Historians/History

Was the Economic Miracle of World War II Fact or Fiction?

by Richard Striner

In 1932, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a prophecy: the American depression would last and never end until the nation’s leaders could identify “some object which is admitted even by the deadheads to be a legitimate excuse for largely increasing the expenditure of someone on something!”Only spending on the scale of total war would do the trick.“In the past,” he observed, “we have not infrequently had to wait for a war to terminate a major depression. I hope that in the future ... we shall be ready to spend on the enterprises of peace what the financial maxims of the past would only allow us to spend on the devastations of war.”Many people after World War II would conclude that Keynes had been right.

Roosevelt, Hughes, and the Battle over the New Deal: Interview with James Simon

by Robin Lindley

This spring may see the issuance of one of the most significant U.S. Supreme Court decisions in decades as the Court weighs in on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, President Obama’s major legislative achievement. A politically polarized Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives led by Chief Justice John Roberts, will determine the fate of the controversial new law by June. The decision may well go beyond the health care act itself and alter the course of the modern federal administrative state.Seventy-five years ago, the nation witnessed another conflict that pitted the Court against the chief executive. Then Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, a Republican, faced off against a popular Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who derided the Court for striking down several key New Deal laws including the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

No More Victory Days?

by Joseph E. Persico

May 8 marks the sixty-seventh anniversary of VE Day, marking victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. On that day Americans poured into the streets, horns blared, factory whistles shrieked, and churches filled. President Harry S. Truman proclaimed over the radio, “The flags of freedom fly over all Europe.”Since that day, we have known plenty of wars, but no VK Day, VN Day, VI Day, or VA Day marking conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.Why? What changed?For one thing, people grow war-weary. U.S participation in World War II lasted three years and eight months. By contrast, the Iraq War lasted eight years and nine months. Afghanistan has gone on for ten years and seven months and still counting.

How Did TV Remember the '92 L.A. Riots?

by Jill A. Edy

Twenty years ago last week, Americans were transfixed by TV images of Los Angeles burning. It was no Hollywood disaster movie. Four Los Angeles police officers charged with beating an African American motorist were acquitted of wrong-doing. Hours later, the city erupted in riots that left 51 dead and over $700 million in estimated damages. Last weekend, television news remembered, offering its particular brand of popular history.It may seem counterintuitive to think about news as a repository for history; after all, the main point of news is supposed to be to tell us what’s “new.” Yet news, and particularly television news, is a vital resource for developing publicly shared understandings of the recent past. For most Americans, a lot has happened since their last U.S. history class, and to get perspective on what happened and what it meant, many of them will turn to the narratives created by TV journalists. What do these TV histories teach us about the past?

Republicans, Mormons, and Jews: The Unlikely 1940s Alliance That Reshaped U.S. Mideast Policy

by Rafael Medoff

Herbert Hoover, a midwestern Quaker, was the only living ex-president of the United States.Senator Elbert Thomas, Democrat of Utah, was the most influential Mormon in America.Benzion Netanyahu and Hillel Kook were young Jewish activists from Jerusalem.In a span of just six months in 1943-1944, this unlikely interfaith alliance would help change the Roosevelt administration's response to the Holocaust, reshape U.S. policy in the Middle East, and redefined the role of Jews in American politics.* * * * *Netanyahu and Kook, born in Europe and raised in British Mandatory Palestine, traveled to the United States in 1940, hoping to mobilize U.S. support for rescuing Europe's Jews from Hitler and creating a Jewish state. "It was a brand new world for us," Netanyahu told me in one of my interviews with him. "I had never been to America. But I had to learn quickly -- there was no time. The world of European Jewry was going up in flames.

David Barton’s Jefferson

by Martin E. Marty

Our premier historian of late colonial and early republican America, Gordon Wood, while reviewing a book on Roger Williams warms up readers with references to Thomas Jefferson. “It’s easy to believe in the separation of church and state when one has nothing but scorn for all organized religion. That was the position of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s hatred of the clergy and established churches knew no bounds. He thought that members of the ‘priestcraft’ were always in alliance with despots against liberty. For him the divine Trinity “was nothing but ‘Abracadabra’ and ‘hocus-pocus’... Ridicule, he said, was the only weapon to be used against it.”If you wanted to promote the idea of “a Christian America,” one which would privilege one religion, a version of Christianity, and de-privilege all others, and if you want to get back to roots and origins, the last of the “founding fathers” on whom you’d concentrate would be Jefferson. Yet the most ardent public and pop advocate of privilege and virtual establishment, David Barton, cites Jefferson for Bartonian positions which are directly opposite of Jefferson’s. Never heard of David Barton? Most of the historians you would ever meet never heard of him, and if you told them about him and his positions, they would yawn or rage about listing him among those who deal honestly with Jefferson.

May Day: From the Haymarket Massacre to the Occupy Movement

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Many people might be surprised to learn that the May Day celebrations that occurred around the world yesterday were born more than a century ago out of a struggle by American workers for the eight-hour day.The late nineteenth century was a particularly hard and brutal time for working people in the United States. The rise of giant corporations fostered accelerated exploitation of workers in the interests of profit by the wealthy few. In the new, giant factories, it was common for workers to labor from 60 to 80 hours a week. Many workers had a six-day workweek, but a seven-day workweek was the standard for steel mills, oil refineries, paper mills, and other highly mechanized plants. The industrial accident and death rate soared to new heights -- not only thanks to new, dangerous machines and the use of child labor, but because of worker exhaustion. In 1881 alone, an estimated 30,000 American railway workers were killed or injured on the job.

I Did It My Way—By Accident: Lessons from an Unconventional Career

by Ray Smock

This talk will be, in part, a reflection on the history profession in the past half century, but what it is mostly about is stories from my career. I hope what I say has some bearing on the larger aspects of the profession. Historians can look at the big overarching themes when they tell their stories, but they can also try to see the universe in a grain of sand. What this talk is about is just one historian’s tale, one grain in the story of our profession.Just a few months ago reports from the American Historical Association (AHA) convention indicate that newly minted PhDs in history find the job market a frustrating experience. There are more people looking for traditional academic jobs than there are jobs available. A large part of this frustration can be laid at the door of too many history departments that continue to train history students the way they have been trained for the past 100 years. Pick a field of history, study under an expert in that field, read the literature of the field, pass a comprehensive exam, and then write a dissertation of your own based on original research. Next, get it published if at all possible. Find an academic job. Teach students, research, write books, and train another crop of students to follow the same path.

Setting the Record Straight: Harry Dexter White and Soviet Espionage

by R. Bruce Craig

With the recent publication of Benn Steil’s New York Times opinion piece, “Banker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” considerable interest has once again focused on whether Harry Dexter White – an assistant secretary of the Treasury and that department’s key figure in the founding of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – was a Soviet spy. White’s daughter, Joan Pinkham responded to Steil’s assertions by claiming that the evidence the author cited did not establish her father’s guilt. In fact, both Steil and Pinkham loosely played with the facts and twisted the truth about Harry Dexter White’s role with both the founding of the Bretton Woods institutions and the Soviet underground.

The Pineapple that Ate Global History

by Alan Singer

When I was a teenager, Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band recorded one of my all-time favorite tunes, "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago." The band played a blend of Appalachian jug music and banjo combined with sixties psychedelic hippie. The song's lyrics told the story of an alien invasion of planet Earth by space fruits and vegetables. It warned listeners, "You better watch out for the eggplant that ate Chicago, if he's still hungry, your whole country's doomed."It seems the eggplant is back again, this time disguised as a pineapple named "Common Core." It is still voraciously hungry, but instead of attacking cities it is attacking global history, content knowledge in the curriculum, and the education of American children, and if it's still hungry, our "whole country's doomed."

North Carolina's Pursuit of a Master Race

by Edwin Black

Of the more than thirty American states that violated one of the most basic rights of their citizens — the right to procreate — few were as pernicious as North Carolina. Yet the nature of North Carolina's history also illustrates the challenge of obtaining modern-day justice, even when the most energetic efforts are undertaken.Most importantly, the crimes committed by the state in conjunction with the leading academic, scientific, judicial, legal, and medical authorities were never about just improving perceived conditions in North Carolina. Rather, it was always about the state doing its fair share to achieve international race purification. This meant close coordination, cooperation, and synchrony with the most virulent eugenic leaders around the world, from California to Connecticut to Nazi Germany.What North Carolina did was never a local transgression; it was part of a global aggression in pursuit of a master race.

Tim Weiner's "Enemies": The Final Say

by Susan Rosenfeld

First, I agree that Mr. Weiner did NOT “neglect” (my word) the bombings by the Weather Underground and other nefarious acts by more extreme members of the so-called “New Left.” Second, I noted that Mr. Weiner, unlike some FBI critics, demonstrates that presidents influenced the Bureau to conduct the kinds of investigations that skirted or broke the First and Fourth Amendments.

Updated OAH/NCPH 2012 Sessions List (Now with Room Numbers!)

by HNN Staff

The 2012 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians starts in earnest this Thursday in Milwaukee. As always, HNN will be posting updates from the convention floor.Below is a list of interesting sessions at this year's OAH -- if you'll be attending one of this sessions, let us know how it goes on Twitter by tagging @myHNN.Full OAH Program

What Susan Rosenfeld Gets Wrong About "Enemies"

by Tim Weiner

David Walsh, the editor of HNN, has invited me to respond to a review of my new book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, by the former official FBI historian Susan Rosenfeld. I am grateful for the opportunity.It seems to me that official history is to history as military music is to music. It is used to make people march in lockstep. Official historians have unique access to the documents that are the foundation of good history. That does not necessarily make them good historians. I was educated by good historians in college. I try to hew to the standards I was taught -- and not only because my own mother has been a professor of history for nearly sixty years.

Tim Weiner's "Enemies" Wears Its Anti-FBI Agenda on Its Sleeve

by Susan Rosenfeld

In the Author’s Note prefacing his book on the FBI, Tim Weiner describes Enemies as the “history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a secret intelligence service,” its major mission, according to Weiner, for most of the past hundred years. The book chronicles the “tug-of-war between national security and civil liberties”—except that as Weiner portrays the FBI, with rare exceptions, there is no tug-of-war. “Security” far outweighs civil liberties and the Constitution. [1]This book is not an objective study of FBI history. Instead it selects examples that bolster the contention that the FBI put its wars against anarchists, Communists, the New Left, and foreign and domestic terrorists ahead of any consideration for the Bill of Rights. Weiner concedes that proponents from all these groups actually committed acts of espionage or violence. But for the most part, he features perpetrators who were never punished.

April 1912 Didn't Just See the Sinking of the Titanic -- The Fortunes of the GOP Sank, Too

by Adam Burns

We stand a century on from April 1912, but the events of that fateful year are still all too familiar to us. Along with numerous books and TV shows, we have the re-release of James Cameron’s epic disaster movie Titanic (in 3D) -- set to coincide neatly, and quite predictably, with the centenary of the sinking of that great ship. However, the fact that most of the press focus in early 2012 has been on the fractious Republican Party presidential nomination battle, bears a more surprising correlation to the events of 1912, and one that the GOP might do well to remember.

Despite What Some Still Maintain, the Lewinsky Scandal Didn't Affect Clinton's Iraq Strategy

by Lee Ruddin

Writing in response to the airing of the latest film in PBS’s American Experience presidential series, Charles Duelfer said in a Washington Post op-ed last month that Clinton "overlooked … the important role [the Monica Lewinsky scandal] played in the confrontation of Iraq in 1998." The "affair meant," the former United Nations (U.N.) weapons inspector contended, that the White House "had been weakened ... Clinton, in the Iraqis’ view, was weakened." Duelfer, author of Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq reiterated that, in the Iraqi view, the president did not "have the will to do anything that would threaten [Saddam] Hussein’s regime."Despite the insight Deulfer provides in the aforementioned book, his article is littered with oversights. Take the factors affecting Bill Clinton’s (un)willingness to use force, for example. These had been shaped by a set of principles a decade-and-a-half prior to Operation Desert Fox. What is more, it was the forty-second president who, with the signing of the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), cleared the way for the forty-third to topple the tyrant in 2003. Let us deal with the former first and the latter second.

Five Myths About Aaron Burr

by David O. Stewart

The truth about the charismatic Aaron Burr, our third vice president, was often surprising. Unsurprisingly, few historical figures have spawned so many inaccurate myths.Intensely ambitious, Burr ached to become president. Instead, he landed atop the list of America’s Bad Boys, remembered principally for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Other unflattering Burr memories include the presidential election of 1800, when he and Thomas Jefferson finished in a prolonged tie even though they were running mates, and Burr’s expedition in 1806-07 to conquer the Spanish colonies of Texas, Mexico, and Florida and even to incite America’s Western lands to secede. Yet the myths are even more remarkable.1. Burr was a vindictive harpy who relentlessly hounded Hamilton until he slaughtered the former Secretary of the Treasury on the dueling ground.

Did France Cause the Great Depression?

by Douglas Irwin

A large body of economic research has linked the gold standard to the length and severity of the Great Depression of the 1930s, primarily because fixed exchange rates precluded the use of monetary policy to address the crisis (see for example Temin 1989, Eichengreen 1992, and Bernanke 1995).But it has never been entirely clear why the gold standard produced the massive worldwide price deflation experienced between 1929 and 1933 and the enormous economic difficulties that followed. In particular, worldwide gold reserves expanded continuously through the 1920s and 1930s, so it is not obvious why the system self-destructed and produced such a cataclysm.The standard explanation...

March is Texas History Month -- So Let's Remember the Alamo Through a New Lens

by John Willingham

March is Texas History Month, so now is as good a time as any to reassess famous battle of the Alamo through a different lens. Far from being simply a pivotal moment in Texas and American history, allow me to suggest that the Alamo was one of the defining moments of the Age of Romanticism, a period which valued emotion and individualism over the rationalism of the preceding Age of Enlightenment.Romantics such as the English poet Lord Byron sought to sacrifice themselves to the great cause of freedom, in his case the cause of Greece against the Ottoman Turks. Men across America saw the fight in Texas as a chance to share in the glory of their forefathers, who had fought in the Revolution or the War of 1812. Whether motivated in part by greed or a desire for adventure, many also saw themselves as chivalrous warriors, knights in the cause of freedom, disdainful of risks and the prospects for defeat.