Book Reviews
Book Editors: Ron Briley, Jim Cullen, Murray Polner, Luther Spoehr
This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.
If you would like to tell the editors about a new book (even your own) that addresses the concerns of HNN -- current events and history -- or would like to write a review, please send us an email: editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (5-16-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
The War of 1812, now in its bicentennial year, is widely regarded as an asterisk in American history. Sparked by a series of British decrees limiting U.S. trading rights during the Napoleonic era that were suspended even as the U.S. declared war, the conflict was a military draw that ended with the status quo ante. Andrew Jackson's celebrated victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 took place after peace terms had already been negotiated (though not yet ratified). As such, the War of 1812 seems not only unnecessary, but just plain stupid.
In The Weight of Vengeance, Troy Bickham, who teaches at Texas A&M, does not assert that the war was fought over high-minded principle. But he does think it had a logic that transcended its stated grievances over trade, the legal status of sailors who may or may not have been British deserters, or the fate of Canadians and Indians in North America. These issues were real enough. But Bickham sees the war as effectively about the two nations' respective self-image. An insecure United States felt a need to assert itself as part of the family of civilized nations. And Britain felt a need to put its former colony in its (subordinate) place. But neither belligerent was in a particularly good position to realize its objectives, and both were subject to considerable internal opposition to their official government positions.
Bickham's parallel arguments seem mirrored by its structure. The book deftly alternates chapters that trace the pro-war and anti-war constituencies in both. For a while, it seems this approach to the subject, however admirably balanced, will only underline the way the various players effectively neutralized each other. But as his analysis proceeds, a decisive view of the war becomes increasingly clear -- and increasingly persuasive.
In Bickham's telling, U.S. conduct in declaring war was remarkably, even stunningly, reckless. The nation's armed forces, particularly its navy, were absurdly unprepared to take on the greatest global power of the age. Its financial capacity for war-making was ridiculously weak, made all the more so by the unwillingness of even the most determined war hawks to make the commitments necessary to place and maintain soldiers in the field. Many observers have noted that there was considerable opposition to the war from the start, much of it with a sectional tenor -- the secessionist tendencies of New England, made manifest by the Hartford Convention of 1814, have long been a staple of high school U.S. history exams. Bickham duly notes this, but asserts the divisions between presumably unified Jeffersonian Republicans were even worse (the principal threat to President James Madison, running for re-election in 1812, came from fellow Republican DeWitt Clinton.) Even in the one universally acknowledged advantage the U.S. military had -- its ability to strike first with an invasion of Canada -- was hopelessly botched. Once that happened, and once the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 freed Britain to redirect its energies across the Atlantic, the U.S. suffered a series of national humiliations, the sacking of Washington D.C. only the most obvious among them. By the fall of that year, the American position was bad and getting worse, with plans for an invasion of New Orleans on the horizon. (The lack of discussion of this strategic and diplomatic dimension of the conflict is a surprising and disappointing omission.)
Viewed in this light, the Treaty of Ghent that ended the conflict is not anti-climactic; it's deeply counter-intuitive, if not a once-in-a century stroke of luck. As Bickham explains, the reasons for the outcome have very little to do with the United States. On the one hand, Britain was under considerable diplomatic pressure to resolve the American situation in ways that did not complicate its broader strategic objectives in Europe. On the other hand, there was tremendous domestic agitation to wind down a quarter-century of of war that had taxed the patience of the electorate to the breaking point. At the very moment Britain might have permanently hemmed in American imperial ambitions, it effectively abandoned its wartime objectives in the name of tax relief. The fate of Florida, Texas, and the fate of Native Americans -- who at one point were to get a swath of territory that cuts across modern-day states like Indiana and Michigan -- were cast. Manifest destiny could now become common sense.
The Weight of Vengeance also discusses other hemispheric implications of the War of 1812, among them the emergence of a distinct Canadian identity (which Bickham feels is overstated) and the diminishing importance of the Caribbean in British imperial calculations. As such, book the reflects the increasingly global cast of U.S. historiography generally, even as it remains attuned to domestic politics. This multifaceted quality is among its satisfactions, including readable prose. It's doubtful that the bicentennial of the war will amount to much more than a commercial or academic blip in the next few years. Whether or not that's fair, the conflict receives a worthy chronicle here that will clarify its meaning for anyone who cares to understand it.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (5-15-12)
Robert Shaffer is professor of history at Shippensburg University. His latest publication, in the Winter 2012 “Journal of American Ethnic History,” examines the India League of America during the Cold War
Lawrence Wittner, through his scholarly engagement from the 1960s to the present, has done as much as anyone to revive and extend the field of peace history. His first book, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1941-1960, was published in 1969, while the final volume of his magnum opus, The Struggle Against the Bomb, appeared in 2003, followed by a condensed version of the trilogy, entitled Confronting the Bomb, in 2009. Wittner has been a leading member of the Peace History Society (which had been founded as the Conference on Peace Research in History in 1964), serving as editor of its journal from 1984 to 1987 and on its executive board for three decades. Recently retired from the History Department at the State University of New York at Albany, Wittner -- whose short pieces on historical and current political themes appear regularly on the History News Network and the Huffington Post -- has written an autobiography which combines his intellectual awakening and academic accomplishments with his steadfast political activism and what he portrays as a rather messy personal life. (This reviewer chaired a Peace History Society committee which in 2011 named Wittner the recipient of the group’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Wittner’s memoir serves as a case study of the shift in the historical profession from its stuffy and predominantly conservative tilt in the early 1960s to its welcoming of left-of-center voices today. Born in 1941 and beginning his first job as a historian in 1967, Wittner was in the first wave of the new breed of historians that helped transform our field intellectually at the time when college enrollments were swelling and public universities -- unlike today -- were expanding their liberal arts faculty.
Wittner’s narrative moves briskly from a nice ethnographic portrait of his family background in Brooklyn’s Eastern European Jewish community to his own lonely boyhood, a flowering as both an undergraduate and doctoral student at Columbia (with a year in the middle at the University of Wisconsin), short stints at historically-black Hampton Institute and elite Vassar, and then two years abroad before landing what would become his career appointment at Albany. The author then describes in greater detail the academic politics at Albany which almost cost him tenure, his divorce and second marriage, his involvement in union and democratic socialist politics in New York State’s capital city, and, as his academic reputation became more secure, his national and international work with the peace and disarmament movements in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Throughout, Wittner mentions dozens of people with whom he worked at one point or another in his very full, multi-faceted life. The vignettes include afternoons and evenings at anti-war GI coffeehouses in Japan in the early 1970s, arrests protesting Reagan’s policies in South Africa and Central America, and unexpectedly being chosen in 2004 to lead the annual march in Hiroshima commemorating the atomic attack.
Wittner generally writes with a light touch, playing up his hijinks as a Columbia student, for example, and his run-ins with police in still-segregated Virginia that appear humorous in retrospect but probably did not feel laughable at the time. Emphasizing that his secular Jewish background was neither left-wing nor intellectual, Wittner portrays his political activism as tentative and intermittent as a student, only becoming more sustained as a professor. At Hampton he became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, was active in anti-draft work, and stood up against the every-day segregation still prevalent in Virginia, while at Vassar he and a few like-minded colleagues vehemently lambasted local corporate heavyweight IBM, an important donor to the college, for its Defense Department contracts.
Wittner also makes clear his disdain for the far left, devoting his time and energy in Albany to Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America rather than to the Marxist-Leninist groupings of some of his university colleagues. (His dismissal of Students for a Democratic Society in just a few sentences is more problematic.) Wittner’s youthful attraction to pranks and spoofs continued throughout his life, with many of his political activities characterized by their theatricality.
Among the best sections of Working for Peace and Justice are Wittner’s descriptions of the day-to-day work of a leftist activist in the 1980s and 1990s, which in his case tied together DSA, local city council elections, the faculty unionism of the United University Professions, other labor support work (including a sustained campaign for fair treatment for campus dining hall workers), and the anti-apartheid movement. Wittner here analyzes both the successes and the personal challenges that such political involvement entailed, sensitively conveying the exhilaration of positive work with the burn-out and even desperation brought on by working with too few activists in the face of a hostile political environment. A spate of recent books examines the liberal and left-wing grass-roots activism of the 1970s and 1980s, and Wittner’s memoir joins them as a first-person account of an era which up until now has suffered relative neglect by scholars because of the long historical shadow cast by the more tumultuous 1960s.
Nevertheless, there are sections of these memoirs that are not as successful, in some cases because of too much introspection and in others because of inadequate self-analysis. I suspect most readers will not have much interest in Wittner’s intimate cataloguing of his relations as a child with girls and women, from biting his mother while breast-feeding to a series of infatuations with “cute” and “attractive” classmates. Memoir-as-therapy is an important aspect of the genre, but in this case Wittner’s introspection fails to yield any semblance of balance in attributing blame for his failed first marriage. The honest description of his courtship -- while still married and with a young child -- with the woman who would become his second wife conveys the anxiety of the affair, but surprisingly makes no comment about the ethics of such a relationship with his teaching assistant. Wittner offhandedly mentions his participation in a “men’s group” (analogous to a feminist consciousness-raising group) for some years after his second marriage, but he gives no indication of how these sessions affected his self-perception or his relationships. Wittner’s examination of his lifelong efforts to overcome his stuttering will elicit greater empathy from readers. The rules of the modern memoir practically demand that an author label himself or herself as an “outsider,” but this theme from Wittner’s boyhood can only partially explain his eventual attraction to radical politics and historical study.
More seriously, perhaps, for the “memoirs of an activist intellectual,” there is inconsistent attention to placing in broad context the events of the author’s life and the significance of his writings. Wittner alludes to material in his FBI files, but does not examine them. He mentions in two brief paragraphs his 1982 book, American Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949 (“my best work thus far,” he says), but does not give its argument or how it added to the growing revisionist historiography of U.S. Cold War policy. Wittner refers at one point to the “dated research and language” of his first book, but does not say how this book on anti-war Americans should have been updated, if the chance had come along to do so. While he shows how his trilogy on the global movement against the nuclear bomb placed him at the nexus of scholarly and activist organizations working for disarmament, and he relates a number of interesting incidents which occurred in the course of researching and writing the books, Wittner’s discussion of the books themselves, and of related articles, does not delve very deeply. A memoir should not repeat wholesale what an author has written in previous works, but an intellectual autobiography might include more sustained reflection on the meaning of one’s academic achievements. Wittner does somewhat better with his activism, but even here, for example, the wider dimensions of the American movement against South African apartheid could be more fully integrated with his description of the role that he and his union played in that struggle.
Wittner demonstrates that he was denied tenure at Vassar for his campus activism, but labeling the next two years spent abroad as “exile” is a bit melodramatic. After all, he received a year’s severance pay from Vassar which allowed him to live on the Italian coast as he wrote Cold War America (1974), and he spent the following year as a Fulbright lecturer in Japan, where he -- an ardent critic of U.S. foreign policy -- was even invited to speak under the auspices of the U.S. Information Agency. While Wittner writes that SUNY/Albany kept him on, despite carping (and delays in promotion) by the conservative old guard, because his publication record would help that department strengthen its doctoral program, he has little to say about teaching, about working with graduate students (aside from his future wife), or about how the intellectual life of what he calls a once sleepy teachers’ college had changed thirty-five years after his arrival.
Lawrence Wittner’s event-filled career, which has taken him far and wide even as the banks of the Hudson River have provided a kind of grounding, has earned him the right to reflect on his activism, scholarship, and personal life. Friends, political acquaintances, and those who have admired his other books will find much of interest in Working for Peace and Justice. But the narrow scope of this memoir reduces its appeal to a wider audience.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (5-11-12)
John McAdams teaches American politics, public opinion, and voter behavior at Marquette University. He is the author of "JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy" (Potomac, 2012)
History is quite frequently distorted by ideological bias, and nothing shows this better than the corpus of JFK assassination books. Written by people on the political left, they almost uniformly want to blame some group on the right for John Kennedy’s death. Of course, it’s far from the case that all voices to the left of center have claimed a right-wing conspiracy. The liberal mainstream media have had little truck with conspiracy theories, and hard left voices like Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn and The Nation have often insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all by himself.
But pick up your average conspiracy book and most likely the culprits will be some of those bêtes noires of the left: the CIA, the FBI, anti-Castro Cubans, rich Texas oil millionaires, and so on. The conspiracists’ fruitless half-century fixation with these groups makes Captain Ahab’s obsession with the Great White Whale look like a passing summer afternoon fancy.
In this context, this volume from longtime CIA Cuba analyst Brian Latell has some value as a corrective. Conspiracy theorists, typically in thrall of Camelot and, if not outright fans of Castro, then at least rather mellow toward the Caribbean dictator, have downplayed the enmity between Castro and Kennedy. But Latell gives a full account of the incendiary mutual denunciations that the American president and the Cuban leader directed at each other. Likewise, he makes it clear (in the tradition of writers like Gus Russo and Max Holland) that the impetus behind assassination attempts on Castro came from the highest levels of the Kennedy administration, with Bobby being John’s chief honcho in dealing with the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans.
Where assassination writers have wanted to believe that Kennedy, at the time he was killed, was preparing to make nice-nice with Castro, Latell makes it clear that Kennedy would only accept a “Tito solution.” Castro would have to end his alliance with the Soviet Union and quit trying to export revolution. But of course, Castro was never going to do that.
Latell, to his credit, is far from being an apologist for the CIA. He straightforwardly describes CIA plots against Castro as “aggression” -- while at the same time showing that Castro was engaged in virtually identical actions against other Latin American nations. He gives a full account of Agency schemes that look at best feckless, and more usually merely stupid. And a major theme of the book is the way in which the CIA arrogantly underestimated the Cuban intelligence agency, the DGI. He says that “for years they ran circles around both the Agency and the Bureau [the FBI].” He quotes with approval a fellow Agency officer saying “Boy, did they do a job on us!” Latell writes compellingly on this point.
So far, so good. But the volume is laced with jarring instances of poor historical judgment.
For example, he details a documentary, on Cuban state television, that showed some of the CIA’s operations on the island -- Cuban double agents meeting their CIA handlers, dead drops, and so on. He goes on at some length about the technical sophistication of the footage in the program.
. . . clearly multiple cameras were used in filming some of the incidents. Segments were shot from above, which probably means that small, sophisticated cameras with telescopic lenses were places in tree limbs. They must have been remotely controlled because they panned left and right to follow the Americans as they moved about. . . .
Targets were seen in close-ups and from various distances, so the cameras had zoom capability. Some of the sequences were filmed from eye level, dead straight ahead of the subjects. All of the footage shown on Cuban television was clear and in sharp definition. The program demonstrated exceptionally sophisticated technical and surveillance skills. (p. 17)
Latell proceeds to wonder “just how the Cubans knew in advance precisely where to position their cameras.”
It appears not to have dawned on him that Cuban television did what the History Channel does routinely: it recreated the events. It’s easy to get broadcast quality footage if you have broadcast quality equipment and a bunch of actors. In real intelligence work, not so much.
Latell’s explanation of why the Cubans got such excellent footage also rings false. He speculates that the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana was “peppered with the most sophisticated and miniaturized audio and video surveillance devices available at the time.” The problem with this theory is not that that the Cubans would not have done that, but rather than U.S. personnel would have assumed they had done that and taken appropriate precautions. Indeed, Latell quotes one official at the mission as saying “We were never sure how secure the protection of the embassy building had been.”
Castro and the Kennedy Assassination
Had Latell steered clear of the Kennedy assassination, he might have written a workmanlike and useful (if not attention-getting) volume. But he does deal with the assassination, and falls into the same sort of traps as his predecessors on the left.
Wanting to blame Castro, he does not go so far as to say that Castro or Cuban intelligence put Oswald up to shooting Kennedy, but he asserts that Castro knew that Oswald was going to shoot Kennedy, welcomed it, and after the assassination lied about knowing it.
A key event in his scenario was Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City on September 27, 1963. Smitten with Castro’s revolution, Oswald tried to get a visa to enter Cuba, and after a confrontation that escalated into a shouting match, left frustrated, knowing that no visa was to be had.
Latell’s theory works up to a point. He plausibly argues that Castro himself micro-managed a lot of Cuban intelligence, and might have known about the confrontation at the embassy. He then argues that Oswald threatened Kennedy’s life when leaving the embassy frustrated, saying “I’m going to kill Kennedy for this.” Then he further asserts that Castro and Cuban intelligence actually knew that Oswald was going to shoot Kennedy about noon on November 22.
This is not just a bridge too far. It’s an entire continent too far.
What is the evidence on this? Latell posits -- with absolutely no evidence -- that Oswald had some contact with DGI officers in the Cuban embassy, and these would be people beyond the three individuals (two consuls and a secretary) with whom he is known to have interacted. He suggests that Oswald may have had contact (either in the Embassy or via phone during the following weeks) with one Luisa Calderon. When someone called Calderon immediately after the assassination to inform her that Kennedy has been shot, she responded “Yes, of course. . . I learned of it almost before Kennedy.” Latell interprets this to mean she knew of it before Kennedy did. Unfortunately, the “almost” makes a big difference here.
More intriguing, and more plausible, is the account of one Jack Childs. Childs was an official in the U.S. Communist Party who was also reporting to the FBI. In May 1964, Childs met with Castro, and Castro informed him of Oswald’s supposed “I’m going to kill Kennedy” outburst.
Childs would seem to be a reliable source. But if Castro told Childs this, was it true? Anybody who thinks that information moves seamlessly up through layers of bureaucracy to top officials needs to examine the things that J. Edgar Hoover was telling U.S. government officials in the wake of the assassination. His conversations with Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and Secret Service head James Rowley are laced with misinformation, including misinformation about important matters.i
Further, there is no source for Oswald having made this threat that dates from before the assassination. Could it be that Oswald’s tantrum got transmuted, via misunderstanding and faulty memory in the wake of the shooting, into a threat against Kennedy? That’s entirely possible.
But if Oswald really did say that, did the Cubans therefore know that Oswald would shoot Kennedy? Or did they write him off as a crackpot? Latell insists that they knew, and indeed knew the exact date of the assassination.
His evidence for this latter notion is tenuous, to say the least. He engages in pure speculation about phone contact between Oswald and Cuban intelligence agents in Mexico City in the days and weeks leading up to the assassination. But much better evidence (if it is to be believed) is the account of a defector from Cuban intelligence, one Florentino Aspillaga. Working Cuban signals intelligence in a complex near Havana on November 22, 1963, Aspillaga reports being ordered to stop his monitoring of CIA traffic from Langley and the CIA’s JMWAVE station in Miami and listen to communication from Texas. He claims to have heard chatter on amateur short-wave bands about the assassination.
None of this makes much sense. Radio amateurs were simply talking about what the media were reporting. Since Miami radio stations could be gotten in Cuba, and since the key events surrounding the assassination were carried throughout the world via AP and UPI, there would seem to be little utility in listening to guys with short wave sets in Texas. Indeed, journalist Jean Daniel, who was with Castro at the time of the assassination, reported that Castro and his staff were listening to NBC broadcasts on a Miami station.ii
Aspillaga doesn’t have to be lying about this. Memory errors greater than this are all too common among apparently honest witnesses. But his story simply lacks credibility.
As is typical of conspiracy theorists, once one adopts an implausible theory, one has to make all sorts of ad hoc assumptions to protect it from being falsified. That’s why the assassination literature is littered with claims of lying witnesses, forged documents, faked photographs and so on.
In this case Latell, who thinks Castro welcomed Kennedy’s death, has to deal with Daniel’s report that Castro was shocked when he heard the news, saying “Es una mala noticia” (this is bad news). Latell dismisses this as “elaborate fidelista theater.” Much more plausible is the idea that Castro had no reason to believe that Lyndon Johnson would be any easier than Kennedy on his Communist regime, and had excellent reason to fear what would happen if blame for the assassination fell on Cuba.
Conclusion
While Castro’s Secrets is hardly without value, it is marred by Latell’s poor historical judgment, especially when it deals with the JFK assassination. He has fallen into the morass that is assassination “scholarship.” It’s ironic that Latell, who rightly laments the failures of the CIA in dealing with Castro, exemplifies the analytical shortcomings he deplores.
i John McAdams, JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think About Claims of Conspiracy (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2011), pp. 197, 202-203.
ii Jean Daniel, “When Castro Heard the News,” The New Republic, December 7, 1963. Online at: http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/history/wc_period/pre-wcr_reactions_to_assassination/pre-wcr_reactions_by_the_left/When_Castro_Heard_TNR.html
SOURCE: Special to HNN (5-11-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
For many years now, I've dealt with the topic of late 19th/early 20th-century immigration in my teaching by relying on pieces from Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, as Told by Themselves, a collection of first-person accounts first published in book form in 1906. There are few better ways of dramatizing this epic global transformation, which typically must be dealt with in sweeping generalizations, than vivid primary source documents like "Story of a Polish Sweatshop Girl" or "Story of a Chinaman," which render the daily of immigrant life with vivid granular detail, from monthly budgets to racial harassment. I was interested in Attachments, the companion volume to a new exhibit at the Nation Archives, for the way it might help amplify this primary source approach to the subject. At first I wasn't so sure it would; the approximately 20 primary source brief essays that accompany the documents in the book rarely contain the voices of immigrants themselves. But the cumulative impact of those documents -- photographs, letters, standardized forms, among others -- is surprisingly forceful, given that the book runs less than a hundred pages.
The core of Attachments is three chapters called "Entering," "Leaving," and "Staying." One need not get far in the first to see the striking variety of reasons why people came to the U.S., among them political persecution, the force of family ties (which were sometimes invented to circumvent stringent rules), and economic opportunity. A number of stories involve people fleeing the Holocaust.
Strikingly, the longest chapter is "Leaving," a reminder that a large percentage of immigrants left the U.S., willingly and unwillingly, to return to their native lands. Looking at records of the deported, we see the reasons range from political radicalism to the theft of peas, with the broad category of "moral turpitude" considered capacious enough to include everyone from prostitutes to those unfortunate enough to have the wrong kinds of friends. Even those who were ultimately not deported were forced to endure long periods of waiting. One particularly striking tale in the book concerns an American-born Caucasian who forfeited her citizenship by marrying a Chinese man -- she became a "lawfully domiciled Chinese laborer" in South Dakota -- who was forced to reapply for citizenship after returning the U.S. after a trip abroad.
A disproportionate number of stories in Attachments involve Asians. This reflects the racist attitude of the American government, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the "Gentleman's Agreement" barring the Japanese after 1907. While the East Coast's Ellis Island was largely a way station for immigrants to get into this country, the West Coast's Angel Island was largely an interception station to keep them out. Europeans had their own problems with the quotas established in 1924; in a number of cases people were thrown out of the U.S. on the basis of questionable political beliefs. Even Mexicans, who were not subject to them, still had to scale bureaucratic hurdles.
The poignance of Attachments derives in part from the very fragmentary quality of the tales it contains. We (literally) get snapshots of people in motion, the facts of their lives listed on standardized forms but captured by the emotionally rich faces in their photographs (taken to prevent fraud) and accompanying documents. These people, otherwise lost to history, get resurrected, a haunting reminder of the hopes and struggles of people seeking a promised land achingly in view.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (5-10-12)
Murray Polner is a regular HNN reviewer who wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-edited, with Thomas Wood Jr., We Who Dared To Say No To War.
Bradley Manning enlisted in the army in 2007. In the army he began exhibiting a good many personal problems. Jihrleah Showman, one of Manning’s team leaders, cautioned his commanders that his mental state was too fragile to handle classified materials -- he once even hit her. At his pre-trial hearing, there was much testimony about his alleged “psychotic issues” and ignored warnings that he should not permitted access to secret data. Even so, on the verge of being discharged because of his erratic behavior in the army, he was trained as an intelligence analyst and assigned to Iraq’s Forward Operating Base Hammer. Soon after he was promoted to the rank of specialist and received a top secret security clearance and given access to classified Defense and State Department data. He is now being court-martialed for allegedly having transmitted some of that data to an “enemy,” and accused of giving hundreds of thousands of confidential military and government documents to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks.
Chase Madar, a lawyer whose writings have been published in the London Review of Books, the American Conservative, TomDispatch, and LeMonde Diplomatique, is out with the first book about Manning’s case. It's a blistering and confrontational work replete with charges that officials who approved of torture and lied about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have never been held responsible.
Madar is certainly not neutral. His book begins with “Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.” If he gave WikiLeaks “the Iraq war logs, the Afghan war logs, and the State Department cables -- then he surely deserves some important national honor instead of the military prison cell where he presently awaits court-martial.” The question is whether Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Catholic son of a broken marriage between an Oklahoma father and Welsh mother, is an intentional traitor or an unintentional hero with many emotional problems.
Manning is accused of violating the Espionage Act to aid an enemy, a controversial law enacted by Woodrow Wilson’s administration in 1917 that convicted authors of anti-draft literature passed among draftees and which the Supreme Court eventually ruled did not fall under protected free speech but instead represented a “clear and present danger.”
In Manning’s case, Army Col. Denise Lind, the presiding judge, has stated that the prosecution will have to establish that Manning leaked classified material with the “clear understanding” that he meant to pass it on to an enemy.
Manning’s defenders have argued that he is being punished for whistle blowing for revealing facts the U.S. would prefer were kept secret. Not so fast, the prosecution countered, for as a soldier he violated orders and endangered American lives and disclosed confidential material. According to Madar’s chronological account, in 2009-2010 Manning read about Iraqi police detaining and torturing other Iraqis and promptly informed his superiors, who supposedly told him to forget about it.
Late in 2009 he also found the video of “Collateral Murder,” which was released by WikiLeaks (it’s too early to know if he and Julian Assange were in actual contact) and which depicted a U.S. Army helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians, killing 14, including two children and two Reuters journalists. Some of the other diplomatic files revealed “high-level corruption in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen” and which, wrote the New York Times, “Arab activists” claimed “helped fuel” the Arab Spring.
Not long after, Manning was charged with violating the Espionage Act. A prosecutor, supported by an informant -- a hacker, Manning's one-time online friend -- charged he had “aided in the publication of those files, knowing that our enemies would use these files.”
But is Manning actually a military whistleblower on par with Ron Ridenhour, a Vietnam War helicopter door gunner in the 11th Infantry Brigade who exposed the murder of an estimated 200-500 Vietnamese peasants at My Lai by U.S. troops, a crime for which only a junior officer, 2nd Lt. William Calley, was punished, receiving three-and-a-half years of home detention?
Whistleblowers, real or imagined, have rarely had an easy time of it. Daniel Ellsberg is a case in point. Former RAND scholar Melvin Gurtov wrote in John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter's Inside the Pentagon Papers: “The crux of these documents was what they revealed about the duplicity of U.S. leaders, who consistently lied…” The government went after Ellsberg, but officials who lied about the war -- a war which led to millions of deaths -- were never punished. The same lack of accountability is true about the invasion of Iraq.
Why all the Espionage Act prosecutions? Perhaps the WikiLeaks revelations lead to a great deal of embarrassment, and perhaps too, as Steven Aftergood has suggested, “Congress has pressured the Administration to vigorously pursue leaks and wants leak prosecuted and they want a lot of them.”
All the same, leaking is a very popular sport in Washington. George W. Bush dealt rather cautiously with leakers, but no president in our history has ever tried to prosecute as many as Barack Obama and his Justice Department, which has brought more charges than every other presidential administration combined. The Espionage Act has been invoked six times since Obama took office. Mark Corallo, who worked under Attorney General John Ashcroft in the Bush I administration, told Adam Liptak of the New York Times last February of his amazement at the number of leak prosecutions. “We would have gotten hammered for it.”
A case involving a supposed leaker charged under the Espionage Act brought by the Bush I administration and prosecuted by the Obama administration was against Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency official, who was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act. He told the Baltimore Sun about a government software program purchased from a private firm which he believed was costly and ineffective. Drake was eventually permitted to accept a plea bargain and received probation. Case closed, though the presiding judge harshly criticized the prosecution for placing Drake through "four years of hell," financially ruining him, and then dismissing the most important charges just before the trial opened, as "unconscionable."
Criminal cases have been launched against John Kirakou, a former CIA official accused of having exposed a CIA employee for his harsh treatment of a captured Al Qaeda member, and Jeffrey Sterling, another former CIA analyst charged with leaking information to New York Times reporter James Risen for his book State of War.
Whistleblower or not, Manning came to public attention after he was transferred to the Quantico Marine Corps stockade, where for nine months he was held in solitary confinement, his clothing and eyeglasses taken from him, and where he was compelled to stand at attention until 5:00 am, supposedly to prevent him from killing himself. Amnesty International has a different word for it: torture. The UN’s special rapporteur on torture agreed, saying “Bradley Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the excessive and prolonged isolation.” The protests and publicity worked and Manning was transferred to Fort Leavenworth prison, where he has apparently received better treatment.
Meanwhile, President Obama condemned Manning at a San Francisco fundraiser in April 2011 because he “broke the law” by releasing secret documents. Earlier, in March 2011, answering a question from ABC’s Jake Tapper at a White House press conference, the president replied that the Pentagon had assured him that Manning’s treatment in prison was “appropriate and is meeting our basic standards” and that he accepted their explanation. Madar, of course, differs. “Our law-professor-in-chief may lecture otherwise but when official Washington decides to leak, the law fades away.”
Madar notes that even the National Review criticized "Manning's pretrial detention in solitary confinement" on December 1, 2010. The next month, the former commandin officer of HQ Company condemned Manning’s treatment. Then, in a widely publicized event, P.J. Crowley, the State Department’s spokesperson, denounced Manning’s treatment and then “resigned” in protest. More than 250 law school professors, including Harvard law professor and one-time Obama mentor Lawrence Tribe, condemned Manning's treatment as “illegal and immoral.” Meanwhile, an AP report in September 2011 concluded that none of the named sources in the material Manning supposedly sent to WikiLeaks have been harmed.
Madar is clearly outraged. “If Bradley Manning had launched a war that slaughtered hundreds of thousands; if he had tortured prisoners; if he had shot dead Iraqi civilians; if he had tortured prisoners; if he were a lawyer, justifying all of the above; or some general or cabinet-level official whispering state secrets to Bob Woodward over a martini -- he’d emerge unscathed.”
Manning’s fate has yet to be decided and Col. Lind’s criteria for guilt will have to be proven, but Chase Madar’s fiery brief, one-sided as it is, deserves to be read and taken seriously in the complicated and potentially dangerous struggle between security and liberty. In an evolving world of ever-sophisticated technology and immediate worldwide exposure on the Internet, it’s ever harder to maintain secrecy, and even harder to prosecute. For, as Judge Damon Keith once wrote in Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft, “democracies die behind closed doors.”
Luther Spoehr (Luther_Spoehr@Brown.edu) teaches "Campus on Fire: American Colleges and Universities in the 1960s," "American Higher Education in Historical Context," and other courses at Brown University.
In the portrait on his biography’s cover, seated at his desk, elegantly attired in brown suit and bowtie, Benjamin Mays gazes steadily at the reader: his eyes are ever-so-slightly narrowed; his eyebrows, raised a bit; there is, perhaps, the trace of a smile on his lips. His expression is difficult to read. But he comes across instantly as smart, tough, solid—in a word, formidable.
As Randal Maurice Jelks, a historian at the University of Kansas, shows, Mays was every bit of that. He had to be, to get as far and do as much as he did. Born in 1894 in tiny Upton, South Carolina, the youngest of eight children born to a tenant farmer and his wife, he seized upon education at a very tender age as the way to bring meaning to his life. Half a century later, he was president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. Alumnus Russell Adams recalled the impact he made: students “saw what a black man could be when they saw Mays, whose high fluting style contrasted with his forthrightness about his family background: he could talk about picking cotton…. he could talk about painting houses…; he would say things such as ‘neither my mother nor my father could read; but I am here.’…One time, he introduced one of his semi-literate brothers to us in Sale Hall Auditorium, saying, ‘My brother gave everything he could spare to help me stay in school.’ I remember going back to my room…and crying without restraint at the sheer nobility of the gesture.”
Mays’s brother may have helped him, and his mother’s prayers may have inspired him, but Mays’s father, his own life circumscribed by the violence and poverty of the segregated, turn-of-the-century South, and even his church’s minister tried to discourage his ambitions. Nevertheless, he moved indefatigably upward (and northward) from school to school, graduating in 1920 from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and moving on to the University of Chicago’s divinity school. For a time, to support himself and his wife, he worked as a Pullman porter, but he was on his way to becoming a scholar, a pastor, and an activist. He served as pastor for the Shiloh Baptist Church in Atlanta. He worked for the Urban League and the YMCA. He co-authored a study of “The Negro’s Church” and wrote his dissertation, later published, on “The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature.”
Jelks carefully traces Mays’s intellectual development and shows how he helped to shape black modernist theology. Encouraged by his mentors at the University of Chicago, Mays argued that while African Americans’ Christianity had helped them to survive slavery, blacks now needed to move on to a more assertive understanding of religion, one that would insist that American society live up to its professed Christian ideals. Central to achieving that transformation would be a new generation of religious leaders, a generation that would require more preparation that African American ministers had usually received before. In 1927, President Mordecai Johnson of Howard University had pointed out that “there are 47,000 Negro churches in the United States, and there are in the whole country today less than sixty college graduates getting ready to fill these pulpits.” To begin to help fill the rest, in 1935 Johnson brought Mays to Howard as dean of the School of Religion. In 1940, Mays left Howard to take on an even bigger job as president of Morehouse College, a private institution for men in Atlanta.
It was at Morehouse that Mays made his great reputation. He served as president for 27 years and became a nationally recognized spokesman for civil rights. His newspaper columns and other writings, such as a 1946 essay called “Seeking to Be Christian in Race Relations,” set the standard for thinkers seeking to justify combining religion and liberal politics. Many of the students he mentored, such as Julian Bond and Maynard Jackson, became leaders in their own right. Most famously, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., who entered Morehouse at 15, referred to him as his “spiritual and intellectual father.” King was, says Jelks, “the son he never had.” King’s rhetoric, mingling Biblical truths and American ideals, sprang directly from Mays’s. (King sometimes quoted Mays so extensively that Mays’s wife, Sadie, thought he should provide attribution. Mays himself, however, apparently didn’t mind.)
Jelks’s book is best when summarizing and analyzing Mays’s ideas and placing them in context. From the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch to the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr and even Billy Graham, Jelks shows how Mays distinguished himself in the debate over the proper role of religion in public life. In fact, Jelks spends so much time on Mays’s ideas that it might have been more accurate to call the book “An Intellectual Biography,” because the private Mays is not very visible here. Jelks had access to Mays’s files, but says that “the only drawback to the Mays papers is that, although they are organized, they have never been fully processed and catalogued as an archival collection.” Perhaps that is why we never glimpse the wellsprings of relentless energy that drove this extraordinary man. Then again, Mays does not seem to have been a very self-revealing type, so perhaps even more organized files would not have made a difference.
Jelks also devotes very little attention to Mays as institution-builder. We are told that Morehouse was in some difficulty when Mays arrived in 1940, and that “from 1940 to 1945 Morehouse College enrollment averaged around 355, with an all-time low enrollment of 272 during the 1943-44 academic year.” But then Morehouse’s institutional growth simply disappears from the narrative. Exactly how it thrived and then was affected by recruitment of black students by traditionally white institutions, starting in the 1960s—and what Mays thought about all that—we aren’t told.
Jelks rightly notes that “nothing prepared Mays” for the upheavals of the mid-1960s, particularly the tempestuous arrival of the Black Power movement, which ostentatiously rejected what it saw as the timidity of its elders. By then in his 70s, Mays stepped down from the Morehouse presidency in 1967, but he continued to be active in his own way, even heading Atlanta’s Board of Education for a time. He died in 1984, having witnessed, experienced, and influenced almost 90 years of dramatic struggle and change for African Americans.
Because Mays is a fascinating, important figure, one could wish for even more from this book: depiction and analysis of Mays’s own personal battles and triumphs, and the intrigues of his involvement in both educational and movement politics. As Jelks observes, “consistently, scholars and critics understate the religious dimension of black life and its influence on the civil rights struggle and black activism.” Jelks helps to bring the “religious dimension” back to the center of the conversation. But no man—not even Mays—lives by ideas alone. Between the covers of this book, readers will find him, like his portrait, formidable. And, still, not a little inscrutable.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (5-6-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
The notion that middle age is essentially a cultural construction is not one that will be surprising to historians. But New York Times journalist Patricia Cohen makes this case with breadth and verve. Though it seems to sprawl at times, with a range of opinions that can become tiresome in their predictable diversity -- every opinion about middle age has its rejoinder -- In Our Prime is a serious and useful survey in the subject likely to remain a standard of its kind for some time to come.
Cohen begins by noting that until the twentieth century, there was rarely discussion of what he have come to know as middle age. To the extent that the concept was understood, it was generally regarded as one of productive maturity -- often enviable to the youthful, who longed for the gravitas time conferred. This situation began to change a century ago, heavily influenced by the advent of mass media, particularly movies and advertising, which substantially changed the terms of the equation.
The status of middle age receded still further in the first half of the twentieth century, as psychologists Sigmund Freud and G. Stanley Hall focused on infancy and adolescence as the crucial staging grounds of personal identity. Not until the path-breaking work of Erik Erickson was there much effort to delineate a notion of midlife, and even he backed into via his attempts to segment the either end of a lifetime. Ironically, it was not until the 1960s, in the zenith of youth culture, that there was any real effort to systematically define and trace midlife using longitudinal studies and neurological research backed by serious foundation money. In recent decades these efforts have led to a greater understanding of the the (still imprecisely defined) concept senescence. Current scientific opinion emphasizes the plastic nature of the brain long after maturity, with recent speculation that there are certain kinds of aptitude (like responding to unexpected stress) that older people seem to handle better than younger ones, even if there are not currently good ways to measure a quality that falls into the category of wisdom.
In the last third of the book Cohen surveys "the Midlife Industrial Complex," which she sees as a largely capitalist-driven phenomenon. She notes how a wide array of conditions associated with age, ranging from physical appearance to sexual drive, have been medicalized in recent decades by huckters seeking to exploit the emotional vulnerabilities and relatively deep pockets of Baby Boomers. Yet even this seems to have a silver lining, as marketers are gradually realizing that their mania for the 18-49 demographic overlooks some of the most fertile terrain for their wares. Such a recognition has begun to have an impact on television, for example, where shows geared to more mature and diverse audiences have become more common.
In Our Prime has an even tone and intellectual depth that talks frankly about some of the most dismaying aspects of the aging process. But its overall mood is upbeat: mid-life -- which Cohen resists defining precisely even as the book ends -- is a lengthening time of opportunity. Her message of hope is worth buying, literally and figuratively.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (4-28-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
John B. Thompson begins this book with a publishing anecdote that will be familiar even to those on the margins of the business: the story of how Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, gave a talk in 2007 as part of a series at the university with the title "The Last Lecture." As it turned out, Pausch was dying of pancreatic cancer, giving his well-received presentation an element of poignance that generated a wave of national publicity. What proved truly stunning, however, was how eager New York publishers were to acquire the book that became The Last Lecture: Pausch, a first-time big-time author was paid a $6.75 million advance by Hyperion, a Disney company. How could that possibly make sense?
In 400 chiseled pages, Thompson explains why such an offer came about, and why it made sense -- indeed, The Last Lecture proved to be a lucrative acquisition for Hyperion. He does so with the the methodological acumen of the sociologist he is (at the University of Cambridge). Thompson conducted hundreds of interviews for Merchants of Culture, supplemented by new interviews with many of his sources for this newly released second edition of the book (the first was published in 2010). Much of Thompson's analysis builds on that of his 2005 book Books in the Digital Age, which focused on scholarly publishing. Here he focuses on trade publishing, the hyper-commercial industry focused in New York and London.
It's in the nature of any project of this sort that it stands to date quickly. But Thompson has done a notably good job of keeping his findings timely -- the figures here run into mid-2011, capturing the arrival of the e-book transformation of the industry at that moment it shifted from an abstract possibility to an increasingly evident reality. In some sense, however, the book feels fresh and up-to-date because of an intuitive grasp of temporal proportion; his perspective dates back to the corporate consolidation of the publishing industry in the 1970s, and he traces trends that in many cases have been decades in the making.
The organizational strategy for Merchants of Culture consists of chapters focused on key constituencies in the industry: on on the rise (and decline) of retail chains; the growing power of literary agents; the consolidation of publishing houses; and so on. He also takes note of what is now an established trend of a blockbuster mentality so typical of the major media, along with emerging ones like "extreme publishing" (quickly-produced books designed to plug gaps in financial projections) and the "hidden revolution" in the manufacture and distribution of books. Naturally, he gives plenty of space to major players like Amazon.com, and the transformational role of the Kindle -- with attention to both those who celebrate as well as fear its power.
Thompson has a measured tone, and his goal here is clearly to explain how the field -- a term he identifies as a conceptual construct within sociology -- interlocks in ways that may not always be obvious to an outsider. He does, however, weigh in with some mild-mannered judgments. Thompson thinks a corporate mentality erodes the long-term attention to backlists that are crucial to the ecology of the industry. He notes that big-time publishers like Random House and HarperCollins, unwilling to tend backlists, have instead been buying them by acquiring other imprints, a strategy that has come close to running its course. He sees a polarization in the industry: business conditions are most propitious for behemoths with deep pockets or scrappy little houses, some of them academic players that run a trade operation on a shoestring. But he notes there's precious little ground for medium-sized houses like Farrar, Straus & Giroux (which leverage prestige and typically federate to maximize back-office resources). Thompson is also attentive to the fact that publishing can be most brutal not to first-time writers, but rather those who establish a track record that is found wanting and who must then struggle to survive in an increasingly indifferent field.
As someone who has worked in publishing as well as published books with trade, academic, and specialty publishers, I must say I have never encountered a work as incisive and complete as Merchants of Culture. This one will surely be a backlist perennial, and must reading for anyone with a stake in the business.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (4-24-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
I didn't plan to read this book. I'd put it on a pile of forthcoming titles, one I consulted after finishing the last book I reviewed sooner than planned. I thumbed through the first few pages of a couple on that pile and found myself engaged by the portrait of New York City mayor-elect John Purroy Mitchel on New Year's Eve of 1913. Maybe this book about the year 1914 was worth embarking upon after all.
It was only after I was well into it that I realized More Powerful Than Dynamite has an arresting provenance that makes the particular manner of its execution all the more remarkable. At first I wasn't too surprised by blurbs that didn't quite come from the usual suspects. Kenneth Jackson, sure -- blue chip. Little odd to have him share a back cover with Noam Chomsky, though. And Marge Piercy. Don't think of Samuel G. Freedman as a fellow traveler. Bill Ayers? Don't imagine you'll find this book lying around Obama '12 campaign headquarters. Outside of radical circles, this is not exactly an endorsement a lot of writers would flaunt.
Turns out the Ayres connection is not merely incidental. The jacket copy informs us that Thai Jones was "born while his parents were fugitives from justice" and that he "went by a series of aliases until the age of four." Jones's previous and first book, The Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience (2004), describes a genealogy of radical leftist politics. In the foreword of this book, Jones explains his interest in 1914 New York originated in a now largely forgotten anarchist bomb blast on upper Lexington Avenue that paralleled the notorious one by the Weather Underground in Greenwich Village in 1970. In both cases, radicals were victims of a blast they intended to inflict on others.
I rehearse this background for Dynamite because one might plausibly expect its author to carry the torch for his family's radicalism. Or, perhaps equally plausibly, to repudiate it with a fierceness that derives from that source. But this is a remarkably measured piece of writing by a truly gifted young man still in his thirties. Jones is a former reporter for Newsday, and this book began as a PhD dissertation at Columbia. It combines the lean prose of a journalist with the depth of an academic. But Jones's eye for detail is novelistic, and he is a master of understatement. He turns the neat trick of making moderation marvelous.
Many of the events discussed in Dynamite -- the Ludlow Massacre out in the Colorado coalfields; the reform efforts of the Mitchel administration; and, of course, the outbreak of the First World War -- will be familiar to students of the period. Ditto for a cast of characters that includes Woodrow Wilson, Upton Sinclair, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. But this biographically-driven narrative is populated by a host of obscure ones like the International Workers of the World activist Fred Tannenbaum, police commissioner Arthur Woods, and the charismatic hunger-striker Becky Edelsohn, all of whom burst into life on these pages (nowhere more so than in the otherwise sleepy suburb of Tarrytown, which in May of 1914 gave Manhattan a run for its money in political drama). Jones narrates public demonstrations with cinematic clarity -- Occupy Wall Street was downright genteel compared to the string of uprisings in the city in the first half of 1914 -- even as he manages to capture the inner life of his characters with an empathy that's moving in its own right. So it is that we experience the radical Alexander Berkman's melancholy nostalgia for the terrorism of his youth, Mayor Mitchel's awkwardness in serving citizens he didn't particularly care to meet, and Commissioner Wood's careful, patient efforts to learn from previous police mistakes maintaining public order. We even feel some sympathy for poor John D. Rockefeller Sr., who can't get through a round of golf without being importuned for stock tips by grasping companions.
Which is not to say that Jones suspends judgments. He notes that Rockefeller Jr. was deeply anguished by the Ludlow situation, which it was his family responsibility to manage. "But," he notes, "while Rockefeller was unwilling to ignore the the inequities of business, he was equally unable to intercede against the executives of Colorado Fuel and Iron." This dithering literally proved fatal, a sin for which Rockefeller sincerely tried to atone. Conversely, Jones shows that while Woods showed far more respect for the First Amendment than any of his predecessors (more for tactical than philosophical reasons), he replied to criticism about authorizing unprecedented wiretaps of suspected radicals by saying, "There is altogether too much sappy talk about the rights of the crook . . . He is a crook. He is an outlaw. He defies what has been put down as what shall be done and what shall not be done by the great body of law-abiding citizens. Where does his right come in?" Jones wisely lets us draw our own conclusion without comment.
The author's self-control has a deeply historical quality; he shows us people living through dramas whose outcomes they could not know, struggling to understand what is happening to them and trying, not always successfully, to grow from their experiences. Young Fiorello LaGuardia was an admirer of Mayor Mitchel who honored his memory -- to a point. The leaders of his Progressive stripe "had attempted to separate government from politics, but that does not work in a democracy," a mistake LaGuardia did not make. One of the few people who comes off truly badly in this book is Walter Lippmann, who coined the phrase of its title. As he is in so many accounts of this period, Lippmann is everywhere and always seems to have a pithy remark that's both incisive and at least faintly condescending. He's heartless, and in his way is harder to take than Rockefeller the younger.
Toward the end of this book -- a little later than we should, really -- its larger argument comes into focus, which involves the role of Progressives as mediators between the plutocrats and radicals of the subtitle. Jones asserts that the events of 1914 were decisive in swinging reformers toward the right, which had lasting implications for American politics. Perhaps there's grist here for his next book.
In any case, Dynamite showcases a rare talent notable for its equipoise in balancing heart and head. Jones serves the memory of his subject with quiet grace. And he serves his readers with stories that deserve to be remembered. Here truly is a career worth following.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (4-18-12)
Murray Polner, a regular HNN book reviewer, wrote Branch Rickey: A Biography; No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran; and edited with Thomas Wood, Jr. We Who Dared To Say No To War.
Tim Wendel has set out to portray the 1968 baseball season against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of that year. 1968 witnessed the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. We seemed to be undergoing a nervous breakdown, with anti-Vietnam dissenters and draft opponents battling the FBI, police forces, the National Guard, pro-war politicians, and, until perhaps 1970, the majority of the American public that still believed in the war.
Still, an extraordinary number of men from all economic and social classes did what they could to avoid fighting. Tens of thousands of resisters fled to Canada and Europe. Deserters went underground. Conscientious objector status was granted to an unprecedented number of applicants. At the height of the fighting and dying Congress Weekly counted only 14 representatives and senators with close relatives in Vietnam.
Perhaps Wendel should have spent more time on what was happening off the field that summer. But baseball, after all, is an escape. It was serious business, though, for major league players, who benefited from what may well have been a tacit, if immoral, agreement between the Selective Service Administration and Major League Baseball to spare players the rigor of military life and the possibility of being shipped to Vietnam. While for most it was hard to gain a slot in the National Guard and Reserves -- the era’s draft havens, unlike our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when entire units were activated -- baseball players were welcomed. Only one major league player, Roy Gleason, who appeared in eight games as a pinch runner with one at-bat in 1963 for the Los Angeles Dodgers, served on active military duty in Vietnam, where he was wounded.
It’s important to note this background since Summer of ’68 retells the story of that baseball season by occasionally weaving in some of the historic events with the action on the diamond, culminating in the dramatic victory of the Detroit Tigers over the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. Wendel’s smoothly-written text recreates the excitement of one of our best post-season games, which featured stars such as Detroit’s Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Al Kaline, Denny McLain, Mickey Lolich and St. Louis’s Orlando Cepeda, Curt Flood, Lou Brock, Roger Maris, and the incomparable Steve Carlton and Bob Gibson. No lover of the game could ask for more, especially since the scars of Detroit’s 1967 race riots had only begun to heal.
Wendel does reference the occasional player in the National Guard and in one instance a player, seriously or not, claimed his part-time service disrupted his career. He also describes a young pitcher arriving with his team in Chicago while police were battling protestors at the Democratic Party convention, but he has nothing to say about what he sees from his hotel window.
Not that many players were immune to the passions of their times -- who could be? -- but the war and its politics, as Wendel rightly points out, were “left to others” and players simply steered clear of the subject. In 1969, when the Mets unexpectedly won the World Series, their exemplary pitcher Tom Seaver, who had served in the Marines before the war, was the exception, famously saying, “If the Mets can win the World Series, the United States can get out of Vietnam.”
Wendel does well in telling how players who admired Robert F. Kennedy responded after his murder. Many refused to play the next day. While half the Cincinnati Reds roster voted to play, the other half did not and Milt Pappas, their player representative, defied them and Reds management, saying “You guys are wrong, I’m telling you you’re all wrong.” For this, he was traded to Atlanta, the Reds naturally denying he was punished. Wendel cites with approval Bob August of the Cleveland Press: “Baseball’s observance of Senator Kennedy’s death was disorganized, illogical and shabby.” Of course, much the same happened in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was killed and the NFL opted to play their Sunday game while the upstart AFL chose to stay home. The AFL, Wendel reminds us, had surpassed the older football league in desegregating its teams.
However, Wendel attempts too much in claiming the summer of ’68 “changed baseball and America.” 1968 also saw the emergence of millions voting for George Wallace, the rise of a disaffected white working and middle class and millions .more electing Richard Nixon. Clearly, the country has since changed. Now baseball is controlled by billionaires and corporate advertisers and TV. Players are paid enormous salaries. Stadiums are built with public subsidies and poor whites, blacks and Latinos are poorer now and many can’t afford a good seat at a game.
Baseball, which usually moves at a glacial pace, did in fact eventually change after 1968. Its players' union arguably became the most powerful union in the country, new stadiums were often built with public subsidies and unlike pro football, they offer reasonably priced seats. The mass arrival of Latino players has been accepted without problems. Though still few in number, there are more black managers than ever and, now there is a black co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. In fact, many of the racial tensions in dugouts and front offices have been sharply diminished because of changing public attitudes and perhaps because of Bud Selig’s enlightened role as commissioner. Tim Wendel has written a compelling book about a pivotal season.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (4-17-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
Timothy Noah is a reasonable person. Like many reasonable persons, he tries to bring people around to his point of view -- a point of view informed by statistics and expert opinion -- by supporting it evidence and anticipating objections. This is typically how informed analysts like himself assert the reality of climate change, for instance. It's also why people like him are sometimes baffled by the indifference, if not hostility, with which their opinions are met. It's not that they don't comprehend denial or cynical short-term self-interest. But can't their fellow Americans understand this is serious -- and that in the long run (which really isn't all that long) indifference and cynical self-interest are naive?
Noah believes they can understand (or at least some people can, and will). And so in The Great Divergence he marshals a great deal of evidence and sculpts it into an impressively svelte book to demonstrate that income inequality in the United States is real, growing, and dangerous. I believe him. Of course, I believed that income inequality is real, growing and dangerous before I ever picked up the book, and in this regard I'm like most of the people who will ultimately read it (or previously read the essays from Slate on which the book is based). Which is not to say that I didn't learn a good deal from him: I gained more clarity on which societal forces explain income inequality more credibly than others (women in the workforce and immigration are not really major factors, while the increasing costs of college education, the decline of unions, and Republican presidents really are major factors). Noah understands perfectly well that many of the measures he advocates, like raising taxes, re-regulating Wall Street, and improving education, are not likely to happen overnight. But as he shrewdly asserts, one need not have a detailed blueprint for every proposal, nor hope to resolve every issue, to still assert that problems are real and can at least be ameliorated. The Buffet Rule raising taxes on "millionaires and billionaires" (to quote President Obama's favorite meme of the moment) would not come close to erasing the national debt. But it's still a worthwhile start.
What leaves me a bit restive about The Great Divergence is his underlying notion that educating the public is going to make much difference at this point. If charts and exposition could make income inequality an irresistibly evident problem, it would have long since done so -- if not in 1973 or 1983, then by 1993 or 2003. Actually, the reality of the problem is virtually beyond dispute by now: the book opens with an admission from George W. Bush (!) that income inequality is a real and increasing. But that didn't mean he or the tens of millions of people who voted for him believed he should have done anything about it. Or that Obama should now.
In part, that's because no one can be certain why economic inequality has happened -- or, more to the point, whether attempts to fix it will do more good than harm. Noah notes that for a long time economists and political scientists resisted believing that government action affected income distribution. Now, he shows, that skepticism is disappearing. It doesn't quite seem intellectually bankrupt to wonder if economic opinion like the New England weather: if you don't like it, wait and it will change. And even if you can prove that the globe is getting hotter or income inequality is increasing, why should I think that authority Z's solutions are better than any other? Is it really impossible imagine a sober (social) scientist discovering that when levels of variable A reach B, then carbon dioxide levels may actually start to go down because of heretofore undiscovered factors C that will cumulatively have an unexpectedly large and positive impact on D?. How many times have you read a sentence like, "Economists/biologists/whatever used to think E, but now we understand F"?
Let me repeat: I believe Noah is right. The stories he tells with graphs and facts and expert opinion -- stories which in their broadest outlines I've heard before, though stories that are here succinct and sometimes vibrant -- are compelling and buttress the anecdotal view of the world I get from Paul Krugman's columns and books like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, which lodge their way into your conscious (and conscience) and stay there. I also believe that many of the people who say Noah is wrong are rationalizing their desire to ignore him and others like him. But all the economic statistics in the world are not going to convince those people. Of those that remain -- of those who really are open to having their minds changed -- I doubt there are many who will be converted by the largely liberal body of opinion that's surveyed here. Instead, they will likely need one of two arguments: 1) an appeal that rests at least as much on the heart as the head, a rhetorical equivalent of Uncle Tim's Cabin; or 2) a series of events, in all likelihood violent in nature, that dramatize the problem in ways that will really tranfix public attention.
Noah might well say that The Great Divergence was written in the hope that social reform would not need to rest on such volatile or tragic means. I understand and sympathize with that hope, even as I confess to a loss of confidence in this age of gridlock that these issues lend themselves to this style of discourse when it comes to issues like global economies or global climates, which are simply too big and dynamic to be understood with any certainty.
I realize I'm trying to make an oddly rational argument about the limits of expository reasoning. If I'm selling Noah and his readers short, or if you'd simply like to have your suspicions about inequality confirmed and explained, he's your man. If I'm right -- right about those limits, but also right in agreeing with his core message -- then he will yet have a day he can say to all who resisted his warnings, "I told you so." But I suspect he'll be too decent to gloat.
Murray Polner, a regular book reviewer for the History News Network, co-edited with Thomas Woods Jr. We Who Dared To Say No To War.
If nothing else, this impressive autobiography by a reflective and long forgotten U.S. Foreign Service officer reminds us how the powerful China Lobby, a combination of demagogic politicians, private interests, wealthy businessmen and media giants, backed Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang against a then-popular, pre-authoritarian Communist Party of China. It set off a furious, if one-sided battle that ended in the U.S. firing its China specialists for daring to predict that the Communists would win the civil war against Chiang unless serious reforms were instituted.
One of the many victims of that purge was John Paton Davies, Jr., the author of China Hand. Davies’s crime was that he had repeatedly warned the State Department that Chiang’s corrupt and ineffectual Kuomintang, the recipient of massive U.S. military aid, was sure to lose the Chinese civil war. Born in Szechuan to American Baptist missionary parents, he was fired in 1954 by that consummate cold warrior Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who then offered to help him get another job!
After the Communist victory in 1949 and Chiang’s escape to Taiwan, the false and deliberately manipulative cry of “Who lost China?” became the common refrain of Republicans and assorted right-wingers desperate for a return to power. But the United States never “lost” China, as if that ancient country was America’s to lose, and it could not have been “won” short of a massive American invasion. The allegation then and now in certain right-wing circles is that, since 1945, the failure to win the Korean and Vietnam Wars was because home front appeasers, subversives, and traitors denied Chiang his victory, an updated “stab-in-the back” theory first enunciated by Erich Ludendorff after World War I, who argued that German antiwar dissenters had lost the war, not he.
Dashing any hope that things might be different once Germany and Japan surrendered, the U.S. suddenly found itself drowning in a climate of fear in which millions of Americans held an induced, pathological dread of communism. Former Reds confessed their sins—some true, some fictional—to the FBI, Congress and the media. Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall were accused of being communist dupes. Communist and left-liberal critics were punished and silenced. That some were in fact Soviet spies certainly helped fan the fires—while ignoring that the U.S. in the early fifties was also engaged in spying and overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala. The new Torquemadas, said Davies, assailed “those whom they regarded as agents or dupes of an omniscient, pervasive Soviet conspiracy”
Davies’s fellow “China hands” John Carter Vincent, O. Edmund Clubb, John Stewart Service, John K. Fairbank and Owen Lattimore were hounded and persecuted for supposedly favoring our new “enemy.” Lattimore was condemned by Joe McCarthy and his sycophants as Moscow’s chief American-based spy. Raised in China, where his father taught French, German and Spanish, he once served as Chiang’s personal advisor. After McCarthy’s allegation he was indicted for perjury for denying that he was “a follower of the Communist line,” a charge later dismissed by a federal court.
John Stewart Service, another China-born son of missionaries, was a prime target because he foolishly gave the left-wing editor of Amerasia magazine copies of classified notes he had written urging the U.S. to take an alternative course in China. For this he was arrested, tried, and acquitted by a grand jury and cleared three times by security boards and State Department investigations. Even so, McCarthy and his followers saw to it that he was pilloried in the press, and he was finally fired (though he was later rehired).
David Oshinsky’s A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy concluded:“To say that Service used poor judgment would be understating the case. But his objective was not espionage; it was rather to publicize an alternative opposition on China through a news leak.” (For another view, see Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh’s The Amerasia Spy Case).
In addition to his unpopular prediction about the Chinese civil war, Davies, who had nothing to do with Amerasia, would also be fired. By then the China Lobby and McCarthy, its favorite senator, were tasting blood. Word spread that as a foreign service officer in China, Manchuria and Moscow, Davies had met lots of suspicious people. One was the Nebraska-born Anna Louise Strong, probably a Soviet agent, who defended Stalin’s blood trials of the thirties and also admired Mao’s pursuit of power. There was also Agnes Smedley, a Missouri-born pro-communist and Mao devotee. Smedley, incidentally, was a friend of Richard Sorge, the German-born Nazi diplomat and Soviet spy stationed in Tokyo. It was Sorge who correctly named the date the Nazis were planning to invade the Soviet Union, which he passed on to Moscow and which Stalin famously and idiotically rejected as false.
China Hand, however, mainly concentrates on Davies’s role as a diplomat, and what times they were. Working closely with General Joseph Stilwell, Chiang’s main American military advisor, he met FDR, Churchill, Gandhi, Nehru, Mountbatten, “Chesty” Puller, George Kennan (who respected and mentored Davies and placed him on his State Department Policy Planning Staff), Mao Zedong, Chiang himself, and the powerful Soong family (he married one Soong sister and another sister was the wife of Sun Yat-sen).
He describes his years with Stilwell, whom he obviously admired. Stilwell, who commanded the China, Burma, India campaigns, detested Chiang and called him “peanut,” while Chiang in turn loathed Stilwell. Davies also took conservative positions, such as flirting with ideas about a preventive war with the Soviet Union and taking “vigorous measures” against communism in Southeast Asia.
At the 1943 Cairo conference with FDR, Churchill and Chiang, he wrote that no one in the U.S. delegation knew much about China or could speak even Chinese. FDR offered Chiang lots of postwar real estate to get him to stay in the war and, wrote Davies, "to sweeten” his bias against “foreign devils.” FDR also sent his leftish vice president Henry Wallace to China to try reconciling Mao and Chiang. “Wallace was … uncomprehending of the Chinese scene,” and was persuaded by three Chiang supporters to recommend Stilwell be fired. (And, in a somewhat irrelevant aside, Davies notes that William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS—“He was a bit of a latter-day Teddy Roosevelt, effervescent and adventurous”—told him J. Edgar Hoover was gay, though Tim Wiener absolutely disagrees in his new book, Enemies: A History of the FBI.)
While hardly a fan of Winston Churchill, Davies considered the British prime minister smarter than U.S. politicians because he kept Britain aloof from what he said was an “American obsession” with Chiang, to which Davies added, “in striking contrast to the distraught, self-destructive behavior not only of the American government, conspicuously within the Congress, but also of segments of the America public, particularly within the information media.”
The China lobby, like contemporary powerful pressure groups such as the Israel lobby, neoconservatives, the Cuban exile lobby, and weapons manufacturers, scare policymakers and politicians and help stereotype and shut up critics while preventing the emergence of possible alternatives. The China lobby’s largely unchallenged assertions that America faced an unyielding, menacing monolithic communism paralyzed all efforts to change course and eventually helped persuade Washington to plunge into two failed wars in Korea and Vietnam.
China Handis a forceful reminder that what happened in the bad old days of the forties and fifties could very well reoccur when another “enemy” is created. Plus ça change.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (4-4-12)
Jonathan Carriel is the author of the Thomas Dordrecht Historical Mystery Series, the third volume of which, If Two Are Dead, set in New York in 1762, will shortly be published by iUniverse.
Revolutions do not usually come cheap—and certainly the American Revolution did not. The eight-year war that secured it is conservatively estimated to have claimed some 25,000 American lives—the percentage-wise equivalent, today, of 3.1 million citizens. (There was huge carnage for the British, too, of course, plus substantial casualty counts for allied Europeans and Native Americans.) Yet even as we take in these staggering numbers, the true human cost remains a bloodless shadow. As Stalin gruesomely but aptly put it, one death is a tragedy, a million … is a statistic.
This is a nexus where historical fiction can profoundly enhance our grasp of historical reality—and one of the greatest novels of the Revolution has happily just been reissued, with a new introduction by its prolific author, as an electronic book. Thomas Fleming’s Liberty Tavern sold a million copies when it was originally published in the bicentennial year, 1976. Its themes are, if anything, even more urgent and relevant today.
Fleming’s fictional middle-class New Jersey family seems at first very familiar: the father’s a widower and the hard-working proprietor of a prospering public accommodation that serves as a social focus for miles around; his two much loved but quarrelsome stepchildren are in their late adolescence and chafing to be free of all adult supervision. This story’s no set-up for a television drama, however: it begins uneasily on January 1, 1776—amid universal trepidation about the future.
Liberty Tavern pulls the reader deeply into the reality of a community that will spend years in upheaval, uncertain of the outcome to the last, often at war with itself as much as with a foreign oppressor. The eponymous hostelry’s respected owner, Jonathan Gifford, is a former British soldier, somewhat hobbled by a knee injury, who for the last decade has immersed himself in building his business, his family, and his locality. Experienced in battle, he views with deep apprehension the cocky assertions of many of his neighbors that Britain can be defeated without difficulty by righteous patriots. He withholds his counsel when others maintain with equal glibness that the king’s forces can never be defeated and that surrendering is the only sane course. Virtually everyone around concurs that British policy is unjust and ought to be changed; but the disagreements over whether that would be possible and how the colonists might promote it turn increasingly acrimonious.
The public situation is further complicated for Gifford when his two stepchildren take opposite sides—passionately, neither evincing any toleration for Gifford’s cautious prudence. Headstrong, seventeen-year-old Kate has taken up with the poetry-spouting, loyalist son of Gifford’s best friend, and deems politics an outrageous imposition on her romantic life. The equally headstrong, nineteen-year-old lad Kemble, home to recuperate from pneumonia after two years at Princeton, is frantic to participate in the glory that he is positive will accrue to the American cause. All three struggle too with remorse and guilt and defensiveness over the memory of the recently deceased wife and mother—the sort of completely personal, apolitical concern that insistently obtrudes itself into everyone’s real life despite all hell breaking loose.
Around this cauldron of personal and local difficulty breaks the American Revolutionary War. Only after Congress has declared independence does Gifford make his own declaration—by renaming the tavern. The boy finds it too little, too late; the girl disdains to perceive the enormous risk involved given the British army’s proximity and the tavern’s location on a major military highway. The best friend becomes estranged. As the years pass, Gifford and his children suffer greatly—physically, emotionally, economically—as control of their county passes abruptly not only between the Redcoats and the Congress, but among them, the loyalists, the state’s militia, rogue vigilantes, and outright criminals.
While dozens of homes, barns, fields, and businesses are plundered and burnt by all sides, the tavern’s needfulness to all factions contributes to its clearly precarious survival. The family’s and the community’s endurance is just as tenuous; determination and heroism are stretched taut to see them through.
As always, war brings out some of the best and lots of the worst in human beings—and it brings them out on both sides of the conflict. Many of the novel’s most memorable characters and scenes involve honorable British enemies … and truly despicable “patriots.”
When the ships finally sail out of New York harbor, Kate and Kendall—eight years older, after all, and much wiser than they were on page one—are fully reconciled to their stepfather. But even as relief and hope offer breath to the gasping population …
We’ll say no more. Treat yourself to the enthralling Liberty Tavern, and you won’t be studying the American Revolution, you’ll be living the American Revolution.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (4-2-12)
Aaron Leonard is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to HNN.
Geoffrey Roberts introduces us to Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov in 1976, long after he has left power. Molotov tell us, “Not often, but sometimes I dream of Stalin. In extraordinary situations. In a destroyed city. I can’t find a way out. Then I meet him, in a word, strange dreams, very confused.” Such disturbing dreams are not surprising. The twentieth century was, in many ways, the most awful time in human history: two world wars, famines, genocide and, for the latter half of the century, the specter of utter nuclear annihilation. Molotov, as premier of the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1941, Soviet foreign minister from 1939 to 1949 and again from 1953 to 1956, was more times than not at the center of it all.
Roberts presents a more nuanced picture of Molotov than other biographers, someone whose mind and meticulousness suited him to the exacting demands of representing the Soviets in the realm of foreign policy. Robert’s Molotov is not absolutely slavish to Stalin -- though when push comes to shove he falls into line -- and he is even less cowering in front of Khrushchev. Regardless, to review Molotov's life is to walk a tightrope, and Geoffrey Roberts does a fine job of doing so.
There is Molotov, the committed Communist selflessly sacrificing for what he saw as a more just world, only to end up in a position of authority during the Great Purge of the late 1930s with its effort to solve real, perceived, and imagined problems through the most horrific and unconscionable means. Then there is Molotov the face of Soviet foreign policy -- a policy that, when stripped of its socialist and internationalist pretenses, is too often driven by fierce nationalism.
Molotov’s pivotal role was during World War II, and it's here that things become most complicated -- and dire. When the Soviets could not broker a deal with England and France to stave off ascendant Germany in 1939, they made a deal ... with Germany. Negotiated by Molotov with the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, it meant Germany and the Soviets would not attack each other -- for the time being. The ink had hardly dried when the Germans took their then-cleared path to invade Poland, ushering in World War II. The Red Army followed seventeen days later, dividing Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and paving the way for the Soviet annexations of the Baltic states, as well as the disastrous Winter War with Finland. In this way the Soviets, pursuing their own state interests, gave their own particular fuel to the fire to that conflagration. In the end they did themselves no service -- though it is still debated to what degree this respite strategy benefited them -- for in June 1941 the Germans, which had used the temporary peace with the Soviets to conquer most of Western Europe, launched one of the most murderous campaigns in human history, Operation Barbarossa -- the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Through the leadership of Stalin, and with Molotov’s diplomacy, the Soviets -- who Roberts notes did the bulk of the fighting and dying in that war (eight million military deaths and sixteen million civilians, or ten percent of the Soviet population) -- were able to defeat Hitler’s forces. The victory was in many ways pyrrhic. The Soviets went from the occupied to the occupiers in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his cadre, at the best of times viewed with suspicion, were now seen by the United States and Britain as a threat. This was not without basis, as Roberts quotes Molotov, “Sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between the desire for security and the desire for expansion.” Yet Soviet foreign policy was not operating in a vacuum. The United States was keen to stake out its place in the postwar world -- and the development of atomic weapons were no small part of that.
The book goes against the grain in arguing Molotov, more than is largely understood, was not a simple bulwark of Cold War intransigence. It describes how, while Stalin was still alive, he fought an uphill battle to keep some semblance of the Grand Alliance together and to diminish the Cold War. Later, under Khrushchev, we learn of his efforts to broker a deal with the Western powers to the same end. He was ultimately unsuccessful, for, as Roberts notes, “his efforts to end [the Cold War] and unite a divided Europe were frustrated first by Stalin and then by Khrushchev. But Molotov’s failure to realize his vision should not blind us to the importance of his efforts.”
Regardless, after the horror of the purges (in which he, like Khrushchev, shared in the culpability), divorcing his wife when she came under Stalin’s disfavor, seeing Stalin attacked by Khrushchev, being kicked out of the Party (though he was reinstated by Leonid Brezhnev toward the end of his life), Molotov was unrepentant. In 1985 at the age of 95, he said, “In time, Stalin will be rehabilitated by history. There will be a Stalin museum in Moscow. Without fail! By popular demand.” Though he comes across like a man in the wrong defending the indefensible, things are more complicated than that. As Roberts concludes, “No simple epitaph could encompass Molotov’s life and career. But for both good and ill, he was a pivotal figure in shaping the diplomacy and politics of those extraordinary times.”
SOURCE: Special to HNN (4-2-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
By now, the scenario is a familiar one: a sovereign state, deeply indebted by many years of public sector spending, is making foreign lenders nervous. The state needs more money; lenders insist on austerity. But government officials, chary of offending voters, prevaricate while various schemes for restructuring get floated and clamor builds in the streets. Eventually, the underlying realities assert themselves and retrenchment takes place.
We know this as a story of Greece and Ireland. But the states Alasdair Roberts are talking about are Illinois, Pennsylvania and Mississippi, among others. And the financial crisis in question erupted not in 2007, but in 1837. Welcome to what he calls the First Great Depression.
As he explains in his note on method, Roberts comes to this history from a relatively unusual angle. A professor of law and public policy at Suffolk University Law School, his previous three books have dealt with contemporary subjects. This well-documented tale, grounded in primary sources, is embedded between discussions of the current economic crisis. His larger point is geopolitical: Americans today fret about finding themselves at the mercy of foreign powers for the first time in its history. In fact, he says, in the broad sweep of U.S. history, autonomy has been the exception, not the rule. The past is prologue.
Roberts begins America's First Great Depression with an impressionistic survey of hard times, rich with anecdote. He does not outright reject the widespread view that the Panic of 1837 resulted from the foolish actions of the Jackson administration, which in destroying the Bank of the United States created a boom and bust by channeling cash to smaller banks that lacked the experience to manage it properly. But, he says, the origins of the crisis are closer to London than Washington; Great Britain had its own problems with credit, food supply, and a global marketplace that was far less well understood and fluid than it is today. And since Britain essentially underwrote the economic development of the whole western hemisphere, a Barings sneeze caused American flu.
Roberts's analysis of the American scene draws heavily on foreign perceptions of the United States, particularly British ones, which are quite critical. For such people, the American experiment is simply not working. He explains why in the most focused and satisfying chapter of the book, which looks at government policy on the state level, where politicians typically found the wrath of voters more frightening that that of lenders. A British ditty at the time captures the caustic mood of foreign elites, which would sting national pride for some time to come:
Yankee Doodle borrows cash,
Yankee Doodle spends it,
And then his snaps his fingers at
The jolly flat who lends it
Ask him when he means to pay,
He shews no hesitation,
But he say's he'll take the shortest way
And that's repudiation!
In snubbing foreign lenders, however, the states also short-circuited internal improvement projects that died on the vine (so much for Pennsylvania's effort to compete with the Erie Canal by linking Philadelphia to Pittsburgh). They also essentially shut themselves out of the credit markets for many years.
The situation at the federal level wasn't much better. Washington never slumped into bankruptcy the way a series of states did; the government actually ran a surplus in the early 1830s that it promised to redistribute to the states. Ironically, however, the perception of plenty made matters worse when the feds began hemorrhaging revenue and pulled the plug on the program, sending desperate states into even more distress.
But Roberts shows the reverberations of the crisis went far beyond economic policy. Economic hard times corroded trust in political institutions, creating government gridlock. The Whig Party swept to power in 1840 by riding a wave of exasperation with Martin Van Buren's Democrats, only to find themselves similarly hobbled and tossed in subsequent congressional and presidential elections. Fiscal difficulties also constrained the nation's military. Though public opinion at the time was militantly expansionist with regard to borders in Maine, Oregon, and Texas, informed government officials realized that war -- especially war with hegemonic Great Britain -- would be folly at best. (Here it's worth noting in passing that Roberts portrays the ninth president of the United States, "His Accidency" John Tyler, who got the job when Whig William Henry Harrison died, as one of the architects of a stronger executive branch. To a great degree that's because he used his authority to trim national sails in the face of realpolitik.)
Finally, Roberts describes the depression as a crisis of civic order. He situates the obscure and often mystifying Rhode Island insurrection known as the Dorr War in the context of an outdated colonial constitution finally breaking down in the face of economic pressures. Ditto for the Anti-Rent uprisings in the upper Hudson Valley. The situation in Philadelphia, where riots broke out in 1844, was perhaps more a function of labor politics in the blast furnace of industrial capitalism. But it too derived directly from populist grievances with financial elites. As governor William Seward of New York observed at the time, there was widespread anger that "none but the educated, the refined, the financial, the brokers, the great commercial interests of society have the right to suspend the their just debts." His recognition of fiscal hypocrisy would sound familiar to the protesters of Occupy Wall Street.
In his laudable attempt to understand the economic mechanics of the nation from a broader perspective, Roberts sometimes seems to stretch his perspective a bit far. It's not clear, for example, that we need the kind of detailed assessment of the U.S. navy in the Age of Jackson that we get in this book. Nor it it clear that finance can really explain why the U.S. never went to war with Great Britain in the 1840s: even a flush nation would have had very good reasons to avoid one with a global superpower whose resources outmatched the United States in just about every meaningful sense at the time. Roberts makes a good case that the Mexican War was in some respects a proxy fight with Great Britain, though less so that credit markets were central to the rivalry (indeed, he seems to stray pretty far from them even in his own telling). But he's surely right that the ease with which the nation was able to borrow money again in its aftermath signaled the degree to which the nation had finally, fully, and visibly recovered from the Panic of 1837.
While this svelte book could have trimmed a bit more, it remains a valuable case study, because it's both detailed and resonant at the same time. As a snapshot of the United States at what might be considered an "in-between" moment of its history, the picture here is rich in suggesting where the nation had come from and where it was going. And as an invitation to consider the U.S. place in a post-hegemonic world, the book offers a glimpse of a plausible future which, while undeniably sobering, is not exactly apocalyptic. In that regard, America's First Great Depression is an oddly hopeful reality check.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (3-30-12)
Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (University of Tennessee Press).
Is it possible to cope with the immense dangers posed by the rapid consumption of the world’s resources? In The Race for What’s Left, Michael Klare claims that it is -- but only through a significant change in behavior.
Klare is the author of fourteen books, the most recent of which focus on resources and international conflict. He is also the defense correspondent for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
In The Race for What’s Left -- a book displaying his stunning knowledge of drilling and mining techniques, obscure minerals, geology, and remote regions of the world -- Klare argues that “the world is entering an era of pervasive, unprecedented resource scarcity.” Both government and corporate officials “recognize that existing reserves are being depleted at a terrifying pace and will be largely exhausted in the not-too-distant future.” In their view, “the only way for countries to ensure an adequate supply of these materials, and thereby keep their economies humming, is to acquire new, undeveloped reservoirs in those few locations that have not already been completely drained. This has produced a global drive to find and exploit the world’s final resource reserves” -- not only energy and mineral resources, but arable land. Thus, a great scramble by private corporations and government entities is now underway to own or control resources in the Arctic, in northern Siberia, in the deep waters of the Atlantic, in remote regions of Africa, and in other previously inaccessible, largely undeveloped regions of the world.
Of course, there has long been a competition for resources among nations. But, as Klare shows, the current struggle is becoming fiercer. “Whereas previous centuries generally witnessed conflict between just a few dominant powers,” he notes, “today many more countries are industrialized or on the path to industrialization -- so the number of major contenders for resources is greater than ever before.” Moreover, “these new challengers also often harbor large and growing populations, whose desire for consumer goods of all sorts cannot be long denied. At the same time, many existing sources of supply are in decline while few new reservoirs are waiting on the horizon.” Consequently, “with more nations in the resource race and fewer prizes to be divided among them, the competition is heating up and governments are being pressed to assume a more active role.”
A skeptic might ask: What is wrong with this competition? The obvious answer, implicitly accepted by corporate and government officials alike, is that there are not enough resources to go around. In this situation, prices will rise and the living standards of many people throughout the world will fall. In the midst of growing scarcity, some will emerge winners and others losers, with the poorest among them starving and dying.
But, as Klare demonstrates, there are other great drawbacks, as well. One is that corporations and governments, in their determination to reach previously inaccessible resources, are employing extractive technologies that are destroying the environment. BP’s deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, corporate hydrofracking in the northeast United States, and the massive Canadian tar sands operation are three well-known examples of this phenomenon. Also, the rising consumption of fossil fuels will accelerate climate change.
Furthermore, wealthy investors, hedge funds, and a growing number of governments (including those of Saudi Arabia, other Persian Gulf nations, China, India, and South Korea) are busy buying up farmland in other nations -- in 2009 alone, an estimated 110 million acres, an area the size of Sweden. According to Susan Payne’s Emergent fund, “Africa is the final frontier,” with land that is “very, very inexpensive.” Thus, Emergent promises to achieve a very high rate of return on such agricultural investment -- exceeding 25 percent a year. The return to African peasants, forced off their ancestral lands to make way for overseas agribusiness and profits, will almost certainly be much less.
Of course, intensive resource extraction will also lead to foreign support for exploitative, dictatorial regimes, as it has in many African nations. Certainly, the average citizens of these countries have experienced little benefit from their resource wealth. Klare observes: “Ever since the early Cold War period, when Niger was still under French rule, uranium extraction has been a significant industry in the country, but it has mostly enriched only a few well-connected government officials and the companies that own the mines. Few of Niger’s sixteen million people have ever seen any benefits from the mining, and two-thirds of them still live on less than $1 per day, making Niger one of the poorest nations on earth.”
Finally, the scramble for global resources provides the potential for heightened military conflict. Klare remarks: “In all probability, countries with major resource deposits will receive more weapons, military training, technical assistance, and intelligence support from states that wish to curry favor or establish closer ties. At the same time, combat forces will be deployed abroad to defend friendly regimes and protect key ports, pipelines, refineries, and other critical installations.” Amid competing resource claims, the Arctic, Africa, and the East and South China Seas have recently experienced new tensions and military buildups.
Fortunately, as Klare points out, there is an alternative to the “race for what’s left” -- a “race to adapt.” This would entail a contest among the “major political and corporate powers ... to become among the first to adopt new materials, methods, and devices that will free the world from its dependence on finite resource supplies.” It would “reward the governments, companies, and communities that take the lead in developing efficient, environmentally friendly industrial processes and transportation systems.” Replacing “finite natural resources with renewables” and focusing “on increasing efficiency” would not only allow the global economy “to escape from the trap of diminishing resource supplies,” but would “allow many nations to free themselves from military pacts and other diplomatic arrangements currently employed to cement ties with foreign resource providers.”
Although Klare does not suggest running this “race to adapt” as a cooperative one, it could proceed much like the women’s races of some years ago, when participants joined hands while crossing the finish line. Wouldn’t it be a grand moment in human history if people of every nation collaborated in facing the challenge of dwindling resources that confronts us all? But, whether cooperatively or competitively, we must begin adapting to the limits of our resources, and Michael Klare’s outstanding book -- exhaustively-researched, beautifully-written, and convincingly-argued -- helps move this vital project forward.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (3-24-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
This book, the product of a powerful mind, integrates cutting-edge research from the disciplines of biology, psychology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and other fields. It attempts to answer a deceptively simple question: How do people determine what is right, and how are we to understand the differences between them? Haidt's answer is that morality is largely a function of processes autonomous of conscious thought. To use a metaphor in a book chock full of mnemonic devices, our minds are like elephants on which reason is the rider -- but that the rider serves the elephant, not the other way around. And that we cannot really begin to have a meaningful political discourse until we recognize that the basis of our disagreements are never really about formal logic.
Haidt's assertion that explicit arguments are literally rationalizations for our deepest instincts has become something of a truism in recent neurological research (and a foundation of his last book, The Happiness Hypothesis). But this observation is merely the point of departure in The Righteous Mind. It turns out that Haidt's real agenda is to deconstruct the liberal secular disposition that he's clearly calculating is the default setting for readers of his work. This deconstruction involves pointing out the striking degree of parochialism on the part of those who consider themselves enlightened. He notes that most of the people who design social science assessments, along with the volunteers who participate in them, are WEIRD -- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic -- and that such people are in fact a tiny minority of the global population. Gaining critical distance on this subset, which he acquired by spending time in India, has helped him to understand the world beyond the elite institutions (Penn, Chicago, the University of Virginia) where he has done most of his work.
From there, Haidt goes on to posit that morality consists of a series of discrete sensors akin to the way those on our tongues determine our sense of taste. They are spectra of care/harm; liberty/oppression; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; and sanctity/degradation. Liberals, he notes, have a very high degree of sensitivity to care criteria, along with aversion to oppression and and an emphasis on fairness (typically defined in terms of equality). Conservatives, by contrast, are not devoid of such sensors; they too wish to avoid harm, oppression and unfairness, though they tend to cast averting such evils in terms of freedom from rather than freedom to, and to define fairness in terms of proportionality rather than equality. But the important point for Haidt is that conservatives, like people in much of the rest of the world, have a much wider basis of morality than liberals do: they value concepts like patriotism and a sense of the holy in ways that liberals stint if not actually dismiss. Liberals have a blind spot whereby they simply don't recognize, much less engage such criteria, one reason why in surveys conservatives tend to do a much better job of describing liberals than liberals do conservatives. (This is a point that has been made a number of times, but the empirical basis of Haidt's research can be found on his website, YourMorals.org.)
Why does this matter? It matters, he says, because biology says it does. Haidt slices through the age-old Gordian knot of nature vs. nurture by jumping on the au courant bandwagon that our brains are not hard-wired, but rather pre-wired. Biology is not destiny, exactly: any number of programs can be downloaded, depending on environmental availability. But not an infinite number. And all of us come equipped with outlets for inputs like a sense of the sacred, whether or not they get filled. Haidt is less interested in whether God actually exists than what he regards as a powerful predilection to behave as if there is one (or 600). He makes a kind of neurological Pascal's Wager: we're better off believing.
And this matters, in turn, because one of the things human beings most certainly are is social beings. Haidt regards the concept of rational self-interest as misleading, not so much because there isn't such a thing, or because that he wants to affirm the reality of altruism, but because humans, liberal mythology notwithstanding, are not simply collections of individuals, but part of larger social organisms that belong to, and behave, in terms of a hive, at least some of the time. Insofar as there is such a thing as altruism, he casts it in terms of Darwinian group selection. Which is to say that altruism is real -- but inevitably circumscribed. We can act on behalf of causes larger than ourselves, but there are strict limits on how far that can go. We will die for God or country. We will not for socialized health care or an abstract sense of a global community. And those of us who really are passionate about such things have little hope of convincing our fellow citizens that such causes matter unless they're able to cast them broader moral terms than relying solely on caring or fairness. One is reminded here of the late Christopher Lasch, who in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), anticipated many of these arguments. As Lasch reminded us in that book, it was the Reverend Martin Luther King who scored the greatest successes in the Civil Rights Movement, a movement that was most successful when its resources and aspirations were understood in terms of (evangelical) religion.
The Righteous Mind is a very carefully constructed book; Haidt ends each chapter by summing up his main points as part of a larger strategy to construct as sturdy an empirical edifice as he possibly can. As his tower gets higher, one nevertheless becomes increasingly aware of its wobbliness: scientific findings -- especially social science findings -- are changing all the time; one generation's insight becomes the next generation's fallacy. And while few of us are in a position to credibly vet the methodology of what seem to be rather cleverly designed surveys, it seems impossible not to think that the wording of a question here or a protocol there wouldn't lead in another direction.
What's really troubling, though, is how emphatically Haidt seems to stint the role of rational discourse in the making and changing of individual minds -- a bit odd, actually, given that this is a densely reasoned piece of writing. He mentions a few times that such discourse can matter in some situations, but he spends little time showing where and how. It's enough to make one think that there's another dissertation on the horizon by a graduate student who takes this vague sense of unease and fashions it into a form of neo-rationalism for the post-Obama era. Surely someone will posit a compelling Darwinian story about how a capacity for persuasion is more than a mere appendix in the lottery of natural selection.
Still, it's no mean praise to say The Righteous Mind is a book written in good faith. It deserves to be read and discussed widely.
Murray Polner, a book reviewer for the History News Network, was editor of Present Tense, a magazine published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973 until 1990, wrote Rabbi: The American Experience, and co-edited, with Stefan Merken, Peace, Justice & Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition.
Peter Beinart is an American Jewish writer who attends an Orthodox synagogue. In The Crisis of Zionism he breaks ranks with the long-established American Jewish guardians of everything Israel does and says about war, peace and justice.
Beinart is a former New Republic editor and now Daily Beast blogger/writer and City University of New York professor whose book was preceded by his earlier essay “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” in the New York Review of Books, where he wrote “In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise has been drained of meaning.”
Beinart takes aim at growing anti-democratic tendencies inside Netanyahu’s Israel (more thoroughly covered in Gershom Gorenberg’s withering Israel Unmasked) and how the wealthy, politically sophisticated organized American Jewish community—by no means a majority of American Jews—has sought to silence criticism of Israel. Beinart’s book will no doubt be assailed as encouraging anti-Semitism and growing (at least as they see it) anti-Israel voices that could persuade some to question their party line. (Jack Ross’s brilliant Rabbi Outcast, largely ignored by reviewers, tracks the history of long-forgotten, largely rabbinic, American anti-Zionism). Beinart also wonders why so many non-Orthodox American Jews, most of whom are unaffiliated with any Jewish groups and who gave Obama 78 percent of their vote in 2008, remain silent, giving free reign for Israel’s unquestioning defenders to denounce critics.
Perhaps that’s why Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the U.S. Congress in May 2011 received twenty-nine standing ovations from both sides of the aisle. It was as if the Messiah had finally arrived, at least in Washington. In March 2012 he was again hailed as he arrived in the U.S. hoping to force the U.S. into attacking Iran, which he charged was building a nuclear bomb and was an “existential” threat to Israel.
According to Beinart, older American Jewish organizations have, in addition to fighting anti-Semitism, abandoned their historic defense of working people, minority rights, civil liberties and democracy. Now it is Israel almost all the time. It was the late Rabbi Alexander Schindler, a former U.S. 10th Mountain Division ski paratrooper who earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart during WWII and later became head of Reform Jewry’s largest religious organization, who early on criticized the transformation to a “kidney machine,” which was designed to reinforce the attachment to Israel and keep the checks rolling in.
By concentrating primarily on Israel’s welfare and policies, says Beinart, the American donor is “contributing to a public Jewish tragedy. What he is buying for Israel, with his check, is American indifference—indifference to Palestinian suffering and indifference to the principles of Israel’s declaration of independence. When Israel subsidizes Jews to move across the green line or imprisons Palestinians for protesting nonviolently in the West Bank or makes it illegal to boycott settlement goods, he helps ensure that the American government will not care.”
Today AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (some of its constituent groups have few or no members), pose as the voice of American Jewry, which they are not. Meanwhile, their sympathizers track dissenters, parsing every word, every sentence, indeed everyone of note who dares to publicly criticize Israeli policies. Skeptics are accused of “delegitimizing” Israel. Jews who think differently are berated as “self-hating Jews.”
The late historian Tony Judt, who was Jewish, once wrote that he thought the best solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was a bi-national and secular state. He also condemned the seizure of Palestinian lands in the West Bank. For this and other offenses he was denied the right to speak when two influential organizational figures intimidated his hosts into withdrawing their invitations. Playwright Tony Kushner was almost denied an award because one detractor found his views wanting. There are many more examples. More recently, M.J. Rosenberg, a former AIPAC employee turned Media Matters columnist and critic, has been assailed but refuses to be bullied about his opposition to war with Iran. “The first step,” he responded after one attack, “is continuing to shine a light on their [Iran war agitators] activities. That is what I do.”
Zionism was founded as a political reaction against persistent European anti-Semitism and murderous pogroms. Early European Zionists taught it was better for Jews to have a home of their own as a desperately needed haven. Though opposed by the Jewish Bund and non- and anti-Zionists, (the former identified with working-class socialism, the ultra-Orthodox believing that only the Messiah’s arrival could herald a return to the Holy Land and still others maintained Judaism was a religion, not a political movement), Zionism’s founding fathers, many of them socialists too, established what they hoped would become a home for world Jewry. Israel’s Jewish population has since been augmented with the arrival of Holocaust survivors and Sephardic and Russian immigrants. But after the capture of the West Bank in 1967 and the influx of Jewish settlers, now numbering some 400,000, democracy is under attack by right-wingers and extremists.
As a result, anti-democratic trends within Israel and the West Bank, concludes Beinart, “in which the illiberal Zionism beyond the green line destroys the possibility of liberal Zionism inside it [and] not only breeds intolerance toward Arab Israelis; it also breeds intolerance toward dissident Jewish Israelis.”
The heart of the problem as he sees it is that Israeli and American Jews are no longer victims. “At the core of the tragedy lies the refusal to accept that in both America and Israel, we live in an age not of Jewish weakness, but of Jewish power, and that without moral vigilance, Jews will abuse power just as hideously as anyone else.”
It is hard to know what, precisely, Zionism means today. Fulfillment of biblical prophesies? A constant reminder that we must never forget a cruel history of persecution? Encouraging non-Israeli Jews to quit their homes and live in Israel? A light unto the world? Or has the world’s first Zionist nation become no more than just another colonial power controlling a subject people, and thus emptying Zionism of any meaning or purpose?
Beinart and many other American Jewish critics will not easily be ostracized or silenced. Nor can an increasing number of newer American Jewish groups such as J Street, American Friends of Peace Now, B’Tselem USA; Shalom Center, Tikkun, Jewish Voices for Peace as well as an army of Internet bloggers.
Peter Beinart’s extraordinary book deserves to be widely read and publicly debated.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (3-19-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
Hitlerland: a term coined in the Berlin-based 1930s by International News Service writer Pierre John Huss to describe Nazi Germany. Huss. Huss, who later worked as one of the so-called "Murrow's Boys" assembled by the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, interviewed Adolf Hitler multiple times. William Shirer, who also knew a thing or two about Germany in the '30s, described Huss as "slick, debonair, and ambitious." Some of Huss's peers grumbled at the time that he was a little to close the Nazi regime, which may or may not have been true. But as Andrew Nagorski makes clear in this often absorbing book, there were many Americans in Germany at the time who were open in their admiration of it, along with those who were confused, afraid, and angry about it.
In Hitlerland, former Newsweek journalist Andrew Nagorski finds a clever way to tell a familiar story. He's gathered up dozens of sources from Americans who lived, worked, or simply passed through Germany in the two decades following the Great War and sketched a compelling composite portrait. Among the most durable and informed observers we meet are Truman Smith, a military attaché to the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Hearst correspondent Karl Henry von Wiegand, and Chicago Tribune reporter (and later radio correspondent) Sigrid Schultz. More familiar names include future television broadcaster Howard K. Smith, future CIA director Richard Helms, and celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Lindbergh, of course, later became infamous for his isolationism, widely viewed as Naziphilia by another name. In Hitlerland, however, we meet him and his also famous wife Anne in their first visit to Germany before his views solidified. Ironically, Lindbergh's VIP tour of state-of-the-art German aviation yielded information that proved to be of considerable value to the American government. The far more repugnant figure in Hitlerland is Ernst "Putzi" Hafstaengl the half-German/half-American Harvard graduate who worked for a time as Hitler's propagandist before being dumped by the Fuhrer. In one of the more dramatic moments in the book, young Hitler takes refuge in the immediate aftermath of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 with Hafstaengl's wife, Helen, in their Bavarian home. Hitler was reputedly infatuated with Helen, who talked him out of possibly killing himself as authorities closed in to arrest him. It's hard to know how serious Hitler's suicide threat was, but it's sobering to consider that an American woman's woman intervention may have been the last best chance to prevent the Holocaust.
There are lots of vivid cameo appearances in Hitlerland, too: Jesse Owens, Josephine Baker, Philip Johnson, and a callow young John F. Kennedy wander through, their opinions perhaps inevitably filtered through their individual circumstances. Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis are initially charmed by what the see, but are increasingly troubled. So is U.S. Ambassador William Dodd, whose story is chronicled in Erik Larson's recently published bestseller In the Garden of Beasts. Dodd's daughter daughter Martha starts out enchanted by the regime but then trades her loyalty to the comparably dubious Russia of Josef Stalin.
If there's a problem with Hitlerland, it's that the trajectory of his story -- which features the usual "highlights" of the failed coup attempt, Hitler's ascension to power, the Night of the Long Knives, Kristallacht, and the outbreak of war -- is little different than any number of other accounts of the period. As a group, Americans, Jewish or not, prove no more or less prescient than any number of other people at the time, German or not. Nagorski usefully emphasizes that the impact of war in Germany was felt forcefully and negatively even in the early, triumphant months of 1940 and 1941, and the pace of the narrative picks up steam as he does. We also view the hugely influential Soviet diplomat George Kennan during what for him was a brief but irritating stint in Germany, trying to corral an unruly clutch of American correspondents temporarily interred by the German government, pending an exchange following its declaration of war on the United States. But interpretively speaking, the book tells us little we didn't already know about the tenor of the Nazi regime. Certainly, Hitler is as magnetic, repellent, and inscrutable as ever.
Hitlerland is nevertheless a well conceived, crafted, and executed story. Casual as well as informed World War II buffs will savor it.
SOURCE: Special to HNN (3-8-12)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is completing a study of Hollywood actors as historians slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.
Even when it was as fresh as as the latest edition of a newspaper, Watergate was complicated. Yes, the essence of the story -- failed attempt to break into the opposition's headquarters leads to cover-up and eventual resignation of a president -- is clear enough. But the cast of characters in the saga is enormous, and the various contexts for the story include the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Vietnam War, and an entirely separate scandal involving the Vice-President, among others. The saga has been widely dissected, beginning of course with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men (1974), the movie of the same year that followed two years later, and countless subsequent accounts that stretch from the journalism of Jonathan Schell to the the multi-volume biography of Stephen Ambrose to the biopic of Oliver Stone (in which Anthony Hopkins does a pretty good Richard Nixon). Should you ever wish to wade into the that water, there's plenty of people waiting to guide you.
Thomas Mallon's novelistic foray into Watergate is distinctive for a number of reasons. The first is that it's relatively demanding. The cast of characters runs for four pages of the print edition (9 on my Kindle). The second is that aspects of this story are clearly -- and not so clearly -- fictional. Wait, I said to myself: did Pat Nixon really have an affair? (This is the first I heard of it.) There's a part of the story that shows the president's secretary, Rose Mary Woods erasing the famous 18 minutes of subpoenaed tapes in which Nixon reputedly discussed Watergate. We actually "hear" those missing minutes, which of course must be fabricated. But much of what's rendered in the novel is factual. We also get interior monologues from a variety of characters, including Nixon himself, which we might safely consider fictive until one considers that Woodward has made a career of writing non-fiction books in such a stream-of-consciousness manner without leaving any fingerprints in the form of quotation marks.
None of this is to suggest that there's anything specifically wrong or even all that unusual in what is now a well-established genre of historical fiction -- one in which Mallon is a master (I simply loved his 1995 novel Henry and Clara, which looks at the Lincoln assassination from the standpoint of a pair of minor characters in the tragedy). But more so than other works of its kind, Watergate requires a degree of mental energy and occasional recourse to Wikipedia.
Which is not to say it is without its rewards. By this point, calling Nixon a crook is shooting fish in a barrel; at the same time, the hatred Nixon aroused seems heartless in retrospect (more recent Republican presidents may well have deserved worse). Mallon steers around these poles, emphasizing the degree to which even the principals in this story operated under a cloud of ignorance, even confusion. Woodward and Bernstein are in the background, as are the protesters who can be heard in the distance. The principal voice of a critic we hear is that of Elliot Richardson, the liberal Republican and multi-cabinet officer who hoped to benefit from Nixon's fall, as both Nixon and he expected he would, much to the former's chagrin. This of course proves to be one more illusion. (Elliot who?)
If there's any one voice that serves as a protagonist, it's Fred LaRue, who, appropriately, was a mysterious figure at the time -- a man without title, salary or listing in the White House directory, but who was close to the planning of the burglary and served as a bagman to buy the silence of those arrested in its aftermath, among them E. Howard Hunt, who also figures prominently here. A wry Mississippian, he's given a backstory here involving a long lost love who helps him try to come to terms with his role in the shooting of his father many years previously.
But it's the women who make Watergate a distinctive piece of storytelling. They are, as a group, as incisive and ruthless as any of their male counterparts. That goes for Woods, typically depicted as a hapless apologist for the president, as well as Pat Nixon, who memorably recalls Dwight Eisenhower as "cheerful as Popsicle and just as cold." Hunt's wife Dorothy is portrayed as playing hardball with more verve than anyone in the White House. But the shameless scene stealer here, as she was in real life, is the octogenarian (who turns nonagenarian) Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of TR best remembered for her epigram, "If you haven't anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." Mallon depicts her as having an unusually close relationship with Nixon, rooted in a favor Nixon once did for her. In an ironic twist of the historical record, Mallon turns Longworth's well-known disgust with Nixon's invocation of TR in his resignation speech and makes it an inside joke. As Longworth well understands, she's a tragic figure in her inability to forge her fiery intelligence into much more than rapier-sharp sarcasm. But she understands Watergate better than most, and confers what comes off as a prescient benediction of sorts on Nixon.
There were times when I felt Watergate sagged, and that its sculpted omissions deprived it of a bit of narrative oxygen. But this is nevertheless the work of a writer at the height of his powers, conferring truths about the past that transcend mere factual accuracy. I suspect it will take its place of one of the truly useful accounts of the event.
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