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.
If you would like to tell the editors about a new book (even your own) that addresses the concerns of HNN -- current events and history -- or would like to write a review, please send us an email: editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
Doug Ireland: Review of Sheila Rowbotham's Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love
Kirk Bane: Review of Pete Fornatale's Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends
Friday, January 2, 2009
Luther Spoehr: Review of W. Barksdale Maynard’s Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency (Yale University Press, 2008).
Source: HNN (1-2-09)
Woodrow Wilson’s time at Princeton—as undergraduate, faculty member, and, most notably, president—has hardly been neglected by his biographers. Years ago Hardin Craig and Henry Bragdon devoted individual volumes to the subject; single volume biographies and, of course, Arthur Link’s multi-volume biography have also highlighted the importance of Wilson’s academic experience to understanding the patterns and passions of his political career. Most recently, James Axtell’s excellent “The Making of Princeton University: From Woodrow Wilson to the Present” (2006) pays considerable attention to the subject.
Despite all these predecessors, however, W. Barksdale Maynard’s “Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency,” is a most welcome addition to the literature. It examines in detail Wilson’s formative undergraduate years, as a member of the Class of 1879; his tenure as charismatic professor (1890-1902); and his initially successful, ultimately failed term as Princeton’s president (1902-1910), which placed him on the road to the New Jersey governorship and then the presidency.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Steven Schwab: Review of Kristian Gustafson's Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964-1974 (Dulles: Potomac Books)
Source: H-Net (12-30-08)
Kristian Gustafson. Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964-1974. Dulles: Potomac Books, 2007. xiv + 317 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59797-097-6.
Reviewed by Steven Schwab
Published on H-War (December, 2008)
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine
At a press conference in 1975, Senator Frank Church castigated the CIA as "a rogue elephant on the rampage." As Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Church had been investigating alleged abuses of power by the CIA and the FBI, including attempts to assassinate or overthrow foreign leaders. One of the main objects of the Church Committee's investigations was the CIA's sponsorship of covert actions in Chile from 1964 to 1974, and especially its role in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, which quickly led to the military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet. As a direct consequence of the Church Committee's published reports, President Gerald Ford issued an Executive Order prohibiting any U.S. involvement in, or sanction of, assassinations of foreign leaders. The Committee's exposure of abuses of law and power by the CIA and FBI, and more generally, within the Executive Branch also led to the creation of permanent intelligence oversight committees with broad powers in both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
In its closed hearings, the Church Committee did uncover a lengthy record of CIA activities in Chile, including covert funding designed, initially, to thwart Allende's accession to power, and, later, to undermine his government. But it did not produce evidence that directly linked the CIA to the coup itself. In essence, it failed to provide any further substantiation to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's cryptic telephone comment to President Richard Nixon that: “We didn't do it. I mean we helped them ... created the conditions as great as possible."[1] Moreover, the fact that thousands of documents pertaining to Chile remained classified until President Clinton authorized the Chile Declassification Project in 1999 long inhibited scholars from a fuller examination of the historic record.
Now, using these newly declassified records and his own interviews with senior U.S. officials, Kristian Gustafson has produced a well-documented analytical study that argues persuasively that the real hostility toward Chile originated in the Nixon White House and that the CIA, far from being omnipotent, was often a mere instrument of White House directives that frequently ignored intelligence in favor of ill-conceived solutions. In support of this strong assertion, Gustafson quotes an official CIA assessment that "during Nixon's years in office, the relationship between the President and the CIA reached the lowest point in the Agency’s history" (p. 17).
Gustafson's monograph opens with an excellent introduction that frames the rest of his work. Almost immediately he states that his sole purpose is "to better establish the facts of a particular series of covert actions initiated by the U.S. government and executed largely by the CIA" (p. 4). Gustafson makes it clear that he does not harbor the assumption that all covert action is evil. On the contrary, he asserts that "it is a tool of statecraft used by all the major world powers, whose study is important for its future use" (p. 4). This chapter also contains a useful review of the literature on Allende's fall, both in Spanish and English. Surprisingly, Gustafson has discovered that almost all Chilean writers do not hold Washington responsible for the Chilean coup. The rest of the work adheres to a chronological treatment of the events leading to the imposition of the military junta. Gustafson notes that both CIA planners and Secretary Kissinger were surprised by "the permanence of the junta and of Pinochet's grip on the apparatus of government" (p. 235).
Gustafson portrays CIA operations in Chile as mostly reactive and haphazard, and frequently out of touch with political realities. His research indicates that instead of trying to organize a coup against Allende in 1973, the CIA had reduced its contacts with military plotters and was relying largely on its sources within the Christian Democratic Party for political intelligence. Unfortunately for the CIA, military plotters did not trust Christian Democrats. "Thus the CIA did not have the best intelligence on the coup plot as it developed," and in the post-coup period "the CIA focused on the political machinations of a party that the junta planned to marginalize" (p. 231).
In many respects, this book is a case study of a series of misguided covert actions that lacked the benefit of congressional oversight. Gustafson characterizes the Church Committee's investigations as "a lamentable and partisan inquisition against the CIA," but he also recognizes that these hearings produced a "codified approval process for covert action," and thus "served a beneficial purpose" (p. 243). As both a well-trained scholar of intelligence and a former military officer, Gustafson appreciates the reality that the United States, acting as a superpower in a dangerous world, will continue to utilize covert action as an instrument of both its defense and foreign policies. He also accurately observes that the U.S. government may be the best known, but it certainly is not the only practitioner of covert action. Yet, in the case of Chile, CIA's operations ultimately produced results that "were neither beneficial to the state nor desirable to the people." Worse, they led the United States "down the garden path to association with the Western Hemisphere's most reviled dictator" (p. 18).
This harsh judgment of U.S. operations in Chile, which cannot be avoided, suggests that even this persuasive study fails to answer the most important question: to what extent did U.S. covert machinations contribute to the overthrow of Allende and the ascendency of Pinochet? It would have been instructive for Gustafson to have consulted Covert Action (1988) by Gregory Treverton, who served on the staff of the Church Committee and years later as a senior official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, it was Treverton who authored most of the Church Committee's report to Congress on covert actions in Chile. In his discussion of how the CIA helped to instigate a strike by Chilean truckers that paralyzed commerce and justified a military intervention, Treverton finds that "what is most striking is how artificial the distinction was between supporting the opposition and seeking a change of government. It was a distinction [only] in the minds of Americans, not Chileans. Those Chileans in the opposition did not want merely to exist; they wanted to succeed.... Their paramount purpose was the end of the Allende government."[2]
Notes
[1]. See http.www.gwu.edu/~nsaarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/chile.htm.
[2]. Gregory Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 141-143.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Ron Briley: Review of Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, eds., Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History (The University Press of Kentucky, 2008).
War has played a significant role in shaping the American experience since the nation declared its independence from the British Empire and commenced upon a policy of territorial expansion. Accordingly, the drama of warfare emerged as a staple genre of the Hollywood film industry during the early twentieth century. America’s wars, as captured in both documentary and feature films, is the subject of an intriguing volume edited by film scholars Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, who established the academic journal Film & History. The collected essays were selected from presentations delivered at the 2005 conference “War in Film & History.” Editors Rollins and O’Connor assert that the twenty-three essays contained in Why We Fought explore “how motion pictures have influenced, reflected, and interpreted the American experience of war” (xv). Employing what the editors term the film and history approach, Why We Fought analyzes American war films as a genre reflecting the historical context in which they were made. The editors acknowledge, however, that the war film must be approached cautiously as the genre is often subject to censorship or supports government propaganda goals.
Thus, films should be perceived as historical artifacts, deserving the same critical analysis scholars apply toward more traditional archival sources. This historical approach tends to assure that the essays are relatively free from the jargon of cultural studies and are accessible to the general reader. And as one might expect from this emphasis upon historical context, the essays are arranged chronologically, ranging from the Revolutionary War to the invasion of Iraq. There are, however, some important gaps in this survey of American war films. Missing are motion pictures dealing with the Indian Wars of the American West (Albeit, Rollins and O’Connor have tackled this issue in a previous volume dealing with the American West.), and the Korean War remains the forgotten war.
The importance which the volume places on historical context is evident in the volume’s lead essay on the Revolutionary War films Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and The Patriot (2000). O’Connor argues that producer Darryl Zanuck, anticipating a wartime alliance with Great Britain, portrayed American Loyalists rather than the British as the primary villains in Drums Along the Mohawk, while Mel Gibson’s character Benjamin Martin in The Patriot was driven more by personal vengeance than political principle. Filmmakers have also drawn upon the dramatic siege of the Alamo. Serving as a consultant for director John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo (2004), Frank Thompson asserts that Hollywood’s most recent depiction of the battle best illuminates the complex realities of the Texas Revolution. The Mexican-American War has failed to gain the attention of feature filmmakers, but James Yates insists that the 1998 Dallas, Texas KERA-TV production The U. S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) successfully interrogates Manifest Destiny readings of American conquest. The Mexican-American War was eclipsed in the popular imagination by the Civil War. While older generations were influenced by such feature films as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939), Gary Edgerton observes that Ken Burns’s television history of the Civil War (1990) provided a theme of unity during a period of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, Robert M. Myers insists that Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain and its 2003 cinematic adaptation demonstrate the continuing influence of the South’s “lost cause” in American culture.
The global conflicts of World Wars I and II have received considerable attention from filmmakers, and Why We Fought devotes nine chapters to these struggles. Michael T. Isenberg argues the popularity of King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) suggests that the antiwar disillusionment and isolationism of the 1920s was perhaps overstated. James Latham also maintains studios promoting films to local exhibitors during the 1920s emphasized weaponry and nationalistic themes. On the other hand, John Whiteclay Chambers II asserts that during the early 1930s, Hollywood was a vehicle for isolationist sentiments. Yet, as David Imhoof argues in his study of local film audiences in Gottingen, Germany, an antiwar film such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) did not always fare well with film goers. By the late 1930s, many Hollywood filmmakers were beginning to advocate interventionism, and Cynthia J. Miller provides a fascinating case study of film propaganda in the low budge production, Hitler, Beast of Berlin (1939).
While the wartime series Why We Fight directed by Frank Capra is well known, Ian S. Scott makes a contribution by emphasizing Capra collaborator Robert Ruskin’s Projection of America series, which provided a quiet affirmation of American everyday life. Frank J. Wetta and Martin A Novelli insist that films such as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) provided positive models of postwar integration for veterans despite the reservations expressed by writers such as Paul Fussell. A more critical interpretation of the war is offered by J. E. Smyth who argues that the James Jones novel From Here to Eternity and its film version by director Fred Zinneman represent the protest of the working-class soldier against the military establishment. In the final piece on World War II, film historian Robert Toplin concludes that films such as The Longest Day (1962) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) demonstrate that the Normandy invasion may be used to shed light upon the contemporary concerns of filmmakers.
The third major section of Why We Fought deals with the Cold War and Vietnam conflict. Thomas W. Maulucci insists that essential to understanding the Cold War is how filmmakers, in both documentaries and features, have employed the city of Berlin as a symbol of the global power struggle between the Soviet Union and United States. In one of the few essays in the collection to focus upon gender issues, Susan A. George highlights the courageous role played by Patricia Neal as Helen Benson in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), advocating peaceful co-existence.
The conventional academic wisdom on the Vietnam War is challenged by Peter Rollins in his essay arguing that the thirteen-episode WGBH series Vietnam: A Television History (1983) was marred by errors and misperceptions regarding the conflict. In a somewhat similar vein, Lawrence W. Lichty and Raymond L. Carroll suggest that Oliver Stone’s interpretation of Vietnam in Platoon (1986) was overly influenced by the director’s reading of domestic cultural politics during the 1970s. On the other hand, William S. Bushnell argues that the 1988 production of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American was tarnished by anti-communist propaganda, while the 2002 film adaptation by Phillip Noyce better conveys the nuances of Greene’s writing.
The final section of the volume deals with the contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan along with images of terrorism. And the general drift of these pieces is more critical of American policy than the essays on Vietnam. John Shelton Lawrence and John G. McGarrahan maintain that despite Defense Department cooperation with filmmakers, the rushed release of Black Hawk Down (2001) did little to alter a negative image of the American military still influenced by the Vietnam War. The rise of modern media in the hands of soldiers in Iraq leads Jeffrey Chown to suggest that the line between feature and documentary war footage is increasingly blurred. Stacy Takacs is also critical of how the military attempted to manipulate the “captivity narrative” of Jessica Lynch in order to foster support for the Iraq invasion. On the other hand, James Kendrick argues that feature films such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) and Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) offer traditional heroic war narratives.
These outstanding essays provide proof of the war film genre’s lasting legacy in American history and cinema. John Shelton Lawrence also augments the text with a useful filmography and bibliography. But as the pieces in this fine collection attest, the American war film might expand its focus to provide greater insight into the war experience of women, under-represented ethnic and racial groups in an increasingly diverse America, and “enemy” soldiers and civilians. Indeed, the United States often seems to be a nation made of war, and filmmakers and scholars focusing upon war appear to have ample material for further films and scholarship.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Mark Anthony Jones: Review of Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom's Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (Routledge: New York 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (12-12-08)
[Mark Anthony Jones is an Australian high school English teacher who spent five years living in the People’s Republic of China, and is the author of Flowing Waters Never Stale: journeys through China, Zeus Publications, Burleigh, Queensland, 2008.]
Historians have long been interested in the impact of Europeans on Asia, though the focus has begun to shift in recent years, with some now emphasizing the dominant role of the intra-Asian marketplace on the growth of world trade, especially from the Ming period onwards. Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom is one such revisionist, whose empirically based study of Shanghai’s emergence as a global city challenges the predominant Eurocentric view that pushes a discourse of an East-meets-West metropolis. Even during the treaty-port era, when Shanghai was so often described as the ‘Paris of the Orient’, it was, argues Wasserstrom, the result of more than “simply an East-meets-West” dynamic, for there “were always non-Western and non-Chinese actors playing key roles in the story of Shanghai’s globalization.” When the Public Garden was off-limits to Chinese other than servants, for example,
it might be visited by a businessman from Korea and a family of Baghdadi Jews, who had come to listen to the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, in which Filipinos were among the musicians, and when they entered to hear the band, they might have passed by a Gurkha constable at the gate. Most significantly, of course, among the non-Western and non-Chinese participants in Shanghai’s initial rise to global city status were the many Japanese who, as investors, as tourists, as literary influences, and as invaders and then conquerors, figured prominently in shaping the history of the city throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
The same holds true for Shanghai today, argues Wasserstrom, with the city’s re-globalization again being “very much an East-meets-East as well as an East-meets-West story.” Japanese companies have been heavily involved in creating many of Shanghai’s postmodern new landmarks, “including what is just now the tallest skyscraper on earth, the World Financial Center,” and Taiwanese and Hong Kong investors have “played a crucial part” in the city’s resurgence. Xintiandi for example, one of the city’s leading entertainment and retail districts, “was bankrolled primarily by a Hong Kong developer. Even the management team in charge of the city’s Starbucks franchise is based not in Seattle but in Taipei.
Although “the rapidity with which Shanghai has been changing and continues to change makes it difficult to predict what lies in store for it,” Wasserstrom believes that Shanghai’s hosting of the World Expo in 2010 will be an important moment in the city’s history, as there is an expectation that the event will draw an estimated 70 million tourists to Shanghai, not only from the West, “but from other parts of the Chinese mainland, from Hong Kong, and from countries near to China, especially Japan and Korea as well as Singapore and Taiwan.” The event then, will not only increase Shanghai’s status as a global city, but will also “lead to yet another face-lift for its waterfront” in order to provide docking space for large cruise ships and to make room for national pavilions.
Another of Wasserstrom’s many interesting predictions, is that Shanghai will provide a model for other cities with global aspirations to follow:
Looking beyond Shanghai and into the future, we can expect to see the city, due to its success at using ideas about the local past to serve its present globalizing goals, stand out more and more as a model for other urban centres that had golden ages as cosmopolitan hubs. This has happened already with Bombay (Mumbai), where some boosters have invoked Shanghai as having blazed a path that their city should follow. And it is easy to imagine developers in a Havana or Hanoi of 2020 trying to figure out how to create a local counterpart to Xintiandi that would simultaneously, like that site, point to a storied past and an ambitious future.
A city that is constantly re-inventing itself, post-socialist Shanghai, says Wasserstrom, is not only the city of the present, but also of the future. In a line reminiscent of Marshall Berman’s description of modernity, where we as subjects are “alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure” while also being “frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead,” the futuristic city, writes Wasserstrom, is “one that regularly inspires dreams and nightmares, not just within but also well beyond its borders, and one that is thought of as rich in disturbing portents and also promise.”
Shanghai’s potent “mix of sensation and spectacle, exploitation and excitement” not only attracts international capital, but also those of us who, like Wasserstrom, find magnetic the global dynamism of such cities of perpetual disintegration and renewal.
Adopting a global rather than Eurocentric perspective, Wasserstrom has produced a fascinating, well-researched and empirically grounded study that sheds much needed light on Shanghai’s emergence, and re-emergence, as a cosmopolitan city of global importance. Highly recommended.
Mel Ayton: Review of Brothers In Arms – The Kennedys, The Castros, and the Politics of Murder By Gus Russo and Stephen Molton (Bloomsbury, 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (12-12-08)
[Mr. Ayton is the author of The JFK Assassination : Dispelling The Myths ( 2002), Questions Of Controversy: The Kennedy Brothers (2001), A Racial Crime – James Earl Ray And The Murder Of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, (2005) and The Forgotten Terrosist – Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (2007). In 2003 he acted as the historical adviser for the BBC’s television documentary, The Kennedy Dynasty and has appeared in Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel documentaries. He has written articles for David Horowitz’s Frontpage magazine, Max Holland’s Washington Decoded, History Ireland, Crime Magazine and the History News Network.]
Gus Russo and Stephen Molton have produced a well-researched and compelling study of the role Cuban, Soviet and American intelligence agencies played in keeping track of Lee Harvey Oswald, the self-styled ‘revolutionary’ who assassinated President John F. Kennedy, in the years before Dallas. Their book provides details of how the Soviets passed information about Oswald on to the Cuban intelligence agencies who in turn decided Oswald may be of some use in their attempts to hit back at the United States for its efforts in trying to topple the Castro regime. Their investigation into the movements of Cuban Intelligence agent Fabian Escalante Font before and after the assassination is also central to their thesis that the assassination can be placed firmly at Castro’s door. The authors have utilized hundreds of documents from KGB, Cuban, Mexican Secret Police, and recently unredacted U.S. government files and combined them with their own interviews of the players in the JFK/Castro conflict to support their thesis.
Additionally, one would have thought that there was nothing more to learn about Lee Oswald especially in his relationship with his wife Marina but Russo and Molton have done exactly that and they also provide the reader with additional insight into the character and motives of the assassin. The authors are particularly informative about Oswald’s activities in the Soviet Union and his friendship with Cuban students in Minsk. Particularly revealing are the snippets of information about Oswald which reveal how the assassin manipulated Cuban and American intelligence agencies into believing he had an important role to play in what turns out to be his own fantasy game of building himself up to be some sort of important figure.
Brothers In Arms also provides further conclusive proof that the facts of the assassination were concealed in order to hide the truth about Robert Kennedy’s determination to assassinate Castro so the younger brother could protect the family’s legacy. The facts were also concealed from the Warren Commission because of Lyndon Johnson’s desire to protect national security.
Two of the most important failures of the Warren Commission were in not investigating the possible links between the CIA’s plots to kill Castro and the assassination of the president and the Commission’s poor job in determining if there was more to Castro’s agents in Mexico City than had previously been discovered. Former CIA Director Allen Dulles, a Warren Commission member, failed to tell his colleagues on the Commission or staff investigators about the Castro plots. This knowledge could have given investigators an important lead on Oswald's time in Mexico City in the short period before the assassination. Commission members Richard Russell and Gerald Ford also knew about the CIA’s attempts to kill the Cuban leader. However, if no link existed between Oswald and the Soviet or Cuban governments, they reasoned, there was no reason to inform their staff investigators who wrote the Commission’s report.
Yet there was definitely a political motive for Oswald’s actions which should have provoked the Commission into investigating these important links. Russo and Molton have succeeded where the Commission failed. Oswald had spent his adolescence and early manhood pursuing a communist dream and searching for some kind of involvement in revolutionary activities. Disillusioned with his time spent in the Soviet Union the young Oswald returned home searching for a new cause. He found it in his hero, Fidel Castro, and began planning a way to help the revolution. As his wife Marina said, “I only know that his basic desire was to get to Cuba by any means and all the rest of it was window dressing for that purpose.” His friend Michael Paine said Oswald wanted to be an active guerrilla in the effort to bring about a new world order.
The Commission also had knowledge that a Cuban Intelligence agent defector had provided information about his agency’s interest in Oswald. Lyndon Johnson was adamant that such information should not be disclosed even if it were true as he believed it would have disastrous consequences.
Russo and Molton provide evidence that this self-styled revolutionary and Castro worshipper may have had contact with Cuban agents when Oswald visited the Soviet and Cuban Mexico City embassies a short time before the assassination. They claim that Castro had been aware of Oswald’s desire to murder the American president and Cuban agents, either acting on their own or with Castro’s blessing, spurred him on. This may have been true. The evidence the authors provide includes a Cuban intelligence agent’s intercepted telephone conversation in which she gleefully reports JFK’s assassination and hints she had prior knowledge of Oswald’s intentions to kill Kennedy and multiple reports of Cuban agents stationed at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City quickly leaving and returning to Cuba after the Kennedy assassination. The inference is that Cuban agents directed Oswald each step of the way. However, there is also a compelling case to be made that Oswald simply presented proof of his authentic ‘revolutionary’ activities in New Orleans to the Cuban agents who then encouraged him to assassinate Kennedy but had no hand in the mechanics of the act.
Russo and Molton have introduced the possibility that Oswald may have had assistance from Cuban agents in Dallas or, at the very least, an observer to make sure the assassin carried out the crime which they encouraged. However, this remains, at best, speculative. Questions still remain about how Cuban intelligence could have placed Oswald in the Texas School Book Depository and why they allowed Oswald to use his own less-than-reliable rifle to commit the assassination. Ruth Paine and Linnie May Randle were the two people responsible for securing the book depository job for Oswald and it beggars belief that Cuban agents would want Oswald to use a cheap rifle which could have misfired at any time during the assassination attempt.
Additionally, Cuban agents would have had no way of knowing JFK’s travel plans or the route the motorcade took in Dallas which placed the president in sight of his assassin - unless they formulated the purported plot only days before the campaign trip. However, would Cuban agents have allowed Oswald to threaten an FBI agent in a note he delivered to the Dallas FBI offices? Would Oswald’s co-conspirators have allowed the assassin to carry only a few dollars with him when he escaped from the Texas Book Depository? Russo and Molton also cannot explain why Cuban agents would risk the possibility of Oswald giving up his co-conspirators in the 48 hours or so between the time he was arrested and his murder by Jack Ruby.
If Russo and Molton fall short of providing concrete proof that Castro organized the assassination of JFK they have, nevertheless, come closer than anyone else to explaining Oswald’s mysterious trip to Mexico City. With the eventual fall of the communist regime in Cuba, Russo and Molton may in time be proven to be correct and the truth of Castro’s role in the assassination established. In the meantime, their thesis cannot either be ignored or rejected. This impressive work comes closer than any other author's efforts, with the exception of Vincent Buglisosi, in establishing the truth of the JFK assassination.
Related Links
Max Holland: Why no one should believe the confessions of this LBJ advance man
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Luther Spoehr: Review of H. W. Brands's Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Doubleday, 2008)
Source: Providence Sunday Journal (11-30-08)
Talk about timing. As banks failed, the economy tanked, and the 2008 presidential nominees argued about what to do next, I was immersed in this big, warm bath of a book that featured all of the above, and more.
H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian, has already written huge-but-accessible biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson, among other books. But recreating FDR’s life in one take may be his most ambitious project yet, if only because that life has been scrutinized so closely, in part and in full, by so many others. That Brands succeeds as well as he does testifies to his talent as synthesizer and storyteller.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Bennett Muraskin: Review of Avraham Burg's The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise From its Ashes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
[Bennett Muraskin is on the faculty of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, wrote Let Justice Well Up Like Water: Progressive Jews from Hillel to Helen Suzman, and is a columnist at Jewish Currents.]
Avraham Burg has a fascinating biography. His father Joseph Burg, was a German Jew who arrived in Palestine in 1939 as a refugee from Nazism. For many years, he led Israel’s National Religious Party and served as a government minister. His mother’s family lived in Hebron for generations before she was driven out in the 1929 anti-Jewish riots that killed over 100 Jews including half her family.
Born in 1955 in Jerusalem, Avraham Burg is an observant Jew, yet has always been identified with the Israeli left. He joined Peace Now and participated in the movement against the Israel’s first Lebanon War in 1983. He was injured in the same grenade attack by an Israeli right-winger on a Peace Now demonstration that killed another protester. Entering the political mainstream, he was elected to the Knesset as a Labor Party candidate in 1988, became Speaker of the Knesset in the 1990s and mounted a serious challenge for leadership of the Labor Party in 2001. Along the way, he served as president of the two pillars of the Zionist establishment---the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization.
First published in Hebrew in 2007, as Defeating Hitler: The Holocaust is Over it caused a storm of controversy. For too long, Burg argues, Israel has been obsessed with the Holocaust. The slaughter of the 6 million Jews in Europe has become internalized to the extent that Israelis view themselves as a nation of victims. Although armed with a powerful military, including nuclear weapons and allied with the sole super power, Israel acts as if it is threatened with annihilation. Its political discourse is laden analogies to the plight of Jews in pre-war Europe and with the Holocaust itself. “We have pulled the Shoah out of its historical context”, writes Burg, “and turned it into a plea and generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah and therefore all is allowed—be it fences, sieges… curfews, food and water deprivation or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave.”
Burg uses the language of psychology to describe the mentality of the majority of Israeli Jews. Abused as a “child,” it has become an abusive “parent.” The suffering of Jews in Nazi Europe becomes the rationale to show no mercy to the Palestinians and other Arabs. First Nasser, then Arafat and Saddam Hussein and now Hamas and Iranian president Ahmanidejad are equated with Hitler. Displacing their anger from Nazis to Arabs, right wing settlers and ultra -orthodox fundamentalists have fostered a “Jewish racist doctrine” shared to various degrees by mainstream Israelis that consider Arabs as inferior beings who do not deserve equal rights.
Ironically, Burg reminds us, the initial reaction to the Holocaust in Israel was one of shame. Jews supposedly went like sheep to the slaughter because they were mired in the slavish habits of the “galut” or exile. Holocaust survivors in Israel were discouraged from telling their stories. The turning point was the Eichmann trial in 1961, where testimony from Jewish victims broadcast live on the radio struck a powerful chord with the Israeli populace. This should have been a catharsis. Instead, according to Burg, it became “a theological pillar of modern Jewish identity” exploited by Zionist leaders to convince Jews that “the whole world is against us.” Or as he calls it, “a boundless paranoia that is no longer able to distinguish between friend a predator, a primitive suspicion of every one, all the time about every issue.” Zionism promised to purge Jews of their “ghetto mentality.” Instead Israel has reproduced it on a larger scale, continuing to believe “the entire world is against us.”
Questioning Zionism is a cardinal sin throughout the Jewish world, although it has a long history among Jews including Vladimir Medem, Elmer Burger, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes, Isaac Deutscher, Noam Chomsky and many others. Burg would like to see Israel become “a state of all its Jews and all its citizens with the majority determining its character.” This would entail repealing the Law of Return that grants preferential immigration rights to Jews and all laws that discriminate between Jews and non-Jews. An ethno-religious state would give way to one based on humanistic Jewish values.
The best traditions in Judaism, Burg avers, are now honored more in the Diaspora than in the Jewish state. In order to return to them, mixed groups of Jewish and Arab youth should be taken on a grand tour of Europe from Spain to Germany and Poland to explore both the Jewish and Muslim experience in Europe, past and present. Auschwitz should not be on the itinerary. Another trip should bring Israeli Jewish students to the US to learn “how life with national meaning can be lived without an external enemy, and with full trust between Jews and the non-Jewish environment.”
Burg’s arguments are not entirely new. Israel journalist Tom Segev explored the tortured relationship between Israelis and the Holocaust in his book The Seventh Million, published in Hebrew in 1991 and in a 1993 English-language edition, and which came to the same conclusions. Neither proposes that Israelis forget the Holocaust. Rather they need to draw different lessons. As Burg has said, “There are two kinds of people coming out of Auschwitz. Those who said never again for the Jews and those like me who say never again for any human beings.”
If Burg set out to provoke, he succeeded. The danger is that this book is too provocative, debunking too many Zionist sacred cows at once to earn a fair hearing. The Jewish establishment in Israel and elsewhere consider Burg persona non grata. A minority on the left, mainly youth, consider him a prophet. Let’s hope that unlike so many others, he is appreciated in his own time.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Doug Ireland: Review of Sheila Rowbotham's Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love
Source: Gay City News (11-26-08)
[Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.]
When Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) broke free of the stifling world of upper-class Victorian England into which he was born, his rejection of its cosseted, impossibly mannered life was total. In his time, he became the most famous apostle of a wide-ranging revolt against sexual hypocrisy and the straightjacket of class divisions in human interpersonal relations. And Carpenter's courageous contributions over a long life made him one of the most important precursors of gay liberation, one whose influence spanned countries and continents.
Carpenter and his working-class lover of 37 years, George Merrill, became one of history's most celebrated same-sex couples, on a par with Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais or with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Yet despite his well-known defense of homosexuality, Carpenter was one of the most beloved figures of British socialism, so much so that on his 80th birthday in 1924, 43 years before same-sex relations were legalized in the United Kingdom, the entire Cabinet of the first Labour Party government, led by Carpenter's old friend Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, signed a profuse tribute to him.
A poet, essayist, and philosopher, a pioneer environmentalist and feminist, the most generous of humanitarians, an advocate of alternative democratic lifestyles who eschewed the bourgeois accumulation of possessions, and a tireless and skilled propagandist for social change, Carpenter is primarily remembered today for his writings on homosexuality.
But it is one of the great merits of Sheila Rowbotham's superb new biography, the first in-depth account of his life and work, that she restores the remarkable Carpenter to his proper place as one of the most significant figures in the rise of the British cultural left and in the creation of the shifts in attitudes that made the election of the first Labour government possible.
When Carpenter was born, "sodomy" was still a capital crime technically subject to the death penalty, a sanction that was only changed to life imprisonment in 1861 when Carpenter was 17, and although aware from an early age of his intense attraction to his own sex he did not have his first sexual experience with a man until he was 20. His first love occurred while he was an increasingly radical and egalitarian university student at Cambridge, but it was fleeting, painful, and an apparent single carnal episode with the love object - Edward Beck, a somewhat younger student who later became a conservative Cambridge dean - was not repeated, because as Rowbotham writes, "the ambiguity of strong friendships in the 1870s blurred any explicit expression of sexual passion [and] the equivocal attitudes to homosexual desire in Cambridge... created a perplexing kind of freedom which had to be intimated within bounds which could never be clearly marked out."
After Beck broke off their brief romantic friendship, leaving a lasting wound, Carpenter visited Paris in search of male prostitutes in a country in which homosex was not illegal, but his sexual experiences there left him emotionally empty, unfulfilled, and unhappy.
Carpenter's sense of alienation from his sexual self only really began to dissipate when he read Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," for "Whitman's advocacy of an 'adhesive' democratic, manly comradeship was attractive to Carpenter because it provided a new homoerotic possibility, and at the same time touched a political nerve. Whitman's 'Democratic Vistas' (1871) presented 'adhesiveness' as the complement to individualism, a brotherhood in which all races fused as comrades."
Carpenter became a confirmed Whitmanite, but it was not until 1874 as he was about to graduate from Cambridge that Carpenter worked up the courage to write "a long letter" to Whitman. "Because you have... given me a ground for the love of men, I thank you continually in my heart," Carpenter wrote the bard, "and others thank you though they do not say so. For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature. Women are beautiful, but to some there is that which surpasses the love of women."
Whitman loved the letter, and there ensued a correspondence that would only end with Whitman's death.
Using a trip to America on behalf of his wealthy family's financial entanglements there as an excuse, Carpenter - who after a brief stint as a cleric had joined the Cambridge University Extension program to teach the working classes in northern England - finally met Whitman and spent a week in his house with him. (He also sought out and met Ralph Waldo Emerson.)
One of Carpenter's young gay disciples in later years, Chester A. Arthur III (1901-1972), the grandson and namesake of the US president, recalled in his old age that Carpenter had told him he had "slept" with Whitman, and that Whitman "thought people should 'know' each other on the physical and emotional plane as well as in the mental. And that the best part of comrade love was that there was no limit to the number of comrades one could have."
Meeting Whitman, writes Rowbotham, "clarified new ways of seeing, feeling, and being for Carpenter, giving him a different means of denoting significance. It was the start of an alternative outlook on the world." Moreover, "Carpenter's visit to Whitman... made him more bold sexually: he embarked on exploratory encounters with working-class men, 'railway-men, porters, clerks, signalmen, ironworkers, coach-builders, Sheffield cutters,' discovering he could 'knit up more alliances more satisfactory to me than any I had before known... I felt I had come into, or at least in sight of, the world to which I belonged, my natural habitat.'"
His Whitman visit had also awakened a deepening love of nature, and on his return Carpenter moved first to the working-class industrial city of Sheffield, then to a farm in a nearby village where he worked at market gardening and wrote his first book, "Towards Democracy" (1883), a long prose poem greatly influenced by Whitman and the influential Christian Socialist art critic and social essayist John Ruskin.
The book "contains Carpenter's observations of the poverty he saw in the streets of the northern cities, the crushing, destructive working conditions, and the lack of human contact between people of different classes. These are mixed together with Ruskinian diatribes against commercialism... and a romantic Whitmanite embracing of all humanity, however despised or outcast." Politics was a means to an end, for the "democracy" Carpenter sought was "a new way of being human, a new manner of encountering others," flecked with homosensual accents. The book attracted a growing audience of socialists and sexual rebels over the ensuing decades and converted many to the radical cause.
By this time Carpenter had inherited considerable wealth on the death of his father, and bought three fields at Millthorpe, a "tiny, remote settlement in the Cordwell Valley" not too far from Sheffield, where he had a gray stone house built and set up to live a simpler life as a market gardener with the aid of a local farming family.
Having been converted to socialism after reading "England for All" (1881) by the pioneer of British socialism, Henry Hyndman, he began attending meetings of Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and gave ₤300 to Justice, the first and longest-surviving Marxist newspaper in England, which Hyndman started that year. And Carpenter began criss-crossing English towns and cities to lecture where "little networks of heresy," from utopians to hard-headed municipal reformers, "coalesced to become the cores of the new [Socialist] movement." He continued to keep a heavy lecture schedule until he was nearly 80.
He helped found the Sheffield Socialist Society, and in 1885 helped the Working Men's Radical Association put up one of the first independent labor candidates for Parliament.
As Rowbotham puts it, "Carpenter's unusual circumstances as a Millthorpe market gardener endowed him with a certain mystique among the newly radicalized intelligentsia earnestly debating poverty, class inequality, sexual relations, new ethical codes..." and he gained renown as a practitioner of an alternative style of living even as his lectures, constant stream of books, and never-ending series of articles in the new socialist and radical publications made him well-known.
In all his speeches and writings, he "stressed, as he had in 'Towards Democracy,' that the moral elements in historical movements were the key to change because they caused men and women to desire an alternative." Carpenter's libertarian brand of socialism had a strong anarchist tinge, but he had an entirely ecumenical view of the left that saw all its factions as working toward a common goal, and envisioned a labor "movement" that would unite them all.
For Carpenter, "Socialism was not merely a movement for industrial emancipation, it 'meant the entire regeneration of society in art, in science, in religion, and in literature, and the building up of a new life in which industrial socialism was the foundation,'" as he put it in 1887.
However, Carpenter's simple, alternative lifestyle, which included rejection of traditional bourgeois dress, a sometimes backsliding vegetarianism, and his fondness for sandals (which he eventually began to make at Millthorpe as a supplement to his income) was not to the taste of all leftists; his Socialist comrade George Bernard Shaw dryly nicknamed Carpenter "the Noble Savage."
In one of his most successful books, "Civilization: Its Cause and Cure" (1889), which went through 18 editions in English in the ensuring four decades and was widely published in translation, including Japanese, Carpenter flayed class divisions, "Panglossian Victorian complacency," and "faith in automatic progress as a result of external changes in science, technology, productivity, and material prosperity." Deploying references to Plato, Carpenter "wanted to validate physical desires denigrated by Christianity, and homosexuality peeps out gingerly from [its] pages, smuggled in under cover of the classics."
Carpenter met the man who was to become his partner for the rest of his life, 25-year-old George Merrill, in 1892 as they were descending from a train at Sheffield. They briefly and wordlessly cruised each other, and Merrill followed Carpenter at a distance as he walked off toward Millthorpe in the company of waiting friends. Eventually Carpenter stopped and turned, the two exchanged names and addresses, and a relationship that would last for the next three and a half decades was born. Their life together at Millthorpe entered into legend.
Rowbotham relates that "After meeting Merrill, Carpenter was seeking a more outright way of expressing male-male love than was possible under Whitman's cloak of comradeship." In 1893 and 1894, Carpenter set to work on four pamphlets - "Woman and Her Place in a Free Society," "Marriage in a Free Society," "Sex-love and its Place in a Free Society," and "Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society."
"The decision to write about sexuality in general," notes Rowbotham, "was consistent with Carpenter's tendency to seek out broad alliances rather than to isolate himself. Moreover the other pamphlets gave 'Homogenic Love' a degree of cover, for he could appear as a writer on sexual topics in general rather than as a homosexual pleading a case."
The first three pamphlets, which took an advanced feminist position arguing that women deserved full social and economic freedom, that marriage was a form of prostitution, and that housework was real work, were all published, and eventually collected as "Love's Coming of Age" in 1896. But the publisher refused to bring out "Homogenic Love," so Carpenter paid to have it privately printed, and "the first British statement by a homosexual man, linking emancipation to social transformation, was destined only for friends and acquaintances."
Drawing on the works in German of the pioneer German homosexual liberationist Karl Ulrichs (Carpenter was fluent in German, French, and Italian), "Homogenic Love" argued that same-sex desire was congenital and that private sexual behavior should be no concern of the law, which could not stop "natural" feelings, only persecute those individuals caught expressing them, while offering fertile terrain for blackmailers.
In the wake of the imprisonment and trial of Oscar Wilde - who had admired Carpenter's "Towards Democracy" - the following year, an event which "left a vortex of fear in its wake," Carpenter's attempts to find a publisher for "Homogenic Love" were universally rejected, and his attempts to publish articles based on his privately printed plea for homosexual liberation were repeatedly rejected, even by journals on the left which normally welcomed him. But "Homogenic Love" was published in German in 1895, in the French journal La Societé Nouvelle the next year, and copies made their way into the hands of sympathetic American sex radicals, particularly in the anarchist movement, which greatly admired Carpenter and Whitman.
In 1897 Carpenter finally managed to get his article on same-sexers, "An Unknown People," published in the freethinkers' magazine The Reformer, arguing for sexual education for lonely young "Urnings" (he'd adopted Ulrichs' term for homosexuals) and insisting that they were not the "decadents" of popular imagination but "fine, healthy specimens."
In an 1899 article in the International Journal of Ethics on "Affection in Education," Carpenter argued that "intense and romantic" friendships between pupils, and between teachers and pupils, played a vital part in education. And when the scientific study "Sexual Inversion" by the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis, a longtime friend and admirer of Carpenter who was married to a lesbian, was crucified in the press and pursued by the censors, Carpenter did not hesitate to spring publicly to its defense.
In 1902 Carpenter edited "Ioläus," an anthology celebrating same-sex love which drew its title from the name of Hercules' warrior comrade, and in which is chronicled, as Rowbotham puts it, "a great crowd of historical 'friends.' Greek and Spartan warrior lovers and shepherd boys appear in the procession along with Sir Thomas Browne, Michelangelo and the Persian poet Hafiz. From more recent times, Richard Wagner, King Ludwig II of Prussia, Walt Whitman, Byron and Shelley present themselves in its pages. Nor were the women forgotten; Carpenter included Queen Anne and Lady Churchill as well as the resolute Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby who eloped to live in Wales and became known as the 'Ladies of Llangolen' during the 18th century."
Over the years, Millthorpe and the Carpenter-Merrill ménage acted as a magnet for young men troubled about their same-sex attractions, both those from the working classes Carpenter favored - and whom he often bedded, sometimes arousing temporary fits of jealousy from the equally promiscuous Merrill that soon subsided - and a stream of younger, disconsolate would-be writers and intellectuals who were homosexual.
Among those whom the charismatic Carpenter served as sexual therapist and literary counselor were the budding poet Siegfriend Sasson, who wrote in requesting an audience that Carpenter's writings had helped him understand the antipathy he felt to young women; and the even younger Robert Graves, a schoolmaster dismissed for an affair with a schoolboy, who wrote in a thank you note that Carpenter had "absolutely taken the scales" from his eyes. Graves eventually gained worldwide fame as the author of "I, Claudius."
Even the already well-known author E.M. Forster benefited from his 1914 Millthorpe pilgrimage. "Merrill," Rowbotham relates, "who was familiar with the syndrome of nervous devotees, intuitively broke through Forster's self-conscious reticence."
As Forster later recalled, "George Merrill touched my backside - gently and just above the buttocks - I believe he touched most peoples. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-lost tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought."
On Forster's return home, he immediately sat down and wrote his novel "Maurice," a homosexual story of love across the class divide for which the Carpenter-Merrill couple was the template, and in which the character of Alec Scudder the servant gamekeeper was loosely based on Merrill. Forster regarded Carpenter as "a saviour" and noted ecstatically in his diary, "Forward rather than back, Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!"
But Carpenter's home also was a magnet for a never-ending stream of radicals - working-class trade unionists, Socialist and Labour Party leaders, rebellious aristocrats, emancipated women (who numbered among his most important friendships), environmentalists, land reformers, leaders of cooperatives, freethinking spiritual seekers, and delegations en masse from Socialist youth walking clubs all trouped to Carpenter's door and enjoyed his warm and bountiful hospitality.
Merrill died suddenly in 1928, and, shattered by the loss, Carpenter soon followed a year later. They are buried next to each other.
In Rowbotham, Carpenter has at long last found the biographer he deserves. A disciple of the great English historian E.P. Thompson and a socialist feminist historian and essayist whose writings over the last three decades have made her a revered figure in the women's movement, Rowbotham has always insisted on the importance of grassroots social movements from below.
And in her massive book on Carpenter, Rowbotham details his tireless activism and its incredible impact in fostering and nurturing the British left and the labor movement. Tens of thousands of workers who never read Carpenter had heard him lecture, or speak at open-air public meetings which attracted crowds in the thousands, whether he was appearing in support of strikers, arguing for women's suffrage, calling for the curtailment of pollution by industry, opposing the Boer War and World War I, or demanding that the privileged aristocracy's control of the land be ceded to the people who worked it.
Many more knew Carpenter, a talented musician who entertained Millthorpe visitors by playing his beloved Beethoven on the piano, as the composer and lyricist of the popular socialist hymn "England, Arise!," which was one of the frequently-sung anthems of the labor left.
Rowbotham is a felicitously vivid, witty, and evocative writer who captures Carpenter's magnetic personality and makes him come alive. But this is no undiluted hagiography, for Rowbotham neatly picks apart Carpenter's failings, foibles, and blind spots, including his unfortunate tendency to an ideological anti-Semitism (although he had close friends who were Jews) and a certain condescension, typical of Cambridge men of the era, toward Third World peoples - this despite his outspoken opposition to British colonialism and imperialism and his early and then-controversial support of the movement for independence in India, which he'd visited and written about.
Carpenter's legacy includes a direct, linear connection to the modern American homosexual rights movement, for it was when a young Harry Hay in 1925 stumbled across a restricted library copy of Carpenter's influential 1916 book "The Intermediate Sex," with its visions of same-sexers organizing to demand their rights, that Hay grasped the principals of homosexual emancipation which, two and half decades later, would lead him to found the Mattachine Society.
As brilliantly researched and told by Rowbotham, "Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love" has lessons for same-sexers, and for the left, which are invaluable in considering how we got to where we are and whither we should go. If you think you know Carpenter, this book's revelations will nonetheless surprise you, as they did me. And if you don't know him, you owe it to yourself to add this important and entertaining work, illustrated with numerous photos, to your bookshelf.
Carpenter's most important writings, including "Toward Democracy," "Ioläus," "The Intermediate Sex," and his word-portrait of his lover George Merrill are all available online at edwardcarpenter.net/. The music and lyrics to Carpenter's working-class anthem, "England, Arise!" are at strawberrythieveschoir.org.uk/music/EnglandArise!.pdf. And the Edward Carpenter Forum provides a wide range of Carpenteriana at edwardcarpenterforum.org/.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Daniel W. Crofts: Review of Harold Holzer's Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (11-27-08)
[Mr. Crofts is Professor of History at The College of New Jersey. He is the author of Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (North Carolina, 1989) and The Diary of a Public Man: A Secession Crisis Enigma (Louisiana State, forthcoming).]
Today the United States finds itself in the midst of an interregnum between outgoing and incoming presidents. A high level of public interest attends this transfer of power because it intersects with a sharp economic reversal. But things could be much worse. In the broader sweep of world history, convulsions often accompany regime change. And the United States has not been immune.
The most dangerous transfer of power in American history occurred in the winter of 1860-61, following Abraham Lincoln’s election as president. Before he even took office, seven states in the Deep South—from South Carolina west to Texas—declared themselves out of the Union and began to organize the government for a separate nation, the Confederate States of America.
Electoral systems are supposed to assure orderly successions. In theory, those who participate in an election pledge themselves to abide by the result. Certainly Lincoln and his fellow Republicans expected the South to acquiesce. But theory and practice do not always coincide. Many white Southerners considered Lincoln’s victory an intolerable affront. Refusing to accept a “Black Republican” president, they demanded that their states secede from the Union.
During the four months following the election in early November 1860, the outgoing lame-duck president, James Buchanan, was responsible for dealing with the secession crisis (until 1936, American presidents were inaugurated on March 4, not January 20). Buchanan insisted that no state could legally secede, but he feared that any use of armed force against the secessionists would make a bad situation worse. As the Union unraveled, Lincoln could only await events. No incoming president before or since has faced such a vexing crisis.
In his inaugural address, Lincoln declared that the Union was perpetual and that it remained “unbroken.” His oath of office obligated him to take care that the laws “be faithfully executed in all the States.” But he eagerly hoped that national authority could be restored without “bloodshed or violence.” And he ended with words that President-elect Barack Obama quoted on election night earlier this month: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” (Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, IV:262-71, quotations on 264-66, 271.) Because Lincoln will always be remembered as a war president, we rarely recall that he came to power hopeful that the peace might yet be preserved.
Harold Holzer has just published a hefty new study of Lincoln’s role during the excruciating interval between his election and his inauguration. One approaches this book with high hopes. Holzer is the author or editor of thirty books on various aspects of Lincoln’s life and the Civil War. He commands a wide audience. His Lincoln at Cooper Union was awarded the Lincoln Prize. This latest venture is being vigorously marketed and carries glowing endorsements from prominent scholars.
Lincoln President-Elect provides an almost linear catalog of Lincoln’s daily routines and movements between early November 1860 and early March 1861. Two-thirds of the volume is situated in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln remained until early February. Another hundred pages detail his roundabout railroad trip to Washington, D.C. The final few chapters sketch the pressure-packed ten days between February 23 and March 4, after Lincoln reached the national capital and had to make weighty decisions about his inaugural address, about the roster of his cabinet, and about the dread matter that hung over everything—his policy toward the disaffected South.
Anything a reader might wish to know about Lincoln’s appearance, attire, and diet may be found here. The book is definitive on his post-election decision to grow whiskers. We learn about the furnishings of his Springfield home, many of which were sold as he prepared to move. We find him besieged by a growing volume of visitors. Holzer also has ransacked many odd nuggets from Lincoln’s incoming mail—counterparts to the miscellaneous avalanche of gifts and mementos that steadily accumulated in a room of the Illinois State House.
Holzer contends that Lincoln’s secession crisis role has been insufficiently appreciated. He takes exception to the idea that the president-elect picked his way tentatively through the shocks and surprises of the interregnum. He rejects David M. Potter’s tart view that Lincoln “groped and blundered” as he began to realize that the seceding states were in earnest. (Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, 315.) Holzer’s Lincoln, by contrast, navigated “brilliantly” (458) through all the snares of the secession winter and had a clear vision of the road ahead.
Part of Holzer’s case is compelling. On one key point Lincoln was adamant—he repeatedly demanded that Republicans maintain their opposition to slavery in the territories. “Hold firm, as with a chain of steel,” he insisted (159). He feared that the party would no longer stand for anything if it backed down from its core principles. He feared too that radicals would defect and cripple his new administration.
Although Lincoln consistently rejected a territorial compromise, in other ways his response to the crisis was opportunistic. New Mexico was the only territory south of the old Missouri Compromise line (36°30´). Lincoln could tolerate its admission to the Union as a slave state. He wasn’t keen to put a non-Republican Southerner into his cabinet, but he decided to offer a position to North Carolina’s John A. Gilmer, who nonetheless declined it. He rewrote his inaugural address so as to emphasize his hopes for peace. Once in office, he anguished for most of a month before deciding to risk war.
Lincoln President-Elect is an imperfect guide to the political crisis that was at the center of Lincoln’s consciousness between November and March. Part of the problem is conceptual. However much a relentless day-by-day format may inform readers about Lincoln’s activities, it is ill-suited to illuminate the various tangled strands of the story. Most historical writing examines particular topics within the broader context of chronology. Only rarely do scholars attempt a rigidly chronological approach.
By focusing so intently on Lincoln, Holzer tends to overlook important parts of the story that did not take place in Springfield. Thus, he barely touches the crisis that engulfed Buchanan’s cabinet in late December, after Major Robert Anderson boldly moved his besieged garrison of federal soldiers in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, from Fort Moultrie, a defenseless sandspit, to Fort Sumter, a mile offshore. The little that he writes about it shows that Holzer should have studied the subject more carefully. Sumter was destined to become Lincoln’s biggest headache of all.
Lincoln President-Elect has other limitations. Holzer tends to turn everything into biography or personality. For example, his account of Thurlow Weed’s visit to Springfield just before Christmas manages to misunderstand why Weed was far more alarmed than Lincoln about the situation in the South. Holzer depicts instead two veteran storytellers trading yarns with each other. A “delighted” Weed, fortified with a “hearty breakfast of sausages,” headed back east with warm feelings about his new friend (170). This glimpse conceals more than it explains.
Holzer knows a bewildering amount about Lincoln—and he cannot restrain himself from putting it all in the book. But he simply hasn’t done the research to write with full authority about the secession crisis. He has not consulted the papers of the other key players—William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, James Buchanan, Stephen A. Douglas, and Charles Francis Adams, for starters. And he knows so little about the South that he keeps making mistakes. Georgia’s Alexander Stephens had never been a U.S. Senator. James A. Bayard, identified here simply as a Philadelphian, was in fact a powerful U.S. Senator from Delaware.
For many weeks Lincoln remained confident that the South would come to its senses. He continually refused to make conciliatory statements or to offer reassurances of his good intentions. Holzer celebrates Lincoln’s stance and castigates those who saw the matter differently. Holzer cannot comprehend why any self-respecting Republican might have supported efforts to enact some kind of compromise legislation.
A recent book by a young scholar, Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (North Carolina, 2008), offers far more depth and perspective on the crisis that led to war. More succinct than Holzer’s bloated volume, McClintock’s book also covers Lincoln’s first crucial six weeks in office. McClintock understands—as Holzer does not—the complexity of what was happening in the slave states. An anti-secession insurgency in the Upper South tempted some Republicans, especially Seward, to heed warnings from Virginia about the need for compromise and about the danger of maintaining federal control over Fort Sumter, the powder keg in Charleston harbor. In the end, McClintock, like Holzer, strongly affirms Lincoln’s leadership. But McClintock’s case rests on far more persuasive foundations.
Holzer shortchanges the one previous book that covers the exact same ground as his—William E. Baringer’s A House Dividing: Lincoln as President-Elect (Abraham Lincoln Association, 1945). An accomplished Lincoln scholar, Baringer wrote more economically than Holzer and did not get bogged down in detail. So too, a wider research base enabled Baringer to grasp some aspects of the crisis that eluded Holzer. Baringer explained more clearly why pressures to enact a modified compromise intensified in January and February, once it could be depicted as a way of supporting Union-loving anti-secessionists in the Upper South.
In the end, Lincoln did prove willing to accept one key compromise—a constitutional amendment forever safeguarding slavery in the states where it already existed. He made this position explicit in his inaugural address. Holzer reprints the inaugural as an appendix, but his own narrative does not breathe a word about Lincoln’s position on the constitutional amendment. To do so would admit too much paradox. Holzer must depict Lincoln as someone who, unlike Seward, would never countenance the permanence of slavery (213-14).
Holzer refuses to see that the man we now hail as the “Great Emancipator” never expected to become a war president and never expected to preside over the forcible destruction of the slave system. Only rarely do Lincoln’s modern admirers come to grips with the “plain evidence of his earnest efforts to avoid that course altogether.” Lincoln was, in fact, “reluctant to become an Emancipator,” David Potter wrote, “and the conflict which immortalized him was a conflict which he had believed he could avert.” (Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, 315.)
Related Links
Daniel W. Crofts: Review of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005)
Monday, November 24, 2008
Murray Polner: Review of Robert Justin Goldstein's American Blacklist: The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Loren Ghiglione's CBS's Don Hollenbeck: An Honest Reporter in the Age of McCarthyism (Columbia University Press, 2008)
When Harry Truman issued Executive order 9835 in 1947, which in effect required all federal civil-service workers to swear they were loyal Americans, little did he realize that it would become a precursor to Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror two years later. Soon after, the government published the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) which constituted, what Robert Justin Goldstein, professor emeritus of political science at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, properly concludes “was critically important to the entire Red Scare, far more than McCarthy.”
Truman wanted to fend off rightwing attacks on his presidency and his close friend Clark Clifford’s memoir claims he never believed communism was a serious domestic threat and deeply regretted not ending “the loyalty program at its inception.” But it was too late to shut the door to a legion of inquisitors on state and federal levels eager to punish supposed malefactors and promote their own careers.
Goldstein opens by citing Alan Barth, the Washington Post editorialist, a preeminent civil libertarian and author of The Loyalty of Free Men accurately portraying the authority granted Attorney General(s) as “perhaps the most arbitrary and far-reaching power ever exercised by a single public official” in our entire history. Some 300 groups were eventually officially proclaimed to be seditious, un-American, revolutionary, and most of all, Communist (a few shuttered fascist and pro-Nazi groups plus the KKK were included as well), the overwhelming majority for their political slant and without so much as a hint of due process.
People were fired without hearings or evidence of criminal activities, while organizations were destroyed for “subversive tendencies.” The euphoria after the end of WWII was quickly drowned out by hysterical fear of Soviet Russia and news of its espionage network and, writes Goldstein in this indispensable study, “deliberate attempts by a powerful coalition of American conservatives, notably the FBI, significant elements of the business community, the Catholic Church and especially an increasingly politically desperate Republican Party, to ignite a domestic Red Scare.” Famously, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a former isolationist turned internationalist, advised Truman, then seeking congressional backing for his Truman Doctrine, to “scare the hell out of the American people.” Informed and misinformed by politicians, radio, films and the press, many Americans panicked.
Actually, the fear and intimidation created by the list and the new class of professional hunters it sired (and later, by McCarthyism) was the opening act in transforming millions of Americans into silent citizens fearful of joining any group, signing any petition, writing any article, reading or recommending any book, or in any way arousing the suspicions of professional Red hunters. With very few exceptions the major media -- no surprise here, given its role as government’s echo chambers during the early years of the Vietnam and Iraq wars—rarely challenged AGLOSO. Radio networks and public and private institutions began demanding loyalty oaths from their employees. Even the ACLU and NAACP cooperated with the FBI in eliminating its “suspicious” members. Justice, legal rights, and fairness were abandoned, a replay of Woodrow Wilson’s post-WWI Red Scare.
Remarkably, given our current two wars and “war on terror” and the Bush-Cheney administration’s dishonorable record in Guantanamo, its reliance on torture, rendition and domestic surveillance, and despite its attempts to bully domestic opponents, we haven’t had any major show trials against antiwar critics as in the Vietnam era. In fact, contemporary American dissenters have not allowed themselves to be silenced. Perhaps we’ve finally learned a lesson.
Don Hollenbeck, whose character was featured in George Clooney’s film about Joe McCarthy and the role of CBS News in “Good Night and Good Luck” killed himself after years of being falsely portrayed as a Comsymp by Jack O’Brien, a New York Journal- American entertainment columnist. Long after Hollenbeck had died O’Brien told Ghiglione that Hollenbeck, a journalist and editor, wasn’t a communist only a liberal “just sympathetic to anything on the left and very antagonistic to anything on the right,” thus presumably giving him the right to malign. When Ghiglione read Holenbeck’s FBI file (a dossier, including many other Americans, should never have been assembled) he wrote, “two detailed FBI investigation reports suggest Hollenbeck was a patriotic American.”
Loren Ghiglione’s workmanlike and sympathetic biography of a reporter, editor and radio newsman long forgotten details the life of this Nebraska-born newsman, warts and all: his alcoholism, failed marriages, mental depression and loss of a job he most cherished and his suicide in 1954. All the same, the essential theme of this compelling book by a onetime newspaper editor and currently professor of Media Ethics at Northwestern University, is the familiar but nevertheless toxic impact the post-WWII Red hunt had and still has on too many people and institutions.
In 1947 Ed Morrow chose Hollenbeck as the writer and host of “CBS Views the Press,” a weekly 15-minute examination of New York City’s daily newspapers (by my estimate and recollection, ten papers, excluding those published in the outer boroughs). Not that criticizing newspapers then or now is novel. Hollenbeck’s predecessors and contemporaries included Upton Sinclair (The Brass Check), A.J. Liebling at The New Yorker, George Seldes’ In Fact newsletter, and I.F. Stone’s weekly on the left plus several on the right. But Hollenbeck’s comments and analysis hit home and drew fire from the papers. While he sought to be even-handed – in one example, he praised the Times and Herald Tribune for “the fairest and most unbiased account” of House Un-American Activities Committee sessions while the Post and PM were too anti- HUAC and the rest of the papers too pro-HUAC. Still, his was a distinct left-liberal bias, something his rightwing critics could never forgive, especially when he went after phony headlines such as “U.S. Ship Fired on Off Siberia.”
The pressure was obviously too much for CBS and on February 4, 1950 Hollenbeck was sacked from the program accompanied by innuendos and anonymous sources detailing his alleged Communist party membership (denied by several FBI reports). Five days after his dismissal Joe McCarthy made his Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, describing the State Department as inundated with communists. The speech eventually created a new class of victims, like Robert Lewis Shayon, a onetime CBS “You Are There” writer-director-producer whose name was mentioned in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. He was accused of having been a member of an allegedly Red front group, thus losing a job he coveted. The Red Channels’ reference, Shayon said, “cost me five years of my life and career.” Added Ghiglione: “That was a price that those who supported the blacklists were willing to have others pay.”
Don Hollenbeck was a reporter and editor and this fine book does him justice.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of Michael Schwartz's War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (11-3-08)
[Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell University.]
The Iraq War has been among the greatest disasters in modern American history. Michael Schwartz’ illuminating new book War Without End: The Iraq War in Context provides a comprehensive overview of the ideological roots of the war and its harrowing social costs for the Iraqi people. He argues quite convincingly that rather than it being purely a matter of administrative incompetence and mismanagement, the ideological zealotry of leading neo-conservatives was a principal cause of the American failure to establish political legitimacy after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He shows how neo-liberal policies and the rapid privatization of state resources backed by a doctrine of massive force helped to exacerbate the suffering of ordinary Iraqis who increasingly turned to resistance against U.S. power and rule and remain disdainful of the occupation.
According to Schwartz, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, America’s war aims were clear from the outset: to create a strategic base for the establishment of control over the Middle East’s prized energy reserves and to usher in an economic transition from the “socialist dictatorship” of Saddam Hussein to an unfettered free-market capitalist state capable of serving as a model for the region. In the aftermath of the invasion, Lieutenant L. Paul Bremer and his staff moved to rapidly privatize state resources, including the formerly state-owned oil industry and all sectors of the economy including the health and educational systems. They rewarded multinational corporations like Haliburton and Bechtel with major contracts to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure, which had been devastated during the shock and awe campaign and previous wars and economic sanctions.
The consequences of these policies were profound: They confirmed for a large number of Iraqis that America had invaded the country for self-serving reasons. Furthermore, they caused a social and economic crisis of epic proportions, which gave strength to the insurgency. The dismantling of state industries caused the loss of thousands of jobs, which were replaced by foreign contractors. Local businesses were bankrupted by the flooding of the country with cheap imports and by a lack of regular electricity. Unemployment rates in the once prosperous nation skyrocketed to over 60 percent. Massive corruption in the rewarding of contracts and the dismissal of skilled local technicians resulted in gross inefficiency. This trend was typified by a failed $70 million dollar Halliburton project to reconstruct an oil pipeline in Al Fatah, which came to resemble, as one observer put it, “some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad.”
Most disconcerting was the decline in health and educational services bred by the U.S. occupation and war. Schools damaged by the fighting were never properly repaired and lacked basic textbooks and school supplies. The U.S. military sometimes even used schools as a staging base for military incursions. By 2007, UNICEF reported that only one-sixth of Iraqi children were being educated at all. After dismantling the state health-care system, which had been among the best in the Arab world before Hussein’s ascent to power, occupation officials promised to construct dozens of private clinics across the country. Most of these never materialized, resulting in a decline in accessibility of basic medicines and equipment. In the newly “liberated” Iraq, doctors would fill out prescriptions that the pharmacies could not provide. Family members of patients even had to serve as nurses and IVs and needles had to be reused. Over time, doctor shortages and the imposition of curfews in cities made the situation grow worse. The inability of occupation officials to provide clean water throughout the country resulted in outbreaks of cholera and other diseases which the hospitals were ill-equipped to treat. The overflow of raw sewage into city streets was another factor breeding disease in the teeming urban slums of Iraqi cities which came to resemble something out of a Charles Dickens’ novel.
One of Schwartz’ important contributions is to show how the failure of America’s privatization and “nation-building” programs contributed to the rise of the insurgency in Iraq. Rather than being composed of “dead enders,” in Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous words, or foreign jihadists or ex-Bathists, he demonstrates how resistance was in fact driven by “local factors that grew strength from deep grievances and a widespread hostility to the presence of foreign troops,” as U.S. intelligence analysts concluded. In the early phases, many Iraqis staged demonstrations against the occupational authorities demanding basic social services and jobs. Rather than seeking to respond to their demands, the authorities instructed the military to greet any act of dissidence as suspicious and to shoot at any perceived threat. U.S. soldiers consequently fired upon peaceful crowds and killed and wounded civilians, thus stoking popular anger. Many more innocent civilians were killed by fearful Marines at often poorly marked checkpoints throughout the country. The routine raiding of homes designed in part to strike fear among the population helped to further stoke popular anger and resentment, as did the prevalence of deplorable prison conditions and the revelations of torture as at Abu Ghraib. The U.S. construction of a gaudy multi-billion dollar embassy made apparent America’s ambitions to remain in Iraq indefinitely.
In order to try to maintain its grip on power, and in clear violation of international law, the U.S. adopted a doctrine of collective punishment designed to annihilate not only the insurgent fighters but anyone who harbored and supported them. The consequence was the perpetration of many massacres, such as the notorious incident at Haditha where 24 civilians, including women and children were slaughtered by Marines. The doctrine of collective punishment was on display during the siege of Fallujah where the U.S. military killed thousands of people and turned the entire city into “a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted homes, weeping power lines and severed palm trees,” in the words of New York Times journalist Erik Eckholm. A marine lieutenant proclaimed afterwards: “This is what happens if you shelter terrorists.” As these comments reveal, the siege of Fallujah was intended as a warning sign to others that it would suffer the same fate if it defied U.S. power.
Much like the Vietnamese in an earlier American failed colonial intervention, the Iraqis refused to bow to U.S. pressure and thus paid a high price in fighting for their sovereignty and independence. The backbone of the resistance took root in Sunni as well as some Shia cities like Sadr city where local warlord Muqtada Sadr gained in prestige not only by defending Iraqi cities from attack but also by seeking to provide basic social services that had been abandoned under the occupation. The resistance in Iraq, however, was never unified and became factionalized and ridden by sectarian tensions which culminated in the onset of full-scale civil war. The war’s ugliness was compounded by the tactics of many insurgent fighters - particularly the small number of Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq whose agenda was to expel the U.S. from Iraq and establish a caliphate through the Arab Middle East embodying the principles of Salafi Islam. They adopted terror techniques such as suicide and car bombings directed against supposed colonial collaborators and Shia, which only intensified public suffering. Criminal gangs seized upon the violence and chaos to carry out the looting of public resources and facilities and to extort money for ransom.
According to Schwartz, the United States bears a large share of the blame for creating a climate in which these trends emerged. In his view, the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq resemble those of the U.S. in Fallujah with the aim of inducing civilians to withdraw their support for the enemy once they experienced the agony of punishment. Contrary to the false impression given by a majority of America’s mainstream media, through the extensive air campaigns and search and destroy missions, U.S. forces and their proxies bear responsibility for the majority of both civilian and combat deaths, which scientific studies have placed at well over one million. Schwartz estimates plausibly that the U.S. has been responsible for at least 57 percent of the killings, many of which he attributes to a hysterical use of firepower by American troops in urban combat zones. The much vaunted “surge” strategy of President George W. Bush only worsened the carnage and further inflamed Iraqis, which remains weary of the American presence and continues to live in conditions of utter destitution. The U.S. backed Maliki government and military, meanwhile, remain predominantly powerless outside Baghdad’s Green Zone due to the growing strength of the sectarian militias who control many neighborhoods.
On the whole, while destined to create controversy, Schwartz has written a very powerful book on the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its devastating consequences for the country. He sheds great insight into the mindset of American policy-elites and military officials and documents the stark brutality of their programs. He demonstrates furthermore that the rise of insurgency in Iraq was not irrational or driven exclusively by an Islamicist agenda or hate but was rather a product of the arrogance of American occupying officials and the failure of U.S. state-building policies and neo-liberalism, which failed to guarantee basic social services and thereby helped to facilitate Iraq’s social decay. Most of all, Schwartz reminds us who the true victims of the war are. In order to move forward the next administration needs to accept accountability and not simply withdraw troops but provide reconstruction and reparations aid so that Iraqis can rebuild their country on their own terms.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Fred Siegel: Review of Bernard-Henri Levy's Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (Random House, 256 pp., $25)
Source: Special to HNN (10-26-08)
[Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.]
The terms Left and Right were coined in 1789 to describe seating arrangements for the National Assembly during the early stages of the French Revolution. Those seated to the podium’s right wanted to preserve parts of the past; those on the left hoped, in the name of progress, to invent a new future. But the maneuverings of politics soon muddied the initial transparency of these terms into an enduring illegibility. The ideas of the bloody minded right-wing reactionary Joseph de Maistre, the intellectual arch-enemy of the Revolution, for instance, became an inspiration for the early socialists—and so it has gone ever since.
The flamboyant French litterateur Bernard-Henri Lévy, widely known in Paris as BHL, acknowledges the problem. In his new book, he writes that “the famous split between Left and Right that has structured French politics . . . has become harder and harder to believe in.” That is because, to his dismay, much of the Left, cuckolded by history, no longer believes in progress or modernity. He describes the contemporary Left, with its signature scowl of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-liberalism, as “that great backward falling corpse which the worms have already started to chew.”
Despite his disdain for much of the current Left, and despite the fact that many of those closest to his point of view in France endorsed the presidential candidacy of the “right-wing” flag bearer Nicholas Sarkozy, a personal friend, Lévy refused to abandon the Socialist ticket. His dilemma, he told Sarkozy, was that no matter how much he liked, respected, and even agreed with the French president, he couldn’t support him because “the Left is my family.” Lévy’s new book is an effort—part memoir, part essay, part polemic—to explain the nature of those family ties.
“And does my insistence, on sticking with the Left that has done everything to empty itself of its substance mean I’m clinging to yesterday . . . to nostalgia? . . . Yes, maybe,” Lévy writes. “But not only.” Lévy’s “not only” refers to the images he treasures of his father in the uniform of the Spanish Republicans who fought Franco; of the great resistance hero Jean Moulin; of the brave socialist Prime Minister of the 1930s, Leon Blum. He acknowledges that “images are not enough” and describes the events that shaped his loyalties and those of his parents. These include the Dreyfus Affair, Vichy France, and the Algerian War, as well as being a young man during the uprisings of May 1968. He wonders if he is worthy of his illustrious ancestors, such as the “young left-wing captains in Portugal 1975 bringing down the Salazar dictatorship.” But here again, he backtracks and adds, “It is true that none of these events can completely justify the clear division of Right and Left.” He recognizes that some on the Right supported Dreyfus and the events of May ’68, while “many socialists . . . pacifists and sometimes Communists” took part in Vichy’s crimes. “These events,” he concludes, “are split by the same dividing line that they purport to draw.”
Some American readers will find themselves exasperated by Lévy’s very French form of discursive, emotional writing, which lacks the concision and specificity of the best English-language essays. BHL criticizes Sarkozy for supposedly writing off the Arab and Islamic rioters of the banlieues who need to be incorporated into France, for example. But his moralizing leaves no room to discuss the rigid terms of France’s statist economy, which makes it almost impossible to create jobs for the unemployed beurs, who have plenty of time to fester on welfare. And some of his concerns are far more salient in a European context than in an American one. Most Americans don’t realize that much of Tony Blair’s cabinet in England consisted of former far-leftists; or that Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s prime minister at the end of the 1990s, was formerly a communist; or that Lionel Jospin, French Prime Minister from 1997 to 2002, had earlier been a Trotskyist for two decades.
But, argues BHL, whatever the considerable failings of those older iterations of Leftism, until the fall of the Soviet Union the Left still had something like a positive agenda. Since then, Leftists—reduced to “the joint ownership of resentment”—have increasingly turned against their parentage, the Enlightenment. The Left now defines itself so closely by its hatred of America and Israel that anti-globalization activists even draw on counter-Enlightenment figures—such as the philo-Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt—to create what BHL calls “a right-wing left.”
The Left’s once proud universalism has devolved into an ethnic particularism, of the sort that once found its home in the fever swamps of the far Right. “We are in a world in which, on the one hand, we have the United States, its English poodle, its Israeli lackey—a three-headed gorgon that commits all the sins in the world—and, on the other side, all those who, no matter what their crimes, their ideology, their treatment of their own minorities, their internal policies, their anti-Semitism and their racism, their disdain for women and homosexuals, their lack of press freedom and of any freedom whatsoever, are challenging the former” and are thus to be defended, Lévy laments. Here he refers, among other examples, to the case of British Leftist playwright Harold Pinter who became, during the Bosnian slaughter of the 1990s, an ardent defender of Slobodan Milošević.
Lévy has fought the good fight. His courageous book Who Killed Danny Pearl, based on his extensive travels in Pakistan, unflinchingly described the radical evil of our time. But under the spell of a hopelessly confused nomenclature, BHL, sticking to his anti-Sarkozy guns, concludes with a call for what he terms “melancholy liberalism.” The phrase may sound odd to American ears, but its content is quite familiar. It’s another name for the disillusioned liberalism of 1950s America, with its strong sense of nuance, irony, and complexity. It’s a chastened liberalism worthy of admiration. But after following BHL’s stylish twists and turns in describing the creation of a “right-wing left,” the reader is bound to ask at least two questions. First, when is it time to leave a dysfunctional family? And second, is it not time to free ourselves, as much as possible, from a hopelessly outdated and unavoidably misleading set of political categories?
Robert D. Parmet: Review of Frank J. Trezza's Brooklyn Steel-Blood Tenacity (Baltimore, MD: Publish/America, 2007)
Source: Special to HNN (10-26-08)
[Robert Parmet is Professor of History, York College of the City University of New York.]
The Brooklyn Navy Yard has had a long life. A shipyard along the East River, it was owned and operated by the United States Government from 1801 to 1966, purchased by New York City in 1967, and then reopened in 1971 as an industrial park. Two years later, Frank Trezza found a job there as a marine electrician for Seatrain Shipbuilding. Under conditions that he describes in vivid detail in his autobiography, Brooklyn Steel-Blood Tenacity, he worked on four VLCCs (very large crude carriers), an ice breaker barge, eight ocean going barges, and two roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ros) until two herniated discs and nerve damage along his right leg incurred on the job forced him into retirement from Seatrain.
Determined not to be sidelined permanently, he afterward worked at the Bath Iron Works in Maine, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire, and a European defense contractor in South America. In 1999, at age forty-six, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Southern Maine. Interestingly enough, at the same time his son received a BA in political science from the same school.
Though Trezza provides a brief historical perspective on the Yard toward the end of his account, what he essentially presents is autobiography, the story of how he and his wife, Milagros, managed to survive and have three children under difficult circumstances.
Trezza and his fellow shipbuilders endured long layoffs, twelve-hour work days, seven-day work weeks, an often treacherous workplace with dangerous walkways, falling equipment, icy decks in winter, hot decks in summer, toilets without privacy, and obnoxious human beings. Labor relations in building the VLCC Williamsburg, for example, involved dealing with the “rat patrol,” people who would raid the restroom and take note of the workers who were there rather than at work and then accuse them of not producing enough, which was punishable by suspension without pay or dismissal. One such individual, “Mr. Rat,” received his comeuppance on a bus, where he was beaten in the face with a tow truck chain. While building the Stuyvesant (“Economic Hell!”), workers gained revenge on an unpopular supervisor by making a voodoo doll to represent him and then sticking pins in its crotch.
More pleasant is what happened to Mary Lindsay, the wife of Mayor John Lindsay. Before a crowd of some 5,000 people, she attempted to christen the Brooklyn by smashing a bottle of champagne on a bracket over the bow. To everyone’s dismay, her aim was poor and the bottle not only failed to break, but also fell out of her hands onto the dry dock below. To the rescue came a marine electrician, who had anticipated the problem, with another bottle of champagne, which he smashed as the crowd cheered.
Along with this account of a ceremony are those of accidental deaths, reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s indictment of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle. For example, one worker died from loss of blood after his legs were crushed by an I-beam, and another from a forty-foot fall when he lost his footing on an overhead crane.
Despite the sometimes terrible working conditions, Frank Trezza expresses gratitude for the opportunity to have worked for Seatrain Shipbuilding, which fell victim to international competition and economic conditions and shut its gates in 1979. “A very large group of economically disadvantaged minorities living in the bowels of poverty were given a chance to work and better themselves against all odds.”
Those people, coming from diverse backgrounds, which the author does not stress in his account, are this book’s heroes. They were workers struggling with each other, their union, and their bosses, as they built great ships. Trezza tells his story and theirs without pretense, in the often raw language of the workplace, and illustrates it with his own photographs.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Reidar Visser: Review of Peter Galbraith’s Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies (Simon & Schuster, 2008).
Source: Special to HNN (10-20-08)
[Reidar Visser is editor of the Iraq website http://www.historiae.org and author of Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq and An Iraq of Its Regions: Cornerstones of a Federal Democracy?]
The last time Peter Galbraith wrote a book about Iraq, the title summed up the problems of the entire volume: based on his own, highly idiosyncratic reading of Iraqi history, Galbraith prematurely announced “The End of Iraq”. However, in his new book on Iraq, the title is nothing short of brilliant: “Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies”. That is by all accounts a crisp summary of some of the main problems that have afflicted US policy in Iraq ever since 2003. So does it mean that Galbraith’s latest offering is an improvement on his previous one?
The beginning of the book is a little ominous. Included in the front matter is a page titled “Iraq’s Ethnic and Sectarian Divisions”. In the description of the “Shiite South”, Galbraith comments that “Iraq’s Council of Representatives has enacted a law permitting Iraq’s nine southern Governorates to form a single Shiite Region [capitalization as per the original] with the same powers as Kurdistan”. There is nothing wrong in the statement as such. It’s just that the law Galbraith refers to also happens to permit more than 100 other federalization scenarios. Basra can become a region in its own right with the other governorates remaining governorates; Maysan can become a region in its own right; Basra and Maysan together may become a region, and so on an