Books
This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.
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Reviews
Jim Cullen, Review of Stone's Fall: A Novel by Iain Pears (Spiegel & Grau, 2009)
B. C. Knowlton: Review of Two Books on Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski and Justin Marozzi
Murray Polner. Review of David Vine's Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009)
Why should anyone care about 5,000 part -African, part -southern Indian Chagossians, who once inhabited Diego Garcia, a remote island in the Indian Ocean mid-way between Africa and Indonesia, who were exiled so the U.S. could build yet another military base?
Since the onset of WWII and its aftermath, tens of millions have been massacred by governments and assorted religious and secular fanatics. In that time, too, the U.S., the world’s most powerful military force, has quietly expelled indigenous populations on the too-little contested argument that the world’s “indispensable nation” possessing several thousand nuclear bombs has a moral duty to do as it wishes to defend its national interest, however ambiguously and broadly defined. Undeterred by Milton Eisenhower’s prophetic phrase in 1953 about a rising “military industrial complex” about which his presidential brother tried unsuccessfully to warn us, why, then, should anyone care about Chagossians?
David Vine, an anthropologist at American University hired by attorneys representing the Chagossians to tell their sad story, does care and with a heavy dose of revealing documentation, convincingly argues their case. His Island of Shame is filled with rage at how the British and U.S. governments stole a people’s home, sent them into foreign slums and then forgot about them. The purpose of this forced dislocation was to control the Indian Ocean, Central Asian oil fields, and help carry out American wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Today, Chagossian-free, isolated Diego Garcia is “the single most important military facility we’ve got,” at least according to the military analyst John Pike.
Between 1968 and 1973, in an act hidden from the world, ignored by the press and TV and Congress and Parliament (the British retain nominal control of Diego Garcia, but granted a long-term lease to the U.S.) the two countries threw out the dark-skinned Chagossians to develop a major U.S. air and naval base.
David Vine was never allowed to visit the island—very few are granted this privilege—but he did translate relevant documents and materials from the French, Mauritian Kreol, and Seselwa (Seychelles Kreol). His rage at what he rightly considers an injustice solely to service the American war machine is apparent in every chapter, perhaps best revealed in a striking and squalid but telling incident that occurred just before the final ejection of the remaining Chagossians.
“British agents and U. S. troops on Diego Garcia herded the Chagossians’ pet dogs into sealed sheds and gassed and burned them in front of their traumatized owners awaiting deportation” –yet another example of how imperial invaders exhibit their values.
Off-limits to all but a few very special visitors, Diego Garcia so top secret (more so than Guantanamo and Bagram Air Force Base) Vine suggests that, in addition to serving as a launching pad for bombing raids in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has been used for “rendition” of prisoners, citing, for example, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s admission to Parliament in February 2008 that the island has been used as a way station for shipping suspected terrorists to friendly nations (paid handsomely by U.S. and British taxpayers to treat prisoners as they wish) plus a Council of Europe report that the island has been used to lock away suspects. Verifiable details remain highly classified since the Bush administration said nothing and the Obama administration, eager to prove its toughness in national security, has thus far been silent about rendition, secret prisons, and Diego Garcia.
The displacement of local people is hardly new and Vine catalogs many defenseless people such as Greenland’s Inughuit of Greenland, the Bikini Atoll islanders, and 3000 0kinawans dispatched to Bolivia because of continuing American military expansion. Nowadays, U.S. military personnel are stationed in approximately 1,000 military bases outside continental U.S. at a cost estimated at more than $100 billion annually. In Hugh Gusterson’s wonderfully descriptive words, “The U.S. is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup” (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 3/10-09). Said one critic in 2007 --who happens to be the leftist Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa unwilling to renew a U.S. base -- when asked if he would renew an American base’s lease in his nation answered, only if “they let us put a base in Miami—an Ecuadorian base.”
And finally there is the plaintive voice of the exiled Olivier Bancoult of the Chagos Refugees Group, its survivors still trying to return home: “We are the descendants of slaves. Our skin is black We don’t have blue eyes…Whether we are black, whether we are white, whether we are yellow, we must all have the same treatment, …Stop all the injustices that have been committed against us.”
It won’t happen, of course. The American Empire stands in their way. Vine’s seminal Island of Shame reveals just one of the multitude of injustices and cruelties always committed in the name of war and preparation for more war.
Jim Cullen, Review of Molly Haskell, Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited, (Yale University Press, 2009)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
For many years now, a Civil War course has been a staple of my pedagogic repertoire, and every time I teach it I struggle to figure out what to do about Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s novel is much too long to be assigned reading (though I have taught a summer course devoted exclusively to it). Even the 1939 movie presents serious scheduling/logistical challenges; it takes about a week’s worth of classes to get through it, and I’ve never had much luck assigning any movie as homework –- too hard for everyone to get and watch in advance. So I’ve typically made a reluctant decision to consign it to the margins as a possible essay topic. I always get a few takers.
I somehow couldn’t bear to do that again this year. So I cleared the deck and showed the movie in its entirety over a stretch of classes, much in the way I do a major chunk of the 11-hour Ken Burns Civil War documentary (running the risk of inducing serious video fatigue). But the GWTW screening was a great success. I was deeply struck by the enthusiasm of some of the boys who saw it, including a pair of African American boys. The kind of racism in the film seemed sufficiently far from their lives to permit them to appreciate other dimensions of the story, though I had a third African American boy who wrote a very good essay on how the film was more dangerous than the obviously racist Birth of a Nation (I showed excerpts) precisely because its bigotry was thus even more insidious.
But perhaps the most striking thing about my experience in showing and discussing the film was its receding status in American life. A 1976 poll showed that 90% of the American public had seen the movie at least once; anecdotally speaking, I’d say 90% of the students I teach have not seen it prior to taking my class. Gone with the Wind, movie or film, isn’t going anywhere. But it clearly has receded from its central place in American life, much in the way of Catcher in the Rye, another once-pivotal generational tale whose appeal, the New York Times recently reported, is also waning even as its status as a classic becomes more secure.
It is in this context that I read Molly Haskell’s Frankly My Dear, a reappraisal of both book and film (and their relationship to each other) as we approach the three-quarter century mark. It is one of those books you can say its author was born to write. Haskell, same age as the film, is a child of the South -– she grew up in Virginia –- and became a notable feminist film scholar. Her 1973 book From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies has become a minor classic through two editions. (GWTW is treated in passing in that book, in a relatively detached, neutral way.) This convergence of regionalism, ideology, and media studies has felicitous results in a compact, evocative piece of old-fashioned cultural criticism, part of the “Icons of America” series published by Yale University Press.
Frankly My Dear is organized as a suite of five essays. The first discusses GWTW, book and film, as “the American Bible,” asserting its ongoing centrality in U.S. life -– a claim that’s plausible, particularly given recent sequels and parodies, but one, as I’m indicating, that also appears to have generational boundaries. The second focuses on the role of producer David Selznick, and actor Vivian Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara, in realizing the movie; the third is on Mitchell’s role. These two chapters –- in effect a trilogy honoring the three people as the pivotal players in what Haskell also affirms as very much a group enterprise -– represent her key analytic contribution to the discourse surrounding GWTW. A fourth chapter surveys some of the other players, among them the underappreciated production designer William Cameron Menzies, who brought the story to life. The final chapter situates the GWTW saga in the broader context of American history, from the antebellum politics to the films of Judd Apatow.
Haskell wears her learning lightly –- maybe a little too lightly; it would have been nice to have footnotes in what is, after all, a university press book –- and this gives the volume a pleasingly fluid, yet resonant quality. She’s completely at ease in discussing other Civil War novels and movies of the interwar years as she is Mitchell’s work, and writes about Southern life with a sense of earned authority (which sometimes takes the form of wry asides, like an off-hand reference to an old Southern joke that Southern girls don’t go to orgies because it will mean too many thank-you notes to write). Having wrestled with her own ambivalence about GWTW for generations, she seems to have finally come out on the side of appreciation, candid about its racial shortcomings but insistent that the story can’t finally be reduced to them. So it is, for example, that she spends a fair amount of time analyzing the Mammy-Rhett Butler relationship, as well as insisting on a specifically Southern, intra-racial amity in race relations that Northern whites have never really understood (I heard a black scholar make a similar argument at a panel on right-wing politics at this year’s Organization of American Historians conference in Seattle earlier this year).
Perhaps not surprisingly, she’s most deft in writing about gender issues, as in this comparison of the stubborn Scarlett, the saintly Melanie, and their respective, albeit very different, relationships with the dashing Rhett: “The male ego needs a certain amount of flattery, and we need the male ego. If all Southern women had been ego-quashers like Scarlett instead of ego-strokers like Melanie, Southern manhood might have been knocked back on its heels, never to rise again.” Nevertheless, for all Scarlett’s obvious personal shortcomings Haskell does see her as a proto-feminist character whose challenge to traditional male authority remains thrilling and relevant in the 21st century.
Gender issues were also on my mind when I watched GWTW again this spring. The scene that really leaped out at me this time came early in the movie, when Scarlett rushes to meet her father, who is returning to Tara, his plantation, so that she can clarify the upsetting report that her beloved Ashley is about to marry Melanie. Gerald O’Hara does confirm the bad news, and goes on to scold Scarlett for her inappropriate interest in Ashley. What she really should love, he tells her, is the land itself, and to the swelling of Max Steiner’s marvelous score, the camera pulls back to show a loving and durably bonded father and daughter surveying Tara in the shadows of a magnificent Georgia sunset. As the father of a daughter myself, I could not help but be moved, even as I knew that bond was forged from real estate speculation, slave labor, and other interlocking evils. In that regard, GWTW remains uncomfortably relevant; as much as we might like to think we have overcome the injustices that marked American life before 1860 (and, for that matter, 1960), we are kidding ourselves if we doubt that love and sin remain inseparably twined. This, if nothing else, is a good reason to keep showing GWTW, and reading books like this one.
Jim Cullen, Review of Stone's Fall: A Novel by Iain Pears (Spiegel & Grau, 2009)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
One of the pleasures of reading historical fiction, especially historical mysteries, involves the (often anachronistic) experience of encountering familiar characters or archetypes in novel settings: the headstrong female bucking paternalistic tradition; the prescient innovator whose genius goes unrecognized by his contemporaries; the likeable scoundrel whose necessary rule-breaking paves the way for a modern happy ending. That’s not why you read Iain Pears, though. Pears, whose fiction of the last decade is often astoundingly saturated in historical detail that spans the Roman Empire to the Second World War, is certainly entertaining enough. And his new novel, Stone’s Fall, features a gamine female character whose spirited defiance of social custom would be familiar enough in an Elmore Leonard novel. But Pears aims higher; his latest has echoes of Balzac, Thomas Mann, and even a dollop of Dickens. Moreover, it’s hard to finish his books not feeling haunted. Pears doesn’t simply capture the strangeness of the past, even as he makes it legible in a new way. He also makes you aware of the highly temporary quality of the moment in which you happen to be living, and how the concerns you’re apt to consider thoroughly modern would be thoroughly familiar to characters in the past who are likely to have thought them through a good deal more than you have.
This lesson in humility takes on a special relevance for U.S. readers of Pears, who is British. American history is at best at the margins of his work. In his thrilling Restoration drama An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998), England’s North American colonies surface as a surprising coda to the main narrative line. In The Dream of Scipio (2002), a recurrent motif of imperial decay implicitly invites comparison with waning U.S. hegemony. Interestingly, one could say that American history is the narrative tripwire for Stone’s Fall –- the Civil War, and the British government’s reluctant decision to reverse a policy allowing military contractors to sell ships (like the fabled Alabama) to the Confederacy is what puts the plot in motion -– but the larger effect of this novel, like all the others, is to make one aware of how the great forces that shape history are finally beyond human intention, much less understanding.
The set-up of Stone’s Fall is simple enough. In 1909, an immensely wealthy (and acrophobic) arms merchant John Stone, a.k.a. Lord Ravenscliff, plunges to his death from a window in his London home. Was it an accident, foul play, or is there another explanation? His grieving widow hires a newspaper reporter to investigate. But as in Fingerpost and Scipio, the storyline is complicated by multiple narrators of uncertain reliability. The first is Matthew Braddock, the naively intrepid reporter who begins working for Lady Ravenscliff. His investigation lurches across theories of varying accuracy, among them that Stone was murdered by his wife, that Stone’s business was being sabotaged from within and/or by left-wing radicals (who again may include his wife), and that Stone himself is involved in a conspiracy to trigger a general European war in order to force a reluctant British government to buy the armada he was building at his own expense before his death. Braddock’s movements are being shadowed by Henry Cort, a spy who then takes the story backward to Paris in 1890, when the mysterious and alluring woman who will become Stone’s wife emerges from the mists and Stone himself is manipulating financial markets so as to gain permission to win naval contracts from the Russian government. The final leg of this triptych is narrated by Stone himself, who in the process of revealing the information that will finally explain his death, describes a sojourn in the languid Venice of 1867, in which he seized financial control of a newly invented torpedo that its hapless but talented inventor actually believes will level the naval playing field and thus become an instrument of world peace.
Saying much about the plot line of any mystery novel is a risky business, but it’s especially true of this one, which is more intricate than most. (The multitalented Pears, by the way, has a background that includes financial journalism as well as the authorship of a series of more conventional detective novels featuring a contemporary art-historian/private eye named Jonathan Argyll.) At almost 600 pages, Stone’s Fall is not one you can read quickly. But its satisfactions are real, sustained, and quickly apparent.
Again, what sets Pears apart is an exceptionally acute historical consciousness. Sometimes, you encounter it as a sly inside joke, as when a onetime war correspondent consigned to reporting on celebrity aristocrats in Biarritz brags to another by saying “I was in Afghanistan doing really well.” His companion asks, “But there isn’t a war in Afghanistan, is there?” The response: “There’s always a war in Afghanistan.” (The Brits fought three wars there.)
But in its broadest sense, Stone’s Fall is a novel about the sweeping force of historical change and the emergence of a modern order rooted in industrial capitalism. “Money,” an old intelligence operative explains to young Cort in the heart of the Belle Époque. “All the world is now convertible to money. It used to be that the sole determinant was the number of men you could march out to meet your enemies. Now more depends on the convertibility of your currency, its reputation among the bankers.” The purest embodiment of the new order is the aptly named Stone. Torpedoes don’t kill people; people kill people, he tells an incredulous Cort, justifying an avowedly amoral approach to commerce that includes a desire to sell weapons to Britain’s enemies. “If men do not have torpedoes, they will use cannon. If there are no cannon, they will use bow and arrows. If there are no arrows they will use stones, and if there are no stones they will bite each other to death. I merely convert desire into its most efficient form and extract capital from the process.”
But Pears also insists that Stone and his ilk cannot simply be dismissed as brutes. The conversion of desire and the extraction of capital is an art no less than the chiseling of a sculpture (or the writing of a novel), and the motives of such people are no less human than those of anyone else. As one character explains, extrapolating from Stone’s financial records, “He seems to have approached what he did rather as an engineer approaches a problem, or an artist a picture. He took pleasure in creating something that was harmonious, integrated, and balanced. He could have been an architect, I think. Or maybe he would have liked these new crosswords, where the delight lies solely in solving the puzzle.” Later in the book Stone endorses this perception: “I find it astonishing that man can regard fine machinery without admiration. The machines our age has produced can induce an awe in me that is as powerful as the impulse to religion in other men.”
It is a measure of Stone’s accomplishment than even people like the callow Braddock cannot fail to apprehend it, as in this scene in which he beholds the construction of Dreadnought battleships at Stone’s shipyard in northern England:
“I stared in utter amazement, with emotions verging on awe. The yard was gigantic, so big you could not see the end of it, whichever way you turned, it was simply swallowed up in the haze of sunlight through smoke. A vast mass of machinery, cranes, yards, buildings, storage areas, assembly sheds, offices, stretching out before my eyes in every direction …It seemed chaotic, even diabolical the way the landscape had disappeared under the hand of man, but there was also something extraordinarily beautiful in the intricacy, the blocks of brick buildings set against the tin roofs and rusting girders and the dark brown of the river, faintly in view to the east. And there was not a tree, not a bird, not even a patch of grass, anywhere to be seen. Nature had been abolished.”
Literally – and, arguably, figuratively – Twitter is small by comparison. So are contemporary hedge fund managers who indulge in little more than idle speculation. One need not romanticize the terrible cost of the Pax Britannica to wonder whether the achievements of its successor will be any more impressive, or durable. In any event, an imperial imagination is an artifact no less than a piece of pottery. “I was a great patriot then,” Braddock reflects at the beginning of the story, which opens in 1953. “I do not know whether I say so in pride or sorrow.”
Stone’s Fall has its shortcomings. Pears takes a comic potshot at the women's suffrage movement at one point, and the resolution of the story seems forced. Some may not like a vein of supernaturalism that runs through what is otherwise a realistic novel. (There was a comparably surprising and, perhaps, misplaced religious angle in An Instance of the Fingerpost.) But this is an endlessly provocative book by an extraordinary popular novelist. In the decade since I first plucked a rack-sized paperback Fingerpost from a train station at Boston’s South Station, I have encountered no author who writes historical fiction of any kind better than Iain Pears. I strongly recommend you have a look.
Andrew Feffer. Review of Jennifer E. Langdon's "Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood" (Columbia University Press, 2009)
Andrew Feffer is Associate Professor of History and co-director of Film Studies at Union College. He teaches American cultural and intellectual history.
Few who have seen the film Crossfire (RKO, 1947) can forget Robert Ryan’s terrifying portrayal of a homicidal ex-GI who coldly kills a Jew “just because he is a Jew.” Yet, in the sixty-two years since its release, the film has slipped into obscurity. Despite excellent box office receipts and nominations for five of that year’s Academy Awards, Crossfire was overshadowed by Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning Gentleman’s Agreement, a far more genteel treatment of the same subject released later that year.
Crossfire’s disappearance from our collective radar screen is largely what this superb study by historian Jennifer E. Langdon is about. As Langdon makes clear, this vivid, and for the time shocking, cinematic exposé of anti-Semitism latent in American culture, deserves far more historical attention than it has gotten, as does RKO producer Adrian Scott, the primary creative force behind it,. The main reasons why it did not receive that attention were the political affiliations of its creators and the “un-American” perspective they wove into the film: Scott and Eddie Dmytryk, his director for the project, were Communists, two of the infamous Hollywood Ten, scriptwriters, directors and producers convicted, imprisoned and then blacklisted for “unfriendly” testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the early days of McCarthyism.
Scott (who died in 1973 at the age of 61) had the ability (rare among Hollywood producers) to collaborate with directors and script writers (he was one himself) on distinctive and innovative projects. Among the works he produced with Dmytryk and his friend, writer John Paxton, were the noir classic Murder My Sweet (RKO 1945) and the anti-fascist revenge thriller Cornered (RKO 1945), both of which helped make RKO studios one of the main centers for the production of film noir as a distinctively American cinematic style. By the spring of 1947, when filming for Crossfire was done, Scott was a rising star at the studio and in the film world generally, a hands-on producer who could turn out critically acclaimed and popular films on tight schedules and low budgets.
Politically, Scott followed a trajectory typical during the Popular Front period (1934-1939), moving from New Deal liberalism into anti-fascist organizations in the late 1930s and from there into the Communist Party, considered by many progressives the political vanguard in the fight against fascism at home and abroad. Like most Communists of the Popular Front and war periods, during which the party stood firmly behind the New Deal, Scott adhered to an “abiding faith in the American democratic tradition.” “Scott may have been a Communist,” Langdon points out, “but he had great faith in the power of the liberal state to transform the lives of ordinary citizens.” His faith, however, did not lead him to be complacent about the United States, which he envisioned slipping under the tide of a resurgent fascism, as did many Party members after the war, when demobilization, economic uncertainty and right-wing backlash threatened FDR’s reforms. In some sense, their fears were justified. Scott was targeted by the FBI as early as 1943 when it raided Hollywood Party headquarters, netting membership lists for much of the film community. From that moment forward, Scott’s fate was more or less sealed.
Despite her desire to elevate Scott’s prominence in cinematic history, Langdon has not written a conventional biography. Instead she has woven a story of intrigue and betrayal, political drama and personal tragedy out of a detailed study of one person’s critical and creative contribution to a pivotal moment in American cultural history. In keeping with recent trends in cinema studies, Langdon explores complex relationships among the system of film production, audience reception and the larger culture context of which filmmaker, studio and audience were a part. At the heart is Langdon’s study of how Scott, Dmytryk, Paxton and the studio adapted Crossfire to the screen from The Brick Foxhole, Richard Brooks’ dark 1945 novel about homophobic violence in the military. Her analysis, a tour de force, reconstructs the artistic, business and political deliberations that went into the making of the film, including script revisions, intra-studio memos, test screenings, audience surveys, and the efforts by the American Jewish Committee to torpedo the film (for being inflammatory) and the Anti-Defamation League to keep it afloat.
Langdon clearly shows Scott’s “belief that rising anti-Semitism was a harbinger of fascism in America,” a secondary theme in Brooks’ novel, as the driving force behind the film. With the exception of Dore Schary, the executive overseeing the Crossfire project, and a few others, Hollywood was not sure it was ready for a full-blown exposé of the sort Scott conceived – certainly not one as violent and palpable as Crossfire turned out to be. Hollywood’s (and later HUAC’s) problem with the film’s “subversive potential” centered on the fact that it raised any troubling (and for anti-communists, “un-American”) questions at all about American bigotry, whether directed against Jews, gays or anyone else.
In general, as Langdon makes clear, Hollywood in 1947 had little interest in opening access to the silver screen for creative artists to address political and other controversies. So much was evident to Scott from his experience producing Cornered, which studio execs subjected to the worst kind of reshaping at all stages of its production. In fact, the studio, the Production Code Administration (Hollywood’s internal censorship board) and even the State Department shaped Hollywood’s output far more decisively than Communists (if they did at all) as a medium for political messages. “[A]s the case of Cornered makes quite clear,” Langdon writes, “artistic freedom was not exactly a top priority within the Hollywood studio system, and ultimately, it was the studio executives – and not Party functionaries like [Communist scriptwriter John Howard] Lawson (however doctrinaire or threatening he might have been) – who held the real power to enforce ‘political correctness’ in Hollywood filmmaking.”
Langdon’s study of the intricacies of Hollywood production reveals a daily drama of duplicity and betrayal ultimately leading to the final act at the HUAC hearings in the fall of 1947, when the demise of Scott and others was staged (abetted by execs like Schary) by New Jersey Congressman and right-wing extremist J. Parnell Thomas and the openly anti-Semitic racist from Mississippi, John E. Rankin. At that moment, she asserts, one “Americanism” triumphed over another, replacing the pluralistic and egalitarian “imagined community” of the New Deal and the Popular Front with the “older, xenophobic, anti-radical, antimodernist tradition” championed by Republican empire-builders and Dixiecrats through the 1950s. In this broader historical register, Langdon’s argument weakens, especially in the sketchy application of Benedict Anderson’s political anthropology. However, her detailed study of film production and politics is simply marvelous and well worth the read.
One additional note is needed about Langdon’s project. As a dissertation it received the American Historical Association’s Gutenberg Prize, leading to publication in book form by Columbia University press and to web publication at Gutenberg-e (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/Langdon). One can freely access the full text of the study along with digitized versions of several documents cited in the footnotes.
Jim Cullen, Review of Kevin Mattson’s What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country (Bloomsbury, 2009)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History.He blogs at American History Now.]
It has now been almost exactly thirty years since a summer of discontent led to one of the most remarkable presidential addresses in American history: Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise” speech. (The word “malaise” was never actually used in the text, but in surfaced in the pre-broadcast discourse of the speech, and stuck.) As far as I can tell, the only other public address remotely like it is Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural of March 4 1865, in that it, like Carter’s speech of July 15, 1979, held American citizens responsible for the crises that beset them. For Lincoln, it was the Union no less than the Confederacy that God punished with a Civil War; for Carter, it was a culture of narcissism that explained a nation literally and figuratively sapped of its energy. But whatever their similarities in content and tone, the outcome proved to be quite different. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural solidified his claim on immortality; Carter’s speech, after giving him a momentary bump in the polls, became an emblem of his ineffectuality and hastened the end of his presidency.
The “malaise” speech is well known among presidential historians and students of the 1970s. But Kevin Mattson, recently named a “Top Young Historian” on this website, here offers the first major book-length narrative history, focusing on the three months prior to Carter’s address. Yet perhaps without intending to, the effect of his account leads one to conclude not so much that his speech should have changed the country, but rather an explanation why it couldn’t. Challenged from his left by Ted Kennedy and on his right by an ascendant Ronald Reagan, the Carter White House was also riven by internal conflict that extended even to his genial vice-president, Walter Mondale, who fruitlessly urged Carter to take a focused and pragmatic approach to a national energy crisis that caused riots, mile-long gas lines, and seething anger at OPEC, the domestic oil industry, and the U.S. government. Instead, Mattson shows, Carter increasingly fell under the influence of the young pollster Patrick Caddell, who, armed with empirical data as well as the writings of scholars like Robert Bellah and (especially) Christopher Lasch, urged Carter to articulate a broader critique as to the troubled state of the nation and what the president would ultimately term “a crisis of confidence.”
Carter pulled few punches. “In a nation of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” he told the American people. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” Carter, whose persona oscillated between his engineering training and his evangelical faith, re-entered the world of the Puritan jeremiad, and hoped to take the nation with him.
He did not. As Mattson’s analysis makes clear, that’s because public opinion was not sufficiently prepared or willing to accept the implications of his message. But this unwillingness was also a result of what Carter did –- or, more accurately, failed to do –- in his leadership role. The president’s address followed ten days of confusion resulting from a cancelled address on July 5 (prompting the New York Post to ask “What the heck are you up to Mr. President?"). Two days after the speech, Carter asked for the resignations of his entire cabinet, an act meant to demonstrate decisiveness but instead projected weakness. So was Carter’s inability to get his energy plan (which included a windfall profits tax and gas rationing) through Congress in anything like a recognizable form that summer. In November of 1979, the coup de grace of the Carter’s presidency -– the Iranian hostage crisis –- began. It’s probably this event rather than the “malaise” speech that was the true turning point that Mattson asserts the speech was.
Moreover, Mattson, who is also a historian of neoconservatism, is off the mark in another sense as well, one that again harkens back to his subtitle. For in a way, Carter’s speech did change the country: it crystallized the perception that modern liberalism was exhausted, and it became the touchstone for conservative critics –- Reagan was only one of a number who cited it as justification for a political realignment –- who would soon dominate American society. Mattson seems to imply that the nation was at a crossroads in 1979, that it was “a time of contingency, when a turn was taken that wasn’t carved in stone.” Yet he has little positive to say about Carter, not to mention his liberal challengers Kennedy and Jerry Brown, and gives little indication of a countervailing force anything like that of an ascendant Moral Majority and a new Right that made even figures like the one-time Republican front-runner John Connally look passé. The country was changing all right, just not in a way Mattson wished it would have. And his analysis, which explicitly affirms contingency, implicitly shows inevitability.
In the final pages of the book, Mattson makes clear that he regards the speech it as prophetic, only becoming more resonant as U.S. global confidence sinks and its energy dependency deepens. He’s right about that. Yet this is an argument in favor of a book that looked more closely at what Carter actually said than Mattson does, a book with a lot more of the Hendrik Hertzberg who helped write the speech and less of the Pat Caddell who lobbied for it. In his acknowledgments, Mattson notes his commitment to write narrative history. Alas, there isn’t much of a story here. It’s more a snapshot of a body politic facing right, not quite in motion.
Marguerite Feitlowitz. Review of Graciela Ben-Dror's The Catholic Church and the Jews: Argentina, 1933-1945 (Published by the University of Nebraska Press, for the Vidal Sasson International Center for the Study of Anti-semitism, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 2008)
Marguerite Feitlowitz is the author of "A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture," a New York Times Notable Book, New York Times Notable Paperback, and Finalist for the L.L. Winship-PEN New England Prize. An updated Second Edition is due out from Oxford University Press in 2011. She teaches Literature at Bennington College in Vermont.
Even before the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe, there was significant anti-semitism in the Argentine press. In 1881, in an editorial in L’union française, Jews were referred to as “noxious insects, powerful parasites.” An influx of their numbers was likened to “an injection of leeches.” This, when there was but a handful of Jews in the land, virtually all of them assimilated or official converts to Catholicism. By the end of the 20th century, Argentina would have the largest Jewish population in Latin America, one that was vibrant, sophisticated, and diverse (Ashkenazic and Sephardic, ranging from Orthodox to secular humanists), and whose members would become major intellectuals and politicians, writers and artists, journalists and activists, bankers and industrialists. Yet there has never been serious hope among Argentine Jews of definitively eradicating anti-semitism. Historically, the task has been to set “acceptable” limits, as one Rabbi put it to me. Jewish cemeteries are periodically desecrated; Jews (though not only Jews) have suffered terribly under right-wing governments and dictatorships; the Department of Education has periodically succeeded in imposing Catholic teachings in public schools.
In the fall of 1989, the first time I attended Kabbalat Shabat services at Bet El, a renowned synagogue in Buenos Aires, the temple’s wall was emblazoned with a swastika. In the early 1990s, the Israeli Embassy, located on a lovely commercial and residential street, was bombed; in 1994, the AMIA (Jewish Mutual Aid Society) was bombed, causing the deaths of hundreds and devastation to persons, property, and a sense of civic comfort in the center of Once, the largest traditionally Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires.
It is well documented that Argentina was a safe haven for prominent Nazis, among them Adolf Eichmann; ex-Nazis modernized the Argentine secret services. Argentina (like many other countries) was inhospitable to Jews fleeing the Nazis. Going further back, the armed forces were modeled on the Praetorian Guard; the Catholic Church long harbored and taught the blood libel, that Jews had killed Christ and framed poor Pontius Pilate, and other distortions of history and theology. One can still buy the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at major news kiosks in subway stations and street corners.
These tensions and contradictions have attracted some first-rate scholarship (Leonardo Senkman and Uki Goñi come immediately to mind). The Catholic Church and the Jews draws on this reservoir of study (and the notes are excellent); the author operates in a charged and restricted time frame and, while she examines some Church documents she contends have not been scrutinized before in this context, the overall project remains relatively modest. Graciela Ben-Dror, born in Uruguay, a member of a pioneer youth movement, and a kibbutznik, carried out her study under the guidance of distinguished historian Haim Avni of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her aim was to gather the various documents and declarations of the Argentine Roman Catholic Church (1933-1945), compare them with statements of the same period made by the Vatican, and then try to ascertain how these influenced Argentine domestic and foreign policy. Ben-Dror has indeed amassed a number of documents: some of these are arresting, some horrifying, others are ambiguous, and yet others are noteworthy for their strong disapproval of the violence being done to the Jews throughout Europe. She reminds us that vicious anti-semites rose to great prominence: Hugo Wast (pseudonym of Gustavo Martínez Zuviría), was a best-selling novelist, whose books routinely portrayed Jews as leeches, lepers, Christ-killers and, when they were not communists, controllers of the international press and banking system. During the years covered by Ben-Dror, Martínez Zuviría was Secretary of Education and Justice.
At the inauguration of the National Library in 1992, the periodicals room was named for this “distinguished” malefactor, despite vigorous protest from Jewish and other citizens’ groups and human rights organizations. She quotes from Father Julio Meinvieille, who from the bosom of the Church, based his own (in)famous works on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
To her credit, Ben-Dror is candid in saying that on the basis of her own research (and owing to the inaccessibility of certain documents), she is unable to conclude with any certainty that such views had a direct influence on actions taken at the highest political levels. She lets us know that Argentina’s neutrality during the Second World War owed as much to its longstanding diplomatic “dance,” which was designed to keep both Britain and Germany as buyers of its wheat, beef, and other exports. Argentine relations with the United States were similarly complicated. It was not until Germany’s defeat was certain that Argentina made its move toward the Allies. She implies, however (and responsibly, I believe) that entrenched hostility to Jews played its part, even if unofficially or indirectly.
Ben-Dror also points up that, owing to the conflation in Argentina of Jews and communists (russo, or Russian, is still a nominative for Jew in some Argentine circles), anti-communist politics often got mixed up with anti-Jewish rhetoric, actors, and actions. Politicians wary of the trade union movements, for example, often found themselves linked up with virulent anti-Jewish campaigns. Nationalists who honored Hispanidad (which was, for them, inherently Roman Catholic) opposed non-Spanish immigration, even of those fleeing certain death in concentration camps. There were Argentine clerics who defended the Jews as having a “chosen” place in God’s overall design, or because they were charged, by the Gospels, to defend the defenseless. The Church was of course on the defensive against “godless communism” which, when it was conflated with Judaism, led to predictable reactions. Ben-Dror does well not to shrink from such braided dynamics.
I wish that the author had spent more time analyzing the texts she puts before us, and weaving a narrative that contends with context. Her focus is so tight that we sometimes lose sight of the live events from which they arose. There is a curious “stop action,” dissertation-like feel to her pages (and in fact this book is an adaptation of her PhD thesis).
It is to be hoped that now that she has immersed herself in the scholarship and arrayed her primary sources, Ben-Dror will continue the work she has begun in the present study.
B. C. Knowlton: Review of Two Books on Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski and Justin Marozzi
Source: Special to HNN (6-21-09)
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels With Herodotus. Translated by Klara Glowczewska (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
Justin Marozzi, The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2008)
Herodotus is enjoying, or enduring, a great deal of attention these days, owing mostly to what The Histories has to say about what Anthony Pagden has called “The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West.” More people than have read that book have seen 300, the simple-minded and extremely violent movie about the Battle of Thermopylae, which some have seen as an allegory and endorsement of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror. Herodotus does speak to the historical present; he does tell the history of the Persian Wars, which were understood at that time as a struggle between a despotic eastern empire and independent western states. But his Histories, that is, his researches or inquiries, have far more to them than the cut and thrust of the actual battles; and these two books will remind Herodotean readers of that.
At the end of Book 1 of The Histories, the Persian King Cyrus has died in battle while trying to conquer the far-away Massagetae. He has been succeeded by his son Cambyses, who as Book 2 begins is about to undertake the invasion of Egypt. But rather than carry on with an account of this campaign, Herodotus digresses, and tells us all about Egypt – the Nile, the pyramids, the political history, religious practices, and other customs unlike those of the Greeks. He went there himself, and spoke with everyone who would speak with him. He was obviously very interested in the Egyptians. He doesn’t get back to Cambyses until Book 3; but in the meantime he has presented to his readers a very compelling contrast between two ways in which a person, or a people, might encounter another – conquest, or inquiry.
Herodotus is often called The Father of History, where history means inquiry; but it is as the world’s first travel writer that he has inspired Kapuscinski and Marozzi. Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist who died just before the English translation of this, his last book, was published. He began his career in the mid-fifties, when his editor sent him on his first international assignment after giving him a copy of The Histories, which had just appeared for the first time in a Polish translation. He then took the book wherever he went. Like Herodotus himself, Kapuscinski tells us of his travels without telling us any more than that about why he is undertaking them. We hear nothing of the journalism he must have done; but we see him reading The Histories in various places, and it is clear that his sensibility and perspective have been strongly informed by Herodotus. Marozzi is a young English journalist with an academic background in History and an active career in security consulting and strategic studies. He studied under Paul Cartledge at Cambridge (though he didn’t read Herodotus until later), and grabbed for his travels “the highly accessible – and portable – Penguin Classics edition of The Histories” (xi). But the Herodotean influence is very much the same, and very much in evidence.
At the time when Kapuscinski began his travels with Herodotus, the Cold War was the current struggle between East and West. The Histories had only just appeared in a Polish translation, because the communist authorities had only just permitted it to appear. The “Iron Curtain” that formed the border between eastern and western Europe is in some ways comparable to the Hellespont of Herodotus’ time; but historical inquiry always complicates such comparisons. Kapuscinski comes from the eastern side of the historic divide, and knows very little about the western; but for some reason he becomes interested in “crossing the border.” At first he wants only to go to Czechoslovakia, though even this is considered irregular. But then, a typically inexplicable decision is made to send him across all sorts of borders, to India.
Kapuscinski’s sense of the significance of “crossing borders” is obviously informed by his experience of Stalinism and post-Stalinism, and as obviously informs his understanding of Herodotus. Herodotus had come from Halicarnassus, a Greek city on the eastern side of the Aegean; he was a Persian subject but a very cosmopolitan one. As a Herodotean traveler, Kapuscinski crosses borders and finds not just the opposite side but the varieties of otherness. India was an unaligned nation during the Cold War and one that Herodotus may or may not have visited, though his inquiries did find both definite strangeness and indefinite spaces there. To get to India, Kapuscinski must first fly to Italy – he must go west to get to the east. He flies in an American-made plane, and meets an Italian journalist who has already crossed the border in the other direction – and who speaks both Polish and Italian. Kapuscinski speaks only Polish, rather as Herodotus was thought to have known only Greek. But where Herodotus seems to have found Greek speakers wherever he went, Kapuscinski finds that he needs to learn English, since English was then, as Greek had once been, the language that crossed the most borders. Language, then, complicates Kapuscinski’s travels in a way that it did not Herodotus’ Histories. “Language struck me,” Kapuscinski writes, “as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and preventing my going further, closing off the world, making it unattainable” (20). Having been thus struck by language, and having begun to learn English alongside his inquiries, he finds that “I approached India not through images, sounds, and smells, but through words.” He “noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being” which gave him the words for the images, sounds, and smells. He “understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture” (21). Having said that, though, Kapuscinski carries on with his travel writing, in which he is well served by his English translator. For Marozzi, the crossing of borders and translation of languages do not figure or signify as they do for Kapuscinski; but if Kapuscinski’s travels are more linguistically complicated, Marozzi’s are more inquisitively implicated.
Marozzi introduces his travels with the man who invented History with an introduction to his reading of The Histories. That reading begins, as so many others have done, with the Prologue in which Herodotus of Halicarnassus tells us what he is going to do and why. Though Marozzi does not do an academic reading, his academic background is evident in his discussion of Herodotean historiography; and though his reading is less earnest than Kapuscinski’s, it is also more purposeful. Kapuscinski reads Herodotus’ Prologue only on page 74 of his Travels, and then only as a respite from his reportage. Marozzi’s angle takes in the beginning of History; Kapuscinski’s the end of memory. Both readings are generally, but not simply, consistent with the current understanding of Herodotus as the historian of the struggle between freedom and despotism. Marozzi’s actual travels begin in Bodrum, the city in Turkey that was once Halicarnassus, and in which he does not merely inquire like Herodotus but inquires after him. The modern borders between Turkey and Greece in some ways line up with the ones that existed in antiquity, but in other ways have been very much reconfigured by history. Marozzi’s Herodotean inquiries find that the father of history has been pretty much forgotten in Bodrum. One person he speaks to, who regrets that no one is interested in Herodotus anymore, also insists that he wasn’t a Greek but rather a Carian. Marozzi corrects that misapprehension for his readers, much as Herodotus does when he says that he reports what people tell him, but doesn’t always believe it. And as Herodotus no doubt had to look hard for people who could tell him what he wanted to know, and had to make inquiries that got below the surfaces of the places he visited, so Marozzi finds a museum director who is superintending an excavation of an ancient sunken ship; and this leads to inquiries which Herodotus obviously couldn’t have made for himself, but which would have as obviously interested him very much.
Marozzi also makes his Herodotean way to Iraq, where at the surface of the ancient history a war is going on. As always, history is being both made and destroyed; the people who are living it are typically ignorant of it. But, as always, critical inquiry can discern and discover much. “All the elements of the war in Iraq carried an unmistakably Herodotean echo,” Marozzi writes: “they sounded the enduring themes of empire, imperial over-reach, the sensible limits of power, cultural confrontation and the clash of civilizations, democracy versus dictatorship, West versus East, religion, greed, hubris and its consequences” (71). In one of many close readings of apposite episodes, Marozzi tells of the wise advice the Persian King Xerxes received from his uncle Artabanus, when Xerxes was determined to invade and conquer Greece. Artabanus reminds him of his father Darius’ failed invasion of Scythia, and of what God thinks and does about those who exhibit hubris. Xerxes, in the end, doesn’t take the wise advice, and the rest, as they say, is history, with its inevitable application to Bush Administration policy. Marozzi goes on to consider just what history has to say about such events and developments. We hear from academic historians and active-duty servicemen who tell us what is going on and what it means. We catch up with King Cambyses, who, having invaded and taken over Egypt, behaves so outrageously that Herodotus concludes he must be mad. Marozzi concludes that “Herodotus’ message is even more timely and relevant today than it was two-and-a-half millennia ago. But it goes unheeded, as it always has and as it always will, because history teaches us that we do not learn from history” (95).
Marozzi undertakes his travels with Herodotus precisely so that he can write this timely book; Kapuscinski only happened to have Herodotus with him as he undertook journalistic work that he would have done even without him, and his book reads more as a memoir of a long career. Marozzi travels where Herodotus had traveled, to see what could be seen and say what could be said about those places early in the 21st century; to inquire like Herodotus and to find Herodotus in his inquiries. Kapuscinski traveled where Herodotus had not – not only to India but also to Africa – and brought Herodotus along to read in his free time. Though the Herodotean influence is much in evidence, it is also more incidental and impressionistic. And though both authors note that, for all his interesting inquiries, we know very little about Herodotus himself, both also admit that they came to consider Herodotus himself, and not just his Histories, as their traveling companion.
Robert Justin Goldstein: Review of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev (Yale University Press, 2009)
Source: Special to HNN (6-13-09)
[Robert Justin Goldstein is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Oakland University and Research Associate, Center for Russian & East European Studies, University of Michigan. He is the author of American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (University Press of Kansas, 2008).]
The Haynes/Klehr/Vassiliev (hereafter Haynes) volume contains a great deal of highly valuable scholarship within a massive tome consisting of over 40 pages of prefatory matter, 550 pages of main text and 90 pages of footnotes. Despite raising massive and extremely troubling methodological, historiographical and, sometimes, judgmental questions, it is unquestionably a major contribution. In general, this reviewer finds it convincing, and certainly a book which anyone interested in the post-World War II Red Scare cannot ignore.
Some disclosure is required here: I have a very slight acquaintance with co-author Harvey Klehr, who recently did me a great kindness by loaning me some research materials, even though he surely knew that my political views and scholarship are probably often at odds with his. I also have a very modest, but less slight, acquaintanceship with Ellen Schrecker, perhaps the most prominent historian of the post-World War II Red Scare, with whom Klehr and Haynes have been involved in a sort of academic cold war for many years. In an earlier joint book, Early Cold War Spies (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which in general I find quite reliable, Klehr and Haynes let their ideological bias and personal pique explode--rather than “peak” through--when (on page 22) they ridiculously declared that Schrecker’s leading study Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, Princeton University Press, 1999, was a “broad academic denunciation of any form of opposition to communism,” which are all “conflate[d]” with “McCarthyism.” My own published views and interpretations are sometimes “conflated” with Schrecker’s and are unquestionably far closer to hers than those of Haynes and Klehr, who have written about half-dozen studies of Russian espionage in pre-Cold War America and are certainly the pre-eminent authorities on the subject.
The Haynes volume ultimately amounts to an extended version of “naming names,” with its primary source the second hand account of a former KGB agent (co-author Vassiliev) of his admittedly limited, selected, exclusive and purchased access to alleged KGB records, which were never viewed by his co-authors and are not available to other scholars. On the basis of this second-hand account of access to alleged documents created by the KGB, an organization controlled by the duplicitous, paranoid, murderous Stalinist regime that is the primary target of the well-deserved opprobrium of conservative defenders of American cold war policy and at least some aspects of the post-World War II Red Scare, scores of Americans are effectively “tried” and “convicted” of espionage by the authors, without any possibility of responding to the alleged evidence against them or of cross-examining their generally nameless accusers, especially because in almost all cases everyone involved is dead.
Haynes and Klehr report that they have carefully cross-checked the Vassiliev material against other records (notably the famous “Venona” intercepts of Russian intelligence communications during the 1940s) and they have made the Vassiliev notes available to other scholars. In general I find that this book has an aura of verisimilitude about it and, with some screaming exceptions, I find the authors’ judgments reasonable. Thus, they quite reasonably conclude, for example, on the basis of the Vassiliev material along with the Venona documents, that both Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were unquestionably espionage agents (Rosenberg’s co-defendant Morton Sobell confessed in 2008 that he and Rosenberg were indeed Soviet agents after years of denying it), while J. Robert Oppenheimer was not, despite numerous attempts by the KGB to recruit him. However, in a few cases they have wildly or irresponsibly leapt without adequate evidence or looking.
Readers should probably verify, but not necessarily trust. Although I found most parts of it believable, I had to continually hold my nose while reading the Haynes book. Espionage is, needless to say, a rather serious charge to level against someone, and to level it against dead people who obviously cannot defend themselves, on the basis of evidence which is usually from nameless people who cannot therefore be questioned even in the unlikely prospect that they are not dead themselves, is very troublesome. It’s even more troublesome because, even if one assumes that the Vassiliev notes --- which are by far the major basis for the Haynes book ---- accurately reflect the KGB records that he was given selective access to, they are not available for independent examination and the records themselves, like so much FBI material, could well be a mix of accurate information, half-truths and utter fantasy, especially since Stalin’s police state practically required KGB agents to report spectacular achievements if they wanted to save their jobs and perhaps even their lives.
Moreover, in the vast majority of instances the alleged KGB records allegedly accessed by Vassiliev (I keep using alleged because even though I believe he did access KGB records, who knows for sure?) refer to alleged American espionage agents by code names and deciphering their real identities is ultimately at the heart of the Haynes book. As already indicated, I think Haynes and Klehr are generally reputable and responsible scholars. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that some of their book is simply far too confident and cocksure, given the chaotic and often stupid nature of KGB activities and records as reported by Vassiliev. Aside from the repeated use of bad detective story/juvenile passwords and exchanges by which KGB and American espionage agents supposedly identified themselves to each other, in case after case the Haynes authors conclude that the same alleged American espionage agent was identified by different cover names and that the same cover names were used for more than one agent. In some instances they report that neither they nor the FBI could determine who the coded names referred to, while in others they declare that the FBI (in its Venona materials) misidentified the cover names while they have got them right or that they have identified the “real” persons although the FBI could not. Just to further confuse things, in many cases the Haynes authors report that the targets of failed KGB recruitment efforts (including Oppenheimer, Walter Lippmann and Ernest Hemmingway) were nonetheless assigned cover names and that individual KGB agents (and who knows who the sources for most of the Vassiliev reports were?) fabricated at least one alleged American agent.
According to my count (and to the authors’ credit, they provide plenty of evidence that can be used against them), in about three dozen cases the same alleged American espionage agent was given, at one time or another, more than one cover name, while in a dozen instances the same cover name was used, at one time or another, for more than one agent. Thus, the Haynes authors recount that cover names “Mary” and “Jack” were each used for three different agents, that Lippmann and Oppenheimer were assigned the same cover names as actual agents, and that Hiss and admitted spy Klaus Fuchs were each assigned at least three different cover names. Thus, Hiss was reportedly designated as “Jurist,” “Ales,” and “Leonard,” while “Jurist” was also used (along with “Richard” and “Reed”) for Harry Dexter White, even though Hiss and White are identified as Soviet agents operating during roughly the same periods--and both “Richard” and “Reed” are also reported to have been used for yet other agents!
If, despite all of these instances that are likely to make careful readers (and very careful reading is required here!) somewhat dubious of the self-certain undertone of the Haynes authors, in some cases their judgment seems highly doubtful or even outrageously irresponsible. Thus severe doubts have been raised in other early reviews of this book about the extremely thin evidence used to “convict” famed journalist I. F. Stone of espionage, which seems to be the only instance in which the Haynes judgments have thus far been subjected to searching scrutiny (the Stone material also appears in the May, 2009 issue of Commentary under the title “I. F. Stone, Soviet Agent--Case Closed” but is severely criticized as thin to non-existent in the June 5 American Prospect and the May 25 and June 22 issues of The Nation).
Moreover, there are several instances in which people are named or smeared based on fleeting references in one alleged KGB document reported by Vassiliev, or even on the basis of nothing whatsoever. I have chosen not to repeat the specific names in most such instances (such as the completely irrelevant--regarding possible espionage--passage in which the wife of a named prominent American general is reported to have cheated “with gusto” on her husband). But, to give one egregious example: in the same chapter which “convicts” Stone, entitled “The Journalist Spies,” it is clearly suggested, if not quite stated, that the deceased left-wing journalist George Seldes, the longtime editor of the independent newsletter “In Fact,” was an espionage agent, yet absolutely no evidence or examples of any kind are produced to support this.
One of the more bizarre targets of Soviet espionage reported on by Haynes involves massive spying on the American Socialist Workers (“Trotskyist”) Party (SWP). The authors report (pp. 480-81):
“By 1942, the American Trotskyist movement, never a significant force, was in dire straights. . . . [It] never amounted to more than a few thousand members, had minimal financial resources, and had only a minor role in the trade union movement. Yet even where the KBG lacked enough officers to service valuable political and technical spies, it dispatched additional personnel to America to recruit and supervise sources and agents aimed at this weak threat. It devoted considerable resources to neutralizing and destroying it, sending in infiltrators to report on its activities, steal its documents, coerce its members, and harass its activists.”
This all seems true, and truly bizarre, but it also seems bizarre that the Haynes authors fail to point out that the FBI was engaged in the same activities against the SWP, which appeared to increase even as the group faded into total obscurity during the 1950s, eventually leading to a widely publicized lawsuit won by the SWP in 1986 in which the FBI conceded that, over the years, it had infiltrated the SWP with 1,300 informers, including 40 who held SWP offices, and burglarized SWP offices on almost 200 occasions.
In the end, what is the significance of the Haynes book? Clearly they establish that the American federal government was infiltrated by a large number of espionage agents controlled by the KGB during the pre-Cold War period, the vast majority of whom were American Communist Party members or intense sympathizers (on the other hand, well over 99% of CP members had no involvement in or knowledge of espionage activities, and the vast majority were not the mindless Russian-controlled automatons as so often portrayed--as they demonstrated by quitting the Party in droves out of boredom, disgust at the Party’s ideological dogmatism, revulsion at revelations about the Stalinist dictatorship, lack of time for the CP’s incessant demands or well-founded fears about American government repression of dissidents).
But there is nothing really fundamentally new about the revelations in the Haynes book or other recent publications on similar topics, since by 1950 anyone reading the newspapers knew plenty about widespread Russian espionage in the U.S. (due to the massively-publicized confessions and/or convictions of Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, Klaus Fuchs, Nathan Silvermaster, Henry Wadleigh, Harry Gold, David and Ruth Greenglass, and Igor Gouzenko, plus the case of Judith Coplon and others who have faded into history). Haynes and Klehr were nonetheless accurate in suggesting in their Early Cold War Spies book that, to a considerable extent, these early pre-WWII revelations became effectively “forgotten” due to the scholarly focus on the excesses of the post-World War II Red Scare during the four decades or so after 1955. Certainly the Haynes authors (and others), in this and earlier books, have filled in many blanks and connected many dots, and probably the Yale University Press release accompanying the publication of Spies is correct in claiming that the new book “provides the most complete account yet written of Soviet espionage in America in the 1930s and ‘40s.” But I’m still holding my nose.
Jeremy Kuzmarov.: Review of Moshik Temkin The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (Yale University Press, 2009)
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Assistant Professor of History, University of Tulsa.
In 1927, two revolutionary anarchists of Italian ancestry, Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were executed outside of Boston, Massachusetts six years after their conviction on murder charges in one of the most controversial criminal cases in American history. Critics have long claimed that Sacco and Vanzetti were framed because of their radical political convictions. It has been widely acknowledged that they did not receive a fair trial because of widespread prejudice, fueled in part by the jingoistic and anti-immigrant climate of the first Red Scare. Moshik Temkin’s book, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial provides new insights on the socio-political resonance of the case and its broader historical implications. He argues that the heated passions that were invoked dispel the myth promoted by many historians that the 1920s were apolitical and the decision to go through with the execution further exemplified the provincialism of many political elites of the era, who rejected a broad international consensus supporting the right of Sacco and Vanzetti to a fair trial.
An Assistant Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Temkin devotes the first few chapters to exploring how the case became a political cause celèbre. He chronicles the dissent of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and labor activists who viewed the case as a reflection of class warfare and structural inequalities in American society. He also analyzes how liberal intellectuals who had predominantly defended the Palmer raids came to support Sacco and Vanzetti’s right to a fair trial, which he sees as a turning point in the growth of the popular front, or alliance between liberals and radicals during the 1930s. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote a particularly influential piece in the Atlantic Monthly pointing to legal inconsistencies and the bias of Judge Webster Thayer. Internationally, the Sacco and Vanzetti case emerged as a symbol of the shortcomings of the American criminal justice system. Across Latin America and Europe, people sympathized with the defendants either in solidarity with their political beliefs or out of moral outrage. In France, the case was viewed as equivalent to the Dreyfuss Affair and fostered the growth of an incipient anti-Americanism. Intellectuals who had welcomed America aid during World War I came to see the U.S. in a hypocritical light.
Because of increasing popular protest and pressure, the Coolidge administration appointed a commission headed by Harvard University President Abbott Lawrence Lowell to reevaluate the evidence. After a short inquiry, Lowell upheld the original decision, which was especially disappointing to Sacco and Vanzetti’s supporters because Lowell had previously defended the right to free speech of several socialist professors at Harvard whom alumni had demanded be fired. Temkin paints Lowell’s decision as the product of his conservative political orientation and his stubborn disregard for domestic and international opinion, which is a dangerous tendency among American leaders. As with the population on the whole, elites were generally divided over the case on political and philosophical grounds as well as in their attitude towards America’s place in the world. Many pushed for the U.S. to adopt a flexible and pragmatic position accepting of diversity and the need to consider a wide variety of perspectives. Those who wielded ultimate power, however, clung to a more parochial and narrow-minded vision, with tragic consequences.
On the whole, Temkin has written an engaging book on the political impact and debates spawned by the Sacco and Vanzetti-affair. In a novel way, he uses them to illuminate the deep socio-political and cultural fissures in American life, which have remained enduring over time. The battle for the nation’s soul continues, as exemplified by the election in 2008, Temkin notes, of a “multicultural, intellectually curious man whose extraordinary popularity overseas was matched only by the global unpopularity of his parochial, proudly incurious predecessor.” A predecessor who had much in common with Abbott Lowell, Judge Thayer and the others responsible for Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution; one of the graver injustices of the 1920s.
Luther Spoehr: Review of Thomas Childers’ Soldier From the War Returning: The Greatest Generation’s Troubled Homecoming from World War II (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).
Source: HNN (6-5-09)
After teaching history for 35 years, I have concluded that all the helpful instructional hints boil down to two injunctions: “Make it real” and “Make it matter.” The first requires, among other things, bringing home to students that the historical figures they study were just as smart and stupid, deep and shallow, optimistic and worried--and so just as varied and complex--as they themselves are. It asks them to try to see events from the perspective of people who experienced them and didn’t know how they were going to turn out.
“Making it matter” is an equally worthy and essential goal. When teachers present students with historical problems, questions, and answers, the latter are likely--and right--to ask, “So what? Why should I care?” Teachers need to respond, not necessarily by linking the past to obvious and immediate concerns about policy or politics, but by addressing larger questions of meaning and significance important to all of us. Questions such as, “How does the experience of war affect the lives of those who fight it, their families, their friends, and their society?”
The same mandates apply to historical narrative, and Thomas Childers, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, more than meets them. “Soldier from the War Returning” (a quotation adapted from A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad”) is the third book that Childers has written to, in his words, “illuminate the events, emotions, and experiences of the Second World War through the lives of the human beings caught up in them, to allow readers not only to observe and analyze but also to feel something of the turmoil—the exultation, the fear, the agony—of those epochal years.” His first book, “Wings of Morning” (1995) was, as the words of its subtitle indicate, “The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II.” His second, “In the Shadows of War” (2004), was about (again, the informative subtitle), “An American Pilot’s Odyssey Through Occupied France and the Camps of Nazi Germany.”
Wesley Hogan: Review of Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle of Civil Rights in the North (Random House, 2008)
Wesley Hogan is Professor of History and Philosophy and Co-Director, Institute for the Study of Race Relations at Virginia State University.
Energizing this 500-page book is Thomas Sugrue’s driving curiosity to understand the racial geography of the 30-plus American states loosely referred to as “the North.” He wants to share widely the stories of unheralded heroes and heroines of the northern freedom struggle. He wants to know how and why power-brokers in U.S. cities and suburbs created and then supported unequal access to education, housing, jobs, and “the good life.”
Along the way, we learn quite a bit about white power, northern-style: how leaders used tax policy, government subsidies to real-estate developers and banks, federal grants, zoning boards, and even the 14th Amendment to make sure that between the years 1945 and 2006, “whites -–whatever they personally thought of blacks-- returned home to white neighborhoods, continued to send their children to segregated schools, and fought to maintain local control over taxation, education and land use in ways that were far more damaging to the cause of racial equality than any negative feelings they might harbor toward black people.”
Sweet Land of Liberty inverts the theme of invisibility long-explored by black writers like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Paule Marshall, and most famously Ralph Ellison. Rather than focus on the ways whites ignored blacks, making the latter feel largely invisible, Sugrue shows how whites consciously and relentlessly pursued racial demarcations in their workplaces, housing, and hearts. Initially, he states, “the lack of state-sponsored racial discrimination had the ironic effect of blinding northern whites to the Negro problem” in their midst. But forced to confront black demands for fair employment practices, northern white Republicans who had supported southern civil rights legislation suddenly experienced a “double consciousness” when major constituents like the National Association of Manufacturers and local chambers of commerce opposed Fair Employment laws.
While signs for “colored” and “whites” might not be publicly displayed, “northern cities were invisibly divided by race. There were colored hotels and white hotels, Negro bars and white bars, black restaurants and white restaurants.” Chicago’s NAACP branch head, Carl Fuqua, noted that “nobody pays any attention to the laws against discrimination if they don’t want to.” Whites consistently used “the market” as an excuse for northern Jim Crow. “Regardless of our personal feelings…we have to cater to the majority,” explained one Pittsburgh pool manager. Whites often claimed support for integrated housing, but moved out in droves when blacks arrived, fearing “loss of market value” if they stayed. Parents who mobilized against busing and integrated education claimed “white” and “black” schools weren’t Jim Crow’ed, but were instead “the result of the inexorable workings of the [real-estate] market.” Any attempt to desegregate housing, accommodations, or schools, these people claimed, violated whites’ “freedom of choice.”
But Sugrue snatches away the veil of “innocence” the vast majority of whites attempted to wear. “The term ‘choice’ obscured more than it revealed. For the vast majority of African Americans in the postwar city, the right to choose schools or neighborhoods was nonexistent. That whites, even those with modest incomes, could choose to send their children to well-provisioned schools in white suburbs or in white-dominated neighborhoods was the consequence of racial privilege. The language of choice masked white privilege: It rested on the false assumption that blacks and whites were equal players in a market that was deeply structured by race.” Today, anyone listening to Fox News’ commentators or right-wing radio will recognize that TV and radio hosts continue to portray civil rights’ gains as major threats to “choice” and the “free market.” Sugrue’s work puts such ostensibly race-neutral pronouncements in historical context, unmasking their racist, northern origins. Its greatest strength is its brilliant illumination of the conscious intent undergirding allegedly “invisible” and “unintentional” structural white supremacy.
Sugrue also largely succeeds in stitching together a fresh narrative for the culture as a whole in giving voice to the mostly forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North. This alone makes his book a valuable resource for people in the North today (like himself), who continue “as community activists trying to better the neighborhood’s schools, to challenge slumlords, and to spark community development.” Stark statistics in the first decade of the twenty-first century highlight how far the nation still must travel: The black middle class is larger than ever, but median household income is still only 62% of whites and 25% of blacks live below the poverty line. While this is true for only 10% of whites. 80% of Black children attend schools that are nearly or all black & Latino, while 90% of white children attend schools that are overwhelmingly white. Statistics for wealth accumulation tell the most damning story. White households’ median net worth was $74,900 at the time of the last census, while black households’ median net worth came in at $7,500. Such disparities will continue into future generations, since as a result of these wealth disparities, “many whites can expect financial support at crucial junctures in their lives (going to college, getting married, buying a home) and inheritance as the result of their parents’ accumulated wealth, few blacks can expect such good fortune.”
For people interested in why so many neighborhoods and schools still resist integration, Sugrue’s first chapter on housing (“No Right More Elemental”), and his final chapter on schools (“It’s Not the Bus, It’s Us”) are simply essential reading. By placing his work, and that of other pioneering scholars of the northern freedom struggle like Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, Ronald Takaki and Roger Daniels alongside the new crop of histories of local civil rights’ struggles in the South and West, we are able to see new connections among activists, patterns in government response that resonate to our own day, and an obvious set of similarities emerge among white reactionaries across regions. Sugrue’s work makes comparisons between regions richer and more nuanced. Facile assumptions about northern blacks or whites are now as untenable as those many historians held a generation ago about southerners.
Sugrue’s narrative ambitions are considerably broader because he wants to reorder our collective timeline, storyline, and map of the civil rights movement writ large. In this task, he is less persuasive. He argues up front that in order to understand why racial hostility and inequality persist today, “we must give as much attention to the unheralded struggles for civil rights in the factories, churches and neighborhoods of Philadelphia, New York, and Detroit, the schools of Harlem and New Rochelle and Gary and Chicago, and the movie theaters of Cincinnati as we have to the now-epic events of Greensboro, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma.”
It’s a high bar to raise for a single book, and Sugrue has his hands full synthesizing the Northern story. But to truly reorder our understanding of the larger civil rights/black power movements, such a book would need to compare and contrast northern activism to the southern-based struggle, examine more closely the impact and interaction between northern and southern movement cultures, activists and activist networks, and examine the emerging organizing traditions in these different regional settings.
This book does not. However, Sugrue successfully traces the timeline back to the 1920s and 30s up through the 1980s and 1990s, following recent scholarly trends in examining the “long civil rights movement.” By doing so, he challenges “the tired clichés of recent books that fixate on the 1960s as the fundamental turning point in the history of race in modern America.”
In power struggles, who tells the story always matters: The father or the son? The worker or the boss? The king or the people? Sugrue tackles this narrative challenge by selecting a wide range of northern black activists, and chapter by chapter, introducing one or two of these people as guides to the multitude of strategies northern civil rights and black power activists used in reaching for “liberty and justice for all.” Some are well known (A. Philip Randolph and the Reverend Albert Cleage), but most are unheralded organizers with unique visions: Roxanne Jones, Herman Ferguson, and Henry Lee Moon. Rather than pigeon-holing these activists as having fixed belief systems, Sugrue artfully shows their philosophies emerging over time. Many of his central protagonists layer new beliefs atop strongly-held convictions. He also situates their activism within the domestic politics, intellectual trends, economic settings, and international events of the day. It’s a complicated set of interconnected storylines, and one that at times appears fragmented, not unlike the movement itself.
While such a strategy has obvious advantages in conveying breadth and depth, when individuals stand in for political and intellectual tendencies, the reader has very little sense of how and why people work together. How do people come together to challenge the racial status quo? How do they form networks? It is extremely difficult – if not impossible- to understand social movements without this piece of the story. To put it boldly: In the face of the extraordinary power of organized money, only organized people can succeed. As was the case in the South, the central task for activists, and particularly for civil rights activists, is to recruit and organize. They need people coming together, and for a time staying together. Without it, there will be no movement. Nothing changes.
The strength of Sweet Land’s movement story is its range and in-depth focus on powerful individuals. Its challenge is seeing how these individuals organized, interacted, learned, grouped and re-grouped, and collectively succeeded (or failed) in pushing their agenda forward.
In other words, we still await the story of northern movement cultures. Nonetheless, the end result is an impressive accomplishment useful for scholars and the general public. This is no small feat. My eighth grade son saw the book and asked about its content. Raised in the South, and fresh from a year-long U.S. history course, he seemed a bit incredulous: “Civil rights in the North?” he said. “Was there really that much to talk about?” Sugrue’s work deserves the wide readership that will make such a question illogical, even absurd, among the next generation.
Jim Cullen: Review of Robert Sullivan’s The Thoreau You Don’t Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant (Collins, 2009)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
I’m one of the people for whom Robert Sullivan wrote this book. Every year, the entire tenth grade of the school where I teach makes a somewhat misnamed “Boston trip” (we spend about as much time in Salem and Concord as we do Boston), part of which involves a pilgrimage to Walden Pond. As my students are sent by their English teachers to walk the perimeter and take notes about what they find there, I merrily instruct them to make sure they have their Transcendental moment before the bus is supposed to leave fifty minutes later. In conversation with them, I never fail to observe that Mr. Simplicity with his cabin in the woods would go home regularly to have his mother wash his laundry. Thoreau has always struck me as the quintessential environmentalist, the proverbial crusader who loves trees more than people (unless those people are frightening vigilantes like John Brown or utterly impractical tax resisters like Thoreau himself), and that I serve a bona fide pedagogical purpose with my insistent irreverence. Dear old Henry wouldn’t have it any other way.
I’m not going to do that anymore –- or, at any rate, I’m not going to do it with quite as clear a conscience. As Sullivan points out, people like me (and I suspect he’s right in his suspicion that there are many) are smug about Thoreau’s smugness. “He worships nature, monk-like, while we carry on at home, ministering to the demands of the non-natural world,” Sullivan writes of our view of Thoreau. “He tends the pure garden of Mother Earth, while we trudge through fields of the mundane. There’s even an element of jealousy: while he gets to live in the cabin in the woods, we stay at home and go to work. We have to make a living.” We can’t afford to be like Thoreau, we tell ourselves; his thrift is actually a kind of extravagance.
Sullivan’s critique of this critique is two-fold. The first is in effect to accept many of the charges leveled at Thoreau and turn them on their head. To point out, for example, that Walden Pond, a short walk from a bustling village, was hardly an exotic wilderness, is not a fact that discredits Thoreau’s experiment but something that was very much the point of his desire for a truly integrated life. To call him out on his foolish inconsistencies is a little like calling a congregation of churchgoers a bunch of hypocrites. As for Thoreau living a life of extravagance, he literally welcomed the idea: ever the etymological maven, he cherished a notion of himself as an extra vagrant.
But the other half of Sullivan’s argument is to directly rebut the charge of Thoreau as a cranky loner. He was not. That we think so, Sullivan says, is as often as not a perception of his cranky contemporaries, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, much more likely to talk the talk than walk the walk of his own philosophy, conflated Thoreau’s iconoclasm with unsociability. We forget that the lifelong bachelor had a hand in raising Emerson’s own children (the sage of Concord loved the idea of family life when he was on tour more than when he was actually at home), and that Thoreau was as comfortable with farmers and mechanics as he was Boston Brahmins. And he was as comfortable refining the process by which he manufactured pencils for the family business as he was cataloging the fate of seeds.
Perhaps the most effective aspect of this defense of Thoreau is Sullivan’s careful attempt to situate Thoreau in the economic and political climate of the antebellum decades. We tend to forget, for example, that the long downturn that followed the Panic of 1837 made social experiments like Brook Farm and Thoreau’s own cabin less a matter of bohemian sentiment than a search for a fiscally viable way of life. Far from isolated from the shifting social tides of his time, this quintessential Yankee had protracted contact and often careful observations about the Irish immigrants who surged onto New England’s shores. And that when Thoreau took on big political issues like abolition in the 1850s, he did not as an abstract dreamer but as a sharp critic willing to point fingers close to home (one more reason why he may be remembered as an irascible rascal). Like many of his contemporaries, Thoreau protested the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which legalized the spread of slavery into new territory. But he was at least as angry about the indifference to the fate of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston as he was the future prospects of Kansas. As he noted of an anti-slavery meeting he describes in his famous address “Slavery in Massachusetts, “I had thought that the house was on fire, and not the prairie ... There is not one slave in Nebraska; there are perhaps a million slaves in Massachusetts.”
It’s important to note that Sullivan is hardly the first person to make these or other points in defense of Thoreau. But he does so with pithy –- yet tangy –- prose worthy of his subject. “To imagine Thoreau and his writing without considering the economy is a little like thinking about The Grapes of Wrath without considering the Great Depression,” he asserts. Sullivan distills the political vision of works like “Civil Disobedience” into a series of declarations: “Stick together! Join the club and pay the dues [well, maybe not all the dues], and don’t abandon the ship, even if you have to get arrested and thrown in the brig to save it, even if you feel undervalued ... Send the telegraph message but have something to say. Use text messaging, but for more than delivering the news that, as the narrator of Walden jokes, ‘Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.’”
Actually, such willful anachronisms go to the heart of what’s original and compelling here. Sullivan, himself a freelance writer (as well as the author of Thoreauvian books like Rats and The Meadowlands) is acutely aware that Thoreau was, too, and that this consciousness really can explain a lot. “A literary stunt is a thing that happens all the time today in publishing circles: a writer living in a particular way –- or partaking in a particular community or ritual or what have you -– in order to ultimately report on the event or place or people,” he writes of the circumstances that led to Walden. “It is an essentially artificial experiment undertaken with an interest in making money on publication or putting forward a not-so-artificial argument (optional) or, in some case, both.” A garden wasn’t the only place Thoreau made his living.
After finishing The Thoreau You Know I went looking for my annotated Modern Library of Thoreau’s writings from my college days, and was distressed that I couldn’t find it. So I had to browse him again fresh, online. And when I did, I remembered why it was that I’ve used Thoreau’s sentences as epigrams for two of my books. Like many of the Transcendentalists, his work is easy to mock as vague, even meaningless, from a distance, and yet it takes on a tensile vitality when you come up against it. He’ll never be on of my favorites (I’m one who finds Whitman’s embrace irresistible, as apparently did Thoreau.) But next time I’m at the pond, I’ll give Thoreau his due (which is likely as not to mean that I'll keep my mouth shut). I might even pick up some trash I find in the parking lot as I walk back to the bus.
Ron Weinberg: Review of Gordon S. Barrass' The Great Cold War: A Journey Through the Hall of Mirrors (Stanford University Press, 2009)
Ron Weinberg is a retired biophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The story of the Cold War has been told countless times in countless publications including the electronic media and cyberspace. Generally, it is a saga of nuclear arms, betrayal of trust and paranoia mixed with innocent (or not so innocent) human fears and misjudgments by a set of players that on several occasions led the world to the brink of nuclear destruction from the end of World War II to the early 90’s. With that in mind, and with that much out there already repeating the same story, one wonders aloud (or in a book review) why someone would add still more to an already chokingly overcrowded field.
Didn’t somebody already get it right by now? Collectively, yes.
But one could argue that there are always missing pieces to fill in, great new revelations to reveal, and a better way to demystify an interesting piece of recent history that has barely had time to settle in history’s boiling cauldron. If that is the reason Gordon Barrass has chosen to write this book, his intentions were, unfortunately, not realized.
The text is dry and scholarly. It reads like a Doctoral dissertation draft, the kind that’s half written and still at the typists’ office, available as the pages come one by one out of the laser printer. With each page comes the new hope that something truly unique or previously unreported will emerge, leading only to further disappointments. There are few, if any revelations here that haven’t already come to light – many times over and already in books that would fill the shelves of some very large libraries.
If there is good news here, and there is some, it rests in the fact that Barrass was an insider in the British Government, and has apparently had access to many primary sources of information. This helps establish the credibility of the long narrative text, which is heavily footnoted and logically ordered.
For readers who are unfamiliar with twentieth century world history, this is book an excellent place to begin. The reader learns about Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman and then the Cold War leaders that followed Stalin and Truman. There is good detail here, with some excellent anecdotal passages on Russian/Soviet history and how it influenced interactions with Britain, Germany and the United States before, during and then after World War II., providing good background reference material. There is also an insightful analysis of the Reagan/ Gorbachev relationship, and why mutual trust between these two men was so important in bringing the Cold War to an end.
In short, readers looking for a good, substantial narrative about the Cold War and the history leading up to it will find this a solid, scholarly account.Still, those in search of new revelations in the “hall of mirrors” might want to look elsewhere.
Patrick Devenny: Review of Anne Nelson's Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler (Random House)
[Patrick Devenny is a graduate of the History Department at Rutgers University. He lives in Virginia.]
In the run-up to the publication of their latest book on Soviet espionage in America, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have yet again named names, identifying prominent Americans who purportedly cooperated with Soviet intelligence. Often lost in the resultant, politically-heated conversation is the ease by which these individuals conducted these activities. Throughout the 1930s, American agents of the KGB had more to fear from their masters in Moscow than from American law enforcement. Even when tipped off by informants such as Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, there was little that a peacetime federal government with no counterintelligence capability could do, especially given the stature of some of those implicated. As a result, most of the individuals involved in the KGB’s American networks evaded punishment.
Such fates were unthinkable for another set of Soviet intelligence assets plying their trade across the Atlantic. The “Rote Kapelle” or "Red Orchestra" -- dubbed by Nazi spy-hunters who listened to their communications -- was one network among several European anti-Nazi rings that worked under circumstances inconceivable to their dilettante American cousins. Their story is retold in Red Orchestra by Anne Nelson, a former foreign correspondent and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Armed with an unrivaled body of research and a playwright’s sense for drama, Ms. Nelson weaves an engaging story. The tale lends itself to histrionics: rather than a straight intelligence study, Nelson's volume concentrates less on the group’s espionage and more on weaving personal portraits of Orchestra members.
The history itself demands this emphasis: one of the immediate insights Ms. Nelson offers is that the members of the Orchestra never characterized themselves as spies -- collusion with the Soviets was only the most expedient tactic available to damage the regime. Nor were they very good at it: Ms. Nelson refers to their intelligence activity as marked by “zealous ineptitude.” Instead, the motley collection of friends, relatives, and fellow travelers saw themselves foremost as political opponents of the Nazi regime: the majority of their activities were acts of subversion, not espionage. These included the publication of underground newspapers, distribution of fliers, and the defacement of Nazi propaganda.
Its members, most of whom lived and worked within blocks of prominent Nazi government offices in Berlin, were organized into cells bound by a myriad of familiar, religious, or political ties; indeed, keeping straight the variety of members and their quixotic backgrounds will challenge most readers. Thankfully, Ms. Nelson includes a membership list for reference and focuses on a finite set of central characters, including Avrid Harnack, a distinguished economist who had taught at the University of Wisconsin. The chief architect of the Orchestra, Harnack utilized his contacts in opposition circles as well as his access to German economic data to covertly build an ever wider web of sympathizers. Also featured prominently are Adam Kuckhoff and his wife Greta, whose stories Nelson uses deftly to describe broader dynamics at work within the Orchestra.
Personal motivations were as varied as the membership, with apolitical disgust for the violent transformation of German life serving as the central driver. The internment and execution of friends or relatives provided additional impetus. Ms. Nelson describes many Orchestra members as traumatized, their secure worlds of artistic expression and political dialogue shattered by a few months of Nazi brutality. This trauma was not wholly psychological: many Orchestra members had been exposed early on to organized raids and the "wild camps," progenitors to concentration camps, where Nazi opponents were viciously beaten, tortured, and often killed. Even after this abrupt exposure to cruelty, many still enlisted in the underground.
Few members of the Berlin Red Orchestra were doctrinaire communists. Rather, its ranks included Social Democrats, anti-Nazi Protestants, and several communists and trade unionists. Further attesting to the organization’s heterodox political nature were the connections it maintained throughout the colorful ideological spectrum that defined the anti-Nazi underground: for instance, Arvid's cousins included Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader in the Protestant opposition to Hitler. The Orchestra also maintained contact with conservatives involved in the plots hatched by chief of German military intelligence, Wilhelm Canaris. Faced with persecution and torture, these political rivals were usually able to set their disputes aside, a concordant summarized by the communist actor Hans Otto: "Look -- we are all for the overthrow of tyranny. We can all come to an agreement about the kind of order that should be set up afterwards."
Nelson's portrait of an ideologically inclusive Orchestra is strengthened by the fact that the network could have easily been Red, White and Blue: Arvid’s experience in America led him throughout the late 1930s to meet with American embassy officials. During such conversations, he covertly provided interlocutors with sensitive data concerning the German economy and various rearmament schemes. Over time, however, Arvid was ignored; America had no spy agency, and the thought of diplomats moonlighting as agents led the American chief of mission in Berlin to declare that his personnel would not "run around Berlin digging up secrets."
The Soviets, supposed masters of espionage, proved similarly incompetent. Although Moscow had built a substantial network of German communists throughout the early 1930s, these connections had been disrupted by Nazi persecution and Stalin's purges. Many German communists who fled Nazi camps in 1933 reached Moscow only to be transferred to gulags for their “foreign” views. The ranks of the Soviet intelligence service were similarly affected by Stalin's bloodlust: only two of the sixteen members of the Berlin rezidentura survived the 30s.
It was a lost opportunity, especially as the Orchestra’s expanding ranks gained access to new information concerning the plans and strategies of the Nazi regime. Few enjoyed the access of Harro Schulze-Boysen, a larger-than-life Luftwaffe intelligence officer who espoused a flighty mix of humanism and democracy. His resistance to Hitler, however, was grounded: once, after being run through a gauntlet of whip-cracking Nazis three times after an initial arrest in 1933, he defiantly offered to run it a fourth time. His careless daring, along with his libertine wife's espionage work against the Nazi propaganda machine provide "Red Orchestra" with its most engrossing narrative.
By 1940, Harro – a natural linguist – had assumed a position within the Luftwaffe command staff, and enjoyed regular access to sensitive information throughout 1940 and 1941. Although the hapless Soviets established a connection to Harro in 1941, they were deaf to his warnings. Harro --codenamed Starshina – provided specific information as to German preparations for Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the USSR. Only seven days before the invasion, Harro informed his handlers that an attack was imminent. In reply, Stalin wrote:
"Comrade Merkulov, you can send your 'source' from the headquarters of German aviation back to his much-f----- mother. This is no informer, this is a disinformer."
Following the invasion, Soviet maintenance of the Berlin Rote Kapelle in Berlin was, simply put, a farce. Radios failed and bumbling Soviet agents regularly endangered the Orchestra: in an August 1941 communiqué to an agent in Brussels, the KGB instructed him to make contact with Orchestra members whose addresses were supplied in the cable. This unthinkable lapse in security would prove to be the Orchestra's undoing, as would other Soviet errors, such as marathon transmission sessions which were detected by German code breakers. Ms. Nelson succeeds in conveying the shock and dread that befell the Orchestra’s membership as German agents captured them, one by one, throughout the first half of 1942. Their fates were almost uniformly tragic, as Hitler insisted on strenuous prosecution no matter the status or connections of the accused. Kuckhoff, Avrid, and Herro were all executed, as were dozens of their associates.
Even in memory the Orchestra could not escape persecution. American intelligence was first introduced to the Orchestra in 1945 when they interviewed a new German asset -- Manfred Roeder, the German military judge who had sentenced many of the network’s members, including Harro, to death. Roeder informed his clueless American handlers that the Orchestra was in lockstep with the Soviet cause, leading to American interrogation and surveillance of surviving members. The Soviets, loathe to hear that non-communists had made up the majority of the Orchestra’s ranks, erased many members while elevating loyal agents in their official history.
Ms. Nelson does much to exalt the legacy of the Orchestra, but the reader is nonetheless left with an uncomfortable question: did the group “matter”? Regardless of their work, the Nazi juggernaut advanced, millions died, and the regime was only destroyed through concerted military action from external actors. Ms. Nelson deals with the question artfully, citing poetry airily extolling the power of example and moral fortitude. It is thoroughly, and tragically, unsatisfying.
Jim Cullen: Review of Edmund S. Morgan's American Heroes: Portraits of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America (Norton, 2009)
[Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.]
“AMERICAN HEROES. Probably most of the people in this book would have disclaimed or disdained the title,” the 93-year old Edmund Morgan writes at the start of this brief anthology of essays that span from 1937 to the present. I would add that probably most academic historians of the last century would disclaim or disdain the title in another sense: it has long been an article of faith in the profession that self-respecting scholars do not “do” heroes. Indeed, coming from anyone else, such a title would seem to broadcast a lack of intellectual seriousness. But no one could ever credibly make that charge of Morgan, the quintessential historian’s historian, author of the magisterial American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) and other landmark books. To read these essays is to be reminded not only of just how fertile and graceful a career Morgan has had, but to understand what he and the great historians of his generation accomplished.
To some extent, Morgan’s title is a bit misleading, because not all the pieces (most of which were published in limited-circulation journals) are celebratory, and even those figures Morgan does admire are contextualized with his customary sense of lightly worn wit and irony. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin are here, naturally. But so are people like Giles Cory and Mary Easty, two accused Salem witches whose fatal refusal to “admit” their crime affirmed the greatness of Puritanism in its darkest hour. This is new material, but the longtime Yale historian also has older pieces here on Anne Hutchinson (who he does not regard as heroic) and another on Puritan heiress Anna Keayne, which, along with a haunting essay on Native Americans, demonstrates that his interest in women and Indians dates back to the thirties and forties, as his unselfconscious use of the term “Asiatic” reminds us.
Perhaps the most prescient of these pieces is the 1959 essay “Dangerous Books,” in which Morgan takes note of the Cold War-era anxiety about American education but questions whether a better knowledge of history will actually make young Americans of the future any more pious than the Jacobin-leaning students of the maverick 18th century Yale president Ezra Stiles (subject of an admiring revisionist essay in comparison with his successor Timothy Dwight later in the book). “If necessity is the mother of invention, curiosity is surely the father of it, and invention is heresy by another name,” Morgan notes with typical grace, later adding that “I am not sure that the effect of wider knowledge will be what some of its advocates suppose.” Many of the next generation of New Left historians would no doubt nod in amusement.
Yet even as Morgan recognizes the power and value of a radical vision – most obvious in his treatment of William Penn – this book makes clear that in both form and content the hallmark of his work is moderation, discipline, restraint. What links the Franklins, Washingtons, Corys and Eastys of American history is at least as much a matter of what they won’t do as what they will. Conversely, the limitations of a figure like Christopher Columbus (topic of another new essay) is precisely a matter of what they allow themselves and others to do. Morgan understands the severity in the vision of John Winthrop (the subject of Morgan’s classic 1954 biography) and Michael Wigglesworth, but he honors their sense of self-aware struggle to do right as God gave them to see the right. He can be every bit as mocking of Cotton Mather as Mather’s contemporaries were; Morgan notes at one point that a girl accused of witchcraft who came to live with the Puritan divine recovered notably quickly “to escape the prayers of that pompous egotist.” But whether in gentle praise or cutting criticism, Morgan’s utter immersion in the world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is so palpable as to be a gift to those who experience it through him.
The final piece in this collection is a 1964 tribute to the great Puritan historian Perry Miller, who mentored Morgan at Harvard before his death the previous year. Morgan’s debt to Miller is beyond doubt. But in reading this survey of Morgan’s work, one thinks less of Morgan’s influences than his exact contemporary Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) and the slightly older C Vann Woodward (1908-1999). These historians tilled different fields than Morgan. But all three of them wrote sturdy, gleaming prose that remains more readable than virtually any U.S. history produced since. If you studied the American Revolution in college in the last half-century, you’re probably familiar with Morgan’s little 1956 volume The Birth of the Republic, surely the finest book of its kind ever written for students and still widely in use. You probably read that one because your professor chose it. But you owe it to yourself to read American Heroes and remember the pure pleasure great history by a consummate artist affords.
Lawrence S. Wittner: Review of Contesting Patriotism: Culture, Power, and Strategy in the Peace Movement By Lynne M. Woehrle, Patrick G. Coy and Gregory M. Maney (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008)
[Lawrence S.Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book, "Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement," will be published this June by Stanford University Press.]
For many years, government officials have been able to count upon patriotic appeals to overwhelm the public's desire for peace.
"Of course the people don't want war," Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering remarked during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. "But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. . . . It works the same in any country."
That is pretty much what the American journalist Randolph Bourne concluded as he watched rival nations plunge into the bloodbath of World War I. "War is the health of the State," he wrote bitterly. "It automatically sets in motion . . . those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals who lack the larger herd sense. Loyalty—or mystic devotion to the State—becomes the major imagined human value."
Nevertheless, in Contesting Patriotism, Lynne Woehrle (a sociologist), Patrick Coy (a political scientist), and Gregory Maney (a sociologist) argue that, although trumpeting a patriotic message still provides government officials with considerable advantages in securing their objectives, in recent years peace organizations have become more effective in countering it. This study, they observe, reveals "the creative and increasingly sophisticated ways that the U.S. peace movement has contested dominant constructions of patriotism."
The authors' original research data is comprised of press and media releases, printed statements, editorials, and calls to action produced by fifteen U.S. peace organizations in response to overseas military actions undertaken by the U.S. government from 1990 to 2005. These actions include the Gulf War, the 1998 conflict with Iraq, the Kosovo intervention, the response to the 9/11 attacks, and the Iraq War. The authors also tap a broad range of social science and history monographs.
Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony—in which holders of power utilize familiar, authoritative ideas to present issues in ways that advance their policy agendas and discourage dissent—Woehrle, Coy, and Maney show how peace organizations sometimes challenged this hegemony, at other times harnessed it for their own purposes, and at yet other times employed a combination of these two approaches. Dangers accompanied both challenging and harnessing. By directly challenging the dominant discourse, peace groups risked ridicule, active opposition from the public and policymakers, and their overall marginalization. On the other hand, the more subtle, harnessing approach risked demoralizing core supporters, increasing the potency of the dominant discourse, and diluting the cause to the point at which victory would be meaningless.
One illustration of how these processes work emerged in the peace movement's handling of the role of U.S. soldiers in the Iraq War. Given the American public's generally laudatory view of U.S. troops, the authors note, "many peace groups consistently tried to make distinctions between the troops and those actually in charge of policy." To be sure, during the early days of the conflict and the revelations of the torture of Iraqi prisoners, some groups adopted a confrontational approach. But, overall, U.S. peace groups worked to harness support for the troops to a critique of the war. Thus, for example, Peace Action declared: "In committing our troops to fight a war of aggression, outside the rule of law, Bush has, in an act of malfeasance, put US troops at risk unnecessarily. We believe the best way to support our troops is to bring them home now and pursue the alternatives to war that other nations and world leaders still believe are possible."
The chapter on "Reconstructing Patriotism" is particularly interesting, for it shows how nationalist ideas used by power holders in government and beyond to stir up opposition to peace groups were addressed by the movement, either through direct challenging or creative harnessing. Thus, for example, the hegemonic idea that the United States is a bastion of freedom was challenged by those who depicted it as an oppressive empire and harnessed by those who argued that the United States, as a decent nation, should lead by example. Or, in yet another example, the nationalist idea that critics of war are traitors was challenged by those who said that Americans should be ashamed of their nation's behavior and harnessed by those claiming that dissent from bad policies represented the highest form of patriotism.
Contesting Patriotism also deftly covers other key issues, including the role of emotions, religion, identity politics, national security, and international pressures in peace appeals. In addition, an appendix provides useful profiles of the fifteen U.S. peace organizations studied.
Overall, the book amply supports the authors' contention of growing sophistication in adapting peace movement discourse to the claims of patriotism. Specifically, they argue, peace groups reshaped patriotism "to represent a global vision, compassion for those who are different, judicious use of power, preference for peaceful alternatives, privileging of diplomacy in times of conflict, protection of civil liberties and human rights, willingness to dissent in times of destructive leadership, and cooperation instead of imperialism."
Of course, critics might argue that public discourse is not the only—or even the main—problem faced by peace organizations. Even so, ideas are important, especially when they are undergirded by powerful nationalist assumptions. In 1900, justifying the U.S. military conquest of the Philippines, Senator Albert Beveridge proclaimed that "God . . . has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. . . . He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. . . . And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation."
Have Americans really departed very far from this belief that they are the divinely-chosen rulers of savage peoples? Alas, they have not, and the fact that such ideas can be confronted more effectively now than in the past by a portion of the public augurs well for the future of American and world civilization.
In summary, readers will find that Contesting Patriotism provides an intellectually complex, nuanced analysis of the conflicting uses of patriotism by war and peace forces in the modern world. Scholars, peace activists, government officials, and members of the general public can learn much from it.
Luther Spoehr: Review of For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom By Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post (Yale University Press, 2009)
Source: Providence Sunday Journal (5-17-09)
Right-wing polemicist David Horowitz wants legislatures to regulate academic freedom by prohibiting “indoctrination” in college classrooms. On the other side of the political spectrum, defenders of controversial professor Ward Churchill often conflate academic freedom with the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
Whether you have strong opinions about such cases or just wonder what all the fuss is about, Matthew Finkin and Robert Post’s book is important reading. Simply put, this is the best volume we have on academic freedom (far superior to the other recent entry in the field, Stanley Fish’s Save the World on Your Own Time, whose arguments, while often parallel to Finkin and Post’s, are marred by rhetorical excess—the title is just one example--and a peculiarly cramped vision of best practices in teaching).
Finkin and Post are both law professors (Finkin at Illinois, Post at Yale), but, as they say, they “address professional understandings of academic freedom, rather than the constitutional law of academic freedom.” This focus is entirely appropriate because—remarkably—those “professional understandings” have become so persuasive and pervasive that today virtually every college and university worthy of the name endorses them.
This development was far from inevitable, as Finkin and Post point out. At the end of the 19th century, when the idea of academic freedom arrived from Germany, professors were often seen by university trustees as just one more group of employees, subject to dismissal at will. Professor Edward Ross, for instance, found himself out on the street when his views on municipal ownership of streetcars and Chinese immigration irritated Stanford’s surviving Founder, Jane Stanford.
In response to such incidents, in 1915 a small group of scholars, including John Dewey, founded the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), complete with Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, which asserted that scholars are not employees like any other, but keepers of the public trust--like judges, for example—and so are not subject to arbitrary removal from office. “In essence,” Finkin and Post say, “academic freedom consists of the freedom to pursue the scholarly profession according to the standards of that profession” in research and publication, in the classroom, and in speech both on and off campus.
The scope and limits of such freedoms are not always self-evident, and the AAUP has clarified and qualified its stance on all of them. Today, its 1940 Statement and subsequent interpretations have been endorsed by about 200 scholarly organizations and higher education associations, so that institutional commitment to academic freedom, at least theoretically, and despite its contested meanings, has become virtually universal in this country.
The reason for such unanimity: this American version of academic freedom works—for scholars, for students, and, ultimately, “for the common good.” In research, teaching, and service, American universities are an American success story, and academic freedom is the oxygen in the air they breathe. Finkin and Post’s clearly written, carefully reasoned book is essential for understanding how and why this is so.
Donna M. DeBlasio: Review of Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Anchor Books, 2008)
[Donna M. DeBlasio is an Associate Professor of History and Applied History at Youngstown State University.]
Almost any American will tell you that the Civil War finally brought an end to slavery in the United States. As Douglas A. Blackmon demonstrates in his powerful book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, slavery, in all its cruelty and inhumanity lasted much longer beyond the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution than is generally believed. In this meticulously detailed account, Blackmon presents the horrifying story of the virtual re-institution of slavery in the post-Civil War South. He uses hundreds of primary sources, including manuscripts and oral histories to document this part of the American past that has been long buried and ignored. While Blackmon focuses on the Black Belt of Alabama, he demonstrates that this phenomenon was widespread in the South.
Blackmon became interested in tracing the history of Green Cottenham, the child of two former slaves, one of whom belonged to the Cottingham family in Bibb County, Alabama. Cottenham was arrested for vagrancy in 1908 in Shelby County, Alabama, and then sold to a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, for $12 a month, until Cottenham’s fees were paid. The young man was forced to mine coal at Slope #12 near Birmingham; his quota was eight tons per day. If he did not do what was required, he was brutally beaten. Cottenham, and the other African Americans who toiled in the mines under forced labor conditions, had no recourse and little hope of freedom. In trying to find out exactly what happened to Cottenham, Blackmon reveals the histories of the thousands of African American who were forced to work in coal mines, at iron and steel mills, in the turpentine industry and in lumber operations, as well as on cotton plantations. While the abuses of the sharecropping system are well-known, they have rarely been seen as a part of the larger picture of forced labor and the virtual re-enslavement of the South’s African American population.
There was some attempt in the early twentieth century to bring a modicum of justice to African Americans. In 1903, the U.S. Secret Service, at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, began an investigation into reports about black men being held in a system of peonage in Alabama. Several of the most egregious practitioners of re-enslaving African Americans were indicted in the process, including Robert Franklin, who was accused of holding a man in slavery and John Pace, who ran one of the most notorious slave farms in the region. The sadistic William Eberhart who was accused of holding blacks in a state of peonage used as his defense that no “federal statute specifically made it a crime to hold a person in slavery.” (173) While a number of the defendants received either fines or jail time or both for pleading “guilty” the trials merely fanned the flames of racism and made the forced labor system even more violent and intractable.
While the South engaged in this new system of slavery, the complicity of the North in allowing the region to handle race relations cannot be ignored. Indeed, northern based companies, particularly U.S. Steel, which held subsidiaries in the South, were some of the worst offenders. The official biography of Judge Elbert H. Gary, president of U. S. Steel, indicated that Gary claimed he was “outraged” when he learned that the company’s Alabama mines used slave labor and ordered the head of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad to end the practice immediately. (335) As Blackmon notes, Gary may have believed this, but in truth “slaves remained at work” in the coal mines (335) In truth, Gary did not end the reliance on slave labor but did institute some minor improvements in the lives of the workers that dropped the annual death toll by 1911 to eighteen. Clearly, the system of collusion where African Americans were arrested almost on site and their services sold to the highest bidder, was extremely profitable for the government entities that sold their labor and the people and companies that purchased these human beings.
With the mechanization of farming and in industries like coal mining, this labor system became less profitable. It was, as Blackmon notes, replaced with the enforced labor of the chain gang system. It was only when the United States became engaged in fighting the Axis powers in World War II that there was a stimulus to finally end the system of slavery. Ironically, it was the fear that our enemies would use the treatment of African Americans as a propaganda tool that was one of the prime reasons for government action. Coupled with the valiant service of African Americans during World War II, the pressure to ensure that this evil would never again be perpetrated resulted in a series of federal laws to do just that. Blackmon, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction for Slavery by Another Name, presents a complex history that needs to become a part of the national narrative.
Josh Nathan-Kazis: Review of Benny Morris's One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009)
[Josh Nathan-Kazis is a journalist and editor of New Voices: The National Jewish Student Magazine.]
After a disheartening few months, prospects for peace in Israel/Palestine seem brighter than they have in years. In Washington, the Obama administration is putting heavy pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to embrace a two-state solution, while in Damascus the exiled leader of Hamas is making statements in support of partition along pre-1967 borders. It's not a rosy picture, but it could be worse. Don’t get your hopes up, says Benny Morris, in his new book, "One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict." Morris, the Israeli historian whose work on the displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 War of Independence exploded the myth that the refugees left on their own terms, has written a deeply pessimistic but thoroughly convincing work arguing that none of the current endgames are viable.
"One State, Two States" positions itself as a response to recent support for a binational state from left-wing academics, most famously New York University professor Tony Judt. Rather than limiting his critique to Judt, however, Morris takes on Judt's critics as well, arguing that the American-supported two-state solution is no more workable than binationalism.
The book offers a thorough history of one-state and two-state solutions from the beginning of the Zionist project. Morris shows that prominent mainstream Zionists, from the earliest settlers to Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, had hoped to settle and declare a state in all of Palestine, including land in what is now Jordan and Lebanon. Those ambitions were gradually relinquished by most Zionists under pressure by the mid-1930s to secure any refuge at all for Europe's Jews.
Meanwhile, Morris argues, the Palestinian national movement consistently refused to moderate its territorial claims. Beginning with their rejection of the Peel proposals, a British partition plan approved by the Zionists in 1937, Morris writes that "the Palestinian Arabs viewed the conflict as a zero-sum game that allowed of no compromise and would necessarily end in one side's destruction or removal." He portrays the Jewish binational movement as having been stymied by a lack of interested Arab partners, dismisses later avowals of support for a two-state solution on the part of Fatah as part of a strategy to take back Palestine in phases, and argues that Palestinian President Yassir Arafat's rejection of Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak's two-state proposal at Camp David in 2000 amounted to "denying the legitimacy and right to life of an existing state…"
In light of what he views as persistent Palestinian intransigence, Morris has nothing good to say about the prospects of a two-state resolution to the conflict. "Put simply, they appear very bleak," he writes. "Bleak primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, in the deepest fibers of their being, oppose such an outcome, demanding, as they did since the dawn of their national movement, all of Palestine as their patrimony."
On a practical level, Morris writes that a Palestinian state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza is economically unviable, particularly if destitute Palestinian refugees from camps in Syria and Lebanon return. Faced with overcrowding and a nonexistent economy, Morris argues that a Palestinian state would attack Israel and Jordan in search of land and resources.
In the last few pages of his book, Morris suggests a twist on the traditional two-state formulation that he says might be more tenable than a Camp David-style formulation. He proposes a Jewish state mostly within the 1967 borders alongside an Arab state consisting of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan. He argues that Jordan's size would allow the peaceful absorption of Palestinian refugees, decompressing Gaza and emptying the camps in Syria and Lebanon.
His plan is sketched only briefly. Morris acknowledges that Jordan's king, Abdullah II, might worry that a massive influx of Palestinians would threaten his hold on power, but does little to explain how to mollify his concerns. What's most surprising, however, is that, after arguing for an entire book that Palestinians are essentially opposed to any sort of partition, Morris makes little effort to explain how they would be satisfied by a deal with Jordan. He writes that Palestinian militants could be controlled by the Jordanian security apparatus, but it's not clear why the Jordanians would succeed in Gaza and the West Bank where Israel has failed. Perhaps Morris assumes that Jordan's authoritarian regime, which has been condemned by human rights groups for its torture of Islamist prisoners, would be able to apply tactics that Israel could not. Leave the savages to the savages, Morris seems to say.
It's an unsatisfying ending to a discouraging book. Morris is convincing in his portrait of a Palestinian national movement unable to let go of its vision of a unified Palestine, and in his skillful destruction of any notion that there is some clear way forward. What does it say, then, that he has no defensible proposal of his own?
Jennifer Mittelstadt: Review of Alice Kessler-Harris's In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America
Source: H-Labor (3-1-02)
Source: H-Labor Review of "In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Reviewed by Jennifer Mittelstadt (Department of History, Brooklyn College, City University of New York)
Alice Kessler-Harris has spent her career documenting the impact of Americans' beliefs about gender on American institutions. In Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982), she revealed how women workers' occupations, benefits, and union membership were shaped by deeply ingrained beliefs about proper gender roles among employers, government, and unions. In her 1995 co-edited volume, Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States and Australia, 1880-1920, Kessler-Harris broadened her scope, examining how protective labor law for women reflected broader gendered societal debates about the family, citizenship, and social welfare. In her latest work, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America, Kessler-Harris expands upon her studies of labor, gender, and citizenship to present a masterful narrative and analysis of the intersections between gender and the welfare state in modern America. The book integrates a remarkably wide range of historical and theoretical scholarship, spanning welfare state theory and history, labor history, gender theory and history, and studies of citizenship.
In keeping with new theoretical and historical literature on the welfare state, Kessler-Harris conceives of the modern American welfare state broadly. Her study includes not only standard social entitlement programs, such as public assistance or social insurance, but income tax laws, anti-discrimination laws, and, true to her background in labor history, protective labor laws, labor standards, and unemployment compensation. Her narrative takes readers from the earliest 20th-century welfare state interventions--laws limiting women¹s hours on the job, in Muller v. Oregon (1908)--through the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, Social Security, the creation and modification of income tax law regarding marriage, the passage of title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the late 1960s. Together, Kessler-Harris suggests, these laws and programs were vehicles by which the state provided entitlements and opportunities to men and women citizens over the course of the twentieth century.
In describing these features of the American welfare state, Kessler-Harris seeks to reveal how policy debates reflect cultural and social beliefs and practices. She listens in on the policy debates and judicial reasoning of a wide range of actors including labor leaders, bureaucrats, government commissions, feminist groups, businesses and business groups, judges and elected politicians. In the process she uses a remarkable range of court documents, governmental hearings and records, and private papers. Attuned to the nuance and subtlety of political argument, Kessler-Harris demonstrates persuasively that "Policies that appear neutral on their face emerge from deeply embedded belief systems that accentuate particular politics" (p. 14).
The "deeply embedded belief systems" that the author exposes are gender belief systems. With this focus, Kessler-Harris follows in the footsteps of American and international feminist scholars who have demonstrated the salience of gender ideology in the creation of public policy. Her innovation lies in her unique articulation of this relationship. Kessler-Harris refers to the gendered system of beliefs held by policy makers as "the gendered imagination." This term evokes both the personal, subjective nature of gender ideology, and its power to create symbolic public imagery (pp. 5-6). Kessler-Harris illuminates how policy makers and the public held deeply rooted beliefs about the proper roles of men and women in the workforce and the family, and how these should translate into public policies.
The book's power derives from the author's ability to demonstrate the effects of the gendered imagination upon a wide variety of public policies, among a broad range of political actors, and through decades of changes in American life. Though it was central in many important public policy debates, the gendered imagination did not remain unchallenged or unchanged over time. As policy makers, lobbies, and the public debated the fairness and equity of new social programs, labor laws, and other public policies, they answered in ways that exhibited both persistence and change in their beliefs about men, women, and their public and private rights and responsibilities.
Kessler-Harris locates the origins of the twentieth-century gendered imagination in the debates over late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century labor legislation. Examining a range of judicial decisions and legislative debate, Kessler-Harris reveals that the law envisioned men as primary breadwinners supporting families, and that their rights to work were central to maintaining their masculine sense of independence and autonomy. Conversely, the law viewed women as wives and mothers; their economic rights, such that they were, consisted of a right to be supported by a male breadwinner and protected by the state from any harm to or interference in that role by employment. This early consensus on gender, work, and rights was quite broad. Although a few equal rights feminists objected to it, the consensus extended from such influential women reformers and bureaucrats as Julia Lathrop to labor unions, employers, the courts, and even to male and female employees themselves.
This early agreement on men's and women's rights regarding work and family became vitally important in crafting some of the most important legislation of the New Deal and the twentieth century. Through unemployment insurance, the federal government created a program directly aimed at supporting workers and rewarding them with benefits based on work. With this premium placed on work, Kessler-Harris argues, federal policy makers took care to define who was considered a worker. "Gender," she shows, "was a major constituent in that definition" (p. 94). The American Federation of Labor and federal policy makers tailored the definition of "worker" so as to preserve male workers' dignity and their ability to support themselves and their families. In the process policy makers consciously excluded a majority of women--and minorities--who were presumed to be irregular workers and/or supported by a male head of household.
Rewarding and supporting male-breadwinners was also the guiding principle in crafting old age insurance, or Social Security. While other historians such as Linda Gordon have already shown how gender influenced the origins of Social Security, Kessler-Harris sheds new light on the issue by focusing in on the rhetoric of masculinity behind the program. To garner support for a new and untested program, Social Security advocates portrayed it as a way to honorably help the working man help himself and his family after he retired from employment. Women, according to Kessler-Harris, did not even figure into the debate over which jobs would be covered--they were just considered too tangential to the labor force to matter. Even when policy makers created the Survivor's Insurance program for widows in 1939, they were not attempting to privilege or protect women. Rather, Survivor's Insurance was a strategy to spend the accumulating Social Security surpluses in a way that would be popular and seen as "fair" to working men: it allowed the Social Security Board to say it was helping working men support their families even after their deaths.
The gendered imagination behind Social Security was challenged, however, in time. Taking the narrative up to the present, Kessler-Harris shows how the rhetoric of Social Security as a "fair" entitlement to workers proved irresistible to the millions of women entering the labor market after World War II. They demanded to be served fairly by the system, overturning provisions which provided lower benefits to married women workers. In this case, Kessler-Harris reveals how a program aiming to provide equity and support to male breadwinners, and treating women as family-bound dependents, could not survive unchanged in the face of a workforce increasingly filled with female breadwinners.
Yet other laws established on the basis of the gendered imagination of the early twentieth century persisted relatively unchanged. The federal income tax system was created, like Social Security, to achieve "fairness" for male heads of households rather than for all individual Americans. The key lay in how policy makers defined the taxpayer. "Though the tax was technically on individuals," Kessler-Harris writes, "Treasury officials believed that families with equal incomes should pay equal taxes, regardless of how the income was derived," and thus taxed households rather than individual members of a married couple (p. 173). This system prevented wealthy men from putting income or assets in their wives' names, and thus avoiding taxes. But it penalized women earners who earned less income than their husbands but who paid taxes at a higher rate because their income was added to their husbands' to determine the tax rate. Like Social Security, a system based on presumptions about female dependency and the male ability to support the home was challenged over time. But unlike Social Security, the challenges did not succeed: today federal income taxes are still calculated differently for married households, demonstrating the remarkable persistence of the early twentieth-century gendered imagination.
In the final chapters of the book, Kessler-Harris draws the reader up to the 1960s and 1970s, and to the issue of job discrimination based on sex. Here, the early twentieth-century gendered imagination was dealt its greatest blow. Kessler-Harris recreates the fierce debate among feminists and federal policy makers over whether or not treating women differently than men at work should be viewed as discrimination. Many women on the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962 declined to view women's differential treatment as discrimination, preferring to invoke "difference" as a prerogative for protecting women from long hours or overwork. After 1963, other women such as legal advocate Pauli Murray, Congressional Representatives Martha Griffiths and Edith Green, and the National Organization for Women jettisoned protections for women based on "difference" and argued that any differential treatment of women in the labor force was discriminatory. Kessler-Harris shows how the perhaps cynical decision of Southern legislators to place "sex" in the 1964 Civil Rights Act in order to prevent its passage had the unintended consequence of reinforcing the arguments of Murray and NOW. Feminists arguing to place sex discrimination on par with racial discrimination as a question of protecting individual equal rights won out.
With this achievement, Kessler-Harris argues, women came closer than ever before to reaching "economic citizenship" on par with men. With legal backing and enforcement from the initially reluctant Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, women now approached "the achievement of an independent and relatively autonomous status that mark[ed] self-respect and provide[d] access to the full play of power and influence that define[d] participation in a democratic society (pp. 12-13). When sex discrimination was defined as differential treatment of men and women in the labor market--and became illegal--many of the barriers that the gendered imagination had erected came under attack. Women could no longer be barred from employment based on their status as real or potential mothers, their presumed "feminine" preferences, or generalized assumptions about their strength, skills, or abilities. Equal rights rhetoric and law envisioned women not through the old gendered imagination--as primarily entwined in familial roles--but as individual actors in the labor market. Accorded with the right to work at a job of their choice, women since the 1970s have also begun to achieve the "customary and legal acknowledgment of personhood, with all that implies for expectations, training, access to and distribution of resources, and opportunity in the marketplace" ( pp. 12-13).
One of the most interesting parts of this discussion of the ascension of an individual equal rights approach to employment concerns its effects on the lives of poor and minority women. In part of chapter six, Kessler-Harris points out that the achievement of the right to work served some women better than others. The law freed up women workers from social and cultural assumptions about women's obligations and special needs with regard to family. But in reality, of course, women still had to struggle to balance work with family obligations: most worked a "second shift" at home. The women who were best able to benefit from the new anti-discrimination laws were women who could afford to privately pay for their family obligations. Middle-class and well-paid working-class women, especially those who were married, tended to have the resources and supports--funding for childcare or networks of family--to take advantage of new work opportunities. But low-income women who did not have resources for child care, or who lived in isolated, unsafe neighborhoods lacking child care, were not able to take advantage of new employment opportunities. These disadvantaged women, Kessler-Harris points out, may well have benefited from retaining the gendered imagination that recognized some women's familial and community obligations and barriers. Low-income women's dilemma in this respect is clearly revealed in the current debate over the re-authorization of the 1996 welfare reform. Rather than increasing spending for child care or safe housing, President George W. Bush's proposal increases hourly work requirements, leaving low-income women struggling to surmount the familiar and community barriers alone.
While Kessler-Harris limits her commentary on the work-family dilemma to poor women, the astute observation may well extend to women of the working and middle classes, too, and to men who now balance both work and family responsibilities. After all, the flip side of Alice Kessler-Harris' story of how women came to gain economic citizenship as individual workers in America is the story of how more and more people, women and men alike, have begun to work more hours per week and more weeks per year than at any point in modern history. For many Americans today, even those of the married middle class, the decision to work may well be a matter of necessity (albeit relative) rather than choice. The "right" to work is just as much an obligation to work, especially for the poor. Though this route to economic citizenship has brought employment-based benefits such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, and fair legal protections on the job to many, it has made the ability the care for family, home and community more difficult for most.
One way to remedy this dilemma would be to pursue the rights of citizens to care for families at the same time as pursuing the right to work. But Kessler-Harris is not hopeful about this possibility. She correctly points out that "women have not generally achieved public power for their caring roles" (p. 13). And if the argument for rights based on family roles has not worked for women, it seems unlikely that it could work for men. Still, it may yet be worthwhile to try to think both historically and presently about strategies for broadening the basis of economic citizenship to include caring. The welfare rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, demanded that caring be viewed as economically valuable. In addition, since the 1970s, there have been efforts by feminist economists to include unpaid caring labor as part of the calculation of Gross Domestic Product. And currently, there is growing support among diverse constituencies for extending and enhancing provisions for caring such as the modest Family and Medical Leave Act. In the end, Kessler-Harris may be correct in her assessment that "[I]n modern democratic societies prevailing beliefs in the sanctity of the market make access to it the only practical route to empowerment as citizens" (p. 13). But hard-pressed American citizens juggling work and family may hope the future holds something more.
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