Monday, November 05, 2007

Empiricism Again and Again and Again

Andrew Sullivan once again demonstrates his uneasy grasp of American and British history. In a blogpost this morning, he writes:

Scott Horton relays a nugget of history I never knew. Today is Guy Fawkes Day, when the British commemmorate the foiling of a religiously-inspired terrorist plot to blow up the House of Commons in 1605. Eventually, it became a holiday fused with anti-Catholic propaganda, and the way in which Fawkes was needlessly tortured, and the monarchy fanned fear of Catholic terrorism to entrench absolute power tarnished the meaning of the holiday. So George Washington banned its celebration in the United States.

Andrew then links to a post by Horton, a lawyer who blogs at Harper's magazine. Horton's post concludes:

America, it was settled, would mark the old Guy Fawkes Day with a new tradition: the exercise of the Democratic Franchise. It was to be the day on which the rulers are held accountable to the people.

As with so many of Andrew's excursions into history, this is all wrong. What George Washington did in 1775 was to ban the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day in his army, not in the United States. (Which of course he would have had no authority to do.) And contra Horton, there is zero connection between Guy Fawkes day and Voting Day. Congress did not set a national voting day until 1845. It chose the "first Tuesday after the first Monday in November" for the selection of presidential electors in order to ensure that the voting was complete by the time the electors met on the first Wednesday in December.

Horton, astonishingly, lectures on law at Columbia.

I thought the Internet was supposed to make us all smarter.

11/05 12:28 PM