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Book Editors: Ron Briley, Jim Cullen, Murray Polner, Luther Spoehr

This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.

If you would like to tell the editors about a new book (even your own) that addresses the concerns of HNN -- current events and history -- or would like to write a review, please send us an email: editor@historynewsnetwork.org.

Reviews

Jim Cullen, Review of "Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America" (Oxford, 2010)
Larry DeWitt, Review of Alan Brinkley's "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" (Oxford, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of "Lit: A Memoir," by Mary Karr (Harper, 2009)
Murray Polner. Review of Yehuda Bauer's The Death of the Shtetl (Yale University Press, 2009)
Murray Polner. Review of Stephen J. Taylor, Acts of Conscience: WWII, Mental Institutions and Religious Objectors (Syracuse University Press, 2009)
Jack Ross. Review of Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Jim Cullen, Review of "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son" (Harper, 2009)
Jim Cullen, Review of "Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture" by Paul Gilroy (Harvard University Press, 2010)
Ron Briley reviews Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Jim Cullen, Review of "Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance" by Michael Goldfarb (Simon & Schuster, 2009)
James G. Ryan. Review of Hirosoki Kuromiya's Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s (Yale University Press, 2007)
Kirk Bane: Review of "The Searchers" by Edward Buscombe (BFI, 2008)
Wesley Hogan. Reviews Kimberly L. Metcalfe, ed., In Sisterhood: The History of Camp 2 of the Alaska Native Sisterhood (Juneau, Alaska: Hazy Island Books, 2008)
Ron Briley: Review of William L. O'Neill, A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001
Jim Cullen: Review of "Wolf Hall: A Novel" by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 2009)
Jim Cullen: Review of Ken Auletta's "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It" (Penguin, 2009)
Ron Briley reviews Robert V. Wells's Life Flows On in Endless Song (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
Luther Spoehr: Review of John Milton Cooper's Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (Knopf, 2009)
Tony Platt: Review of Douglas Cazaux Sackman's Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America
Renee Romano. Review of Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor's Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

Jim Cullen, Review of "Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America" (Oxford, 2010)

Posted on Monday, February 8, 2010 at 2:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Larry DeWitt, Review of Alan Brinkley's "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" (Oxford, 2010)

Source: Special to HNN (2-4-10)

[Mr. DeWitt is a public historian and a doctoral student in public policy history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the principal editor of Social Security: A Documentary History (Washington, D. C., Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008)]. This is a surprisingly slight book, especially for a biography of Franklin Roosevelt, whose biographies tend to approach four-digit page lengths. This slim little volume (in a 5” x 8” format) contains fewer than 100 pages (99 to be exact), yet it aspires to survey the entirety of Roosevelt’s life and career. Although I suppose one cannot help but be impressed by a book whose entire table of contents consists of only four entries: Preface; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Notes; Bibliography.

Slight or not, one might well think that Brinkley has some explaining to do: we might expect some justification for yet another biography of our 32nd president. In a fleeting stroke of understatement, Brinkley says only: “There is no lack of biographies of Roosevelt. At least four have been published in the last five years alone.” (pg. xii) Well yes, and so why a fifth? Brinkley does not say. By the way, I can count at least 15 biographies of FDR published in the last year-and-a-half alone, to join the untold number still in print, plus at least three more that have appeared since he penned his Preface in June of 2009 (not all of them in Brinkley’s league, to be sure, and not all of them comprehensive). His publisher, Oxford University Press, claims it as “the only short biography of FDR on the market” and advises booksellers that: “This title will appeal to individuals with an interest in general and American History, as well as those wishing to compare the achievements of FDR and Obama during their first years in office.” Egad. One can only hope that no actual reader will attempt to use this book in such a puerile way.

The book consists of only a single chapter, subdivided into topical “chapterlets.” There is a two-page intro and a two-page conclusion; sandwiched in between are overviews of: FDR’s early personal life and his marriage to Eleanor; his early career during the Wilson administration; his polio; his emergence in New York state politics; his presidential campaign; the New Deal (three “chapterlets”); World War II (also three “chapterlets”); Roosevelt and Churchill; a section on African Americans, the internments and the problem Jewish refugees (2 pages); and the third-term and his death. All the usual suspects have been rounded up.

There is nothing here that isn’t already well-known to most historians; although some readers may find a few tidbits that they hadn’t known, or had forgotten. I hadn’t known, for example, that while serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson that FDR had some role in a covert Navy sting operation designed to ferret out and arrest homosexuals who were cruising in the area around the Newport, Rhode Island naval base. I also didn’t know that the Philadelphia Eagles football team was named the “Eagles” during the New Deal in honor of the blue-eagle symbol of the National Recovery Administration (That tidbit of history might well frost the noses of some of the Philly fans in the stands at Lincoln Financial Field!).

But the chief value of this latest biography of FDR is not that it tells us something new, but mainly that it tells the broad-brush story of FDR’s era in a brief and accessible way. Alan Brinkley is without question a master historian, and one who knows this period (the New Deal) as well as any. His writing is always insightful and deeply informed. But readers accustomed to the kind of complex policy history that one finds in his The End of Reform, or the kind of rich political and intellectual history one finds in his Liberalism and its Discontents, or even the colorful portraiture of interesting political actors and social history one finds in his Voices of Protest, will discover a very different genre being exercised here. Frankly, the book looks and reads more like the publication of an honorary lecture given on some suitable academic occasion.

If there is an overarching theme to Brinkley’s biography, he states it in his second paragraph:

“So powerful was his impact on the world he led through the twentieth century’s darkest years that the literal truth of his life often seemed less important than the powerful image he created . . . Even decades later, public figures across the ideological spectrum try to seize a piece of his legacy—even at times to justify efforts to dismantle it—without much concern about who Roosevelt was or what he actually did. He has become a figure of myth: a man for all seasons, all parties, and all ideologies.” (pg. 2)

Jim Cullen, Review of "Lit: A Memoir," by Mary Karr (Harper, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (2-2-10)

Posted on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Murray Polner. Review of Yehuda Bauer's The Death of the Shtetl (Yale University Press, 2009)

So what was a shtetl? The heartbreaking and exhilarating play “Fiddler on the Roof”? Not according to Yehuda Bauer, who calls the play a “distorted bowderlized” version of a story by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. “[I]n this sickeningly sweet, made-up world of Eastern Jewry, all Jews were deeply religious, naïve and clever, and the shtetl was a place where goodness and ethical uprightness ruled”

This fake nostalgia – so warm and fuzzy to the children and grandchildren whose ancestors long ago fled East European shtetlach (plural in Yiddish)--was more realistically portrayed by writers such as Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch and Y.L. Peretz and later, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Their writings depicted the joys of course but also the poverty, misery, superstition, religious fanaticism, as well as sharp class distinctions of Jews and non-Jews alike. Lording over them were malevolent governments and pervasive anti-Semitism.

According to Bauer, one of the preeminent scholars of the mass murder of Polish, Byelorussian and Ukrainian Jews during WWII, professor emeritus of Holocaust studies at Hebrew University and author of “Rethinking the Holocaust” (2001), shtetlach were small townships with 1,000-15,000 Jews, where the Jewish calendar and customs “derived from a traditional interpretation” of Judaism. From these hamlets, villages and small towns sprang the joyous faith of Hasidism and its anti-Orthodox opponents, followers of left and right Zionism and communists, socialists, and secularism, most of whom would die not in German concentration camps but instead were executed by the Germans and their very willing Polish, Baltic. Byelorussian and Ukrainian partners. The fact is, one-third of the three million Jews living in Poland on the eve of the German invasion in 1939 were killed by them.

What Bauer attempts to do and then does exceedingly well, is to try to explain and understand how these Jews in eastern Poland, and western Belorussia and the Ukraine lived before the mass slaughterers arrived and how they reacted in the face of such unprecedented sadism From available documents including Polish and Soviet archives and unpublished Yad Vashem material he examines nine representative shtetlach, where, in 1941-42, about twenty-five percent of all victims of the Holocaust lived and died.

Before the German invasion, Poland’s economy was in a near-ruinous state and its political life dominated by extreme nationalists and a traditionally anti-Semitic Catholic Church—though there was always a minority that rejected the accepted anti-Semitism. Indeed, the Church’s prewar primate and archbishop of Cracow approved the government’s anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist, pro-fascist policies. So extreme were the nationalists in their views that, coupled with a long-established Polish Catholic Church’s loathing of Jews and Judaism, they came close to mirroring the racism of neighboring Germany, whose Nazis couldn’t abide the Poles. Jews were unable to escape the Eastern European world of ethnic and religious hatreds by acculturating because the overwhelming number of their fellow Poles rejected them. It was no surprise then that soon after the start of WWII, Poles encouraged by the local Catholic clergy, carried out a pogrom in a shtetl called Jedwabne. And after the German armies arrived, it was no different in the Baltic states, Belorussia and the Ukraine, where the local collaborators and executioners thrived.

What sealed their fate and was a central factor in the mass murders, as Bauer writes, was “the attitude of the host populations.” While there were always non-Jews who would not participate in the killings—“there were rescuers even in Jedwabne,” write Bauer. Still, saviors were few and far between. The Baltic nations, so beloved by postwar American cold warriors and their politicized “Captive Nations Week,” generally welcomed the Germans and became fervent collaborators. Ukrainians, many of whom worked with the Nazis, provided huge numbers of police and concentration camp guards and helped carry out the murders.

There were always rescuers, some of whom have been honored by Yad Vashem, the memorial museum in Jerusalem as “truly heroic figures.” Bauer mentions Old Believers and assorted individuals who for many reasons risked their lives and that of their families to shelter Jews, some for money, political beliefs or religious convictions. Bauer, however, offers a caveat: “Lest I give the wrong impression of a multitude of rescuers, let me note that that the number of [shtetl] survivors from Zborow was thirty-three” --of an original several thousand.” And Zborow was no different from other shtetlachs.

Some were saved by erstwhile German Communists who had hidden their party membership and were in the Wehrmacht. Many young Jews saved themselves by fleeing into the forests and joining Soviet partisans, not all of whom welcomed them but needed them, if only temporarily, to kill Germans and their allies. (Soviet anti-Semitism would flourish after the war) Some few managed to live to tell the tale but recognized that it was merely chance that allowed them to live. All came close to death. “Some of them thought it had been the work of God, but most knew better: the same God, if he existed, had failed to protect their loved ones.”

What we now refer to as the Holocaust consumed millions of people, mainly Jews but also gypsies (Roma people), homosexuals, political opponents, and one and a half million children. It is fair to ask why did Nazi racial theory and hatred of Jews lead to such unparalleled mass killings. And who were the responsible parties? The first query is impossible to answer definitively. Since then we have seen mass, directed killings in Cambodia, the Congo and Rwanda and elsewhere. After the war, denials of responsibility came from the enormous number of onetime Nazi loyalists in Austria, Romania,and East Europe. Then was it only Hitler and his inner circle? The fact is, Bauer rightly concludes, “the vast majority of Germans, both in Germany and in the German forces in the USSR, were in agreement with the policies of their government.” In Christopher Browning’s fine work, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, “ordinary German working men, helped along by ordinary Ukrainians, Belorussians, Baltics and Poles” were the executioners,” --“willing executioners” (to borrow from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s apt phrase) -- who shot 38,000 Jewish men, women and children and dispatched another 45,000 to Treblinka. Still, and worth remembering, is that “ordinary men” who refused to join Battalion 101 and carry out orders to kill were excused and allowed to return home. In somewhat parallel situations, Danes and Bulgarians who refused to allow the Germans to deport their fellow Jewish citizens to the death camps also went unpunished and are today hailed for their courage.

By July 1944, when the Soviet armies on their way to Berlin arrived, there were pitifully few Jews left alive. The shtetl was dead.

Posted on Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Murray Polner. Review of Stephen J. Taylor, Acts of Conscience: WWII, Mental Institutions and Religious Objectors (Syracuse University Press, 2009)

By 1943, Frank Olmstead of the War Resisters League had turned sharply critical of World War II’s Civilian Public Service Camps and what he contended was the pointless work assigned to Conscientious Objectors. While briefly volunteering in a mental institution he approached a closed door. “I have been in storms at sea, in train wrecks, and in Moscow during the Bolshevik revolution, but I have never had quite the feeling that I had when I turned from that locked door to face three hundred insane incontinents.”

He was not unlike the intrepid 19th Century reporter Nelly Bly who faked her condition and entered a New York City mental institution and then described her experience in her best-selling book Ten Days in a Mad-House. Many decades later, in 1948, Hollywood’s Snake Pit discovered mental institutions when Olivia de Havilland portrayed a wife dispatched into the hell of an asylum. Despite excellent reviews, it did little to change governmental and popular indifference.

To their lasting credit, 3,000 COs also chose to reject what they regarded as senseless work assigned them in CPS and instead work with mentally-ill patients in state asylums (many also opted to serve as human guinea pigs in medical and scientific experiments). “The idea of CPS mental hospital units came from COs at two AFSC Forest Service camps in Massachusetts who wanted to do more socially significant work,” writes Steven J. Taylor, Centennial Professor of Disability Studies at Syracuse University. COs like these were then able to document the wretched conditions they observed, let alone occasional ruthless mistreatment. One photo in the book displays a metal pipe used by non-CO attendants to maintain control of patients.

“Harsh treatment and brutality were commonplace at many mental hospitals and training schools and offended the pacifist sensibilities of many COs,” notes Taylor, a phenomena that ironically “challenged the[ir] pacifist beliefs.” How to control violent mental patients attacking other patients, attendants or even themselves? Some pacifists chose to “turn the other cheek,” but others simply left or “came to a position that distinguished between unacceptable violence, on the one hand, and acceptable force or nonviolent coercion, on the other,” only blurring the distinction. Still, many tried to be true to their nonviolent faith, and as one report put it about those who stayed, “even when dealing with a group of people who were mentally incompetent, the philosophy of love practiced in all human relations, was both practical and achieved the best results”

When COs Philip Steer, Leonard Edelstein, Willard Hetzel and Harold Barton tried to establish an organization to seriously alter the way mentally ill patients were treated it “failed to have a lasting impact on mental health and developmental disabilities,” writes Taylor, just as Snake Pit failed to generate any widespread popular attempt to humanize asylums. Yet the COs were able to pass on what they had seen and learned to Eleanor Roosevelt, who visited CPS mental hospitals and praised and publicized the COs. Albert Deutsch, of the adless leftwing newspaper PM, made the mentally ill his beat and picked up their findings. In article after article he concluded that the CO’s exposes were enormously valuable since they were more interested in underlying causes than headlines. “They rarely concentrate on personal scapegoats. Many put the blame where it rightly belongs—on calloused state executives, penny-pinching legislatures and an apathetic and ill-informed public.”

Steven Taylor has written a seminal book about a subject largely ignored. Acts of Conscience honors these forgotten WWII COs, as much a part of the “Greatest Generation” as anyone else.

Originally published in Fellowship magazine, www.forusa.org

Posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 11:58 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jack Ross. Review of Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)

[Jack Ross is author of a forthcoming book on American Jewish anti-Zionism]

If the conservative and libertarian intellectual communities are to be believed, we are presently experiencing an Ayn Rand renaissance. The radical socialist (or corporatist, depending on who you ask) agenda of Barack Obama, symbolized by bank bailouts and stimulus bills, has aroused a great populist upsurge in defense of the creative individual – Atlas Shrugged, they say, has finally come to pass. Indeed, it has not been uncommon to see placards at Tea Party protests asking “Who is John Galt?” and other slogans lifted from Rand’s novels. So is the Rand Revolution now coming to pass?

At the very least, it makes extremely timely the new biography of Rand by University of Virginia associate professor Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market. Historically speaking, Professor Burns does a remarkable service by shedding light on Ayn Rand’s long-neglected early career, where under the tutelage of the anti-New Deal columnist Isabel Paterson she became an active booster for Wendell Willkie and aspired to be nothing less than the laissez-faire answer to John Steinbeck. This sets the scene for an Ayn Rand much closer to the political mainstream than her reputation has suggested. She moved on to be equally enthusiastic for Barry Goldwater and, according to Burns, securing the place of modern libertarianism on the American right, as opposed to the radical fringes of left or right.

This thesis of Burns has vast implications for the recent history of American politics, which she only begins to grapple with. Just prior to the rise of the Tea Party movement, libertarianism as an ideology was given its most visible platform yet in the phenomenal presidential campaign of Ron Paul. Yet many self-described libertarians were disquieted by the dramatic rise of Ron Paul, whom they considered a throwback to the retrograde libertarianism of Murray Rothbard, who invariably sought alliances with the new left and with the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan. Paul, for his part, makes no secret of his strong preference for Rothbard over Rand.

Burns convincingly argues that, historically speaking, Rand’s influence far outweighed that of Rothbard. Even when, to Rothbard’s profound delight, the libertarians of Young Americans for Freedom walked out of the organization over the question of the draft in 1969, they roundly rejected his call to enter the antiwar movement full force and instead looked to Rand, who remained an unbowed Cold War hawk and counseled that the destiny of libertarianism was still tied to the destiny of the Republican Party. Moreover, Burns brings the weight of archival evidence to bear in demonstrating that Rothbard was never considered a serious figure by most other libertarians, and that most references to him were in the form of attacking his views.

This teaches us much about the present political fortunes of libertarianism. The Ron Paul phenomenon was almost entirely attributable to the issue of war and peace, specifically the widespread feeling in the second half of 2007 that the new Democratic congress had betrayed the antiwar sentiment which swept them into office. Since the election of Obama, Rand, not Rothbard, has been the guiding light of right-libertarian protest, and Randian hawkishness has been only too compatible with the feeling of Glenn Beck’s followers that the Muslims are boring from within. If Ron Paul was the Gene McCarthy of the right, then the Tea Parties have been the Days of Rage that followed.

In the promotion of her book, Burns has even said on more than one occasion that the sharp decline of the Christian right in the last five years has augured well for the enduring legacy of Ayn Rand on the American right, with economic arguments now becoming its modus vivendi. But Burns makes no attempt at all to assess the potential pitfalls of this reality. The analogy to the era of the new left is instructive, as the Tea Party movement, if the reputation of its titular leader Sarah Palin is any indication, could prove no less politically toxic to the center of American politics. Writers ranging from Michael Lind to Walter Russell Mead have argued the striking similarities between our own time and the first Nixon Administration, with Lind very plainly declaring that “the teabaggers are the Yippies of the right.”

Conservative boosters in the early weeks of 2010 will no doubt have a simple two-word answer to this warning – Scott Brown. But Brown’s election might well prove to be the most dramatic indicator yet of the analogy between the two eras and the two movements. In 1969, the upset re-election of John Lindsay, who was closely identified with the new left, as Mayor of New York, was seen by liberals as the ultimate repudiation of the notion that Nixon had ushered in a new majority. But this betrayed a gross misreading of the returns: Lindsay had only been elected with a 43% plurality against two conservative Italian Catholics, and moreover was able to keep the increasingly rightward-drifting Jewish vote by running on the Liberal Party line.

In a similar vein, Scott Brown was only able to pull off his upset against a candidate who was both exceptionally hapless and had a remarkably extreme position on abortion in 50% Catholic Massachusetts. But like the Lindsay liberals of 1969, the Republicans give no sign whatsoever that they will learn the right lessons of this victory, convinced that the country is truly in a great popular uproar over health care legislation. Indeed, the Republicans have made the fateful turn of believing their own propaganda in their embrace of the Tea Party movement. In ultimately fooling itself most of all, the American right has been ably assisted by Ayn Rand.

Posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 8:25 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son" (Harper, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (1-26-10)

Posted on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of "Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture" by Paul Gilroy (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Source: Special to HNN (1-25-10)

[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003). He blogs at American History Now.]

Over the course of the past two decades, Paul Gilroy has emerged as a highly influential international scholar of "the Black Atlantic" -- the title of a landmark study he published in 1995. A product of the Centre for Contemporary Studies at Birmingham University in the UK -- the so-called "Birmingham School" -- Gilroy has become a renowned chronicler of the black diaspora as both a transnational event in the history of racism and an ongoing struggle for post-colonial emancipation. So it seems appropriate that his latest book, Darker than Blue, would be published under the imprimatur of Harvard University Press as part of the university's W.E.B. DuBois Lecture Series. It's in this context that I say the book showcases the impressive strengths of this interdisciplinary discourse as well as some its glaring weaknesses. As an experience in reading, Darker than Blue is perplexingly fragmented: striking insights mingle with inadequately supported assertions, garbled prose and a vision that seems surprisingly parochial.

This decidedly mixed quality is typified by the first of the book's three essays, "Get Free or Die Tryin,'" which tweaks the title Get Rich or Die Tryin,' a 2003 film and album starring 50 Cent. The piece rests on an arresting fact that Gilroy cites but does not document (in footnotes that are often intriguing but not particularly well aligned with the text): that African Americans constitute roughly 12% of the U.S. population but constitute about 30% of the domestic automotive market, spending close to $40 billion annually. This prompts Gilroy to make a cultural excursion on the implications of African Americans' century-long romance with cars. His analysis here is often both nimble and deeply provocative, as he uses figures ranging from bell hooks to Ralph Ellison (and an honorable mention of Rosa Parks and the unsung heroes who ran the driving pool at the Montgomery Bus Boycott) to note both the liberating, but, more decisively, geopolitically problematic, consequences of that obsession in terms of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, climate change, and other issues.

Gilroy makes the shrewd decision here to focus considerable attention on the music of Chuck Berry, whose artistry in capturing the complexity of American automotive culture is unparalleled. He portrays Berry as a proto-Marxist critic in songs like "Maybellene" and "No Money Down," which is fair enough. But he sidesteps the Berry who celebrated the (imperial) joys of the American Century as it crested in songs like "Back in the USA," a (guilty) pleasure if there ever was one: "Did I miss the skyscrapers did I miss the long freeway? . . . I'm so glad I'm livin' in the USA." Berry's deserved reputation rests at least as much on the sensuous joys of the consumerism he celebrates as it does the capitalist ideology he critiques.

Throughout the book, Gilroy expresses dismay that the emancipatory effects of black popular culture have curdled into decadence: "The contemporary contrast between Kanye West's ironic appetite for branded finery and 50 Cent's scarred, muscular Republican frame prompts us to ask: Where can [Curtis] Mayfield's dignity and seriousness have gone?" An interesting question, but a bit problematic for a discourse, which, however stretched and textured, finally rests on a foundation of dialectical materialism. It hardly seems surprising that those who experience any lessening of their oppression would choose to cash in on their freedom, whether it's inside or outside the borders of the American empire.

Such reservations aside, Gilroy is notably informed and insightful in his readings of popular music, which include Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix. But all too often this book is written in academese that's dense to the point of impenetrable in ways that suggest laziness more than sophistication. I've read it a number of times now, and still can't make sense of this description of a Primo Levi's work: "It [the referent is not clear whether Gilroy is speaking of a specific essay or the book in which it appears] lies at the centre of his exploration of civilisation's inner tensions and the implication of decivilising racial tensions that are not to be dialectically resolved into a reconfigured narrative of progress." Or this passage from the same Gilroy piece on human rights: "the racialisation of war and law is retained as an overspecialized topic relevant only to a few exceptional places characterized by openly racialised polities and forms of citizenship that, in turn, institutionalize the patterns of exclusionary inclusion which race hierarchy facilitates and renders acceptable." At times like these, and there are many of them, one wishes Gilroy would take a page from Marley and write in a vernacular language more redolent of the people for whom he presumes to speak.

This insularity extends to asides and allusions whose meaning and interpretation Gilroy takes for granted. He complains that liberal intellectuals tend to celebrate western European contributions to Human Rights, refusing to consider the colonialism that spread in tandem with this self-congratulatory discourse; he criticizes "scholars worthy of the name [who] would never raise the topic of racism as an object of inquiry." But few liberals I've encountered fail to raise it. Racially-based analysis hardly seems lacking in any number of disciplines in the academy, which in recent decades has also witnessed the growth of Africana studies as a discrete discipline, along with the concomitant appearance of scholars like Michael Eric Dyson and Tricia Rose on cable news programs (not to mention Gilroy's own institutional perches at places like Yale and the London School of Economics, where he currently teaches).

Near the bedrock of this book is a generational lament, "an acute sense of being bereft of responsible troubadours," as Gilroy puts it near the start of the book's final essay. The world has changed, and the issues he cares about are not necessarily as central as they once were, even among blacks who have sold their soul (or chosen a president). Gilroy legitimately criticizes the standard conservative response to anti-racist demands that "we should all become resigned to racial orders because they are natural kinds and therefore a permanent, significant, and immutable aspect of human social and political life." But does he really think that the somewhat diffuse anti-colonial project he advocates will actually bring about an unprecedented world of perfect social justice? No: He does not "argue naively for a world without hierarchy, but practically for a world free of that particular hierarchy which has accomplished untold wrongs." Fair enough. But given that there are manifold others -- hierarchies of gender, and intelligence, and physical appearance and the like that are simultaneously within and beyond the reach of social redress -- it is perhaps not surprising or inappropriate that collective gazes may shift over time.

Nor is it surprising or inappropriate that those gazes linger on approaches other than the one he advocates. The subtitle of this book invokes "the moral economies" of Black Atlantic culture. Though never explicitly explained, the core of that morality is apparently egalitarian, adapted with supple postmodern skill from a notably plastic template of Marxism. Yet Gilroy glancingly at best acknowledges other moral economies, like organized religion, which, like Marxism, have done much evil in the world, but which also have occasionally done an immense amount of good by way of defining egalitarianism in a somewhat different way. Christianity gave the Black Atlantic slavery, but it also gave us King. No Allah, no Malcolm. No Exodus, no Exodus. One could argue that a history without colonialism would have rendered such blessings unnecessary. But the hurts of history are inescapable, and their balm can never be entirely political. Here I would point to the example of Cornel West, who whatever nuances he would surely apply to this observation, is nevertheless more attuned to the spiritual dimension of modern life than Gilroy is.

But as Gilroy suggests in the closing pages of Darker than Blue, such arguments are increasingly beside the point. A millennial wind is blowing, one hard to ignore wherever one stands. Gilroy understandably welcomes the prospect of sunset for Western global hegemony. I'd be interested to know how he regards the moral economies of a Confucian order, and how he imagines the wretched of the earth will fare under it.

Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 10:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ron Briley reviews Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Recent memory of student radicalism in the 1960s tends to focus upon the 1969 split within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which led to formation of the Weather Underground. The division within the ranks of the student movement culminated in a Weather Underground bombing campaign and the loss of the high moral ground once occupied by student activists striving for civil rights, participatory democracy, economic justice, and ending the Vietnam War. The Weather Underground was denounced by former SDS leader turned professor Todd Gitlin as well as 2008 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who attempted to link Barack Obama with former Weather member Bill Ayers and terrorism. Even former Weather leader Mark Rudd issued an apology for the group’s tactics in his recent memoir. But as Robert Cohen reminds us in his fine biography of Mario Savio and history of the University of California, Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM), there is considerably more to the radical legacy of the 1960s than the Weather Underground.
Cohen, who teaches history at New York University and chairs the school’s Steinhardt School of Education, argues that the eloquent Savio framed the rebellion of the 1960s in the broadest of terms with his 2 December 1964 speech, “Bodies Upon the Gears.” Calling upon Berkeley students to engage in acts of civil disobedience by occupying Sproul Hall, Savio urged them to place their sacrifices and struggles within the context of the civil rights movement and those battling for self determination and democracy. Suggesting that the corporate university was part of a bureaucratic state stifling the individual, Savio proclaimed:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Cohen concludes that the machine speech was “at bottom a passionate moral summons to stop evil” (178-179).
Thus, Cohen argues that Savio was a spokesperson for an idealistic crusade to assure that the promise of American life was available to all citizens. Cohen agrees with Savio’s view that the social movements of the 1960s “championed new freedoms, opening the American mind by pushing it into questioning the racism, sexism, homophobia, and imperialism that had predominated for so long” (12). Although Savio suffered from personal problems which forced him to withdraw from activism for much of the 1970s, Cohen chronicles that in the 1980s and 1990s Savio regained his voice and was championing democratic rights and freedoms when he died from a heart condition in 1996. Accordingly, for Savio and many in his generation the 1960s were “a seedbed for a lifelong commitment to a more democratic and egalitarian social vision and a nonviolent America” (313).
Savio, however, was a strange choice to lead such a crusade at an elite institution such as Berkeley, but his story exemplifies the possibilities of a more egalitarian society. Mario Savio was born 8 December 1942 to a working-class Italian-American family in New York City. Savio’s father pushed his son toward assimilation, while his mother hoped that Mario would become a Catholic priest. Savio was deeply influenced by Catholicism, and he tended to perceive the world in moralistic terms even after he left the faith for its rigidity and dogmatism. As a young man, Savio, noted for his oratory during the 1960s, struggled with stuttering and a speech impediment; perhaps the product of childhood sexual abuse by a family relative which Savio was reluctant to discuss. The essentially shy Savio was no student rebel during his high school days, focusing upon his studies in science and entering the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
In the fall of 1960, Savio entered Manhattan College. While his father wished to see Mario become an engineer, the young student was increasingly drawn to the study of Greek philosophy and was restive at a Catholic institution. He transferred to Queens College the following year, and in 1963 he followed his parents to California, enrolling at Berkeley and pursing a major in philosophy. Savio became connected with the activist community at Berkeley and participated in several civil rights demonstrations. His first arrest was during a sit-in protesting the racial hiring practices of the San Francisco Sheraton Palace Hotel. He was especially drawn to the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Savio volunteered for the 1964 SNCC Freedom Summer project in Mississippi. Savio’s experience registering blacks to vote in Mississippi was crucial to his political development, but Cohen maintains that Savio's commitment to social justice was already well documented before his pilgrimage to the South.
In the fall of 1964, Savio returned to Berkeley determined to complete his degree and work for civil rights in the Bay Area. Little did he realize that efforts by the Berkeley administration to alter the rules by which political advocacy could be disseminated at the Bancroft strip, which was technically viewed as being off campus, fostered a semester of discontent on the campus. Although much of FSM was spontaneous and grass roots-oriented, Savio emerged as a media figure when he climbed atop a police car in Sproul Plaza and urged students to block the arrest of protest leaders. Interestingly enough, Savio’s stuttering seemed to evaporate as he articulated the goals of student protesters against the Berkeley administration. Savio was elected to the FSM Steering and Executive Committees, negotiating with University of California Chancellor Clark Kerr, whom Savio viewed as representing the university as a knowledge factory in service of the corporate state. Although opposed to the cult of personality and advocating democratic leadership, Savio became the public face of the FSM when he was arrested December 7 for attempting to speak at a campus meeting organized by the administration. After finally gaining the support of the faculty, the FSM achieved their speech victory on 8 December 1964. While agreeing with Savio that Kerr often negotiated in bad faith, Cohen laments the growing hostility between liberals and radicals which the right would later exploit.
As for Savio, the triumph of free speech at Berkeley brought troubled times. He was expelled from Berkeley and sentenced to jail for his participation in the Sproul Hall sit-in. Seeking to avoid the glare of publicity, Savio resigned from the FSM, concentrating on his marriage to fellow activist Suzanne Goldberg. As the student movement expanded nationally in response to the escalating Vietnam War, Savio was often silent. While he was opposed to what he considered the imperialistic foreign policy of the United States, Savio was also impatient with the growing dogmatism of the student left. Savio continued to struggle with personal demons, suffering from depression. Drifting from job to job and often hospitalized, his marriage to Goldberg dissolved.
After a season in hell, Savio re-emerged during the 1980s, denouncing the foreign and domestic policies of the Reagan administration. He married again and earned a master’s degree in physics from San Francisco State University. In 1990, he was hired as a lecturer at Sonoma State University. Teaching classes in both the sciences and humanities, Savio also recovered his political voice; opposing state efforts to restrict affirmative action and immigrant rights in California. At the time of his death in 1996, Savio was leading a student revolt against an increase in campus fees. As Cohen notes, Savio died fighting for the democratic and egalitarian values he had championed in the 1960s.
Cohen’s volume is a valuable contribution to the historiography of the 1960s. It restores the voice of Mario Savio to the radical legacy of the 1960s which sought to expand the possibilities of American democracy. The book is well researched in the oral histories of the FSM as well as relying upon insightful interviews conducted by Cohen with Savio’s friends and associates. For access to Savio’s private papers, Cohen enjoyed the cooperation of Savio’s second wife, Lynne Hollander. Cohen also includes a selection of Savio’s speeches and writings from the FSM through his case against Proposition 209 to dismember affirmative action in California. Freedom’s Orator restores Mario Savio to his well deserved place within the political legacy of the 1960s which extends well beyond the exploits of the Weather Underground.

Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 8:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of "Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance" by Michael Goldfarb (Simon & Schuster, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (1-19-10)

Posted on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | Top

James G. Ryan. Review of Hirosoki Kuromiya's Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s (Yale University Press, 2007)

[James G. Ryan is professor of history at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Among his books is Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism (University of Alabama Press).]

“The voices of the dead recovered in this book are,” writes Hiroaki Kuromiya, those of ordinary men and women “who faced unwarranted death in their own desperate ways.” Joseph Stalin, who was certain no one would remember them, condemned them to oblivion. Ironically, his “efforts to extinguish their voices helped preserve them, in the depths of their case files.”

Kuromiya’s book represents a monumental social history achievement. Its methodology will doubtlessly inspire many imitators. The author, a master of many languages, has combed former NKVD (KGB) case files written in Russian and Ukrainian, and different archives compiled in Japanese, German, and English. He notes that we have a fairly accurate picture of the other unnatural deaths of millions during the 1930s in the collectivization of agriculture; dekulakization; famine; and forced labor. The Great Terror of 1937-38, however, has remained “an enigma.” Yet the latter constituted “an extremely concentrated wave of purposeful mass killings” that accounted for “91 percent of all political death sentences handed down between 1921 and 1940.” Stalin “used the Great Terror as a preemptive strike to prepare for war.” He and his close associates “firmly believed until the last days of their lives that the Great Terror was fully justified and that, without it, the Soviet Union would have been beaten in World War II.” The “lives of individuals meant absolutely nothing to Stalin.” Politics and power were absolute; the mass killings of 1937-38 were a purely political expedient.

Kuromiya notes that other authors have attempted to retrieve the voices of the lost. Yet such efforts have invariably related to persons “with at least some degree of fame, who left behind speeches, novels, stories, diaries, and other forms of self-expression.” Because “the vast majority” of Great Terror victims were “utterly unknown,” however, Kuromiya chronicles “workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas [and] beggars.” Heretofore these “ordinary” persons had “attracted the attention of no one outside their own families and relatives.”

Only the author’s creative and insightful use of sources makes this book possible. Whereas during the medieval Inquisition “a notary took down nearly everything a defendant might utter during torture,” by contrast, the “records of the Great Terror appear to be little more than stacks of falsification.” An all-night session might produce only a single page of notes. While retrieving the voices of those who stood their ground and refused to confess is easy, admissions of guilt extracted by force require one to face what Kuromiya (and early modern French historian Natalie Zemon Davis) call “fiction in the archives.” Hence one cannot simply take case files and other police documents “at face value.” The author argues that confessions “written by interrogators and signed by the accused under duress” contain “just enough detail to be credible to the unsuspecting reader.”

Since the “slightest doubt about the Soviet system and its leaders constituted a political crime, formulaic remarks” such as “Stalin’s death will save Russia” and “People live better in the West than in the Soviet Union” were “obviously inserted into interrogation records by the police to lend the confessions credibility.” The sheer repetition of such comments in file after file supports Kuromiya’s assertion. He adds that “no attention was paid to consistency in confessions and testimonies,” therefore “contradictions abound.” For the historian, these flaws “provide the key to retrieving the hushed voices of the arrested.”

Kuromiya’s inventive use of sources goes a step further. Painstakingly, he locates differences between the longhand and typed notes of a confession. “The records of interrogations in which the accused denied the charges were not normally typed up afterwards, because they were not useful.” Furthermore, in nearly all cases the bill of indictment was typed, sometimes falsely stating that the accused had confessed. Missing documents mentioned in such bills often concern police informers and provocateurs, a practice used by security agencies around the world. “From dull and vapid files emerge concrete, individual and varied lives that have been condemned to oblivion.”

Kuromiya mined case files from Kiev because “today’s independent Ukraine allows greater access to information than does Russia.” Kiev also had the advantage of being closer to the Polish border and ethnically diverse, factors which always prompted Stalin’s suspicions. The author chooses several dozen cases at random, except when he encounters women’s names. “Given that women were affected by the Great Terror to a much lesser degree than men, and that women were much less likely to be executed,” he contends that such cases are extreme and possibly more revealing.

Still, cases chosen for this book happen to include persons representing most elements of Stalin’s varied paranoias. They include women who had affairs with foreign diplomats (all diplomats must be spies); informers (the KGB made agents out of compromised persons whom it distrusted, such as priests, yet service to the state did not relieve that distrust); monarchists (“the ultimate anathema, signifying the antithesis of the Soviet regime”; beggars (social parasites); Ukrainian peasants and Kulaks (ubiquitous enemies); Ukrainian folk singers (hidden Ukrainian nationalists); Koreans and Chinese (Japanese agents); persons with links to Germany, Latvia, and Romania (enemies on the borderlands); families divided across borders (sources of spies); and spouses who would not divorce persons accused of political crimes (those who valued private life over civic responsibility).

By filling in gaps in the record with penetrating analyses, thoughtful hypotheses, and speculations built logically on the events and beliefs of the times, Kuromiya brings the reader as close to the true lives of these ordinary people as we are ever likely to get. All of the executed (and some who escaped death) were later rehabilitated by the Soviet government. No relatives received apologies, however, much less compensation.

Posted on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 8:53 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Kirk Bane: Review of "The Searchers" by Edward Buscombe (BFI, 2008)

[Kirk Bane is professor of history at Blinn College in Brenham, Texas.] On May 31, 1956, the Los Angeles Examiner gushed, “The grandeur, the beauty, the sweep and the tragic horror of the newest John Wayne-John Ford classic of the Old West…cannot, with justice, be detailed by mere words. Its scope is simply tremendous. Its motivation spine chillingly grim. Its setting the most starkly beautiful ever seen in a Western film.” Ladies and gentlemen, “The Searchers.” Fifty years on, reviewers and cinephiles still venerate this epic motion picture. In the 2002 Sight and Sound critics’ list of best movies, “The Searchers” ranked number eleven, tied with Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.” And in his exceptional study The Searchers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), film historian Edward Buscombe calls it “a touchstone…one of the great masterpieces of American cinema…one of those films by which Hollywood may be measured.”

Director John Ford’s masterwork featured an outstanding cast, including John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, Henry Brandon, Ken Curtis, Harry Carey, Jr., and Hank Worden. Set in the Lone Star State in 1868, the plot concerns an Indian-hating, scalp-taking former Confederate, Ethan Edwards (Wayne), who spends years tracking the Comanche warriors who brutalized and murdered his family and kidnapped his young niece, Debbie (Wood). Joining Ethan on his obsessive quest, which covers hundreds of miles across Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, is mixed-blood youth Marty Pawley (Hunter), the “moral centre of the film, the one who, while all around him are driven by their prejudices, sees clearly that Debbie can and must be saved.” Buscombe contends that “there is a powerful irony in the fact that Marty is the one person in the film of mixed race, a ‘half-breed’ in Ethan’s casually insulting term; worth considering when charges of racism are thrown at Ford—or at the Western generally.”

Ford’s screenwriter, Frank Nugent, based his script on a 1954 Alan LeMay novel, originally published in the Saturday Evening Post as “The Avenging Texan.” LeMay probably used the ordeal of Cynthia Ann Parker, a little girl seized by Comanche raiders on the Texas frontier in 1836, as the inspiration for his story. A novelist, screenwriter, and “something of a Western specialist,” LeMay also authored The Unforgiven and worked for Cecil B. DeMille and Raoul Walsh.

Wesley Hogan. Reviews Kimberly L. Metcalfe, ed., In Sisterhood: The History of Camp 2 of the Alaska Native Sisterhood (Juneau, Alaska: Hazy Island Books, 2008)

Wesley Hogan is Professor of History and Philosophy and Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Race Relations at Virginian State University.

Native Alaskan women’s history has been marginal to the “big story” of US history since the professionalization of the discipline in the 1870s. Indeed, few groups have seen more marginalization – by distance from Washington DC, by gender, by ethnicity, and by culture and language – than the women who populated the Southeast Alaskan coast, members of the Tlingit (pronounced “Klink-It”) and Haida tribes.

In this oral history, one father cautioned his daughter Gaxaansán (Olga Keene Wilson) as they rounded Point Retreat by boat to Juneau: “We’re coming into white man’s territory so you have to learn their ways.” Reading this collection of oral testimony by Tlingit women, one realizes anew how dislocating and odd it could be to interact with Euro-Americans in our own time.

Indeed, the timing of this contact – the 20th century – marks it as distinct among the vast majority of contact stories that make it to mainstream US history narratives. Schoolchildren learn about Pocahontas and John Rolfe in Virginia’s 17th century and Sacajawea helping Lewis & Clark from Dakota to the Pacific during the early 19th century. But they should also learn about Eliza Marks, grandmother of Nora Marks Dauenhauer, who saved her family’s hereditary land outside Juneau: “The surveyor was coming down to survey the whole place and she took an axe to them. She was so tiny. After that, they left them alone.”

In this beautiful collection of oral histories, readers learn what contact was like in our own era. Rich in detail about cultural, economic, and political life, these women’s narratives challenge us to rethink the impact of families’ internal relationships on broader society and politics, as well as basic causal relationships such as what caused Alaskans (Native and white) to succeed in the fight against Jim Crow well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act became the law of the land.

Oral historian Kim Metcalfe’s interviewees share their experiences with the education system, motherhood, labor, community work and political struggles. Their histories reveal that Tlingit children identified themselves by their mother’s ancestry. “It wasn’t just the family, it wasn’t just your uncles that raised the children. It was the whole village…We always saw people looking out the doorway and they would report back to our Mom where we were.” “My grandmother came from a family of 14 daughters,” recalled Kaayistaan (Marie Olson). “A family with that many daughters was considered a wealthy family-I mean rich, rich!” (107) “The Tlingit nation is very clan oriented,” recalled Geethlá (Harriet Roberts). “You can talk to somebody, you ask, ‘What is your mother’s name?’ and you know who they are.”

Fishing culture dominates many of these histories. Generations of Tlingit women describe how the nets were made, who caught, dried, fried, and sold them. Women fished in skiffs or canoes with their mothers and grandmothers. Subsistence living continued throughout the past century and into our own: Tlingits continued to smoke salmon, halibut and seaweed, and harvest clams, cockles, deer meat, seal meat, seal grease and herring eggs as well as salmonberries and blueberries. Often during the summer women would take their children and work in the canneries to make enough money to buy clothes, shoes and winter coats for the children.

The brutality of resource extraction emerges as women tell of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. One father worked in a gold mine on the crusher, alongside other Natives, Filipinos, Mexicans and poor whites. Each man put a brass tack on the board upon entering the mine, and took it off when he came in. “After the shift was over, the foreman would check the board. If there were some missing, it meant [the men] fell in [the crusher]. They never stopped the crusher, they would just hire new people.”

Like many western regions focused on extracting natural resources, Southeast Alaska witnessed a significant influx of men from abroad who came to work in the canneries and mines, and as fishermen. Russians and Filipinos in particular intermarried with Tlingit women. These Native women often set up fundraisers and recruited support for their own communities, a Filipino community hall , as well as for Russian Orthodox schools and orphanages. While a frontier mentality often promoted acceptance of this cultural mélange, at times, such intermarriages could lead to discrimination. Doloresa Cadiente (Gloodás) remembered that her father, a Filipino, was told by the community center people he was welcome, but needed to leave his wife, a Tlingit, at home.

Contact with white Alaskans often resulted in bigotry. In 1915, the legislature began to force Natives to apply for a “certificate of citizenship,” to prove they had “abandoned tribal customs and adopted a civilized lifestyle.” Alaska natives were segregated from whites in education, housing, and business establishments. Natives recalled the parallel with Jim Crow. Their kids were not allowed to ride school buses, whites designated some restaurants and bars off-limits with signs reading “No Natives or Dogs Allowed,” and they were forced to sit in the balconies of movie theaters. Even more appalling, children who spoke Tlingit in school had plaster put across their mouths, or had a shaming white rag tied in their hair. Stella Martin (Yaan da yein) recalled that outside of Juneau, “after Christianity came in, the Indian customs were done away with. You were fined $40 if you were caught putting on something Indian, which in those days was an extreme amount.”

When US troops arrived during WWII, the Juneau USO prohibited “any soldier from publicly associating with Indian girls.” Juneau’s Tlingits protested in a public letter: “The inference drawn is that there are no decent Indian girls, and that the regulations are to protect the soldiers from contamination.” They reminded the USO of the blood of young Indian men being spilled on foreign shores in the name of democracy: “Their wives and sisters are entitled to the same rights as are being fought for in China, Europe and Africa.”

In Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and other parts of the South, challenges to Jim Crow would be driven by youth groups (like SNCC), church groups (SCLC), and middle-class organizations (NAACP). Similarly, in Southeast Alaska, the Alaska Native Sisterhood (ANS) and Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) served as the grassroots organizing nerve center against discrimination. In Sisterhood documents the path by which the ANS, ANB, and human rights advocate and Alaska’s territorial governor Ernest Gruening, combined to push through the first human rights act in the US since the Civil War – the Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945-- nineteen years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would do the same for the rest of the nation. (Gruening eventually became a US senator from Alaska and he and Senator Wayne Morse were the only ones to oppose the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964)
Gruening, another fascinating Western leader largely absent from the dominant American narrative, had experienced East Coast anti-Semitism first hand as a young man, then a hearty dose of colonial arrogance through his experiences working for the Interior Department and as Administrator of Puerto Rican Reconstruction before coming to Alaska as part of the International Highway Commission in 1938. As governor, he “put as much feeling as I knew how into an appeal” for the anti-discrimination legislation in 1945. State Senator Allen Shattuck violently opposed the measure: “Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind us?” Another senator also noted opposition to the bill: “He did not want to sit next to Eskimos in a theater; they smelled.” As per Alaskan territorial custom, the chamber then offered to anyone present to state his or her view. A young Native woman, Elizabeth Peratrovich, stepped forward: “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights. When my husband and I came to Juneau and sought a home in a nice neighborhood where our children could play happily with our neighbors’ children, we found such a house and had arranged to lease it. When the owner learned that we were Indians, they said, ‘no.’” She continued on, as Gruening noted, with a plea that “could not have been more effective. When she finished, there was a wild burst of applause in the gallery. The Senate passed the bill, eleven to five.” By 1969, the first Natives won seats on the Juneau city council and school board.

The second half of the century showed more positive results. Lyndon Johnson’s Model Cities program helped to incorporate Tlingit culture and language into the K-12 system. But “Great Society” urban renewal also forced long-time residents out of their homes without replacement housing, “resulting in the wide scale transfer of land from low income people to commercial entities” like luxury condominiums and office buildings. It eliminated “the ethnic neighborhood that was mostly of Tlingit families and mixed Filipino-Tlingit marriages and created a Diaspora to scattered suburbs.” Still, the ANS continued to work within the US political system, lobbying legislators, organizing voter registration drives, putting their candidates up for office.

Within the last decade, the ANS has organized marches and public demonstrations, particularly to support Native subsistence rights to hunt and fish in areas prohibited by federal law. In 1999, Desa Jacobsson and four other Southeast women caught five sockeye salmon in an act of civil disobedience to protest the closure since 1962 of a traditional fishing site for the Aak’w Kwáan. The following year, Jacobsson went on a hunger strike to support subsistence rights, and repeated it again in 2006, to protest proposed federal policies that endangered subsistence hunting and fishing in rural Alaska.

The book follows in the tradition established by oral historians of giving history back to the community from which it comes. However, this means that people unfamiliar with Southeast Alaska may need more context at times, or may feel like the histories are disjointed compared to a traditional narrative. And because of the difficulties for oral historians in treading on too-personal ground, the book lacks much discussion in the key areas of religious practices and beliefs, and sexuality. Still, it’s hard to criticize a book that covers so much ground, from Native traditions to Native-white cultural synthesis. For example, just as in the lower 48, sports provided a bridge between segregated communities. Basketball, “a community obsession” for both Natives and whites, became a “bright spot in race relations in Juneau,” where everyone turned out to watch the competition. Indeed, basketball gave birth to the book: Editor Kim Metcalf’s father, a regional basketball announcer, introduced her to Tlingit culture, fostering the relationships that eventually led to the book’s inception.

The founder of the Alaska Native Sister, Bessie Visaya (Kaachgun), epitomizes the approach so many Tlingit women took to improving their communities: “When I was grant president sometimes I’m way down. I didn’t have enough education. I feel broken hearted sometimes, and then I cheer up. I tried, I’m going to work because [even without] education, still I said to myself, ‘I’m going to work and I’m going to fight with the people. My feeling is strong.’” Such powerful testimony invites conversation and reflection.

Posted on Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ron Briley: Review of William L. O'Neill, A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001

In this history of the 1990s, William L. O’Neill, professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University, again displays his courage in writing on contemporary history reminiscent of his classic study, Coming Apart: An Informal History of the 1960s (1975). In A Bubble in Time, O’Neill comes off as representative of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once termed the “vital center.” In his observations on the politics and culture of the 1990s, O’Neill will be sure to anger partisans of both the political left and right.
It is difficult to locate a center for this essentially narrative history of the decade, but in his preface, O’Neill explains, “. . . perhaps the greatest of many missed opportunities in the 1990s was not the failure to obtain universal health insurance, an early malfunction of the Clinton administration that destroyed its hopeful promise, but the absolute refusal of prominent American leaders on both sides of the aisle to reform the military so as to meet the challenges of the post Cold War world” (xi). Thus, O’Neill believes that both Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton were unable to take advantage of the Soviet Union’s collapse and reduce defense spending along with restructuring the military to better address the challenges of counterinsurgency. O’Neill laments that neither President was able to alter the appetite of the military-industrial complex for expensive and outdated weapons systems. The 1990s were, accordingly, a bubble in time between the Cold War and War on Terror when opportunities were missed as what O’Neill terms the “tabloid nation” focused increasingly on the superficial issues of celebrity.
O’Neill generally treats George Bush the elder in somewhat sympathetic fashion. He observes the unfairness of Republican opponents calling the decorated World War II pilot “a wimp.” Although critical of mixed diplomatic signals sent to Baghdad in the days leading to Saddam Hussein’s ill-fated invasion of Kuwait, O’Neill credits Bush with developing a strategy during the First Persian Gulf War that avoided becoming bogged down in the sectarian politics of Iraq. Nevertheless, as Bill Clinton correctly surmised, Bush’s undoing politically would prove to be the economy, as the legacy of the Reagan deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy fostered a growing class division in the nation.
While acknowledging the intelligence and appeal of the youthful Clinton, O’Neill is highly critical of the President’s failure to address the growing class divide. Following a political approach which advanced his career at the expense of the Democratic Party, Clinton, influenced by pollster Dick Morris, moved to the political right by embracing such traditional Republican issues as deficit reduction, free trade, and welfare reform. O’Neill has even less use for Congressional Republicans under the leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who exploited “the rage, alienation, and despair of those who have lost ground economically” by focusing upon such moral and social issues as abortion, gun control, and gay rights. But O’Neill concludes that Republicans overplayed their hand in the attempted impeachment of Clinton following the Monica Lewinsky scandal. O’Neill writes that a majority of Americans did not want special prosecutor Kenneth Starr “and other icons of the right enacting their personal views into law, hounding minor offenders and putting their sexual activities on-line, censoring movies, and abolishing abortion. Given the choice between a pig and prude, they had come down not in favor of the former but against the latter” (336).
Although critical of a tabloid nation, O’Neill devotes a great deal of space to the analysis of social and cultural issues. For example, O’Neill spends considerable more time discussing the sexual harassment allegations made by Anita Hill against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas than the elder Bush’s invasion of Panama. Other issues from the 1990s which receive little attention include environmental concerns such as global warming and the growing debate over immigration. The O. J. Simpson trial for murdering his wife and her male companion, however, warrants a full chapter. O’Neill asserts that although Simpson was clearly guilty, African Americans, especially women, were predisposed to find him innocent. But O’Neill neglects to develop the reasons for this predisposition. While not exonerating Simpson, the troubled historical legacy of lynching black men for alleged attacks against white women needs to be factored into the equation.
In fact, A Bubble in Time is often rather racially insensitive. O’Neill has little patience for affirmative action in higher education admissions, describing the policy as unnecessary reverse discrimination thirty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In addition, O’Neill aligns with many on the political right who employ the term “political correctness” in a pejorative sense, suggesting that excessive sensitivity to issues of race, gender, and sexual preference threatens freedom of speech on the nation’s campuses. Lamenting recent changes in higher education, O’Neill comes off as somewhat of a curmudgeon when he concludes, “The great paradox of higher education today is that while the workplace grows more and more competitive, colleges are graduating people whose ability to compete has been declining for decades” (311).
O’Neill’s objections to multiculturalism and diversity will certainly antagonize many on the political left, but he is even more critical of the George W. Bush Presidency following the missed opportunities of the 1990s. O’Neill observes, “Beneath the frivolity of the Clinton years dark forces had been gathering their strength, waiting for a chance to slouch toward Bethlehem, the opportunity that 9/11 would give them. Flying under the nation’s radar in little-read publications, think tanks, and other shadowy venues, neoconservatives and their allies plotted to invade Iraq, alienate the rest of the world, and ruin the American economy by means of runaway spending, massive tax cuts, and lax regulations—the trifecta of looting” (391).
O’Neill is not shy about stating his conclusions, and it is reflective of our increasingly partisan times that this well written and researched volume will antagonize many scholars as well as general readers.

Posted on Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 10:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen: Review of "Wolf Hall: A Novel" by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (1-11-10)

[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of a number of books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003). He blogs at American History Now.]

Americans are prone to believe that they invented upward mobility. They assume people in other times and nations were products of class-bound societies in which everyone knew their place, whether or not they were happy with it. Attempts to overthrow that order, like the French or Russian Revolutions, backfired in the short run and only partially succeeded at best in the long one. The American Dream of upward mobility -- one instantly understood in shorthand references to Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Horatio Alger -- is considered the fruit of American exceptionalism. "Only in America . . ." the unfinished expression goes.

But this notion is false. Poor boys (and, very occasionally, poor girls) have been making good at least since the time of the Confucian civil service. And while social orders have tended to be fixed, they were not always immutable, as stories of those from Cicero to Genghis Khan make clear. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a novel that takes a series of liberties with the life of the sixteenth century English statesman Thomas Cromwell. But at the core of this tale -- a man of modest means fashioning a nation-state in the face of an aristocracy that hates him for it -- is both factual and true.

For students of English history, Cromwell is a familiar figure. But Mantel casts him in an unfamiliar light. Usually rendered as a peripheral figure in the saga of the six wives of Henry VIII, Cromwell's role is that of the political fixer who executes the displacement of Katherine of Aragon and enables the King to marry Anne Boleyn as part of a quest to produce a male heir to the Tudor line. As it turns out, Boleyn gives birth to a girl, the future Queen Elizabeth. When the mercurial Henry dumps her in favor of Jane Seymour (a development only hinted at in the novel, whose title refers to a Seymour estate), Cromwell paves the way for that transition as well. A protégé of the powerful Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, whose fall from power occupies the first half of the novel, Cromwell is typically portrayed as a hatchet man, particularly in his subsequent struggle with Thomas More, the celebrated "man for all seasons" in the 1966 movie of the same name in which More is depicted as a martyr who resisted the opportunistic creation of the Church of England as means of both allowing the king to divorce at will as well as confiscate the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church. In Wolf Hall, however, it's Cromwell who's the hero, a wily pragmatist who skillfully navigates the murderous shoals of religion and politics and steers England to safety.

In Mantel's telling, Cromwell's ability to serve this function is rooted in his background as the child of an abusive alcoholic blacksmith who runs away from home and has a series of (offstage) adventures that include soldiering, banking, and working in the wool trade on the continent. Cromwell eventually becomes a lawyer, but never loses this sense of versatility; as she explains, he's a man who can "draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house, and fix a jury." Multilingual and exceptionally entrepreneurial, Cromwell regards the mounting fury of the Reformation with detachment, if not distaste: to him both the Catholic More and the Lutheran biblical translator William Tyndale are equally blind to human realities that range from spirituality to personal relationships. Recognizing that power is at least as much a matter of not coercing people when you have the power to do so as it is punishing them, he constructs ingenious webs of literal as well as figurative indebtedness that have the effect of reinforcing his indispensability. The quality that rounds out and deepens his character is a sly wit that's all the more satisfying for its judiciousness. When the prone-to-tantrum Henry wonders aloud why he's had a troubling dream about his long dead brother and asks "Why does he come back now?" Cromwell bites back the temptation to say "because you are forty and he is telling you to grow up" before putting a soothsaying spin on the dream.

Part of what makes Wolf Hall so effective is the way in which it both evokes a lost world and anticipates a modern one. This Janus-faced quality extends to its political subtext. Disgusted with the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, Cromwell fashions a pragmatic Protestant state for England whose legitimacy rests less on doctrine than a perception of credibility. "These people want a good authority, one they can properly obey," he tells the Archbishop of Canterbury. "For centuries Rome has asked them to believe what only children can believe. Surely they will find it more natural to obey an English king, who will exercise his powers under Parliament and under God." In one sense, sentiments like these seem retrograde; they are condescendingly paternalistic, if not authoritarian in their emphasis on the deference of the people. And yet in their concern for a legitimate basis for political authority, they also seem to prefigure the logic of the American Revolution 250 years later. Mantel's Cromwell is a prescient patriot, a founding father of the modern nation-state.

Like Hans Holbein, who makes a cameo appearance here, Mantel, author of historical novels with eighteenth century settings, paints an arresting portrait. But is it an accurate one? As a non-expert on Tudor England, it's hard for me to say. But the eminent Renaissance England literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, writing an approving review of Wolf Hall in the New York Review of Books, makes clear that Cromwell was a ruthless, and at times less than wholly honest, enforcer of royal power. Perhaps a more telling indication of Mantel's desire to place her subject in a glowing light is the time frame of the novel, which ends with Cromwell asceding to the apex of his power. In fact, he would experience a spectacularly rapid fall from grace that would result in his execution a mere five years after the events depicted in the novel, events that will apparently be the focus of a sequel. But the mere fact of the cadence suggests a desire to savor; indeed, any adult reading this book knows implicitly that glory of any kind is fleeting. Some of the most moving passages in the book deal with the unexpected deaths of Cromwell's loved ones; a closing image of the book is that of a shape-shifting English landscape, "her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in the dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist."

I will confess to some impatience with Wolf Hall. There are a lot of characters to keep track of; I was consulting the tables in the front matter to the very end, and Mantel has an annoying habit of using the pronoun "he" to refer to Cromwell in ways that can be confusing. It's a long book in which the narrative energy flags. But there's something magnificently luxuriant about its evocation of the past that makes it well worth an extended visit. You finish the book amazed and grateful for the strangely familiar world it brings to life.

Posted on Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 4:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen: Review of Ken Auletta's "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It" (Penguin, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (12-26-09)

[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.]

About a year ago, I got a legal document in the (snail) mail from the representatives of Google. As I recall, the company was offering me $300 for the digital rights to publish each edition of my books, whether they were in print or not. There would be some royalty payment for any copies that got sold electronically through Google, though it was hard for me to tell how that was going to work.

My first reaction was impatience: I was deeply mired in the quotidian demands of everyday life like kids' coats, dinner, an evening's work of grading papers. My second reaction was wariness: Beware of big corporations bearing gifts, especially ones with a slogan like "Don't be evil."

I went back a little while later and signed off on the agreement (online).

In the time since, I've felt twinges of regret and unease about the decision, though when I got an online notification from the Southern District of New York, which is handling what is now a gargantuan court fight that has embroiled publishers, libraries, and Google rivals around the world, I decided against availing myself of the invitation to change my mind, in part out of laziness.

Then I read Ken Auletta's Googled. I've now decided, narrowly but firmly, to leave matters where they stand. This is not because Auletta himself would necessarily endorse my decision, but because his book is as thorough and impartial a piece of journalism you're going to find on Google specifically and the transformation of the media generally. Auletta is that rarest of things: a real reporter. He talked to lots of people, attended lots of meetings -- and of course, getting access to both is to a great degree what defines reporting excellence -- and he's done lots of contextual research. (Doesn't hurt that Auletta has been at this for a long time at The New Yorker, and wrote landmark analyses like his definitive 1992 book Three Blind Mice, which charted the decline of network television at the hands of cable.) I may not have made the right decision, but I've made an informed one.

Auletta does three core things well in this book. First, he charts the meteoric rise of Google a decade ago from the meeting of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the digital hothouse of Stanford University. Auletta foregrounds the extraordinary symbiosis between the introverted Page and the extroverted Brin, and their passion for developing an Internet search engine geared to the needs and interests of users rather than advertisers. This passion led them to develop a company organized around a culture of creative engineering rather than one of corporate management, and one determined to forgo short-term profit -- or any profit at all -- until they felt they had perfected their product. This created strains at Google, but once the pair developed a formula for unobtrusive, but highly targeted advertising rooted in exceptionally good consumer data, the company exploded into an Internet superpower.

The second issue Auletta looks at in depth is the dismay, suspicion and anger Google's emergence has engendered in domains that include longtime rivals like Microsoft, one-time allies like Apple and Amazon.com (both of which invested in Google and now face the prospect of competing with it), and the U.S. Government, not to mention a privacy advocates and consumers. Acquisitions like the data-collecting company DoubleClick, along with massively popular video site YouTube, have tremendously expanded the potential domain of Google far beyond a search engine, as have forays into digital books and (most recently) smartphones. Competitors perceive the dangerous shadow of monopoly; government leaders and consumer advocates fret over privacy concerns in a company whose stated desire is to anticipate your every wish. Page and Brin talk endlessly about their desire to do good in the world, and the sacred sense of trust that they would comprise at their own peril. But they show themselves to be remarkably obtuse in addressing their inevitable moral fallibility or the danger that their information could fall into the wrong hands. No one ever seems to consider the possibility, for example, that China, a nation in which Google complies with censorship demands, or even the United States, could force Google data to be turned over at non-virtual gunpoint and used the for the most malignant of purposes.

The third leg of Auletta's sturdy stool is the fate of traditional media -- books, magazines, music, movies, and television -- not as corporate enterprises but rather as old forms of cultural expression in the new digital order. Auletta repeatedly criticizes the stewards of these media for their failure to anticipate the coming technological tsunami, though in fairness to them it's hard to expect anyone to preemptively capitulate an entire way of life and business. In any case, one finishes Auletta's analysis of this situation with a sense of optimism. The record business may not survive, but music will. Books may not be typically bound with paper and glue, but the word "book" will still mean something, albeit virtually. It's hard to see in the short term how YouTube will make much money, but that's not really our problem.

Actually, the state of the Web reminds me a little of the state of radio a century ago: a mish-mash of content, some of it amateurish, some of it quite powerful, that eventually sorted itself out as a viable artistic as well as economic proposition. Culture has a life independent of capitalism, though the situation I'm describing is hardly a violation of the way industrial capitalism has functioned in the last century and a half. Someone will always be making a lot of money. But it was never likely to be small-timers like me no matter what happens.

That's why I'm finally comfortable signing my rights over to Google. I like Google -- its Blogger application has given my writing a new lease on life -- and trust it to a point, but don't take the "don't be evil" very seriously. As Auletta and others point out, if Google seems fearsome now, so did IBM twenty years ago. Or Microsoft a decade ago. Or Facebook will in a few years. I'd love the U.S. government to publish my work digitally, but that train left the station when it passed on the telegraph 150 years ago. Google has come forward, so Google it is. The point for me, as a content provider, is to get my work out there. And if, in the aftermath of a catastrophe, my digital imprint vanishes entirely -- something I regard as quite possible -- there's always the possibility of a stray hardcover or paperback book ending up in a museum or library (perhaps the same thing). You work hard and you take your chances. That, for better or worse, is my corporate policy.

Posted on Saturday, December 26, 2009 at 8:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ron Briley reviews Robert V. Wells's Life Flows On in Endless Song (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

In this most recent title from the University of Illinois Press series Music in American Life, Robert V. Wells, Chauncey H. Winters Professor of History and Social Sciences at Union College in Schenectady, New York, places folk songs within the context of American social history. Wells describes himself as attracted to folk songs through the music of the Weavers which encouraged him to pick up a guitar. Although history rather than music proved to be the career choice for Wells, he discovered that he could incorporate his passion for folk songs into some of his American history lectures. In 1997, the historian was selected for a Fulbright in Denmark, where he developed an elective course on American folk songs and history. After meeting with enthusiastic reviews from his European students, Wells incorporated the folk music course into his teaching load at Union College. The folk music history curriculum provides the foundation for Life Flows On in Endless Song.
Wells employs four criteria to identify folk songs. First, the song has to be transmitted orally, even if it has an identifiable print origin. Wells also insists that folk songs must include a forthright and unaffected style as well as be performed for enjoyment rather than commercial purposes. Finally, folk songs should have a traditional element rooted in the past, but they also should be recognized as evolving in the hands of current performers to address contemporary problems and concerns. Wells concludes, “An essential element of folk songs is that they should grow out of or resonate with the lives of common people. As such, they should address emotions and basic values, helping people get through life by expressing, enhancing, or altering a mood” (8).
This definition leads Wells into a somewhat conservative approach to his subject matter, often associated with more left-wing political movements of the twentieth century. Thus, Wells tends to dismiss some labor organizing songs of the 1930s and 1940s, along with much of the Vietnam War era protest music of the 1960s, as too topical to adequately be described as traditional folk songs. In addition, the qualification that folk songs need to be non-commercial negates the contributions of artists such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen to folk music. Such restrictions also limit the attention given by Wells to such contemporary urban music as hip-hop and rap, which certainly contain a grass-roots element.
On the other hand, Wells certainly does not imply that folk songs are the exclusive property of the white working class. The origin of much folk music in the African-American slave experience is acknowledged by Wells. In fact, Wells uses the work of W. E. B. DuBois to develop how songs from the cotton fields of slavery expressed the sorrow of the black experience and subverted the masters’ depiction of happy and contented laborers. But the continuity of these attitudes into the civil rights era receives less attention from Wells whose history tends to be rooted more in the nineteenth century. In his final chapter, Wells, nevertheless, credits Huddie Ledbetter and Woody Guthrie with combining black and white folk traditions into their lives and music. Wells argues, “Both men were sons of Middle America, with a Southern flavor; both suffered enough hard times for several men, some of it their own making; and both did more to preserve, promote, and expand folk songs in the twentieth century than any other singer-songwriters” (176).
Wells credits Ledbetter and Guthrie with embodying traditional folk values and music which reassured common people during difficult times. This more conservative orientation leads Wells to eschew the more radical implications of critic Greil Marcus that folk songs allowing people “a heretic’s way of saying what never could be said out loud, a mask over a boiling face.” The more subversive aspects of this counter narrative are undermined by Wells’s traditional interpretation of folk music as a way to cope with the vicissitudes of daily life. Wells organizes his volume thematically rather than chronologically, and this approach works in this readable volume--although there is some repetition. Among the key themes examined by Wells are courtship, marriage, and children; religion and patriotism; work and the labor movement; ships, trains, and transportation; migration and separation; and the impact of hard times on hard men, both black and white. Although much of the music provided comfort for those whose loved ones were killed in war or train accidents, as well as warning those preparing their souls for the train to heaven to avoid drink and promiscuity, Wells concludes that there was a hard edge to songs which extolled the social banditry of a Jesse James or the African-American bad man, Stagolee. While most singers were not willing to engage in active resistance, Wells, nevertheless, insists “a pointed song would serve as modest defiance against an all-too-imperfect world” (174).
While one may quibble as to whether Wells adequately conveys the more radical possibilities of folk music, there is little doubt that he has devoted considerable thought to the traditions of English-language folk songs. Wells establishes connections among Captain William Kidd, Stagolee, John Henry, and Jesse James, while providing fresh insights into such traditional folk texts as “Amazing Grace,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” The Ballad of Tom Dooley,” and “Pretty Polly.” Mature readers of Life Flows On in Endless Song will enjoy revisiting the folk songs which Wells is introducing to a younger audience in his Union College classes. Music of the people, whether traditional ballads, contemporary hip-hop, or the corridos of Mexican Americans, offer valuable insights into the way common people live, work, die, and sometimes rebel.

Posted on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 10:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Luther Spoehr: Review of John Milton Cooper's Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (Knopf, 2009)

Source: Providence Sunday Journal (12-20-09)

Woodrow Wilson--long-jawed, stern-faced, gazing intently from behind pince-nez eyeglasses--seems remote and old-fashioned. He’s also easily caricatured, as the naïve, inflexible, self-righteous schoolmaster out of his depth among the worldly European leaders, or, more positively, as the idealistic crusader for world democracy.

It’s worth getting to know the real Wilson, who, notwithstanding his Victorian image, helped bring America into the modern age. In his two presidential terms, he pushed a domestic legislative agenda—including the Federal Reserve and Federal Trade Commission laws—that helped to usher in “progressive,” active government, and then led the nation through a world war that established it as the world’s preeminent power.

Tony Platt: Review of Douglas Cazaux Sackman's Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America

Source: TruthDig.com (12-18-09)

[Tony Platt is working on a book about the history of anthropology in Northern California, and with the Coalition to Protect Yurok Cultural Legacies at O-pyúweg (Big Lagoon, Calif.). See his blog on history and memory at http://goodtogo.typepad.com.]

Many of you no doubt recall some basic impressions about Ishi: how a Yahi survivor—the “last wild Indian”—emerged from hiding in the small California town of Oroville in August 1911 to become a big-time celebrity under the guardianship of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber until his death in San Francisco in March 1916. It’s familiar because the Ishi story generated a cottage industry of publicity, from the millions of words written about him in the popular press in the 1910s to a flurry of books since the 1960s.

Kroeber (1876-1960) produced some 550 publications during his distinguished academic career, but wrote surprisingly little about Ishi. His wife, Theodora Kroeber, had great sucesss with “Ishi in Two Worlds,” published in 1961, the year after her husband’s death. It’s a well-told tale of pop anthropology that humanizes Ishi and resonates with a broad audience, much like Anne Frank’s diary. A new edition, with a filial introduction by Karl Kroeber, published in 1989, pushed sales of the book to more than 1 million. For the academically inclined, there is an anthology of primary documents, “Ishi the Last Yahi,” edited by Robert Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (1979). And in 2004, anthropologist Orin Starn also reached a wide audience with “Ishi’s Brain,” a smart muckraking investigation into the disrespectful treatment of Ishi’s body after his death that deflated the hitherto unsullied reputation of Alfred Kroeber and UC Berkeley’s department of anthropology. Starn’s book, inter alia, provoked a departmental apology for the “final betrayal of Ishi”—namely, shipping off his brain to the Smithsonian.¹ [See unlinked footnotes at end of article.]

You would think the subject matter of Ishi has been thoroughly raked over by now, but Douglas Cazaux Sackman, a historian at the University of Puget Sound, has found two new seams that promise a payoff. The results are mixed. “Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America” gives us new ways of thinking about the Ishi phenomenon by locating the fascination with the “last uncontaminated man” in cultural anxieties about modernity and nostalgia for the “wilderness.” The book is less compelling, however, when it turns the Kroeber-Ishi relationship into a mawkish parable about how two men from different worlds “stood looking at each other from the opposite edge of a chasm” and “reached out in the hope of keeping the other from falling in.”

In 1901 Kroeber, under the patronage of Phoebe Hearst, joined the new department of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and became director of the university’s Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. It was a time of fierce competition between museums for collections of “Indian relics,” and Kroeber joined the hunt. When Ishi emerged from hiding in 1911—the only survivor of massacres, bounty hunts, epidemics and starvation that wiped out the Yahi people—Kroeber quickly staked a claim to becoming his official guardian after he learned from an assistant that “this man is undoubtedly wild” and will make a “good exhibit for the public.” Kroeber housed Ishi in a room at the museum, gave him a job as a janitor, and proudly displayed him to his colleagues and the curious as “the most uncivilized man in the world today.”

Thousands of people showed up at the museum to watch Ishi drilling fire and making arrowheads, or followed his adventures through the local press, which documented every outing to Golden Gate Park, the theater and upscale social events. For Sackman, this obsessive interest in Ishi was related to “contemporary crazes for hunting, camping, and wilderness trekking,” in particular a desire by the urban middle class to assert “the white male body in the machine age.”

Ishi was not the only “wild man” to become a media star. Sackman tells us about “Nature Man No. 1,” Ernest Darling, a medical school dropout, whose experiences in the wilds of Maine were popularized by Jack London; and “Nature Man No. 2,” Joseph Knowles, an illustrator, whose vicarious experiences as a “cave man” in the Siskiyou Mountains were reported by The San Francisco Examiner.

There is a wonderful, stand-alone set piece in “Wild Men” that graphically illustrates why so many respectable men “harbored a tangled and confused desire” to go Indian. In May-June 1914, Kroeber persuaded Ishi to join a small expedition to his homeland in order to document place names, diet and topography. Initially, Ishi “refused to go back” to a place that he associated with death and misery, or to leave “the comforts of civilization.” But while he eventually complied with Kroeber’s request to restage how he had hunted and survived, he would go only so far. Sackman takes us on a journey to this camp-out by assembling a scrapbook and album of original photographs, including a snapshot of Ishi in loincloth gazing at Kroeber posing in the nude.

Sackman tries his best to get inside Ishi and Kroeber’s attitudes to their relationship. The problem, which he’s unable to solve, is that Ishi guarded his personal life, while Kroeber’s family has so far successfully guarded the anthropologist’s personal writings from researchers.

“I will not tell anything about myself,” Ishi said when Kroeber hired a native Yana speaker to translate for him. Sackman compensates for this lack of evidence by drawing upon native myths and stories to imagine how Ishi might have remembered his life and experienced his last four years as a living relic in the university’s cabinet of curiosities. The author does a good job of evoking Ishi’s two worlds, but makes a patronizing stylistic decision to represent his voice in staccato, childlike sentences: “He learned to chip arrowheads, to keep watch, to sing the language of the birds, the animals. All the world was alive. All the world was watchful. You had to respect it.”

As for Kroeber, Sackman pores over his voluminous but sanitized papers in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and looks for hidden clues in Theodora’s dutiful memoir (“Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration,” 1970). But without access to diaries, letters and personal revelations, we are left only with the author’s speculation that “wildness is something that dwelled within, repressed by his own culture and his chosen profession of anthropology.”

The case for the inner Kroeber identifying with Ishi is rather thin. It is true that Kroeber did not support a dissection of Ishi’s body. “If there is any talk of the interests of science,” Kroeber wrote from New York to his assistant, Edward Gifford, “say for me that science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends.” Against Kroeber’s advice, the museum went ahead with the autopsy. But a few months later, after his return to the Bay Area, Kroeber did not have any moral qualms about sending Ishi’s brain to a eugenicist at the Smithsonian. Moreover, under Kroeber’s leadership Berkeley’s department of anthropology amassed thousands of native craniums, and Gifford was encouraged to develop his penchant for measuring skulls in the search for racial explanations of social difference.²

Kroeber himself did not buy into prevailing views about multiple human races. He was, as Sackman discusses, a cultural relativist who argued against the “hoary taboos” of white supremacy and ethnocentrism. But he was not immune to racialized imagery, a topic that Sackman tends to sidestep. “By temperament,” Kroeber observed in a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California in 1909, the “California Indian is docile, peaceful, friendly, sluggish, unimaginative, not easily stirred, low-keyed in emotion, almost apathetic.”³ Nor does “Wild Men” acknowledge Kroeber’s public description of Ishi as a “puppy” who “comes running when you call him, and if you were to tell him to stand in the corner or stand on his head, if he were able he would do it without hesitation.” ⁴

In order to find common ground between the two “wild men,” the author has a tendency to exaggerate Kroeber’s social activism. “The deep prejudice that had engulfed California’s Indians for a century—a prejudice that held that they were ‘diggers’ who lived off roots and insects and had no culture or even language—was swept away by Kroeber’s relativistic research,” asserts Sackman. This is wishful thinking. Kroeber certainly had an impact on the field of anthropology, but almost no impact on the “deep prejudice” of public discourse. Throughout most of his lifetime, the popular press and publishing industry saturated a large and receptive audience of readers with relentlessly racist images of native peoples as stupid and brutish, backward, a drag on progress, childlike and predisposed to extinction. Moreover, Kroeber rarely spoke out against California’s genocidal past (though Theodora did so eloquently after his death), preferring to focus on what he called “the purely aboriginal, the uncontaminatedly native.”⁵

Sackman argues, as have others, that Kroeber was propelled into a personal crisis after the death from pneumonia of his first wife, Henriette, in 1913 and of Ishi two years later, and by news of the carnage taking place in Europe during World War 1 (his parents were immigrants from Germany). Kroeber could not write about Ishi, Theodora suggested in her memoir, because “he had lived too much of it, and too much of it was the stuff of human agony from whose immediacy he could not sufficiently distance himself.”⁶ There’s some support for this thesis in Kroeber’s decision to undergo psychoanalysis in 1917 and to begin a second career as a therapist. But Kroeber continued a furious output of anthropological writing during this period, and by the 1920s was again teaching full time at Berkeley and was remarried, to Theodora. Maybe he was occasionally haunted in his dreams by images of Ishi and death. Maybe not.

I share Doug Sackman’s desire to break with old-style radical history that simplistically posits good guys against bad guys, oppressors against resisters. He identifies, as I do, with “the new western historians,” such as Patricia Limerick and Richard White, whose “multiperspectival” approach advocates moving beyond overly romantic interpretations of the native past and demonization of settlers, pioneers and anthropologists. It’s one thing, however, to reject a black-and-white view of history; it’s another to throw out power along with the binaries. There’s no question that Kroeber had an impact on Ishi: He changed his life fundamentally and took action that exposed him to an infection that caused his death. But whether Ishi had an impact on Kroeber other than enhance a career brimming with success remains an open question.

Footnotes:
1. On the politics of the apology, see Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes: Anthropology and Genocide,” Anthropology Today, Vol. 17, 2001, Pages 12-19.
2. See, for example, Edward Gifford, Californian Anthropometry, University of California Press, 1926.
3. A.L. Kroeber, “The Indians of California,” Transactions of the Commonwealth Club of California, Dec. 4, 1909, Page 434.
4. A.L. Kroeber, “It’s All Too Much for Ishi, Says The Scientist,” San Francisco Call, Oct. 8, 1911.
5. A.L. Kroeber, “Two Papers on the Aboriginal Ethnography of California,” Reports of the University of California Archaeological Survey, No. 56, March 1, 1962, Page 58.
6. Alfred Kroeber, “A Personal Configuration,” Page 93.

Posted on Sunday, December 20, 2009 at 3:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Renee Romano. Review of Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor's Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

[Renee Romano is Associate Professor of History at Oberlin College]

On a fall evening in 1921, eighteen-year old Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, the son of one of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families, met Alice Jones, a 22-year old maid. After a complicated romance, the two married in 1924. But only one month after their wedding, news reports began to circulate that Rhinelander’s new bride was “colored,” the daughter of a white British mother and a father of “colored” West Indian origins. Under intense pressure from his family, Leonard deserted his new wife and appealed to the New York courts to annul his marriage on the grounds that Alice had deceived him about her race. The 1925 Rhinelander annulment trial became a media spectacle, and as historian Elizabeth Smith-Pryor asserts in her fine new book, a “social drama” that revealed the anxieties of white northerners about racial instability in response to sweeping cultural and demographic changes during the Jazz Age.

Closely analyzing the Rhinelander trial in the historical context of the 1920s, Smith-Pryor explores why the public became obsessed with the tale of Kip Rhinelander and Alice Jones and what that obsession reveals about the expansion and strengthening of racial hierarchies in the North in the period after the Great Migration. Two migrations—that of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe to the United States, and that of southern blacks to northern cities—intensified anxieties in the North about how to determine race and how to uphold and maintain racial boundaries in the 1920s. Whites sought to find new ways to shore up the boundaries of race, and as Smith-Pryor ably demonstrates, although Alice ultimately won the case, the Rhinelander trial became an important site for reasserting notions of race that served to uphold and maintain privilege.

Drawing on the trial transcript, archival and media sources, Smith - Pryor offers chapters that alternate between a detailed narrative of the trial and an analysis of the different historical contexts that relate to the case. She highlights the many ways in which this trial revealed and strengthened racial hierarchies. No one at the time seemed to question the very basic assumption of Leonard’s case that the marriage should be annulled if Alice had lied about her race. Drawing on her legal expertise as a former lawyer, Smith-Pryor deftly explains annulment law to show that attorneys for both sides agreed that race was a “material fact,” something that if known, would have prevented the marriage. If Alice had deceived Rhinelander about her race, in other words, all sides agreed that the marriage deserved to be annulled. The question this case raised was not whether race should matter in marriage, but whether Kip knew that Alice had “colored blood” before they married.

The trial also made clear that whiteness was something very valuable that was worth going to great lengths to defend. Smith-Pryor argues that the intense opposition of Leonard’s family to the marriage, as well as the public opprobrium about interracial marriage even in a state where it was legal, demonstrates the immense value of whiteness. Borrowing from the well-known analysis by legal scholar Cheryl Harris, Smith-Pryor demonstrates that the trial revealed whiteness as a form of property which whites worked hard to protect. White racial identity conferred both societal and financial privileges, making it crucial to draw clear lines between whites and nonwhites.

Yet even as the Rhinelander trial revealed the importance of whiteness as a form of property, it also highlighted the intense difficulty of demarcating clear racial boundaries at a time of great social and cultural change. In what is perhaps the most interesting argument of the book, Smith-Pryor explores the competing ideologies about race that were revealed in this trial. She points in particular to two different notions of how best to define race: race as blood, and race as vision.

Kip Rhinelander’s attorney, Isaac Mills, embraced the traditional view that race was a carried in the blood and did not need to be visible to the naked eye. Mills insisted that Alice was passing as white and that Kip Rhinelander had no way of knowing that she had “colored blood.” Yet Alice definitely was “colored,” Mills insisted, evident from her ancestry and from her supposedly aggressive sexual behavior. Much of Mills’ legal strategy tapped into stereotypes of mixed-race colored women as lascivious Jezebels with the power to seduce and trick white men.

Lee Davis, Alice Rhinelander’s attorney, offered a very different definition of race as something that was visible to the naked eye. Davis put forth a common sense definition of race: white people knew a colored person when they saw one, and he exhibited Alice and her family as evidence that proved that Kip Rhinelander must have known Alice was “colored” when he married her. Smith-Pryor offers a compelling analysis of how this emphasis on the visibility of race was a response to white fears that modern life made other means of determining race less effective. In polyglot and anonymous New York, it was nearly impossible to be certain of someone’s ancestry or their “blood.” Moreover, as whites embraced practices like tanning, and explored black cultural forms by going to jazz clubs or speaking in “slang,” it was becoming more difficult to determine race simply by examining an individual’s behavior. Davis’s legal strategy, therefore, reassured whites who feared racial mixing that they could in fact trust their own eyes to help them draw racial boundaries. In this context, Davis’s famous decision to have Alice partially disrobe in front of the jury in order to prove that Leonard could not have been deceived about her race, makes a great deal of sense.

Smith-Pryor’s account offers other fascinating discussions of the ways in which shifting notions of middle-class manhood, courtship practices, and acceptable sexual behavior, affected the course of the trial. While her account covers much of the same ground as Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone’s 2001 book about the Rhinelander case, Love on Trial, Property Rites is an illuminating and engaging read that is particularly suitable for an undergraduate classroom.

Posted on Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0) | Top

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Larry DeWitt, Review of Alan Brinkley's "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" (Oxford, 2010)

Jim Cullen, Review of "Lit: A Memoir," by Mary Karr (Harper, 2009)

Murray Polner. Review of Yehuda Bauer's The Death of the Shtetl (Yale University Press, 2009)

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Jack Ross. Review of Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Jim Cullen, Review of "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son" (Harper, 2009)

Jim Cullen, Review of "Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture" by Paul Gilroy (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Ron Briley reviews Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Jim Cullen, Review of "Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance" by Michael Goldfarb (Simon & Schuster, 2009)

James G. Ryan. Review of Hirosoki Kuromiya's Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s (Yale University Press, 2007)

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Wesley Hogan. Reviews Kimberly L. Metcalfe, ed., In Sisterhood: The History of Camp 2 of the Alaska Native Sisterhood (Juneau, Alaska: Hazy Island Books, 2008)

Ron Briley: Review of William L. O'Neill, A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001

Jim Cullen: Review of "Wolf Hall: A Novel" by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 2009)

Jim Cullen: Review of Ken Auletta's "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It" (Penguin, 2009)

Ron Briley reviews Robert V. Wells's Life Flows On in Endless Song (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

Luther Spoehr: Review of John Milton Cooper's Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (Knopf, 2009)

Tony Platt: Review of Douglas Cazaux Sackman's Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America

Renee Romano. Review of Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor's Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

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