Patricia O’Toole, author of The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, notes that Wilson looms large today “because his triumphs as well as his defeats were so large and lasting.”

In the last fifty years, Wilson has gained new respect for his progressive domestic politics and his idealistic visions for world democracy. In a recent CSPAN survey of Presidential achievement, historians ranked Wilson a No. 11, just behind Lyndon Johnson (Abraham Lincoln, as usual, was first). 

Wilson was swept into office in 1912. In a three-way race, he took 41.8 percent of the popular vote and won 435 electoral votes from 40 states. With a strong Democratic majority in both the House and Senate, he was able to enact an unprecedented wave of reform legislation. This included the first permanent, progressive income tax, creation of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission and the Clayton Antitrust Act. He also appointed Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice. 

Although he campaigned for re-election in the summer of 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” aggressive German actions (and increasing, desperate pleas from Britain and France) forced Wilson to make a declaration of war on April 2, 1917. He then went on to successfully oversee the rapid conscription, training and deployment of some 1.5 million troops in Europe within eighteen months. At the Paris peace talks in 1919, Wilson proposed the League of Nations, precursor to the United Nations and advocated for establishing independent, democratic nations after the break-up of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. His strident lectures to French and British leaders at the peace conference was a precursor to an era of American moral vanity and overreach in international affairs.

The Introvert

Unlike later activist Democratic presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who worked the telephone and dispensed political favors with Congressional leaders, Wilson was a shy introverted man, who avoided the press and spent much of his time in reading and contemplation. A key reason he was able to enact so many progressive measures was the strong support he enjoyed from the Southern Democrats who wielded enormous power in Congress and who considered him a sympathetic colleague. Wilson’s father was a Presbyterian minister and a chaplain to the Confederate Army. Although he would be mostly educated in the North and would earn a national reputation as president of Princeton University in New Jersey, he retained many Southern values of elitism, close-knit family and white racial superiority. 

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Southern states were a pillar of the Democratic Party. As President, Wilson readily acceded to Southern politicians’ demands for the segregation of the federal government workforce, including the Post Office, Treasury and Navy departments. Thousands of black workers were thrown out of work, hundreds of others denied promotions. They were mostly replaced by white workers named by Southern politicians. 

During his second term, black enlistment in the Armed Forces was perceived as a threat by many white supremacists and the lynching of black men surged across the South. Wilson privately expressed shock, but declined to take any federal action. When the U.S. Army finally deployed in Europe, he rejected pleas from black leaders that their men be integrated into regular combat units. Instead, black infantrymen fought in segregated battalions, often under French command. 

The book’s title, The Moralist, suggests the author’s take on Wilson’s political achievements. O’Toole states that his moral ideology was “more secular than religious, the effect of his long education in history, government and the law.” Although he often referenced God in his speeches, Wilson’s view of government was anchored in secular thought, particularly British parliamentary law. 

Wilson had written widely on government, including authoring a widely used college textbook. He saw the United States as a unique, nation with an idealistic Constitution that required its leaders to lead with “moral force.” As a result, he rarely acted as a traditional, flexible politician, ready to compromise and trade favors to get a bill passed. Rather, he saw himself, a man of superior education and intellect, as one who was destined to lead the masses. Confident in his erudition (he is the only President to earn a Ph.D.) he sincerely believed he knew what was best for the nation and, after World War I erupted, the world (e.g. The 14 Points and the League of Nations). 

Personal Racism

From our 21st century viewpoint, Wilson had one glaring blind spot: the racism of a privileged white male. Woodrow Wilson could change his mind when confronted with protests. After a decades long campaign by American suffragettes, he came around to support women’s right to vote. He advocated Congressional passage of the 19th Amendment, finally ratified in 1920. However, his Southern background shaped his view of minority rights, and a private acceptance of white supremacy. He refused to accept African-Americans’ claims for equal rights, believing they were “not ready.” 

In the summer of 1917, with lynching and anti-black riots spreading across the South, he declined to meet with a group of black newspaper editors who came to the White House. Discouraged, but not defeated, the editors left a long series of demands for him. In a muted written reply, he said “We all have to be patient with one another. Human nature doesn’t make giant strides in a single generation.” 

Privately, he told his political associates that it was better that blacks be segregated, since they could not yet compete successfully with whites in the job market.

He was unable to connect his vision for new, liberal democratic nations in post-war Europe with the cruel suppression of African-American rights occurring in his own country. 

O’Toole, who presents a generally balanced view of Wilson and his accomplishments, treads lightly on her subject’s racism. Early in the book, she explains his cold shoulder to the demands for fair treatment by African Americans by stating “He knew the segregation was morally indefensible, but ending it would have cost him the votes of every Southerner in Congress.”

O’Toole’s other reporting of Wilson’s political career is balanced and often critical. She notes many hypocrisies and frequent prevarications. His stubbornness and refusal to compromise limited his political achievements. The most significant was his refusal to accept any changes to the treaty which would have brought America into the new League of Nations. The author shows that if had accepted a few minor amendments and staged a face-saving negotiation session with Republic senators, he might have secured passage of the measure. 

Instead, Wilson embarked on a grueling, nationwide speaking tour. On Sept. 25, 1919 in Pueblo Colorado he suffered a massive stroke. He was never able to speak or write normally again. He finished his term in a beleaguered, secretive White House, protected by his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt and a coterie of advisors.

The story of Woodrow Wilson’s doomed presidency has aspects of a great tragedy. Patricia O’Toole’s carefully crafted account is always interesting and insightful and becomes a fascinating, page-turner in the later chapters when the inflexible, idealistic President has to come to terms with the horror of the Great War.

But the two men did meet and established a friendship: “Sweeny was the war hero that Hemingway longed to be, while Hemingway was [to become] the acclaimed writer that Sweeny would have liked to be,“ claimed one who knew both. The friendship flourished until Hemingway’s death on July 2, 1961. Charles Sweeny, much older, served as an honorary pallbearer.

 ]]> Tue, 14 Aug 2018 10:36:21 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169439 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169439 0 The journalist Anne Applebaum is a leading popular historian of the former European Communist countries. She has published a substantial study of the Soviet Gulag camp system that won a Pulitzer Prize, and a study of the Communist takeovers of Eastern Europe.1   In Red Famine Applebaum focuses on the great Soviet famine of the early 1930s, which she portrays as imposed artificially by the Stalin regime on Ukraine, and the result of a long history of alleged Russian and Soviet hostility toward Ukraine. 

This book has new information on Ukrainian culture in the 1920s, Ukrainian émigré historiography of the famine after World War II, the Ukrainian government’s use of famine history, and few other topics. Overall, however, it retells the nationalist story of the famine found in earlier publications, but inaccurately, and does not cite evidence in its sources that contradicts or undermines almost all its arguments. This review focuses only on certain indicative issues in the first part of the book, and then addresses the main problems with her depiction of the famine itself.

This book relies almost entirely on published sources: monographs, articles, and archival document collections published in post-Soviet Ukraine or in Canada. In footnotes from the document collections, Applebaum consistently cites the full archival source, followed by the reference to the published source. A superficial reader might glance at these endnotes and think they were her own archival research. Applebaum criticizes scholars for “cherry picking” (49-50), and also falsely claims that one of my publications was not based on archival sources (419).

Red Famine begins with a brief historical background, then has two to three chapters on each of the book’s main topics: the Civil War in Ukraine (1918-1921), the NEP in Ukraine (1921-1929), collectivization in Ukraine (1930-1931), events in 1932 that she considers the “preparation” of the famine including grain procurements, the “blacklisting” of villages and farms, restrictions on peasant movement, suppression of Ukrainian culture, the famine itself and its aftermath, the Soviet “cover-up” of the famine and later writings on it. 

This outline makes the book appear coherent and comprehensive. Yet every section has important omissions, errors and distortions. For example, she defines the Ukrainian word Holodomor, “a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger-holod-and extermination-mor.” (xxvi) But “mor” in Ukrainian means “plague”; the word for “extermination” is vynyshchennia [винищення].2   She begins her book on the “Holodomor” by mis-translating that term, attributing to it an intentionalist meaning it does not have. 

Applebaum portrays Ukrainians as unique and different from Russians, in line with Ukrainian nationalist arguments. She writes that Ukraine was the Soviet republic with “the most numerous peasantry” (102-103). Yet the Russian Republic had more than triple the rural population of Ukraine and was slightly more rural.3   She also brings up the old nationalist theme (33) that Russian peasants were “communal” while Ukrainian peasants were “individual farmers” who “owned” their land, horses, and livestock. The literature shows, however, that virtually all Russian and Ukrainian peasants held land in strips scattered across the village fields, planted their strips in the spring crop fields in spring, in the winter crop fields in fall, harvested the fields together, and grazed their livestock together on the fallow field.4   This pattern persisted in the Soviet period, and Applebaum’s main source noted this, but she did not mention it.5   Many “communal” peasants owned, rented, bought and sold land during the 19th century, rarely or never repartitioned their lands, and all of them owned their livestock and equipment, unless they were poor.6   “Individual” tenure was less widespread than she claimed in Ukraine and led to extreme inequality and “an army of dwarf-holders and landless peasants.”7

Applebaum also overemphasizes negative aspects of Russian-Ukrainian relations. She claims that the Ems Edict issued by Alexander II in 1876 “outlawed Ukrainian books and periodicals” and anticipated Soviet “sharp hostility” to Ukraine (8-9). Yet Alexander II’s government initially aided publication of Ukrainian books; the later restrictions on Ukrainian culture were a response to the Polish uprising of 1861 and were limited and weakly enforced.8  Ukrainian publishers published numerous publications in Ukrainian and about Ukraine, many of which are in western libraries, including catalogues of Ukrainian books available for purchase there.9  She discusses Bolshevik actions in Ukraine in 1919, the peasant rebellions of 1919-1921, the famine of 1921-1923 in Ukraine, and the successes of Ukrainization in culture, all of which have major problems, but for reasons of space I will focus on the 1933 famine and the events leading to it. 

In chapter 4, “The Double Crisis, 1927-1929,” Applebaum discusses the food crisis of 1928 and the harsh “extraordinary measures” that the Soviet regime applied to obtain food from peasants to feed townspeople, which have long been viewed as events that led to collectivization.10  Applebaum describes food shortages in Soviet cities in 1928 (82-83), but then writes that in Ukraine, “police discovered many tonnes [sic] of grain that had been kept back because peasants had, quite rationally, been waiting for prices to rise” (86). By calling peasants’ actions “rational,” Applebaum seems to endorse their withholding food for high prices, but her subsequent discussion is very critical of the Soviet government’s measures to induce peasants to stop hoarding and obtain food for starving townspeople. Yet many publications have argued that famines can be caused by farmers or traders withholding food from townspeople, sometimes expressed as the “moral economy,” the right to subsistence over the right to profit.11   Applebaum does not consider the possibility that hungry townspeople, and Soviet officials trying to feed them, could have interpreted these reports as a “man-made” famine created by profiteering peasants. 

Applebaum claims that the government’s procurements to alleviate that shortage “comprehensively destroyed the peasants incentives to produce more grain” (87). Yet later she writes that the 1930 harvest was much larger than the 1929 harvest (161). How could that have happened if peasants’ incentives were “comprehensively destroyed”? She also discusses Soviet famine relief effort in 1928-1929 (82, 108) but does not consider how crop failures and famine relief affected peasants’ incentives in this case. She shows that some Soviet leaders during this food crisis came to see Ukrainian nationalism as a threat, held show trials of Ukrainian nationalist groups, and began to connect peasant resistance problematically to nationalism.

In this crisis that the Soviet regime decided to collectivize Soviet agriculture. Applebaum cites Stalin’s references to mechanized agriculture but dismisses them as a “Soviet cult of science” (87-89), not considering that Soviet leaders and planners were trying to emulate American farming, which was even more mechanized and scientifically based. She does not consider that repeated crop failures, which she mentioned, could have persuaded Soviet leaders that Soviet peasant farming needed to be modernized.12  Rather, she attributes the decision to collectivize agriculture to the 1928 Central Committee plenums that allegedly concluded that peasants had to be “squeezed” and “sacrificed” for industry (90-91). Yet modernizing agriculture was a central issue in those plenums. She never mentions that in 1929, the Soviets established VASKhNiL, the central agricultural research academy, under the leadership of the great biologist Nikolai Vavilov, who did not seek to “squeeze” the peasants. 

Applebaum’s discussion of collectivization and dekulakization in chapter 5 describes peasants as “abandoned and alone,” helpless, weak, with no incentive to resist (122). But in chapter 6 she describes them as angry, organizing armed bands, and extremely violent, slaughtering their livestock, rebelling against and murdering Soviet officials, without addressing the contradiction. She admits that in the archival documents of the 1930 rebellions, “it is not always easy to separate fact from fiction” and describes them as often “deliberately embroidered” and “exaggerated and hysterical” (152-153). Yet she never questions them based on this point.

Applebaum’s discussion of the collective farm system (chapters 6 and 7) has many inaccurate and problematic passages. For example, she claims that after collectivization, peasants had no way to earn a “salary” (137), but she notes a few pages later that kolkhoz peasants had private plots and livestock, from which they earned money through the whole Soviet period (147). Peasants before collectivization did not earn “salaries” or wages but were “paid” by the harvest they produced, which depended in part on their work, so payment by labor days after the harvest was basically similar. She claims that in the kolkhozy the “fruits of the peasants’ labor no longer belonged to them, the grain they sowed and harvested was requisitioned by the authorities,” but this would at least require evidence of harvests and procurements, which she never clearly presents (see below). She asserts that kolkhoz peasants “lost the ability to make decisions about their lives,” and that kolkhoz peasants had to follow local authorities’ directions for the crops they grew. Yet on the one hand, she never explains that for decades before 1930, peasants were obliged by the village to farm the same crops at the same times in the same fields in dozens of strips scattered over the village, which means that collectivization retained village dominance over farming. On the other hand, she claims that peasants “worked as little as possible” (159-160), and that 40,000 peasant households decided they “would not plant anything” in April 1932 (171), which were clearly their own decisions.

Applebaum also claims that in kolkhozy as in socialist industry, since there was no “private property,” peasants like workers engaged in pervasive theft (160, 165). Yet American businesses lose tens of billions of dollars every year to workplace theft.13  She ignores the fact, which she notes later, that the kolkhoz-sovkhoz system recovered from the famine and that food production increased. This could not have happened if the peasants did no work and stole everything. 

Repeatedly she purports to know what people were thinking, with no evidence. During 1931-1932 she asserts “everyone understood at some level that collectivization was the source of the new shortages” (165). Yet she admits that in 1931 there were “bouts of drought,” which is an understatement; even Stalin publicly stated that drought “considerably” reduced the 1931 harvest.14  Russia and Ukraine had a long history of droughts and famines, which she admits (283); how can she know that no one, even peasants, saw the drought as a cause of shortages? In discussing the regime’s decision in spring 1932 to stop the procurements and provide food and seed for the villages to produce a new harvest, she asserts that officials “knew” that “food aid to Ukraine was a tacit admission of Stalin’s failure,” but also “knew” that “catastrophe would follow” if Ukraine did not get aid (173). Yet her sources include the published decree of 16 February 1932 that allotted 870,000 tons of seed and food to Ukraine and several eastern provinces, which she does not mention.15   The fact that this decree was publicized implies that leaders did not see it as an admission of failure. Applebaum does admit that in April the Politburo allotted Ukraine some aid, but she then asserts that Stalin suddenly “withdrew the food aid he sent to Ukraine” (174). There is no evidence for this action in her footnotes, nor in her other sources, not even a single telegram or letter; this claim appears to be false. Applebaum does not mention the Politburo decree from 15 May 1932, in her sources, that allotted Ukraine 6.5 million puds (106,000 tons) of grain for food relief, and more in the next weeks.16

To explain most concisely the problems in Applebaum’s chapters on the famine, the following section examines the main points in two summaries of her main arguments at the end of the book. The first summary addresses the causes and nature of the famine, in which I will number each relevant phrase and discuss the broader argument or claims that each represents (357):

“Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine (1). Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933 (7), were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes (4); the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food (3); the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages (2); the restrictions on barter and trade (6); and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbors died of hunger (5).”

(1) She discusses the harvests and procurements in separate, inconsistent passages. She refers to the 1932 harvest being “40 percent below the plan for the USSR, and 60 percent in Ukraine” (190), but she never explains what those harvest plans were. Yet on the same page, she writes “Intriguingly, the overall drop in production was not as dramatic as it had been in 1921,” and she cites official total Soviet harvest data for 1931-1934, all in the range of 67-69 million tons, showing no decline. She never addresses this inconsistency. She does not mention that Davies and Wheatcroft, whose work she cites for the 40 percent and 60 percent declines, gave much lower figures for 1931 and 1932.17   In other passages she implies or explicitly refers to “harvest failure” in Ukraine (209, 211, 213, 283). Yet in her conclusions she ignores these earlier statements and evidence. In fact, the official figure for the 1932 harvest of 69 million tons that Applebaum cites (190) was a pre-harvest forecast, and the actual 1932 harvest was much smaller. The kolkhoz annual reports, which included final harvest data, reported that the 1932 harvest was extremely low, and the 1933 harvest much larger.18

Applebaum’s discussion of the grain procurements is similarly inconsistent and incomplete. She refers to the “unrealistic, impossible procurement plan of 5.8 million tons” for 1932, (179) yet earlier she wrote that the 1931 plan was 8.3 million tons (168), and she never compares the two or explains why the lower 1932 plan was “impossible” while the higher 1931 plan was not.19   She also does not explain that this 1932 plan was reduced from the original 1932 procurement plan of 7.1 million tons.20   The regime announced the reduced procurement plan for 1932 in a long decree published on 6 May that granted peasants and kolkhozy the right to sell their produce on the free market after fulfilling procurement quotas.21  This was a crucial decision in Soviet history because it laid the basis for the kolkhoz private-plot economy that played a major role in food production to the end of the Soviet regime. Yet she calls it an “an edict” that “forbid peasants from trading” until meeting procurement quotas (195), completely omitting its reduction of those quotas, including Ukraine’s from 7.12 million tons to 5.83 million tons, or almost 20 percent. She does not even footnote or give any other reference to this document, which was in her sources. 

Applebaum does cite correspondence between Stalin and Kaganovich in July 1932 about reducing Ukraine’s procurement plan, but she never states that they actually did reduce the plan (179) or how it would have changed the procurement plan. She also claims that in the winter of 1933 Stalin refused to “ease up on grain collections” (193). Her sources, however, show that the regime reduced procurement targets for Ukraine four times: in the May 1932 decree by 1.3 million tons, as noted; in July by 40 million puds, 656,000 tons, more than ten percent of Ukraine’s plan; in October by an additional 70 million puds, 1.15 million tons; and in January 1933 by 28 million puds, 459,000 tons.22  In all the cases after May, Stalin reduced procurements in response to appeals from Ukraine to help starving peasants. He even turned down other provinces’ requests for reduced procurements while granting Ukraine’s, which Applebaum does not mention.23   Finally, on 5 February, the regime ordered local officials to stop procurements and focus on seed, and began providing food relief.24

The Soviet government thus reduced Ukraine’s procurements from kolkhozy and peasants in 1932 not by a begrudged 40 million puds, 656,000 tons, as Applebaum ambiguously implies, but from 434 million puds to 218 million puds, 7.1 million tons to 3.57 million tons, or approximately half. Even with the procurements required from state farms, the total procurement plan for Ukraine was reduced to 260 million puds, or 4.2 million tons, about one-third below the 1931 actual procurements.25   Although this evidence is in Applebaum’s sources, she misrepresented the second reduction, failed to explain the first, never mentioned the third, fourth, or the decree suspending procurements, and never stated the final procurement plan. And she criticized other scholars for cherry-picking (49-50)! Applebaum notes later that the regime reduced procurement for Ukraine from the 1933 harvest by 915,000 tons (284), yet she never explains that they cut procurements in 1932 four times as much. Even with that reduction, actual grain procurements for 1933, 6.2 million tons, were larger than those for 1932, 4.2 million tons. These data, in her sources, are central for understanding the famine, but she never cites them.26

(2) Applebaum describes the blacklisting policy, which denied a kolkhoz or village access to trade, forced them to pay debts early, and sometimes seized other possessions, as a main cause of the famine. Yet her own sources show that in December, at the peak of the campaign, only some 400 kolkhozy were blacklisted, out of 23,270 kolkhozy in Ukraine.27   Her sources agree that blacklisting could not and did not stop trade.28   The Ukrainian government also removed villages from the blacklist if they met most of the procurement quota.29   Applebaum never mentions these points. Based on this evidence, it is difficult to accept Applebaum’s claims that blacklisting was a major cause of famine mortality. 

(3) The Soviet regime attempted to prevent peasants from fleeing Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Lower Volga in decrees in early 1933.30   Applebaum notes that several thousand peasants were caught, but never presents an estimate of the total number. The only figure I have seen is 219,460 people caught by mid-March, the great majority of whom were sent back to their villages.31   Even if twice as many were caught in this harsh policy, and all of them died of the famine, this would account only for a minority of famine deaths (see below). Applebaum also claims that “beyond Kharkiv where the Russian territory starts there was no hunger” (198). Yet archival sources show “there were massive cases of swelling from famine and death” in the Central Blackearth Oblast’, especially in southern parts across the border from Kharkiv.32

(4) In chapter 10 Applebaum describes the harsh searches that local personnel, often Ukrainian, imposed on villages, based on a Ukrainian memoir collection (222), and she presents many vivid anecdotes. Still she never explains how many people these actions affected. She cites a Ukrainian decree from November 1932 calling for 1100 brigades to be formed (229). If each of these 1100 brigades searched 100 households, and a peasant household had five people, then they took food from 550,000 people, out of 20 million, or about 2-3 percent. As will be discussed below, even if all of these people died from the confiscatory searches, this would be only a small share of the total famine deaths.

(5) Applebaum’s attribution of the famine to a “vicious propaganda campaign” against peasants accused of withholding grain leaves out half the story. She cites several sources in which officials and other people expressed certainty that peasants were withholding food (231ff). Yet she does not connect these sources to the published reports from 1928 she cited earlier of peasants withholding grain, which some people must have remembered. Yet the propaganda was not the whole story. She cites Stalin’s famous letter to Sholokhov blaming peasants for shortages, but does not mention that he sent food relief to Sholokhov’s region.33   Her sources have many documents that viewed peasants as victims, allotted relief to starving villages and to children and invalids in hospitals, and even reporting arrests of personnel for poor work in aiding starving people.34   She wrote about some of these relief efforts (269ff), but does not consider whether these actions undermined the “propaganda campaign” of hostility to peasants. 

(6) Applebaum does not present any evidence for her claim that limits on kolkhoz trade were a cause of the famine. Most Ukrainian provinces were allowed to trade by the end of 1932 or early 1933, but even with this permission, peasants brought much less grain to markets than in any other year (another sign of a low harvest).35   But the other side of this issue was famine relief. She asserts that “during the winter of 1933 he [Stalin] did not offer any additional food aid” (193) and that only in May 1933 the government “finally approved significant food aid” (283). Her own sources show that after 5 February 1933, when the regime suspended procurements, officials at all levels worked to obtain and distribute food to these starving people, especially children.36   Most of the documents in both Ukrainian document collections dating from the cessation of procurements in February until the harvest in August (Holod 1932-1933[1990], 350-558; Holodomor [2007], pgs. 621-920) discuss famine relief by officials at some level, as do her other sources, but she cites almost none of these in her very incomplete discussion of aid by Soviet institutions.37   This relief for the USSR as a whole included millions of tons of grain allocated from the USSR’s limited reserves and from grain procured.38

Perhaps even more important, Applebaum almost completely ignores the fact that these starving peasants were the ones who ended the famine, with the help of Soviet famine relief, by producing a much larger harvest in 1933. She mentions peasant work in early 1933 extremely elliptically (252, 265, 296), and never mentions the many agencies the regime established to help farmers overcome the famine.39

(7) In chapter 13, “Aftermath,” Applebaum discusses famine mortality. She notes that views are “coalescing” around an estimate of 3.9 million excess deaths (279-280), but this is still disputable.40   Then she asserts, with no evidence, that famine mortality was highest in Kyiv and Khar’kiv provinces, citing Andrea Graziosi’s claim that these regions posed the “greatest political resistance” to the Bolsheviks in the Civil War and in 1930 against collectivization (282-283). Yet neither she nor Graziosi provide any evidence that Stalin gave directives to “punish” those provinces. She does not cite evidence, again from her own sources, that procurements from Kyiv oblast’ were reduced greatly and ended up “extremely minimal,” that the region had crop failures in 1932, and that Kyiv oblast’ received substantial food relief.41

Applebaum’s second summary conclusion concern Ukrainian nationalism. She argues that “the famine was a political famine, created for the express purpose of weakening peasant resistance, and thus national identity, and in this it succeeded” (283). Yet she provides only anecdotal evidence of “peasant resistance” and never explains how it was related to “national identity.” Her main evidence for this consists of stories fabricated by officials about peasant conspiracies and connections with Ukrainian nationalists abroad (e.g., 95ff, 102ff, 184). If “resistance” meant peasants holding back produce for higher prices, it is difficult to see this as “nationalist,” because it caused people in Ukrainian cities to starve, and because Russian peasants were accused of this as well. Later, in discussing Nazi genocide in Ukraine, she makes an even stronger claim (323): “This was Stalin’s policy, multiplied many times: the elimination of whole nations through starvation.” But 24 pages later (347) she writes: “Stalin did not seek to kill all Ukrainians ….” She never addresses this contradiction and never documents either claim.

She argues the famine brought “the end of Ukrainization.” She writes the arrests of “almost 200,000” Ukrainian political and cultural figures, which she calls an “entire generation of educated patriotic Ukrainians” (217), although she never explains what happened to them. While the arrests she describes certainly harmed Ukrainian culture, Ukraine had 8-9 million townspeople, and many more than 200,000 were educated.42   She claims that, as a result of this repression, “Russian language returned to dominance” (218), but her examples are Donetsk and Odessa, highly Russian regions. Ukrainian statistics show that the share of district newspapers in Ukrainian decreased from 85.3 to 80 percent. But 80 percent is still dominant, and greater than the percentage of Ukrainians in Ukraine in the 1937 census.43   The number of books published in Ukrainian in Ukraine increased from 27 million in 1928 to over 55 million in 1934 and 65.3 million in 1937, almost 90 percent of all books published, with only 5.8 million in Russian.44   In 1935-1936, out of 4.96 million students in schools in Ukraine, 4.1 million were taught Ukrainian, 634,962 Russian, and much smaller numbers for 17 other languages.45   In light of these data, it is difficult to accept her claim that Ukrainization ended. 

In chapter 14 Applebaum discusses the Soviet attempt to conceal the famine and reports by foreign visitors to inform the outside world about it. They included journalists, and she contrasts the writings of Gareth Jones, who traveled in Ukraine briefly and wrote about the famine, with those of Walter Duranty, who she claims concealed the famine. Yet she does not cite Duranty’s article on the front page of the New York Timeson 24 August 1933, with the headline “Famine Toll Heavy in Southern Russia,” with the subheading, “Death Rate During Last Year Has Trebled – Food Supply Now Held Assured,” and the first paragraph, which reads, in part: “The food shortage which has affected almost the whole population in the last year, and particularly the grain-producing provinces – that is, the Ukraine, North Caucasus, the Lower Volga region – has, however, caused heavy loss of life.” Duranty did not “deny” the famine. 

Applebaum’s chapter 15 on “The Holodomor in History and Memory” surveys the nationalist historiography of the famine, from publications during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, to émigré publications mainly in Canada, culminating in Robert Conquest’s 1986 book Harvest of Sorrow, and writings on the famine in independent Ukraine. This historiography is informative, but she criticizes “Soviet scholars and mainstream academic journals” for allegedly ignoring Ukraine. She describes as “unprecedented at the time for a book about Ukraine” (337) that academics reviewed Harvest of Sorrow. Yet a search in JSTOR for reviews in 18 Slavic studies periodicals during 1960-1985, the 25 years before the publication of Harvest of Sorrow, using the keyword “Ukraine” brought up over 800 reviews, and using the keyword “Ukrainian” over 1100 reviews. 

Red Famine does present recently published anecdotal evidence about many aspects of the famine, but most of Applebaum’s extreme statements are undocumented. Her portrayal of Ukrainians as victims of persecution is exaggerated for the Tsarist period and misleading for the Soviet period: the regime arrested many Ukrainian cultural figures, but they arrested many Russian cultural figures as well, and Ukrainization as evidenced in publishing and education did not end. Her arguments attributing the 1932-1933 famine to blacklisting, roadblocks, searches, and propaganda are contradicted by evidence in her own sources that she does not cite. Her claim that the famine did not result from a crop failure is contradicted by her own statements, and by evidence in her sources that she does not cite, especially the large reduction in food procurements from Ukraine. Since the famine after the low procurements in 1932 was much worse than the one after the higher procurements in 1931, the only rational explanation is that the 1932 harvest was also much smaller.46   Applebaum’s discussion of the debate over whether the famine was genocide (347ff) ignores these issues, which are crucial for that discussion. 

While this review article does not allow for a full discussion of the issue of genocide and Stalin’s responsibility, we can at least note certain conclusions from the sources presented here. Stalin and other leaders made concessions to Ukraine in procurements and were clearly trying to balance the subsistence needs of Ukraine and other regions, especially people in towns and industrial sites who could not access the surrogate foods that some peasants relied on to survive (see for example Applebaum ch.12). Soviet leaders did not understand the 1932 crop failure: they thought that peasants were withholding food to drive up prices on the private market, as some of them had in 1928. They worried about the Japanese take-over of Manchuria in 1931-1932 and the Nazi victory in Germany in early 1933, and feared nationalist groups in Poland and Austria could inspire a nationalist rebellion in Ukraine. Faced with these “threats,” Soviet leaders were reluctant to make the USSR appear weak by admitting the famine and importing a lot of food, both of which they had done repeatedly earlier. The famine and the Soviets’ insufficient relief can be attributed to crop failure, and to leaders’ incompetence and paranoia regarding foreign threats and peasant speculators: a retaliatory version of the moral economy.

Red Famine has received considerable notice in the press, yet none of the reviews that I have seen, even academic ones, address the book’s serious problems. Michael Ellman described Applebaum’s book as “balanced and nuanced” and only noted that hers “is not the only possible framework for a study of the famine.”47   Sheila Fitzpatrick, in theGuardian, calls the book “a superior work of popular history.” She mildly disagrees with Applebaum’s view that Stalin intended “to kill Ukrainians,” without mentioning Applebaum’s contradictory statements on this point.48

One scholar asked me: why have academic works not received the kind of attention the Applebaum’s book has? In addition to her status as a well-known and widely published journalist, another reason for her book’s popularity is that Ukrainian nationalist scholars have been propagating the perspective she advocates for decades, as she documents (ch.15). Applebaum’s omission of key evidence replicates the practices of Ukrainian nationalist writers. For example, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (which worked with Applebaum and Conquest, as she documents in the book) recently published an article collection, After the Holodomor, in which, like Applebaum, the authors attributed the famine to grain procurements but never state what they were in 1932 and how much lower they were than in 1931 or 1933.49

Some might ask whether Applebaum’s writing is more accessible to “non-specialist” readers. There are many excellent writers among Slavic specialists, and a more accurate account could easily have been presented in clear and simple language. Applebaum’s writing does not “simplify” the truth, it obscures it, as discussed in this review. Red Famine thus does not fit well in the existing scholarly literature, even as “popular history.” Its interpretation resembles that of Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, and it does use recent published sources that provide vivid descriptions of many people’s experiences in the famine. But it leaves out too much important information, has false claims on key points, and draws unjustified conclusions on important issues based on incomplete use of sources, making it not even close to the level of genuine scholarship, like Davies and Wheatcroft’s Years of Hunger. Red Famine is better characterized by a passage from Peter Kenez’s book on The Birth of the Propaganda State: “propaganda often means telling less than the truth, misleading people … manipulating and distorting information, lying” and addresses “audiences in simple language…”50

When even academics avoid confronting popular histories that mislead the public, they perpetuate a problem in the history field. The American historian Peter Charles Hoffer wrote in his book on malfeasance in American history writing, Past Imperfect: “In law to defraud is to misrepresent or conceal with the intention of deceiving and the aim of gaining from deceit.  In historical scholarship, falsification, plagiarism, and fabrication were devastating types of fraud.  They might not be indictable in a court of law, but they undermined the very foundations of scholarly authority.  What was more, they tested the profession's ability and willingness to police itself.”51 

I hope that this review will help readers and scholars to be cautious in referring to Red Famine and to be alert to the problems in this kind of writing. 

_________________

1Gulag: A History, Doubleday, 2003; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, Doubleday, 2012. Her website that lists many of her writings is:https://www.anneapplebaum.com/. 

2See for example, M. L. Podves’ko, Ukrains’ko-Anhliys’kyy slovnik, Kyiv, 1957, pp. 106, 445; W. Niniows’kyi, Ukrainian-English and English-Ukrainian Dictionary, Edmonton, 1985, pp. 343, 488. The Google translator also gives these translations. 

3Ukraine’s rural population was approximately 24 million, Russia’s was 76 million, in 1926; Vsesoiuznyi perepis’ naseleniia 1937g. Kratkie itogi, Moscow, 1991, 48-51. Russia’s rural population was 83% of the total population, Ukraine’s rural population was 81.7% (my calculation from this source). She discusses the 1937 census (299ff), yet does not notice that it also shows the same population relationship: Vsesoiuznyi perepis’ naseleniia 1937g., 51. 

4V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past, Stanford: Stanford University Pres, 1939, 136. 

5Graham Tan, “Transformation versus Tradition: Agrarian Policy and Government-Peasant Relations in Right-Bank Ukraine 1920-1923,”Europe-Asia Studies, v. 52 n. 5, July, 2000, 918ff. Her source was V. M. Lytvyn et al., Istoriia ukrains’koho selianstva, Kiev, 2006, v. 2, 59.

6T.K. Dennison, A.W. Carus, “The Invention of the Russian Rural Commune: Haxthausen and the Evidence,” The Historical Journal, v. 46 n.3, September 2003, 561-582; M. M. Gromyko, Mir russkoi derevnyi, Moscow, 1991, 57ff.; P. N. Zyrianov, Krest’ianskaia obshchina evropeistkoi Rossii, Moscow: Nauka, 1992, 50ff. 

7Zyrianov, Krest’ianskaia obshchina , 36, shows repartitional communes dominant in most Ukrainian provinces; on household tenure, Vadim Koukouchkine, From peasants to labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007, 17-18; David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930, London: Longman, 1999, 93. 

8The best study of this issue is Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century, Budapest: CEU Press, 2003; on these points: 62ff, 97-115, 230-241, 267ff. 

9Kataloh knyzhnaho magazyna redaktsiy zhurnala “Kievskaia staryna,”28 pages, 1899, and Katalog malorusskikh khig knizhnago magazine Stepana Ivanovicha Gomolinskago, 32 pages, 1887, which is available online: https://cdm16014.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4014coll9/id/21391/rec/1. 

10See, for example, Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power(New York: Norton, 1968), and Michael Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), among many other publications. 

11See for example Pierre Spitz, “The Right to Food in Historical Perspective,” Food Policy, v. 10 n. 4, November 1985, 306-316, and especially E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present, n. 50, February 1971, 76-136. . 

12These are discussed in Tauger, “Stalin, Soviet Agriculture, and Collectivization,” in Trentmann and Just, eds., Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars, New York, 2006, and “La famine soviétique ‘inconnue’ de 1924-1925,” in Tauger, Famine et transformation agricole in URSS, Paris: Delga, 2017, 27-74. 

13See the study inhttps://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-businesses-50-billion-a-year.html?__source=sharebar%7Cemail&par=sharebar, and Edwin H. Sutherland, White Collar Crime: The Uncut Version, Yale University Press, 1983. On Russia, see for example Christine Worobec, “Horse Thieves and Peasant Justice in Post-Emancipation Imperial Russia,” Journal of Social History, v. 21 no 2, Winter 1987, 281-293.

14See Tauger, Natural Disaster and Human Action in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933, Pittsburgh, 2001; Davies and Wheatcroft,Years of Hunger, passim; Stalin, Sochinenniia, Moscow, 1954, v. 13, 216-217. 

15Ruslan Pyrih, ed., Holodomor1932-1933 rokiv v Ukraini: dokumenty I materialy, Kyiv,2007, 63-64. 

16Holodomor, 2007, 156; Holod na Ukraine, Ochyma istorikov, movoiu dokumentiv, Kyiv, 1990, 162. 

17Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, Palgrave MacMillan, 2004, 449. 

18On these points see Tauger, "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933." Slavic Review, v. 50 no. 1, Spring 1991, 70-89; and idem., Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union: A Comparative Case Study of Projections, Biases, and Trust, The Donald W. Treadgold Papers in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies (Seattle: University of Washington, 2001), no. 34. 

19Her sources indicate that the 1931 procurement plan for Ukraine was actually 7.17 million tons; Holodomor, 2007, 173. 

20Holod … ochyma, 1990, 352-353; Holodomor, 2007, 642. 

21Holodomor, 2007, 149-52.

22Holodomor, 2007, 290-303, 355-360, 597-601. 

23Holodomor, 2007, 291, document 217, telegram from Stalin to Kaganovich, 19 August 1932: “As is evident from the materials, not only the Ukrainians but also the North Caucasians, Middle Volga, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan and Bashkiria will speak with the Central Committee about reducing the grain procurement plan. I advise satisfying for the time being only the Ukrainians, reducing their plan by 30 million and only in extreme case by 35-40 million. As for the others, postpone discussion with them until the end of August.” 

24Holodomor, 2007, 641; Holod … ochyma, 1990, 349. 

25Holodomor, 2007, 597-601. 

26Davies, Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 470. 

27Heorhii Papakin, “Blacklists as an instrument of the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 in Ukraine,” translated from Ukrainian and available at: https://holodomor.ca/academic-articles/ , pp. 8-10. Holodomor, 2007, 458, 620; Holod 1932-1933 ochyma, 1990, 311-314; on number of kolkhozy, Asatkin, Narodne hospodarstvo USRR, 1935, 205. 

28Holodomor, 2007, 458, 620; Holod 1932-1933 ochyma, 1990, 311-314; the regime had brought goods to villages for years to trade for grain. 

29Papakin, “Blacklists,” note that some villages were placed on and off the blacklists multiple times, which implies that the policy was arbitrary rather than systematic. 

30Tragediia Sovetskoi derevni, v. 3, 634, 644. 

31N. A. Ivnitskii, Golod 1932-1933 godov v SSSR, 2009, 199. 

32RTsKhIDNI, f. 112, op. 26, d. 21, l.229. I discussed this source in detail in “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-1939: Resistance and Adaptation,” in Steven Wegren, ed., Rural Adaptation in Russia, Routledge, 2005, 83ff. See Ivnitskii,Golod 1932-1933 godov v SSSR. 

33http://vlastitel.com.ru/stalin/reform/perepisk.html.

34Holod 1932-1933… ochyma, 1990, 455-456. 

35See John Whitman, “The Kolkhoz Market,” Soviet Studies, v. 7 (April 1956), 390. 

36Holodomor, 2007, 641; Holod … ochyma, 1990, 349, as noted above. For an example of relief that began on & February, two days after the suspension of procurements, see Holodomor, 2007, 663; Holod … ochyma, 1990, 374. The fact that both collections include this document means that the editors considered it significant. 

37For example, Davies, Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, ch. 6. 

38Tauger, “1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933,” 74; Tauger, Davies, Wheatcroft, “Soviet Grain Stocks …” 

39See Tauger, Commune to Kolkhoz, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 1991, ch. 7, and Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, passim, among other sources. 

40France Meslé, Jasques Vallin, Evgeny Andreev, “Demographic Consequences of the Great Famine: Then and Now,” in Graziosi et al., After the Holodomor, Cambridge: HURI, 2013, 220-222. 

41Holodomor, 2007, 771, 775-778; Holod … Ochyma, 1990, 399-400. 

42Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1937 g. Kratkie itogi, Moscow, 1991, 28.58. 

43Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1937 g., 94: Ukraine had 28.4 million people of whom 22.2 million or 78 percent, were Ukrainian. 

44Narodne hospodarstvo USRR: statystychnyi dovidnik, ed. O. M. Asatkin, Kyiv, 1935, 575, 577, Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1937 g., 94; Kniga i knizhnoe delo v Ukrainskoi SSR, Kiev, 1985, 399. 

45Sotsialistychna Ukraina: Statystychnyy zbirnik, Kyiv, 1937, 222. 

46I made this point in 1991 in “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933.” 

47http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51300

48https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine-anne-applebaum-review

49Graziosi, ed., After the Holodomor, Cambridge: HURI, 2013. For this and other issues, see my review of this book inNationalities Papers, v. 43 n. 3, 2015, 514-518. 

50Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929, Cambridge, 1985, 2, 4, 7. 

51Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect. Facts, Fictions, Fraud: American History from Bancroft toAmbrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin, New York, 2004, 139. 

Academic historians have long paid considerable attention to Williams’s ideas; Edmund Morgan’s Roger Williams: The Church and the State (1967) and Edwin S. Gaustad’s Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (1992), among others, are still in print.  But until recently there have been relatively few accessible biographies.  Gaustad wrote a brief one for Oxford University Press’s “Lives and Legacies” series in 2005.  The best one that I have read is John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul:  Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (2012), a full-scale treatment so vivid and immersive so that the reader feels the blizzard’s cutting wind as the author describes Williams’s escape from Massachusetts. It does justice to Williams’s intellectual life, too.

Although Barry’s splendid book contains nearly 400 pages of text, it cannot cover every angle thoroughly.  Happily, James Warren, a writer known primarily as a military historian (he did a study of Vo Nguyen Giap, the diminutive general who so often frustrated American forces in Vietnam), supplies new and deeper perspective on Williams’s attempts to find fair and peaceful solutions to the increasingly fraught relationships between the many Indian nations of southern New England and the relentlessly aggressive English colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut.  

Williams was remarkably well equipped to be a mediator.  A brilliant scholar (growing up in England, he studied law with Sir Edward Coke) and charismatic personality, he earned the trust and respect of virtually everyone he met. Despite disagreeing sharply with his theological views, John Winthrop secretly warned him that he was about to be arrested in Massachusetts, enabling him to get away (and found Rhode Island).  So persuasive was he that he successfully fended off attempts by the Massachusetts and Connecticut Puritans to annex Rhode Island for themselves, and finally (along with John Clarke) obtained a royal charter in 1663 that guaranteed the littlest colony’s separate survival.

Williams’s understanding of and empathy with the Indians made him unique.  He spent long stretches of time with them and learned their languages and customs.  (His landmark book, A Key into the Language of America, stands alone in its time for its insights into their culture.)  Not that he was a total relativist:  as Warren notes, Williams “joined fellow Puritans in believing the Indian labored in spiritual darkness.”  But intellectually and temperamentally he shrank from believing that he possessed the entire truth.  Warren quotes the great intellectual historian Perry Miller: for Williams “the Christian predicament—which was also the glory of Christianity—was to hold what the believer conceives to be truth with fierce tenacity, yet never [attempt] to impose that truth upon the minds or souls of other men.”  For that reason, he insisted the government must never be the enforcer of any religion’s “truth.”  And for his pains, the unprecedentedly tolerant colony he founded was viewed by its orthodox neighbors as “the sewer of New England.”

Williams’s scholarship and winning temperament governed his dealings with the Indians.  He comprehended and accepted, in ways that Winthrop, William Bradford, and other Puritans could not, the Native Americans system of property, so different from the English.  He purchased the land where he built Providence.  For more than 30 years after the colony’s founding, he worked to keep it out of harm’s way, striving to keep the peace between Rhode Islanders and the Indians who lived in and around it, and between various Indian nations themselves.

Warren’s narration of Williams’s efforts during those four decades provides the clearest and most accessible description of the cultural, military, and political landscape that I can recall reading.  Textbooks almost invariably skip this period, hustling to get to the big, bloody finish, King Philip’s War.  But that explosion could have come much sooner, had it not been for Williams's diplomatic dexterity.  He juggled multiple tribal relationships, conflicts, and rivalries:  not only the Narragansetts (headed variously by Miantonomi, Canonchet, Ninigret, and Canonicus) and, of course, King Philip’s Wampanoags, but also the Mohegans (led by Uncas), the Pequots (already much reduced by their defeat in 1638), and others.  Simultaneously, he dealt with the growing power and avarice of the English colonies that hemmed Rhode Island in.  It was power-balancing worthy of Metternich, but the English grew stronger and stronger, so the balancing act could not last forever.  

In 1676, New England exploded.  King Philip’s War was total war, scorching the land and killing men, women, and children, sometimes in combat and sometimes by starvation, by the hundreds. Alarmed and seeking revenge for what the English termed the “Great Swamp Fight” and the Indians called the “Great Swamp Massacre” in December 1675, the Indians burned towns throughout the region. When they came to Providence, only about 30 of its 500 people remained (the rest had fled to Newport), Warren reports, “seventy-three-year-old Roger Williams emerged from a garrison house unarmed and confronted the Indians.  Even at such an advanced age, as his own home burned behind him, he felt compelled to do what he had been doing for the last forty-five years—to talk, to understand, to do what he could in this orgy of destruction to bring peace.”  In a letter to his brother, Williams recalled what he had said: “This house of mine had lodged kindly some thousands of you these ten years. They said that we were their enemies joined with Massachusetts and Plymouth…. [I said] neither we nor this colony had acted in hostility against them.  I told them this while they were killing and burning … like wolves tearing and devouring the innocent and peaceable…. They confessed they were in a strange way.”

The Indians’ early success only fueled the English lust to become even more wolfish, and, thanks to their superior fire power, they did.  The balance in New England had shifted for good.  Roger Williams lived until 1683, but after nearly 40 years of deftly balancing the scales, his time as an honest broker was past.

By focusing on those 40 years before King Philip’s War, however, James Warren renders his target audience, the proverbial “general reader,” a real service.  His clear retelling of how Williams navigated and negotiated the tangled web of relationships between the Puritans and the Native Americans, especially the Narragansetts, grounded in substantial research in primary and secondary sources, is both appropriately complex and admirably accessible.  Portraits of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and, especially, Plymouth colony, in their devious and avaricious glory, are far darker than their stereotypes. Warren is commendably skeptical of their versions of what happened and makes use of much recent research to balance their accounts, without merely splitting the difference.  By the same token, he avoids romanticizing the Native Americans:  their world before the English arrived was no peaceable kingdom but an uneasy collection of fiefdoms, and their calculated efforts to get the new arrivals to aid them against their enemies mark them as anything but naïve or passive victims.

Above all, Warren successfully shines a light on a relatively neglected period of Williams’s life and provides a striking study of both the possibilities and the limitations of what religious idealism can accomplish in the world.  Williams, he says, “saw more clearly than any other first-generation English settler the dire implications for the Indians of the Puritans’ inclination to mistake their own vision of truth and the good society for God’s.”  He acted “not only for the welfare of the Indians, but for the good of the colony that he helped to found…. But above all, Roger Williams defended the Narragansetts and his fellow Rhode Island settlers against the predations of the Puritan establishment because he felt called to do so by the spirit of Christ.”  In an age like ours, when religion is often wielded as a weapon to denigrate and divide, his is a voice and an example worth revisiting.

With so many books, covering so many angles (e.g. specific battles, new weapons, politics) of the war, can any author provide an account with new insights and fresh information?

With Pandora’s Box, the answer is definitely yes.

In this book, German historian Jorn Leonhard examines the war’s causes and impacts from a 2018 perspective. His review of the war is framed by contemporary issues including gender roles, the “crisis of white masculinity,” the rise of anti-Semitism, racial discrimination and the impact of new communication technologies. 

Leonhard, who serves as Friedrich-Schiller Professor of West European History at the University of Freiburg, has previously written many articles on “multi-ethnic empires,” nationalism and German Unification. He has also edited several collections on Western European history. In this, his first book, he displays an in-depth knowledge of the material drawing on a wide range of sources in English, German, French and Italian. 

Although he is, of course, a German he does not excuse his nation’s political leaders for starting the war nor does he condone German army atrocities in Belgium and France. He is also, at various points, critical of British, French and Russian leaders. 

The United States, of course, entered the war quite late, so the author devotes relatively less coverage to its political and military leadership. He is critical of President Woodrow Wilson, whom he calls a nationalist and racist with “messianic expectations.” According to the author, Wilson was a progressive on domestic affairs but an advocate of military intervention. He expounded the “university validity of democracy” which prompted him to order an invasion of Mexico in 1913. Later, at the Versailles negotiations, he ignored the long-held “principle of national sovereignty” to redraw national borders and remove existing rulers in order to establish new, unstable “democracies.”

Bloodless War Exhibits

The book begins in 1900 with the European powers’ rapid military buildup and continues into the 1920s and the war’s after-effects. Although the book proceeds in a chronological order, the author takes numerous digressions to explore specific topics in-depth, such as “Nearing the Limits, Soldiers between Deviance and Protest, Captivity and Politics.” 

This approach allows Leonhard to explore topics in-depth and bring up a new insights and unusual anecdotes. These include:

— As the war dragged on and cases of shell shock soared, many British politicians and generals grew concerned about a “crisis of white masculinity.” They were afraid that the white race in Great Britain had “degenerated” due to industrialization and urbanization and was no longer capable of enduring the ordeal of mass death and catastrophic injuries caused by sustained battle.

In the last two years of the war, with available manpower dropping, Britain appealed to its Asian and Caribbean colonies for troops (it had long used white soldiers from Canada, Australia and New Zealand). When the soldiers from India and Jamaica arrived, however, the British generals, afraid that the growing war weariness and anti-authoritarianism of the front-line British troops might be “contagious,” they kept the black and Asian troops in segregated battalions well in the rear. 

— With dramatic newspaper accounts of large battles and scores of wounded men showing up in their home communities, the civilian population became very curious about the conditions in this new, mass warfare. The Germans satisfied the public’s curiosity by recreating a war tableau with real-life trenches in Berlin’s Zoo Garden. Britain mounted a similar display in Trafalgar Square. The crowds viewing the exhibits saw an idealized battlefield, with neat, dry trenches, undamaged shelters and small strips of barbed war. The authorities carefully omitted any sign of mud, blood or body parts. 

— Although both the British and German leaders were concerned about desertions and mutinies, surprisingly few men in these armies took part in rebellious activities. The German Army executed only 18 men for desertion and the British Army 269. The French army shot some 650 alleged deserters. In World War II, the German Army executed more than 10,000 men for desertion, while the British Army abolished capital punishment completely. 

—The first mosque in Germany was set-up in a POW camp for captured Muslim soldiers. While the Germans created the worship place in an attempt to comply with the Hague Convention of 1907, they also took many photographs of the Muslim prisoners. These were used in propaganda materials depicting an unchristian, “degenerate” enemy. 

— In the United States, Harvard abandoned an attempt to build a “Museum of Germanic Culture.” The museum was first conceived in 1897 when German art, music and philosophy were held in high regard. Although the building was almost complete by 1917, construction was halted when the U.S. declared war. Finally finished in 1921, it still stands in the middle of the campus, now renamed the Aldolphus Busch Hall. 

War Outcomes

In the last three chapters of the book, titled Outcomes,Memoriesand Burdens, the author examines the impact of the war on the major powers. 

The war fatally weakened many traditional concepts of political order (e.g. monarchy, empire) but failed to put a new order into place. Instead, tensions grew between competing visions of liberal democracy, Fascism and Communism. Although the Versailles conference attempted to establish new nations based on ethnic identity, it created new set of problems as many dissenting minorities were left within the designated boundaries. 

Leonhard cautions against historians who treat World War I as a “chronological block” with a “simple ‘before and after’ ” viewpoint. The causes of the war began in the nineteenth century and the impact of the peace lasted for decades afterward. In fact, no real peace ensued, Leonhard notes, instead new “long-term zones of conflict” emerged in Yugoslavia, the Middle East and Asia. 

While Pandora’s Boxwill be valued by military history buffs, it may be too analytical and too long (1080 pages) for the general reader. Because of its many digressions and critical analyses, it lacks the driving narrative of Tuchman’s The Guns of Augustor John Toland’s No Man’s Land: 1918, the Last Year of the Great War.

Readers seeking a basic overview of the war might try the war histories of either Martin Gilbert or John Keegan. 

The more than one hundred articles in “Russians on Trump”tell us a little about the first question, but they do not shed much new light on the motivations of his policies. One piece, citing poll data, indicates that in October 2016, almost five times as many Russians favored Trump as Hillary Clinton. Another article indicates that at about the same time only the Russians, out of people from 45 different countries, said they preferred Trump over Clinton.

Some of his popularity with Russians was no doubt due to his flattering remarks about Vladimir Putin and his expressed desire to improve U.S.-Russian relations. As one article from theMoscow Times (MT) indicates, however, Russian “state media . . . . were less for Trump, more staunchly against [Hillary] Clinton.” The same could be said for most Russians. Another MT essay criticizes Clinton for her statement of American exceptionalism, “We [the USA] are the indispensable nation.” Still another MT piece notes that “a Trump presidency would shatter the US political system and leave the country distracted and weak—hence Trump’s appeal to the Kremlin.”

As the above quotes indicate, the numerous and varied pieces in “Russians on Trump,” are primarily a reflection of the Russian press. The collection’s editor, an American translator and scholar, has collected them mainly from theCurrent Digest of the Russian Press, a weekly periodical of the same East View Press that has published the book being reviewed here.

In his Foreword, Russian-specialist Mark Galeotti points out that Russia is not “a totalitarian country in which the media all speak with a single voice, but nor is it wholly free.” Furthermore, “even as we seem to slip deeper into Cold War 2.0,” Russians and Westerners alike are having trouble grasping and agreeing “on what Donald Trump really is.” 

As with U.S. media, there are both favorable and unfavorable pieces about Trump. One useful article, “White House and Television: Who Invented Donald Trump?” reminds us of how pivotal the support of Fox News was for Trump’s success in the USA. Although the Russian articles’ terminology is more varied than in Soviet days, Marxist terms occasionally appear. We can read here of the U. S. “ruling class,” or of a “superstructure that determines US domestic and foreign policy,” or of our government “serving the needs of the global capitalists.”

Although the editor provides Endnotes and a Timeline (from June 16, 2015 to October 30, 2017), readers receive little information about the authors of the various articles. For example, Vladimir Frolov wrote 13 of the collection’s pieces (the most of any contributor), but we are not told that he was once a press attaché to the U. S. Russian Embassy, and in 2001 the FBI claimed he was a “Russian spy.”

The editor does, however, provide a useful explanation of Trump’s mistaken claim that Putin called him a “genius.” The Russian word that Putin used was “yarky.” It can be translated as “brilliant,” “striking,” or “colorful,” but it “carries no connotation of intelligence.”

Although the collection contains eleven short pieces that predate Trump’s 2015-16 presidential campaign and a six-piece Epilogue, all the remaining selections (divided into four parts) deal with the campaign and the first two hundred days of Trump’s presidency. As with so much writing about political campaigning, many of the articles, often touching on what might be, no longer seem relevant. Among those that could still be of interest—partly due to the ongoing Mueller investigation regarding the connection of Trump and/or his campaign to the Russians—are those dealing with Trumpian Russian contacts and Trump’s foreign policy. Part Three is entitled “The Story of Trump’s ‘Russia Ties.’ ” Part Four deals with his foreign policy. 

About the Russian connections, there is little new here except the varied Russian reactions to them, which are less critical than are Trump’s U. S. opponents’ responses. Regarding Trump’s foreign policy, there are multiple pieces on each of the following: Europe and NATO, Terrorism and the Middle East, Nuclear Policy and North Korea, and Russian-American relations. 

The editor acknowledges that most Russian “journalists and political analysts” have found Trump’s foreign policy to be “inconsistent and unpredictable,” but, unlike many U. S. commentators, “they do not impugn his character, honesty, or intelligence.” 

Overall, the foreign policy analysis recognizes that Trump is constrained by various institutional and other restrictions, including Congress, and that his policy options are limited. But few of the commenters seem to realize, as some of the U. S. press does, that Trump’s foreign policies, like his domestic policies, are driven primarily by his narcissism (see, e.g., here).

One U. S. analyst who recognized both Trump’s motivation and constraints in early 2018 was historian Andrew Bacevich, who wrote:“Trump seemed to think that, having won the presidency, he would be in a position to sort of serve as planetary dictator, that he would issue directives and the rest of the world would fall into line . . . . [but] external circumstances have constrained Trump, and on balance I think that’s a good thing.”

Trump’s narcissism does not exclude certain ideas (or perhaps “grievances” is a better word) from affecting his foreign-policy. In a previous essay, I mentioned that Bacevich and other “ethical realists” had indicated that the biggest failing of U.S. foreign policy was “its arrogance, its lack of humility.” Trump now magnifies that arrogance by projecting his own personal narcissism onto the national and international stages. Just as he often thinks that he is personally treated unfairly, so too he believes the USA has often been mistreated by other nations, has gotten a “raw deal.”

Typical were his recent comments about pulling out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which the Obama administration and other foreign governments signed with Iran. “The fact is this was a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made. It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.” 

Occasionally, Russian commenters display laudable acuity regarding our president. For example, “Trump loves being praised. . . . has only a passing knowledge of the facts, but loves to gab and makes promises.” “He is extremely unpredictable.” In an insightful piece on Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, he is quoted as saying the accord was “unfair” to the USA, and that he assumes that “the world is ready to take advantage of it.” 

One of the most perceptive Russian observers of U. S.-Russian relations, Fyodor Lukyanov, in an article on Trump’s nuclear policy, writes that Trump seems to be harkening “back to the period that to him defines America’s golden age, the 1950s, when it wielded global might and influence, but without excessive commitments—and, most importantly, without political correctness. . . . As always, Trump is being grotesque . . . . Statements like Trump’s are risky, because they are not backed by any thought-out idea on how to change the system, but are driven by a desire to get rid of any restrictions in order to negotiate with one’s hands untied.” 

The books “Epilogue” section concentrates mainly on the declining hopes for any improved U. S.-Russian relations. The main reasons given for the decline are the charges leveled against the Russians for “meddling” in the 2016 presidential election and subsequently, the passage, in the summer of 2017, of The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.

Since “Russians on Trump” was completed, important changes have occurred. Although Trump once stated that he himself is his own chief foreign policy adviser—in 2016 he responded to a question about whom he consults on foreign policy by saying, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain—the recent replacements of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster by Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, respectively, bring into Trump’s inner circle two more hawkish individuals. Both individuals seem more likely than their predecessors to provide Trump with the flattering agreeableness he likes to be surrounded by. In addition, Bolton has been especially critical of Putin. In 2014, he toldFox News that Putin “wants to re-establish Russian hegemony within the space of the former Soviet Union. Ukraine is the biggest prize, that’s what he’s after. The occupation of the Crimea is a step in that direction.”

In addition, U.S.-Chinese trade talks, the U.S pulling out of the “Iran deal” (JCPOA), and the changing relations between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and their upcoming meeting in Singapore next month, all may have major effects on Trump’s foreign policy. What happens in regard to the Mueller investigation, which continues to examine what Trump knew about Russia's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign, could also prove crucial.

What seems unlikely, however, even given Trump’s unpredictable behavior, is that U.S.-Soviet relations will greatly improve. A new book, Trump/Russia: A Definitive History, and further Mueller investigation revelations are likely to fuel more anti-Russian sentiments. A recent U. S. analysis of U. S.-Russian relations noted the present “absence of nuance on the Russia question . . . the embrace of Russia as America’s new-old supervillain.” One of the articles in the Epilogue

of Russians on Trump fears that a new generation of experts on both sides of the U. S.-Russian divide may become more confrontational. 

The final article in this collection (written in November 2017) faults both the USA and Russia for lacking a “foreign policy strategy.” One might argue that Trump has one—make America (and himself) appear great—and Putin’s is to restore Russia’s greatness, but neither is a well-thought-out strategic vision. More than ever the USA needs a new foreign policy, one based neither on the narcissistic whims of our current president nor on a knee-jerk Russophobia, but on an ethical realism that soberly assesses Russia and the rest of the world and acts for both our own good and that of humanity as a whole.

New York Tribune reporter James Redpath, described the procession as “a celebration of their deliverance from bondage … a jubilee of freedom.” One of the most striking scenes, Redpath noted was large mule-drawn cart with a sign that said “Negroes for Sale.” Behind the auction cart marched a mock slave “coffle,” sixty men tied together by a rope. A black man playing the role of auctioneer cried out to the crowds, “How much am I offered for this good cook? Who will bid?”

Although most of the crowd laughed and jeered at the sham auction scene, Redpath observed some older women who “burst into tears as they saw this tableau, and forgetting that it was a mimic scene, shouted wildly, ‘Give me back my children! Give me back my children.”

This parade is just one of dozens of events depicted in Denmark Vesey’s Garden, Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, a new book by authors Blaine Roberts and Ethan Kytle. Both authors are history professors at California State University, Fresno and have written previously about the South. Kytle is the author ofRomantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era. Roberts’s previous book is Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South.

As the subtitle of their book indicates, this book is about slavery and memory. By focusing on Charleston, the “cradle of the confederacy,” the authors provide the reader with a year-by-year account of the rise of Jim Crow and the local effort to “whitewash” the cruel tragedy of black slavery. While a valuable addition to scholars of Southern history, the general reader will find it very interesting because of the many personal stories, black and white, the book contains.

The authors have done a good job of including black voices, which are often missing from history books describing the nineteenth century. They have tapped local archives with letters from black citizens, church sermons and the archives of the interviews of former slaves conducted by the federal Works Progress Administration.

Kytle and Roberts chronicle the fifty-year long transition, from the brief period of celebration enjoyed by the emancipated slaves, through the brief, failed attempt at Reconstruction to the imposition of Jim Crow laws in the late 1800s. They draw on a variety of sources, including newspaper reports, letters and documents from local archives and the trove of interviews of former slaves conducted by the writers in the Federal Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. 

By focusing on the people of Charleston, they construct a fascinating narrative of a how the South resisted the Republican Party’s policy of Reconstruction. In a way, the book reminded me of Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. By focusing on a small community and individual stories we gain insight into a complex, continent-wide catastrophe that is otherwise hard to grasp. 

The authors say they chose Charleston because “it was the capital of American slavery…. If Philadelphia and Boston serve as the clearest windows into our nation’s colonial and Revolutionary-era history, Charleston is the best portal to the antebellum South.” They note that “nearly half the slaves transported for sale in this country first set foot on North American soil in Charleston or on neighboring Sea Islands.” 

As it turned out, the huge parade by blacks in 1865 was the high water mark of the post-Civil War freedom enjoyed by the local emancipated community. Within a decade, the Union Army troops had left and the white residents and ex-confederate soldiers had begun to reassert their authority. Voting rights for blacks were restricted and Jim Crow laws mandating segregated, second-class public facilities took effect.

In Charleston, dozens of plaques, memorials and statues honoring the Confederacy appeared, while all traces of slavery were conveniently “whitewashed” (e.g. ignored or depicted in benign terms). Slave auction houses were converted into stores, rickety slave cabins dismantled and black celebrations suppressed. 

While some of the Confederate statues have been removed or augmented with modern historical explanations, a forty-foot tall monument to John C. Calhoun still towers over the city. Calhoun, a white supremacist who served as a congressman, U.S. Senator and Vice President (under Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson) died in 1850. He had threatened secession as early as 1830 and he vilified Northern abolitionists, who he accused of striking “directly and fatally not only at our prosperity, but our existence as a people.”

After his death in 1850, local leaders placed a giant marble block over his tomb in a local church cemetery. The marble monument was chipped and defaced in the years after 1865. In 1884, the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association commissioned a large monument, one tall enough to be out of reach of vandals. It remains in place today, a bronze statue of the Senator atop a 40-foot lump of granite, watching over the city. 

One of the interesting aspects brought out in the book is the how the rhetoric of “Lost Cause” advocates reflected a conflicted, hypocritical position on slavery. 

Kytle and Roberts point out that “Lost Causers deployed two distinct arguments. Some attempted to absolve the South of responsibility for slavery. Others mounted a full-throated defense of the institution as a civilizing institution.” 

In supporting the first argument, defenders of the Confederate memorialists “insisted that slavery was a burden that had been imposed on the South by outsiders.” For example, Edward McCrady, a prominent Charleston attorney and leader of a local Confederate war veterans association defended slavery at a veterans’ gathering in 1882. “We of this generation had no part in the establishment of slavery in this country,” he asserted. 

Instead, McCrady “pointed his finger” at England and the North, whose merchants dominated the slave trade. He said they had transported thousands of slaves to Charleston and then cast them off to be cared for by South Carolinians. Thus, McCrady’s speech assured the veterans that “slavery was a burden that had been imposed on the South by outsiders.”

The second part of the Lost Cause argument was that slavery had been a humane, civilizing institution. The blacks enslaved on the South’s plantations were better off than their brothers and sisters left in Africa.

In March 1861, At the very beginning of the Civil War, Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederate government, declared in his famous “Cornerstone Speech” that slavery was the natural condition of blacks. The new secessionist government was founded on “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."

A decade later, as Jim Crow laws and continual physical and psychological violence impeded black progress, Lost Cause defenders suggested that emancipation had been a mistake. The authors note this enabled them to “not only venerate the past but also to critique the present.” 

They cite an article by J. Colton Lyons, a Citadel professor, who wrote at the beginning of the 20th century that “as a rule, those negroes who are old enough to have experience … do not hesitate to declare that the state of bondage was far happier” than the restricted “freedom” they now lived under. 

Today, Charleston, with its many beautiful antebellum homes and historic Fort Sumter is the region’s major tourist attraction. A small city of just 100,000 residents, it now attracts some five million visitors a year. Although for much of the twentieth century, the region’s history of slavery was whitewashed, it is now cautiously acknowledged. A dozen monuments, plaques and a new museum accurately depict the brutality of slavery. Several local guide companies offer “history of slavery” tours, complete with journeys to restored slave quarters on local plantations. 

Denmark Vesey’s Garden, the memorial named in the book’s title, is located in a quiet park on the northern part of the city. Vesey, a symbol of antebellum black resistance, was the leader of a planned slave revolt in 1822. Betrayed by an informer, Vesey was captured, tortured and hanged, along with 30 additional blacks accused of conspiracy. The revolt never happened and no white person was injured.

His statue and garden, created in 2014, was the result of a twenty-five-year effort to create a memorial for him. Local historian Bernard Powers stated “the monument changes the landscape by now offering a counterpoint to those other monuments to white supremacy that populate Charleston’s streets.”

The debate over Confederate monuments continues almost daily in many cities and states. Denmark Vesey’s Garden and its detailed account of the struggles in Charleston provides a valuable new perspective on why certain groups in the South cling to a “whitewashed” version of history when most Americans are seeking to learn more about slavery and its deep impact on American life. 

Q & A with the Authors

James Thornton Harris: Your book focuses on the issue of “whitewashing” the history of slavery in the City of Charleston, S.C. One place we see this sort of misrepresentation of the past is with Confederate monuments, most of which were erected a century ago. Why do you think this national conversation about Confederate monuments is occurring now? 

Ethan J. Kytle: This conversation really kicked off three years ago, in response to the tragic murder of nine black parishioners in Charleston by white supremacist Dylann Roof. Roof’s support for slavery and the Confederacy that waged war to protect it, as well as his affinity for the Confederate flag, forced many people across the country to consider, perhaps for the first time, whether it was acceptable that Confederate and other proslavery symbols still enjoy a prominent place in American culture. 

But as we explore in our book, this conversation is far from new. In Charleston, black residents have protested Confederate and white supremacist memorials for more than a century. Most of their ire has been directed at two towering monuments to South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, a great defender of slavery who famously insisted that the institution was “a positive good.” Black Charlestonians repeatedly mocked and vandalized those two monuments, from the late 1800s, when they were installed in a prominent spot in the center of the city, through World War II.

So, while the scope of the debate over Confederate monuments has changed considerably over the last few years, it draws on long-standing arguments against memorials that whitewash our enslaved past.

James Thornton Harris: Your book ends on a generally upbeat note. Charleston seems to have reached an accommodation between the demands for black history and preservation of Confederate monuments. What lessons, if any, can other cities learn from the Charleston experience? 

Blain Roberts:In recent years, Charleston has done a much better job of acknowledging its enslaved and black past by erecting new historical markers and statues and developing new black history tours. But Charleston teaches us that change does not come easily or quickly. In 2014, activists erected a monument to Denmark Vesey, who plotted a failed 1822 slave insurrection. Yet it took them almost twenty years to do so. The opposition to their project was powerful.

While I’m generally hopeful that Charleston and other cities will continue to make their commemorative landscapes reflect a more accurate and diverse history, it’s been dismaying to see so many state legislatures pass laws making it next to impossible to remove or even contextualize problematic memorials. And in Charleston, an effort to contextualize the monument of John C. Calhoun has stalled because of disagreements about the language. There is reason to worry that the final text may dilute the goal of the project—which is to highlight Calhoun’s pro-slavery political career. 

James Thornton Harris: At one point in your book, you mention the general lack of awareness about slavery and the Civil War among many tourists visiting Charleston. Is this a result of our current educational system? Do you have any recommendations for K-12 educators to improve knowledge of slavery and its role in American history?

Blain Roberts:The recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s, “Teaching Hard History,” provides ample evidence of our failures in adequately teaching slavery in K-12 classrooms, as do the regular news stories on ill-conceived classroom assignments (“list four reasons Africans made good slaves,” for example).    

Right here in the Central Valley of California, a middle school in Madera recently wrapped up its unit on Civil War history by hosting a Civil War Ball. The ball was framed as a celebration of the war’s end. Male students wore Union and Confederate uniforms; female students wore hoop skirts.  In one sense, it was a classic, Gone with the Wind kind-of-affair.  In another, it was reconciliationist and completely ahistorical—apparently no one thought it was odd that students dressed as both Union and Confederate soldiers were dancing the night away at a ball to mark the Confederacy’s defeat. And, of course, such an event inevitably papers over slavery as cause of the war and ignores the perspective of the enslaved. An African American parent complained about the ball and she got nowhere. We are now in touch with her and hope to work together to help the principal and teachers understand why a Civil War ball perpetuates bad history.  

So, my advice is actually geared toward history professors: collaborating with K-12 teachers is one of the most important things we can do as historians.  Teachers want good information. We need to offer our knowledge and expertise whenever and however we can.

James Thornton Harris: You are currently teaching at a large state university. When you discuss slavery in American history in the classroom, what is the reaction of your students? Are they interested? Do they see it as relevant to 21st century American problems?

Ethan J. Kytle:Most of my students are eager to explore the history of slavery, which, as a nineteenth-century American historian, I touch on in every class I teach at Fresno State. Some of them tell me that they have been exposed to the topic quite a bit in high school. In general, though, students in my classes say that they learned very little about slavery, or at least very little that was accurate, before they got to college. They are often shocked, for instance, when confronted with the brutal realities of slavery or the extent to which the institution shaped the growth and prosperity of the United States. 

Many students are also surprised to learn that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. I’ve lost count of the number of times that students—almost all of whom were educated here in California’s Central Valley—have told me that their high school history teachers echoed the Lost Cause canard that the Civil War was fought over as states’ rights or high tariffs. As a result, I devote the first week of my seminar on the Civil War to the memory of the conflict. We consider the origins of the Lost Cause and how it continues to distort the way that the Civil War is taught—and not just in the South. 

The work spans the millennia between Abraham’s covenant with God right through the fiery twentieth century and into the modern, post-Oslo Accords era. In this compilation, God is an acknowledged factor as much as turning-point wars, crumbling international agreements, and fractious diplomacy. On an early page, Rabbi Eliach writes, “The Israelites’ relationship to Hashem was based on a covenant binding God and Israel through a series of obligations.” God is written about as a real and all permeating force, an ipso facto that functions as the alpha and omega of the story—dwelling above all events.

The Divine is a part of the Israel equation that many modern commentators do not emphasize. But Rabbi Eliach magnifies the role of the Lord, intertwined with those of skillful diplomats and brave warriors, from the perspective of a believer, as one who walks in the aura of understanding that too many analysts in the secular world circumvent.

Many, regardless of religious rigor—myself included—assisted Rabbi Eliach in the pursuit of his literary quest—admittedly in a world and an era where such books may not be welcome.

For example, the estate and publishers of the late, great historian Martin Gilbert have allowed Rabbi Eliach to republish many of Gilbert’s treasured and classic maps in this volume. Alan Dershowitz, who famously argued for the Jewish State in The Case for Israel, endorsed Rabbi Eliach’s book with a back cover blurb: “The case for Israel must be made anew in every generation and to every audience,” wrote Dershowitz, adding, “Rabbi Eliach has been making the case to generations of high school students. Now he brings his insights and experience to a general public that is desperately in need of history and current realities.” 

Prize-winning journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, whose works, such as We Were Like Dreamers, set forth the religious, political, and cultural perspective of Israel also blurbed the book: “With passion, clarity, eloquence and most of all love,” he wrote, “Yotav Eliach lays out the story of Zionism and the case for Israel. At a time when that story is under growing and systematic attack, Rabbi Eliach has given the Jewish people an indispensable gift.”

Four of Long Island’s most distinguished rabbis agreed to assemble at Rambam Mesivta on May 7 for the book launch. They are Rabbi Heshie Billet and Rabbi Shalom Axelrod of Young Israel of Woodmere, Rabbi Kenneth Hain of Congregation Beth Sholom, and Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum of Young Israel of Lawrence Cedarhurst. The revered Rabbi Elie Abadie, a leader of the Sephardic Jewish community, opened up his Manhattan East Synagogue for the book’s Manhattan launch. StandWithUs added its name to the endeavor and gave logistical support for his book launches.

What began on a typewriter in the 1980s was finally completed on a computer only earlier this year. In an unusual publishing move, the book has been released simultaneously in 17 countries. 

At a time when Jewish and Israeli history is being battered by revisionist theories and alternate narratives amplified by hate groups, Judaism, Zionism and the Land of Israel cements the centuries together in one binding that will be a compelling fundamental resource for Jews, Christians and anyone seeking a factual platform to gather atop, from where they can peer far back and far forward.

“The Graduate” is Beverly Gray’s nominee for “Touchstone of a Generation,” by which she means her own g-g-g-generation.  Gray, a Ph.D. in American literature, has been a story editor, reporter, and author of books on subjects including Roger Corman and Ron Howard.  But it is her ability to stay in the mindset of her early adulthood that is both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest liability. It is a strength because the movie has been revisited over and over again, most recently in this 50th anniversary year, when virtually every political, social, and cultural event of that tumultuous year seems to be undergoing relentless reexamination.  As usual with cultural criticism, “reexamination” generally means “revision,” and now, in this era of #metoo, pointed questions come thick and fast:  Is Mrs. Robinson the real hero or the most admirable character in the movie?  Is Elaine too passive to be admirable or even realistic?  Is Ben a stalker?  

It is entirely possible to answer “No” to all these questions, as Gray does, when she addresses them at all, but there are plenty of writers out there who want to say at least a qualified “Yes.”  For a sample, check out The Atlantic’s “The Graduate 50 Years After Its Oscar Win,” the most entertaining element of which may be its reprise of critic Roger Ebert’s 180-degree turn on the movie, 30 years after the fact.

How well the movie stands up over the years and decades is a question well worth considering.  Gray notes, in the last part of her book, that the movie’s influence has echoed through popular culture ever since, from “The Simpsons” to “Wayne’s World” and beyond.  But for historians, trying to see the past as it looked through the eyes of the people living the experience, it is important to try to understand how and why the movie made such an impact at the time.  

Gray is better at the “how” than at the “why.”  The book’s first part, “Making the Movie,” shows, in case there was doubt, that Mike Nichols had an uncanny ability to make the right decisions about casting, scripting, and on-set directing.  For instance, when casting the role of Ben, he went through a long list of candidates (Robert Redford?  Charles Grodin??) before settling on little-known Dustin Hoffman.  (Hoffman thought he was wrong for the role:  Ben, he told Nichols, isn’t Jewish.  Nichols replied, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.”)  He chose Katharine Ross to play Elaine partly because she was the only auditioner to sound angry when confronting Ben and demanding, “How could you rape my mother?”  (First exhibit, of several available, showing that Elaine was hardly passive.)

Nichols also had the wisdom to turn down virtually every suggestion from Charles Webb, author of the book on which The Graduate was based, to improve the script and plot.  Imagine, for example, Ben arriving breathlessly at the locker room in search of Elaine’s betrothed, only to be diverted into a comic scene involving endlessly opening and slamming doors, intended to be reminiscent of the Marx Brothers.  And Nichols essentially discarded Calder Willingham’s script, going with a complete rewrite by Buck Henry (although contractual obligations dictated that Willingham also receive on-screen credit).  Finally, it was Nichols who made the final decision to have Ben arrive at the church AFTER the wedding ceremony had been completed, which made the ending more shocking to mainstream, mid-‘60s sensibilities.

The book’s second section devotes about 70 pages to a close reading of perhaps every scene in the movie. For readers already familiar with the movie, this may be a bit much, but even they might be reminded of details they’ve missed.  Younger audiences (including many of my students) will benefit from Gray’s comprehensive take on how editing, imagery and sound (“Hello, darkness, my old friend”) combined to depict Ben’s isolation so powerfully.

When it comes to explaining WHY the movie resonated so long and deeply at the time, Gray is much less successful.  For one thing, she yields far too often to what my tough-minded high school journalism teacher, Martha Lindey, deplored back in the ‘60s as “Us Girls Journalism”: operating on the assumption that one is writing for one’s intimates, with stylistic results that are cloying and all-too-cozy.  There are all too many phrasings like “thousands of young people like me,” “we young moviegoers,” and “youthful fans like me”—and those three are all on the same page.  Fifty years should be enough time to acquire a little distance from your younger self—and to realize that you shouldn’t be quite so eager to take on the role of spokesperson for a generation. 

One major paradox on which Gray does spend some time:  arguably the most iconic movie of the ‘60s is set in a time before what we now think of as “The Sixties” had occurred.  Ben, his family, and contemporaries are groomed and dressed for the early ‘60s (Webb’s novel was published in 1963).  There is no mention of the draft, Vietnam, or civil rights (with the possible, minor exception of when Ben’s hostile landlord demands to know if Ben is one of “those agitators”).  The counterculture hasn’t arrived; alcohol (consumed by the adults) is the only drug on the scene.  Student radicalism seems nonexistent.  The Berkeley campus is downright serene (possibly because the campus scenes were shot at Southern Cal).  

Still, despite the absence of late ‘60s visuals, “The Graduate” has endured far longer than the movies that followed on its heels that tried to cash in on the ambience, including “Getting Straight” (1970), a mishmash of what were already clichés, and “The Strawberry Statement” (1970).  At least some of my college students have seen “The Graduate”; nobody in years has admitted to watching the other two.  How does one explain the fact that a movie without the “right” period look apparently had just the “right” feel?

Partly, I think, it’s because a movie that might have been received as simply a lively, romantic satire on middle class mores and materialism found an unexpected gear at the very end: the camera had kept rolling while Ben and Elaine sagged, exhilarated and exhausted, into the back seat of the bus, and began to absorb the uncertainties to which they had just committed themselves.  But the main reason, I believe, is Dustin Hoffman’s quirky, unorthodox portrayal of Ben, who for most of the movie seems like he’s been hit by a stun gun, almost in shock, often staring blankly into the middle distance, speaking in a monotone (punctuated occasionally by a muffled squeak—which Hoffman had done only once.  In last cuts, Nichols added a few copies.)  As has been pointed out, it’s almost impossible to imagine Ben having been the accomplished student and athlete that he’s described and congratulated as being. Ben is a blank slate, on to which a generation of young men could project whatever worries and concerns they chose.      

Of course, in the end Ben is revived and (perhaps) redeemed by love, in the tradition of countless romantic comedies.  (Elaine is an active influence in this, coming to him and insisting that he “have a plan.”  Again: far from passive.)  But the enduring image of Ben is the baffled, emotionally anesthetized young man who answers his father’s query about what “those four years of college” had been for with “Ya got me.”  Having seen the movie more than once back then, I can confirm that that line always got a rise out of the audience.  It was the perfect line for a time riddled by middle class college student angst, when the buzz words were “identity crisis,” “alienation,” and, of course, “generation gap”: cultural and psychological concerns, primarily, not political or economic ones.  They had grown straight out of ‘50s concerns, where the buzz words had been “conformity” and “materialism,” and worried middle class youth worried about the price of success, and whether it was worth the price to be an “organization man” in a “gray flannel suit.”  And, despite changes in material and verbal styles, they remain relevant today.

Ultimately, “The Graduate” is still well worth watching, even by people without historical interest in it (do such people frequent HNN?), because, as Gray demonstrates, it is an extraordinarily well-made movie.  Plot, character, setting, dialogue, pacing, even the unlikely-but-effective use of Simon and Garfunkel’s folk rock, are tightly knit and mutually reinforcing. The Academy got at least its Oscar for Best Director right.  Here’s to you, Mr. Nichols.

Fels challenges the scholarly findings of four books that are considered to be among the most prestigious academic studies available on the events in Salem: Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft(1974), John Putnam Demos’s Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England(1982), Carol F. Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England(1987), and Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692(2002). This is not to suggest that Fels fails to discuss other scholarly investigations of Salem as Switching Sidesdemonstrates considerable familiarity with both primary and secondary sources on the topic and includes extensive explanatory endnotes occupying approximately half of the book. Nevertheless, Fels focuses upon the four academic texts mentioned above as he considers them to be the most influential post-1960s studies of Salem, and they provide the inspiration for his allegation that academic historians, influenced by the political events of the 1960s, abandoned the victims of the witch hunts in favor of the accusers.

While criticizing such esteemed scholars as Boyer, Nissenbaum, Demos, Karlsen, and Norton, Fels lauds Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials(1949) for endorsing universal principles of the post-World War II liberal consensus that attempted to understand Salem within the historical context of how mass hysteria and fear may drive a community to abandon rational judgment and engage in the scapegoating of innocent victims. Fels argues that postwar liberalism was influenced by the examples of the Soviet and Nazi terrors of the 1930s, but he also acknowledges that the extreme anti-communism of the 1950s found in McCarthyism also contained similar dangerous populist elements. He laments that liberalism was abandoned in the 1960s for radicalism by a younger generation of scholars influenced by the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, feminism, counterculture, and social unrest of the era. The new generation of scholars, Fels argues. emphasized conflict over consensus and universal humanistic values.

Thus, Fels insists that Boyer and Nissenbaum overstated the economic conflict in the Salem community and identified with the accusers who represented a less affluent segment of the population who resented the growing capitalist economy benefitting more prosperous elements of the community. Fels is somewhat less critical of Demos for his emphasis upon psychological and anthropological explanations, but he concludes that in a more widespread investigation of witchcraft accusations throughout New England, Demos distracted attention from the violence perpetrated upon innocent victims in Salem. Karlsen is credited by Fels with focusing upon women who were overrepresented among the accused, but he chastises Karlsen for grounding her criticism of the Puritan patriarchy in a general reading of Christianity rather concentrating upon Puritanism. In fact, one of Fels’s central complaints is that the post-1960s scholars neglected to pay sufficient attention to the extreme religious views of the Puritans as an explanation for social unrest and the scapegoating of the witchcraft trials. 

Fels devotes most of his argument—two full chapters—to the scholarship of Mary Beth Norton, who currently serves as president of the American Historical Association. Fels concedes that Norton may be on target with her thesis that the violence of the warfare with the Wabanaki people on the New England frontier made a major contribution to the social unrest and fear perpetuating the hysteria of the witchcraft allegations. However, he parts company with Norton over the role of the colonial elite in the witchcraft outbreaks. Fels accuses Norton of taking sides with the accusers as a populist manifestation of class conflict against the governing and commercial elements who exploited and failed to adequately protect the common people of the frontier.

While acknowledging their work in the archives and primary sources Fels, nevertheless, accuses Norton and her scholarly colleagues of being biased and projecting their political prejudices into their scholarship. Labeling these scholars as members of the New Left, Fels writes: “These works mostly ignore the victims of the witch hunt, occasionally even expressing hostility toward them, and either write sympathetically about the accusers or else shift the reader’s attention away from the 1692 panic itself. In these accounts the role of courageous individuals standing up to mass prejudice moves out of view. Instead, social conflict among groups takes center stage, even to the point of seeming to justify the witch hunt” (2). This almost conspiratorial perspective on Salem scholarship seems to suggest that the work of an entire generation of historians is suspect. Reflecting upon what he perceives as the New Left period in American historiography, Fels concludes: “One hopes this era will be superseded by a period in which new works will rise to dominance, influenced again by the liberal universalist values that fell out of favor during the 1960s-inspired radicalism” (134).

Fels condemns a generation of scholars for introducing concepts of race, gender, and class while concentrating upon marginalized groups and attempting to tell history from the bottom up. He fails to consider how this broader perspective has increased our appreciation for the complexity of the past as well as contemporary events. Historically marginalized groups such as the LGBTQ community have been able to reclaim their history and place within the American story. And this search for a more inclusive past with multiple perspectives does not mean that historians have switched sides. The tragic execution of innocent victims in Salem is an important narrative that his been incorporated into American culture, but historians Boyer, Nissenbaum, Demos, Karlsen, and Norton have broadened our understanding of the witchcraft trials by asking different and more complex questions. Seeking to comprehend the motivation of those who made the witchcraft accusations does not mean that scholars have abandoned the victims. Rather, these historians have succeeded in producing a multi-faceted portrait of events that enhances our appreciation for the complexity of historical causation. In fact, Karlsen certainly expresses admiration for the “uppity” women of Puritan society who defied gender norms and became the targets of witchcraft accusations for their nonconformity. Expanding one’s perspective and understanding by taking a walk in someone else’s shoes does not necessarily constitute switching sides.

The detailed critique of Salem scholarship provided by Fels certainly raises some interesting questions regarding the evaluation of historical evidence on the witchcraft trials. His argument that scholars should pay more attention to the religious ideas of Puritanism also appears to have merit. Debates regarding sources and interpretation enhance our appreciation for the complexity of the past. However, dismissing an entire generation of historians for their alleged radicalism seems a simplistic exercise. 

In his evaluation of evidence regarding the witchcraft trials Fels is a stickler for detail; however, when it comes to evaluating the motivation of historians from the 1960s and 1970s he is quick to paint with a broad brush, assuming but offering little in the way of actual evidence, that scholars such as Boyer, Nissenbaum, Demos, Karlsen, and Norton were politically biased in their research and writing. In the eyes of Fels, the consideration of race, gender, and class connotes radical politics while liberalism is equated with universal humanitarian values above politics. It is a little like those who criticize kneeling football players for injecting politics into sports, while giant flags, marching soldiers, and military jets flying above the stadium are all apolitical. As the tweets of Donald Trump suggest, the politics of witch hunting is indeed complicated and conflicted. 

 ]]> Tue, 14 Aug 2018 10:36:21 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168832 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168832 0 Over the course of his presidency, Jewish Americans overwhelmingly supported Franklin Roosevelt, voting for him with wide majorities of over 80% in each of his four elections. They turned to him, as did most Americans, to pull the country out of the Great Depression, to keep America safe, and after December 1941, to fight the war against Germany and Japan. They also supported Roosevelt, in part, because he was the only major Presidential candidate who was friendly with prominent American Jews and who (at least occasionally) responded to the concerns of those worried about the rising threat of Nazism in Germany. After the start of the war and with the rise of atrocity stories, many looked to him to stop the murder of Europe’s Jews. Support for Roosevelt stayed strong as most Jews believed that stopping Hitler was the key to ending the slaughter. In spite of regular entreaties to the administration to do somethingto save Jewish lives or to declare publicly that that mass murderers would face severe consequences after the war, Jewish American support for the President never wavered while he was alive.

Admiration for Roosevelt began to shift only in the late 1960s and 1970s, as new historical works appeared that challenged the view of the President—and by extension, the United States—as defenders of Jews during the war. Books by historians such as David Wyman, (who passed away in March of this year), Monty Noam Penkower, and Arthur Morse pressed the case that as much as American Jews may have loved their President, his administration not only left European Jews to their fate, but went even so far in its disregard for Jewish suffering as to have been in part responsible for the Nazi genocide. Some of these early works, most notably Wyman’s Paper Walls, correctly pointed to the US immigration laws that Congress passed in the early 1920s in order to maintain white racial supremacy as the primary obstacles that prevented German Jews in the 1930s from finding shelter in the United States. Following the Depression, the new quotas that were put in place were heavily policed by employees of the State Department who, acting out of isolationist motivations, kept immigration quotas unfilled and cut the number of new migrants to levels far below (often to just 10%) even what the new restrictive legislation would allow. These practices began under President Hoover and were maintained by Roosevelt for much of his presidency.

This narrative, of an indifferent or complicit America, found receptive audiences across the ideological spectrum. Some on the political left were attracted to this history on account of its implied attack on the Democratic party, whose stance as a defender of freedom and liberty was severely compromised by Johnson’s war in Vietnam and the failures of the Great Society program, which had been modeled on Roosevelt’s New Deal. Others found in this narrative a way to bolster US support for the state of Israel, which wasn’t as unwavering as it would become in subsequent decades. These histories produced a boogey man in the figure of Breckinridge Long, the State Department official in the late 1930s who was primarily responsible for keeping the number of refugees entering the United States at a minimum. They also gave us a new symbol of Jewish suffering in the doomed voyage of the M.S. St. Louis. (In fact, between 1938 and the US entry into the war, more than 100,000 European Jews found sanctuary in the US, despite the fate of the passengers aboard the St. Louis.) By the mid-1980s, this version of history held sway, largely in part because of Wyman’s 1984 book, The Abandonment of the Jews: American and the Holocaust 1941-1945, which ruled as the standard work in the field for decades. It told a tale of America’s refusal to come to the aid of European Jews, even in light of overwhelming evidence of wholesale mass murder and many opportunities to intervene, including the ransoming of Hungarian Jewry and the bombing of Auschwitz. Wyman’s view became the new orthodoxy and helped to build support for and to shape the permanent exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. Decades later, this view of the American response still holds sway in popular Jewish American opinion. Critics of President Trump’s 2017 attempt to establish a “Muslim Ban,” for example, evoked the story of the St. Louisas a reminder of “Never Again.” 

Scholars who suggest that the United States’ response was not so one sided have faced attacks on their integrity and professionalism from steadfast defenders. In 2015, for example, Rafael Medoff, head of “The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies” along with Bar-Ilan historian Bat-Ami Zucker published a 34-page pamphlet attacking the scholars Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, who had in 2013 published FDR and the Jews, an award-winning study that offers a nuanced view of Roosevelt and the US response to Nazism. More recently, Medoff has publicly criticizedState Department historian Melissa Jane Taylor for demonstrating that the State Department’s role in the refugee crisis was more complicated than Wyman suggested, and that some US consulate officials sought to help Jews seeking to escape Nazi Europe.

A new book by Rebecca Erbelding, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts To Save The Jews of Europe(Doubleday, 2018), poses the most significant challenge to this orthodoxy yet. A historian, curator, and archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Erbelding spent ten years scouring through more than 43,000 sources to write a history of the War Refugee Board(WRB), an executive agency authorized by President Roosevelt in January 1944 to save European Jews from destruction. Typically, discussions of the WRB are dismissed as “too little, and too late” as if the WRB activities were a half-hearted attempt by Roosevelt to save face in light of ever-increasing atrocity reports stemming from Europe. As Erbelding convincingly demonstrates, however, the WRB is more accurately understood as a highly admirable and often successful effort by a small coterie of (mostly) Treasury Department officials who were willing to go to extremes in order to save as many lives as they possibly could. 

The WRB was established by Presidential Executive Order in January 1944. Such an agency could likely have not been created much sooner. Despite of a regular stream of classified reports from Europe—as early as the summer 1942—that Germany was engaged in the mass murder of Jews, the ability of the United States to actively intervene was nearly non-existent. The US only landed troops on the continent in September 1943. That was in Italy, and Allied forces were only halfway up the peninsula by the time of the WRB’s founding four months later. By that time, reports of the murder of European Jews were widespread and advocates on their behalf—both from within the Jewish community and from aid groups such as the American Friends Service Committee—clamored for a governmental response. Increasingly, officials in the Treasury Department came to realize that there were ways in which they would be able to intervene, not militarily, of course, but by issuing licenses to allow the transfer of funds by refugee organizations, such as the Jewish Joint Distribution committee, to refugees within Axis-controlled territories. Such transfers were being blocked by the State Department, primarily out of concern that the money would fall into enemy hands and behind that, a fear of not wanting to be responsible for any refugees who the US did manage to assist. With the creation of a new agency to oversee such transfers, however, the likelihood was greater that the monies could get to their intended recipients.

Convincing the President of the need for the WRB wasn’t easy and took several months of back and forth dealings with the State Department and the White House with Treasury officials in between. Pressure from Jewish groups convinced some members of Congress to begin agitating for such a body and hearings were held in November 1943. Eventually, it was the office of the Foreign Funds Control who convinced Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau of the need for a special agency to oversee refugee assistance. Frustrated, Pehle and his colleagues wrote a report entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews,” which gave Morgenthau the arguments he needed to bring his report to Roosevelt, who eventually approved the plan in late January 1944.

The hero of Rescue Board is unquestionably Treasury official John Pehle. Pehle serves as a useful foil to Breckinridge Long, who by the time of the WRB’s creation, had been reassigned (demoted really) away from overseeing immigration matters on account of false testimony that he gave to Congress during the November hearings in which he wildly inflated the number of immigrants who had entered the country in the past decade. At the time of the Board’s creation, Pehle was 35 years old. An attorney from South Dakota and born of a German immigrant father, Pehle had been the director of Foreign Funds Control, responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of frozen assets. His position allowed him to realize that by facilitating the transfer of funds from the United States to refugee groups working within neutral and Axis countries, the US government might make a significant impact and save Jewish lives. 

Upon agreeing to establish the WRB, Roosevelt funded it with an initial allocation from his executive funds of one million dollars. Pehle cobbled together a team, primarily made up of Treasury officials, and for the next year and a half, until the end of the war, the WRB dedicated itself to finding and exploiting every opportunity to rescue European Jews. When describing their activities, Erbelding’s book reads like a spy thriller, replete with crash landings, nighttime rescues, and espionage. WRB representatives sought to purchase ships to ferry refugees from Europe to safe harbors. While this was unsuccessful, they were able to break the “Bulgarian bottleneck” and allow refugees from Romania to reach Palestine through Turkey. It funded much of Raoul Wallenberg’s efforts to issue certificates of protection to thousands of Jews. It was instrumental in establishing the refugee camp at Fort Ontario in Oswego, NY that housed nearly 1,000 Jews (most of whom became US citizens after the war). It strung along Nazi officials who sought to trade goods, including military vehicles, for Jewish lives. Without ever engaging in such trades, they managed to keep Jewish prisoners alive for months, many until they could be liberated or could receive aid. It even convinced the Goodyear Tire corporation to launder $50,000 so that the WRB could transfer the equivalent amount in Swedish kronor to a WRB agent to help facilitate the rescue of refugees from the Baltic states just ahead of the Soviet invasion (leading Swedish Communists to accuse American diplomats of aiding the flight of Nazi collaborators). Its last major project involved organizing the purchase and delivery of hundreds of thousands of care packages to prisoners in German concentration camps in the last months of the war.

Erbelding’s study doesn’t whitewash the obstacles faced by the WRB, both from the State Department, which had suppressed information about the murder of Jews from becoming public, and the military, which wanted no distractions from the war effort. Most uncompromising were the British, who regularly refused to even consider aiding Jewish refugees. Nor does it recast Roosevelt in the light in which he was held by Jewish Americans during the war years. Rather, like the best of the new scholarship on this period, Rescue Board demonstrates that the response of the United States government to the Holocaust was a mixed one, and the country should neither be viewed as the heroic defender of European Jews or as complicit in their destruction. Rather, the response was defined by the intersection of contingencies of the war, pressure from refugee advocacy organizations, and by tensions within the Roosevelt administration between those who thought only in terms of military strategy and immigration restrictions and those who, like Pehle and the WRB, were motivated by humanitarian concerns to save as many civilian lives as possible.

Although Daniel Ellsberg is best-known for his 1971 role in delivering the Pentagon Papers (the Top Secret Defense Department study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam) to the American people, he spent much of his 13-year career as a military analyst at the highest levels of the U.S. national security apparatus grappling with issues of nuclear war.

Ellsberg’s tasks for the Rand Corporation and the Defense Department included studying how to deter, avert, control, limit, or terminate a nuclear Armageddon between the United States and the Soviet Union, providing McGeorge Bundy (President Kennedy’s national security advisor) with an early briefing on existing nuclear planning, and writing the Kennedy administration’s Top Secret guidance for the U.S. operational plan for general nuclear war. In addition, he was the only person to serve on two of the working groups reporting to the executive committee of the U.S. National Security Council during the Cuban missile crisis. In 1963, he was the sole researcher in a government study of past U.S. nuclear crises, with a classified access several levels above Top Secret. As he writes in this book: “These functions gave me an unusual knowledge . . . of the nature of the plans and operations of the nuclear forces and the dangers these posed.”

This background informed Ellsberg’s decision to copy and release much more than the Pentagon Papers. Horrified by what he had learned about the readiness of the United States and the Soviet Union to exterminate a substantial portion of the human race, he copied everything in his government files with the intention of exposing it to public scrutiny and discussion. He released the Vietnam material first, for war was already ravaging that land. But he always regarded his nuclear records as more important, for they revealed how fragile the survival of world civilization had become. Ironically, however, the nuclear material, hidden by Ellsberg’s brother in a compost pile and, later, in the hillside adjoining a garbage dump, was buried or swept away in a tropical hurricane.

Consequently, bringing the full range of his nuclear revelations to public attention took Ellsberg considerably longer than he anticipated. Over the following decades, while giving lectures and participating in numerous antinuclear conferences and demonstrations, he laboriously reconstructed his missing files from memory, located documents through Freedom of Information Act requests, and drew upon newly declassified government records. He also spoke with national security officials and read extensively on nuclear issues. Nevertheless, despite Ellsberg’s extraordinary knowledge of nuclear war planning and the overriding importance of confronting the issue of human survival in the nuclear age, 17 publishers rejected The Doomsday Machine before it was finally accepted for publication.

The result, though, is a book commensurate with Ellsberg’s courage and unwavering determination―eloquent, honest, and packed with fascinating revelations.

Perhaps the most startling of the revelations is that the leaders of the nuclear powers have delegated authority to initiate nuclear war to military commanders and even to their military subordinates. After Ellsberg discovered the adoption of this alarming policy by the Eisenhower administration, he reported it to the Kennedy White House, only to find that Kennedy continued it, as did Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and―as he notes―“almost certainly . . . every subsequent president to this day.” Indeed, General Curtis LeMay, the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, argued that, when it came to launching a nuclear war, U.S. presidents should be left out of the picture entirely. “After all,” LeMay remarked gruffly to Ellsberg and a White House official, “who is more qualified to make that decision: some politician . . . or a man who has been preparing all his adult life to make it?” According to Ellsberg, “it is virtually certain” that this same secret delegation of authority to military officers “exists in every nuclear state.” 

The reason for the remarkable looseness of command in launching a nuclear holocaust is that the leaders of nuclear-armed nations fear a “decapitating” nuclear strike that, by snuffing out their centralized command and control systems, will prevent them from ordering a retaliatory nuclear assault. Therefore, they gravitate toward diversifying their opportunities for waging nuclear war. In the Soviet Union and, later, Russia, the authorities went so far as to establish a “Dead Hand” system in which machines have the authority to launch a full-scale nuclear war in response to an American attack on their central command and control system.

Ellsberg’s discussion of the reasons for the development and maintenance of the massive U.S. nuclear weapons system is less startling, though no less disturbing. “Thedeclared official rationale for such a system,” he observes, “has always been primarily the supposed need to deter―or if necessary respond to―an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States.” But that’s “a deliberate deception,” he contends, for that “has never been . . . the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations.” Instead, they represent an “attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strikeagainst the USSR or Russia.” In particular, this nuclear capability is “intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them . . . to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts.”

Ellsberg reports that, “contrary to the cliché that `no nuclear weapons have been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ U.S. presidents have usedour nuclear weapons dozens of times in `crises,’ mostly in secret from the American public (though not from adversaries).” U.S. officials have employed them as threats, just as “a gun is used when it is pointed at someone in a confrontation”―to “get one’s way.” Thus, for example, the Nixon administration threatened the government of North Vietnam with a nuclear attack on 13 occasions. Ellsberg also outlines 24 other U.S. government threats, from Presidents Truman through Clinton, to initiate nuclear war against a variety of countries.

Naturally, to bolster these threats, the U.S. government has insisted upon not only the massive nuclear arsenal needed for a “first strike” (a nuclear attack on an enemy’s nuclear facilities to prevent retaliation), but the right to “first use” of nuclear weapons (the initiation of nuclear war). Ellsberg notes that no major party presidential candidate or president “has ever come close to adopting and proclaiming a no-first-use policy.” Asked about a nuclear attack upon Iran in 2006, President George W. Bush stated emphatically: “All options are on the table.” During the 2007-2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign, Barack Obama temporarily went off message and, asked by a reporter whether there was any circumstance in which he’d use nuclear weapons in Afghanistan or Pakistan to defeat al-Qaeda, replied: “That’s not on the table.” Naturally, his rival, Hillary Clinton, seized on this brief departure from the holy writ of U.S. national security policy to chide him, remarking: “I don’t believe any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons.” Similarly, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, pressed by an interviewer about his willingness to launch a U.S. nuclear attack in the Middle East, declared that he “would never take any of my cards off the table.”

One of the most chilling aspects of this book is Ellsberg’s revelation of how close the world has been―and remains―to nuclear annihilation. Nuclear war, he argues, is “a catastrophe waiting to happen,” and he provides many examples of how nations have been sliding toward it thanks to the growing acceptability of targeting civilian populations, the delegation of launching authority to military officers, the ruthlessness of military officers and other national security officials, false alarms, and unexpected events. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, he remarks, the United States and the Soviet Union came within “a hairsbreadth” of ending world civilization, despite the fact that Khrushchev and Kennedy “were determined to avoid armed conflict.”

How did this paradoxical situation develop? As Ellsberg explains, the risk of a nuclear war between the superpowers grew exponentially during the missile crisis thanks to the fact that a Soviet missile crew, acting on its own authority, destroyed a U.S. U-2 flight over Cuba and that Castro’s armed forces, already firing on low-flying U.S. reconnaissance planes, were getting closer to hitting them. Also, although the U.S. government didn’t know it, there were 42,000 Soviet troops in Cuba, armed (among other things) with over 100 tactical nuclear weapons, and the Soviet government had agreed to delegate authority to local military commanders to use them to repel a U.S. invasion. The situation was clearly spinning out of control. Khrushchev later recalled: “A smell of scorching hung in the air.”

Meanwhile, U.S. warships cornered a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean and attempted to force it to surface by bombarding it with depth charges. The submarine’s top officers, considering themselves under attack, were cut off from outside communications and unsure whether a U.S.-Soviet war had already begun. Moreover, the submarine’s ventilator system had broken down, temperatures in the vessel ranged from 113 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and crew members began collapsing from the extreme heat and carbon dioxide buildup. Increasingly desperate, the Soviet officers wondered whether they should fight back by firing their nuclear torpedo at the U.S. warships. After a four-hour assault on the submarine―which one Soviet officer later said “felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is blasting with a sledgehammer”―the exhausted Soviet submarine commander “became furious” and ordered the nuclear torpedo readied for battle. Justifying the order, another emotional officer cried out: “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all―we will not disgrace our Navy!” But, as another officer recalled, the submarine’s commander “was able to rein in his wrath” and, after consultation with top officers on board, made the decision to bring the vessel peacefully to the surface. As a result, an almost certain escalation into a full-scale nuclear war was averted―but only narrowly.

And what would the results of a full-scale nuclear war have been at that time? In 1961, Ellsberg discovered that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that 600 million Russians and Chinese would die from a U.S. first strike. In addition, another 100 million or so would die in the East European satellite countries, plus (thanks to the radioactive fallout) up to another 100 million people in the surrounding neutral countries and up to another 100 million in America’s West European NATO allies. Also, of course, there would be a great many millions of additional people killed by the Soviet Union’s nuclear response. Furthermore, as Ellsberg notes, this was a “fantastic underestimate,” for it was based on fatalities from nuclear blast and fallout, and did not include deaths by fire.

Today, of course, the destruction from a full-scale nuclear war would be far greater. The shift in nuclear arsenals from atomic bombs to H-Bombs (weapons that can be made a thousand times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima) has certainly upped the ante. Moreover scientists have discovered and confirmed the phenomenon of “nuclear winter,” in which the soot and smoke from a large number of nuclear explosions would be lofted into the upper stratosphere. This, in turn, would create global darkness and cold that would destroy the world’s agriculture, thereby leading to massive starvation and the death of nearly every human left alive on earth, along with that of most other large species.

Ellsberg’s conclusion is stark, but follows logically from this evidence. “Any social system,” he writes, “that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being―. . . still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons―is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.”

Although Ellsberg is pessimistic about the prospects of human survival, he is not without remnants of hope or recommendations for action. “The U.S. government,” he writes, “pressed by a popular movement and preferably backed by binding congressional legislation,” should proclaim “that there is no `nuclear first-use option’ on the bargaining table in our dealings with . . . any nation.” Indeed, first use of nuclear weapons is “not a legitimate `option’ for the United States, Russia, or for any other country under any circumstances.” Other “necessary goals” include reducing the role of the world’s nuclear weapons to deterrence while securing, as rapidly as possible, the “total universal abolition of nuclear weapons.”

His top priority, though, is the dismantling of the Doomsday Machines of the United States and Russia through drastic reductions in their nuclear arsenals. As he reminds us: “No cause, no principle, no considerations of honor or obligation or prestige or maintaining leadership in current alliances―still less, no concern for remaining in office or maintaining a particular power structure, or sustaining jobs, profits, votes―can justify maintaining any risk whatever of causing the near extinction of human and other animal life on this planet.” Omnicide―whether threatened, prepared, or carried out―”cannot be regarded as anything less than criminal, immoral, evil.”

Whether the people of the world will take this message to heart remains uncertain. It’s tempting to ignore it for, like the evidence of human-instigated climate disruption, it necessitates a significant change in behavior. And it’s sometimes easier to continue a bad habit―even when it leads to harmful consequences―than to face up to the necessity for change.

But, as Ellsberg’s brilliantly-written, deeply insightful, and powerful book should convince us, continued preparations for nuclear war seriously threaten the survival of most life on earth. Also, in fact, millions of people in nations around the globe have already spoken out against government plans for nuclear annihilation, demanding, instead, nuclear disarmament. Perhaps, ultimately, humanity will have the wisdom and strength to prevail.

His new book broadens the optimistic argument that he made in his The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), which maintained that the world was becoming a less violent place. Here he argues that we have also progressed in numerous other ways:  “People are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, [and] they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter.” [323] To prove his assertions, he provides (as he did in Better Angels) numerous graphs. To cite just a small sample, “Life expectancy, 1771–2015,” “International inequality, 1820–2013,” “Racist, sexist, and homophobic opinions, US, 1987–2012,” “Literacy, 1475–2010,” and “Leisure time, US, 1965–2015.” Even skeptics will find it difficult to dismiss or minimize Pinker’s overwhelming factual evidence.

His final pages are also inspiring. He writes,

The case for Enlightenment Now. . . . may be cast as a stirring narrative. . . . The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious. It is uplifting. . . .

We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a force that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness, and at times astounding stupidity.

Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our experience and ingenuity. We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy—for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration. [452-53]

It is little wonder that Bill Gates, a major contributor to technological progress and subsequently to various important philanthropic causes, considers Pinker such a significant writer.

Pinker envisions his present book as an “attempt to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment [reason, science, humanism, and progress] in the language and concepts of the 21st century.” [5] By the term “Enlightenment,” he means that trans-Atlantic eighteenth-century movement that included the thinking of such individuals as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Nicolas de Condorcet, Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste d’Alembert, Rousseau, Beccaria, Vico, and some of the American founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson. He refers to the Declaration of Independence as “the most famous product of the Enlightenment.” [12]

Because Pinker believes “the Enlightenment has worked—perhaps the greatest story seldom told,” it irritates him that “this triumph is so unsung,” that “the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well.” [6]

He divides his long book (453 pages, plus another hundred for notes, bibliography, and index) into three parts: “Enlightenment,” Progress,” and “Reason, Science, and Humanism.” Parts I and III each contain three chapters; but Part II spans 17 chapters on topics such as inequality, peace, the environment, and happiness, all of which attempt to demonstrate the overall progress that Pinker believes we have achieved.

In some major ways Enlightenment Now is like another recent book by a psychologist, Tom Lombardo’s Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution. Both books are long, stress the importance of evolution, the concept of flourishing, and the importance of believing that humanity can continue to progress toward a happier future. (See here for links to my three-part review of Lombardo’s book.) Both books also stress the necessity of working hard, individually and collectively, to achieve continued progress. They also cite a mind-boggling number of sources and reflect a broad spectrum of knowledge.

Despite all the positive elements of Enlightenment Now, including very readable prose, it also has its faults. One is that it undervalues the importance of character virtues, especially wisdom, which it treats too casually. Whereas Lombardo devotes a whole chapter to wisdom and believes that the way we create a better future is “by developing a core set of character virtues, most notably and centrally wisdom,” Pinker makes few statements about wisdom except casual remarks like “the first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.” Immediately after contending that higher IQs indicate that we are getting smarter, he makes the mistake of equating “smarter” with more wisdom by saying that “people are putting their . . . wiser lives to good use.” [323] As Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid (Yale University Press, 2002) indicates, “smart” people are often not wise.

General Omar Bradley once said: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.” He was right in perceiving the centrality of wisdom if we wish to lead the kind of life Pinker extols: a reasoned and humane one that values scientific truth and seeks progress.

From a historian’s viewpoint, Pinker’s new book is too full of sweeping, and at times inaccurate, generalizations. For example: “Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress.” [39] Enlightenment “ideals are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt.” [6] In his generalizations about Enlightenment thinking he also ignores most of the many differences among thinkers of the era. For example, he fails to mention Hume’s contention that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Although Pinker is correct in pointing out that the Left can sometimes be as intolerant as the Right, he goes too far at times in criticizing critics of modern society. He accuses them of “greenism,” “a quasi-religious ideology,” and implicates not only the Unabomber, but also Al Gore and Pope Francis. No mention is made of Gore’s book, The Assault on Reason (2007 and 2017), defending one of Pinker’s most cherished ideals. Regarding the pope, Pinker finds more to criticize than praise in the pope’s stances on climate and inequality, and he ignores Francis’s 224-page “exhortation” on capitalist failings. (Criticism of such failings and those of our consumer culture do not concern Pinker.)

In general, his whole approach is nicely indicated in his subtitle’s use of the word “case.” He is indeed like a lawyer presenting his case. Only rather than prosecuting or defending a client, he is arguing the “case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” What provides evidence for his case is included. What casts doubts upon it is excluded or explained away. For example, he admits that climate change denial and the existence of so many nuclear weapons present the world with “existential threats” (Ch. 19), but he contends that pessimists are too alarmist about their dangers, and that such alarmism does more harm than good. Although troubled by the type of populism that Trump and some other politicians in Europe and elsewhere represent, he asks, “But will Donald Trump (and authoritarian populism more generally) really undo a quarter of a millennium of progress?” He doubts it. But other political observers are not so sanguine.

While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Pinker’s courtroom method of proceeding, we should not mistake it for the ideal, enlightened, open-minded, empirical, scientific approach that Pinker believes the Enlightenment bequeathed to us. Like all the rest of us, he has his biases.

One of them concerns religion. The Humanism he advocates, especially in his long concluding chapter, “promotes a non-supernatural basis for meaning and ethics: good without God.” [410] One can hardly argue with his statement that humans are the result of evolution, but his insistence that it is “unguided evolution” [411] is more contentious. Already in Part I of his book, he lists various enemies of Enlightenment ideals and asks, “Who could be against reason, science, humanism, or progress?” He begins his answer by saying, “The most obvious is religious faith. To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason.” [29-30]

Pinker’s approach is the opposite to that of someone who wishes to mobilize all good-willed and open-minded people to work for progress. Dorothy Day, recognized by both President Obama and Pope Francis as a great American, was fond of saying that we should seek “points of agreement and concordance, if possible, rather than the painful differences, religious and political.” Although an ardent Catholic, being considered for sainthood by the Vatican, she often defended her association and dialoguing with communists, anarchists, and non-Catholic religious believers and unbelievers. Pinker is not a concordance-seeker, but a case-maker who makes many good points, but leaves us with reasonable doubts.

As a member of the Russian nobility, Dzhunkovsky loyally served the Romanov royal family as a soldier and administrator, who was appointed Governor of Moscow and Assistant Minister of Internal Affairs for the security police. However, Robbins documents that Dzhunkovsky’s opposition to the influence of Grigorii Rasputin on the Russian court displeased the royal family and led Nicholas II to dismiss his loyal minister. After his administrative career was terminated, Dzhunkovsky served with distinction as a military commander during the First World War before the collapse of the Russian military plagued by political dissent and a lack of supplies.

Following the Revolution, Dzhunkovsky’s career as a supporter of the tsarist regime made him suspect, and he was arrested. Nevertheless, Dzhunkovsky was not executed and was able to secure his freedom during the 1920s and 1930s by cooperating with the Soviet authorities and providing information on his tenure as security chief and governor. In the final analysis, he was unable to escape the reach of Stalin’s terror, and Dzhunkovsky was again incarcerated and executed on February 26, 1938.

Relying upon Dzhunkovsky’s extensive memoirs focusing upon his administrative duties, Robbins relates this fascinating life in a deft fashion that will appeal to both scholars and more general readers, although for the uninitiated he might provide a little more background information on the administrative structure of Imperial Russia.

Robbins describes Dzhunkovsky as a “liberal conservative” who was devoted to order, the monarchy, and his Orthodox faith, but he was sympathetic to the plight of the Russian masses. He embraced reforms that would create a more modern, diverse Russian society with increasing commercial and bourgeois elements. Dzhunkovsky, however, believed that reforms and change should be introduced from above and guided by enlightened conservatives rather than revolutionaries. Reactionaries accused Dzhunkovsky of being a traitor to Imperial Russia, but Robbins argues that the nobleman remained true to his conservative principles while being open to dialogue and managed change, treating others with respect and demonstrating an intuitive grasp of what would later be described as “public relations.” Robbins writes, “With regard to workers, peasants, and common soldiers this took the form of patriarchal concern for their welfare; in the case of the more privileged and educated, he displayed it in his respect for the law and proper procedures and in the willingness to extend an open hand even to those with whom he might strongly disagree” (485).

While admiring Dzhunkovsky’s character, Robbins is certainly not uncritical in his evaluation of the nobleman. Robbins acknowledges that Dzhunkovsky seemed to embrace the anti-Semitism of his Russian social class. His courtship of a married woman, Nina Evreinova raised the prospect of scandal in his personal life, but the relationship did not culminate in happiness for Dzhunkovsky. He proposed marriage after the death of Nina’s husband, but she declined the offer, and Dzhunkovsky never married while growing increasingly dependent upon his sister Evdokiia in his old age. Another tragedy in his personal life was the assassination of Grand Duke Sergie Alexandrovich to whom he was devoted.

This act of violence against the royal family, however, did not turn Dzhunkovsky into a reactionary, and he continued to navigate a more moderate course as he assumed the governorship of Moscow province in 1906. He abhorred the chaos unleashed by the Revolution of 1905 and supported the efforts of the Minister of Internal Affairs Petr Arkadevich Stolypin to suppress dissent, while embracing the reforms introduced by the minister to improve the lot of the peasants. Dzhunkovsky sought to tame the growing radicalism of organizations for self-government in the countryside such as the zemstvos and insisted that representatives of the working class demonstrate proper respect for the monarchy. On the other hand, he encouraged social clubs for workers where fellowship and food were available, but vodka was forbidden. However, he eventually banned the discussion of politics and labor organization at government-sponsored activities. The condition of workers and peasants was to be improved from above and not through grass-roots organizing.

Dzhunkovsky was also in charge of the centennial celebrating the Battle of Borodino and the resistance to Napoleon. In appreciation of his work, Nicholas II rewarded the governor in 1913 with an appointment as Assistant Minister of Internal Affairs with responsibility for the security police. The Moscow governor accepted the promotion with the understanding that he would be able to pursue reform of the security services. For example, Dzhunkovsky sought to discontinue the use of government agent provocateurs among high school students and the military. He also wanted to end the surveillance of private letters by the security police, but he was unsuccessful in this endeavor.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of his career with the security forces was the handling of Roman Malinovsky, a government agent who infiltrated Lenin’s inner circle and was elected as a Bolshevik representative to the Duma or Russian parliament. Misreading the political situation, Dzhunkovsky also sought to reduce the size of the security forces, leading some to accuse him of treason and conspiracy—charges for which Robbins finds no evidence.

Dzhunkovsky’s endeavor to balance reform with order was evident in his mission to the Baku oilfields of Azerbaijan to mediate a strike. He refused to employ troops to suppress the striking workers, but he concluded that the oil companies should not increase wages over which they had already made concessions. Yet, he also ordered the companies to improve working and living conditions for the workers and their families. In addition, the minister earned the gratitude of the tsar for the security surrounding the tercentenary celebration of the Romanov dynasty. Seeking better public relations, Dzhunkovsky sought to downplay the security presence as he continued to believe in a mystic relationship between the Russian people and their tsar. Despite his service to the royal family, Dzhunkovsky was dismissed by Nicholas II after the minister attempted to warn the tsar about the negative influence of Rasputin upon the deteriorating political situation in Russia.

After he was sacked, Dzhunkovsky joined the war effort on Russia’s western front. Although the troops were initially suspicious of Dzhunkovsky, Robbins relates that he won them over through his courage, organizational skills, and the respect with which he treated all those under his command. Dzhunkovsky was saddened by the tsar’s abdication, but his patriotism was evident in his willingness to serve the new revolutionary government. Robbins credits Dzhunkovsky with maintaining a degree of order among his troops as the war wound down and Soviet soldiers gained more control over their daily lives. After the war, Dzhunkovsky was arrested but released from prison in 1923. He maintained a low profile and survived until 1938. Dzhunkovsky has little to say about these years in his memoirs, but Robbins speculates that he may have received protection from Soviet officials such as Viacheslave Menzhinsky in exchange for his willingness to cooperate with the security forces. However, like so many others he was unable to escape Stalin’s terror.

The life of Vladimir Dzhunkovsky is an amazing journey from Imperial Russia to the terror of Stalin that is well told by Robbins in a book that has the scope of a Tolstoy novel. Robbins employs the fascinating story of the rather obscure Dzhunkovsky to shed light upon modern Russian history and the legacy of autocracy which continues to cast a long shadow over both internal and international politics under the rule of Vladimir Putin. It is a history of which Americans should be aware as the specter of Russia increasingly dominates the national political scene. But Robbins concludes on an optimistic note, asserting that Dzhunkovsky’s life suggests the possibility of a more positive legacy for Russian life and politics: “that government existed for the people, not people for the government; that firm authority could be based on the rule of law, respectful of individual rights and receptive to public opinion” (489).

Wickham states it plainly on page one: “historical development does not go to; it goes from.” Medieval Europe, he writes, “is interesting in and for itself; it does not need to be validated by any subsequent developments.”  But why study medieval Europe if other places and times are also interesting?  The best Wickham can come up with is: “The attraction of sticking to what we have is precisely that 500-1500 is an artificial span of time, in which changes can be tracked in different ways in different places, without them having to lead teleologically to some major event at the end, whether Reformation, revolution, industrialization, or any other sign of ‘modernity.’ … if its artificiality is recognized, the medieval European experience can be used comparatively, to be set against other experiences in a more neutral and thus useful way.”  

And if that isn’t confusing enough, there’s this: “…medieval Europe is simply a large differentiated space, seen across a long time period. It is also well enough documented to allow some quite nuanced study. This is not a romantic image at all, and is intended not to be. But this space and time holds some enthralling material all the same.” Which calls to mind the old joke about a person down on all fours.  

“What are you doing?” a passer-by asks. 

“I’m looking for my contact lens.” 

“Where did you lose it?” 

“Over there.”  

“Then why are you looking over here?” 

“Because the light is better.”

The only reason Wickham can think of to study medieval Europe, evidently, is that it’s documentarily richer in terms of archives, church registries, theological treatises, and the like and hence well suited to “nuanced study.”  But where the person in the joke is at least looking for something, Wickham seems to believe it’s wrong to look for anything at all. 

Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Wickham’s survey is not without its rewards.  He is good on the barebones society that emerged after the barbarian conquests of the fifth century in which kings were less rich, peasants were less poor, and economics in general were greatly simplified.  He is quite good on the subject of taxes, which had all but disappeared from the disorganized west by the year 700.  “Kings began to rely on the revenues from their own lands … rather than fiscal receipts, except for tolls on commerce,” he writes.  “The whole economic basis for political action shifted, from taxation to landowning.”

The effect was to stimulate agricultural production since peasants were no longer subject to confiscatory taxation by the state while at the same time holding down trade other than in humble local products.  Wickham points out that the European peasantry during the so-called Dark Ages was not only unusually free by the standards of the day, but even dominant.  As he puts it: “in general the economy of most of the north is likely to have followed the logic of peasant, not aristocratic choices and needs for a long time. This is supported by the rarity of large concentrations of wealth in the early medieval archaeology of the north, with the significant exception of Denmark, until the Viking period.”  Monarchs lived more like peasants while, by the eleventh century, an increasingly well-off countryside was sprouting its own nouveaux riches.

Still, Wickham's horror of formal methodology leads to gaps and inconsistencies.  While he has much to say about the peasantry’s political status, he is relatively silent about rural technology even though advances in agricultural productivity were what gave the medieval economy its initial lift.  He is silent on water mills and windmills, which were hardly less transformative than coal centuries later.  He discusses Christianity in broad-brush terms but says nothing about how western doctrine differed from that of Byzantium or how clerical organization differed as well.  (Where emperors controlled the church in the east, Gregory of Tours fairly bullied Merovingian kings like Chilperic I in the west.)  He also doesn’t mention the west’s unique legal structure, especially the rediscovery of Roman corporate law, which enabled Europeans to form themselves into guilds, religious fraternities, scuole, and companies.  Organizational density of this sort was also one of the distinguishing characteristics of the west.  Finally, he is silent on the eradication of slavery, which, by the eighth and ninth century, is what differentiated western Christendom most sharply from the Muslim caliphate.

Wickham’s grasp of Muslim history is surprisingly unsure.  He writes apropos of the caliphate that “khalifa means ‘deputy’ – that is to say, of God.”  But it originally meant merely a deputy of the prophet.  He says that “it is becoming increasingly likely … that the Qur’an had reached something close to its final form already by around 650, as Muslim traditions have indeed always held.”  Notwithstanding Wikipedia, which Wickham actually cites as his source, the debate continues to rage.  He says that westerners have viewed Muslim political development “through the lens of Orientalism … full of incomprehensible intrigue and harsh and repetitive – indeed, essentially meaningless – changes of regime.”  But since both Ibn Khaldun and Engels commented on the repetitive nature of Muslim regime change even though they lived five centuries apart, that tired old term “Orientalism” seems particularly inapt.

Contrary to Wickham, history is not just one damned thing after another, but a science packed with meaning no less than events.

The book, over 500 pages in length, comprises 31 chapters as well as a postscript and certain addenda—e.g., a brief bibliographical essay at book’s end. Boles proceeds not thematically, but chronologically—an approach which decuples the difficulty of writing a readable biography of Jefferson, given Jefferson’s numerous interests and entanglements in them. Still, by book’s end, readers will find that Boles succeeds in his sympathetic and sometimes critical depiction of Jefferson, as the “most quintessential American Founder of them all.”

The prose throughout is fluid and engaging, and enjoyable. Moreover, though Boles’s task is a “full-scale biography,” we are throughout introduced to Jefferson in chunks, as the chapters, usually between 15 and 20 pages, are not overwhelmingly large. That allows readers to savor the dimensionality and depth of Jefferson as well as mull over certain of his failings.

One of the shortcomings of the book is its motivation. Why are we introduced to another biography on Jefferson? What has Boles to say that others before him have not said?

The answer, unfortunately, is relatively little. There are other better and more comprehensive one-book biographies—e.g., Merrill Peterson’s Thomas Jefferson & the New Nation—and less comprehensive biographies—e.g., Joseph Ellis’ American Sphinx—that are better written.

Yet one of the merits of the book are certain insights, Boles offers, sprinkled throughout the book that function as correctives to misstatements or incautious claims in other biographies.

For instance, Boles mentions that we cannot make much of Jefferson’s terseness apropos of his mother’s death, as numerous others have done, when Jefferson writes, “My mother died about 8. oclock this morning in the 57th year of her life.” Jefferson was equally terse when Dabney Carr died and when his daughter Maria died, so we cannot assume a strained relationship between the two.

Moreover, Boles makes an especial effort to show, not bypass as do others, the degree of Jefferson’s political involvement in his years of governmental service. He mentions, for instance, Jefferson, as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1776, had served on “an astounding thirty-four committees,” while still a fledgling politician. Boles writes clearly of Jefferson’s successes in his first term as president and failures in his second term. He makes the aidful point that the magnitude of certain successes—e.g., the Louisiana Purchase—inevasibly led to subsequent failures—e.g., the Embargo Act. Both were a result of the complexity of the relationships between France, England, Spain, and the United States in those frictional years.

Boles also clears up the confusion of the Taddeus Kosciuszko affair. Kosciuszko, a friend of Jefferson, allotted his American assets to be given to Jefferson to purchase “Negroes from among his own or any others” and give then liberty. Boles shows that Kosciuszko had written three wills, not one, and Jefferson, at 74 years of age and not having practiced law in 43 years, did not wish to embroil himself in “an extraordinarily complicated legal mess.” Most authors merely cite Jefferson’s unwillingness to act as more evidence of his racism.

Boles’s account of Jefferson’s view of Blacks and slavery is especially good. Not prey to the fallacy of historical anachronism (presentism), Boles is intent on situating Jefferson. Jefferson’s belief in many of the inferiorities of Blacks in his Notes on Virginia, notes Boles, was a “summarizing [of] commonplace late-eighteenth-century French and European scientific conjecture” (see my HNN piece, “Was Jefferson a ‘Scientific Racist’?”). Again, Jefferson’s relatively gentle treatment of his slaves is contrasted with “the violent nature of white society at the time,” where it was acceptable to whip schoolboys, wives, servants, and soldiers and sailors. Jefferson’s view that emancipation could not be done successfully without colonization is not given as an instance of hatred of Blacks. Boles notes that the view was deemed reasonable by many others at the time—James Madison, John Marshall, and Henry Clay—and Abraham Lincoln years later. Boles also indicates that Jefferson’s not doing more to eradicate slavery later in life was likely due to a willingness not to force the issue, but let it move in tardigrade fashion, as Jefferson was always chiefly concerned that precipitous action would result in a break of the union, which would have made insignificant the Revolutionary War and would have made a shambles of the experiment in republican governing, which for Jefferson allowed for a strong union over a vast expanse of land in spite of parochial differences.

One of the weaknesses of the book is uncritical acceptance of the Sally Hemings’s story, from the account of Sally’s mother, Betty, being the concubine of Jefferson’s wife’s father, John Wayles, to Jefferson’s involvement with Hemings. Boles connects with the pro-paternity literature—Brodie, Gordon-Reed, and Burstein—but overpasses the anti-paternity literature—Burton, Turner, and Hyland—and that mars his book. A greater focus on the evidence behind the claims instead of the avowed historical consensus would have been preferable. The issue needs to be settled not by a show of scholarly hands, but by evidence, and there is a critical lack of evidence to decide the issue either way.

I close by returning to the problem of motivation. Boles never tells us why we has written the book. What does he have to say that others have not said? The secondary title, Architect of American Liberty, misleadingly suggests to readers that Boles will begin by introducing them to Jefferson the architect, and then show how what drove him to an interest in architecture drove him to his other interests and to his fixation on liberty. Boles does not take that route, and so the secondary title remains a mystery.

Overall, readers, looking for a new or fresh depiction of Jefferson, will be disappointed. Readers, unfamiliar with Jefferson and looking for an enjoyable one-volume history of him, will not.

M. Andrew Holowchak, Editor, The Journal of Thomas Jefferson’s Life and Times

Most Americans remember King as an eloquent leader of the movement for racial equality and civil rights. But King also focused on economic justice, an often overlooked yet still timely aspect of his legacy. Economic concerns drew King to Memphis in 1968 where he stood with 1,300 striking sanitation workers who called for a living wage, better working conditions, and union recognition. For King, these workers epitomized the issues of poverty and economic injustice he planned to address with his unfolding Poor People’s Campaign.

In his groundbreaking new book To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice, University of Washington history professor Michael K. Honey examines King’s life through the lens of his efforts to address poverty and inequality. Honey is an authority on civil rights and labor history, a former civil rights organizer, and author of several books including the definitive history of the 1968 Memphis Strike, the award-winning Going Down Jericho Road. (I interviewed him in 2017.)

As Honey writes, King’s concern for the suffering of the impoverished and the travails of working people compelled his lifelong crusade for fundamental economic and social change. He was a compassionate child who witnessed the brutality of racism in the Jim Crow South. His father, Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., taught him to respect poor and working people. As a teenager, he worked on a tobacco farm and said, “I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro.”

King became a Baptist minister who served in the tradition of the black Social Gospel that applied Christian ethics to social problems and recognized the gross inequities between rich and poor and the suppression of worker rights. In college and graduate school, he studied Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance and found that nonviolence “was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their quest for social justice.” These beliefs underpinned his future campaigns, starting with his leadership of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that led to desegregation of the transit system by late 1956.

King was also a champion of unions, as Honey stresses. By 1957, King began forging relationships with unions committed to civil rights. His concern for economic rights was interwoven in his continuing work for racial equality. He believed that a coalition of the “Negro freedom movement” and the labor movement could change the segregated South, as he worried that, without a powerful interracial labor-civil rights coalition, labor would be driven to impotency by forces on the far right.

King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered during the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” on August 28, 1963 as he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and spoke to a crowd of hundreds of thousands. As Honey reminds readers, this march was an effort to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African-Americans and was organized by a coalition of labor, civil rights and religious groups. In his speech, King proclaimed that black citizens were stranded “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

After adoption of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, King’s energies shifted to addressing racism in the North and the “evils” of militarism, materialism, and economic injustice. He sharpened his critique of rapacious capitalism and the resulting suffering of the poor and working people, and he called repeatedly for economic restructuring and a “true revolution of values.” He also protested a futile and wasteful war as social programs were “shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam.”

As intellectual James Baldwin observed, King traveled “a dangerous road.”

He had faced beatings, arrests, jail terms, and frequent death threats through his adult life. White supremacists were obvious foes, but more painful for King was abandonment by his former allies in his final years. Moderates urged him to stay in the civil rights arena and rejected his anti-war and radical economic agenda while black militants believed he was too passive and conciliatory.

And, as Honey details, for the last decade of his life, King was also under constant surveillance by the FBI. The Bureau’s Director, J. Edgar Hoover, was open about his loathing of King and publicly called him the “most notorious liar” in America. King was aware that the FBI followed his movements every day, bugging his rooms and tapping his phones, and even creating anti-King editorials that were published virtually verbatim by newspapers such as the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Despite the threats and hounding and undermining, King courageously continued his efforts for human rights as he planned the interracial Poor People’s Campaign and heeded the fateful call to Memphis where he joined the striking sanitation workers. He told these representatives of the working poor, “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.”

Honey’s book offers a lively, inspiring, and carefully researched study of King’s efforts for economic justice, reminding readers of this seldom-documented but crucial aspect of King’s legacy. To the Promised Land also vividly recounts the story of King’s life and work and the influence of his philosophy of nonviolence and social Christian mission as it provides insights for activists today. Although not a comprehensive biography of King, an extensive list of resources provides ample material for further study of his life and times.

To the Promised Land is especially timely and revelatory as we struggle still with racism, militarism, poverty, and extreme economic inequality 50 years after the death of King. Although his dream for the poor and working class has not been realized, his nonviolent resistance to all forms of oppression continues to inspire.

At a union conference in 1961, King encouraged the audience with these words that resonate still today: “As we struggle to make racial and economic justice a reality, let us maintain faith in the future. At times we confront difficult and frustrating moments in the struggle to make justice a reality, but we must believe that these problems can be solved.”

“Lest We Forget: The Great War” is a sumptuous volume about “the War to End all Wars.” Written by Michael W. Robbins with a forward by Sir Hew Strachan, this ample book offers an in-depth look of World War I as viewed through the stunning poster collection at this major military museum and library in Chicago.

Used primarily for propaganda, posters were employed around the globe to encourage enlistment, demonize the enemy, increase public fervor and otherwise engage the common man in the war effort. During World War I, modern lithography and professional paintings elevated posters from mere handbills to influential works of art. Many are iconic of this era and set the tone for future artistic works as well as ushering in the age of modern marketing.

Michael Robbins, former editor at MHQ: Military History Quarterly and Military History magazine, worked closely with the Pritzker Military Museum & Library to develop the writing and coordinate it with the selection of posters. His wife Wendy served as an art director on the project, helping to determine which few of the hundreds of posters would make it into the book.

“The Pritzker Library has more than 800 original posters,” he said during a recent interview. “It is the largest collection of World War I art in the world – and a first-rate collection at that. Getting it down to the 160 or so posters we used in the book was a tough job!”

The posters are spectacular. Vibrantly colorful and exquisitely rendered, these impressive illustrations and paintings incited young men to defend their countries and inspired the populace to contribute their meager savings and possessions to conquering the enemy.

“I hope it gives readers an appreciation of the skill of propaganda that was developed during the war,” he said. “The posters were successful in presenting a single idea while conveying other extremely complex concepts of nationalism and pride.”

With the posters as a background, Robbins does a wonderful job of distilling World War I’s spider web of political machinations and four years of brutal battlefield carnage into a 30,000-word narrative. The book flows through the pre-war intrigue and entangling alliances to the stalemate of slaughter caused by technological advances in weaponry and the inability of military commanders to develop new tactics.

Even for an accomplished historian such as Robbins, there were new things to learn. As he delved deep into World War I for the book, he discovered historical nuggets that were eye-opening even to him.

“Some of my research surprised me,” he said. “I know a lot about the Great War but the scale of some of the operations was revealing. I was unaware of certain actions on the Eastern Front early in the war. The battles in the Carpathian Mountains between the Austrians and Russians were new to me. Both sides suffered some 2 million casualties in the winter of 1914-15 as these two enormous armies clashed in conditions that defy description.”

The book, which will be released April 11 – exactly six months before the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I – is a superlative reference volume for the bloody conflict that presaged a tsunami of political and social change at the beginning of the 20th century. Robbins has provided a new generation with insight and reflection of an era that shaped the world we live in today.

“This was a war that changed our world – politically, technologically and geographically,” Robbins noted. “The map of the world was altered forever. It set the course for events that would shape the future of the 20th century and continue to influence us even today.”

“Lest We Forget: The Great War” includes 166 print reproductions, along with 180 photos and maps – only a small percentage of the Pritzker Military Museum & Library’s World War I stunning collection. The book is the result of a partnership between the museum and the United States World War One Centennial Commission, created by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Barak Obama.

It serves as a companion book to a major exhibit at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library now through mid-2019. “Lest We Forget: Sailors, Sammies and Doughboys Over There in World War I” explores the experiences of those who served in World War I and the role the United States played in ending the first global conflict. The exhibit features the fabulous posters, along with photographs, maps, rare books, artifacts and film from the era.

Harold Stassen was born April 13, 1907 on a farm near St. Paul, Minnesota. After graduating from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1929, Stassen was elected District Attorney of Dakota County five years later. In 1938, Stassen was elected Governor of Minnesota at age thirty-one, and the popular “boy Governor” was re-elected in 1940 and 1942. He resigned from office in 1943 to join the Navy during the Second World War, providing distinguished service as an aide to Admiral William H. “Bull” Halsey. Especially popular among young Republicans, Stassen encouraged cooperation between labor and management, while challenging the isolationism of the Republican establishment. His commitment to international cooperation led President Franklin Roosevelt to appoint Stassen as a delegate to the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations Charter in 1945. Stassen was an enthusiastic supporter of the United Nations, although Kaplan points out that he feared the veto power would limit the organization’s effectiveness.

Many of Stassen’s supporters urged him in 1946 to challenge the re-election of incumbent Minnesota Senator Henrik Shipstead. Instead, Stassen decided to prepare for a 1948 Presidential bid by making a series of speeches and traveling abroad to meet world leaders. In 1948, Stassen was a valid contender for the Presidency and was even granted an interview with Stalin in Moscow. After winning several Republican primaries, Stassen seemed to self-destruct in an Oregon debate when he emphatically demanded the outlawing of the Community Party in the United States, a position that was even a bit too extreme for such staunch anti-communists as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Kaplan notes the irony of Stassen later being denounced for not taking a stronger stance in negotiations with the Soviets. Although Stassen’s best opportunity for the Presidency had passed in 1948, Kaplan acknowledges that Stassen’s ego and ambition led the Minnesotan to continue his pursuit of the office.

To keep his name before the public, Stassen accepted the Presidency of the University of Pennsylvania, and the regents supported Stassen’s frequent travels and speeches. In 1952, Stassen again sought the Republican Presidential nomination, although Kaplan argues that Stassen was primarily interested in slowing the momentum of Senator Taft while Eisenhower vacillated on whether to enter the contest. Stassen ended up supporting Eisenhower and was awarded with an appointment as head of the Mutual Security Agency. The position pleased Stassen as it provided him with a seat on the National Security Council and Eisenhower cabinet. Stassen was placed in charge of foreign aid and military and defense assistance programs, including economic and technical assistance. Although technically under the authority of the State Department, Kaplan documents that Stassen often clashed with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Kaplan argues that Stassen believed the hard-line approach of Dulles toward the Soviets was undermining efforts to achieve international peace and understanding, while his ego convinced him that the President shared his more conciliatory approach to the Soviets. This assessment was probably true, but Kaplan concludes that Stassen’s overconfidence eventually led to the triumph of Dulles in the cabinet. While Dulles focused upon military assistance to European allies, Stassen emphasized economic and technical aid to regions such as Africa and Asia.

Stassen’s status seemed to expand when he was appointed head of the newly created Foreign Operations Administration which was to oversee all programs for technical, economic, and military assistance, and Stassen announced his support for an Asian Marshall Plan. Dulles was opposed to the new agency, and it was terminated after two years with its responsibilities divided between the State and Defense Departments. Stassen was out of a job, but Eisenhower still valued his counsel, making him a Special Assistant for Disarmament. Much to the chagrin of Dulles, the new appointment continued the bureaucratic and policy disagreements between the two men, and Dulles especially resented the press when they referred to Stassen as “the secretary of peace.” According to Kaplan, a confident Stassen was “convinced that Eisenhower saw him as a kindred spirit in his approach to the Cold War, as opposed to the secretary’s rigid anti-communist stance. He would be a better instrument than Dulles to carry out the president’s initiatives on disarmament” (112). This reading of Eisenhower encouraged Stassen to seek implementation of the President’s open skies proposal for inspection of nuclear arsenals despite the misgivings of Dulles.

Kaplan devotes considerable detail to the diplomatic efforts of Stassen to reach some type of arms control or disarmament agreement with the Soviets despite the intransigence of the Secretary of State. In the final analysis, Dulles finally issued a harsh reprimand of Stassen to which the President agreed. Stassen had shared a memorandum on arms control with his Soviet counterpart without clearing the proposal with American NATO allies such as Britain and France who were pursuing their own plans for the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Although Stassen attempted to maintain his office after the reprimand and continued his efforts at negotiating an agreement limiting nuclear testing, it was clear that the President had lost confidence in him, and in February 1957 Eisenhower asked for his resignation.

In typical Stassen fashion, however, the Minnesotan insisted that he was stepping down to run for Governor of Pennsylvania. After his service in the Eisenhower administration, Stassen would continue to seek elective office for the Presidency, Congress, the Governorships of Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and even Mayor of Philadelphia, but he was unsuccessful in these electoral endeavors. His time had passed, and the tragedy of Stassen is that the frustrated politician failed to recognize this fact, making him somewhat of a joke on the American political scene. But Kaplan argues that the jokes should not be the political epitaph for Stassen, asserting instead that the Minnesotan should be remembered as a “liberal Republican, who had emerged from World War II determined to serve his party and his country, following a path that derived from his experience as one of the fathers of the UN Charter. His belief in his destiny may have been unqualified, but a steadfast conviction that it was possible to live in a world free from the menace of a nuclear bomb resonated throughout his long life” (186). In the age of Trump, the Republican Party could use someone like Harold Stassen.