Books
This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.
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Reviews
Jim Cullen, Review of Samuel Moyn's "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History" (Harvard, 2010)
Doug Ireland, Review of "The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham" (Random House, 2010)
Aaron Leonard, Review of "A Companion to Marx's Capital" (Verso, 2010)
Jeremy Kuzmarov. Reviews Bruce Cumings' The Korean War: A History Random House, 2010.
Jim Cullen, Review of Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists: A Novel" (The Dial Press, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of Samuel Moyn's "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History" (Harvard, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (8-28-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
If there's one goal that seems to have universal human currency since the Second World War, it would be human rights. Ever since the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the concept has been celebrated as a foundation of international law: never something that could be taken for granted, and yet something to which all nations would pledge allegiance. Even nations that denied human rights -- and, of course, there have been many -- nevertheless paid lip service to them, and committed offenses against them as secretly as possible (which, thanks to organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, has not always been so easy). Many consider human rights synonymous with the very idea of civilization itself. In this provocative little book by Columbia University historian Samuel Moyn, however, the global history of human rights is rife with irony, if not contradiction.
The first and perhaps most potent irony is that a concept whose appeal and power derives from principles that transcend the nation-state has almost always rested on national sovereignty. Widely regarded touchstones like the Declaration of Independence (1776) or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) derived their justification and effectiveness from state power: rights followed flags. Even in those rare cases where activists challenged a government's power to project itself into the lives of citizens (a key word here), it has almost always been on the basis of the state's own criteria (like a constitution). This high degree of dependence on the state would eventually be overcome, but fuzzy thinking on the part of those who championed the cause would make that difficult and obscure how it happened.
Indeed, Moyn asserts that the history of human rights is, in effect, a history of amnesia. He challenges the widespread perception that the modern movement's core energies derived from the experience of the Holocaust, as suggested by the timing of UN Declaration in its immediate aftermath. But, as he shows, this is very misleading. In fact, all kinds of other agendas took precedence of human rights in the years after World War II, principal among them the Cold War. The emerging U.S.-Soviet rivalry, combined with older powers' efforts to salvage disintegrating empires, effectively made the UN itself largely beside the point. And that meant high-flown rhetoric celebrating transnational human dignity was as well. The Last Utopia opens on a note of mordant humor; the UN celebrated the 20th anniversary of Human Rights with an international conference in the Tehran of the Shah Rezi Pahlevi (!), much of which was devoted to denunciations of Israel. There can be few more vivid illustrations of the irrelevance of independent internationalism.
Which brings us to another irony. The postwar decades did witness the emergence of a global anti-colonial movement that brought about the dissolution of old European empires, as well as the emergence of independent Third World nations that sought to escape the clutches of superpower domination. One might think that the rhetoric as well as the concepts of human rights would have been embraced as a vehicle in such quests. They were not. That's partly because insofar as the energies and language of the movement had much life, they were propelled by intellectual forces (notably a re-energized Catholic Church) that were correctly seen as conservative. Moreover, the meaning of concepts like "self-determination" had a decisively collective character -- it was peoples, not persons, who were seen as the repository of freedom. In particular, revolutionary movements on the left still had utopian hopes attached to them, particularly in the Latin America of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
And here we have perhaps the final irony: the modern human rights movement was at least as much a matter of disillusionment as it was idealism. In particular, it was the experience of 1968, and the realization that neither side in the Cold War -- or its proxies -- could be trusted to treat national, ethnic, or religious communities in a non-exploitative manner. A very specific set of contingencies brought about decisive change. Among the most important was the U.S. failure in Vietnam, which created an opening in the Democratic Party that allowed Jimmy Carter to become president. It was Carter's human rights campaign of 1977, a campaign that somewhat unintentionally both took on a life of its own, that allowed a genuine international movement to take root. This one was grounded far more in non-government organizations than in the UN, depended on grass-roots organization (typified by the explosive growth of Amnesty International in the late seventies), and had a decisively secular orientation. In the thirty years that followed, it was this movement that took the airy abstractions of international law and began to breathe real life into them. While there's still a long way to go in this regard, it's clear that a kind of critical mass has developed here in what has become a global discourse with a language, protocols, and membership that sees itself as engaged in a meaningful enterprise.
And yet, for all this, Moyn sees the human rights movements at a crossroads. To a great degree, that's because its adherents have never really grappled with the implications of some of these contradictions. For example, in its impatience with ideology, the human rights movement has drawn its strength from a perception that it is essentially apolitical. Insofar as this is really possible -- and it may well be so when it comes to things like opposing torture or genocide, two commitments that have really come into focus in recent decades -- it is also limited. One reason why the movement never got much traction in mid-century is that political communities in the Third World were looking for rights that were often economic and collective: it's good not to be tortured, but it would sure be nice to have a job. In a way, the triumph of human rights reflects the collapse of any effective challenge to the logic of global capitalism, and in that regard may be legitimately considered conservative. Or, at any rate, elitist: Moyn that the role of expertise in NGOs now has crowded out some of its attractive grass-roots features of Amnesty International in its heyday.
Although Moyn doesn't really explore this, one also wonders how well the individualistic premises at the core of human rights will fare in a world in which the Confucian foundation of Asian cultures, as opposed to the Christian foundations of western ones, will dominate. Whether or not this is right question, The Last Utopia makes a compelling case for a specifically historical understanding of the world (even if it is a bit repetitive at times; the content of the last chapter, for example, might have been folded into themes of the preceding ones). As he chides its uncritical adherents, human rights were made, not discovered. They're contingent, not timeless. And if they're evolutionary, it's an evolution of mutations and sudden emergence, not gradual change. It's the people who have their stories straight who are most likely to realize their ends.
Luther Spoehr, Review of Daniel A. Clark, “Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood, 1890-1915” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).
Source: HNN (8-22-10)
[Luther Spoehr teaches courses on the history of American higher education at Brown University.]
Daniel Clark begins by quoting a grumpy Andrew Carnegie: “A college education unfits rather than fits men to affairs.” Clark, a historian at Indiana State University, then spends the rest of his monograph showing how popular new, mass-audience magazines, including “Collier’s Weekly,” “Munsey’s Magazine,” “Cosmopolitan,” and the “Saturday Evening Post” contributed to dramatically changing that stereotype. “American mass magazines,” says Clark, “spearheaded a cultural reconstruction of college and middle-class masculinity…in the years surrounding 1900, as they emerged as a central national cultural forum, our nation’s first truly national media.”
Clark thus posits an answer to the important question of how and why the undergraduate college experience, previously limited to tiny fraction of the population, increasingly came to be considered an important, even essential, part of middle class life. In 1900, less than 4% of college-age youth attended college, but that figure has approximately doubled every 15 years or so ever since, and nowadays we hear that everyone should aspire to a college degree. Although Clark places too much emphasis on mass magazines as causal factors, he is entirely successful in showing that college life was moving closer to center stage in American culture at the turn of the twentieth century.
Jim Cullen, Review of Terry Teachout's "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
Source: Special to HNN (8-21-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and is working on a book on the way historiographic visions of American history are embedded in the careers of movie stars. He blogs at American History Now.]
Louis Armstrong (1901-71) is one of those artists -- his contemporary, Norman Rockwell, comes to mind as another -- who were very popular with the masses in their lifetimes but regarded with disdain, if not outright hostility, by the critical elite then and since. Like Rockwell, however, Armstrong has been the subject of increasingly respectful reappraisal in recent years. Armstrong revisionism dates back to the time of Gary Giddins' 1988 study Satchmo. So Terry Teachout's appreciative new biography of Armstrong, soon to be out in paperback, does not exactly break new interpretive ground in that sense. But it is a notably fresh reading of the man nonetheless.
There are a number of reasons why. The first is the quality of the research (though I will confess I found checking the citations to be clumsy). Teachout draws heavily on newly available writings and taped recordings Armstrong made in the last 25 years of his life. Armstrong's idiosyncratic prose voice, no less than his musical one, is delightfully off-beat. (I'll tell ya watcha do now," he instructed a group of musicians during a taped television broadcast. "Not too slow, not too fast -- just half-fast.") He also includes a bevy of previously unpublished photographs that bring his subject to life, along with excellent captions to go along with them. Armstrong's irrepressible personality -- funny, profane, subject to occasional rages and funks -- leaps off the page.
Teachout can take some credit for that. A critic for the Wall Street Journal and Commentary, his prose is polished to a high sheen, and can be playful without ever being precious. Responding to Armstrong's assertion later in his life that he took better care of himself than his colleagues (there's an absolutely hilarious private postcard Armstrong made for friends celebrating the virtues of an herbal laxative), Teachout writes, "He did not see -- or refused to admit -- that he was in the same boat, and it was sinking fast." He also does a terrific job of placing his subject in a broader cultural context, both culturally and politically.
The publications Teachout writes for have a conservative tilt, and this comes through in his stance toward his subject. For a long time, the standard line on Armstrong -- one articulated most sharply and influentially by John Hammond, the giant of American ethnomusicology who in this case allowed his blue-blood disdain for populism to get the best of him -- was that he betrayed his talent. In this version of the story, Armstrong was a Promethean genius, an organic musical intellectual who sprang from the whorehouses of New Orleans and helped found an entirely new jazz idiom in the 1920s. But by the end of the thirties, he stopped playing in the ensembles that showcased his talent, and became increasingly content to work with indifferent collaborators and sadly thin pop material. His defenders at the time and since in effect celebrated him despite, not because, of this. Yet Teachout stoutly defends Armstrong's work over the course of his life. He concedes that a vein of passivity in Armstrong's personality did cost him opportunities at different times. But he asserts that songs like "Mack the Knife" and "Hello Dolly" have their place in the Armstrong canon right beside "St. Louis Blues" and "West End Blues." It is stunning to read that Armstrong's collaborators ranged from Jimmie Rodgers to Barbara Streisand, and there is something truly Whitmanic about Armstrong's range and generosity of musical spirit toward these and many other people. Even Bing Crosby seemed to like him (and that's really saying something).
The other dimension to this musical fault line is a racial one. The bebop artists who came of age in the forties had little patience for Armstrong's accommodationist sensibility. To a great extent, history was on their side, both in terms of Civil Rights politics and in giving a distinctively African American genre a new generational lease on life. But Armstrong was never exactly a patsy. He made international headlines in 1957 when he criticized President Eisenhower for his inaction on Civil Rights, and described segregationist Arkansas governor Orval Faubus as "an uneducated plowboy" (the Associated Press could not run with what he originally said). Perhaps more to the point, it's hard not to be awed by the sheer resilience of a man who started with nothing and became one of the gigantic figures of the 20th century, a global symbol of what was best in America. You don't attain those heights without strength and discipline, part of which involves being able to ignore slights.
Similar to his line on Armstrong's music, Teachout asserts that Armstrong did not pander to middle-class values. That's because he avowedly embraced them. Comparing the trumpeter to Horatio Alger, Teachout claims Armstrong's house in Queens "was the home of a working man, bursting with a pride not from what he had but what he did." He may be pushing his luck here in suggesting that Armstrong's lifestyle was anything like that of from his fictional Queens neighbor, Archie Bunker. But insofar as he's right, such a perspective serves as a reminder that conservative values have never been white property alone. Booker T. Washington was no patsy,either.
Teachout's encapsulation of Armstrong's life, offered in the introduction of Pops (a moniker he gave to virtually everyone he saw, whether he remembered their names or not) seems like a good way to end here: "He was a man of boundless generosity who preached the stony gospel of self-help, a ferociously ambitious artist who preferred when he could do what he was told, an introspective man who exploded with irrepressible vitality when he stepped into the spotlight, a joyous genius who confounded critics by refusing to distinguish between making art and making fun." God Blessed America when he gave us Satchmo.
Doug Ireland, Review of "The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham" (Random House, 2010)
Source: Gay City News (8-4-10)
[Doug Ireland, Contributing Editor of Gay City News, can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.]
The prolific W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), novelist, playwright, and short story writer whose work was frequently compared to that of Guy de Maupassant, was the highest paid author in the world by the 1930s.
More works of his have been adapted for the cinema than of any other writer in the English language (some 98 films, his nearest rival being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with 94 big-screen adaptations of his Sherlock Holmes stories.)
Maugham was a man of many contradictions. He achieved fame and fortune as a playwright literally overnight in 1907 with “Lady Frederick,” was lionized by London society, and by 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously in London’s West End; yet he abandoned playwriting in 1933, said he hated the theater, and averred that he considered actors “less than human.” He professed to be a socialist, yet he assiduously collected friendships with aristocrats and royalty. He was obsessed with making money and the luxurious life, yet he was capable of great generosity and gave away large sums. He could be unbelievably kind and unforgivably cruel.
Above all, Maugham was a lifelong practitioner of homosexuality who pretended not to be. An inveterate letter-writer, in his declining years he burned all his extensive personal correspondence that might have revealed his same-sex proclivities, and wrote to his friends begging them to burn all his letters. This request had just the opposite of the desired effect, and a great many of Maugham’s letters repose today in British, American, and French universities and libraries.
In “The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham,” just published by Random House, the British literary critic Selina Hastings, author of well-regarded biographies of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has given us a meticulously researched, admirably written, and endlessly revealing portrait of Maugham’s life, loves, and work.
It is one of Hasting’s great merits that she details Maugham’s extensive sex life, from his long-running affairs with men to his addiction to young gigolos and rent-boys, without either sensationalism or prudery. There is not the slightest subliminal tongue-clucking here, for Hastings is resolutely unshockable.
“Throughout his life an appearance of conventionality was of profound importance for Maugham,” she writes, and he “rarely revealed himself except to his closest intimates.”Maugham was 21 when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality under a law that remained in force until two years after Maugham’s death, and “the exposure of Wilde’s homosexuality and its terrible consequences, the loss of family, of home, of reputation, had made a deep impression on Maugham, who could hardly avoid seeing a number of potential parallels in his own situation.”
Maugham was also traumatized by the suicide in 1904 of his alcoholic older brother Harry, also a promiscuous homosexual, and persuaded himself that it was ‘because of the life he led.’”
As he told a friend in later life, “I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and only a quarter of me was queer — whereas really it was the other way round.”
Maugham — “Willie” to his parents and friends — was born in Paris, where his father handled the legal affairs of the British Embassy, and learned French before he did English. The youngest of four children (his older brothers were already in boarding school), Willie was left an orphan at the age of 9 when first his mother (whom he adored) and then his father died in rapid succession. Packed off to live with a cold and cruel uncle who was the vicar of Whitstable in Kent, young Willie had a miserable childhood, especially when he was sent to a boarding school in Canterbury, another purgatory where he was continuously mocked for the inadequacies of his command of the English language and developed the intermittent stammer that stayed with him all his life.
Maugham subsequently was allowed to spend a year studying literature and German at the University of Heidelberg, where at 16 he had a passionate sexual affair with John Ellingham Brooks, a dashing English graduate student ten years his senior and with whom he remained on life-long friendly terms.
Although Willie had his heart set on being a writer, he was sent to medical school by his guardian the vicar (Maugham’s stammer had precluded his becoming a clergyman), and while there he used his experiences doing midwifery in the London slums to write his first novel, “Liza of Lambeth,” which was well-received by the critics and quickly sold out. Maugham left the medical profession and embarked full-time on his 65-year career as a man of letters.
His next nine novels never matched the success of his first, and so the penurious Maugham, after analyzing what he thought would please the play-going public, turned to the theater to make money. “Lady Frederick” was only the first of a series of deft but ephemeral society comedies that gave Maugham the wealth and recognition he so ardently desired.
Maugham’s large income allowed him to play the elegant Edwardian dandy, and his youthful good looks were extremely attractive to both women and men; his dalliances included a brief love affair with Princess Alexandra Kropotkin, the daughter of Prince Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist intellectual then living in London.
Maugham led a dizzying social life in London and then — after the celebrated American theatrical producer Charles Frohman took him up and brought a string of his plays successfully to Broadway — in New York as well.
Willie’s abominable childhood led to Maugham the man being rather shy and withdrawn, which together with his painstaking concealment of his same-sex private life gave the exquisitely dressed playwright something of an air of mystery. He became an observer rather than a participant, and often relied on the second-hand stories related by others about real people for the plots and sub-plots of his plays and fictions.
Weary of his contrivances for the theater, Maugham embarked on the semi-autobiographical “Of Human Bondage,” the 1915 work on which much of his literary reputation was built. It was made into the 1934 Hollywood film that made Bette Davis a star in the role of the working-class Mildred, with whom “Philip Carey” (Maugham) has a masochistic relationship. Hastings writes, “Maugham’s one-time lover, Harry Philips, who might be expected to know, definitely asserted that ‘she’ was a boy,” and this was hardly the only time that Maugham changed the gender of the real-life people on which he based his characters.
The vivid sequence in the book in which Carey’s life as a shop assistant is convincingly described was based entirely on a 6,000 word account Maugham had commissioned for 30 guineas from a young actor, Gilbert Clark, who had been employed in a Piccadilly department store: “‘Willie used my stuff practically word for word,’ Clark later recalled with satisfaction.”
Aaron Leonard, Review of "A Companion to Marx's Capital" (Verso, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (8-3-10)
In May 2010, a young man in China jumped to his death from a factory building in the sprawling FoxConn compound in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. FoxConn is the Chinese manufacturer of iPhones, iPads, Dell computers and other technology products. According to Time magazine, FoxConn is “a place where distraught workers regularly throw themselves to their deaths.”
One thinks of such events when reading the following from Karl Marx, writing in the first volume of Capital: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”
As the triumphalist howling in the wake of the collapse of the fall of the Berlin Wall has receded, the world we have entered seems much more like the world Marx tried to apprehend nearly one hundred forty years ago. It is that understanding that anthropologist and geographer David Harvey illuminates in his just-published Companion to Marx’s Capital. Harvey, who has taught a course on Capital for forty years, has written a reader’s guide to Capital with the stated aim of getting us to read this work. In doing so, he makes accessible the at-times challenging but fundamental insights of Marx, and shines new light on his path-breaking methodology.
One of the striking things in reading both Marx and Harvey is that we live amid a time where there is an awful lot of misunderstanding—and—worse of basic things. Harvey writes: “Conventional economics has in practice a hard time measuring (valuing) the factor of production that is capital. So they just label it K and put it into their equations. But actually, if you ask ‘what is K and how do you measure it,’ the whole of contemporary economic theory is [shown to be] dangerously close to being founded on a tautology: the monetary value of K in physical asset-form is determined by what it is supposed to explain, viz. the value of the commodities produced.” What he’s getting at is that in order to create capital (or profit, if you will) you actually have to generate a surplus from something. And that something is human labor power. In fact, it is the only commodity that can create surplus value.
The failure to grasp this goes a ways toward explaining why there can be feverish excitement about “The New Economy,” only to see it disappear with the bursting of the tech bubble. It shines light on why companies like Enron profited—for a while—on pure ether, but in the end collapsed. And of course it is testament to the failure of 2008 and the meltdown of companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG, and GM. There is, in short, in the dominant culture a sense that money and commodities are somehow magical. This is part of what Marx was getting at when he talked about commodity fetishism, the mistaking of social relations as relations between things.
Those social relations, as Harvey points out, are particularly ugly these days. He tells us the way surplus value is being squeezed out of workers in places like China is akin to capitalism resurrecting its period of “primitive accumulation”—when it grabbed hold of whatever wealth, by whatever means, to be able to jump start capitalism (think of slavery, the acquiring of gold, the outright theft of land). Harvey calls its modern day equivalent “accumulation by dispossession,” and it is a concept worth pondering.
Also worth pondering is Harvey’s bitterly ironic point that “only cranks misfits and weird utopians think that endless growth, no matter what the environmental, economic, social and political consequences, might be bad. To be sure, problems deriving from growth need to be addressed, but rarely is it said that the answer to the problem is to stop growth altogether.” In the wake of the unending oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the acceleration of all the dire signs of global warming, the acres of smog hanging over China on any given day, etc, etc, it seems we ought to be talking quite a bit more about stopping such growth.
In that regard, what Harvey says in explaining why he wrote this book—and why people should read it—resonates. He wants to “open up a space of dialogue and discussion in such away as to bring the Marxian vision of the world back onto center stage, both intellectually and politically. Marx’s works have far too much to tell us regarding the perils of our times to consign them to the dustbin of history.”
Jeremy Kuzmarov. Reviews Bruce Cumings' The Korean War: A History Random House, 2010.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is assistant professor of history, University of Tulsa.
Overshadowed by World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War has long been the “forgotten war” in American memory. Apart from a few notable exceptions, American historians have predominantly accepted the standard propaganda that the Communist North (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – DPRK) was singularly responsible for provoking the war by invading the Southern Republic of Korea (ROK) and carried out myriad atrocities, justifying U.S. action. Mainstream analysts and commentators similarly devour Washington’s line that North Korea today is a threat to humanity which should be contained and its leaders overthrown.
Bruce Cumings’ book The Korean War: A History shatters these conceptions and shows in vivid detail that the Korean War was among the most misguided, unjust and murderous wars fought by the United States in its history, displaying many of the features of the Vietnam War that aroused mass public protest. Cumings, chair of the history department at the University of Chicago, writes: “Here was the Vietnam War we came to know before Vietnam – gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally…untrained GIs fighting a war their generals barely understood, fragging of officers….press handouts from Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or lunatics, an ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid dictatorship run by servants of Japanese imperialism.” The most disturbing element was the unrestrained air power that was used to destroy large portions of 18 of 22 major North Korean cities, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians by American and ROK soldiers which exceeded that of the DPRK by at least fifty percent. Hungarian journalist Tibor Meray is quoted as stating: “I saw destruction and horrible things committed by American forces….Everything which moved in North Korea is a military target, peasants in the field often were machine gunned by pilots, who, this was my impression, amused themselves to shoot targets which moved.”
Drawing on material from his magisterial two-volume history, The Origins of the Korean War, Cumings demonstrates that the Korean War began not in 1950 but during the period of U.S. military occupation of the South from 1945-1948, which was a product of America’s imperial ambitions in the Asia-Pacific. After World War II, American policy elites were committed to extending the American informal empire and presiding over an integrated global economic order driven by free-markets and trade. The Far-East was seen as a region of vital strategic significance, with Korea envisioned as a repository of raw materials and surplus markets for Japan, the “super-domino” in the containment strategy, which the United States was committed to reconstructing in order to keep it in the Western orbit. In January 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall scribbled a note to Dean Acheson that said, “Please have plan drafted of policy to organize a definite government of So. Korea and connect up (sic) its economy with that of Japan.” In order to achieve this objective, the United States divided the country at the 38th parallel (a line which had no historic justification), occupied the south and put in power the conservative nationalist Syngman Rhee, supporting his campaign of repression against the left.
An Office of Strategic Services (OSS) liaison who had spent over 35 years in exile, Rhee lacked a popular base and relied on former Japanese colonial collaborators, setting off alarm bells in the DPRK, which was run by Kim Il-Sung, a principal guerrilla leader of the anti-Japanese resistance. Rhee’s unwillingness to promote basic land reform and support for fascistic youth groups ignited a widespread revolt spearheaded by members of people’s committees, who organized democratic governance and social reform at the local level. American policy was especially influential in building up the paramilitary capabilities of the Korean National Police (KNP) consisting of many Japanese collaborators who worked with the youth groups in hunting down leftists. The U.S. also established the ROK Army, which grew out of police constabulary units headed by Colonel James M. Hausman, a contemporary of legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale.
With support from U.S. counter-intelligence, the ROKA and KNP killed an estimated 100,000 South Koreans in counter-insurgency campaigns before 1950. The worst of the violence took place in Kwangju, capital of the rebellious South Cholla province, and in the southern island of Cheju-do, where U.S. backed forces burned houses, tortured en masse and, writes Cumings, killed anywhere from 30-60,000 people (1/6 of the population), driving thousands more into exile. One government report of the period noted “frustrated by not knowing the identity of these elusive men [guerrillas], the police in some cases carried out indiscriminate warfare against entire villages.” Cumings wonders if Americans living today who served in the campaigns were ever able to “connect the dots between the indigenous organs of self-government that Koreans fashioned in the aftermath of four decades of brutal colonial rule, and the peasants armed with the tools of their trade, being cut down like rice shoots by the same treacherous Koreans who had served the Japanese?”
The North-South war, which began on June 25 1950 when Kim’s Korean People’s Army (KPA) crossed the 38th parallel, was equally as brutal as the civil war in the south. While the New York Times likened the northern armies to “barbarian hordes and invading locusts reminiscent of Ghengis Khan” and the Nazi blitzkrieg, new archival evidence and the findings of the South Korean Commission on Truth and Reconciliation show that the torturing and shooting of POW’s was carried out more systematically by the South and that the KNP liquidated the prisons in the aftermath of the DPRK invasion and shot thousands of people in the back of the head, including women and children. Driven by an acute racism, U.S. troops were also notorious for their cruelty and carried out numerous civilian massacres while showering the countryside with napalm. Much like in Vietnam, many soldiers were left to wonder why if South and North Koreans were identical “North Koreans fight like tigers and South Koreans run like sheep.”
These comments underscore for Cumings how Americans were ignorant of the political dynamic underlying the fratricidal war and its connection to the past half century of Japanese colonial rule. As he writes: “it did not dawn on Americans that anti-colonial fighters might have something to fight about.” Characterized in American propaganda as a Soviet puppet and stooge, Kim Il-Sung presided over a nationalist revolutionary government, which whatever its flaws, promised autonomy from foreign colonialism and tutledge, and still does today. While harsh and oppressive, the DPRK never was Stalinist or totalitarian and land reform programs were less violent than in China and North Vietnam. Cumings likens the current regime to a modern form of monarchy that draws on neo-Confucianism and other historical traditions in Korean politics. Instead of adopting orientalist stereotypes, he argues, Westerners would be best to try and understand the country on its own terms, including how many of its policies have been designed out of fear of another invasion by the United States and by the threat of renewed domination by Japan. American bellicosity in this latter respect and “axis of evil” rhetoric has done nothing but harm.
One of the greatest tragedies of the Korean War, which was a major watershed in the growth of the American overseas network of military bases and put the country on the path of a permanent war economy, is that it is still ongoing. After all the bloodshed and destruction, the artificial division still endures as do many of the stereotypes and caricatures of the northern enemy in the United States. The one positive development over the last 25 years was the reemergence of a pro-democracy movement in the ROK (receiving minimal support from the United States) and establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which has enabled many South Koreans to come to terms with their losses. While old enmities are starting to breakdown in the ROK and a more progressive leadership has taken charge, the United States remains locked in a 1950s, McCarthyite time-warp, exemplified in CNN’s ever present warning of the “new North Korean threat.” Failing to learn anything from history, Americans are currently replicating their Korean experience in Iraq where, as Cumings writes, “without forethought, due consideration or self knowledge, the United States barged into a political, social and cultural thicket without knowing what it was doing and now finds that it cannot get out.”
Cumings has written a powerful book which serves to refute many historical myths and distortions in the United States about the Korean War. He shows in lucid detail the vicious character of America’s strategic allies and the barbaric and genocidal nature of the air and ground wars. In spite of the manipulations of Washington and to a far lesser extent the Soviet Union, Koreans were ultimately most decisive in shaping the conflict. And one day, with hope, they will come up with their own solution to the mess which liberal heroes Truman and Acheson helped to create.
Jim Cullen, Review of Donald Stoker's "The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War" (Oxford, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (7-26-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) and Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]
My first reaction to encountering this substantial, handsome volume is puzzlement: strategy and the Civil War? What does Professor Stoker mean by strategy? This sense of curiosity intensified when I read the jacket and promotional copy promising that the book is a rare one of its kind, and still more when I opened it -- as one often does when casing a book -- to a random page and entered a conversation that didn't sound much different than what you'd hear in a book by James McPherson or Shelby Foote. Actually reading The Grand Design both clarifies and disappoints: the book does indeed offer some fresh angles on a familiar subject, but, like many of the people it criticizes, the author loses the forest in a maze of what by now are some well-marked trees.
In his vigorous introduction, Stoker, who teaches at the U.S. Naval War College in Monterrey, distills what are clearly years of teaching by demarcating some boundaries and defining terms in an approach heavily influenced by Carl von Clausewitz. Stoker notes, and dispenses with, the common contemporary conflation of the words "strategy" and "tactics," distinguishing between them by correlating the former with ends and the latter with means. But then he goes beyond that: actually, he says, strategy is embedded in a larger intellectual construct that includes "operations" (a midpoint between strategy and tactics), and, especially, the concept of "policy," which stands at the top of an inverted pyramid. To establish a policy is in effect to determine war aims. The next strata down are "grand strategy" (which is as likely to be political and economic as it is military) and "strategy" (typically more narrowly military). These are effectively the approach one adopts to realize a policy. The next layer down the pyramid is "operations," the plans one formulates to implement the strategy; at the bottom are "tactics," ground-level movements in the service of operations. Example (in reverse, from bottom to top): Pickett's Charge was a tactic in the Gettysburg operation, part of a larger Confederate strategy to take the military as well as political initiative and thus achieve the policy objective of Confederate independence.
This appears to be a reasonably clear taxonomy, but if you find it a bit confusing, you're not alone: Stoker notes that many Civil War political and military leaders had the same problem, which is why the war went on as unnecessarily long as it did. By way of illustration, you might think -- as, for example, someone like Union general George McClellan did, at least for a while -- that winning the Civil War was a matter of capturing the Confederate capital at Richmond. But here you would have to ask why you think so. Presumably, it's because taking Richmond would destroy the Confederate capacity to fight. But if snuffing out an insurrection is really the goal (that is to say policy) of a given military campaign (that is to say operation), then defeating the Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia would be a better strategy than seizing the admittedly valuable piece of real estate that Richmond represented. Much to his exasperation, this is something that Abraham Lincoln came to understand better than everybody he put in charge of the U.S. armed forces for the first three years of the war. Conversely, when Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863, he was as mindful of the impact his actions would have on Northern public opinion as he was in impeding Union efforts to conduct its own offensives. Indeed, Lee never thought he could actually stay in Gettysburg or anywhere else north of the Potomac River for very long; his offensive operations were really part of a larger defensive strategy that sometimes required him to go on the attack operationally.
The problem with military leadership in the Civil War, Stoker says, is that far too few generals (and he would include the officious Jefferson Davis here) could think straight. It is this capacity to implement well-thought ideas -- not personalities, not ideology, not even material resources -- that ultimately decides the outcome of conflicts, he asserts. Unfortunately, this resource was in hopelessly short supply. Confederate general Leonidas Polk may have thought he was bringing the pivotal border state of Kentucky into the rebel fold when he invaded it in 1862, but he did precisely the opposite in mobilizing Unionist resistance there. McClellan celebrated driving the invader from "our soil" at Antietam, only to be reminded by a furious Lincoln that as far as McClellan should have been concerned, it was all U.S. soil, which was not really the point in any case: Lee's army was. Both sides diffused their energies in 1863 by paying far too much attention to the perimeter of the war in places like Texas rather than the Confederate heartland, and both sides allowed indecisive generals to lose sight of one of one of the most critical commodities of war: time. The longer wars go on, Stoker notes, the more remorseless they become, and the more time you take to get your ducks lined up in order, the more time you give your enemy to do the same.
Inevitably, however, it becomes difficult to separate ideas from the character of the person who advances them, and this becomes one of the ways the book bogs down. Stoker makes a fairly good brief for McClellan as a strategic thinker, but his assessment inevitably ends up where just about everybody else's does: Good ideas are worthless if you don't have the will to act on them. Ditto for the man Lincoln called a "first-rate clerk," Henry Halleck. Stoker notes that Jefferson Davis seemed incapable of the kind of big-picture thinking that Lincoln and Lee routinely performed. But the principal reason for that incapacity was the pettiness and vanity that Stoker repeatedly cites.
Not that either Lee or Lincoln escape criticism here. Even when his actions were rational, Stoker finds, many of Lee's decisions proved counterproductive. Similarly, while Lincoln had real reason to question the resolve of his string of commanders that ran from Irvin McDowell to George Meade, his ideas were of limited value, and his meddling -- which, ironically, might actually have been less bad if he ordered more and suggested less -- sapped administrative morale.
These are the kinds of points -- along with counter-intuitive thinking about the limits of Ulysses S. Grant's capture of Vicksburg, or the way the Civil War hearkened back to the American Revolution at least as much as it anticipated the First World War -- that make for interesting reading. Far too often, however, Stoker makes precisely the same mistake that he laments: he gets bogged down in page after page of operational detail in a book that's explicitly about strategy. I mean, who cares about the endless indecisive squabbling between Halleck and Don Carlos Buell? Can Stoker just get on with it -- or, at least, remind us why such details matter? He spends much more time setting up the battles than actually describing what happens, which is logical in its way. But you're left with the worst of both worlds: lots of largely irrelevant hypotheticals without the payoff you get in the hands of masters like McPherson and Foote, who for all their differences shared a deft grasp of the big picture that Stoker claims as his own but far too often loses.
I actually think there's a good book still in here that remains to be written, perhaps after the volume on Clausewitz I understand Stoker is currently researching. This would involve boiling down the diffuse intelligence that's evident here and distilling it to its essence. Perhaps this would be a slim volume organized around the strategic visions of particular people, or sorting out a set of strategic approaches and the people who adopted (or, as the case may be, abandoned) them. For my part, I would have also liked to see a bit more consideration of how political factors like emancipation and the enlistment of African American soldiers had bona fide military implications and consequences at the level of strategy. Stoker gives us a lot to think about in The Grand Design. It's in his own design dimension where he should be thinking a little more strategically.
Ron Briley reviews Elizabeth Abbott, Sugar: A Bittersweet History (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2009).
Elizabeth Abbott, research associate at Trinity College, University of Toronto, is the author of broad historical studies targeting more general readers. For example, she has written A History of Mistresses and balanced that study of sexual activity with A History of Celibacy. In her current work on the sugar industry, Abbott focuses much of her attention upon the West Indies, an ancestral home for the author. Sugar: A Bittersweet History is a readable account which should remind consumers that the sugar which sweetens our cakes, pies, soda, ice cream, and candy not only contributes to obesity and diabetes also has a long and troubling history based upon the exploitation of human labor.
Europeans initially relied upon honey to sweeten their food, but the Crusades introduced them to the delights of Mediterranean sugar which became a luxury item for the upper class. The expansion of sugar cultivation and refineries reduced prices and placed the product within the reach of the European working class who used sugar to sweeten their cocoa, coffee, and tea—as well as rum. This growth of sugar consumption was based upon colonialism and the search for a labor supply to harvest sugar cane in the West Indies.
Colonialism proved disastrous to the indigenous populations, and European planters initially relied upon the labor of white indentured servants. This work force proved unstable, and a permanent labor solution was apparently found in the African slave trade. The bulk of Abbot’s book concentrates upon the history of African slavery in the West Indies, as well as efforts by enslaved peoples and their European abolitionist allies to end the slave trade and slavery. Although Abbott discusses the impact of the Haitian Revolution upon slavery and sugar cultivation, her major concern remains with the British West Indies. Condemning the harsh nature of racialized sugar slavery, Abbott writes, “Whites relied on blacks to produce their sugar, counted them as their biggest capital investment, enslaved and mistreated them, vilified their race, sexually assaulted and fell in love with them, and lived dependent on and surrounded by them” (122). The labor and sexual exploitation was made worse, Abbott argues, by the absentee owners who could not abide the climate of the West Indies and left even more unscrupulous overseers in charge of their estates. In London, the West Indies planters lived a life of luxury, and the sugar lobby assured that Parliament would protect the industry from foreign competition.
Yet, the sugar lobby was challenged by the rise of abolitionists, who drew support from East Indian planters whose labor practices were exploitive but not dependent upon the institution of slavery. While Abbott tells her readers little about the East Indian sugar industry, she does emphasize an expanding role for middle-class women in the sugar boycott movement dedicated to ending slavery in the British Empire. Abbott argues, “By boycotting slave-grown sugar, that homemaker could make a moral statement and wield her economic purchasing power as a weapon to bring down the enemy. As her family’s chief food buyer, she and millions of other women could lead the war against sugar slavery” (251).
The British abolition of slavery in 1838, of course, did not end the exploitation of sugar workers. Slavery remained legal in Spanish Cuba and the American South, where Louisiana became a major producer. Meanwhile, desperate planters in the West Indies used “indentureships” to import laborers from India and China. Although technically free labor, these Indian and Chinese workers often suffered the degradation once reserved for African sugar slaves. “Indentureship,” however, failed to restore West Indian sugar to its once dominant position in the sugar trade.
The last two chapters of Abbott’s volume focus upon the twentieth century. She chronicles how a growing consumer dependence upon sugar in the diets of North Americans and Europeans have contributed to health problems as well as a sugar diaspora which has expanded the world production of the commodity. Nevertheless, in a brief examination of sugar cultivation in such diverse areas as Australia, Brazil, and Fiji, Abbott notes that earlier trends of racial division and exploitive labor remain dominant. Nor has the growth of the sugar beet industry altered these conditions as the harvesting of this crop also calls for cheap labor. In addition to the issues of labor and health, Abbott documents the ecological damage of sugar cultivation in regions such as the Florida Everglades. Abbott also examines the feminization of sugar and chocolate, which she insists has “objectified women and, like cheap abundant sugar, undervalued them” (373).
Abbott, however, does hold out some hope that the potential of sugar cane-based ethanol will allow the sugar industry to become more versatile and reduce dependence upon fossil fuels. She concludes, “Although it will continue to delight and comfort, and be the handmaiden of celebration, sugar will no longer need to rely on promoting grotesquely unhealthy consumption to stay in business” (408). Unfortunately, Abbott’s history of sugar cultivation seems to offer little basis for such an optimistic conclusion.
Abbott’s research is based primarily upon an extensive reading of secondary sources as well as printed primary accounts. Her reading is supplemented by her personal travels and experience. There are gaps in her coverage. For example, she mentions the importance of British East Indian sugar production but goes into little detail on this topic. On the other hand, her survey of twentieth century production is such a whirlwind journey that it is sometimes difficult for the reader to remember which country one is examining. The real strength of this volume is Abbott’s detailed investigation of African slavery and the sugar industry in the British West Indies. It is a story well known to most professional historians; however, the connection between slavery and sugar may be less obvious to more general readers. If Abbott’s book is able to awaken consumers to the relationship between consumption and global labor exploitation and ecological damage, the author will have made a major contribution. Continued indifference to the sufferings of the planet and the world’s laboring poor will one day reap the whirlwind.
Luther Spoehr: Review of Stuart Buck’s “Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation” (Yale University Press, 2010).
Source: HNN (7-22-10)
[Luther Spoehr teaches about the history of American school reform at Brown University.]
Stuart Buck, Harvard–trained lawyer and now a doctoral candidate in education at the University of Arkansas, wants readers to know that “I believe strongly in integration as a moral ideal. The message that I intend to convey is NOT that desegregation was a bad idea, NOT that the people who pursued desegregation were foolish or misguided, NOT that desegregation is something that we should consider reversing.” That kind of disclaimer, which appears repeatedly throughout his book, gives some indication of how sensitive he believes his topic to be.
I’d like to think Buck worries too much. But, in any case, Buck’s book should go a long way toward settling the increasingly one-sided debate over whether or not accusations of “acting white,” directed by African-American students at other African-American students, really happen, and whether they matter. They do, and they do. Research by scholars including John Ogbu, John McWhorter, Roland Fryer, and many others, as well as individual testimony from people as highly placed as Michelle Obama, have established the reality of the problem. And pointing that out does not make somebody a racist or mean that he is “blaming the victim.”
Robert Parmet. Review of Julius G.Getman, Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement (Yale University Press, 2010)
Robert D. Parmet is professor of history at York College, The City University of New York
The decline of the American labor movement to its present state, with fewer than ten percent of private employees affiliated with trade unions, is an undeniable reality. The reasons for its decline are many, including weaknesses within organized labor itself. In Restoring the Power of Unions, Julius G. Getman studies labor’s ailments and proposes cures. As he states, the book’s “basic concept” is “the need for organized labor to become a movement again.” Battered from many sides, labor, he argues, must rekindle its spirit, with strong participation by the rank-and-file as well as the leadership. In a highly detailed, meticulously researched volume, Getman explains how this feat might be accomplished.
The author, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Texas, discusses but does not dwell on the customary explanations, such as national politics, globalization and union corruption, to explain organized labor’s woes. In a concise chapter entitled, “The Downfall of Organized Labor,” Getman makes no mention of John McClellan or Richard Nixon, little of Ronald Reagan, and not much more of those of followed them in the presidency. Instead he provides a broad overview in which he cites the many factors responsible, including the failure of “most unions” since the 1960s “to give organizing the high priority that it required.” He is particularly critical of labor leaders whose poor sense of “solidarity” results in factional division at the expense of labor unity.
A case in point is the merger of UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, with HERE, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. UNITE contributed a heritage consisting of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. Bruce Raynor had been a hero of the textile workers’ fabled J. P. Stevens campaign in the South. More recently, he brought UNITE, of which he was president, into a marriage with HERE, to form UNITE HERE. UNITE had funds for organizing, and HERE, led by John Wilhelm, featured a substantial membership. Unfortunately, this marriage was a case of “Solidarity Rebuffed,” attributable in good part to Raynor, whose conduct, according to Getman, included, “vicious attacks . . . abuse of office [and] . . . mishandling of funds.” Under fire, Raynor departed to head a new union, Workers United, which soon merged with the Service Employees Industrial Union (SEIU). The rancor and instability that characterized his jockeying did little to advance the cause of unionism.
When the members of HERE had earlier mobilized “in solidarity” they won. Getman describes, for example, the campaigns to organize the clerical and technical workers at Yale University and negotiate a new contract between the Culinary Union and the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. These victories and others elsewhere demonstrated the value of solidarity and that organizing was “a complex process” that depended on “the effective mobilization of the membership and the application of relentless pressure on recalcitrant employers.” Moreover, they showed that unions must be “member-centered.” Union members, Getman states, must select their leaders, “feel that the union is theirs,” and believe that they can influence its “actions and priorities.”
Sometimes perseverance can overcome apparent failure. Getman discusses what happened to a local of the United Paperworkers International Union (UPIU), which 1n 1987-1988 went on a sixteen-month strike against the giant International Paper Company. Local 14 of UPIU, in Jay, Maine, employed “superb leadership, widespread grassroots involvement, and highly creative strategies.” The local did the right things to win, even gaining local media and national political support, but with the assistance of replacement workers, International Paper prevailed, and the strike was called off. However, the issues did not die, and the company encountered a public relations disaster over its use of the replacements, and a decade later the workers, now under the United Steelworkers, signed a satisfactory agreement.
The author spends much time on this dispute and others, but he is actually most intent on instructing unionists how to organize, strike, and avoid missteps such as the Employee Free Choice Act, which he notes would not protect the right to strike. Getman is a scholarly counsel, instructing workers on the fundamentals of organizing and maintaining effective unions, but also sadly describing the enormous obstacles that have driven organized labor downward for several decades.
Jim Cullen, Review of Timothy R. Pauketat's "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi," (Penguin, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (7-19-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) and Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]
Look in any recent U.S. history textbook and you're likely to find a passing reference to Cahokia, a thousand year-old Native American civilization best known for its scores of huge earthen mounds, near the site of modern-day St. Louis. It's likely to be a passing mention, in part because textbooks handle just about everything in drive-by fashion. But it's also because compared with the much-better known Aztec, Mayan, and Inca civilizations, Cahokia remains a bit mysterious to the archeologists and anthropologists who have been studying it. In Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi, anthropologist Timothy Pauketat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides an overview of a half-century's worth of study about Cahokian society as well as indicates some recent directions of research and interpretation. The book, published last year by Viking and just out in paperback, is part of the Penguin Library of American Indian History.
Pauketat describes the flowering of Cahokian civilization as part of a "big bang" that occurred circa 1050 CE, and appears to have been a response to a supernova whose effects were visible in the sky around the globe. This event appears to have had some kind of religious significance, and prompted the effective replacement of one settlement ('Old Cahokia") with a much larger and more ambitious one. The still-evident feature of a city-sized settlement bigger than the London of its time -- one whose traces were evident to French and Spanish explorers, as well as Lewis and Clark and countless other visitors near what is now East St. Louis -- included gigantic sculpted piles of earth, whose massive construction was carefully sited and executed.
Recent digs near these sites have made a number of other discoveries. Besides discovering evidence of a widely and durably popular Native American game called "chunkey," a forerunner of lacrosse, researchers have also found evidence of widely dispersed Cahokian pottery, cuisine, and language. It's a great mystery that a civilization that appears to have sprawled from Wisconsin to the Mexican border has left behind so few traces. But the most striking recent discoveries at ground zero of Cahokia is the realization that the mounds there have been elaborately organized repositories for bodies that were buried in layers. This layering suggests a strongly hierarchical society, in which violent ritual human sacrifice was common, as indicated by dismembered remains at the bottom, as well as careful interments of what appear to be authority figures near the top.
One of the more intriguing aspects of Cahokia is Pauketat's generational approach to describing interpretations of this civilization, and the way changes in American intellectual life shape the priorities and emphasis in archeological research. New attitudes about gender, for example, appear to have sensitized researchers to the role of women in Cahokian society and mythology. Pauketat notes that recent scholars have embraced a more avowedly speculative approach to understanding Native American cultures, a tendency he embraces in a vivid chapter in which he "walks" his way into the heart of the settlement. Researchers have been confounded in their efforts to establish an unambiguous link between Cahokia and the much more densely documented Mesoamerican Indian societies, but Pauketat aligns himself with those who have extrapolated their way to concluding that such ties were strong.
In short, Cahokia is as much an introduction to the study of defunct civilizations as it is a survey of this one in particular. It's a brief, evocative little book that makes a nice addition for anyone trying to integrate an element of diversity into the study of American history.
Donna M. DeBlasio. Review of Alison K. Hoagland's Mine Towns: Building for Workers in Michigan's Copper Country (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)
Donna M. DeBlasio is Professor of History, Youngstown State University
Interpreting the lives of working class people can be, at best, problematic. This is largely due to lack of available evidence that historians traditionally use to examine the past. So-called non-traditional sources such as oral histories, photographs, and material culture need to be considered in order to understand the fullness of working class lives.
The built environment is another tool that historians can utilize, which Alison K. Hoagland does in her new book, Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan’s Copper Country. This is a study of the towns in northern Michigan that supported the copper mining industry of the region. These communities, because of their ties to the local employers, became vehicles for management’s paternalism and control of its workforce. Stuart Brandes, in his classic, American Welfare Capitalism, also postulated that company housing was one means of controlling employees. Hoagland, however, while going over similar ground, uses the built environment to further bolster this view of domestic working class life. She draws on floor plans, photographs, extant structures and contemporary descriptions to understand the everyday existence of the residents of the mine towns.
Hoagland opens each chapter with the story of one working class family living in a company town, Joseph and Antonia Grubesch Putrich. While the Putrich house is no longer extant and the family left little documentation, their house played an important role in the 1913 strike in the Copper Country, as this region of Michigan is known. Because of that. contemporary accounts reveal much about the Putrich residence. The Putrichs, following their marriage in 1907, moved into a small four room company house. By 1910, they housed seven borders along with their own growing family and one servant. The Putrich house was a common example of a simple housing plan used throughout the Copper Country. Over time, other plans developed, as concepts regarding the housing of the working class also evolved. The inclusion of amenities such as indoor bathrooms, closets, and hallways reflected changing expectations not only by management but among the workers themselves. The appearance of hallways, for example, meant that bedrooms could be accessed individually, without having to go through an adjacent bedroom, thus providing greater privacy for the inhabitants. The addition of such spaces also meant that the houses themselves had to be bigger, which also happened over time.
Hoagland’s analysis focuses on the Copper Country from the 1840s through the end of World War I. In that time, the built environment changed to reflect what American industrialists believed was necessary to the smooth operation of their enterprises. By the early twentieth century, theories abounded over how best to deal with the burgeoning unskilled labor force—theories that evolved into a system known as welfare capitalism. This method of worker control manifested itself in diverse ways—including in the various schemes for housing the working class.
The author’s discussion of the 1913 strike is especially relevant to prevailing notions on the part of management about methods for squelching unionization. The strike, which began on July 23, 1913, dragged on into the following April. It was a strike marked by much violence, including the showdown at the Putrich house, where two unionists were killed by local deputies. It was also defined by contested space, “including how public space and private homes were defined when the company owned nearly all the land.” The relationship between company owned space and other space is critical to understanding the dynamics of the Copper Country and Hoagland does an excellent job in delineating this aspect of the area’s labor history. As she notes, in many mining communities which were torn by labor/management conflict, evictions of strikers was the norm. But in the Copper Country, “there were few evictions. Instead the companies used their houses to favor certain workers, to engender company loyalty, to keep wages down, and use as a propaganda tool in the battle for public opinion.”
Hoagland discusses other aspects of Copper Country towns, including the role of homeownership. In the Copper Country, different strategies for homeownership emerged, including the establishment of buildings and loans, buying homes from companies that were going out of business, and building a house on land rented from the company. The author views home ownership as antithetical to the company town; while this may have been true in the Copper Country, there are examples of company housing in other places where the management did build houses specifically to sell to its employees and even established a mechanism for providing the mortgage. In other words, company housing and home ownership were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Hoagland also examines the evolution of modern amenities such as electricity, central heating and indoor plumbing. What she discovered was that while the size of the residence spoke to class differentiation in the older company houses, by the time of World War I, new units defined class not by the size of the house, but by the kinds of conveniences that were incorporated in the structure.
The copper companies not only constructed residences, but they also included amenities such as churches, schools, libraries and bathhouses. While these structures appear to be examples of corporate benevolence, they too were contested spaces. The very size of the buildings reveals what Hoagland refers to as “the architecture of paternalism.” Not all of the employees basked in the reflected glow of the company; in some quarters, such as among union supporters, these structures were viewed as company tools to control the workforce. Many immigrants, especially from southern and eastern Europe, “probably did not feel welcome…Immigrant women, especially were less likely to speak English and would have been less likely to circulate freely in the community.” In spite of this, Hoagland provides evidence that many of the employees and their families took advantage of the company-provided amenities.
The final chapter ties the book together by looking at the preservation (or lack thereof) of the built environment. The author focuses on two structures, one of which was demolished and the other saved. The tale of two buildings vividly expresses the still-contested ground in the Copper Country, only now it is a battle of how events are remembered and interpreted.
Italian Hall, which was one of the most significant Copper Country structures, is no longer standing, yet it was the scene of a tragedy during the 1913 strike. It is the site clearly identified with the workers. At Christmas, 1913, a party was organized for the children of the strikers at Italian Hall. About 500 children and 175 parents attended. At one point, someone supposedly yelled “Fire,” which caused a panic among the partygoers. The room where the party occurred was on the second floor of the building and there was only one exit—the front door. In trying to escape, people ran down the stairs; some tripped and fell and others fell on top. In the end, seventy people died, including fifty-eight children. At the time, the tragic event became a bone of contention. No one claimed responsibility and on one was ever convicted of any crime. The Western Federation of Miners could have taken advantage of the incident to maintain public support of the strike, but did not do so and eventually the strike ended the following April.
Hoagland notes that there are two questions that impact memory of the event that have never been resolved: “who, if anyone, cried fire? And how and why were people trapped in a stairwell.” She explores both of these questions and the various interpretations that have arisen about the event over time. Eventually, in 1984, despite the establishment of a Friends group to save Italian Hall, it was demolished. The author attributes the unfortunate demise of the building to the unpleasant events surrounding the structure, especially its reminder of strife in the community. The only element left is the arched door surround, which now stands in a memorial park on the site of Italian Hall, dedicated to the memory of the Italian Hall’s victims. There have been other attempts to interpret and preserve the memories of the incident as well as of the history of labor relations in general, including songs, poems, public art, and videos, but the building itself is now only a memory.
The other structure that Hoagland examines is the Calumet Theater, which met a very different fate than Italian Hall. The author recounts the history of the structure and its role in the community. It began life as a venue for live performances and then became a motion picture theater in 1913 and converted to sound in 1929. By the 1960s, it was no longer a viable operation, but the community would not let the building die. In 1971, rehabilitation began, funded by several entities. Since that time, various efforts have tried to keep the theater afloat and functioning in the community.
The author believes that the concerted preservation efforts directed at the Calumet Theater were a part of a larger endeavor to engage in what is now called “heritage tourism.” When the effort to develop a Disneyesque park called Coppertown USA, which included a mix of historic buildings and new construction, failed, the community decided to pursue federal funding through the establishment of the Keweenaw National Historic Park, which opened in 1992, includes five buildings that the author contends “indicates the park’s involvement in the paternalistic landscape.” The park buildings are the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company’s headquarters, office building, warehouse library, and non-company Union Building which was a meeting hall for fraternal organizations. Nineteen other sites throughout the community were designated Keweenaw Heritage Sites, including the Calumet Theater and Coppertown. These elements of the built environment were meant to help tell the story of the Copper Country, which is heavy on the area’s mining history. Hoagland notes that many elements of the region’s past are excluded from these sites, including the rich ethnic diversity and the impact of deindustrialization.
She also reminds us that in “thinking about how people remember the past, it is important to recognize which people.”
She is so right. Even with elements of the built environment still extant, the tendency, especially in deindustrialized communities, is to engage in historical erasure. Her work raises issues about the nature of the historic preservation movement in the United States and its emphasis on heritage as opposed to history. The author has done an admirable job in delineating the working class history of the Copper Country. Alison Hoagland demonstrates how important it is for historians to utilize all types of evidence to reconstruct and interpret the past.
Larry DeWitt, Review of Victor Davis Hanson’s "The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern" (Bloomsbury Press, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (7-13-10)
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a serial misanthrope who thinks that liberal society is ruining America. He deplores the excesses of the multicultural moment (detailed in his 2001 book The Bonfire of the Humanities); he resents the ne'er-do-wells in line at the supermarket shopping with their food stamp credit cards; he deplores the presence of illegal Mexican immigrants in his formerly bucolic California hometown (his 2003 book, Mexifornia, gave full vent to this grievance); he bemoans the fact that today’s young people use libraries to hang out in and to play with their various electronic devices, hardly noticing the books; he is in despair over the flagging interest in the classics (another book, Who Killed Homer?, in 2001); vandalism, he tells us indignantly, has forced him to build a fortified mailbox outside his rural farmstead; “prissy” liberals have prevented victory over terrorism and have produced a steep decline in the study of military history, and on and on. His list is long and his wounds grievous.
Hanson likes to represent himself as a lapsed Democrat, but I doubt even Scoop Jackson would have signed on to his jeremiad against modern America. Hanson spends most of his time these days writing and opining from the neoconservatives’ West Coast bunker at the Hoover Institution, near Stanford University. Technically, the Hoover Institution is part of Stanford, but I suspect most of the Stanford campus is embarrassed by the association. Hanson also writes a weekly column for the National Review Online, where some of his more extreme rhetoric finds its way into the blogosphere.
Hanson is a classicist whose study of the deep past produces in him a great certainty about the events of his own day. To say that he is a cheerleader for conservative causes (he was one of the most voluble defenders of George W. Bush and the Iraq War) would be to mistake him. While he may be standing on the sidelines in his cheerleading uniform, he usually is not so much cheering for the home team as he is sneering at the opposing team across the field. He is a sneerleader. Hanson is legendary for the nastiness of his attacks on “the liberal agenda.” Think Rush Limbaugh with a doctorate.
The kind of progressive hopefulness that the Obama campaign captured in 2008 is exactly the kind of sentiment that causes Hanson’s lips to pucker. Indeed, Hanson calls President Obama, “self-righteous, self-centered, and prissy” and excoriates him for being a “global penitent” for America around the world. Here is how Hanson saw the 2008 campaign and its aftermath:
During the campaign there was Obama the Humble, offering creepy messianic rhetoric about subsiding seas and cooling temperatures, in a mise-en-scène of faux-Greek temple convention sets, Latin mottos and the Obama “seal,” schoolchildren singing Obama songs, and the staged Victory Column backdrops. All that led right into ten months of an even more megalomaniac climate in which dissent — whether from Fox News, the Tea Party protests, or the Chamber of Commerce — was seen as blasphemous. (1)
One may also have some doubts about his judgment. Hanson is the man who told us that Donald Rumsfeld was the equal of George Marshall, and who said of Rumsfeld in 2004: he is “a proud and honest-speaking visionary" whose "hard work and insight are bringing us ever closer to victory.”
But rather like the proverbial broken clock that gets the time right twice in a while, Hanson writes so much, and speaks so much, and opines so much, that even he gets it right on occasion. In the 13 chapters of the present book, Hanson strikes the right hour a time or two.
The new book is a collection of previously published (but updated and expanded) essays and reviews on the history of war, from ancient Greece to modern-day Iraq, all threaded together by Hanson’s main theme, which can be stated in a sentence: “War is an enduring part of human nature and so we best adjust our attitudes accordingly.” His subsidiary thesis—while less obvious—explains much about his politics and his scholarship. I think I can state it too in a sentence: “Liberals hope for a future without war and endless conflict; in this they are naïve, and hence, dangerous.”
Jim Cullen, Review of Ira Berlin's "The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations" (Viking, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (7-13-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) and Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]
Ira Berlin is a national treasure. Scholars of American history are indebted to him for his pivotal editorial role in the vast collective project Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, a multi-volume treasure-trove of primary source materials that capture the African American experience from slavery through freedom, which appeared through the 1980s and 1990s. In the last decade, Berlin has moved from the hard and important work of excavating and arranging these sources to contextualizing and explaining them in a series of books that greatly enhance our understanding of the black experience in the United States from the colonial era to the present. To say that this is a story he could tell in his sleep is to make a statement not about his prose -- which is notable for its clarity -- but rather the depth of his saturation in American history and his ability to convey information with seeming effortlessness.
Berlin's latest book, The Making of African America, manages to distill this vast story from an intriguing angle. He makes the arresting assertion that black history can be seen as a set of four migrations. The first, and best-known, is the so-called "Middle Passage," the brutal experience of enslavement and transportation across the Atlantic Ocean. The numbers involved grew over the course of the seventeenth century and ebbed by the end of the eighteenth. The second great migration was the movement of slaves from the Atlantic seaboard to the nation's interior in the first half of the nineteenth century, where they were used to build the great cotton kingdoms of the plantation South. The third -- long actually called "The Great Migration" -- was the movement of emancipated slaves from the Southern countryside to Northern (and Southern) cities in the first half of the twentieth century. The final migration, now currently underway, is that of the peoples of African descent (including Latin America) into the United States, finally weaving black people into the fabric of traditional immigration history. This is the most novel chapter of the book, and brings this epic tale up to date.
Throughout the book, Berlin demonstrates a supple ability to make large generalizations while texturing them with counter-currents. He is attuned, for example, to the dialectical way an emphasis on movement alternates with a sense of place, a tension captured in Black Atlantic scholar Paul Gilroy's phrase "routes and roots." He notes the way black people had their identities imposed on them -- they only became "African," a designation without much meaning for tribal peoples until they arrived on American shores -- as well as the ways they resisted and reinvented themselves every step of the way. He also notes that even words like "black" and "African American" have become newly fraught, reflecting tensions between native and immigrant -- tensions comparable to those that also occurred in earlier migrations. Berlin is able to illustrate many of his examples with recourse to the great African-American musical tradition that courses from shouts to hip-hop, reflecting simultaneous continuity and change. He ends the book with a discussion of Barack Obama, who embodies many of the themes of traditional African American history as well as the more recent black immigrant experience.
An easy read that's notable for its brevity (240 pages), The Making of African America is a powerful teaching tool. That's because it's so neatly segmented, as well as so broad in its narrative trajectory. There's something wonderfully skillful about this book; it represents the finest aspects of the contemporary historical enterprise, and is likely to be a durable resource for some time to come.
Luther Spoehr, Review of Bruce Watson's "Freedom Summer: The Savage Season that Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy" (Viking, 2010).
Source: Providence Sunday Journal (7-11-10)
[Luther Spoehr teaches about the history of the 1960s, among other things, at Brown University.]
In the summer of 1964, the state of Mississippi found itself in the glare of history’s headlights. Seven hundred college students, organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, entered America’s most “closed society” to set up “Freedom Schools” and register black voters. They were greeted by night riders, gunfire, dynamite, arson, and murder.
Angilee Shah, Review of Stephen Kinzer’s "Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future" (Times Books, 2010)
[Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.]
Stephen Kinzer’s 2007 book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq was fourteen chapters about fourteen instances in which the United States “was the decisive factor in the overthrow of a particular government.” It demonstrated that Kinzer has an uncanny ability to draw unexpected links between histories of many places. Reset is another accomplishment in that regard. It is a dual history of emerging democracies, histories that resonate with America’s own democratic narrative. Iran and Turkey, Kinzer argues, make for excellent partners in the Middle East because they have, embedded in their cultures, a struggle for democracy.
If all this sounds too far-fetched, particularly with oft-maligned Iran, Kinzer’s work begs the reader to take a longer view. In the early 1900s a democratic movement in Iran arose against — and ultimately capitulated to — British and Russian occupiers. “Iran’s first experiment with democracy was over, crushed by foreign powers,” Kinzer writes. “It left a vivid imprint on the nation’s collective psyche.”
Kinzer parallels this history of Iran with the rise of Turkey as a democratic nation. He chronicles the journey of Mustafa Kemal, better known as Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. While Turkey became a republic with an exiled caliphate, Reza Shah, installed in a British-engineered military coup in Iran, sought to create an enlightened kingdom. Both leaders valued higher education and women’s rights, but brutally repressed opposition and were uncomfortable with ethnic diversity. Atatürk’s reforms took hold and created institutions that facilitated Turkey’s bumpy road to democracy. Reza Shah’s legacy was a propped-up two-generation dynasty.
In the throes of the Cold War, the United States removed the democratically-elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in the covert Operation Ajax and installed Reza Shah’s son. “[American leaders] might have looked at Iran’s democracy and recognized a partner…” Kinzer writes. “Instead they looked at its nationalization of an oil company and saw an enemy.” Turkey’s military might during the Korean War, on the other hand, made it a partner of the U.S., and eventually a member of NATO.
U.S. actions in Iran set the stage for the Islamic Revolution and the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini. Clerics emerged as leaders from the wreckage of a corrupt regime that had crushed civil society. Relations between Iran and the United States deteriorated. In the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld, moonlighting as a Middle East envoy, allied with Saddam Hussein and helped Iraq cover up its use of poison gas and “unconventional weapons.”
Kinzer’s history continues, folding in short narratives of Saudi Arabia-US relations and of Israel and Palestine. While the United States’ string of foreign policy failures in the Middle East has been documented at length in many recent books, Kinzer’s work ultimately is an ambitious blueprint, a plea really, for the United States to take a different course. He wants the United States to loosen its joined-at-the-hip policies with Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabian money. He suggests using Turkey, with its democratic and Muslim institutions, as a mediator. Turkey, he says, is in a unique position given its good relationships with Hamas and the Taliban, as well as with Israel and the United States. Kinzer asks for diplomacy with Iran based on the recognition that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will not hold power forever, and that Iran’s theocracy belies the persistence of democratic values. “Agreement comes first,” he says. “Changes in behavior follow.”
Excerpt: “Evening was falling over Tehran when news of that day’s terror attacks [September 11, 2001] was first broadcast. Spontaneously, groups of people carrying candles began walking through the streets to express sympathy and support for the United States. They converged at one of the city’s main squares and stood in silent witness, reflecting a visceral sense of solidarity that many Iranians, despite the vicissitudes of history, feel with Americans. This vigil was the only pro-American demonstration held that day in any Muslim country.”
Further Reading: All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
Jim Cullen, Review of Peter Doggett's "You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup" (Harper, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (7-7-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) and Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]
I'll admit that I was seduced into buying this book on the basis of its cover: the image of a green Apple on black vinyl conjured up strong emotions from my childhood. (This a time when such a logo had nothing to do with computers; as we learn here, it was an inspiration to Steve Jobs and the basis of a whole lot of subsequent litigation as a result.) Though I was barely in elementary school when the Beatles were still a group -- my first memory of the band was Let It Be -- I nevertheless grew up with the music and followed the members' solo careers avidly in the 1970s. So while I knew much of their story, having read some of the countless books, I welcomed a volume with the somewhat offbeat angle of apparently focusing on their business empire and their post-Beatle careers.
Alas, this is one of those cases -- and it seems to me that there are a lot of them these days, perhaps a direct result of marketers determining the title of books -- where we're somewhat misled. The subtitle here is "The Beatles After the Breakup," but a full third of this 350-page book covers very familiar territory that stretches from the creation of the band's corporate arm, Apple, in 1967 and the group's disintegration in wrangles over the band's and the company's management three years later. Moreover, such segmentation represents the worst of all worlds, because it seems to me that if you're going to trudge through this tawdry story, you should at least go back far enough to understand what was lost, i.e. to spend a little time describing the magical collaboration of the early sixties that led to the creation of Apple in the first place, before you go on to explain how a company that was created to be a force of counter-cultural liberation became a millstone around the neck of anyone (except lawyers) who ever had anything to do with it.
Music journalist Peter Doggett, who began his career writing for The Beatles Book fanzine 30 years ago, and got access to many important figures, including Yoko Ono (but not the two living Beatles), demonstrates mastery of the truly byzantine detail surrounding the breakup of the band. But after a certain point, it becomes a little like learning the details of a parent's divorce: you just don't want to know or be reminded. Here I refer not simply to the numbing financial maneuvers, but also the worst traits of the principals: John Lennon's solipsism; Paul McCartney's petty desire for control; George Harrison's dour moralism; Ringo Starr's pathetic insecurity. Ironically, for all their personal differences, you can actually attribute each of these traits to the others.
The lost opportunity here is any serious attempt to evaluate the four solo careers musically. To be sure, the pickings are arguably slim, and it's clear that none of the Beatles produced much in the way of memorable music after 1980. Still, all four members produced records that both registered commercially at the time and reveal something about what they actually brought to the band in its heyday. (This is particularly true of Harrison, whose talents were less prodigious than those of Lennon or McCartney but who nevertheless enjoyed surprisingly durable commercial success in the late eighties with his 1987 album Cloud Nine and as a member of the Traveling Wilburys, and who was capable of real wit, as attested to his work with the Monty Python troupe in its satire of the Beatles, the fictional Rutles of the 1978 mock-documentary All You Need is Cash.) John Lennon's first two post Beatles' albums, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Imagine (1971), are harrowing even now in their honesty and intensity, and hold their own with anything the Beatles did. Yet we hear almost nothing about the making of these albums, much less "Imagine," a song I regard as overrated but was nevertheless a generational anthem.
You Never Give Me Your Money does make a few points worth noting, however. Perhaps the most important is the flip side of the complaints here: The Beatles really gave us the best of themselves in 1962-70, and we weren't missing much in the oft-invoked, but never realized, desire on their part to reunite. (Their one effort in this regard, the posthumous-Lennon group collaborations on his songs "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love," part of The Beatles Anthology documentary in 1995, was underwhelming.) Another is that it's McCartney, not Lennon, who has a better claim on the spirit of experimentation that characterized the group's later records -- indeed, Lennon's work looked musically backward, not forward, in the final phases of his career. Perhaps most important is Doggett's suggestion that Lennon's reunion with Yoko Ono in 1975 after a tempestuous rupture in their notorious relationship effectively short-circuited a promising artistic revival. He argues Lennon was a hen-pecked husband, not a happy stay-at-home dad, in the years that followed.
It is curious, though, how a man who professes in his acknowledgments to consider the band a formative influence on his life and career has so little love to express or explain. And such, You Never Give Me Your Money serves as a cautionary tale. It's all fine and good and necessary to say why something (or someone) doesn't work. The real challenge lies in helping us understand and care about who or what does. Surely there are more good Beatle books there.
Jim Cullen, Review of Williamjames Hoffer's "The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War" (Johns Hopkins, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (7-2-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) and Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]
It's the classic dilemma of the History teacher: On the hand, the most interesting classes come from discussions of specific subjects (usually, but not always, grounded in primary sources). On the other, it's hard for students to really understand those subjects without context, and context takes time. You can deliver it by lecturing, which can be efficient in limited doses, though rarely comprehensive. You can also provide it by assigning textbook reading, though this tends to be regarded as dull when it's done at all (and textbooks, as any cost-conscious student knows, have become very expensive).
The new "Witness to History" series launched by Johns Hopkins University Press under the editorial supervision of the father-son team of Peter Charles and Williamjames Hoffer offers a solution to this problem. These short volumes on prismatic moments in U.S. history also provide brief overviews of the period immediately preceding and following the event in question. As such, the books represent a variation on Oxford University Press's "Pivotal Moments in U.S. History" (which are more interpretively ambitious) and Bedford's "Series in History and Culture," series which packs an editorial apparatus around a set of primary sources. "Witness to History" books, by contrast, are brief secondary sources pitched to an undergraduate audience. As such, they may hit a commercial sweet spot.
The inaugural volume in the series is The Caning of Charles Sumner, by Hoffer the younger (Williamjames). This notorious episode of antebellum history will be familiar to any student of the Civil War, though usually as a passing one; indeed, I'm not aware of any recent scholarly study, which makes it a shrewd choice for a 133-page treatment. After a brief introduction, the book opens with a detailed rendition of the single minute on May 22, 1856 that South Carolina Congressman Preston beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner within an inch of his life with a cane inside the hallowed halls of Congress. As Hoffer shows, this eruption of violence was by no means an isolated incident, but reflected a lingering frontier ethos -- one with a Southern, Code Duello tinge -- that characterized national political life until the Civil War. Hoffer also shows that notwithstanding some intriguing parallels between the two men, Brooks and Sumner were virtual synechdoches for the two sections they represented in a political system that was veering toward a breakdown.
The second chapter of the book then steps back from this moment and retraces the origins of the antebellum crisis in the half-century preceding the Brooks-Sumner affair. This is a very familiar story that stretches from the framing of the Constitution to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But what it lacks in novelty -- not the point, in any case -- it makes up for in compression, distilling the era into a compact 30 pages: a night's homework. The chapter that follows then looks at the aftermath of the caning, tracing the legal process (Brooks got off absurdly easy) and media treatment of the case, the latter in particular intriguing because its modern infrastructure was just emerging at the time. Hoffer's point here-- the thesis of the book, really -- is that the incident shows that by 1856 the two sides in the slavery debate were essentially incapable of really communicating with each other, as partisans simply interpreted events to suit their purposes and mobilize their constituencies in ways that would finally culminate in Civil War. I can imagine a nice conversation coming out of this about the possibilities and limits of forging consensus generally in American politics, and the three chapters as essentially a week's worth of curriculum in a survey or Civil War course.
The final two chapters trace what happened after the Brooks-Sumner affair, tracing landmark moments such as the Dred Scott Case, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and secession. But these chapters may also suggest the limits of the caning as a historical peg, because while it did help frame the issues in the presidential election of 1856, in which the Republican Party emerged as a national force, the event quickly became yesterday's news. Brooks was dead within about a year, and Sumner's influence declined relative to other members of the Republican Radical wing. In this regard, the caning was perhaps less consequential than, say, John Brown's Raid. This is not so much an argument against a book about the caning of Sumner than a shorter one with a smaller historical radius, though this in turn raises the question of the viability of effectively selling 100 pages of text for $20, the book's list price (about $15 on Amazon.com). Interestingly, Preston Brooks's defense of his actions -- an obvious primary source foil for The Caning of Charles Sumner -- recently became available as a $1 Kindle book at Amazon. Hoffer's book is not available in this format, something that would surely improve its utility, not to mention its durability.
The second book in the "Witness to History" series, Tim Lehman's Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, Custer, and the Destinies of Nations, is also now available. Unlike the caning of Sumner, Little Bighorn is a topic that has not lacked chroniclers, most recently Nathaniel Philbrick. This may reflect that somewhat larger bulk (about 200 pages) of Lehman's volume. But again, this is an undergraduate-friendly text that would seem to slot easily into a course on the West as well as the survey. But the key word here may well be "seem": given the acute sense of technological transition in publishing, and the acute sense of economic transition in academe, any solutions to classic dilemmas appear to be provisional. For the moment, at least, these books are helpful.
Ron Briley, Review of Robert Elias's "The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad" (The New Press, 2010)
In The Empire Strikes Out, Robert Elias, who teaches law and politics at the University of San Francisco, interrogates popular assumptions of baseball as America’s pastime, while suggesting that perhaps William Appleman Williams provides insights into baseball and American life more valuable than the exploits of Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Barry Bonds. Elias contends that Major League Baseball officials did, indeed, succeed in making the sport an integral part of American expansionism from the 1880s into the twenty-first century. By attaching itself to American empire and militarism, however, so-called Organized Baseball (in which American Major League Baseball assumes that it is the only legitimate voice for the sport in the global marketplace) has earned the ire and resentment of many in the world who might, otherwise, be attracted to the mental and physical challenges of the sport. As a true patriot and baseball fan, Elias, nevertheless, believes that the game has the potential to detach itself from the pursuit of empire and profit by pushing “the nation to live up to its ideas.”
In his chronological survey of baseball and expansionism, Elias points to Albert Spalding’s 1888 World Tour as establishing the pattern of baseball’s close connection with American exceptionalism and manifest destiny. Seeking markets for his sporting goods company in Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, and Europe, Spalding identified baseball with America’s civilizing mission in the world. Elias writes, “Spalding’s trip was a model for other industries going abroad. New markets were needed, and imperial conquests offered the solution; such interventions were rationalized by social Darwinism, in the ‘interests of civilization and humanity’ and to proliferate the American dream” (27).
Baseball also embraced the Spanish-American War, establishing an identification of the sport with militarism which still resonates in patriotic celebrations at American ballparks. American service personnel brought the game with them to Cuba and the Philippines as part of the nation’s civilizing mission. Cubans initially embraced the game as offering a cultural sporting alternative to Spanish bull fighting, but they would later take great pleasure in challenging imperialism by defeating the Yankees at their own game. Military conquest brought America’s game to the Philippines, and numerous leagues were formed during the occupation. Baseball’s popularity, however, declined after Filipino independence was granted. The Filipinos had fiercely resisted annexation, and baseball as representative of American imperialism failed to resonate in the long run.
As Elias notes, Japan was a special case. While baseball was introduced to Japan by missionaries and the American military, the game was not associated with conquest and occupation. Accordingly, Elias argues that the Japanese found baseball a useful means through which to implement a modern national identity by asserting control over their own version of the game; instituting a policy of Japanese baseball imperialism in their dealings with China, Taiwan, and Korea. In fact, contemporary baseball may be more accurately described as the national pastime of Japan rather than the United States.
Japanese exceptionalism, notwithstanding, baseball officials continued to follow the flag, supporting American military and business ventures into Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. The sport’s identification with militarism was furthered by the Mills Commission which fostered the founding myth that baseball was conceived in Cooperstown, New York by General Abner Doubleday. By associating itself with the state, professional baseball was able to establish a monopoly that was recognized by the court system.
Nevertheless, baseball’s special status was challenged by the sport’s somewhat ambiguous response to the First World War. While Major League Baseball embraced the war effort by fund raising and having players conduct military drills, many Americans were critical of how some baseball owners and players attempted to circumvent the government’s work or fight mandate. Elias maintains that baseball officials vowed to reaffirm their alliance with American militarism so that allegations of wartime shirking would never arise again and threaten the sport’s status.
As the United States edged toward entering the Second World War, both politicians and baseball management placed the sport on a pedestal, insisting that the game’s continuation during the national emergency was essential for the nation’s morale and well being. Selling war bonds and having most of their star players drifted into the military (where many of these athletes spent their service time playing for Armed Forces clubs) allowed baseball to embrace patriotism and militarism during the Second World War. And even though there was a shortage of players and the St. Louis Browns resorted to the employment of a one-armed outfielder, Major League Baseball continued to affirm the segregationist policies of the military by failing to enlist black players during the war years.
Nevertheless, Elias observes that Pearl Harbor and the war with Japan in the Pacific demonstrated the shortcomings of baseball diplomacy. Concluding that baseball “failed” by becoming entangled in U. S. military adventures, Elias argues, “U. S. political and military leaders had used the game to further imperial policies, and thus baseball became associated with American aggression. For Japan, baseball was a symbol of U. S. intervention as much as it was a common denominator and peacekeeper” (124).
Despite the obvious limitations of the Japanese example, baseball eagerly enlisted in the Cold War crusade against the Soviet Union and communism; again asserting that the sport modeled the virtues of American democracy. Recognizing that the sport’s color line provided propaganda opportunities for the nation’s ideological enemies, Baseball Commissioner A. B. “Happy” Chandler supported the signing of Jackie Robinson by Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers. In embracing the interventionist Cold War policies of the United States, Elias,however, suggests that Organized Baseball antagonized many third world citizens. The sport’s association with militarism and patriotism was also evident in Organized Baseball’s support for Little League and American Legion baseball. Wrapping itself in the flag allowed baseball to suffer minimal losses from conscription during the wars in Korea and Vietnam. In fact, Elias intimates that there was somewhat of a gap between baseball’s patriotic rhetoric and the sport’s willingness to protect top prospects from the draft. Nevertheless, Elias concludes that Organized Baseball’s identification with the quagmire in Vietnam led to the growing popularity of football; a game which seemed better suited to the violence plaguing American society in the 1960s and 1970s.
Despite these problems, during the 1980s baseball aligned with the nostalgic vision of President Ronald Reagan; regaining a degree of influence in the culture by supporting Reagan’s military interventions in Central America and the Persian Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush. The failure of Fidel Castro to allow Cuban players to be plucked by Organized Baseball increased support for the embargo against Cuba, and Elias suggests that the desire to embrace American power after the Vietnam experience encouraged baseball to turn a blind eye to the growing use of steroids by the sport’s leading home run hitters.
Major League Baseball also adhered to the economic exploitation of globalism by seeking new sources of cheap labor in the Caribbean where players could be employed free from the restrictions imposed upon the signing of young athletes in the United States. Elias perceives the rise of baseball academies in Latin America as somewhat dangling the prospect of the American dream before economically-strapped Latinos; few of whom would ever be able to sustain a career in baseball. The sport also relegates the production of baseballs and replica merchandise to sweatshops in Latin America and Asia. In addition, Elias is critical of the World Baseball Classic as a means for Major League Baseball to maintain control of foreign markets by focusing upon individual stars as “trailblazers” who can be signed by Organized Baseball and then marketed in their home nations.
Elias is especially perplexed by the decision of Organized Baseball to endorse President George W. Bush’s war on terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—or what Elias terms “foreign policy on steroids.” Baseball games today regularly include displays of military hardware and fly overs by jets and tributes to the troops accompanied by the patriotic trimmings of flag decals on uniforms and the singing of both the “Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America.” And there is no room for dissenting voices in these militaristic and patriotic displays promoting the war effort. Celebrating the return of professional baseball to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2003, this reviewer was stunned to witness a fireworks display accompanied by a recording of George W. Bush’s speech announcing the shock and awe campaign launched against Iraq.
Elias concludes, however, the decision to cast its lot with American Empire has cost the sport dearly. As the international critics of American empire grow more strident, baseball‘s reputation and place in the world have suffered. Organized Baseball has sought a special relationship with American empire, and as a business it has often prospered at the expense of the sport. Elias. who loves the game, urges baseball to separate itself from militarism and empire by championing the principles of equal opportunity contained in the promise of the Declaration of Independence and American dream.
The Empire Strikes Out is a provocative work of cultural criticism which clearly recognizes the politics of sport. Cloaking sport within the flag certainly does not de-politicize sport, and Elias is willing to question this hypocrisy. Elias’s work is carefully documented in an exhaustive survey of both primary and secondary sources on the relationship between American expansionism and Organized Baseball. Those who profess to love the sport of baseball and claim that it represents what is best in American life would do well to read Elias carefully and see if it is possible to rescue the game from those who would exploit it in the name of empire, militarism, and the search for markets abroad.
Jim Cullen, Review of Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists: A Novel" (The Dial Press, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (6-29-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) and Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]
It's a measure of how rapidly our media order has changed that it seems almost unrealistic to even imagine a small, economically viable, English-language newspaper in the Rome of 2006-07, let alone one that managed to publish everyday without a web presence. And indeed this premise -- actually, the imminent collapse of the paper functions more like the plot -- is the most far-fetched aspect of this clever, sharply observed little book, which made a brief appearance on the New York Times bestseller list this spring (no doubt thanks in part to
a page one rave review in the the paper's Book Review by the ever-shrewd Christopher Buckley). Elegiac without ever brooding, historically resonant while insistently contemporary, The Imperfectionists is perfect summer reading.
It's worth calling attention to the subtitle here: "a novel." You might glean from reading the table of contents, or even in plunging into to the first chapter, that you've embarked on a book of short stories. And there would be good reason to think so: each segment of the book is a fully realized character portrait of people involved in publishing the newspaper, from publisher to reader. But it's soon apparent that the pieces interlock, further cemented by flashbacks to the founding of the unnamed paper and its fate across three generations of ownership.
So it is, for example, that we see the driven young chief financial officer of the paper, who finds herself on an intercontinental flight seated next to a copy-editor she just fired (turns out she likes him more than she ever would imagined -- maybe). Or a lethargic obituary writer who deals with tragedy in an unexpected way by finally coming to terms with his job. Or a corrections editor who discovers that the friend he's idolized his whole life is not who he thought he was (no crime there). In every case, the portrayal of the character in question has just enough of a twist to keep you off-balance and intrigued, as Tom Rachman manages to steer clear of cliches and soar with an artistry that lands gently by moving on to the next little epiphany.
He also manages to turn to produce some striking prose. The middle-aged owner of the paper sees a woman he loves for the first time in twenty years, and "glimpsed in a the tilt of her head, in her hesitant smile, the woman he had known. By fading, the past only seemed to sharpen before him." A young business writer "is on a diet that started, roughly at the age of twelve. She's thirty-six now and still dreaming of butter cookies." (In love no less than cuisine, she feeds, perhaps distressingly so, by providing for others.) A dying intellectual marvels at how thoroughly she has been in the thrall of her own ambition. "It's like being a slave all your life, then learning one day that you never had a master, and returning to work all the same." Such pithy insights are all the more impressive when one considers that they're imagined by a young man of 35 writing his first book.
Yet the sober moments here never manage to dampen the spring in this novel's step. Actually, the book feels a bit like a tourist excursion, notably good at evoking the rhythms of everyday life in the timelessness of Rome, where most of the book is set. The Imperfectionists is the literary equivalent of a margarita on the rocks: bracing, salty, and refreshing. Find room for it in your suitcase (or on your iPad).
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