Remembering Corporal Dunham

Next to being elected president, the greatest honor bestowed on an American is the Congressional Medal of Honor, awarded for extraordinary courage in battle. A Medal of Honor winner is so venerated in the military that officers stand up when an enlisted medal recipient enters a room. The award is not given out lightly. In World War I, 124 Medals of Honor were awarded. In World War II, with millions mobilized, only 464 were. In Korea, there were 132 recipients. In Vietnam, 245 Medals of Honor were bestowed.

In Iraq, there'd been only one, Sgt. Paul Ray Smith, whose valor in the early days of the war was recounted in these pages last year by Fred Barnes ("A War Without Heroes? Only If You're Read ing the Mainstream Media," December 26, 2005). Then, on November 10, President Bush announced that a second Medal of Honor for bravery in Iraq would be awarded (posthumously, like Sgt. Smith's) to Marine Corporal Jason Dunham.

In April 2004, Dunham was struggling in hand-to-hand combat with a terrorist. When the terrorist rolled a grenade near his fellow Marines, the president said, "Corporal Dunham did not hesitate. He jumped on the grenade to protect his fellow Marines. He used his helmet and his body to absorb the blast." He died so that members of the Marine squad he led would live. Bush got choked up as he talked about Dunham.

Dunham's story was news, especially since the medal is awarded so rarely. The Associated Press wrote a story about Dunham. The Washington Post ran a brief story. Katie Couric mentioned Dunham on the CBS Evening News. On NBC's morning Today show, Campbell Brown interviewed Dunham's parents.

But America's supposed paper of record, the New York Times, took no notice of the award in its nationally circulated print edition. (The paper ran a short AP story online.) The rarity of the award argued for front-page treatment, and one of the Times's rivals, the New York Post, put Dunham on page one. The Times's other rival, the Daily News, found room for two stories--one on the president's announcement and another on how the news was greeted in Dunham's hometown of Scio, N.Y. Everyone knows the Times is antiwar. That doesn't make ignoring a home-state Medal of Honor winner any less unprofessional.

Milton Friedman, 1912-2006

Commentators more expert than THE SCRAPBOOK will be needed to reckon with the technical achievements of Milton Friedman--the 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. But if Friedman was widely celebrated on the occasion of his death last week, it was not for his having elaborated the quantity theory of money or refined the consumption function. Rather, it was because he shared with fellow free-market Nobelist Friedrich Hayek a gift for popularization that rivaled his economic genius. What Hayek's Road to Serfdom was for the World War II generation--a lonely lighthouse of freedom piercing the fog of socialism--Milton Friedman's 1980 PBS series Free to Choose was for all who suffered through the economic sclerosis and stagflation of the 1970s.

It is easy to forget nowadays, when both parties are more or less persuaded of the benefits of free markets, that as recently as 30 years ago, it was the other way around: Both parties were more or less enamored of Washington's heavy hand on the levers of economic policy. Indeed, it was a Republican president of that era who imposed federal wage and price controls when his "jawboning" against rising prices came to nought, and another Republican who thought it enlightened policy to give a speech urging his fellow Americans to "whip inflation now."

Milton Friedman was as responsible as any individual for overturning this horrendous bipartisan consensus; for that and much else besides he deserved the gratitude of his fellow citizens (as well as the billions of other people around the globe who benefit from a vibrant U.S. economy).

For its part, THE SCRAPBOOK will also remember Friedman as the subject of "Production Lost," a brilliant parody of a different Milton's "Paradise Lost," published in the January 1980 American Spectator by our friend Andy Stark. An excerpt:

So asked economists of the fallen seventies of the archeconomist Milton: "Our inflation is infinite, our unemployment immense. How can we many goods produce, And have instability turn to stability?" "Be sure it will," replied Milton. "But from Chicago We to you a comforter will send: Monetarism; a theory which, combined with The spirit of frugality and the law of self-reliance, with all men Working with entrepreneurial ardor, will succeed, with No guidelines, no make-work, No welfare nor the irresistible drive To print money to quench the fiery demands of Congress. Monetarism will stand against them, not afraid To insist that laziness ought not be recompensed. And no more shall Congress send, To evangelize the nations, money to those not Baptized in the religion of Democracy, Nor with wondrous gifts them endow. . . ."

The Prizes of Franklin

Our attention was drawn this week to the award of the John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity to the historian John Hope Franklin. The Kluge prize, named for the Metro media mogul who endowed it, is awarded annually by the Library of Congress and is, in the words of Librarian James H. Billington, "the only global award given at the level of the Nobel Prizes that recognizes a lifetime of accomplishment in humanities and social sciences." THE SCRAPBOOK assumes there's a plaque or glass bowl or something, but the main scratch is a check for one million simoleons.

Needless to say, THE SCRAPBOOK was relieved to get these tidings because, frankly, we had been worried that there might be a prize somewhere out there that Dr. Franklin has not won.

For since publishing From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans in 1947, Dr. Franklin has been awarded (in addition to the usual hundred-plus honorary degrees, organizational presidencies, visiting lectureships, and appointments to advisory boards, delegations, and commissions) the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Jefferson Medal of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, the Encyclopedia Britannica Gold Medal for the Dissemination of Knowledge, the Charles Frankel Prize, the Gold Medal for History of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Cosmos Club Award, the Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, the NAACP's Spingarn Medal, the Organization of American Historians' Award for Outstanding Achievement, the Cleanth Brooks Medal of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the W.E.B. DuBois Award of the Fisk University Alumni Association, the Alpha Phi Alpha Award of Merit, and the Trumpet Award of the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

That's a partial list, by the way, and just from the past few years.

Of course, THE SCRAPBOOK would never dream of telling the Nobel Peace Prize people in Oslo how to do their job, but we have a piece of advice: Dr. Franklin is 91 years old, and it would be pretty embarrassing to deny him an honor that has gone to the likes of Jody Williams, Jimmy Carter, and Le Duc Tho.

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