The Way We Live Now: 8-20-00: On Language; Iron Fist
'They wanted this iron fist to command them.' That was the statement of Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, about the need for discipline among the English troops sent to the Canadian frontier in the 1812 war with the United States. The victor over Napoleon at Waterloo became known as 'the Iron Duke.'
Iron is hard. An iron hand is rule that is rigid, stubborn, severe, even cruel; iron-fisted has an additional connotation of 'parsimonious, close-fisted, niggardly.'
Thus it was surprising to read in several articles that an iron fist was in control of the Republican convention in Philadelphia early this month. The attribution, though not in direct quotation of a full sentence, was to George W. Bush himself in the week before he became his party's nominee. In The New York Times, the prescient R.W. Apple Jr. wrote, 'If there are abortion rights supporters at the podium this week, for example, they will talk about something else, thanks to what Mr. Bush calls his 'iron fist' control of the proceedings.'
That's a curious phrase from a candidate who popularized the marriage of the adjective compassionate with the noun conservative. The decidedly noncompassionate phrase iron fist has not even the smooth qualifier that Thomas Carlyle reported in 1850 was used by the Iron Duke's defeated rival: 'Soft of speech and manner, yet with an inflexible rigour of command . . . iron hand in a velvet glove,' as Napoleon defined it.'
Strange that Bush should adopt that phrase; perhaps it was a slip under stress. Political figures from Austin are sensitive to the political meanings of words.
For example, Karl Rove (invariably described as 'Bush's chief strategist'; there is apparently nobody with the title 'deputy strategist') demonstrated a grasp of nuance in an interview on The New York Times/ABC News Webcast at the G.O.P. convention. His questioner had asked about the gap between the convention's 'moderate, inclusive message' of those chosen to speak and the notably conservative views of the delegates shown in polls.
'Let me correct,' Rove responded quickly. 'You said 'inclusive and moderate.' What we're saying is, it's 'inclusive and compassionately conservative.''
What was the chief strategist's chief strategy, while accepting the adjective inclusive, in going out of his way to reject the nearly synonymous adjective moderate?
Because that word, when used as a noun, causes political reverberations. From a conservative's point of view, a moderate is the liberal's way of avoiding the pejorative tag of liberal. From a liberal's point of view, moderate is not only self-applicable but also a friendly way of describing a Republican who is not a hard-core, reactionary, troglodyte kook.
The word's political sense was born in the Eisenhower administration. Minutes of the Nov. 4, 1954, cabinet meeting reported the president using the phrase 'a policy of moderation.' Adlai Stevenson, a year later, told a fund-raising audience: 'Moderation, yes! Stagnation, no!' At the same dinner, Averell Harriman, a potential opponent for the 1956 Democratic nomination, disagreed: 'There is no such word as moderation in the Democratic vocabulary.'
The conservative columnist William F. Buckley at that time wrote, 'I resist moderate because it is a base-stealing word for the benefit of G.O.P. liberals.' The Nelson Rockefeller wing of the party at first accepted it in the early 60's, but then supporters of Barry Goldwater used it in derision, to catch the centrist minority off the Republican political base. On July 14, 1963, Rockefeller denounced Goldwater 'extremists' for a philosophy 'wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principle.'
I recall dragging a large banner across the San Francisco Cow Palace floor at the 1964 convention that read 'Stay in the Mainstream!' But as Francis Bacon pointed out in 'On Faction,' written in 1597, 'a few who are stiff do tire out a great number that are more moderate.' The Goldwaterite true believers scorned the electoral mainstream and lost in a landslide; four years later, Nixon steered toward it and narrowly won.
In 1968, Nixon and his writers shied from the noun moderate, still inflammatory to 'real' Republicans, but embraced its euphemism mainstream. President Gerald Ford, after his 1976 defeat, called a meeting of the Republicans Ronald Reagan, John Connally and Nelson Rockefeller and used an older metaphor: 'The Republican tent is big enough to encompass the four individuals who are here today.' As the big tent was replaced by mainstream, both were supplanted by 'the politics of inclusion' in the 1980's.
That's why the iron-fisted Bush chief strategist Karl Rove accepted inclusive and rejected moderate. Gen. Colin Powell followed up with a convention speech hailing George W. Bush's 'passion for inclusion.'
In his acceptance speech to the G.O.P. convention in Philadelphia, Governor Bush repeated compassionate conservatism, defining it in a plain sentence: 'It is to put conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity.'
Where and when did the phrase (akin to Jack Kemp's bleeding-heart conservative) originate? In his recent book, 'Compassionate Conservatism,' Marvin Olasky, professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin (and the Bush adviser who suggested the phrase to the Bush campaign), provides a lead. Olasky suggests coinage by Vernon Jordan, then head of the National Urban League, who said on July 22, 1981, in criticism of the Reagan administration, 'I do challenge its failure to exhibit a compassionate conservatism.'
However, four months earlier -- on March 13, 1981 -- in an article by Judith Miller of The New York Times, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, said: 'I'm a conservative, and proud of it, but I'm a compassionate conservative. I'm not some kind of ultra-right-wing maniac, despite some portrayals in the press.' That remains the current political sense of the phrase.