought might be received well by the audience. We obviously want to be careful as taking these at face value. But even with these qualifiers attached, the reports, the me l internal memos, the editorials around them are still value for certain articulation of ideas. The disadvantages of studying president ial commissions. If we put president ial commissions at the center i spoke as someone who has done this myself. If i put it at the center, i wonder worry that this suggests an importance to president ial commissions that isnt necessarily there. The history of president ial commissions often is of these institutions that are created. They have an executive director, a staff. They file a report. And then the report goes in the library and then it just sort of sits there. They may not have altered political conversations on the topic or the political incentives involved for the Decision Makers and the topic. I was telling a story of success in changing that conversation in really interesting ways i want to get back to. But nonetheless, the proposal doesnt happen, right . The ultimate end is failure in certain ways. So, question, what do we get from studies president ial commissions. Should we be studying those institutions . How do they help us think about a broader political history story, right . One key facet of political history, of legal history is focussing on where Decisionmaking Authority is placed. If there is little actual decisionmaking placed in president ial commissions, what should we do with these entities and what should we make with them . Telling a story as a natural literature raises questions if no one is reading them, what do we do with this . But it does raise the question that maybe intellectual history is maybe a better approach than political history. I dont actually believe that, but im throwing that out to provoke conversation. Well, i think the thing with the running concern commission and the National Turning Point commission. Those things, the turning point ones, not by everybody. There is multiple volumes, multiple appendices, but they do make a difference in the way some of the wor thinkier for technical ones do not. Wilson im not really a his torn, but it occurs to me that its possible that historians might view president ial commissions as a really accurate barometer of what the elites of the time were thinking. Of what the kind of person who gets appointed to a president ial commission considered as a class of people of thinking and that can be useful in itself regardless of what happens to their proposal. And even the proposals, the inner documents you are talking about, the first drafts of a section that may or may not get written may tell you a lot about the deliberations of the commission. And, again, these may or may not become policies, but it will tell you what that kind of person was thinking in that period. And that can be useful in itself. I have in my book, very small book, some recommendations. I reread the other things the other day with great trepidation. And i discovered that i actually had two recommendations that i like that still work today. One is that the people who are appointed to president ial commissions ought to have some actual early life experience, preferable early life experience, with the problem theyre talking about. And looking at president ial commissions all those years ago, i could find very few people, say on the all volunteer army who had ever been drafted or on the various Public Health commissions who have ever been given any sign in their life of lacking medical care or what was another one . Oh, yeah, the various riot commissions. There was very little evidence that i could find that any member of the commission had ever been affected by a riot or around a riot or near a riot or in the neighborhood of a riot, much less having participated in the riot. And i thought that somewhere there there ought to be this experience that doug was talking about where, you know, harvard professors discover kind of poverty that never show up in their statistics. Was there anybody on the Income Maintenance Commission who came from a poverty background . Do you know . Not that i know of. Not that i know of. Okay. But i will say this. The discoveries were over the course of the commissions work. So with this particular commission, by design, those who served on it had not taken a Public Commission on income transfer programs and had thought very little about it. But the idea being they would have a clean slate coming in to the work of the commission. And it sounds like then they filled that slate very dramatically, very graphically. Exactly, exactly. Most of the other ones that i looked at, couldnt see very much in terms of, you know, grounding and reality. Maybe one or two members. Maybe very early in their life. But they never seemed to even talk about it in the deliberations of that commission. So i think both at constitutions, as well as windows into or on to particular historical moments. So one of the most interesting things that happens with a president ial commission as an institution is the dynamic among the commissioners themselves. Amy zinger wrote an article about commissions and argued that they are commissions that, by design, are aimed to create consensus among elites and Decision Makers. So the processes matter less than bringing together a group of Decision Makers in order to reach consensus on a particular issue or particular question. My interest is in shifting the focus away from why the intentions of a president and creating a commission in the first place and on whether the recommendations of a Commission End up being caused by policy and look at the document production and source production thats going on over the course of the commission. So not all commissions have testimony and hearings, but all commissions are producing an enormous amount of paper over the course of their of their tenures. And like Joanna Grisinger said, its all typed and neatly organized and often in a president ial library so we have a window of sources around various levels of decision makes and various dynamics thats readily available for researchers to be able to bring light to a particular historical moment. So following up on one of the threads certainly in those papers is this question of how we think about these as profoundly unrepresentative entities, right . The elite nature of the staffing of these commissions, who gets to be on the commission . And id like to say i know it was in your paper more about who was on the commission you are talking about. Whats in it for the president . And whats in it for the commissioners . Who gets to be on these commissions. How seriously are their views taken . How seriously do they expect their views to be taken. And what kind of expertise are they bringing to this, right . It picks up on the point frank was just making. What kind of expertise are we looking at these commissions think that commissioners should have, should have had versus what expertise is seen at the time as being valuable, right . Educationally, employment background, veteran status, et cetera and what might also be relevant but not valued. Again, getting to the point of franks question that do you have people who have received welfare, who have grown up in poverty or experienced poverty . Is that not considered expertise, right . And it is sort of a bigger question about thinking about president ial commissions. Theyre not strictly speaking the kind of bureaucracies we often talk about when he name bureaucracy and when we talk about expertise in that context. But at the same time, there is some similarities there. And in some ways people that get to be on president ial commissions are the people that get to be on president ial commissions, right . And the fact that people are on multiple commissions that sort of having been on a president ial commission for one thing validates your ability and makes you an expert on being on a president ial commission for something completely different. So i wonder if you can talk about this question of expertise. Yeah. So the president ial commission on income maintenance, and again may have been an outlier, but i drew together expertise from politics, from industry and even from organizations like the National Mental health association. Jerry joseph was the president and served on this commission. You know, in addition to robert solo who was an economistic, won a nobel prize in economics. The ceo of westing house was represented. The chairman of the board of ibm was represented. This particular commission had representation from both social services, politics, industry and several other sectors. Hien man made a conscious decision when he decided to hold the hearings that the reason he was going to do that was precisely to challenge the expertise of the experts. So he was calculated in insisting that hearings were going to be a part of the investigative strategy i think both to destabilize expertise coming from politicians from washington but also to very legitimately and genuinely try to educate senators who hadnt green up with experiences in poverty. I guess its my sense of well, first of all, it agrees with yours. But a lot of and a lot of these people are chosen for general wisdom. They have impressed other notables like themselves with this particular quality that not everyone has. Ive looked at it myself for years and years and always come up empty that way. And i suspect a lot of people who dont get appointed to president ial commissions are likewise lacking as i am. And you phrased it very nicely. The kind of people that get appointed to president ial commissions are the kind of people who get appointed to president ial commissions. There are also the people, the kind of people who ascend in University Life to become chairs and deans and so forth. They do have this particular quality, very different from technical expertise, very different from necessarily real reality bases in their own past. But they are able to, by means of this wisdom, ascend in organizations and then move them. It is a kind of magical trait, at least to me. And i have never really seen any good Academic Studies of how this works, even from my daughter who went to business school. She came away this is her fathers impression, not what she said to me that this kind of wisdom was a sort of religion among the people who actually had it, a tangible quality of being drawn together and ascending in leadership through Large Organizations because they have displayed this eerie but very tangible quality. And some people have it, and most people dont. And thats why most people arent on president ial commissions. All right. Well, thats a good transition to my next question, which is based on the fact that this intangible quality is often whiteness and maleness. Well, yeah, yeah. Theres that. Yesterday doctor called about the need to se gdesegregate. So there hasnt been much work on this on the nature of these commissions. Theyre focussing on whatever racist characteristics might be inherent in president ial commissions. But i think nobody can look at the history and call them affirmatively antiracist. There have been plenty of commissions on race. Yes. But is that the same thing . No, not at all. Right. So i think a general question, what would looking at president ial commissions with a race, with a gender, with a class analysis, with that as the center, what would that look like and how might that change the way we think about the role in president ial commissions in political history . I have a real simple, quick answer about the race commissions and also the commissions on the status of women and maybe a few other commissions as well. If youre going to have a commission on race, make the clear majority of the appointees to the Commission Representative of the races you are worried about. Okay . Seems very simple, very straightforward. Thats never happened in any of the long history on president ial commissions. There has been a number of state commissions in places like california and i believe illinois as well looking at Racial Conditions and always the racial minorities were racial minorities on the commission itself. Now maybe that would discredit the commissions. But it would be an interesting experiment to try. And its never been tried at all. Using again, using this commission as a case study, well, so in the personnel of the commission, there was representation from people like randolph served on the commission and Clifford Alexander served on the commission. And julian tamora who was an academic at notre dame in the 60s who was one of the founders of latino studies. So there was representation, ly but some. In the findings, the finding that there were discriminatory mechanisms built into the structures of American Society and how the unemployment and education, that thats printing that finding as part of the commissions work was its part of a project that one might argue leads to progress on issues of equality. So the commissions final report was called poverty amid plenty. Many of those pages were spent talking about discrimination and bias in the structures and institutions of American Society that had led to systemic and cyclical poverty. How i want to push this just a little bit further, though. How would going back to, say, the 9 11 commission, going back to the hoover commission, which i have looked at, going back to some of these commissions and really thinking through the kind of expertise, the people on the panel, the kind of proposals and the assumptions that those people were starting from. Now, again, my first question was premised on the fact that maybe these dont matter as much. But assuming that they do and again have been important in the writing of policy, history and political history, how am i going back with that and looking at them through that lens change the way we think about their role in political history . I mean, i think there is an application to the question, which is a good one, which is if we think about how one might put together president ial commissions Going Forward is are there possibilities that we can use the experiences of past president ial commissions to diversify the makeup of current president ial commissions to give more voices or give more kinds of people a voice in deliberations and in recomme recommending policy. And the second part of it is then it becomes more important to understand why the recommendations of the president ial commissions do or dont shape policy because if a commission is diversified and there are many voices coming up with a consensus recommendation, it doesnt matter so much as there is no opportunity to turn those recommendations into policy. I dont know if you meant that question. But it has really, i think important implications for thinking about the construction of president ial commissions Going Forward. I have a somewhat different answer. Its not really a historians answer at all. One of the great problems of American Society as we are all aware of at this conference, people are across the country, is this huge dislike and distrust of government. This is beneath all the sessions weve had here in west lafayette, at purdue, Political Polarization and the roots of the radical right and the origins. All of these have at their core what seems to be a native american hatred for government that is particular ly viral thee days. And if i had one president ial commission that i would suggest forming, our present president or his successor would actually look into is a commission on why a lot of people hate government so much and what government could actually do to tamp down within legitimate democratic norms, how government could change to create a less alienated population. This is an enormous problem, and it underlies all these policy issues, whatever they are, except, perhaps, the National Turning Point commissions. But certainly the midlist ones. The alien nation of the American Population from government, it is disapproval of politicians. It is disapproval of bureaucracy and disapproval of government in general. It comes up with any political speech. The people on the fringes of the speech who are obviously there to get laughs or something or to express victory or to participate in the political process. That would go a long way. And on that commission, i think i would be less worried about who was appointed to the commission as long as they did a decent job of actually looking at why americans hate government so much. I guess im sorry. Do you have no. I was going to go back to your original question. You are right historically. Give us an idea of which voices were privileged in the conversation and which were marginalized. Thats kind of a super important frame work. I would add, too, that they also give us a sense of whos making the who is creating national priority. Frank spoke a little bit about this before. But president reagan had a commission on National Aspirations and objectives in 1980, which is really interesting to read. But it is one particular voice of what the National Project should be in 1980. Yeah. I think that does get back to my question. There is the question of competition and, again, sort of going back to what you were talking about yesterday in terms of you can change the people, change the institutions, right . And those are two different things, is the President Commission itself as an constitution, what value independently does it bring . The follow up question i was going to ask frank is you said there was one president ial commission, it would be to pursue sort of a solution to the problem of current polarization. Why a president ial commission . Thats a good question. There has got to be other ways to deal with the problem, too. I think in some ways it gets to the heart of the question of whats you know, what advantages, what disadvantages do president ial commissions have in politics. Well, they do have the advantage. To some extent they still have the advantage of prestige. You may not like government, but you look at the people around president ial commissions. These are clearly successful people who have made interesting, varied lives for themselves and you may not respect any one of them, but in particular cases, but the group of them, you know, the 10, the 15 or whatever might, as a group, carry some weight that a president would not. The president who is arguing with congress about this or that or doesnt like the last three Supreme Court decisions or whatever. But this group of people with this mag ic talking about might carry some weight in terms of just saying we understand your problem. We understand where you are coming from. There are things that can be done. The next follow up question, what would those things be . Please dont ask it. I dont have an answer. I have one more broad question. What should we be looking for . What should we be skeptical of when we turn to president ial commissions, when we read their reports, read the letters, the editorials, the members write and support of their findings. How might we read against the grain . Frank had talked about conflict. Is it true we dont have a president ial commission created without some sort of conflict. But if you have read the materials on president ial commissions, at least the public work, there is a grain of conflict. And how might we try to find that tension or that conflict when it is missing in the form of materials. You know, where is the violence that must be there . Where is the conflict . Ill take a shot at that. In two places in the decent that comes in the final report and sometimes its published and sometimes its not published. But frank spoke a little bit about that. But oftentimes there are some large percentage of the commission writes dissent to particular parts of the Commission Report. So there is rarely complete consensus. I think, too, in the relationship with the executive who appointed the commission and oftentimes of course finance and internal memos from president ial association shed different kinds of light on the commissions themselves, especially in pointing out where the abrasive moments are. Two answers on that. One of the lines that recurs a lot, that originates with the president ial commission was a commission that Lyndon Johnson appointed on the race riots of 1967, the Kerner Commission and the particular line that resonated was that america is endanger of becoming two societies, one black, not equal to each other and so on. Two societies, one black, one white, not equal to each other. Its an approximate paraphrase. And i think that has stayed in the National Memory again, not necessarily creating any particular policies to undo the divide or even to explore it further. A second moment of dissent, and this may be something that some of the older people in the room remember, came when the challenger rocket exploded in, i think it was spring 1986. And there was appointed a commission with Richard Nixons secretary of state, William Rogers as the chair of the commission. And it had a lot of technical people and some political people and some business people. After all there has been a lot of Business Investment in the challenger. There had to be automatically. But also appointed to the commission was a physicist named richard fineman, who may have been the best of the century, certainly top three, certainly top five or so. Who was on the commission. And he actually had two forms of very nasty cancer at the time, was dying. But he smelled a rat in the testimony of the nasa people who sent the rocket up. And he figured out not so much from the testimony, but inferring from the testimony that it was, in fact, the decision to send the challenger up in relatively cold weather was a very risky decision. Nobody actually had said so in the testimony, but he had done some fine mman who was very practical figured out this had to be a riskier decision than it looked. And over a weekend while the commission was meeting, he hunted around to a Department Store where he got some very simple equipment that enabled him to show publically in front of hundreds of people and then on the daily news basically forever and of course its on youtube as well what it is specifically that went wrong with the with the shot, a structure called the o ring, which was made of rubber and which held together two metal parts of the rocket. Had this integrated. And he showed right here, on this scale, you know, as a witness, right in front of everybody with the stuff he had bought in the hardware store, when it got too cold he had cold water in the vile he had gotten. When it got too cold the rubber would snap. And when the rubber snapped, the challenger blew up. It is a long chain of events leading to the explosion, but the basic fault, the basic break in the chain was the o ring disintegrating, breaking really. And that was one of the great moments of dissent on any commission. Rogers had, by the way, gotten quite furious with fineman throughout the whole thing. There were clearly not exactly temperaments that would ever come to understanding each other. But fineman, who did many Hidden Services for the american government, for once did something in public that actually displayed the idea that it was not a wise decision to agree to send up the rocket in the first place. And it was based on a risk, a gamble, the people who made the decision, knew the gamble. It was Something Like a 70 30 decision. It was in their minds about the Risk Assessment and the 30 came up. And thats a form of dissent. Very effective form of dissent. It, in fact, forced the commission primarily by means of this desktop demonstration, to be much more critical of the Space Industries and their testing requirements. The actual story is a little more complicated and a little more technical. But there is opportunity for a certain kind of person, for a certain kind of expertise or temperament to this then. And increasingly, i think they do, and this is again part of the polarization or the sense of, you know, rising individualism to the point of, h well, nobody quite anticipated. But these are not disclosed in president ial commissions. There are ways or dissent, for lack of consensus or failed consensus or consensus thats just flawed in the first place to be demonstrated. All right. Well, thank you so much. And id like to get any questions from the audience. The idea for the participati participation, i oom not sure how its going to work. The thing thats interesting to me, a lot of the people named dont do anything. And the great example that is a lot of it was actually the government burrow cats, but not the big name people. My favorite example of this is clark kerr. No, not just about around the time when hes being fired from Ronald Reagan doesnt show up at all for the Higher Education act which he would eventually propose. But there is this idea that who is left behind is the nameless burrow cats left behind it and i think thats a lot of who actually participates and who is shaping that we need to think about. I think it goes to that question about how who is being appointed through these commissions are not actually government officials. Is it any wonder we have no real sense about the men and women in the Civil Service. Does it focus on these commissions which very rarely actually, you know, lead to any sort of effective policy change. There are a lot of interesting ideas and things like that, but those are not the people on the ground actually trying to implement policy. Its just a thought. I dont know what yall think. Well, one possible answer its not a complete answer. The stats are frequently people seconded by their agencies at the request of the executive director so that the lifetime Civil Servant often makes up a half, a third, Something Like that of the Commission Staff and theyre sort of nameless in the nature of these things. The staff is distinct from the commissioners, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They, of course, because theyre fulltime and theyre there all the time can influence what the report says a lot. They are the people that pull the all nighters on this stuff. All nighters do happen, and it is not the commissioners for the most part doing it. But the lifetime Civil Service staff does have this reputation, i think, of being influential. Its in the commissions. I think part of the larger problem of the United States is we dont respect Civil Service the way we should. And they know things and they have been there and they have had reality and so forth that who is actually writing them . And who is actually shaping them . That intent is so important here. Especially this idea about why. There is this lack of conflict in them that that is a foundation. Less study, we learn less about the administration or its really interesting in the field of Higher Education, you can see which difference in the administrator they bring in. But who fundamentally is left at the end of the day writing this stuff and doing this work are the Civil Servants who are there throughout the administration. So what does that and the people that write the mid list reports, not the epic ones. The epic ones, just by the nature of the situation draw more attention. Would you argue that the report maybe there are two ways to answer your question or think about your question. That the report itself would be different if it were the Civil Servant writing it, a, and, b, the effect that might have on the recommendation. Our respect for the Civil Servants. I also think whats true to think about, the reason we know so much about whats going on right now, was the Civil Servants screaming their heads off to woodward and bernstein and these reporters. We might need to think in how historians have been complicit and not giving the Civil Servants their respect instead of folks headlines names picked by the president and you see often that are recomplicit in our own saturations of how little we understand about these blue ribbon commissions and what they represent for American History. Certainly the how do i put this . The present white house doesnt seem to have a staff, whether political or Civil Servant, that would score very high on selfoppression. Its a bunch of blabber mouths, at least to read the papers. These are not people that have the passion for anonymity that was so prized in Franklin Roosevelts administration when the white house was starting to grow often again with people seconded from the existing executive agencies and where people like louie brownlo talks specifically about how the ideal Civil Servant had this passion for anonymity. Wasnt that also the title of his memoire, which does cast the anonymity aspect of it. I think the normal well known appointees are out there for a name. But im talking about the ones right now who are talking and letting us know about all the evil going on in the epa, like that kind of stuff. I have not had a chance to read the mueller report. We dont know who talked to him or even actually in terms of what we now know about how poorly the epa was being run. Those people are quiet, but they are coming forward and saying there is something truly rotten. Like michael lewiss book . Right, exactly. And i think you make a really good point in thinking about president ial commissions historically. We think about how to add president ial voices back into the conversation, which is important. And we have already privileged the elite voices. But with President Commissions especially, we know with the Civil Servants to whom you are referring are because theyre in the reports and there are correspondents in their documents and significant to the life of the Commission Also in the archives. I think you are making a really good point that we overlook that middle end group. Even though we have the sources to see what their role was in these commissions. Growing up in the d. C. Area, i know this is not true really before the civil rights act, but some of those Civil Servants are women of color. This is good employment for them that we could ask the diversity questions going on there in terms of who as the Civil Servants would grow, especially to push for equal opportunity in Public Employment that it certainly was in the private sector. Thats an interesting way of speaking about how these things might have changed over time. Im sorry. Lets get some more questions. Yes, sir. My experience with government is as a librarian specializing in Political Science and information. I like to, when i get the chance, introduce students and faculty to the products of their time. You can look at the findings and determine whether their policy recommendations are good or bad or indifferent. A lot of them are now available online. You dont necessarily have to go to the president ial library to look at them. It can also be helpful to look at the hearings that were held by these commissions. We should also go beyond president ial commissions to look at agency appointed commissions, even quasi government organizations like the National Academies of science because they all can influence policymaking. What that would caution about is there should be experts. For these reports to be credible with the public, they should be based on substantive expertise regardless of the ethnic or gender or political background of the appointees, if its perceived as just being appointed as diversity for diversity sake, its not likely to resonate with the general public outside of the policymaking and historical circles. And i also mentioned where you find lack of distrust in government. Thats some of it. We have made the mistake in this society of wanting to villify government. Civil servants make mistakes. They can also do great things. We need to have realistic expectations of what government can do, as well as should do. I mean, you know, i agree with much of what you said. I will push back a little bit. I dont think any of us were suggested that diversity in and of itself. But to say the kind of expertise that has been value larized has been nonexpertise, has been a person who went to harvard, which a lot of people nowadays have gone to harvard. That cant be the kind of expertise. But to say one of the questions i didnt have a request to ask doug and im not going to ask right now. Im just going to lay it out there. Is to engage in the kind of expertise that was very clear in your paper that these hearings opened up the commissioners to experiences they hadnt heard. And they listened and took it deeply seriously and it influenced their recommendations. But those people have the expertise that the commissioners lacked, right . Im not going to say why werent those people on the commissions instead because i think we know. Those are the experts, right . And to be reconceiving what we think of when were talking about expertise and knowledge and a background that that helps us look back and realize how very limited its been in the past and what do we actually want people to know and to have and to have done on commissions . And i think that by definition is going to result in a very different look for president ial and agency and congressional committees. Another thing is how often the subject commissions are repeated. Like there have been tons of commissions on integration. So you can often get very interesting themes in american political history through governmental examination of them. One thing shines through, though. And the Income Commission that doug talked about seems to be a very important exception. In the 1960s when the commissions i was basically looking at and even today, in all of american politics, one of the rarest things you hear and there are entire big chunks of government you never hear at all is the voice of the poor person. Its the rarest thing in american politics. Was then. Is now. And we have to find better ways to do this stuff. We have all this experience. And doug i represent in a very small way studying commissions. But its not just the lack of people who have really suffered from American Society and commissions. It is throughout government. And somehow when they do get into government, theyre minimized, marginalized, whatever the term is. And i just wish we could face this directly. Though, again, i dont want to be told, dont want to be asked how to do that directly. But i think this may be, oh, you can do the usual professions, copout. You, students, solve it. Your dpgenerations can do it. But you, the golden generation, go get it. Yeah. Patiently waiting for the microphone. First, thank you for doing this panel and for coming out and for revitalizing president ial commissions or the significance of president ial commissions. So i greatly, greatly appreciate that. So i have a lot of thoughts and im going to try and boil them because i know there are other folks in the audience who have questions as well. So there are a couple of things that id really like for the panel to think about. In particular, i find myself convinced by the panelists and their significance placing a significant amount of attention on president ial commissions and using president ial commissions to specific ends. And i find that this is actually particularly when we frame it in very specific ways that this is actually, in fact, a useful tool for historical analysis and for historians to think about the intersection of traditional models of political history and nontraditional models but also bringing social history, ethnic history, race history, what have you, these marginalized perspectives and voices into conversation and traditionally elite spaces representative of this state. But then also treating some of these spaces as representative voices that disrupt this idea of elite. So to the i cant see who is up front, but to this question of, say, whistle blowers, speaking about whistle blowers as underrepresented voices in narratives or Civil Servants within the apparatus of this state. To this idea of power within the hierarchy of the state. I also think its useful first thinking about questions of class. And i think, frank, this is to your point about thinking about how president ial commissions can be useful in rendering an understanding of elite perspectives on a broad array of issues. In this case, you know, particularly by dougs point about all of these elites, basically going into poverty. Adventuring into the unknown territory and people getting an experience they otherwise would not have had. So i think that is useful in telling a story about that. Next, i do think president ial commissions are useful in talking about the significance of failure in history. And, so, this is not simply an issue or problem for the discipline of history. Very much a problem for Political Science, particularly the ideas of the socials of American Political Development has tried to discuss this. But the idea that failure therefore renders something insignificant is actually the wrong way of looking at it. So we should be looking about what is the story that this failure tells us. What does it mean that the Kerner Commission puts out this explosive report and the only two things taken out of it are things that greatly increase mass incarceration. All those other things, structural, institutional, those get tossed out. Thats a story in and after itself, right, that also does tell us about contemporary the foundation of contemporary problems, the equality, things like that. And then i think, you know the last one of the last points that i think is useful in kind of teasing out here actually i will rephrase it. Im really interested im really interested in the panel in speaking about the not just the intentionality of these president ial commissions because i think the story changes depending on what president ial commission you are looking at. But perhaps using president ial commissions not as some objective truth or some kind of archive of rich sources that tell us us, but instead to tell us as an analytical way of looking at a particular moment and then extrapolating it out. So using it as part of a tool kit to extrapolate out. Im thinking of trumps, you know, president ial commission on sbe lek churl integrity. If we take that at face value and go back or go into the future and say 20 years historians are looking at this, that tells us what we need to know about that particular commission. But its only in using that commission within a very specific context and looking at the intersection of the political the political history with social history and cultural history that we get a fuller narrative that tells us this is a Sham Commission with a very specific intent at a particular moment in time. So perhaps the panelists can comment on this. You know, in terms of how do you see the purpose of using these commissions in a way that speaks to the over arching significance of the political history and social history. I think youre right to identify commissions. I think youre right to identify president ial commissions and the materials introduced in the processes as tools to do political history but not necessarily as artifacts within themselves. Your third question related to each other in interesting ways, that understanding the president ial commission is a value of looking at that president ial commission as an object of study. And then the question becomes looking at that president ial commission in relation to what and to which other groups and to which events. And, you know, in relation to the second question you ask about what happens to the recommendations of those commissions and whether they are considered quote, unquote, successful or not may get us to a better understanding of the way the power flows within governments and societies at particular moments. So that understanding commissions in Historical Context to various moving parts of the way in which decisions are made and resources are allocated and why or why not particular recommendations have an impact, whether thats in their rejection, the process of their rejection or shaping policy i think is really interesting to think about. In other words, maybe their lens is on to the way in which power works in any particular moment. And just to your point about failure, i think its absolutely key, and i think we need just a lot more work on failure in political history. I think it tends to come up in writings paths not taken where you can see alternatives, but the eye is on where we went, where we could have gone, but where we went. But centers here is what people wanted to do and here is why it didnt work. I think we tend to talk about the things that work or mostly work, and we dont really dig into what the constraints were, what the institutional constrain constraints, the political constraints, et cetera, were that made something fail. I know that wasnt your main question, but i think it is such an important thing that we dont spend nearly enough time talking about. Id start with that last example you gave about the Voter Suppression commission. I found it plausible to 40 of the population. For the other 60 looked like just another trump stunt, okay . And maybe in 20 years from now that will be the metaphor of the trump administration. The only president ial commission in history that got appointed, got money and collapsed anyway. Now thats a failure. Thats a meta failure, really. And maybe failure studies, historians start doing that. They could start with that one. It is a meta failure and it does some up a lot of the context of the time and it does sum up what lots and lots of people think of the trump administration. I think there is also an important critique in your question about the ways that his tor yans have written. In two ways maybe. We know that the sources are in the archives for the voices of both the nonpowerful but also of Civil Servants, for example. But we have chosen largely enough to write about them. Thats conscious decision about what we write about and what we dont write about it so that the privilege is not just the result of what archival material is available but decisions we have made about who should have a voice in the history that we write. And thats kind of a really important critique, i think, into american political history. One more thing coming back to failure. Doug and i are both in our schools respective Public Policy schools. Those schools do a lot of whats called policy analysis. That is, they look at particular initiatives and see how they played out, see how they were implemented. The vast number of policy analysis that get done of particular programs show failure, show short fall, show partial achievement, but they should have looked more here. This may be the passage of time speaking or the light shining in my eye, but failure is a big part of life. One of ten Small Businesses succeeds and is still operating after five years. Why should it be any different . A lot of human life is about failure. And sometimes the failure is structural. That is, it was doomed to fail to begin with. And other times its what you might call more situational. It could have worked if different decisions had been made at different times. But we shouldnt be surprised at such by failure. I want to see if there is a way to connect some of the themes of different panels from what some of you all have been talking about. In terms of the history of failure, i wonder if government officials and historians and political scientists are all able to somehow come clean about the importance of failure, the significance of failure. Wont that feed into the con spir tomorrow mind view that government cant do anything right, number one . And then the second thing im thinking. Im married to and related to a number of career Civil Servants, lawyers, scientists. And they cant talk to the press. You know, so when you talk about the need to bring out the sort of work a day voices of the government, it is not possible to. You know, its not possible to talk to people who are working for the Census Bureau right now because of government regulations but also because the whole thing is in litigation. So there isnt as much access to what the daily tasks of government are and how theyre being attended to as wed like to think theoretically there is. Those people, you know, they cannot speak even off the record in much detail about what theyre doing, depending on the kind of job. And of course the far out number is the political employee. Oh, yeah, greatly. Like two million. In some ways, i think that is a source question. You study bureaucracy, youre looking at their work. Now the question is what kind of archival management is happening . I think thats getting at the point. What work are they doing, ideally, again question mark, but ideally in 20, 30, 40 years one could go to the archives and see at least some of the work they were doing and use that to figure out, right, along with oral histories and whatever after the fact things we might have, we would also just have the files i think is at least we know theyre partial. We know theyre limited. We know theyre constrained. But, you know, were reading them against the grain and doing what historians do. The record should have some context, i agree. But we cant trust those records to tell us the full story and you know that as well as anybody. They never can. But then also there is a certain amount of the press, and journalist. I thought that was funny, but i guess its not. But the press, i mean, inevitably given deadline constrain constraints, pay constraints, all kinds of things, often simplify a problem. You get complexity of the problem from the people youre talking about, but the press operating on a deadline often tends to exaggerate certain kinds of things. It likes to focus on personalities. It creates man gods and monster women. It gods people up if theyre in a particular category sort of like sports figures or entertainers or Something Like that. This is very different than the life of the sober Civil Servant. Its the tortoise versus the hare really. Thinking much more as historians and maybe in conversations with political scientists in particular about the ways we talk about success and failure and how those are included or incorporated or excluded by virtue of being failures for example from the scholarship that we write. I think its actually a really important challenge to rethink the ways that we think about the framework of success and failure and how it affects research really. You know, in terms of skepticism about government, when i think of the 9 11 commission for instance, which may have been more congressional than president ial no. It was president ial. It was president ial, okay, good. Then it fits. But so many people did not trust what that commission produced. There are all kinds of conspiratorial convictions that grew out of 9 11 that the Commission Report did absolutely nothing to allay. Nobody wanted to be pacified by that report. And that, i think, is part and parcel of this larger problem of this sort of idealogical conviction that we cant trust what comes out of the Government Printing office or its digital equivalent. Unfortunately, were out of time, but i want to thank you all for coming and participating in our discussion. Thank you. Thank you. [ applause ] all week were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3, lectures in history, american artifacts, reel america, the civil war, oral histories, the presidency, and special event coverage about our nations history. Enjoy American History tv now and every weekend on cspan 3. In 1979, a Small Network with an unusual name rolled out a big idea, let viewers make up their own minds. Cspan opened the doors to washington policy making for all to see, bringing you unfiltered content from congress and beyond. A lot has changed in 40 years, but today that big idea is more relevant than ever. On television and online, cspan is your unfiltered view of government so you can make up your own mind. Brought to you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. American history tv continues now as historians analyze the correlation between violence and u. S. Political change from the American Revolution to present day. This was part of a Conference Held at purdue university. Its an hour and a half. All right. Since we have a very ontime sort of coming of the room, im going to go ahead and kick us off. Thank you so much for coming to the violence in american politics panel. I think youll see it as an incredibly timely panel and a really good time to be putting these topics into the context of a broader American History. Im going to start off by introducing our panel and everyones going to give our