Books
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.
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Reviews
Joseph A. Palermo: Review of Sam Tanenhaus's The Death of Conservatism
Jim Cullen, Review of David Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Paul Moses. Review of Joyce Purnick's Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics (Public Affairs, 2009)
Jim Cullen, Review of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women (Scribner, 2009)
Andrew Feffer. Review of Christopher Bigsby's Arthur Miller: 1915-1962 (Harvard, 2009)
Murray Polner. Review of Beth Bailey's "America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force" (Harvard, 2009)
It was General Lewis B. Hershey, head of Selective Service from 1941 until 1973, who said, “I hate to think of the day my grandchildren will be defended by volunteers.”
Well, Lew, they are now.
Still, looking back, it’s hard to believe that an army of volunteers was ever meant to be anything but peacetime force, available only for an occasional march into a feeble state in, say, the Caribbean or Central America
After Korea and before Vietnam, very few men were drafted. Public demonstrations were unheard of. Vietnam changed everything. Since the early seventies, when opposition to the draft mushroomed as its lack of fairness became so evident (yes, college students were exempt, but so too were pro baseball players whose bosses had a tacit agreement with government allowing them to play soldier in occasional reserve duty, the children and grandchildren of fire eating Congressmen, prowar editorial writers and pundits, and future hawks hiding behind numerous deferments) a few libertarians such as economist Martin Anderson of Stanford helped lead the fight to end the draft. Drawing upon the conservative/libertarian stance of the draft as a violation of one’s personal freedom, Nixon said he was concerned about “the question of permanent conscription in a free society.” It was just campaign rhetoric, but a handful around him thought that no draft would mean the end of mass campus and street demonstrations. In 1973, relying on Anderson, Nixon fulfilled his campaign promise and ended the despised draft. The last man inducted, Beth Bailey tells us in "America's Army," was in December 1972.
Despite contemporary conservatives who would like to see it reinstated to maintain American worldwide hegemony and liberals like Charles Rangel and Bill Moyers who fantasize that a draft will lead the American people to rise en masse and shut down our current two wars (it never happened in Korea and Vietnam), Nixon preferred a “market-driven all-volunteer force.”
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that an army of volunteers was ever meant to be anything but a peacetime force, available solely for an occasional invasion of a frail nation in, say, the Caribbean or Central America.
But most significantly, Nixon and his advisors recognized the absence of a draft meant fewer anti-war protests and student protestors. And they were right. Certainly, non-vets George Bush and Dick Cheney understood this as did Donald Rumsfeld, who went a step further in believing that the era of WWII great land and sea battles were ended and what was needed was a smaller army populated with men and women who want to be in the military, much preferable to relying on reluctant, short-term conscripts. This new army of choice would then attract volunteer specialists trained in the new techniques of contemporary, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorist warfare. Of course the assumption proved to be questionable given that well-paid mercenaries outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq (and will perhaps in Afghanistan as well) plus the onerous reliance on the National Guard, whose members signed up for home front duty and extra pay with no idea they would end up in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Beth Bailey, who teaches history at Temple University, has painstakingly and perceptively detailed the process involved in ending the draft after combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam. She also poses thorny questions—though never quite answers—such as whether a volunteer army offers young men and women a chance to better their lives and serve their country or is merely a duty to be borne by every citizen. Then there is a central question: Why serve in the military at all when the wars to be fought may be unworthy of the pain and sacrifice demanded of our young men and women?
Other than periods of economic distress, recruiting was always a problem. The army sought to cope with the many societal changes occurring in civilian life, and their efforts, at times well-intentioned, are covered well in the book. Advertising slogans were written and rewritten. Agencies were changed. As Iraq demanded more and more troops, and as tours were extended time and again, even recruiters felt the stress, Bailey noting that thirty-seven of them went AWOL in 2005. In 1978 ABC-TV featured a program, “the American Army: A Shocking Case of Incompetence.” Critics spread the false and deliberately racist rumor about volunteers as “too dumb, too black.” However, Bailey rightly nails the critics by writing that in 2007. “Even in enlisted ranks,” the army is “fairly solidly middle class,” (also noted in an earlier conservative Heritage Foundation study) and that “people of color have not borne the brunt of the war.”
Many volunteers have certainly benefitted from their service and performed well. But we now know that many have also suffered the agony of death and destruction, multiple tours, government falsehoods and the consequences of alcoholism, divorce, domestic violence, post-combat mental illness, rape in the ranks, shockingly high rates of suicide and grievous wartime injuries. Who, other than Hollywood and TV myth-makers, and think tank patriots, ever thought real war was easy and fun?
As problematic as depending on volunteers to fight two wars, resorting to a draft as an alternative is no answer. Simply put, no draft is fair. Four million Americans turn eighteen every year. Should the current lottery system even be utilized, how could a draft of about 50,000 annually be justified when all the rest are free to go about their civilian lives? As happened during Vietnam, virtually no Washington VIP in or outside the government today (save Joe Biden’s son) has a child on active military duty in Iraq/Afghanistan. The same elitism and deference to influence and wealth will certainly prevail in any future draft. Anyone with serious political contacts and family connections will always be able to avoid active military duty, or if not, receive plum jobs.
This is not to say that efforts have not been made to reinstitute a draft. Bailey reports that during the Reagan Administration the Department of the Army issued a “secret” report urging a draft. When the Washington Post reported it, Secretary of Defense Weinberger exploded and the White House instantly announced it had no intention of reinstating conscription. Every president and presidential candidate since then has restated his opposition to a draft to widespread national approval. It is also evident that no draft has ever deterred policymakers from going to war. All it does is provide an endless supply of cannon fodder.
Then again in 1980, Jimmy Carter, seeking to bolster his failing presidency and buffeted by home front neocons demanding a more warlike foreign policy, called for every eighteen old male to register (remarkably, it’s still in effect) for a non-existent draft and then spun the deed as a symbolic protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which Bailey describes as a “sensible move.” Why so is entirely unclear since there is not a shred of evidence that Moscow, mired in its own overwhelming domestic and foreign problems, was swayed in any way by American high school boys signing registration cards in U.S. post offices. Within ten years the USSR collapsed of its own incompetence and corruption, not draft registration.
Historically addicted to war, the U.S. has a vast “national security” apparatus, more than 1000 bases, and with much money to be made by arms producers and global weapons traders. To service this immense and complex system requires a constant supply of troops. Meanwhile, far from the battlefield, politicians and pundits debate the “proper” use of military intervention, whether for allegedly humanitarian causes or by invading, bombing and occupying to ensure economic and military domination. Now, faced with nonstop wars in the Middle East and possibly elsewhere, and while the drums of war against Iran are heard in Washington and Jerusalem, the question remains, who will be required to serve and fight, and most important, why?
Jim Cullen: Review of Clarence Clemons and Don Reo, "Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales" (Grand Central Publishing, 2009)
Source: Special to HNN (11-16-09)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
At one point in Clarence Clemons's often amusing new memoir Big Man -- if a book laced with fictional anecdotes that shares space with a co-writer can be called a memoir -- the legendary E Street Band saxophonist imagines himself at Fenway Park in Boston at the 2004 World Series with the great pop singer Annie Lennox. "I loved you guys on the Born to Run cover," Lennox tells Clemons.
"I'm on the back," he says.
"What?"
"I'm not on the front cover. I'm on the back. I'm talking about the album as it came out. You've got to turn it over to see me. That's how they printed it."
"Really?"
"Really."
Really. While we do get a piece of him on the front, we don't see a recognizable Clemons except on the on the back cover. So he's speaking an uncomfortable fictive truth. With the exceptions of the security and concession staff, and the seemingly inevitable black back-up singers, Clemons was the only non-white person I saw at my last Springsteen show at Giants Stadium last month. (Clemons's co-author, Don Reo, relates running into a self-described black female fan in 2008 who says her favorite Springsteen song is "Jessie's Girl" -- a 1981 gem by Rick Springfield.) In his ever-self aware way, Springsteen refers to the racial question that lingers over the Born to Run album cover in his one-page foreword to this book, in which he cites "a friendship and a narrative steeped in the complicated history of America." Huck, meet Jim.
I feel uncomfortable bringing all this up at the start of a review of Clemons's book, not because the racial tension implicit in Springsteen's career isn't real, but because, to use his word, it's complicated. Clemons is now the only featured black member of the E Street Band. But it wasn't always so; indeed, in the early days the band was truly interracial, and one of its members, David Sancious, went on to have a distinguished jazz career. Moreover, a number of important African American performers, among them Donna Summer and Aretha Franklin, have recorded Springsteen's songs.
More to the point, Clemons himself doesn't seem to regard his anomalous presence in Springsteen's career as especially problematic. A native of Norfolk Virginia, he's spent his entire life living mostly among white people. His co-writer, Reo, a television writer and producer, is white, and they're seem quite comfortable talking about matters of race in ways that range from comic to serious. But always in passing.
Actually, the Clemons who emerges in this book is a notably easygoing man whose big appetites -- in every sense of that word -- enlarge the spirit of those around him. He does not appear to be a particularly introspective figure -- one can base this assertion simply on the fact that he's been married five times -- and he exhibits a casual sexism one sometimes sees in his generation. But it's not hard to imagine how he might invite the confidence of a Robert DeNiro, for example, who once told Clemons that his legendary "Are you talking to me?" monologue from Taxi Driver came from listening to Springsteen on stage (as such it's a testament to the transformative power of De Niro's artistry that the the actor could turn joyous patter into an ominous threat). Actually, Big Man is a kind of touring travelogue in which we meet a great many celebrities, including some unlikely ones such as Damon Wayans and Kinky Friedman. We get the idea that Clemons and Co. have lived a rarified life for a very long time. And there's some interest in that, even if the book goes on a little longer than it probably should.
That said, there is a swiss cheese quality to Big Man, which grazed the bottom reaches of the New York Times bestseller list recently. We get a fairly straight stretch of narrative about Clemons's early life, and a great deal about the Magic tour of 2007-08, for the understandable reason that the star-struck Reo was with the band for much of it. We also come to understand that Clemons has been in a great deal of pain with bad knees that have made performing an ordeal in recent years, which the authors manage to convey in such a way that makes his unaffected persistence and good cheer all the more impressive, even as they are couched in intimations of mortality.
There's surprisingly little on Clemons's role in the making of Springsteen records. To some extent, that's because making studio albums is a much more painstaking and fragmented process than live performance; much of Clemons's work on Born to Run, for example, was daubed in by producers and engineers. Still, it would have been nice to hear more about the process, and how Clemons interpreted Springsteen's musical instructions in signature performances like "Rosalita" or "The Promised Land." On those rare occasions we do get such glimpses, they're fascinating, as in Clemons's offhand explanation of how Springsteen wrote "Hungry Heart" in the space of ten minutes.
Glimpses of Springsteen's relationship with Clemons are also few and far between. There's a lovely little set piece of the two on the boardwalk in Asbury Park in the early years. There are also allusions to some hard feelings when Springsteen broke up the band in 1989 -- ironically, Clemons was in Japan with the victim of another breakup, Ringo Starr, when he got the phone call -- and the depiction of the aftermath of an argument between Clemons and Springsteen. To a great degree, this is surely because Clemons is temperamentally not inclined to dwell on such events. But I'd also bet my last dollar that it's because Springsteen was closely monitoring what Clemons would be permitted to say. (That foreword has the feel of a stamp of approval.)
Which, in turn, brings us back to the defining core of their relationship. Clemons may be the Big Man, but Springsteen is, well, the Man. Clemons tells a story from the early seventies about how he and drummer Max Weinberg got marooned on the Garden State Parkway when their car broke down and they were in panic trying to inform what was certain to be an impatient Springsteen. "He was the Boss even back then," Clemons observes. He's probably more like the CEO now. There's very little evidence here that Springsteen treats Clemons as an intellectual equal, or a part of his everyday life offstage. But there's a lot of evidence that he has taken very good care of Clemons, financially and with real affection. After all, Huck really did love Jim.
Actually, there's been some buzz in the blogosphere lately that Springsteen himself may be shopping a memoir around in the publishing business, a development which, if and when it happens, would be a blockbuster event. I'd be sure to get my copy of that autobiography pronto, just like I do every new Springsteen album -- and just like I did this cheerful, diverting book. I'd do so even though we fans know a great deal of the story already, and that much of what we do know has been expertly sculpted by a man who has played the media with almost as much skill as he's played the guitar. But that's what makes true artists great: They always leave you wanting more.
Jim Cullen: Review of William Cohan's "House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" (Doubleday, 2009)
Source: Special to HNN (11-10-09)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
Darling," said Judy, "Daddy doesn't build roads or hospitals, and he doesn't help build them, but he does handle the bonds for the people who raise the money.”
“Bonds?”
“Yes. Just imagine that a bond is a slice of cake, and you didn’t bake the cake, but every time you hand somebody a slice of cake, a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you get to keep that.”
--Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
Finishing House of Cards, it's hard not to wish the financial crisis of 2008 wasn't worse. Given the ongoing wreckage it has caused, and the likelihood that an even worse disaster may well have destabilized the political no less than economic system, this perhaps cannot be a responsible opinion. On the other hand, given the resistance of the banking industry to structural reform and the U.S. government's inability to extricate itself from the implicitly embraced doctrine that some financial institutions are too big to fail, perhaps we need a few more stories like the one William Cohan tells here to shake sober people out of their complacency.
That's the real value of this book: that it tells a story -- more specifically, in the words of its subtitle, a "tale of hubris and wretched excess on Wall Street." By this point, names like John Mack, Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, and institutions like Bank of America, Citibank and Lehman Brothers, are at least vaguely familiar to people whose eyes never cross the business pages of a newspaper. To a greater or lesser degree, we understand the situation in its broadest outlines, one of excessive speculation and inadequate supervision, which intersected in the housing bubble of this decade. What we get here is a close case study of the first domino to fall: the collapse of the once-mighty investment bank, Bear Stearns, in March of 2008.
Cohan renders his narrative in three concentric circles. The first is a gripping, novelistic account of the final days of the firm. We're thrust into the hurricane of its credit crisis, and the lurching terror, hope, anger and resignation of the bank's leaders as it is smashed into a shadow of its former self and geets handed off, with government aid, to JP Morgan Chase. The second section of the book traces the origins of the Bear Stearns in the early twentieth century, focusing on a trio of chief executives: (Salim) "Cy" Lewis, Alan ("Ace") Greenberg, and the flambouyant, bridge-playing Jimmy Cayne. The final section situates Bear in the larger feeding frenzy of Wall Street in the first decade of the 21st century, as the firm's never especially scrupulous practices edge toward fraud and the increasingly hapless Cayne (off playing cards and smoking $140 cigars) is forced from leadership.
This approach has real advantages in segmenting the saga into digestible chunks (which can in fact be appreciated separately), though it does have the effect of marginalizing the otherwise central Cayne -- whose arrogance and narcissism become increasingly tiresome -- in the crucial first third of the book. Some readers may also have trouble, as I did, in following, both as a matter of comprehension and interest, the intricacies of investment banking. Editing may have been a factor here: the book was published in March, a mere year after Bear fell and six months after the financial crisis became acute. A long epilogue traces the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September; one hopes a new afterword will be in the offing for the paperback edition.
One service House of Cards performs uncommonly well is demonstrate something critics of modern finance capitalism like Kevin Phillips have been asserting for some time now: that investment banks like Bear Stearns produce little of value -- a term I used advisedly here -- to society at large. Industrial titans of yore like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller actually made things. More to the point, a banker like J.P. Morgan, who was hardly an hardly attractive human being, not only acted to stabilize the economy at crucial moments like the Panic of 1907 and in the creation of U.S. Steel, but had to work to gain the confidence of depositors over time. Investment banks like Goldman and Bear, by contrast, did not even bother to take responsibility for the earnings of ordinary people, but rather relied on extremely large loans of 24 hours duration to finance their operations and skim off cream from the churn of their transactions. Or, to switch metaphors, this game of musical chairs seemed safe -- what, after all, could go wrong in a day? -- but when one firm is left without a seat it threatened to take out the entire economy with it. Ironically, in one case these banks arguably participated in improving society through loan programs designed to foster home ownership (here the Clinton no less than the Bush administrations share blame for some careless social engineering), they abused their opportunities by throwing money at people who had no business receiving it and slicing their loans into "tranches" that metasisized in the banking system as a whole.
Again: in its broadest outlines, this is a tale often told, and well understood (most recently by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin in Too Big to Fail). What's remarkable here is the speed with which Cohan, former investment banker himself, was able to gain access to talk to the principals, talk with them at length, and render a first draft of history that will be of considerable value for some time to come.
Some may hear stories like these and react with outrage, as the so-called "tea-baggers" have and generalize it to cast a pox on any government intervention in the economy at all. Others may shrug with indifference: greedy bankers, ineptly monitored, is something new? Still others may find satisfaction in that people like Cayne really were punished for their actions in the only language they understand: financial loss. But we will all stand to pay the price for allowing business as usual to resume, and if in what follows we are swallowed in the deluge we will suffer a rough justice. Allowing such commissions constitues a crime of omission.
Luther Spoehr: Review of E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools (Yale University Press, 2009)
Source: Providence Sunday Journal (10-18-09)
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation and professor emeritus of English at the University of Virginia, has been fighting the good fight for over twenty years. All of his books, including Cultural Literacy (1987), The Schools We Need—And Why We Don’t Have Them (1996), and The Knowledge Deficit (2006), have insisted that students must learn both content and skills, and that the content that matters most is found in the established disciplines. For his pains, he was sometimes denounced as reactionary, an ironic fate given his deep conviction that enabling all students to master the essentials of American culture is a matter of social justice.
Daniel McCarthy. Review of George H. Nash's Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism (ISI Books, 2009)
Daniel McCarthy is senior editor of The American Conservative (www.amconmag.com)
George H. Nash made his mark as a historian with the 1976 publication of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, a book that remains indispensable as one of the few scholarly volumes to take postwar conservatism seriously as a philosophical (and not merely political) force. Reappraising the Right (I once worked for ISI Books but had no involvement with this book) serves as a postscript to that earlier work. It collects 32 essays on individual conservatives (ranging from Richard Weaver to John Chamberlain to Ronald Reagan), trends within the Right (such as the growth of think tanks), and the prospects for conservatism. Herbert Hoover, of whom Nash wrote a three-volume biography (actually only two were published, though the third volume was apparently written) receives extended treatment, as does the topic of Jews and the American Right.
Nash is first, if not foremost, a meticulous researcher who has spent years mining the archives of his subjects, from such overlooked right-wing intellectuals such as Willmoore Kendall and Francis Graham Wilson to the 31st president of the United States. Yet Nash is most significant as the scribe who recorded the conservative movement’s creation myth. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 is not only an impressive compendium of research, it is also an interpretive lens through which the conservative movement understands itself. Before 1976, conservatives had long told a story of uniting disparate right-wing elements—religious traditionalists, free-market libertarians, and ex-Communists turned anti-Communists—into a coherent movement. Nash’s book gave this account the weight of historical scholarship. He retold the story conservatives had been telling about themselves, and in the process he thickened the narrative into something convincing—a usable past.
“Reappraising the Right is not a manifesto,” Nash announces in his introduction, “It is a work of scholarship and reflection intended for readers of all persuasions.” Yet it is also, at least in part, a catechism: “perplexed conservatives especially may decide to turn to its pages,” the author writes, “in search not of instant formulas for success but of something deeper and more sustaining: enhanced perspective on who they are, where they came from, and what they believe.” What readers will actually find in this volume is not a reappraisal of the right, but reaffirmation and reiteration of the narrative employed in The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945.
In places, the new book rises to heights of the old. Two essays collected here, “Jews for Joe McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of the American Jewish League Against Communism” and “Forgotten Godfathers: Premature Jewish Conservatives and the Rise of National Review,” are exceptionally valuable for their discussion of the overlooked history of the Jewish Right. The essays on Willmoore Kendall and the influence of Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences upon conservative thought can also be singled out for praise. Indeed, many of the biographical studies here are as rich as anything in The Conservative Intellectual Movement. Nash’s pellucid prose ensures that scholars and laymen alike will profit from these pieces. They are a joy to read and fine specimens of the historian’s craft.
But for all that is admirable about Nash’s art, he is by inclination a historian of continuity and consensus, and this forecloses many avenues of investigation. He acknowledges dramatic changes that have come to the Right in the past 30 years—“it may fairly be said of today’s mainstream Right: ‘We are all neoconservatives now,’” “the Reagan presidency coincided with a profound generational shift in American conservatism”—only to minimize their implications. Since the publication of The Conservative Intellectual Movement two new factions have joined the old complex of libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-Communists. The newcomers are the neoconservatives and the religious right. What they have in common is a revulsion against the hedonistic and critical—they would say anti-American—ethos of the 1960s. Nash presents these new forces as adding to the existing coalition. Yet there is an argument to be made that they have not supplemented the conservatism of old so much as supplanted it.
“The most important fact to assimilate about modern American conservatism is that it is a not, and has never been, univocal,” Nash argues. “It is a coalition, with many points of origin and diverse tendencies that are not always easy to reconcile with one another.” What goes unasked in this account is the question of how the coalition is structured: are the partners equal? Has balance of power between them shifted over time? Twice Nash likens conservatism to a river fed by many tributaries. But a river is a natural phenomenon; it does not require explanation in terms of human action. The conservative movement is artificial—it is not a river, but a system of canals, dams, and locks. Nash’s metaphor draws attention away from the engineering of the system. Yes, conservatism is a coalition—but who decides who is to be part of the coalition? Who sets the agenda?
To raise these questions is to call attention to the dynamic element within the conservative intellectual movement. A problem for the consensus narrative, one Nash touches lightly upon, is the widening gulf between the institutional continuities of the Right—organizations such as National Review and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have been around for more than half a century now—and philosophical discontinuities. Bluntly, to the extent there is a conservative movement today, it bears little genealogical resemblance to the intellectuals studied in Nash’s first book. And to the extent those intellectuals remain active today, they increasingly find themselves as odds with the movement. This point is made clear in Jeffrey Hart’s The Making of the American Conservative Mind (which Nash wrote about for National Review; his review included in Reappraising the Right). Hart himself is a symbol of the change: he was a senior editor of National Review from the 1960s until 2008, and in the 1970s and 1980s often served in William F. Buckley’s absence as chief editor of the magazine. He was removed from its masthead in 2008, at the same time that Buckley’s son Christopher was dismissed and apparently for the same reason: Hart and the younger Buckley had endorsed Barack Obama.
The Obamacon phenomenon of 2008 was symptomatic of deeper changes. Leading conservative intellectuals such as Claes Ryn, George Carey, George Will (to some extent), and before his death William F. Buckley Jr. himself made their displeasure with the Bush administration and the drift of the conservative movement abundantly clear. These were not the Buchananite “paleoconservatives” of the 1990s; they were no-prefix conservatives who had once been within the mainstream of the movement. But by 2008, the current of conservatism was flowing in another direction.
To Nash, this dissension is all much like the tensions between libertarians and traditionalists that characterized the conservative movement in its earliest days. “Conservatives had survived and transcended these tensions for decades,” and they could “continue to prosper” by “remember[ing] the ecumenism of Reagan” and “resist[ing] the temptation to fragment.” This begs the question of whether a coalition is worth preserving at all when its wisest minds have been marginalized. The conservative movement is not a coalition of equals; it is hierarchy with neoconservatives and tenured editors and think-tank administrators at the top. The history of the intellectual Right over the past three decades is the story of how the old fusion of libertarian, traditionalist, and anti-Communist intellectuals gave way to a new ideological apparatus.
Nash is a genteel and charming writer, fair-minded, and a meticulous researcher. Reappraising the Right would be worth purchasing for the chapters on Jewish conservatives alone, and historians of 20th century intellectual thought will find much to value in this book. But the author hews to a narrative framework that fits the development of the Right since the 1970s not at all. Reappraising the Right is not a reappraisal but a restatement.
Murray Polner. Review of Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman, Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009)
For Americans old enough to remember 1941-2 when the Japanese took control of the Philippine Islands—that economic and strategic prize seized by the United States in an imperial war of conquest---the depressing events of those years are hard to forget. Despite the many thousands killed and maimed, Japanese war crimes, the eventual U.S. reconquest of the islands and the vengeful, perhaps even legally questionable, execution of the two top Japanese commanders, the brutal era is captured in this engrossing history of the Bataan Death March, grounded in large part on the experience of Ben Steele, a death march survivor and Montana artist, whose impressive sketches of his years as a prisoner are scattered throughout the book.
Michael Norman, a Marine combat Vietnam veteran, previously wrote the impressive and moving These Good Men: Friendships Forged from War. Elizabeth, his wife, is the author of two striking accounts of military nurses, We Band of Angels, about the women captured on Bataan, and Vietnam’s nurses in Women at War. Both now teach at New York University.
Before the Japanese attacked, thousands of Americans, civilian and military, lived lives of colonial tropical ease. At the summit sat the imperious, egomaniacal, proconsul General Douglas MacArthur, for whom the authors reveal a deep distaste for his military blunders long hidden from worshipful wartime Americans desperate for heroes.
The loss of the Philippines was one of the largest single defeats in American military history. The U.S. Army Force was shattered on the opening day of the war. In furious battles, American and Filipino troops were forced to retreat into the Bataan Peninsula and the neighboring fortified isle of Corregidor in Manila Bay, with its big guns pointed out to sea. MacArthur, write the critical Normans, mistakenly “left most of his rations behind,” thereby ensuring that the troops would soon have little or no food. MacArthur “spent just one day on Bataan, reluctant to leave his command post on Corregidor. (“he had refused to lead from the field”), which is what he would do during the Korean War when, as David Halberstam revealed in The Coldest War, the General “did not spend a night in Korea; in fact he did not spend the night there during the entire time he commanded,” preferring instead his imposing office in Tokyo while his politicized sycophants churned out press releases extolling their leader.
As thousands of troops on Bataan were hopelessly surrounded, starving, sick, and facing possible annihilation (by February Japanese troops were also suffering badly and would soon have to be reinforced), MacArthur confidently told his collapsing armies that, “Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes” were on their way, which the Normans brand as “a lie, a Judas kiss.” Still, the blame was not entirely MacArthur’s. A Navy Department dispatch of December 28, 1941 mentioned “positive assistance” lay ahead and thus given him reason to believe help was coming. One week later General Marshall wrote him of Washington’s hope that U.S. planes would soon “permit an attack on the southern Philippines, as Ronald Spector noted in his Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan.
But it quickly became evident to Washington, if it wasn’t always evident, that the Philippines could not be relieved for a variety of reasons such as lack of troops and equipment but also because no-one was able smash through the Japanese air and naval blockade Even more galling was Washington’s judgment that the tens of thousands stranded in the Philippines were expendable, so that the blame for the loss of the Philippines should also be shared with the War Department and the Roosevelt administration.
On May 6, 1942, General Ned King surrendered his entire Bataan force of 76,000 Americans and Filipinos, 22,000 ill or wounded, and the remnant famished, fever-ridden, and hiding in holes to escape the never-ending bombardment. Driven with guilt for the rest of his life, King never forgave himself, though in no way was he to blame for the disaster. Nor was General Jonathan Wainwright, who succeeded MacArthur after he departed on orders from Washington for Australia, accompanied by his retainers. Orders were orders in the military, one supposes, but in this instance the Normans disagree. “A soldier never leaves another soldier behind.” When news spread of MacArthur’s leaving many abandoned troops sneeringly sang the 4-line ditty “Dugout Doug” ending with “Four- star generals are as rare as good food on Bataan; And his troops go starving on.”
Dwight Eisenhower, who knew MacArthur well and had once served under him, made a diary entry while the Bataan blockade was still underway, warning that he should not be evacuated. "If brought out, public opinion will force him into a position where his love of the limelight may ruin him." An even more devastating judgment was rendered by General William E. Brougher,commander of the 11th Division on Bataan:"A foul trick of deception has been played on a large group of Americans by a commander in chief and small staff who are now eating steak and eggs in Australia. God damn them!" (The remark from D. Clayton James' The Years of MacArthur, 1941-45 and also cited by Spector)
Wainwright, left to cope with a hopeless situation, surrendered Corregidor and then spent the remainder of the war in Formosan and Manchurian prison camps.
Meanwhile, as all this was happening, MacArthur, now safe, was celebrated throughout the U.S. as the “hero” of Bataan. Books were written extolling his virtues, babies given his name and in March 1942 he received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
But in Bataan, the “death march” had begun, personal accounts of which was “suppressed for months” according to British military historian Max Hasting’s Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. Here, though, the Normans describe it in painstaking and painful detail, depicting undeniable Japanese savagery and the experiences of a broken army of Americans and Filipinos. Based on Steele’s recollections and their ten-year long research (some 400 interviews, including Japanese, and thousands of other sources) it tells a story long forgotten in contemporary America. Sixty-two days after boarding a “hellship,”as Steele and other GIs called it. and reminiscent of European slave ships, they arrived in Japan to become slave laborers. Many were seriously ill. Between January 1942 and July 1945, the Normans calculate that 156 boatloads of Allied POWs, in all some 126,000 prisoners from battlefields throughout the Pacific, were crammed into similar ships, starved and maltreated, and shipped to Japan. More than “21,000 died en route” or drowned en route following attacks by American ships, planes and submarines.
After liberation, Ben Steele began prolonged medical treatment for his many problems. He had suffered from beriberi and malaria in a prison camp and was given final rites on three separate occasions. Back home, his hospital chart at one time noted he was being treated for, among other ailments, “extreme nervousness” and an inability to sleep, prompting [my assumption] combat vet Michael Norman to comment, “There was no therapy for war, no drugs or talking cure to blunt what war leaves behind in the minds of men [and now women] coming home from the battlefields and prison camps….” And more, in an “Author’s Note, the Normans add: “It is true that some men—men of greed, ambition or raw animus—love war, but most, the overwhelming number who are forced to bear arms, come home from the killing fields and prison camps with annui, “tears in the darkness.” In the end, Ben Steele did return home to Billings, Montana, taught art in a local college, divorced, remarried, and is still alive.
The Normans then take a postwar detour. Two Japanese generals, Masaharu Homma and Tomayuki Yamashita, were tried and executed for war crimes in the Philippines despite the fact that the trials appeared to resemble “kangaroo courts” where no evidence had to be “verified or supported by direct testimony.” One of Homma’s American. military defense lawyers claimed he was pressured not to put up a serious defense. Were the guilty verdicts justified? Should more Japanese have been tried for war crimes? And were there no American war criminals as well? Before he was executed, Homma, a complex man who seemed to have little responsibility for the death march, told the officer in charge of his firing squad, “I’m being shot tonight because we lost the war.”
An excellent history of an appalling time.
Jim Cullen: Two new books on the Reagan era
Source: Special to HNN (10-27-09)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]
Twenty years after he left office, five years after his death, and a year after what is widely regarded as a watershed election that rejected some of it core tenets, the life and times of Ronald Reagan are poised on the cusp of a transition from memory to history. As with Andrew Jackson, with whom he had much in common, one can speak of an "Age of Reagan" that extended beyond his presidency. As with Jackson too, much perception of Reagan among intellectual elites was strongly negative when in power. Both were viewed as willful, but unintelligent, executives who delegated political operations to fierce partisans. Those partisans in turn reputedly manufactured a faux populism embraced by a gullible public even as they set the nation on a potentially ruinous course.
But as with Jackson, a school of Reagan revisionism has emerged. Two new books illustrate the ongoing range of opinion about Reagan -- and the new consensus, recently articulated by figures like journalist Richard Reeves (Ronald Reagan: the Triumph of Imagination, 2005), and Professor Sean Wilentz (The Age of Reagan, 2008) that this was a man to be reckoned with as a statesman and policy maker no less than in the realm of masterful communication.
In a sense, Gil Troy, who writes regularly for HNN, seems ill-suited to write a book with the title The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009). Troy has carved out a space for himself as a latter-day Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in books like Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents (2008). And in fact, the argument of The Reagan Revolution belies its title: according to Troy, there was no Reagan revolution. This is not to say Reagan was an inconsequential president: Troy portrays him as a man who changed the nation's political climate even if he never changed its topography. And one can elaborate on this sentence with a half-dozen like it: Reagan cut taxes, though he never quite managed to rein in spending. He was perceived as hostile to Civil Rights, even as he maintained affirmative action and the nation underwent a demographic transformation. He rattled a saber with the Soviets yet ushered in a post-Cold War world. And so on.
Troy's mastery of his material and ability to condense it elegantly reflect both deep immersion in his subject and an ability to see forest through trees. But its underlying logic engenders a little restlessness. Reagan succeeded because he was at heart a centrist. As Troy makes clear in Leading from the Center, so was FDR. And Abraham Lincoln. And George Washington. One begins to suspect that for Troy, a successful, non-moderate Reagan would be a contradiction in terms. Yet he was more of an ideologue than any of these leaders. (One again thinks of Andrew Jackson and suspects Troy would tame him as well.)
The Reagan Revolution is a new entry in Oxford University Press's marvelous "Very Short Introduction" series, now over 200 (pocket-sized) volumes strong. Like other books in the series, it does not try to provide an unbroken narrative line. Instead, Troy segments its 130 pages into eight chapters, each of which are titled with questions -- "Was Reagan a Dummy?"; "Did the Democrats Fiddle as the Reaganauts conquered Washington?"; "Did the Reagan Revolution Succeed or Fail?" -- and sequenced into an overlapping, but loosely chronological, discussion. This intelligent strategy makes the book very useful for the casual reader as well as highly flexible for classroom use. It's hard to imagine another book serving such a function any better than this.
As it happens, Troy, who teaches at McGill University, is also the editor, along with Vincent J. Cannato of UMass Boston, of Living in the Eighties, an anthology in another Oxford University Press series, "Viewpoints on American Culture." As one might expect, this is a collection notable for the quality of its scholarship and sturdiness of its prose. But the hallmark of the anthology, perhaps not surprisingly, is balance, not only in terms of opinion, but also generations and even professions. On the Right, former Attorney General Edwin Meese makes a cogent brief for Reagan's presidency as an almost unalloyed triumph, while Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution decisively credits Reagan for ending the Cold War. On the Left, heavyweight historians Sara Evans and Bruce Shulman decry the evisceration of feminism and the decline of public space respectively.
In terms of actually advancing the historiography of the Reagan era, the most important essays are a pair of pieces by Joseph Crespino and Kim Phillips-Fein, both of whom gave papers in a notably lively session at the Organization of American Historians Conference in Seattle earlier this year. In that session and these pieces, Crespino and Phillips-Fein and their generational cohort seek to move beyond the argument, crystallized most succinctly in Thomas and Mary Edsall's 1992 book Chain Reaction, that converging resentments of race, rights and taxes explain the success of the neoconservative movement. Crespino suggests the neocon synthesis in the South is much deeper and broader than such a formulation suggests; Phillips-Fein implicitly challenges Troy (who here zeroes in on Reagan's first hundred days to suggest they were the high-water mark of his "revolution") in emphasizing the scope and depth of Reagan's long-term success in shifting the nation's political discourse.
Perhaps the most satisfying pieces in the collection, however, are those that function as tightly focused case studies. Editor Cannato does a nice job in looking at New York mayoral politics and the ambiguous career of Ed Koch. Mark Brilliant of the University of California at Berkeley uses his own institution as a point of departure for tracing subtle shifts in the evolution of multiculturalism in academic life. Music executive and record producer Steve Greenberg's precise yet resonant analysis of racial -- and racist -- currents in the transition from the seventies to the eighties in popular music is rock criticism of the highest order. David Greenberg performs comparable service in tracing currents within liberalism in the eighties, as does Lauren Winner in her analysis of evangelical religion in the years between the Carter and Reagan administrations.
The field of what might be termed "Reagan Studies" is already well established, and there are no doubt graduate students across the country right now struggling to master a large and growing body of work. But these two works together comprise a remarkable sampler of a discourse in motion. It's morning in Reagan studies.
Jeremy Kuzmarov. Review of Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009)
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tulsa and author of the newly-published book “The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs” (Massachusetts)
In the build-up to the Iraq and Afghan wars, liberal humanitarians and neoconservatives alike bantered on and on about the necessity of empire and its capability of removing tyrannical dictators and bringing material prosperity and stability to the most turbulent regions of the world. As U.S. troops continue to slug it out in these violent conflicts with seemingly no end in sight, Alfred W. McCoy has published an important new book, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State, which provides a historical corrective to the flawed analysis and hubris of the war hawks. He lays bare the coercive and fundamentally illiberal consequences of U.S. imperial influence in the Philippines during the first half of the 20th century, which set a precedent for more recent interventions.
McCoy chronicles how the United States developed a coercive policing apparatus to ensure colonial domination, incorporating a mixture of covert penetration and violence to gradually subdue remnants of the nationalist resistance. Over time, the United States created a constabulary which endured as a pivotal mechanism of state power and control and contributed to a legacy of political authoritarianism and repression which has persisted through the present. Many of the secret police methods developed were appropriated back in the United States and paved the way for the creation of a formidable surveillance apparatus during the era of the first Red Scare shortly after WWI. In this respect, individual civil liberties and democracy were severely impeded by imperial expansion – a fact evident today with the passage of the USA Patriot Act.
McCoy begins the book by comparing U.S. imperial strategies in both the Philippines and Iraq, pointing out the vital difference: In Iraq the Bush administration made the error of disbanding Saddam Hussein’s former army, whose members provided the backbone of the anti-occupational resistance, whereas in the Philippines, the Theodore Roosevelt administration recruited members of the defeated nationalist movement to help complete the pacification. At the time, the Philippines was viewed as an important stepping stone into the Asia-Pacific and vast China market.
From 1899-1902, the U.S. military waged a relentless campaign to suppress the nationalist movement, resulting in the death of an estimated 200-700,000 Filipinos and destruction of the societal fabric. As the fighting waned, the Philippines commissions under future president William H. Taft focused on building an indigenous police force capable of finishing off the insurgents and establishing law and order. Modeled after the Cuban Rural Guard, the constabulary engaged in patrols for over a decade to suppress nationalist and messianic peasant revolts in the countryside. It frequently employed scorched earth tactics and presided over numerous massacres, including hundreds of civilians at Bud Dajo in the Moro province of Mindanao, where Muslims refused to acquiesce to American power and rule.
The constabulary’s success owed largely to the role of military intelligence officers in imparting new methods of data management and covert techniques of surveillance in order to enhance the ability to monitor subversion against American colonial rule. Under the command of Harry H. Bandholtz, the secret service became especially effective in adopting novel psychological warfare techniques, such as the wearing of disguises, fabricating disinformation and recruiting paid informants and saboteurs in their efforts to “break up bands of political plotters.”
They monitored the press, carried out periodic assassinations and compiled dossiers on thousands of individuals as well as information on the corruption of America’s Filipino proxies, which was used as leverage to keep them loyal to the occupation. The declaration of martial law ensured minimal governmental oversight and enabled them to carry out surveillance and make arrests without the application of due process
One of the crowning achievements was improving communication, including the installation of a Gamewell police and fire alarm system in Manila to curb dependency on the public telephone. The Philippines commission proudly reported that this “put the city on equal footing with any in the United States.” The U.S. on the whole provided much technical aid and support, including the imparting of new fingerprinting methods, which allowed for an expansion of the police’s social control capabilities. The reach of the constabulary became so deep that it was able to effectively infiltrate and sow dissension within radical organizations, including an incipient labor movement, and even played a role in apostolic succession by undermining the influence of Bishop Gregorio Aglipay, a nationalist with socialist sympathies whose services were attended by thousands of the urban poor, through the spread of disinformation.
Constabulary officers generally assumed formidable powers in the country, which they were prone to abuse. McCoy reports that in Manila “police in effect became partners in crime, accepting bribes to protect opium dens and gambling houses,” as well as brothels which sprang up to service Americans. Periodic exposure served to undermine the legitimacy of the colonial order, fostering several highly publicized though ultimately limited efforts at reform. The legacy of political repression and corruption survived long after the Philippines was granted independence in the mid- 1930s. The Philippines constabulary and police maintained its ties with the underworld and remained notorious for torture and brutality. During the 1950s, the U.S. resumed police assistance to combat the Huk peasant insurrection, which was driven by the demand for agrarian reform. CIA operative Edward Lansdale played a particularly important role in developing all kinds of psychological warfare methods designed to sow dissension and intimidate the Huks into submission. He also cultivated hunter-killer squads within the constabulary, which provided a forerunner to the Phoenix death squad operations in South Vietnam. American support for massive state terrorism continued during the reign of Ferdinand Marcos, where the USAID’s Office of Public Safety trained specialized riot control units within the police to crush student dissidents following the declaration of martial law. American trained police were also implicated in wide-scale extrajudicial killings and torture, leaving the cadavers of their victims on city streets to discourage further dissent.
When Marcos was overthrown in the mid -1980s, the United States continued to provide police and security assistance to successor Corazon Aquino, who remobilized the police apparatus for repressive purposes after refusing to negotiate with the left-wing New People’s Army (NPA) and address its underlying demand for social reform. Police torture and the assassination of labor leaders and suspected guerrilla cadres remained commonplace, as did the use of covert tactics promoted under the U.S. Army’s low intensity warfare doctrine designed to destroy the leftist movement from within. Governmental and police corruption all the while reached unprecedented levels, as Aquino and successor, Joseph Estrada, funded their campaigns through control of gambling and narcotics sales.
After a brief interlude during the 1990s with the closing of American military bases, Washington resumed extensive police and military assistance as a result of the declaration of the War on Terror. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo shrewdly appropriated U.S. weaponry and funding to help suppress her political rivals, and remobilized violent paramilitary organizations to destroy Islamic separatists in the Moro provinces as well as supporters of the Communist Party, which remained active as a result of lingering social inequalities. While the Bush administration and conservative ideologues such as Max Boot heralded the Philippines as a successful front in the War on Terror, human rights groups as well as the United Nations have censured the Arroyo administration for its atrocious record, which is reminiscent of that of Ferdinand Marcos during the dark days of the martial law period. As McCoy makes clear, much like with the Cold War, the War on Terror is being used as a pretext to encourage the adoption of extra-legal violence and repression by privileged elites to suppress social movements pressing for the rectification of long-standing structural inequality. Covert assassination methods to dismantle the Abu Sayaff terrorist network meanwhile have served as a model for American military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, with a similar disregard for international law.
Besides showing the high human costs of empire, McCoy’s book is innovative in showing the domestic costs of U.S. foreign expansion. Through extensive research in military archives, he analyzes how constabulary veterans such as Ralph Van Deman, who was known as the “father of U.S. military intelligence” and of the “American blacklist” played a crucial role in applying their expertise in the clandestine arts to spy on and repress radical organizations such as the American Communist Party and International Workers of the World (IWW). Many of the methods pioneered by the constabulary – including the recruitment of local informants and defectors, the use of agents provocateurs and spread of disinformation – proved effective in facilitating their demise. The surveillance apparatus would remain in place throughout the Cold War, resulting in myriad constitutional abuses, and has most recently re-appeared with the advent of the War on Terror.
McCoy’s book on the whole is truly eye-opening in showing the dark underside of the American empire. A short review cannot do justice to all the nuances embedded in his analysis and the meticulous quality of his research which was undertaken for a decade in both American and Philippine archives. Policing America’s Empire fits well with the theme of McCoy’s previous scholarly books which have exposed the CIA’s complicity in the global narcotics trade and its promotion of torture techniques during the Cold War and War on Terror. Alone among professional historians, he has also written poignantly on the destructive consequences of the CIA-run secret war in Laos, which literally tore the society to shreds and caused the displacement and death of thousands of rice farmers who had never even heard of the United States. McCoy has further published numerous books on Philippines society and culture, including an illuminating study of its military culture.
McCoy’s latest work is among his most important in showing the corrupting influence of American imperial interventions. It should be read alongside his other books as an important cautionary tale about the dangers of misplaced executive power, the symbiosis of organized crime and politics in an era of globalized capitalism, and the perils of covert military intervention, which has been a pivotal instrument of American power in the modern age. McCoy’s book furthermore represents an authoritative counterpoint to pro-imperialist voices which have consistently misrepresented the past and sanitized the historical record in advocating for policies contributing to the perversion of democracy at home, the spread of ample violence abroad and a legacy of corruption, fragmentation and discord in an array of shattered societies, the Philippines among them.
Mac McCorkle: Review of Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited: Engagements with an American Original, ed. by Daniel Rice with an introduction by Martin E. Marty
Source: Special to HNN (10-17-09)
[Mac McCorkle is a Democratic political consultant from Durham, N.C. who was a fellow this spring at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, N.J. His essay "On Recent Political Uses of Reinhold Niebuhr" will appear in the forthcoming Reinhold NIebuhr and Contemporary Politics (2010) edited by Richard Harries and Stephen Platten.]
A melodramatic summary of this book could be entitled Revenge of the Liberal Niebuhrians.
Opponents can justifiably complain that it amounts to a conscious effort by remaining elder Niebuhrian eminences -- and some new fellow-travelers -- to secure their mentor's high status in the American canons of liberal intellectual, theological, and political thought. And these Niebuhrians are adept in going about their business.
Since Niebuhr's death in 1971, struggle on two different fronts has raged over his legacy. The ferocity and overlapping nature of the two debates led to quite a murky portrait of the politically-minded theologian.
On the one hand, a tug-of-war has taken place over the ideological nature of Niebuhr's legacy. In order to justify their break with liberal reform, such neo-conservatives as Catholic theorist Michael Novak have invoked Niebuhr's emphasis on original sin, his relentless critique of progressive utopianism, and his Cold War anti-communism.
Liberal Niebuhrians have cried foul -- insisting that, despite his constantly dialectical mind, their mentor did not go and would never have gone over to the conservative side. And they have pointed out that Niebuhr specifically testified to "my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made the servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism."
The other front, which brewed for a long time but especially caught fire in the 1990s, was not over how Niebuhr legacy's should be preserved but whether Niebuhr's legacy was worth preserving.
At the end of the decade, during his Gifford Lecture at Scotland's St. Andrews University, the polemically-minded but pacifist Stanley Hauerwas charged that his Gifford Lecture predecessor of 1939 had ended up as little more than a secular establishment toady cloaked in religious garb. And in the field of intellectual history, younger scholar Eugene McCarraher even dismissed Niebuhr's 1930s radical manifesto Moral Man and Immoral Society as a warm-up for his subsequent role as a "pontifex maximus to Cold War liberals."
Liberal and neo-con Niebuhrians united in outrage over the charges that he was hardly a Christian and a minor-league thinker to boot. Nevertheless, as the 21st century began, liberal Niebuhrians seemed rather besieged if not beleaguered by their two-front challenge.
Then as with so many other things big and small, September 11, 2001 changed the intellectual dynamic on Niebuhr's legacy. While the mass-murder terrorist attack on American soil obviously rocked the anti-Niebuhrian pacifist position, soon thereafter the Bush administration's overreach in Iraq discredited the neo-conservative vision of a new global Pax Americana.
In contrast, the liberal Niebuhrian emphasis on avoiding the extremes of anti-statism and the heavy-handed state in foreign as well as domestic policy again seemed like the sensible intellectual position just as during the Cold War era. A renewed wisdom now seemed to reside in such Niebuhr formulations as "man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."
And in 2007, while starting his historic ascent to the presidency, Barack Obama affirmed that Niebuhr was one of his favorite political philosophers. The theologian, according to the presidential candidate, understood that "serious evil in the world" had to be combated but could not be eliminated and thus that reform efforts had to avoid "swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism."
With all that intellectual momentum in the background, the essays in Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited impressively reconstruct his political theology while also providing specific
analyses of his views on such topics as democracy, pacifism, war, foreign policy, and American politics and culture. Although taking occasional side shots at his prominent critics, the contributors mainly glide through explorations and explications of Niebuhr's thought.
The contributors avoid the suggestion that Niebuhr was flawless -- which would be an odd position for followers of a thinker who emphasized all of humanity's imperfection and constantly acknowledged shortcomings in his own thought. Yet they make a pretty impressive case that Niebuhr cannot be fairly embraced or dismissed as a cheerleader for American civil religion, capitalism, or militarism.
A majority of the book's nineteen essays come from theological scholars. But there is a mix of historians and political scientists as well. And the essay of historian David Noble is a clear sign of the changing times in favor of Niebuhr's liberal legacy.
In his 1985 historiographical study The End of History, Noble expressed mild appreciation for Niebuhr's warnings in such works as The Irony of American History (1952) about American blinders in world affairs. Far more vehemently Noble ripped Niebuhr for becoming "a conservative defender of the American status quo." Noble even seemed to agree with New Left historian William Appleman Williams' proclamation that in religious terms Niebuhr amounted to a "heretic."
Yet Noble in his essay here hails President Obama's embrace of Niebuhr and excuses Niebuhr's "uncharacteristically optimistic" attitude in Irony about American capability to accept limits to its power. He ends his contribution by declaring himself "grateful" for the continuance of the Niebuhrian tradition's effort "to teach us all to accept irony and limits so we might avoid the inevitable tragedy that will follow any claim to omnipotence."
Not surprisingly, criticisms of Niebuhr in this collection have a certain air-brushed quality to them. The common technique is to historicize Niebuhr's shortcomings by acknowledging that he was, in Noble's words, "a participant in the culture of his generation." That is the main reason given for Niebuhr's political theology not being sympathetic enough to the plight of the Palestinians (Ronald Stone), too apologetic in defense of religious orthodoxy and too hostile toward critics of organized religion (Henry B. Clark), and too harsh on his liberal Social Gospel elders (Gary Dorrien).
Only theologian Robin Lovin directly acknowledges that Niebuhr actually fell behind the times on such an important issue as civil rights for African-Americans. During the 1950s, Reverend Martin Luther King and his lieutenants found great inspiration in the prophetic call for a strategy of non-violent resistance that Niebuhr made two decades before in Moral Man. But when King asked him to sign a petition to President Eisenhower on behalf of federal enforcement of desegregation in Little Rock's public schools, Niebuhr refused.
On the one hand, as Lovin acknowledges, Niebuhr in the 1950s was overly concerned about white backlash. Yet Niebuhr was also too sensitive to the presidential prospects of Democrat Adlai Stevenson and the danger of alienating the Southern wing of the Democratic coalition.
Niebuhr even criticized Eisenhower for ultimately deciding to send in federal troops to Little Rock. He was not alone among intellectuals -- Hannah Arendt penned an essay in opposition to the federal intervention there. But Niebuhr's position on Little Rock still put him to the right of Republican Eisenhower.
In an inadvertent way, however, the collection as a whole arguably slights Niebhur's legacy by largely stopping with the 1950s. That is understandable because Niebuhr suffered a physically debilitating stroke the year that Irony was published (1952) and his subsequent books do not evidence major changes in his thought.
Yet as historian Mark Hulsether notes in passing, Niebuhr definitely took a "moderate left turn" during the 1960s" in his political journalism and activities. (Contributor Martin Halliwell also emphasized this point a few years ago in his provocative The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture but does not repeat it here.)
It appears that the prophetic example of Martin Luther King in particular re-awoke Niebuhr to new openings and possibilities on the political landscape and made him grow less solicitous toward the incrementalism of mainstream statesmen. By 1966 Niebuhr was claiming King to be "the most creative Protestant, white or black." He endorsed King's opposition to the Vietnam War and even dismissed the significance to his differences with King's pacifism. The exasperated conservative theologian Paul Ramsey remarked that "Reinhold Niebuhr signs petitions and editorials as if Reinhold Niebuhr never existed."
Recognition of his movement to recapture the prophetic outsider spirit during the 1960s complicates an already complex Niebuhr legacy. But it makes his legacy even richer than is otherwise expertly laid out in Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited.
Jim Cullen, Review of Gail Collins's When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women, 1960-present (Little, Brown, 2009)
Source: Special to HNN (10-14-09)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
This is a book that begins and ends with a pair of pants. In the summer of 1960, a 28-year-old secretary named Lois Rabinowitz was fined $10 for showing up in court in slacks to pay her boss's parking ticket. Forty-seven years later, a 33-year-old woman named Tahita Jenkins was fired from her job as a New York City bus driver because she refused to wear them, citing her Pentecostal religious beliefs. One could plausibly bookend a narrative history of women this way to show how, when it comes to gender relations, some (female) people just can't win. But for Gail Collins, these incidents dramatize the success of a revolution so decisive that it's easy to forget just how much has changed.
Collins, one of two regular women columnists for the New York Times (I view her as a milder chronicler of human folly than the somewhat more venomous Maureen Dowd -- not that I mind a little venom with my breakfast in the morning) has a sharp eye for telling detail that really keeps her story moving. When Everything Changed is a sequel to America's Women, her 2003 book that traced the directory of women's lives from the colonial period to the 1960s. Over the course of 400 pages, Collins covers topics that include the growing presence of women in the workforce in the decades following the Second World War, the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on the gathering Women's Movement, the rise of the sex revolution, and the full flowering of what came to be known as "Women's Lib." She also describes the backlash in the decades that followed, hostility most evident in the successful fight to halt the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the ongoing strength of the antiabortion movement. Chapters on the last three decades suggest a kind of stasis marked by sometimes surprising counter-currents and contradictions.
This is, of course, a very familiar story to even casual students of women's history. Collins is a classic liberal feminist who sees events like the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the fight over the ERA as central events in the struggle for female emancipation. Such a sensibility has room for more edgy figures such as Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, radical feminist Susan Brownmiller, and Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who are all treated respectfully here (as is Sarah Palin). But it's mainstream feminists like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, and legislators like Jeannette Rankin and Bella Abzug, who seem closest to Collins's heart as well as her head.
But what really makes the book work, and likely to last, is the skill and empathy with which Collins weaves in the stories of ordinary women, who navigate dilemmas ranging from what shoes to wear to whether or not to keep a baby. It's the journalist in her who makes sure we hear the voices of mothers, daughters, lesbian lovers, and employees, and the way those voices are often those of the same people. Collins is also attentive to the broader social forces that are shaping the possibilities and limits of modern feminism, most notably an economy in which women's skills became increasingly attractive, and whose contraction made two- income couples increasingly indispensable.
But perhaps the most important message in this book is generational. Whatever their ongoing challenges, young women today take for granted that they should have the same educational and occupational opportunities as men, be paid equally as men, have at least some participation in housekeeping and child raising from men, experience about as much sexual satisfaction as men; and so on. This sense of equality was not only missing a half-century ago, but widely regarded as laughable, if not insane. When Everything Changed is not only a reminder that some things did change, but also that things can. As such, it can be read as a warning. But also, more decisively, as a gift of hope. It's one we should relish.
Joseph A. Palermo: Review of Sam Tanenhaus's The Death of Conservatism
Source: Special to HNN (10-9-09)
[Joseph A. Palermo is Associate Professor of History, CSU, Sacramento.]
Sam Tanenhaus, a senior editor for the New York Times, has written a useful book about modern conservatism and its discontents. It is a short intellectual history tracing the pedigree of ideas that have informed conservative (and liberal) thought over the past couple of centuries focusing mainly on the last fifty years. Tanenhaus breezily sifts through the ideological highlights giving readers a primer on the tenets of conservative thought.
Using snippets from Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, William F. Buckley, Jr., and other icons of the Right, Tanenhaus takes us through the John Birchers, Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the Gingrich revolution, all the way to Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and the "noisemakers and pyrotechnicians" that dominate conservative talk radio. Tanenhaus fills this slender, lightly sourced volume with well-chosen texts that illuminate the revanchism of the contemporary Right and how far today's conservative movers and shakers have drifted from their true intellectual roots. "Today it is almost taken for granted," Tanenhaus writes, "that the American Right is intrinsically hostile to both governmental and social institutions, seeing in each a purveyor of false values that imperil the 'true America.' " (p. 20) And as a result of adhering to this rigid ideology, in Tanhenhaus's view, "conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology." (p. 7)
Tanenhaus is a brilliant and masterful writer but this venture into intellectual history is not devoid of weaknesses. As is the case with other histories of ideas, Tanenhaus gives his readers disembodied voices plucked from their historical contexts where the nexus of thought and action, theory and praxis is either broken or simply ignored. This tendency is best illustrated when Tanenhaus contrasts the ideas informing the conservative/right and the liberal/left.
One example is his seeming embrace of the Tom Brokawian thesis of 1960s "excesses" leading to the discrediting of the Left. Using a useful metaphor that recurs in the book, Tanenhaus writes: "The liberal sun, even as steadily enlarged, swerved off its consensus course and strayed into the astral wastes of orthodoxy. And the conservative movement, building a coalition of disenchantment and alienated elements of the old Democratic coalition -- blue-collar urban ethnics, Jewish and Catholic intellectuals repelled by the countercultural enthusiasms of the New Left -- shaped a new consensus." (p 66) This observation may be true on the surface but it doesn't explain why or how these "countercultural enthusiasms" developed in the first place.
The African-American civil rights movement touched a sensitive nerve deep in the American psyche that laid bare the contradictions about "freedom" and "equality" that a generation of people had internalized. As the movement matured from its integrationist roots in the South to grapple with the deeper problems of economic inequality in the North (as the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. illuminates) the thoughts and actions of the movement changed and became more radicalized (meaning they focused more on the "root" of the problem). Tanenhaus discusses the "Moynihan Report" on the black family sympathetically without acknowledging that what got Moynihan in trouble was his emphasis on "pathologies" found in the black family and tracing this "sickness" back several generations to slavery. (The historians Herbert Gutman and Eugene Genovese, in very different ways, demolished the sloppy premises of the Moynihan Report years ago.) My point here is that in 1960 if one were to tell John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy that by the end of the decade all three of them would be gunned down and blacks would tear apart 200 cities in rebellious rage they never would have believed you. Their evolving thoughts on the issue of race relations changed through the actions they witnessed and participated in. No countercultural "excesses" there.
Similarly, Tanhenhaus's discussion of the intellectual context of the Vietnam War leaves much to be desired. There were plenty of Americans who felt that their government was guilty of "excesses" by sending 58,000 Americans to their deaths, killing over 2 million Vietnamese, and dropping more tons of bombs on Vietnam than were used by all sides in World War Two. Like the civil rights movement, as the Vietnam War dragged on and became ever more violent and costly it produced a new set of oppositional ideas that arose from the thoughts and actions relating to the movement to end that bloody war. Here Tanhenhaus's argument could have benefited greatly by including at least a few snippets of text from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. They were the two figures of the 1960s that best embodied what Tanenhaus sees as a fusion of Burkian pragmatism and governmental activism to provide for a better society and protect (conserve) what is good about America. The fact that both these men were assassinated only added to the perceived "excesses" of the era. Tanenhaus barely mentions the effects these killings had on Americans in the late 1960s.
Finally, there was also a set of liberal/Left ideas that emerged from the cauldron of thoughts and actions relating to civil rights and the peace movement that comprised a new awakening to injustices by other subaltern groups: Latino farmworkers, women, gays and lesbians. One can argue that once the second wave feminist movement took off in the early 1970s that everything the Left did was "excessive" because it brought politics into the bedroom and the kitchen and the workplace. The conservatives were really just a bunch of reactionaries when it came to the women's movement and especially the LGBT movement -- and continue to be so to this day. No need to turn to Edmund Burke to explain this phenomenon.
Tanenhaus might have also grappled with how Ronald Reagan actually did more damage to modern conservatism than any other figure. I know it sounds counterintuitive but what Reagan did in the 1980s is combine profligate government spending with a 1960s-style hedonism that emphasized getting rich, living in the moment and let the devil take the hindmost; get what you can now and consume like crazy; greed is good. Reagan, like George W. Bush (who was the farce who followed the tragedy), left the country weaker with huge trade imbalances and a battered middle class. There's nothing "conservative" about that.
And then there's the Cold War to which Tanenhaus gives short shrift. The Soviet Union did not threaten U.S. national security in the way the conservatives always claimed. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Libya, etc. were just used as bogey men to scare the public into turning over more of their tax dollars to the military-industrial complex and elect Republicans. The current tragedies in Iraq and Afghanistan are the latest examples of this falsehood. If the Pentagon cannot protect the lower 48 then why have a defense department and a permanent war budget? No, the conservatives sold the country a bag of goods about the "Communist threat" and no amount of eloquence from William F. Buckley, Jr. or others can change that fact.
Tanenhaus has written a thought-provoking book that I highly recommend but I believe it is far to early to declare the "death of conservatism." The reason I believe Tenhenhaus's conclusion is terribly premature is that conservatives' ideas don't matter. The only thing that matters is power. And they still have power. They have corporate-backed think tanks; they have corporate-backed astroturf groups; they have their own 24/7 media outlets; they have armies of lobbyists and oodles of campaign cash; and they have foot soldiers from all walks of life dedicated to furthering their cause. They have the legions of anti-abortion activists. They have the NRA. And so on, and on. But above all, their ace in the hole is that conservative ideas serve the most powerful interests in society.
Conservative ideas will continue to percolate to the top and be widely disseminated in our political discourse because they reinforce the status quo. Even today, with the Republicans out of national power and the total failure of the Alan Greenspan/Milton Friedman free-market utopia that is the lifeblood of the conservative movement, we hear calls for deregulation, "free trade," and privatization (and staying in Iraq and Afghanistan forever). Even when the Republicans are a satellite orbiting the majority party in power their ideas resonate because they are the ideas that serve corporate capital (and always will).
As a historian I believe that events will determine whether we've entered a new thirty-year "cycle" of liberal dominance or if we're just witnessing a replay of the early 1990s. There's simply too much unfinished business for the Democratic Party and liberals these days to proclaim the "death of conservatism."
Jim Cullen, Review of David Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (Oxford University Press, 2008)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
It’s a measure of the pace of technological change these days that linguist David Crystal’s book, which was published last year and just issued in paperback, is already a historical artifact. The word “Twitter,” for example, does not appear in the index; no mention is made of the role of cell phone text messaging in building grass-roots support for Barack Obama, or in the public demonstrations of last summer in Iran (nor, needless to say, its role at the recent G-20 summit protests last month in Pittsburgh). To Crystal’s credit, he anticipates such developments even if he doesn’t name them. In any event, it’s clear that if the book is to have any future, a new introduction will have to be produced –- at the very least. And yet this compact volume, which can be read in little more than a sitting, is both a useful sociological survey of the practice as well as a handy reference guide for novice and veteran alike.
The “db8” of the title refers to a discourse of criticism, common at the start of the decade but since largely resolved, about the potentially deleterious effects of texting on the English language, on the education of the young, and the future of civilization itself. (We now all understand texting is here to stay, though we’re finally getting serious about banning the practice while driving.) But while many of us now take the various linguistic shortcuts that we associate with texting for granted, we often feel unsettled about its seemingly hieroglyphic quality, a sense that it’s a foreign tongue always at the edge of comprehension.
Crystal addresses this unease with a number of important points. First, he notes, there is, in fact, no codified SMS (short message service) idiom; the various forms of shorthand out there are largely contextual and improvised. Second, in almost every case, the abbreviated terms that have entered common usage have pre-texting antecedents. Crystal provides a table from a 1942 dictionary in which many, like “amt” (amount) and “mtg” (meeting) appear, as well as noting that many abbreviations, like “Mr.” long pre-date cell phones, while others, like “obdt.,” as in the “your obedient servant” Abraham Lincoln used to close his letters, have gone out of usage. And third, the anxiety over the linguistic debasement of the young overlooks the fact that ability to abbreviate language presupposes knowledge of how it works in the first place. A staunch defender of the practice, Crystal concludes texting is the “latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and adapt language to suit the needs of diverse settings.”
Indeed, while untangling a series of discrete uses for text-messaging, Crystal emphasizes throughout the sheer pleasure and inventiveness tools like emoticons afford for human beings with an anthropological need for play. He reproduces a series of clever poems written in text language, as well as some lol (“laugh out loud”) pictographs, like this one for the animated television character Marge Simpson: @@@@8-) Homer, for his part, looks like this: ~(_8^(׀)
Crystal devotes a chapter to the complexities of texting in other languages, many of which have adopted Anglicisms along the way. He speculates that over time there will be linguistic mergers. Again, this book was clearly written in the days before the iPhone and the growing proliferation of QWERTY keyboards on cell phones eased the challenges posed by alphanumeric keypads. But as a snapshot of a world in motion, the book shows us how far we’ve come as well as suggesting where we’re headed.
Plus, if you buy a bound book instead of downloading it onto your Kindle or iPod, you can always hold on to it as a collector’s item. ;)
Paul Moses. Review of Joyce Purnick's Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics (Public Affairs, 2009)
Paul Moses is the author of The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace (Doubleday, 2009). He is a professor of journalism at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
There are scenes in Joyce Purnick’s biography of Michael Bloomberg that could have come straight out of New York in the Gilded Age: titans of commerce plotting in private to change the law so that the wealthiest resident of their city would remain mayor, warding off a takeover by Tammany Hall.
As Purnick, a veteran New York newspaper reporter, tells the story in Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics, the scheme to undo New York City’s term-limits law so that the billionaire media mogul could retain his mayoral seat in this year’s election relied on a hoax of sorts. Wall Street’s flop in September, 2008 created the crisis that Bloomberg used to justify tampering with a law voters had supported in two referenda. But in fact, Purnick notes, Bloomberg had conducted polling months earlier to see how the public would view his attempt to get around the two-term limit. The financial crisis provided a pretext.
Supported by a coterie of wealthy business leaders – including owners of New York’s three major daily newspapers - Bloomberg moved with a sureness that would have impressed New York’s 19th-century robber barons. After gathering up the backing of the city’s newspaper editorial boards, he circumvented the referendum process by getting the City Council to change the term limits law.
“Pressure from business barons,” Purnick writes, cleared away one last obstacle: the wealthy businessman Ronald Lauder, who had bankrolled the term-limits referenda in the past.
The term-limits caper gently marks a turning point in the story Purnick tells about Bloomberg and “his detour to the dark side.” To New Yorkers, it meant he could be “a dreaded selfish pol,” she writes. “He had surrendered to the seduction of politics, the lure of power.”
Still, Bloomberg comes across more Horatio Alger than Charles Foster Kane in this telling. Purnick starts with a breezy account of Bloomberg’s youth in Medford, Mass., where he was an Eagle Scout. (No “rosebud” here.) With clarity and conciseness, she explains how he came into his fortune by renting out computer terminals that provided financial data.
Purnick is particularly good at describing Bloomberg’s days as a social climber in the years following his divorce – “the social reinvention of Mike Bloomberg.” During his Mr. Big phase, Bloomberg sought to be seen with the likes of Barbara Walters, Beverly Sills, Liv Ullman, Marisa Berenson and Diana Ross.
Purnick, however, skewers Bloomberg over his apparent habit of speaking crudely about women. She goes beyond the widely reported allegations in a sex discrimination lawsuit against Bloomberg’s media company to include the perturbed reaction of men who had heard him unfiltered on boys’ nights out.
Still, Purnick portrays a kind of nobility in Bloomberg, detailing his philanthropy, his sense of honesty, his impatience with the phoniness of political discourse, his willingness to take unpopular stands. And, like many New Yorkers, she seems simply happy that he is not Rudolph Giuliani – that he took such basic steps as re-connecting City Hall’s severed lines of communication with African-American leaders after he was elected mayor.
“He is probably the most unusual and perplexing mayor New York has ever seen: diffident, unemotional, hard to like, yet so grounded that he is even harder to disrespect,” Purnick writes, presenting Bloomberg as a paradox.
Purnick makes some stinging observations along the way, but this is not an investigative work. For the most part, she avoids issuing judgments of her subject and seems content to let the readers decide what to make of Bloomberg, who is presented as an effective manager who has improved even New York City’s schools (although not to the extent he claims). At the same time, there is a disturbing undercurrent as Purnick recounts how Bloomberg has used his fortune to buy up politically influential non-profit groups, Republican leaders in the state Senate, members of Congress, and entire elections.
Purnick doesn’t put it this way, but what she describes amounts to a subversion of democracy. And, as the book makes clear, Bloomberg had harbored a deep desire to use his fortune in an even bigger way - to run for president in 2008.
Purnick’s even-handedness is welcome at a time when much political discussion is anything but. It is a strength of the book because it makes her tougher observations very credible. At the same time, it is a frustration that she tends to report what Bloomberg’s friends and critics say without offering her own conclusion. If any writer has earned a right to express such a judgment, it is Purnick. She has long experience in covering New York City politics, having served at The New York Times as a columnist, metropolitan editor and City Hall bureau chief (I was a reporter for the competing New York Newsday when we both covered the Koch administration.).
Mike Bloomberg is an important book because heretofore, Bloomberg has been able to define his own story mostly unchallenged, whether through his profligate campaign advertising or his boastful 2001 memoir, Bloomberg by Bloomberg. Purnick’s well-written, knowledgeable, fair-minded account provides much-needed perspective on a man of enormous influence in the interlocked worlds of business, politics and philanthropy.
This book arrives just as Bloomberg is running for election to a third term and, as Purnick notes, third terms usually go badly for New York mayors. So there will be room for more books about Bloomberg.
One will most likely be by Bloomberg – he reportedly (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/the-fate-of-bloombergs-memoir/)wrote a new memoir, but held it back from publication because he is said to have feared its boasting might turn off voters in the 2009 mayoral race. Presumably, it will be issued after the election – he is not one to let others take control of his story.
David Barber: Review of Thulani Davis's My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Confronts Her Roots (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
Source: Special to HNN (10-1-09)
Thulani Davis, journalist, novelist, and now, historian, is a sixth cousin to one of the most important antebellum Presidents, Tennessee’s James K. Polk. At least three of her great grandparents were members of some of the South’s great slaveholding families. One of her great-great uncles, Leonidas Campbell, was a Confederate Army officer and a man who succeeded to the Mississippi State legislature in the wake of his black predecessor’s lynching – on Campbell’s own plantation grounds. Still, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Davis is herself black and at least three of her great-grandparents were slaves. It should come as no surprise because Davis’s very tangled and intertwined ancestry of slaveowners and slaves is not so unusual. Indeed, as her My Confederate Kinfolk argues, such knotted relationships may be characteristic of the histories of millions of Americans today; which means, too, that this history, and its public denial, stand as a cornerstone of American history and of the ongoing problem of race we have in America to this day.
In My Confederate Kinfolk Davis centers her narrative on the life of her maternal great grandmother, Chloe Tarrant Curry, born a slave in 1850, and on the family of her maternal great grandfather, William Argyle Campbell, born in 1852 as the youngest son of a prominent slaveowning family. Chloe and Will began living together in the mid- to late-1870s, had a child, Georgia, Davis’s maternal grandmother, in 1878, and remained together until the time of Will’s death in 1902. Through the telling of the Curry and Campbell family story lines Davis seeks to reframe a popular understanding of American history, emphasize the centrality of the African American story and the power of African American culture to American history, and debunk the romanticism of a lost Southern civilization.
In accord with her book’s title, Davis spends the greater part of her book in tracing the lives of her Confederate kinfolk, that is, the white side of her family. In part, this may be because the documentary record is so much better for her white family: letters, diaries, property and court records, even county histories, offer Davis abundant sources for telling this side of her family history. But I also suspect that Davis puts the effort into researching this history precisely because these people – whatever they did with their lives, whatever racial animus they held, however much or little they took for granted the privileges accruing to them from their ownership over other human beings – these people were, nonetheless, family. And this is the first thing that Davis wants us to understand.
She puts considerable effort, for example, into following the lives of three Campbell women: her great-great grandmother, Louisa Terrill Cheairs Campbell; her great- great Aunt, Will’s sister, Sarah Rush Owen; and a cousin, Louisa Cheairs, “Lulu.” If I’m not mistaken, Davis finds something admirable in each of these women, despite their evident racial prejudices. Quite clearly, all three are strong women. Her great- great grandmother, for example, illegally and repeatedly crossed Union lines to bring medicines and materials to her Confederate uniformed sons, much of the time keeping a pair of grandchildren in tow. Early in the war, when she was compelled to host a dinner for Union officers in her Springfield, Missouri home, she was asked by a general whether she wished the Union forces success. “I am a Southern woman,” she replied. “And you have sons in the Confederacy?” he asked. “Four… and I wish they were fifty and I were leading them’ ” [98]. Davis wants us to know that when we look at millions of African American people in this country we need to see a people shaped, not only genetically, but culturally, as the descendants of slaves and of slaveowners. Indeed, we see a people who, perhaps more than any other people, are quintessentially “American.”
Notwithstanding the energy Davis devotes to depicting her white relations My Confederate Kinfolk’s most important character is Chloe Tarrant Curry, Davis’s African American great grandmother. And she is important to Davis not because she represents the African American side of Davis’s family, but because she is incomparably strong and large of spirit. On her husband Will’s death in 1902 Chloe inherited the Campbell land, and successfully defended this inheritance against Will’s sister’s legal challenge, and this, in Mississippi at the nadir of African American life in the United States. Chloe became the matron of the extended Tarrant family, a woman, who, although she remained illiterate her entire life, funded the education of any Tarrant child willing to put in the effort.
Born in Alabama Chloe was still a teenager at the close of the Civil War. To help understand her great grandmother’s Alabama years, Davis draws on the journals of a Union Army chaplain, Elijah Edwards. Edwards had arrived in Selma, Alabama, twenty-odd miles from the Marion plantation where Chloe had been living, during the closing days of the war. From Edwards we get a powerful picture of what these days must have been like for Chloe and other African Americans at the time:
Soon as it was definitely known that Lee had surrendered the murder of negroes commenced. It seems as if the defeated could by turning upon the unhappy cause of all their reverses and shooting them in this way revenge themselves and keep up their feeling of superiority. The negroes have been shot down at sight in some neighborhoods. The policy of their murderers is to kill them since they cannot retain them as slaves [164].
Two months later, Edwards’s journal reports more of the same: “They still shoot Negroes and try to force others to work on their plantations asserting that there has never been any emancipation proclamation…. There is a class down here radically contumacious and barbarous [168].”
Chloe must have experienced this “radically contumacious and barbarous” class of landowners as a 15 year old. At 18 she married a former slave two years her senior, James Curry, and the two worked for a number of years as domestic servants, probably in the household of Chloe’s former masters, the Tarrants. In any case we definitely know that the two set off for Yazoo County, Mississippi in 1875, leaving four children in Alabama. Again, in the absence of evidence Davis can only speculate here as to the Currys’ motives. But one reasonable explanation is that as late as 1875 Mississippi was a better place for African American people than was Alabama, given the short-lived experiment in Reconstruction in Alabama, and the continued life of Reconstruction in Mississippi.
In Mississippi, Davis draws on Albert Morgan’s writings to depict Chloe’s environment. Morgan was himself an exceptional individual, a Union Army officer who stayed in the South after the Civil War, set up a plantation in Yazoo County, and hired free black labor to work his plantation. Treating these workers with dignity earned him the enmity of the region’s white landowners and the respect of the area’s black population. Because of the local landowners’ hatred Morgan was forced off the plantation he was renting and he became a leader of the Republican Party in Mississippi, serving in a variety of official capacities in the state. Davis’s book reminds us that men like Morgan, and Edwards, were the now forgotten honorable exceptions to white violence in the post-Civil War South. After Reconstruction’s defeat in Mississippi, Morgan would author a powerful account of his years in Mississippi: Yazoo; or On the Picket Line of Freedom in the South.
Morgan’s story is the story of the prolonged struggle over Reconstruction in Mississippi, and of its ultimate overthrow. Backed by the power of the Federal Government, Republicans in Mississippi had won four successive elections, largely with black votes. But Mississippi whites, with the former slaveowners in the lead, determined on resistance. Here we see in Morgan’s words what Chloe must have seen in Yazoo County, Mississippi: the white South’s refusal to accept the Civil War’s verdict. According to Morgan,
The greatest minds in the state, on the ‘superior side of the line,’ were gravely debating the question, which would be the wiser policy for the white man, emigration and the abandonment of the State to the negro, or a general rearming of the white race with the purpose of checking by force the ‘threatened supremacy’ of the negro race. To such persons these were the only alternatives [32].
In uncovering Chloe’s story, then, Davis must excavate a buried part of American history: the hatred, brutality, and violence that white Southerners used to destroy black rights following the Civil War. From Morgan, Davis learns for the first time of the organized planning that white Southerners, landowners first of all, put into overthrowing Mississippi’s Reconstruction government. In Yazoo, white leaders openly published their plans for overthrowing black rights during the election of 1875. Thus, Chloe and her husband, James Curry, arrived in Yazoo at the very moment that the Democrats were beginning their ultimately successful destruction of black rights.
But from Morgan, Davis gleans still more important information: the tremendous dignity and courage of Mississippi’s African American population. Morgan, writes Davis, “saw in those he met what I see in my great grandmother: energy, determination, incredible endurance, and ambition” [32]. Davis especially brings these qualities to bear in the climax to My Confederate Kinfolk. Will Campbell had willed his estate to Chloe, and Will’s sister, Sarah Rush Owen, apparently sued Chloe to reclaim the property. Having lost the court battle – a white woman losing a law suit to a black woman in Mississippi in 1902! – Rush Owen bitterly penned a letter to Chloe’s attorneys challenging the illiterate black woman’s ability to retain the already debt encumbered estate. But, as Davis argues, this was “one contest in which the formidable Sarah was outmatched.” Says Davis:
If all Chloe had to do was stay there and raise cotton and pay those debts, Sarah would be waiting a very long time for Chloe to be crushed under the weight of it and repent, or pray for death, or whatever wish Sarah was trying to articulate in her letter…. As [Chloe’s daughter] Georgia wrote, work ‘was all that had confronted … [Chloe] all of her life.’ ….
That first harvest, whether 100 bales or 600, was an incredible victory over slavery, starvation, the loss of loved ones, and the terrible odds against many. It was a triumph for the bond between Chloe and Will and the promises people make to live on, to keep going what has been built, and to take care of those who need help. It’s the victory we have when we get another day to do the work that is ours to do, when we are allowed by good fortune to press body, mind, and soul to the a task we have actually chosen. Chosen, not by force of a whip, but by our own determination to win another day [267-268].
Davis’s book, in short, is a moving testimonial to the African American spirit. At the same time Davis’s choice of title, My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Confronts Her Roots, underlines the incredible truth that American history is very much a family’s story, a family in which one part disowns, enslaves, and tramples upon the rights of the other part. And in the use of the term “freedwoman” to describe herself, Davis reminds us of one further truth: the history she recounts is far from over. Those of us wishing better to understand this history would do well to read Davis’s book.
Jim Cullen, Review of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women (Scribner, 2009)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
The title of this novel is a series of interconnected jokes. Given the emphasis on the diversity of womens' experiences central to contemporary feminism, "a short history of women" is tantamount to a contradiction in terms, a self-evident admission of omission typical of the kind that even well-intentioned men, like the cluelessly condescending professor who in 1914 delivers a lecture with this title early in the novel, make all the time. Any attempt to tell the story of women would almost necessarily have to be long, and yet this book is a conspicuously svelte 237 pages. And given the sometimes fierce internecine battles that have raged in the last century, the women it portrays -- relatively wealthy, white, educated Anglo-Saxons -- verge on demographic parody. This sense of self-aware, compressed irony is the hallmark of the novel. And it is deadly serious.
A Short History of Women consists of a series of fifteen vignettes, rendered largely as interior monologues, centering on five generations of an Anglo-American family spanning from the late 19th to the early 21st centuries. The first of these figures, Dorothy Trevor Townsend, dies as a result of a hunger strike in 1918, as the First World War and the suffrage movement come to a climax in Britain. Townsend leaves behind two young children. Her daughter Evelyn (who, given the first-person narration of her segments, is apparently the locus of the story), becomes a successful scientist at Columbia University. Evelyn's brother, Thomas, is sent to San Francisco and ultimately has a daughter, who marries a World War II POW, divorces him after a half-century, and lives long enough to get herself arrested for protesting the Iraq War. The couple has three children, a son who dies in middle age and two daughters, both of whom we hear from. We get a glimpse of the fifth generation of these women in the Yale undergraduate who posts a cheeky Facebook profile that pays homage to her great-great grandmother.
It would be hard to overstate the artistry that goes into the elliptical, yet resonant, narration of these lives. Walbert demonstrates an exceptionally fluid sense of historical consciousness, moving across time with a grace and clarity reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. Even as she does so, she's able to incorporate a variety of other figures, ranging from the husbands, lovers, and companions of these women, as well as a peripheral figure like an African American maid or working-class G.I., with insight and compassion.
And yet there's something dismaying, perhaps even upsetting, about the major characters and the author's ambiguous stance toward them. This is, by and large, a miserable family unable to find fulfillment. (We can have hope for the latest generation, but historical precedent is not promising.) Political emancipation, occupational and educational opportunity, sexual expression, successful child-rearing: if they aren't elusive they aren't satisfying. And the cost of these women's choices are stark and evident to character and reader alike. Is it really acceptable, for example, to kill yourself and leave two children behind in the name of suffrage, because you say you have no choice, as Evelyn does on the opening page of this book? The men in this story are hardly monsters; at least two are notably decent, if perhaps ineffectual (or prematurely dead). If these women can't be happy, who can?
Perhaps Walbert is saying that this really is the history of women: thwarted aspiration. As Evelyn says at one point late in the story, "I often wished for more, or rather, other things, and that was it, wasn't it? The wishing?" These are people haunted by the promise of modernity, the idea that life really can be different, be better, than it currently is. This is true for men, too, of course, but for women only more so. "A problem without a name," Evelyn's daughter Dorothy tells her husband, echoing Betty Friedan. "It's who we are by God, it's our type, our lot, our cross to --" But she never finishes her sentence because she senses he's not interested. He is, but he's simply not as dissatisfied his life generally (or his marriage specifically) to the extent his wife is. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud's famous question, "What do women want?" The answer is: something else.
For these women, it seems, feminism, like communism, seems to have become a secular god that failed, and a truly transcendent vision of life is impossibly remote, if not retrograde. They lack the gift of faith, and, at the same time, are unable to reliquish their commitment to a sense of choice that finally oppresses them. It's hard to fault them for that, and hard not lose patience with them.
This is especially true because there are plenty of women for whom feminism has been a genuinely liberating force, if not always an unalloyed blessing. It's been instructive in this regard to finish this book and begin reading Gail Collins's forthcoming When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (which I will review as well). Here we encounter some people, at least, who find a measure of contentment with the pursuit of happiness, whether or not it is entirely attained.
I'm very aware in writing this review that I do so as a man who almost surely is demonstrating a kind of obtuseness that is at least lamentable and quite possibly infuriating to the target audience of this novel. In the end, I don't really know what Kate Walbert wants (or whether she knows what she wants, either). But I honor the intelligence and artistry that went into the provocative and troubling novel.
Luther Spoehr: Review of Peter Morris's Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero (Ivan R. Dee, 2009).
Source: HNN (9-26-09)
Nobody is better at recapturing how and why Americans played baseball in the 19th century than award-winning baseball historian Peter Morris, whose several books on early baseball even include a study of pioneering groundskeepers. Last year, in “But Didn’t We Have Fun,” he traced the game’s evolution from the pastime of self-governing amateur clubs who played for fun and sociability to the post-Civil War appearance of professionals like the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who played for fun and profit.
Now, in “Catcher,” Morris tells the story through the last three decades of the 19th century and into the 20th, when the game became essentially the one played today. He does so by focusing on the role of the catcher. Although his argument that for a couple of decades the catcher became a folk hero like the cowboy or even Daniel Boone is more than a bit of a reach, the rest of his book is so well done that Morris’s occasional detours into the Am Civ theorizing are only minor distractions.
Andrew Feffer. Review of Christopher Bigsby's Arthur Miller: 1915-1962 (Harvard, 2009)
(Andrew Feffer teaches American cultural and intellectual history at Union College in Schenectady, New York where he co-chairs the Film Studies program. He presently is writing a history of anti-communism and liberal political culture in New York City at the end of the Depression.)
When Arthur Miller died in 2005 the lights were dimmed on Broadway. Conservatives who hated him politically and resented his literary stature, however, could not resist parting shots. Roger Kimball announced the event on the New Criterion’s weblog with the headline “Arthur Miller: Communist Stooge.” (Arma Virumque, 12 February 2005) Commentary’s Terry Teachout called him “pretentious” in the Wall Street Journal, dredging up reviews from the heart of the McCarthy era to show that he pretended to be a greater writer than he in fact was. Miller was, Teachout intoned, “a man of limitless self-regard.” (Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2005)
Christopher Bigsby’s massive biography shows a considerably more modest Miller than that, a man of limitless self-reflection perhaps, but no pretender. And yet, Miller had no occasion to be modest, certainly not about his life. Vanessa Redgrave, whom right-wing pundits like Kimball and Teachout despise, offered the most fitting eulogy, one supported marvelously by Bigsby’s book. Miller, she told the press, “just represented the utmost integrity and the very best values we were so proud of.” Of course the “we” is the rub.
As someone clearly sympathetic to Miller and his work, Bigsby had unusual access. He builds a narrative of Miller’s life in part on a series of interviews conducted from the early 1980s almost up to Miller’s death. In those encounters Bigsby established an unprecedented trust with the playwright, who as a target of both anti-communist inquisitors and paparazzi was understandably wary of probes into his private affairs. Miller also opened an archive of personal documents to Bigsby, including unpublished and uncompleted stories, unproduced plays, earlier drafts of well-known plays, and poetry, all of which allowed a biographical and literary exploration in intimate detail.
In cultivating a long and durable relationship to Miller, Bigsby achieved insights into the writer’s intellectual and literary formation that would escape other biographers, many of whom would have the sorts of political axes to grind that Bigsby does not. It is no revelation to discover that Miller incorporated much from his own life into family dramas such as All My Sons (1947) or Death of a Salesman (1949): His ambitious but uncultured (in fact, illiterate) father, a coat manufacturer broken by the Depression, but also by the constantly receding dream of success; his conscientious and frustrated mother, whose literary and cultural interests were defeated by her marriage and then again by the family’s impoverishment; his older brother, who like many brothers in Miller’s plays took on responsibilities that Arthur could then relinquish.
Bigsby does, however, reveal an almost overwhelmingly intricate relationship between Miller’s personal history and the characters, narratives, and speech written and rewritten for the stage. Thus, Bigsby opens a rare view into the formation of a great writer. He also meticulously chronicles Miller’s creative deliberation, the enormous amount of work he logged to become a skilled playwright (including several years turning out weekly radio plays for NBC’s Cavalcade of America in the early 1940s) as he refined his skill at constructing compelling stories and dialogue.
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Yet, this is not a credulous, authorized biography. Bigsby gets inside his subject, to be sure; however Miller’s agonized self-reflections (which evolved over a lifetime) and Bigsby’s scholarly integrity lend themselves to a critical narrative that could never be labeled hagiographic. There are plenty of moments at which Bigsby could take Miller’s side and does not. He is even reserved in his judgment of Miller’s work, accepting the historical and literary impact of the earlier plays (before 1960) while recording the less than enthusiastic reception of his later ones. It is safe to say that Bigsby’s feel for Miller’s literary strengths is probably unsurpassed, especially for the relationship between Miller’s reflections on private life as the scene in which a social order is formed, doubted, fought over, taken apart and rebuilt; the agonized intimacy for which Miller’s drama was and is widely celebrated.
In most of the book Bigsby painstakingly covers territory that will be familiar in outline to most readers, including Miller’s association as a writer and activist with the Communist Party and the broader Popular Front against fascism. As framed by a life disrupted by poverty, Miller’s conversion to Marxism at the age of seventeen comes as no surprise. It made sense of the times: “Suddenly, there was a spine to history,” as Bigsby puts it. As a matter of record, the book makes a good case for doubting that Miller officially joined the Party (unlike his brother Kermit, who signed up as a young man), which he always denied yet which has been assumed by many historians. Yet his sympathies for and with the party, which developed in his student days at the University of Michigan are never in doubt. As Miller explained to Bigsby many years later, to be a “communist” merely meant to take global affairs on the eve of the Second World War seriously: “The word ‘communist’ was a generic name for people who were militant, and cared about all this, because the majority of students didn’t. They didn’t know what was happening. They were studying dentistry. It was the difference between those who were conscious of what was happening, particularly in Europe, and those who were not.” And of course a good deal of the last part of the book deals with Miller’s nearly catastrophic marriage to Marilyn Monroe, a sympathetic account (towards both parties) that has unexpected relevance to the playwright’s political life.
There are some small surprises in this rather overwhelming narrative, which in its nearly seven hundred pages reaches only the start of the 1960s – an early unpublished novel on racism, for instance, that emerged from Miller’s experience growing up with anti-Semitism in New York City during the 1930s and 40s. And there is a superb account of Miller driving a college friend to New York to catch a ship bound for Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Miller received word in Michigan that the friend had been killed by Franco’s soldiers but never learned his exact fate until Bigsby tracked it down fifty years later. Here the trust Bigsby cultivated with his subject allows a delicate exploration of Miller’s feelings of “undischarged responsibility” concerning the anti-fascist struggle, sentiments entangled in his personal life (his relationship to his brother, for instance) that continued to drive his political and literary endeavors until his death.
When tracing the complicated relationship between Miller’s private and public lives, this biography is excellent. Bigsby is less convincing when he tries to place Miller as a political figure in the intellectual context of the Cold War and McCarthyism. This not entirely Bigsby’s fault, as the history is heavily contested and confused, with too many historians of the era (on whom Bigsby depends) lapsing into superficial nostrums about and condemnations of the “the left.” In trying to understand Miller’s place in the wider American political culture Bigsby relies too heavily on rigid conceptions of Communism and the Popular Front that treat participation in largely institutional terms -- of membership (in party or front organizations), attendance at meetings, and the signing of documents. But Miller is perhaps better understood as part of what Michael Denning called the “cultural front,” a form of engagement by writers and artists in anti-fascist, labor, racial justice and other movement activism that defied simple institutional or party affiliation. It was such ambiguity and nuance that the anti-communists of the era couldn’t or chose not to understand (they still can’t).
Readers will find this book a bit daunting and a bit rambling. Still, it is a book well worth reading and a life certainly worth appreciating. There is no pretense here, not on the part of the author or the subject. Only a lifetime of reflection and self-reflection in a world that has too little of it.
Jim Cullen: Review of Dennis Baron's A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution (Oxford, 2009)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
This is an odd hybrid of a book. Part narrative history, part snapshot of the current technological landscape, and part meditation on the cultural implications of the written word, it's a little hard to see the whole from the sum of the parts when you're in the middle of it. Dennis Baron is a professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champagne, and the book has the anthology-of-essays quality typical in volumes of literary criticism. This sensibility is commercially fatal in contemporary publishing, so it's probably for the best that it's masked -- best for author and publisher to be sure, but best for reader, too. If you make your way through this lively and well-written book, you'll have an edifying and intellectually provocative experience (though you can also profitably dip into pieces of it).
Three core ideas thread through A Better Pencil, all interrelated. The first, made repeatedly, is that all forms of writing are forms of technology. Even a medium of communication seemingly as primitive as clay tablets involves mastering a series of skills and processes that take time to acquire and disseminate. (Baron makes this point in a chapter where he describes an assignment in which his students use a stylus to write on clay.) The remarkably useful pencil, first developed to mark sheep, is in fact a complex instrument that took a long time to perfect. British pencils were long considered the best, though U.S. production took a major step forward thanks in part to the work of Henry David Thoreau, who developed a new calibration of air and graphite that kept his family fortunes alive and gave him the means to go live in the woods for a while, a fact that the well-known techno-skeptic omitted from Walden.
The second is that new writing technologies also generate widespread uncertainty and anxiety. Besides the challenges involved in mastering them, they engender fears that they will undermine the social fabric of the societies in which they emerge. Actually, the mere act of writing itself was suspect among oral cultures that ranged from the Ancient Greeks to the medieval Anglo-Saxons of Norman Britain, who suspected that their conquerors would use written language to swindle communities where personal relationships and public discussions were considered the most trustworthy source of social contracts. Baron notes that such fears were by no means wholly irrational; all new writing technologies bring with them a series of tradeoffs, and the potential to do good inevitably means the capacity to harm. Typewriters are wonderful, once you know how to use them, provided they don't get jammed and you have a replacement ribbon. Group e-mails greatly simplify collective communication, but the mere click of a mouse can cause a mountain of regret if you make an error or say something you'll regret. Baron has a whole chapter, "The Dark Side of the Web," surveying the various forms of fraud, hate, and oppression digital technology makes possible.
Finally, notwithstanding these issues, Baron comes down decisively as a supporter of new technology, and on balance sees the digital revolution as a decisive force for good in the modern world. Though computers are among the most sophisticated devices in the history of mankind, their adoption and evolution has been remarkably rapid. Indeed, one of the most striking parts of this book is Baron's chapter on the history of word processing, in which he reminds us of developments that many of us who lived through them are likely to have forgotten, among them that computers were never really developed with writing in mind -- as their very name suggests, they were made with mathematical considerations as paramount -- and that the seemingly transparent Microsoft Word software so many of us use was preceded by clunky, complex predecessors like WordStar, WordPerfect, and MS-DOS. And yet, within a generation, it's possible to take a laptop out of a box, plug it in, and get to work. Literally child's play. Though he notes that the impact of computing on education is no more clear than that of the typewriter, he nevertheless concludes that "because of computers, people are writing more, they are creating new genres of writing [Baron includes discussion of instant messaging and blogs, among other kinds]; and they have more control over what they write and how it is distributed."
If there's one aspect of the modern world that gets stinted here, it's the interface of written communication with other media. These days text is only one component of digital experience that includes sound and image, and there's some reason to think that text will someday be a junior partner in this mix. Barron does at one point consider visual images in the chapter on the problem of authentication (there's a witty discussion of an image juxtaposing Abraham Lincoln and Marilyn Monroe, with observations that Lincoln would unlikely to be looking away from Monroe and the Monroe's taste ran toward Democratic politicians), but no real reckoning with the growing use of video online that in some cases is actually replacing print, as in how-to manuals that show rather than tell, or journalism that owes its media lineage more to television than newspapers. If it seems unlikely that written communication will ever disappear from human civilization, it's by no means clear that it will retain its prominence, any more than voice mail will survive the age of instant messaging.
I found myself in reading this book thinking about it as a book: it is an artifact no less than a chronicle. At one point I wondered if it might have worked better as a series of blog entries than a bound volume, especially because it lacks an entirely satisfying sense of narrative cohesion. But in its thematic unity and burnished prose, A Better Pencil embodies and honors its hard-copy heritage. Anchored in the past while looking to the future, its message both reflects and transcends its medium.
Jeffrey Gaab: Review of Eric Kurlander's Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (Yale, 2009)
[Jeffrey Gaab is Professor of History and chairperson of the Technology Studies
January 30, 1933 did not mark the end of political discourse in Germany. Eric Kurlander in Living with Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich illuminates how, liberal democrats at least, continued to publish and debate their political ideas throughout Hitler’s twelve year reign. As long as they did not oppose the regime too vigorously (which they did not), Kurlander, Associate Professor of History at Stetson University, demonstrates that liberal democrats even enjoyed a remarkable amount of personal and professional freedom in Hitler’s Germany.
Liberal democrats, members of the German Democratic Party (DDP), acquiesced in the accession of Hitler and the NSDAP to power. Exhausted by years of weak and ineffective Weimar governments, Kurlander observes that liberal democrats embraced Hitler’s government because it shared many of the same goals of the D.D.P.’s “Naumannite philosophy,” including Friedrich Naumann’s advocacy of a “national-social” form of German government. In fact, liberal democrats supported a German dominated Central Europe (Mitteleuropa) and common economic market.
Liberal Democrats, and most Germans, hated and despised the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany in 1919, and they supported Hitler’s efforts to revise it. As Kurlander points out, “German parity in armaments, regaining the Saarland from France, re-militarizing the Rhineland, achieving union with Austria, revising the eastern borders with Poland, and recovering German minorities abroad” were all goals espoused by the DDP throughout the Weimar Republic. Even before 1933, they advocated “restoring German sovereignty over Danzig and the Polish corridor.” Thus, Kurlander writes, Democrats shared an “ideological continuum” with the National Socialists. At least in foreign affairs, Hitler’s plans did not seem all that distasteful to them.
Unfortunately, they also seemed to share an ideological continuum with Nazi racial and Jewish policies. Kurlander observes that the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty caused many democrats to “fall back on a more chauvinist and irredentist vision of Mitteleuropa, a ‘Greater Germany’ that sought the (re) incorporation of Europe’s ethnic Germans, with little regard for their Slavic or Baltic neighbors.” Their attitude to the Nazi’s anti-Semitic Jewish policy, at least up to 1938 and the pogroms of Kristallnacht, seem surprisingly casual. Democrats, writes Kurlander, believed the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Germany’s Jews, “would make it possible for the German people to be able to seek a tolerable relationship with the Jewish people.” He observes that Democrats believed that the “Jewish Question” would be settled by Jewish assimilation into German culture and life. For Democrats, the Nuremberg Laws simply “stabilized the situation.” They, and many Germans, did not realize until it was too late, that the Hitler regime did not want a “tolerable relationship with the Jewish people”; they wanted them gone—and dead.
Kurlander also shows how Democrats strove to help their Jewish colleagues on an individual basis as the regime’s noose slowly closed around them. However, it was only in 1938 and Kristallnacht that some Democrats began to understand the brutal nature of the regime. Among these few was the future president of the Federal Republic of Germany, Theodor Heuss. Even then however, outright opposition to the regime remained “disorganized.” Moreover, Kurlander points out, “most Democrats failed to propose a conceptual alternative to the Nazi ‘Jewish Question.’ ”
Even Democrat feminist activists (to which Kurlander devotes a very informative chapter) found positive aspects in Nazi racial doctrines and policies toward women. For example, the Nazis granted women more rights when seeking a divorce and generally liberalized divorce law, promised more assistance for unwed mothers, and greater maternity leave. Yet, as Kurlander points out, the regime’s goal was more “Aryan children,” not greater freedom for women.
And then came Stalingrad. By 1943 it was clear that Nazi racial policy and foreign policy differed substantially from anything Naumann had proposed or Democrats had ever envisioned. More vicious and nihilistic than anything they could have imagined, Democrats realized too late that the regime they had “engaged” was leading Germany to total ruin and Europe to utter destruction. Some then joined the active resistance or cooperated with the conspirators in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Still, as Kurlander rightly points out, most of those executed after the July 20th assassination attempt were conservative aristocrats or socialists. “Where were the liberals?” he asks.
By then, most liberal democrats had retreated into inner exile and began to conceptualize a Germany after Adolf Hitler. Did Democrats advocate the extermination of whole races of people and the ethnic cleansing of central and eastern Europe? Certainly not. But Kurlander makes clear that Democrats believed they could realize many of their long-held political objectives in the National Socialist regime. He also demonstrates that this was clearly a Faustian bargain that liberal democrats realized only too late.
Confronted with overwhelming evidence of atrocities, and the total destruction of Germany and Europe, Democrats began to rethink their long held Mitteleuropa philosophy. After Stalingrad, but especially after the total capitulation of the nation in May 1945, Democrats (West Germany’s future political elites) began to espouse a “post-nationalist, pan-European peace” that would include a Germany that “accepted the commonalities in all peoples”. Democrats transformed their Naumannite “national social” philosophy from a German dominated central Europe, into a paradigm for a European dominated Germany. Thus, the underlying philosophy of the post-war Federal Republic was born. Kurlander writes that “Naumann’s malleable concepts now came to define a liberal vision of European community.”
Eric Kurlander’s Living with Hitler illuminates the ideological transformation that middle class Democrats experienced as a result of their political engagement with the Third Reich. This transformation was crucial to the survival of democracy in Germany after 1945.
Extremely well written, and very well documented, Eric Kurlander has provided us with not just another book about political parties in Hitler’s Germany. Rather, Living with Hitler also provides us with yet another perspective on how democracy thrived in post-war Germany against seemingly overwhelming odds.
Robert Parmet : Review of Constance Rosenblum's Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in The Bronx (New York University Press, 2009)
[Robert Parmet is Professor of History at York College of the City College of New York.]
After having grown up on Walton Avenue in the Bronx, N.Y., three blocks west of the Grand Concourse, I can emphatically say that Constance Rosenblum is correct. It was indeed a source of great pride to have resided near that magnificent thoroughfare in the 1950s. “The Concourse,” as it was called, was where worldly Bronxites viewed foreign films at the Ascot Theater, Hollywood productions at the Loew’s Paradise, under a ceiling sprinkled with stars, and purchased affordable but eminently respectable clothes at Alexander’s department store. It was also the showplace of the West Bronx, with broad roadways, Art Deco apartment buildings, and splashy Memorial Day parades. To the south was the massive Bronx County Courthouse, overlooking 161st Street and Yankee Stadium, where the lords of baseball reigned supreme.
As attractive as these features were, the Concourse neighborhood was where a working-class Jewish family such as mine could live in decency. An automobile was not a necessity, because there was ample public transportation, including two subway lines four blocks from each other. Then, too, there were synagogues on and just off the boulevard, and excellent public schools on all levels. It seemed ideal, and in Boulevard of Dreams, Constance Rosenblum has captured its spirit.
In addition, she has added names and faces and imparted a human touch, with numerous black-and-white archival photographs. Here one can see engineer Louis Risse, the engineer who designed the Grand Concourse, as well as Gerald McQueen, an usher at the Loew’s Paradise, and African American women awaiting job offers on a street corner in what came to be known as the “Bronx Slave Market,” located just off the boulevard. “Hired by the white, mostly Jewish matrons of West Bronx,” these women were household workers, and virtually the only blacks in the area. Almost all of the broad thoroughfare, Rosenblum notes, “during most of its existence . . . was off limits to blacks in virtually every respect. . . . Along the Grand Concourse . . . resistance to minorities was notorious.” Amidst the grandeur of the stately Concourse Plaza Hotel, Andrew Freedman Home and Theodore Roosevelt apartments, this “slave market” endured into the 1950s.
A social and economic history of the West Bronx as well as the thoroughfare, Boulevard of Dreams contains relatively few political names, but is loaded with architectural, entrepreneurial, literary, entertainment, and celebrity figures. The long list includes former residents such as architects Israel Crausman, Horace Ginsbern, and John Eberson, developer Logan Billingsley, novelists Theodore Dreiser, E. L. Doctorow and Avery Corman, singer Eydie Gorme and film director Stanley Kubrick. In addition, it features urban builder Abraham Kazan and “power broker” Robert Moses, whose creations, Co-Op City and the Cross Bronx Expressway, respectively, contributed to the decline of the West Bronx, beginning in the late 1950s. New apartments to the north, increasing crime rates, and bulldozed neighborhoods, as well as destructive public and private attitudes, led to the “abandonment” of the previously glorious Grand Concourse.
Rosenblum concludes her book on a cautiously optimistic note. Hoping for the area to rebound, she identifies recent revitalization efforts, including the reclamation of the Loew’s Paradise and the construction of the new Yankee Stadium. However, she also reports that “everyone agrees [there is] a long and arduous journey ahead, particularly given the economic upheavals that began in 2008.”
Despite this difficult task, pride in the Grand Concourse and West Bronx remains alive. This affectionate volume will help keep it that way by serving as a tangible reminder of what is very much saving and restoring in the Bronx. There was and still is something special about that “boulevard of dreams.” The ethnicity of the dreamers may have changed, but the hopes have not.
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