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.
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Reviews
Jim Cullen, Review of Stacy Schiff's "Cleopatra: A Life" (Little, Brown, 2010)
Doug Ireland, Review of R. Tripp Evans's "Grant Wood: A Life" (Knopf, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom: A Novel" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of Aziz Rana's "The Two Faces of American Freedom" (Harvard, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of Samuel Moyn's "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History" (Harvard, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of Lewis Hyde's "Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership" (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (12-21-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
Back in the Reagan era, a group of historians ranging from J.G.A. Pocock to Sean Wilentz ransacked U.S. history in a quest to find some model of American society that could furnish an alternative to the free-market industrial capitalism that had so evidently triumphed over its domestic and international rivals. The varied explorations of this counter-tradition went under a general rubric of civic republicanism, usefully surveyed in a 1992 article on the career of the concept by Daniel Rodgers in the Journal of American History. Other historians, notably John Patrick Diggins in his book The Lost Soul of American Politics (1984), regarded the attempt to locate an alternative to liberalism -- in the laissez faire sense of the term -- as quixotic at best, and the overall historiographic project went into eclipse, though scholars in related fields, like Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, have continued to trace, and argue, for the reality and necessity of a strong civic tradition in American life.
Lewis Hyde is not an academic historian, and a rearticulation of the civic republican synthesis is not his primary agenda in Common as Air. But in the process of arguing for the expansion and production of a public domain in the realm of intellectual property -- a point of view associated most prominently with law professor Lawrence Lessig -- Hyde offers a stalwart defense of the public domain strongly grounded in history, particularly that of the Founding Fathers. In so doing, he offers a fresh set of reasons for thinking about the reality, viability, and necessity for a civic republican vision of national life.
Hyde has two core strategies for making his case. The first is to make a distinction between property that is material and finite, and intellectual property that is infinitely reproducible with no reduction in content. Hyde quotes Thomas Jefferson's famous formulation that "he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine." He draws on examples from Jefferson's own work as an inventor, John Adams's work as a pamphleteer, and the remarkable career of Benjamin Franklin to show that all these people created works with the unmistakable (and often explicit) intention of collective use without financial remuneration. As Hyde notes, these people were familiar with the idea that creators of content needed some recognition for their work as a matter of incentive and support. But he also notes they were resolutely consistent in their belief that a monopoly over such content should always be temporary, typified by the 14 years of copyright stipulated in the U.S. Constitution. As a string of figures from James Madison to William Rehnquist have repeatedly affirmed, copyright protection is not something whose primary purpose is the permanent protection of private property, but rather a means to the more important end of encouraging the production of knowledge that will contribute to the common good.
And yet, as Hyde notes, copyright protection has increasingly been seen a form of patrimonial inheritance, typified by the Sonny Bono Act, which in some cases extends it close to a century beyond the death of its creator and the rapacious behavior of Martin Luther King Jr.'s son Dexter in extracting royalty payments King's likeness and speeches (though using King to sell telephone service is OK if the corporation pays up). This is not exactly a novel argument, but it's one made with real cogency and novelty in a series of illustrations that extend forward to the musical career of Bob Dylan to the mapping of the human genome.
The other pillar of Hyde's argument, which he makes in tandem with this one, is to point out that material property has never been entirely private. Beginning with the reciprocal obligations embedded in feudalism and moving through the enclosure acts in Britain, the development of allodial notions of property and the decline of entail as legal means of preserving estates in North America, he notes the very notion of private property itself has rested on the existence of a commons and notions of responsibility that range from voting to public service. Indeed, private property is worthless without a public infrastructure, whether in roads or regulations to keep it viable. Ironically, many of those who seek patents or copyrights on things that range from songs to genes are very often appropriate big chunks of the public domain in the process of "inventing" things that are very often more accurately described as discoveries. Indeed, it is a measure of how rapacious private interests have become that Hyde should even have to make this case, which he does with notable clarity and grace.
Hyde's preoccupation with creativity and the way it transcends economic considerations can be traced back to his now classic 1983 book The Gift, an extended literary meditation with an anthropological overlay. His output of in the last quarter-century (five books) is small, but beautifully wrought and quietly influential. A former MacArthur fellow who teaches creative writing at Kenyon who is also affiliated with Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, Hyde is an essayist in the Thoreau tradition. In his simple, plainspoken wisdom, he is a great American, which is to say he is an excellent democrat. His mere existence is a living demonstration of the civic republican tradition in American life, which we forget or dismiss at our peril. Unless we remember that a society is more than a market, we will soon not only find ourselves at the mercy of large corporations, but even greater powers who have fewer compunctions about deploying, if not seizing, property in the service of interests that are more than merely economic.
David A. Johnson and Gary B. Nash, Review of William J. Bennett's "America: The Last Best Hope" (Thomas Nelson, 2007)
Source: Special to HNN (12-31-69)
[David A. Johnson is Professor of History at Portland State University and Editor of the Pacific Historical Review. Gary B. Nash is Professor Emeritus at UCLA.]
Is this the kind of history students need?
William J. Bennett’s two-volume America: The Last Best Hope, is a brisk and readable survey of American history from Columbus to Reagan. It is a story of great men—politicians, diplomats, and military figures, interspersed with occasional vignettes of individuals and events that Bennett seems to find edifying. The arc of Bennett’s story—until the last four chapters, which cover the 1960s through the Reagan presidency—resembles nothing so much as the so-called consensus history of the 1950s. There are unsurprising champions of the American consensus, the founders, Lincoln, TR, FDR, JFK, and Martin Luther King. In Bennett’s telling, these, and lesser lights such as Grant, Truman, and Eisenhower, embodied the American themes of liberty, justice, equality, opportunity, and patriotism. On occasion, he turns vehemently against figures such as William Lloyd Garrison, who are featured in most textbooks as fearless reformers. For Bennett, Garrison, in his message of undying opposition to slavery, used language that was “insulting and degrading.” Bennett concludes from the New Englander’s unbending campaign for universal freedom that Garrison “hated the Constitution. He hated the Union. At times, he seemed to hate America and his fellow Americans, too.” (I;285)
For Bennett, furthermore, the United States took a terribly wrong turn in the 1960s and 1970s. In the three chapters that precede his closing encomium to “Reagan and Renewal,” radical students, Woodstock nihilists, abortion feminists, black radicals, and other miscreants undermined American verities. The left’s pernicious spirit infected the Democratic party, leading to the grievous McGovern campaign and the catastrophic Carter presidency (II: 426). There is a biographical slant here. Bennett, a young liberal Democrat in the 1950s and 1960s, left the party in the 1980s, when he became an ardent convert to the Reagan movement and a neo-conservative zealot. However, his residual regard for FDR, the New Deal, and his boyhood hero JFK, is everywhere in his treatment of the twentieth century, residing uncomfortably throughout the narrative and leading to scores of “yes, but” questions for the reader.
As Alan Wolfe pointed out in his Washington Post review of America: The Last Best Hope, “no new discoveries await the reader.” The book is grounded in secondary sources. But there is more to Bennett’s evidentiary base than his reliance on existing historical writing. His chronicle of the years before the 1960s draws primarily on an older body of scholarship, such as Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People and well-known books by Bruce Catton, Thomas Bailey, Hans Trefousse, Robert Beisner, and Martin Gilbert, among others. In addition, Bennett draws heavily on bestselling academic and popular biographers such as David McCullough, John Keegan, John Steele Gordon, H.W. Brands, Michael Beschloss, and Geoffrey Perrett. Once Bennett reaches the 1960s 1970s, and 1980s, however, the authorities on which the narrative depends narrow strikingly, mostly to conservative authors (many of whom, like Bennett, were once liberals or left radicals) such as Michael Barone, Ronald Radosh, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Norman Podhoretz, David Frum, and Dinesh D’Souza.
Almost entirely missing from Bennett’s sources are references to historical scholarship of the last generation, especially the transformative work that has redefined the very meaning of social, labor, and racial/ethnic history. While this disregard is, at first glance, curious and surprising, it is in keeping with Bennett’s revisionist position that recent American historical scholarship, the product of the purported left academy, rests on the dark side of a Manichean divide between a purportedly “real” America and its radical nemeses.
One consequence of this anti-intellectualism is the stunning erasure from Bennett’s story of much of the racial and ethnic history that scholars have so painstakingly reconstructed since the 1960s. The treatment of the first two centuries of American history are astoundingly barren. Enslaved Africans who came to represent one-fifth of the population by 1775 warrant a single mention—of their presence in Virginia in the seventeenth century. Students can assume they lived nowhere else, nor can a word be found on how they provided the backbone of the Southern economy and a lucrative source of income for Northern merchants. In the American Revolution, they are nowhere present, either fighting with the Americans or—as in the case of most—fleeing to the British to gain the freedom offered under Dunmore’s Proclamation. Such figures as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, and Richard Allen, founder of the AME Church, are missing in action In the early nineteenth century, Gabriel’s rebellion, David Walker’s radical abolitionism, Denmark Vesey’s rebellion, and Sojourner Truth disappear from the record. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the establishment of the hemisphere’s first black republic is passed over without a word.
Jim Cullen, Review of Joseph Cummins' "Why Some Wars Never End: The Stories of the Longest Conflicts in History" (Fairwinds Press, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (12-11-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
This is a clever book by a clever writer, produced by a clever publisher. To work backwards: Fairwinds Press is an imprint of the Quayside Group, a house with roots in instructional materials. The evident ability to produce lavishly illustrated books at a surprisingly inexpensive price $20 list price (a strategy that in part appears to be derived from shrewdly chosen photographs, art and maps in the public domain) has resulted in a series of oversized trade paperbacks that are nevertheless easy to tote and browse. Many of these books are authored by Cummins, a former editor for Book of the Month Club -- yes, it's still in business -- who has become a one-man cottage industry of books on military history. Why Some Wars Never End is the latest in a string of works that range across time in a case study approach (three of which were contributed by other writers).
These particular case studies stretch from the failed Persian attempts to subdue Greece in the fifth century BCE to the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Cummins divides them into five sections consisting of 2-4 chapters. These are: wars of empire, religious wars, guerrilla wars, nationalist struggles, and wars of chaos. This taxonomy isn't airtight; one wonders, for example, why the Ottoman wars of 1354-1529 are considered wars of empire rather than religion, given that the struggle was largely between Muslims and Christians. One possible reason is balance: a virtual sequel, the Balkan struggles from 1912-2001, also included, are classified under a nationalism rubric. Some of these conflicts have what may be regarded as arguable periodization; indeed, the chapter on civil wars in Guatemala (1944-1996), for example, makes the subject a virtual theme of the chapter in its own right.
In any case, the taxonomy here is less the point than in brief chapters that consist of an opening anecdote followed by a regional overview and then a series of military encounters. Recurring themes include the likelihood that installing a puppet regime in any conflict tends to prolong it, as well as the role of technology and geography in determining the cast and length of wars. Cummins' sources are almost entirely secondary, but the best kind -- from John Keegan to Stanley Karnow, with a sprinkling of quality journalism from Thomas Friedman to Robert Kaplan.
You're not going to get a whole lot of original interpretation here, but that's not the point. What you do get is editorial versatility: this is a handy reference guide, a source of brief readings -- any of these chapters is readily imaginable as a night's reading to accompany some larger pedagogical objective -- or a book that can be read in its entirety (as I did) with satisfaction. These are not the kind of books that tend to be honored in a profession that prizes original research and interpretive novelty. But when done well, they deserve recognition. Kudos to Cummins and Co.
Lee Ruddin, Review of "A World on Fire: Britian's Crucial Role in the American Civil War" (Random House, 2011)
Source: Special to HNN (12-31-69)
[Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.]
Much has been said about the Anglo-French military treaty. Historian Andrew Roberts, writing in the Wall Street Journal, called it the “Entente Suicidal.” John Bolton went even further, warning David Cameron that London’s defense pact with Paris could undermine its relationship with Washington. Speaking to the Daily Mail, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN said that the deal to share nuclear secrets as well as aircraft carriers—dubbed the Entente Frugale given its cost-saving measures—would lead to a cut in transatlantic intelligence sharing.
Let us hope it does not come to this, though, and that diplomatic sense prevails, since, as Bolton stresses, the special relationship “relies on intelligence sharing”—much of which, needless to say, the United States does not “share with France.” You need only refer to the recent Yemen bomb plot to appreciate this, however, as President Obama evidently does given the rapidity with which he expressed gratitude towards Prime Minister Cameron for his cooperation in helping to prevent U.S.-bound planes reaching its eastern shore with an explosive payload.
That said, you still get the impression that commentators on both sides of the Atlantic are grossly exaggerating any future fallout. Thankfully, though, Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography in 1998, helps put this latest diplomatic spat into historical context with her new book, A World on Fire. Telling the story of British involvement in the American Civil War and illuminating the strain events of 1861-1865 placed upon Anglo-American relations, it is recommended reading for those who believe today is the nadir of the special relationship.
I say this for the simple reason that, as angry as people are about the war in Afghanistan, you do not hear of Britons writing letters to the U.S. Embassy in London threatening to cut American throats. And yet, this is what a letter to Charles Francis Adams at the U.S. legation threatened in 1863. The anonymous letter is just one interesting fact among many dramatic episodes and even more colorful characters (197 in all, including soldiers, mercenaries, politicians, spies, journalists, diplomats, doctors and nurses who, on both sides of “the pond,” chronicled their experiences during the mid-nineteenth century) brought to life by Foreman in what is a sweeping 800-page narrative on a topic long overlooked. A decade’s worth of research ensures that Foreman’s work is near-perfect; it is her mid-ocean perspective, however—born in London and brought up in Los Angeles, educated at Columbia and then researcher at Oxford—that ensures, some would contend, her work is considered pioneering.
Writing in the Literary Review, Saul David says “Foreman is the ideal guide for this fascinating tale of diplomatic intrigue and skulduggery.” The military historian is both right and wrong in his comments here. A World on Fire, to be sure, is no “historical Mills & Boon” that Tudor historian David Starkey has come to expect from “quite pretty” females whose names “usually begin and end with A.” The fact remains, however, Foreman is still regarded by some in the academic world (most notably Kathryn Hughes) as an author of “popular” history.
Any sort of Civil War book, you would think, especially one containing a British dimension, would be welcome as we approach the Sesquicentennial. Not so, however. News that the 42-year-old visited the city of Liverpool after her manuscript had been sent to the publishers and just before it was about to hit bookshelves only adds insult to injury. “This is the first time she has seen many of the British places she has written about,” Amy Turner reports in a Sunday Times feature.
American born, British-based historian Dr. Tom Sebrell is diplomatic enough not to be drawn into an academic tit-for-tat with Foreman on the audaciousness of her comment “look, it’s my book-buying public!” when joined by a group of tourists at the offices of Fraser and Trenholm down by the docks. What is more, he is simply too professional. Cognizant of the time the historical consultant for the American Civil War tourism packages (advertised in the U.S. by UK-based Select Travel Service) has invested in Liverpool, however, meeting with local enthusiasts, museum curators and (un)elected officials in order to make the commemoration a focus for tourism, I cannot help but think of Sebrell as a more “ideal guide” to tell “this fascinating tale of diplomatic intrigue and skulduggery.”
This is not to say, though, that Foreman’s book is not worth obtaining. Indeed, if her “popular” history adds to the popularity of Sebrell’s American Civil War Experience Walking Tours in London and Liverpool (organized by Queen Mary and John Moores, respectfully) as well as the already established Wirral Civil War Heritage Trail produced by the American Civil War Round Table (UK), then so much the better. Since, like Foreman, says Sebrell in the latest edition of American Studies Today, his “project will also prove valuable in addressing the greater issue of Anglo-American relations.” More recent tensions, such as those mentioned above, he concludes, “make analysing Britain’s near entry into the American Civil War even more necessary.”
Foreman’s late show in Liverpool is the least of her concerns, however, when compared with the fact some readers will undoubtedly feel short changed by the omission of a bibliography. Granted, Foreman provides over a hundred pages of endnotes. But I am surprised Lincoln’s Man in Liverpool: Consul Dudley and the Legal Battle to Stop Confederate Ships (2007), written by Coy F. Cross II, is not utilized. I am equally amazed David Seed’s (ed.) American Travellers in Liverpool (2008) is not consulted, if less perplexed that John Hussey’s Confederates, Cotton and Cruisers: Liverpool Waterfront in the Days of the Confederacy (2008) does not feature. I am pleased, however, to see the author Duncan Andrew Campbell referenced. His 2007 work, Unlikely Allies: Britain, America and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship, is, as reviewer William Anthony Hay pens, a “well-written overview of its subject that offers newcomers a thorough introduction.”
The same, regrettably, cannot be said for Foreman’s second book, notwithstanding the (twenty-plus) maps, (sixty-plus) illustrations and (eighty-plus) plates. As Sam Leith writes in the Spectator, “This is a very long book, and I don’t think it an insult to Amanda Foreman to say that you’d have to be pretty interested in the American Civil War to pick through its detail-crowded pages. And you’ll need to pay attention.” As a consequence, those without a postgraduate degree in Civil War history are instructed to walk past good bookstores to join the heritage trails before purchasing a copy. Then, and only then, will Foreman’s words—“look, it’s my book-buying public!”—a chance of ringing true.
Luther Spoehr, Review of Ellen Schrecker's "The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, The Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University" (New Press, 2010).
Source: Providence Sunday Journal (11-21-10)
[Luther Spoehr, Senior Lecturer at Brown University, teaches courses on the history of American higher education.]
Titles of books warning of threats to American higher education often sound apocalyptic, from Page Smith’s Killing the Spirit (1990), to Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1995), to Harry Lewis’ Excellence Without a Soul (2006). Ellen Schrecker’s new book fits right in.
Jim Cullen, Review of James C. Cobb's "The South and America Since World War II" (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Source: Special to HNN (11-16-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
Is the South -- still -- a place apart? Thirty years ago, in Place Over Time, Carl Degler argued for the persistence of a distinctive regional identity notwithstanding the successive waves of modernity that followed the "New South" of the post-Civil War era. Earlier in this decade, in Still Fighting the Civil War, David Goldfield argued that many Southerners insisted on seeing themselves as apart from the of the Union. Meanwhile, an array of scholars from Bruce Schulman to Michael Lind see recent American history as essentially a process of Southernization. In this ably written synthetic account of the region, veteran University of Georgia professor James C. Cobb shows how all these views can be seen as credible in a narrative trajectory that moves from that of a backward, isolated region to an assertive national presence. But for Cobb, the region and the nation have always been deeply intertwined.
The first half of The South and America moves at a brisk pace, describing the quickening effect of the Second World War on the region, the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, and the emergence of a steady -- and increasingly sophisticated -- strategy of resistance to it. We meet a familiar gallery of characters, from Gunnar Myrdal to Emmett Till, and a political spectrum that runs from the daring novels of Lilian Smith to the whites who said of their returning veterans, "Our heroes didn't die in Europe to give Negroes the right to marry our wives." (Those Negroes, for their part, had their own ideas about what they were fighting for.)
Cobb pays particular attention to the economic dimensions of the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath. He notes that the business community was anxious lest segregationist intransigence interfere with commerce, and that this concern played a factor in the willingness of many whites to accept, though not embrace, what was ultimately seen as an inevitable move toward racial integration. It did not take long, however, for corporate leaders to conclude that the new status quo was not only acceptable, but necessary for the maintenance of a low-wage, low-regulation economic climate. A full-throated liberal, Cobb is insistent -- and convincing -- in tracing a persistent double standard on the part of white Southerners, who disproportionately benefit from federal spending while remaining reluctant to tax themselves, and warning about the corrosive effects of welfare for the poor while distributing lots of pork to the rich. This hypocrisy is not unique to the South, but notably widespread there.
The second half of The South and America takes more a thematic approach, covering cultural, gender, and racial history. What this part of the book lacks in cohesion it makes up for in useful segmentation. It is also notably up to date, covering topics like controversies over the Confederate flag, gay rights, and the growing Latino presence in the region. Cobb occasionally betrays his generational roots (he's much better on pop music of the fifties than later, for example, omitting what would seem to be a necessary discussion of soul music, though OutKast does make a cameo). But there's plenty of grist for an undergraduate mill here. Cobb also shows a sharp eye for the resonant detail. It's moving for example, to learn that while supporters of the vicious segregationist U.S. Senator James Eastland could not raise the funds for his portrait to hang in the U.S. Capitol, the once obscure Fanny Lou Hamer is rightly lionized as one of the true heroes of American history (there's a Bronx high school named for her a few miles away from where this review has been written, where her legacy -- and the social inequality that made her labors necessary -- live on).
By this point, the discourse on the place of the South, in the broadest sense of that phrase, is vast. Indeed, Cobb has spent the better part of a lifetime mastering it. The South and America is a useful place for the neophyte to begin.
Andrew Hartman, Review of James Livingston's "The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010)
Source: U.S Intellectual History (Blog) (11-2-10)
[Andrew Hartman teaches at Illinois State University.]
“Keep arguing.” James Livingston, 2010
Professor Livingston needn’t worry. His new book will keep people arguing. For The World Turned Inside Out is nothing if not maddeningly counterintuitive. Some of my friends and colleagues who have read it inform me that they agree with nothing in it. Of course, these same friends and colleagues also tell me they have never agreed with a single word Livingston has written. And yet, they keep reading. And they keep arguing.
In his first major contribution to intellectual history, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (1994), Livingston argued against historians who made the Populists out to be history’s tragic, if fallen heroes, celebrated for their resistance to the corporate order. In contrast, Livingston marveled at the material surpluses offered by the new corporate order and, furthermore, contended that the emergence of corporations merited intellectual innovation in the eyes of pragmatists, especially John Dewey. “In the narrative form of pragmatism,” Livingston wrote, “the decline of proprietary capitalism loses its pathos, and the triumph of corporate capitalism appears as the first act of an unfinished comedy, not the residue of tragedy” (1994; xvi). Livingston thus inverted the historical trajectory posited by Christopher Lasch in his 1991 The True and Only Heaven: whereas Lasch understood “progress” to be mere ideological cover for the bureaucratic and technocratic constraints of the corporate order, Livingston pointed to the newfound freedoms made possible by that order. Unfortunately for us all, Lasch died in 1994, unable to respond to Livingston’s provocations.
In his next significant book, Pragmatism and Feminism: Rethinking the Politics of American History (2001), Livingston contended that the intellectual revolutions otherwise known as pragmatism and feminism were very similar in structure, largely because both were made possible by consumer capitalism’s obliteration of older bourgeois restraints. In opposition to most feminist theorists, especially those who framed their ideas in the Marxist tradition, Livingston theorized that feminism not only worked well alongside consumer capitalism, but that the latter created a context that allowed for the former. He wrote: “So if the cause (in both senses) of modern feminism is the extrication of women from an exclusive preoccupation with domestic roles—a process that both presupposes paid employment and permits the detachment of female sexuality from familial objects or reproductive functions—and if modern feminism is by definition a cross-class social movement because it claims to speak for all women, it would seem to follow that the necessary condition of modern feminism is the rise of corporate capitalism” (2001; 176). Somewhat ironically, Marxist theorist Nancy Fraser recently came around to this view, not to celebrate consumer capitalism, as Livingston, but rather, to critique second-wave feminism.
And now, in The World Turned Inside Out (2010), Livingston makes a whole series of counterintuitive claims that serve as an intellectual defense of consumer capitalism and the corporate order. Here are a few of his central points that should keep us arguing:
1. The left won the culture wars, and in fact, most political struggles since the 1960s.
2. Postmodernism and poststructuralism are American inventions, prefigured by pragmatism and other American intellectual revolutions.
3. Mass consumer culture (television, film, music) anticipated even the most radical forms of postmodern thinking, such as deconstruction.
4. All of these developments were good, and happened despite Livingston’s recognition that a spike in economic inequality caused the financial crisis of 2008.
This review will focus on Livingston’s first point, that the left has been largely victorious, since, more than the others, it will likely engender the most cognitive dissonance in those who lived through the past thirty years, when even the eight-year interruption to conservative rule, in the form of the Clinton administration, needs to be qualified by such pesky facts as Ross Perot, NAFTA, and Welfare Reform.
“The cultural and intellectual revolution that changed North America and the world after 1975,” Livingston writes, “was so successful—it was so formative, causative, and measurable—that we can take it for granted, and then look past it, to the point where some of us even argue that conservatism took over American thought and culture after 1980” (2010; xiii). At first glance, it seems Livingston is making an argument similar to that made by historian David Courtwright in his new book, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America. Courtwright shows that where the cultural right failed, the economic right succeeded; where the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition fell short in turning back the tides of secularism, the American Enterprise Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce achieved lower taxes and fewer regulations. Courtwright’s thesis is that contemporary American life is dominated by both cultural and economic libertarianism, the twin legacies of the boomer generation. Like Courtwright, Livingston accentuates the cultural effects of “the fabled 1960s,” arguing “that the tendencies and sensibilities we associate with that moment decisively shaped intellectual agendas and cultural practices… in the 1980s and 1990s” (2010; xv).
But unlike Courtwright, Livingston thinks conservatives failed in the economic arena as well. In other words, the Reagan Revolution was not very revolutionary, at least, not in the sense we are accustomed to thinking about it. Livingston offers up as evidence the ineluctable growth of government, even its redistributive arm, which for him includes the military, a redistributive agency for the poor. Livingston says that an “unspoken socialism” became an entrenched national consensus, as transfer payments—“income received by households and individuals for which no contribution to current output of goods or services has been required”—“were the fastest-growing component of income in the late twentieth century, amounting, by 1999, to 20 percent of all labor income” (19). This is compelling stuff, though it requires a mild suspension of disbelief, since, in this instance, Livingston ignores that transfer payments likely increased in response to the loss of millions of well-paying unionized jobs. To this extent, deindustrialization better describes recent U.S. political economy than does socialism, and the growth of transfer payments should be understood as necessary to political stability in the face of growing inequality. At a more basic level, the fact of growing inequality calls into question the premise that the left is winning the national political battle. By what political spectrum does a society with a victorious left equate to an increasingly unequal one?
Livingston is on firmer ground when he limits the scope of his analysis to the culture wars. On this battleground, the left did much better, even if, again, Livingston overplays his hand. It is beyond doubt that the United States is now more tolerant than it was sixty years ago, when many more forms of discrimination were still legal, and that this tolerance led to conservative frustration in the culture wars. “Whatever the issue—whether sexuality, gay rights, reproduction, education, women’s rights, racial equity, equal opportunity, affirmative action, or freedom of expression—the domestic debate was… always lost by the so-called cultural conservatives who kept citing ‘family values.’” The key to Livingston’s point here lies in the recent history of the university, for, as he writes, “the New Left of the 1960s grew up and got jobs in all the right places, especially, but not only, in higher education” (20). In accentuating the importance of higher education, and in claiming that the left controls the “commanding heights” of the university, Livingston is rehashing conservative culture war contentions, most famously argued by Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, and Allan Bloom. But whereas these right-wingers lamented left-wing academic hegemony, Livingston brags about it.
Livingston is certainly correct in asserting the centrality of the university to American society: the university credential system has become the principal gateway to the professional world, a sorting mechanism for white-collar hierarchy. The numbers tell the story: in 1960, there were about 3.5 million Americans enrolled in universities; by 1970, this number had more than doubled to around 7.5 million, as the size of faculties grew proportionally. Livingston nicely relates this demographic explosion on the nation’s college campuses to the culture wars, or to what he generally describes as the “debates about the promise of American life.” “By the 1970s,” Livingston writes, “the principal residence of that promise was widely assumed to be the new ‘meritocracy’ enabled by universal access to higher education” (21). To this extent, class resentment aimed at intellectuals—and tropes about “political correctness”—made sense, in a misplaced sort of way, since intellectuals indeed held the levers to any given individual’s future economic stability. Similarly, Eric Hobsbawm recently related the growing importance of a university education to the redirection of class animosity against “toffs of one kind or another—intellectuals, liberal elites, people who are putting it over on us.” But whereas Hobsbawm detects false consciousness in this rhetorical arrangement, Livingston, rather, implies there is truth in such charges since, by his estimation, the left did indeed control the university, the culture, and thus, the postindustrial, postmodern political system.
Jim Cullen, Review of Stacy Schiff's "Cleopatra: A Life" (Little, Brown, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (11-3-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
Over the course of the past fifteen years, Stacy Schiff has emerged as one of the nation's most esteemed biographers. With France as a geographic crossroad, her subjects have ranged widely: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Vera Nabokov (a portrait that won her the 2000 Pulitzer Prize), and Benjamin Franklin. But Schiff's latest book takes her far afield in time and place. It's an audacious move, and as such is a form of fidelity to the life she limns.
In a way, Schiff's body of work is less a set of individual lives than an extended exercise in different kinds of biographical problem-solving. Saint-Exupéry was a shrewd choice of subject in that he's both famous and little-known to the general reading public that is Schiff's chosen domain; Vera is a foray into the fascinating life lived in the shadow of a powerful mate. Benjamin Franklin, by contrast, is almost too well-known (an issue Schiff finessed by focusing on his diplomatic career). So is Cleopatra; but while the problem for Franklin is essentially one of too much documentation, that of Cleopatra is a matter of having so little.
But of course this is also an opportunity, because the ambiguities surrounding Cleopatra's life give a biographer lots of license for informed speculation, a stratagem Schiff seizes frequently and boldly. (Was Caesarion really Julius Caesar's biological child by Cleopatria? Schiff acknowledges this long-running controversy in a footnote, but considers the child his and moves on.) In an important sense, the facts are really beside the point anyway; if ever there were a case where the truth resides in legend, this would be it.
But living legends are moving things. So it is that Schiff gives us a Cleopatra for the third millennium. I was not surprised to learn that Angelina Jolie is already said to be involved in a possible film version of the book; I kept thinking of her while reading it (perhaps because of the evocative jacket). Schiff is insouciant in deploying anachronism for dramatic effect, whether in comparing Cleopatra's wealth to that of the most successful hedge fund manager in history, or by emphasizing her Hellenic heritage by asserting that she was about as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.
It's only natural, then, that this Cleopatra is a feminist icon: intelligent, powerful, and patriotic. She uses her sexuality, but she isn't defined by it. Faced with a difficult geopolitical situation, she navigates it not infallibly, but nevertheless with an acumen that has largely escaped previous writers -- who are, to Schiff's credit, often classical ones. But she's not one to defer to antiquity, and she's pointedly critical of Cleopatra's critics. "Cicero had two modes: fawning and captious," she says, calling him a Roman John Adams. (Given Schiff's Francophile orientation, we can safely conclude the comparison is not flattering.) Plutarch "sniffs" that Cleopatra pretends to be in love with Mark Antony; Dio's account of her meeting with Octavian is "so cinematic as to be suspect, too purple even for a Hellenistic queen." (A somewhat odd criticism coming from Schiff, who is nothing if not colorful.) Some readers will no doubt be thrilled with such prose; others may be unsettled by the glee with which she settles sexist scores -- which, of course, will not make her unhappy. But it may not be an accident that none of the impressive accolades that accompany the book come from Egyptologists.
This Cleopatra is thoroughly contemporary in other ways as well. Schiff filters her material through a postmodern sensibility. Whether or not Cleopatra actually believes she's the incarnation of the Egyptian goddess Isis, playing the part certainly confers strategic advantages. A sense of indeterminacy shapes relationships in which the personal is political; as far as Julius Caesar is concerned, "Cleopatra was in many respects similar to her country: a shame to lose, a risk to conquer, a headache to govern." (The ironically allusive language here, which evokes "veni, vidi, vici," is one of the many ways Schiff shows herself to be a master prose stylist.) Even those parts of the book that are presumably meant to showcase the distance between the ancient world and ours, like those that talk at some length about the literally incestuous character of the Ptolemy dynasty of which Cleopatra was the culmination, exhibit a multiculturalist's hearty embrace of Difference.
It is ironic, then, that the truth apparently remains: in front of every great woman is a man -- or, in this case, two: Caesar and Mark Antony. At different points in the story it almost seems they're going to run away with the book. Partly this a function of the fact that Hellenistic Egypt was closer to a pawn than a queen in Roman geopolitics. And partly it's a function that most of the extant sources are Roman, not Egyptian, and as Schiff notes, echoing observers like Edward Said, the West has long been constructed as masculine, and the East as feminine. Sigh, one might plausibly conclude. It's still a man's world.
Early reviews of this book have hailed it as myth-shattering, as uncovering lost truths about Cleopatra. It is probably more accurate to see it as a feisty piece of mythography that resonates with the spirit of its time. As another Francophile once said, "the earth belongs to the living." And Cleopatra, whoever she was, is now -- amid the struggles and uncertainties of history that provide the indispensable ballast for myth -- ours to claim. Schiff has done so with gusto.
Doug Ireland, Review of R. Tripp Evans's "Grant Wood: A Life" (Knopf, 2010)
Source: Gay City News (10-27-10)
[Doug Ireland, Contributing Editor of Gay City News, can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.]
Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” is the most recognizable American painting.Of all the paintings in the world, only the Mona Lisa has been more parodied. As Tripp Evans notes in his groundbreaking new biography of the artist, when it was first exhibited in Chicago in 1930, it made an instant global celebrity out of Wood: “Never in the history of American art had a single work captured such immediate and international recognition; by the end of 1930, the painting had been reproduced in newspapers around the globe… Never before, either, had a painting generated such widespread curiosity about its artist.”
“American Gothic” was considered by most critics of that day as something of a national self-portrait, and it made Wood the icon of a new native American, regionalist art. The New Yorker wrote at the time, “As a symbol Wood stands for the corn-fed Middle West against the anemic East, starving aesthetically upon warmed-over entrees dished up by Spanish chefs in Paris kitchens. He stands for an independent American art against the colonialism and cosmopolitanism of New York.”
Wood, who was born in the small town of Anamosa, Iowa, in 1898 and spent nearly all his life painting in the Hawkeye State, depicting its countryside and inhabitants, was said to stand for the flinty, manly virtues of heartland America. The New York Times proclaimed that Wood, who styled himself a “farmer-painter,” had earned his “toga virilis” for, as Evans summarizes it, “ending Americans’ perilous fascination with impressionism.”
Wood himself encouraged this anti-intellectual, quintessentially American, and rigorously heterosexual version of his persona and the origins of his art. He famously declared in a newspaper interview, “All the really good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while I was milking a cow,” adding, “You don’t get panicky about some ‘-ism’ or other while you have Bossy by the business end. Your thoughts are realistic and direct.”
The public image Wood constructed of himself even extended to the way he dressed. As one prominent critic eulogized him on his death in 1942, “In past years artists adopted smocks for their own… the working attire of French peasants. Grant Wood wore the work clothes of his own country when he painted, overalls such as a farmer or mechanic would choose.”
Jim Cullen, Review of Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz's "The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election" (Simon & Schuster, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (10-20-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
My initial reaction to encountering a book with this title was to be be reminded of Randy Newman's camp-classic song "It's Lonely at the Top": a smug alert went off in my head. Turns out, however, that it's a deft little (192-page) piece of scholarship that takes up resonant questions in a notably fair-minded way. The book deserves wide consideration in a variety of contexts, and I will not be surprised if it becomes a fixture of undergraduate syllabi for many years to come.
After a brief -- and necessary -- introduction that notes many people throughout history have considered themselves chosen, the authors perform an elegantly simple piece of exegesis on the Book of Genesis, in which they tease out the many ambiguities that lurk in the covenants God made with Abraham and Moses. This analysis includes discussions of the repeated failures on the part of the Israelites to keep up their part of the deal, as well as the burdens, psychological as well as political, that being a chosen people imposed on them. Gitlin and Leibowitz note that Zionism emerged both as an ethnic alternative to the assimilationist thrust of post-Napoleonic emancipation as well as a secular alternative to diaspora Judaism. But the post-1948 fusion of people, faith and land created a spiritual cocktail that even the most hard-bitten pragmatists found impossible to resist after the Israel's territorial gains in 1967. The authors consider this a bad bargain, and criticize those who unstintingly embrace it as indulging in worship of "a golden calf," though they do not repudiate the idea of a Jewish homeland.
Gitlin and Leibovitz then shift their gaze to the United States. In some ways, the analysis is familiar -- we hear lots about the Puritans, of course -- but we also hear some surprising accents. Despite his religious skepticism, the authors show Thomas Jefferson as a full-throated exponent of the United States as a Promised Land, evident in his famous assertion that "those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his substantial deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." Though it's possible to discern latent heterodoxy in Jefferson's use of the word if (there are any chosen people) Gitlin and Leibovitz make a compelling case that a covenant sensibility shaped Jefferson's approach to the Louisiana Purchase, and that this sensibility coursed through the psyches of his successors.
The title of this part of the book, "His Almost Chosen People," comes from a single reference in speech Abraham Lincoln delivered on his way to Washington in 1861. Gitlin and Leibovitz stint the degree to which the word "almost" decisively checks Lincoln's embrace of the idea, notwithstanding that the Great Emancipator famously described the United States as the "last, best, hope of earth" (a phrase, curiously, that they do not quote). In any case, it remains true that the language of the chosen people recurs through the rhetoric of politicians ranging from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush. As in the parallel case of Israel, that language can be alternatively sacred and secular, invoked in the name of principle or real estate, and those who reject such language understand they operate in a discourse saturated in it.
From here, the authors then turn their attention to the so-called "unchosen." The core of their analysis is an arresting juxtaposition between the Jews' relationship with the indigenous population of Palestine, and that of the U.S. with Native American peoples. Gitlin and Leibovitz also take a critical look at those who react to the claims of the chosen by fashioning counter-narratives of their own chosenness; while typically a minority impulse, compounds difficulties for just about everybody. They note that the majority of Palestinians, for example, reject the extremism of Hamas.
The Chosen Peoples concludes with a look at the U.S.-Israeli relationship itself, one Gitlin and Leibovitz assert has transcended self-interest and the seeming contradiction of a harmonious tie rooted in separate claims of primacy. Again, they specifically reject the proposition that either nation can disown its chosen identity; instead, they regard it as something that must be grappled with in an ongoing and creative way.
In the acknowledgments that follow the main text of the book, the authors thank "Columbia University, which gave Todd Gitlin the opportunity to teach several sections of Contemporary Civilization." It's not often that a senior scholar expresses gratitude for the privilege of teaching standard service courses, even courses as storied as those in Columbia's CC program. But the experience was clearly invigorating in allowing a powerful thinker -- one who has spent most his time grappling in twentieth century U.S. history -- to engage a new set of discourses. The Chosen Peoples is a worthy testimonial for teaching and writing grounded in foundational sources and clear-eyed prose.
Jim Cullen, Review of James Lander's "Lincoln & Darwin: Shared Visions of Race, Science and Religion" (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (10-12-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
"Seek and ye shall find."
--Matthew 7: 7
The bicentennial of Charles Darwin's and Abraham Lincoln's births on February 12, 1809 has prompted a flurry of comparisons in the lives of two men who on the surface would not seem to have much in common, notwithstanding the fact that Darwin certainly knew of Lincoln and Lincoln, we can safely extrapolate, knew of (but probably didn't read) Darwin. Perhaps the best of the lot is Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages, recently published in paperback (see my review here). Gopnik's book was a marvelously evocative meditation on how the power of good writing allowed both men to achieve gigantic aims. But if your interest lies in more systematically tracing the similar, and even shared, frames of reference that shaped the lives of the two men, James Lander's deeply researched and elegantly executed study will likely become the standard work.
At the core of Lander's study, as with many who have studied the two men separately and together, is a shared dilemma. Lincoln and Darwin were two men who almost miraculously rejected the racial prejudices of their time as well as conventional ideas about religion, and yet practiced a savvy pragmatism in remaining as diffident as possible on their personal feelings even as they advanced public discourse in terms of principle. Lander no less than Gopnik is attentive to the sculpted prose that made this possible, but Lander goes a good deal further in providing a rich sense of context in recreating the mens' shared world. Many Lincolnphiles are aware, for example, that he was a tinkerer and inventor who is the only president to hold a patent. It is nevertheless startling to learn, as one does here, that Lincoln's interests extended to geology -- of course a crucial field of inquiry in the articulation of a theory of evolution -- and to have multiple accounts of Lincoln reading the same 1844 study that had a significant impact on Darwin. Conversely, it's a little surprising to learn just how avidly Darwin followed the Civil War in the the Times of London, articulating a very clear and consistent abolitionist position that was as deeply informed, passionate (and disappointed by Lincoln's slow pace on emancipation) as one could find on the streets (er, make that parlors) of Boston.
But what may be even more interesting here is the degree to which Lander brings the state of mid-nineteenth scientific discourse to life in discussing the state of public conversation in the Atlantic world generally. Though it has been noted before, one sees with new clarity here just how quickly the educated classes galloped to (sometimes erroneous) conclusions about On the Origin of Species in 1859, particularly as they extended to race relations. I never realized until reading this book just how quickly and assiduously some Southern apologists for slavery actually abandoned biblical justifications for slavery in favor of scientific ones that came from people who argued in Darwin's name and against him. As such, the book is a sobering lesson to those who believe that the progress of science marches in lockstep with progressive politics.
But Lander makes his argument in terms of form no less than content. Carefully conceptualized chapters with titles like "Campaigning" and "Delegation and Control" capture the way Lincoln and Darwin grappled with similar problems in their life cycles. Both men were politicians; both men had agendas. And both men had powerful rivals. For Lincoln, it was Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas; for Darwin it was the Swiss-born American Louis Agassiz, whose polygenetic notions of race, which insisted black people belonged to a different species, dominated science in a way comparable to that by which Douglas dominated U.S. politics. (As someone who has often crossed paths with Douglas in a lifetime of reading, it was startling to bump into him here attending a lecture by Agassiz.) Such execution makes the book pleasurable as well as informative.
I don't agree with Lander on every particular; I'm among those, for example, who believe a deep vein of spiritualism marked Lincoln's religious evolution, which is largely stinted here. But this is a provocative and edifying book that serves its principals, and readers, well.
Jim Cullen, Review of Thomas Weber's "Hitler's First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War"
Source: Special to HNN (10-4-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
Early on in reading this book, I showed it to a colleague who teaches a course in Nazi Germany, offering to pass along the galleys when I was through. "No thanks," she said. "I'm kinda Hitlered out." It's an understandable reaction, even among those with a professional stake in the topic. Like his virtual antithesis, Abraham Lincoln, Hitler can be historiographically exhausting.
Yet this study is worth some attention for two reasons. The first is that it reconstructs, in a tour de force of scholarly research, an oft-noted, but dimly documented, chapter in Adolf Hitler's career. The second is that it uses this account of what happened -- or, more accurately, didn't happen -- in Hitler's wartime experiences of 1914-18 as a means of making a larger point not only about his political trajectory, but that of Germany generally. It's this second point that may result in some serious controversy.
Though it's a fixture of virtually all accounts of his life, including his own, situating Private (later Corporal) Hitler in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment -- sometimes referred to the "List Regiment," after its first commanding officer, Julius von List -- is in fact quite difficult. Partly that's because much of the documentary record has been lost, whether by design or in the destructive final days of the Second World War, when much of Germany was reduced to rubble. It's also because Hitler's wartime record has been the subject of a series of conflicting aims by friend and foe alike, both of whom have distorted it. In some cases, Thomas Weber of the University of Aberdeen, whose own grandfather volunteered for the Luftwaffe in 1943, is actually able to disprove minor points of conflict through extrapolation. He begins the book, for example, with a close reading of a famous crowd photograph taken on the first day of the war in which Hitler appears, a photograph which would seem to show both popular enthusiasm for the war and the future Fuhrer's place at the heart of the demonstration. But Weber documents the way it is in fact deceptive and that Hitler's position in the frame may have been doctored.
The core approach of the book is to provide a collective profile of the men who served in the List regiment along with Hitler during the war by sifting through previously unsorted and unanalyzed documents, and in so doing to create a collective portrait of the men (probably about 15,000 or so) who served in it over the course of the war. This methodology is reminiscent of that of Christopher Browning in his now-classic Ordinary Men (1992), which attempted to understand the motivations for the Holocaust on the part of those who actually executed it. (It's worth noting that both Browning's 101st Police Battalion and the List Regiment consisted of reservists, not crack troops.) The difference here is that the demographic and anecdotal evidence is being used to determine to what degree Hitler was typical of the men with whom he served. Weber's answer: for the most part, no.
There are a series of reasons why. The most basic, of course, is that Hitler could not be a typical German recruit because he wasn't German, having left Austria to volunteer in Bavaria instead. The fact that Hitler served in the regiment for the entire war is also unusual -- and, given casualty rates that could go well over 50% in engagements like the First Battle of Ypres and the Somme -- fortunate for him. Hitler was injured twice in his service, including a temporary blindness after a poison gas attack at the end of the war that may have been psychosomatic. But that he was twice decorated, and committed to the cause for which he fought, appears to be beyond dispute.
That said, there may be less to this than meets the eye. Hitler's job for most of the war was that of a regimental dispatch carrier, running messages between headquarters and the front. There's no doubt that this exposed him to danger -- and that he experienced considerably less than comrades who spent weeks at a time in rat-infested trenches. As Weber says flatly, "The popular claim that Hitler [in the words of one scholar] 'knew what it meant to live in the mud and the slime of the Western Front' is quite wrong."
Although this is of course difficult to establish conclusively, Weber believes that Hitler was considerably more ardent about the German cause than most in his adoptive country, particularly as the war dragged on. He carefully traces the role of the List Regiment in the famed Christmas Truce of 1914, an episode of fraternization by the rank and file that was frowned upon by the officers with whom Hitler identified. (That said, Hitler developed a durable respect for British and colonial fighting ability, and visited a Canadian war memorial during the interwar years.) For at least the first half of the war, German troops got along reasonably well with civilians in Belgium and France where Hitler was based, and resisted a late-war scorched-earth strategy formulated in Berlin. Contrary to frequent claims that the First World War was a brutalizing experience for the soldiers that fought in it, Weber asserts that the experience of total war was no more permanently scarring than that of the American Civil War, for example -- a searing ordeal, certainly, but not one that sowed irreparable hatred of former enemies.
Moreover, even while Hitler himself would insist that the morale of his regiment and that of the army was considerably higher than that of civilians and the nation's political leadership -- key ingredients for ideologically crucial Nazi legend of "the stab in the back" -- Weber asserts that not even Hitler came out of the war with the obvious, permanent hatreds that would mark his later political career. It's only one of many telling indications of this that it was a Jew, Hugo Gutmann, who proposed that Hitler be awarded his second Iron Cross in 1918. (Weber notes that this decoration was "less as sign of bravery than of his position and long service within regimental headquarters").
So if it wasn't the war that curdled Hitler -- or Germany -- what did? Weber's answer is the brief revolutionary upheaval of 1918-19 in which radical leftist elements seized control of Bavaria and established the Munich Soviet Republic -- in which, ironically, Hitler actually briefly served as a guard. This murky episode has been understood in a series of ways, including those that assert Hitler was actually a double agent. In any case, Weber asserts that Hitler came out of the Great War "unsure about his future and his identity. He was a man who even now could have been swayed in different directions." That he would find a home on the radical right German Worker's Party and eventually as a Founding Father of the Nazis is a tragic contingency of history -- not, as Lucy Dawidowicz has asserted, part of a fully crystallized vision on Hitler's part that had taken shape by 1918, or, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen would have us believe, a viral eruption of specifically German hatred of Jews.
Emphasizing the lack of deep electoral support Hitler prior to 1932, Weber argues that "most Germans did not take Mein Kampf seriously, at any rate not his anti-Semitism. Hitler was to come to power not because of, but in spite of his crude and virulent anti-Semitism." Hitler was disappointed that so few of his compatriots of the List Regiment -- who, Weber is at some pains to demonstrate, were a reasonable microcosm of German society at large -- rallied to his cause, and in that frustration both rewrote its history and destroyed anyone who would challenge his fictionalization of it. So it is, for example, that when Weber mentions Kristallnacht, what he sees is less a populist pogrom than a top-down murderous rage unleashed by a Nazi regime frustrated that ordinary Germans were not anti-Semitic enough.
Dismissing historic anti-Semitism or the cataclysm of world war as direct causes of the Nazi triumph of course begs the question as to how an epiphenomenal event like the Munich Soviet Republic would be more decisive. Weber's answer is that Germany's Bolshevik moment spooked an essentially moderate German people whose basic political instincts remained more or less intact from 1890 through 1920. The frightening destabilization caused by radical left opened a tear in the social fabric in which the radical right could opportunistically incubate and remain latent long enough to break through a political immune system badly weakened by Versailles, the Great Depression, and totalitarian microbes coursing through the world at large.
Yet if one assumes this to be true, one might well wonder why such an explanation has been largely overlooked until now. Weber's answer, essentially, is (generational) political correctness. In a key sentence about two-thirds of the way through the book, he writes: "There has long been a taboo against discussing the degree to which the attitude of Germans toward National Socialism and other radical right-wing movements was centrally driven by anti-Bolshevism and the experience of radical Socialist revolutions across Central and Eastern Europe, lest historians were seeking to exculpate 'ordinary' Germans for their support of the Third Reich and trying to provide an apologia for the crimes of National Socialist Germany." He goes on to say that "to explain is not to excuse; to empathize is not to sympathize." Let's face it, he's saying: Communism was something one could be legitimately scared of, even if the "cure" proved worse than the disease. Now that the people who lived with the shame of that cure are dying off, and now that the failure of the Soviet way is unambiguously clear, we can begin (again) to grapple with that truth.
By this point, we've come a long way from the wartime service of Private Hitler. With each analytic brick Weber stacks on top of it, the structure he builds grows steadily less solid. But it's an edifice worth regarding with some attention, because the implications are so vast. As my colleague, who about a year from now will be teaching her course on Nazi Germany again, well knows, we can't long remain "Hitlered out" while explanations for the disaster remain so vivid and contested.
Luther Spoehr, Review of David Remnick, ed., "The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker" (Random House, 2010)
Source: Providence Sunday Journal (8-15-10)
[Luther Spoehr, Senior Lecturer at Brown University, contributed more than 50 essays to David L. Porter, ed., "The Biographical Dictionary of American Sports" and co-teaches a course at Brown on the history of intercollegiate athletics.]
If sportswriter Jimmy Cannon was right when he self-deprecatingly described his part of the newspaper as “the toy department,” then the New Yorker’s sportswriting is F.A.O. Schwarz: the top of the line. David Remnick, the magazine’s editor (and author of a recent biography of Barack Obama—when does he sleep?), has compiled a collection of 32 articles (plus a goodly number of sports-related cartoons) written between 1930 and 2008, many by familiar authors, some of them classics, all worth savoring.
Jim Cullen, Review of Jefferson Cowie's "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class" (The New Press, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (9-21-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
The decade of the seventies has become a historiographic cottage industry. For a long time, about the only study out there was Peter Carroll's It Seemed Like Nothing Happened; first published in 1982, it has held up surprisingly well. The consensus on the standard treatment now seems to be Boston University historian Bruce Schulman's 2001 book The Seventies; David Frum gave the decade a puckish -- and pointedly neocon -- reading in How We Got Here in 2000. More recent treatments have tended to focus on aspects of the period, like the Ford and Carter presidencies. In 1973 Nervous Breakdown, (2006) Andreas Killen made a compelling case for that year as a synechdoche for the seventies as a whole. And Natasha Zaretsky rendered a compelling gender reading of the period in No Direction Home: The American Family and Fear of National Decline.
Labor historian Jefferson Cowie, who teaches at the school of Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell, follows the recent tendency to render portraits of the decade through a particular lens. In Stayin' Alive, that lens is both specific and yet capacious: that of the American working class. Working-class culture figures prominently in all the above-mentioned works, but Cowie's focus on it gives his book an energy and coherence that will likely make it among the more useful and durable treatments of the period.
Cowie's take on the seventies is tragic: He posits a decade which opened with sense of possibility, only to end in a sense of division and evisceration in which "working people would possess less place and meaningful identity within civic life than any time since the industrial revolution." To build his case, he constructs a framework of notable symmetry and sturdiness, in eight chapters divided into two parts. In the first four, he develops a line of thinking he first unveiled in an essay for Beth Bailey's anthology America in the Seventies, in which sometimes perplexing cross-currents led people like Dewey Burton, the much-interviewed Everyman of the time, to ricochet between George Wallace and George McGovern before finally settling on Ronald Reagan a decade later. Cowie asserts that the Democratic Party of 1968 was essentially a labor party, albeit a divided one. He offers analyses of events like the 1972 strike at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, which was a much a labor action about deadening work conditions as it was pay, and depicts the literally deadly internecine warfare among the United Mine Workers of America as a struggle for the soul of the labor movement.
In political terms, many observers have noted the obsessively Machiavellian tenor of Richard Nixon's presidency in its attempt to co-opt the Wallace vote. But Cowie traces, with quality research and rich detail, both the administration's difficulties in dealing with labor leaders like George Meany, even as the Nixonites captured, with surgical skill, the language and symbolism of the working class without ever actually addressing its material concerns. In the second half of the book, Cowie argues that new institutions like the Business Roundtable did address such material concerns -- by attacking them directly. They were aided by the indifference and hostility of politicians like Jimmy Carter, who while nominally sympathetic to labor as a Democrat, in effect functioned as the first post-New Deal president.
Cowie shows at least as much facility with cultural history as he does labor and political history. He offers nuanced readings of figures like Merle Haggard, whose background and musical complexities were obscured by the success of truculent anthems such as "Okie from Muskcogee," and suggests that there was less richness than is sometimes supposed in the work of widely hailed independent films like Taxi Driver. Perhaps not surprisingly, country rockers like Crosby Stills Nash and Young are exposed as elitists, even as other figures of their ilk, like Jackson Browne, get surprisingly positive appraisals. Bruce Springsteen, of course, looms large here, though Cowie compellingly suggests how cramped his portrait of working-class life has tended to be, more an ordeal to be endured rather than a vibrant culture it own right. At the same time, Cowie traces the emergence of demographic transformations of the working class that would lead to new subcultures like those of disco, feminist manifestos like 9 to 5, and punk rock (there's a wonderfully nuanced analysis of the Akron-based band Devo).
There is, perhaps, a forgivably romantic air about Stayin' Alive. Although Cowie is scrupulously careful in noting the limits of the McGovern campaign, for example, the gestalt of the book seems to suggest that it had more possibilities than it probably did. Similarly, while Cowie rightly notes a sense of ferment in the racial and gender dimensions of the labor movement, and duly notes the growth of unionization in the public sector, he tends to stint the tectonic plates of the international economy. We do hear a lot about oil shocks; we hear less about the rise of Japan and the tremendous cost pressures it exerted on the auto industry. Such developments cannot single-handedly explain labor's demise, of course; nations like Germany responded to such challenges without dismantling the welfare state. But then Germany never really had a Jacksonian political culture in which a libertarian strain was bred even into the working class. It might have skipped a generation or two after FDR, but it was always there, ready to emerge when the environment was right.
Regardless of what one thinks about the character of the seventies working class, or whether its "end" was inevitable, Cowie foregrounds, with laudable care and clarity, a set of people who too quickly recede in critiques of the New Class, accounts of the rise "Atari Democrats" like Gary Hart, or the emergence of feminism, developments which pointed toward the future more than the past. As Cowie well knows, class struggle did not end circa 1979. But a particular kind of class struggle did, and its contours are worth noting and remembering so that its successes and failures may yet furnish object examples in the battles still to come.
Jim Sleeper, Review of Victor Davis Hanson's "Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome" (Princeton, 2010)
Source: Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (9-14-10)
[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale University and the author of Closest of Enemies: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. He wrote this article for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.]
Affluent Western democracies have “difficulty maintaining popular support for costly counterinsurgency wars,” laments Victor Davis Hanson, the accomplished historian of ancient Greek wars and fanatical insurgent in his own right, against what he considers the beleaguered American imperium’s fickle liberal elites. He means to restore the legitimacy of the unilateralist U.S. hegemony envisioned in George W. Bush’s National Security Strategy of 2002; writing in The American Enterprise Magazine in 2006, he attributed a dearth of popular support for that project to “ignorance of military history.” Now, in Makers of Ancient Strategy, he assembles ten military historians of classical Greece and Rome (including himself) to rectify that ignorance by showing how Athenians, Romans, and, even before them, Persians extended their sway and coped with challenges to it in ways that American grand strategists can learn from.
At the same time, though, Hanson is a geyser of vituperations in National Review, the conservative Pajamas Media website, and beyond, against challenges to America’s missions abroad from our liberal governing and cultural cliques, “the mindset of the faculty lounge,” and, naturally, the media. As Iraqi casualties rose in 2006, he accused journalists of sensationalizing setbacks in Iraq thusly: “I deeply love [California], but . . . imagine what the reaction would be if the world awoke each morning to be told that once again there were six more murders, 27 rapes . . . and 360 instances of assault in California. . . . I wonder if the headlines would scream about ‘Nearly 200 poor Californians butchered again this month!’ ” Here he’s blaming the messenger instead of reckoning with different kinds of carnage and their causes, but Hanson writes like this day and night–indeed, several times a day.
Even in Makers, a scholarly anthology, he claims grandly that today’s “problems of unification, civil war, expansion abroad, colonization, nation-building, and counterinsurgency all have clear and well-documented precedents in both Greek and Roman culture.” But many of the book’s precedents point in directions Hanson doesn’t want to go, and he ends his introduction by advising cagily that “[r]ather than offering political assessments of modern military leaders’ policies, we instead hope that knowledge of the ancient world will remind us of all of the parameters of available choices–and their consequences.” This, after years spent invoking ancient precedents for decisive American action:
People wonder how Rome could conquer all of northwest Europe with . . . four or five legions. The answer is the Romans had a very similar policy to our own: They looked at the most retrograde, bloodthirsty, nationalist leaders–the bin Ladens of the ancient world–and took them out, but with precision and with a lesson.
Ancient histories, epics, tragedies, and disputations do make clear that at some point in public deliberations, there’s no substitute for decisive action driven mainly by what the nineteenth-century military strategist Karl von Clausewitz, a student of the classics himself, called “the silken thread of imagination.” Before all facts can be known, leaders must act decisively on intuitions about the interplay of their own and others’ traditions, moral structures, and economic practices. The study of classical history and literature revivifies the inevitability of that silken thread, even if also its elusiveness.
But some conservatives seem to go further. Feeling trapped in neoliberal postmodernity, they think that emulating the ancients opens opportunities to shed the mincing Christian moralism, political correctness, and secular revolutionary fantasies of our time. In their view, ancient Greeks and Romans, unburdened by otherworldly preoccupations or the secular nostrums of today’s reigning but empty neoliberal relativism, were more realistic, brave, and exultant in breasting the terrors and felicities of the human condition than are technocrats and bottom-liners or the apostles of progressive groupthink who react against them. The ancients expected not to escape the human condition through science, personal salvation, or historically redemptive Hebraic or Protestant missions, but to bear it nobly through character nourished in a civic culture far stronger than a slippery web of contracts and rights.
“The Greeks accepted the idea that we all get old, there’s certain things that we can’t change, human nature is constant throughout the ages and therefore certain things will always be with us–war, pestilence, the fact that individuals are capable of pretty awful things without civilization and culture,” Hanson told The Boston Globe in 2003, when he was becoming infamous for turning folksy insights into bludgeons against critics of the Iraq War. A fifth-generation California raisin farmer, self-styled Jeffersonian republican, and best-selling historian of ancient wars, Hanson pleased Bush and Dick Cheney with his Carnage and Culture, which cited nine historic battles to attribute the supposed superiority of Western war-making to its rooting in Greek and Roman values. Hanson reserves his deepest scorn for leftist academics, who he claims prefer a politics of moral (or amoral) posturing to taking real responsibility, and for progressive activists who think they can improve the world rather than affirm some dignity amid deprivation, moral depravity, and capricious fate.
Jim Cullen, Review of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom: A Novel" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (9-12-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
This is a novel that's much easier to admire than it is to like. By just about any meaningful critical criterion -- plot, character, dialogue, description, a sense of place, a sense of history -- Jonathan Franzen has long since proved himself to be a master, and in his latest novel he is at the height of his powers. But as a reading experience, Freedom is as emotionally exhausting as it is impossible to put down.
As with his 2001 novel The Corrections, with which it has strong affinities, Franzen's great subject in Freedom is the tumultuous inner life of the American family, and the indirect but unmistakable way in which that tumult is connected to looming imperial decline. Generationally speaking, the loci of the former were the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom; this time it's the Baby Boom and Generation Y. The core of Freedom is a love triangle formed by the life trajectories of Walter and Patty Bergland (whom we meet indirectly through their former neighbors in St. Paul; this is a story of multiple narrations) and Walter's best friend Richard Katz, a misanthropic rock musician who meets Walter in college and stays in touch in the decades that follow. Along the way we also meet the two Bergland children, in particular Walter and Patty's son Joey, whose iconoclastic rejection of his parents' progressive values -- Patty's permissiveness and Walter's environmentalism -- lead him into a number of unanticipated directions, among them an early marriage and a career as an international arms merchant during the Iraq War. Actually, all the major characters in this book undergo metamorphoses in one form or another; part of the book's excellence is the way in which very smart people all too credibly find themselves in truly ridiculous, if not paradoxical or even hypocritical, situations.
Yet the novel's narrative energy, and its satisfying resolution, may well be among its secondary pleasures. As with the best recent fiction, this is a book in which you really learn things about the way the world works: how companies like Halliburton game the system; how environmentalists drive Faustian bargains with companies like Halliburton; how the indy rock world has adapted to the end of the traditional record business; how Title IX changed the life of female athletes (Patty was a college basketball star); and so on. Franzen's ability to fully imagine the lives of his characters also turns their frequent arguments into lively ping-pong matches of dialogue, in which each side makes compelling points that resist easy villainy or pigeonholing.
So what's the problem? For lack of a better term, it's Franzen's relentlessness. He bores into these people, anatomizing their pettiness in ways that are real enough -- and recognizable enough -- but that finally feel like a form of aggression that he takes out on them. Take, for example, this quintessential Franzian sentence in which Patty assesses her mother, a small-time Westchester politician: "Paradise for Joyce is an open space where poor children can go and do Arts at state expense." There's something painfully exquisite about this masterpiece of compression: the crudeness of Joyce's verb ("do"), the effortless abstraction of the limousine liberal ("open space," "poor children") and the vindictive quality of her altruism ("state expense"). You laugh out loud when the collegiate Joey muses that "the really attractive girls he'd met in Virginia all seemed to have been sprayed with Teflon, encased in suspicion of his motives." And you nod with grim amusement as you listen to Richard rationalize seducing a fan's girlfriend because "rather than thwarting his father's vicarious ambitions by pursuing entomology or interesting himself in financial derivatives, Zachary dutifully aped Jimi Hendrix. Somewhere there had been a failure of imagination."
But 500+ pages of this can really wear you down. There are few writers who can allow you to really experience what (someone else's) depression feels like, and Franzen's virtuosity in evoking this in multiple characters is admirable, enervating, and addictive. It's hard not to get halfway through this book without sensing that writing is above all else a therapeutic act for Franzen, even as he's one of the very few people who can actually succeed artistically in doing this -- and even as one of the things that you suspect most depresses him are people that read Jonathan Franzen novels (because their motives, like this one being the Big Novel of Fall 2010, are suspect). You end up feeling weirdly implicated.
That said, Franzen does have a larger point to make here, a point of real historical, political, and psychological importance. It's right there in the title: freedom, a term which pops up with subtle regularity. "It's all circling around the problem of personal liberties," Walter says at one point. "People came to this country for either money or freedom [money of course is another form of freedom]. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily." Walter is making a critique of working-class libertarianism here -- his elitism is something he has an increasingly difficult time hiding or resisting -- but the point applies to Americans generally. Our love of freedom, a love unmoored from any larger goal or value, is killing us.
Freedom is not exactly a fun book, readable as it is. But it's an important one, if for no other reason as a vivid document of our time. It shows us a republic that's dying from within, and how, amid very considerable difficulties, a decent life may yet be lived within it. And how the antidote for freedom is love.
Jim Cullen, Review of Aziz Rana's "The Two Faces of American Freedom" (Harvard, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (9-3-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
It's a truism that has now vexed generations of historians: that in the United States, the people who have tended to have the most egalitarian class politics have also tended to be the most racist, while those with the most pluralistic vision have tended to be the most elitist. In American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), Edmund Morgan found the locus of this contradiction in the colonial slaveholding south. In The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, (1990) Alexander Saxton found it in the culture of the nineteenth century urban working class (as did labor historian David Roediger, who collaborated on a recent second edition of Saxton's book). In Two Faces of American Freedom, a sweeping reinterpretation of American history from the seventeenth century to the present, Cornell University Law professor Aziz Rana locates this American dilemma on the (shifting) western frontier in an ideology he calls "settlerism." Not surprisingly, Rana laments it. But he appears to be even unhappier with what's replaced it.
Rana begins his study by challenging the premises of American exceptionalism by arguing that in many respects the United States was a fairly typical empire from the beginning -- except for the fact that it tended to expel or exclude conquered people rather than directly subjugate them. (Yet even this was not unique; he notes a similar pattern can be discerned in the development of South Africa.) What did set the United States apart was its ability to successfully gain autonomy from the imperial metropole -- an aspiration that crystallized when Great Britain sought to reorganize a sprawling empire after 1763 by homogenizing privilege and limiting expansion in ways that colonial setters considered antithetical to their errand in the wilderness.
It is this dynamic of local autonomy and imperial expansion --the two faces of the title -- that Rana says historians like Gordon Wood overlook: the democratization of American society he and others have traced overlook its dependence on the exploitation of Others. Settlerism relied on the fuel of (white) immigration to sustain it, which is why certain kinds of Europeans enjoyed surprising rights like suffrage even before they became citizens, and why non-Europeans have had a devilishly difficult time procuring them. With rare exceptions like Orestes Brownson, or the workingmens' parties of New York and Philadelphia, this freedom was understood in negative rather than positive terms: central government was the problem, not the solution. So it was that Jefferson rather than Hamilton, dominated early American politics, and the farmer trumped the merchant in the collective imagination. Abraham Lincoln? A big government guy itching to seize billions of dollars worth of property and destroy centuries of freedom (i.e. the right to own other people).
The irony, as Rana and others have noted, is that what would become a characteristically Jacksonian approach to freedom jealously checked government power but left Americans defenseless against the depredations of corporate power. This new form of tyranny cloaked itself in a free labor ideology presented as the logical heir of Jeffersonian yeomanry. After the Civil War, populist leaders like Tom Watson and labor organizers like Eugene Debs challenged this substitution by arguing for a modified form of producerism that emphasized meaningful work, not mindless drudgery. In a departure from the earlier generation of continental expansionists, many of these people began to also challenge imperial expansion overseas, for reasons that ranged from moral principle to racism. And as the frontier closed, they began to lose their enthusiasm for immigration.
But the charms of empire proved too great to resist. Meanwhile, in the decades after 1896, progressive elites decided that the best way to combat corporate power lay erecting a government apparatus that promoted the common good as something to be delivered via administrative expertise. By the time of the New Deal, "freedom no longer amounted to collective control over the basic sites of decision making; rather, it comprised security from economic want." The presidency was increasingly seen as the barometer of popular will, which justified its ever-growing power. Yet as we all know, that power has also become increasingly less accountable. It has typically been exercised in foreign adventures that are embarked upon in the name of preserving freedom, but which end up actually sacrificing it, both in terms of local power and human life.
Rana renders this story in a sturdily constructed narrative girded by illustrations from an array of Supreme Court cases, some well-known, others obscure, and still others, like the Dred Scott case, analyzed in a fresh light. He identifies a strand running from Thomas Skidmore through Randolph Bourne to Martin Luther King that he believes offers an alternative America of universal egalitarianism, one that emphasizes the distribution of freedom and power broadly. It does not rely, as the Civil Rights movement increasingly has, by defining social progress in terms of creating opportunities for minorities to join elites, rather than challenging the premise of elitism itself. Rana places his future hopes, as improbable as he knows they are, on immigrant protest against second-class citizenship.
This strikes me as an intelligent, honest, and decent critique of American society. I do have reservations. As a matter of style, I wish Rana would wean himself of his tendency to use the phrase "in other words," which is at best tedious and at worst engenders suspicions of rhetorical legerdemain. I think he creates a misleading impression that late nineteenth century farmers and labor ever achieved much resembling real symbiosis in their challenge to industrial capitalism (he fails to note mutual suspicion, and antithetical interests, like food pricing, that characterized their relationship), and I think he underestimates the degree to which managerial elites of the New Deal order were challenged in the decades since (Ronald Reagan isn't even in the index!).
My biggest concern, though, is that there's an oddly abstract air to this lament for a vanishing, albeit flawed, American freedom. Actually, I don't really know what freedom finally means to Rana. I might have a better sense if he actually took us to what he regarded as an effective New England town meeting, or visited a western town in which a real-life Jimmy Stewart was hard at work, so that we could see just what it was that he values. (T. H. Breen does this brilliantly in his new book American Insurgents, American Patriots, in which he peoples his analysis with individuals who took liberty into their own hands and made a new nation.)
For freedom is a means, not an end. And so I feel compelled to ask: What does Rana want? He is sorry that Americans have been so ready to settle for mere security. But what else is there? One answer, of course, is the esteem that comes with publishing books with high-profile presses and teaching at an Ivy League university. But of course not all of us are as smart, talented, and lucky as he his. I myself have another answer, which among other ways takes the form of paying absurdly high local taxes for what some administrators would plausibly consider an absurdly inefficient (read: small) school district. That gives me the right to be a helicopter parent and to vote on an annual school budget. On Sundays, I can nod to a couple local policemen from my pew at church, which I hope will make a difference on a future bad day. I'm not sure how many brown neighbors I have (a few), but none of them are cleaning my house or mowing my lawn. (I do both; Rana regrets to observe at one point that one thing feminism has come to mean is a career premised on low-wage help.) No one would call this utopia. But does it count as an authentic form of freedom, albeit underwritten by the prerogatives of empire? (Really: Can freedom ever not be?) I don't imagine it would satisfy Thomas Jefferson -- I've got too much attachment, literally and figuratively, to the city. But how about Aziz Rana? If this isn't good enough, what is?
These are not rhetorical questions. However he might answer them, now or later, I honor Rana on a fine debut -- and provisionally recommend the pleasures, and maybe even the virtues, of settling for suburban living as one face of American freedom.
Jim Cullen, Review of Samuel Moyn's "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History" (Harvard, 2010)
Source: Special to HNN (8-28-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]
If there's one goal that seems to have universal human currency since the Second World War, it would be human rights. Ever since the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the concept has been celebrated as a foundation of international law: never something that could be taken for granted, and yet something to which all nations would pledge allegiance. Even nations that denied human rights -- and, of course, there have been many -- nevertheless paid lip service to them, and committed offenses against them as secretly as possible (which, thanks to organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, has not always been so easy). Many consider human rights synonymous with the very idea of civilization itself. In this provocative little book by Columbia University historian Samuel Moyn, however, the global history of human rights is rife with irony, if not contradiction.
The first and perhaps most potent irony is that a concept whose appeal and power derives from principles that transcend the nation-state has almost always rested on national sovereignty. Widely regarded touchstones like the Declaration of Independence (1776) or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) derived their justification and effectiveness from state power: rights followed flags. Even in those rare cases where activists challenged a government's power to project itself into the lives of citizens (a key word here), it has almost always been on the basis of the state's own criteria (like a constitution). This high degree of dependence on the state would eventually be overcome, but fuzzy thinking on the part of those who championed the cause would make that difficult and obscure how it happened.
Indeed, Moyn asserts that the history of human rights is, in effect, a history of amnesia. He challenges the widespread perception that the modern movement's core energies derived from the experience of the Holocaust, as suggested by the timing of UN Declaration in its immediate aftermath. But, as he shows, this is very misleading. In fact, all kinds of other agendas took precedence of human rights in the years after World War II, principal among them the Cold War. The emerging U.S.-Soviet rivalry, combined with older powers' efforts to salvage disintegrating empires, effectively made the UN itself largely beside the point. And that meant high-flown rhetoric celebrating transnational human dignity was as well. The Last Utopia opens on a note of mordant humor; the UN celebrated the 20th anniversary of Human Rights with an international conference in the Tehran of the Shah Rezi Pahlevi (!), much of which was devoted to denunciations of Israel. There can be few more vivid illustrations of the irrelevance of independent internationalism.
Which brings us to another irony. The postwar decades did witness the emergence of a global anti-colonial movement that brought about the dissolution of old European empires, as well as the emergence of independent Third World nations that sought to escape the clutches of superpower domination. One might think that the rhetoric as well as the concepts of human rights would have been embraced as a vehicle in such quests. They were not. That's partly because insofar as the energies and language of the movement had much life, they were propelled by intellectual forces (notably a re-energized Catholic Church) that were correctly seen as conservative. Moreover, the meaning of concepts like "self-determination" had a decisively collective character -- it was peoples, not persons, who were seen as the repository of freedom. In particular, revolutionary movements on the left still had utopian hopes attached to them, particularly in the Latin America of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
And here we have perhaps the final irony: the modern human rights movement was at least as much a matter of disillusionment as it was idealism. In particular, it was the experience of 1968, and the realization that neither side in the Cold War -- or its proxies -- could be trusted to treat national, ethnic, or religious communities in a non-exploitative manner. A very specific set of contingencies brought about decisive change. Among the most important was the U.S. failure in Vietnam, which created an opening in the Democratic Party that allowed Jimmy Carter to become president. It was Carter's human rights campaign of 1977, a campaign that somewhat unintentionally both took on a life of its own, that allowed a genuine international movement to take root. This one was grounded far more in non-government organizations than in the UN, depended on grass-roots organization (typified by the explosive growth of Amnesty International in the late seventies), and had a decisively secular orientation. In the thirty years that followed, it was this movement that took the airy abstractions of international law and began to breathe real life into them. While there's still a long way to go in this regard, it's clear that a kind of critical mass has developed here in what has become a global discourse with a language, protocols, and membership that sees itself as engaged in a meaningful enterprise.
And yet, for all this, Moyn sees the human rights movements at a crossroads. To a great degree, that's because its adherents have never really grappled with the implications of some of these contradictions. For example, in its impatience with ideology, the human rights movement has drawn its strength from a perception that it is essentially apolitical. Insofar as this is really possible -- and it may well be so when it comes to things like opposing torture or genocide, two commitments that have really come into focus in recent decades -- it is also limited. One reason why the movement never got much traction in mid-century is that political communities in the Third World were looking for rights that were often economic and collective: it's good not to be tortured, but it would sure be nice to have a job. In a way, the triumph of human rights reflects the collapse of any effective challenge to the logic of global capitalism, and in that regard may be legitimately considered conservative. Or, at any rate, elitist: Moyn that the role of expertise in NGOs now has crowded out some of its attractive grass-roots features of Amnesty International in its heyday.
Although Moyn doesn't really explore this, one also wonders how well the individualistic premises at the core of human rights will fare in a world in which the Confucian foundation of Asian cultures, as opposed to the Christian foundations of western ones, will dominate. Whether or not this is right question, The Last Utopia makes a compelling case for a specifically historical understanding of the world (even if it is a bit repetitive at times; the content of the last chapter, for example, might have been folded into themes of the preceding ones). As he chides its uncritical adherents, human rights were made, not discovered. They're contingent, not timeless. And if they're evolutionary, it's an evolution of mutations and sudden emergence, not gradual change. It's the people who have their stories straight who are most likely to realize their ends.
Luther Spoehr, Review of Daniel A. Clark, “Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood, 1890-1915” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).
Source: HNN (8-22-10)
[Luther Spoehr teaches courses on the history of American higher education at Brown University.]
Daniel Clark begins by quoting a grumpy Andrew Carnegie: “A college education unfits rather than fits men to affairs.” Clark, a historian at Indiana State University, then spends the rest of his monograph showing how popular new, mass-audience magazines, including “Collier’s Weekly,” “Munsey’s Magazine,” “Cosmopolitan,” and the “Saturday Evening Post” contributed to dramatically changing that stereotype. “American mass magazines,” says Clark, “spearheaded a cultural reconstruction of college and middle-class masculinity…in the years surrounding 1900, as they emerged as a central national cultural forum, our nation’s first truly national media.”
Clark thus posits an answer to the important question of how and why the undergraduate college experience, previously limited to tiny fraction of the population, increasingly came to be considered an important, even essential, part of middle class life. In 1900, less than 4% of college-age youth attended college, but that figure has approximately doubled every 15 years or so ever since, and nowadays we hear that everyone should aspire to a college degree. Although Clark places too much emphasis on mass magazines as causal factors, he is entirely successful in showing that college life was moving closer to center stage in American culture at the turn of the twentieth century.
Jim Cullen, Review of Terry Teachout's "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
Source: Special to HNN (8-21-10)
Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) among other books, and is working on a book on the way historiographic visions of American history are embedded in the careers of movie stars. He blogs at American History Now.]
Louis Armstrong (1901-71) is one of those artists -- his contemporary, Norman Rockwell, comes to mind as another -- who were very popular with the masses in their lifetimes but regarded with disdain, if not outright hostility, by the critical elite then and since. Like Rockwell, however, Armstrong has been the subject of increasingly respectful reappraisal in recent years. Armstrong revisionism dates back to the time of Gary Giddins' 1988 study Satchmo. So Terry Teachout's appreciative new biography of Armstrong, soon to be out in paperback, does not exactly break new interpretive ground in that sense. But it is a notably fresh reading of the man nonetheless.
There are a number of reasons why. The first is the quality of the research (though I will confess I found checking the citations to be clumsy). Teachout draws heavily on newly available writings and taped recordings Armstrong made in the last 25 years of his life. Armstrong's idiosyncratic prose voice, no less than his musical one, is delightfully off-beat. (I'll tell ya watcha do now," he instructed a group of musicians during a taped television broadcast. "Not too slow, not too fast -- just half-fast.") He also includes a bevy of previously unpublished photographs that bring his subject to life, along with excellent captions to go along with them. Armstrong's irrepressible personality -- funny, profane, subject to occasional rages and funks -- leaps off the page.
Teachout can take some credit for that. A critic for the Wall Street Journal and Commentary, his prose is polished to a high sheen, and can be playful without ever being precious. Responding to Armstrong's assertion later in his life that he took better care of himself than his colleagues (there's an absolutely hilarious private postcard Armstrong made for friends celebrating the virtues of an herbal laxative), Teachout writes, "He did not see -- or refused to admit -- that he was in the same boat, and it was sinking fast." He also does a terrific job of placing his subject in a broader cultural context, both culturally and politically.
The publications Teachout writes for have a conservative tilt, and this comes through in his stance toward his subject. For a long time, the standard line on Armstrong -- one articulated most sharply and influentially by John Hammond, the giant of American ethnomusicology who in this case allowed his blue-blood disdain for populism to get the best of him -- was that he betrayed his talent. In this version of the story, Armstrong was a Promethean genius, an organic musical intellectual who sprang from the whorehouses of New Orleans and helped found an entirely new jazz idiom in the 1920s. But by the end of the thirties, he stopped playing in the ensembles that showcased his talent, and became increasingly content to work with indifferent collaborators and sadly thin pop material. His defenders at the time and since in effect celebrated him despite, not because, of this. Yet Teachout stoutly defends Armstrong's work over the course of his life. He concedes that a vein of passivity in Armstrong's personality did cost him opportunities at different times. But he asserts that songs like "Mack the Knife" and "Hello Dolly" have their place in the Armstrong canon right beside "St. Louis Blues" and "West End Blues." It is stunning to read that Armstrong's collaborators ranged from Jimmie Rodgers to Barbara Streisand, and there is something truly Whitmanic about Armstrong's range and generosity of musical spirit toward these and many other people. Even Bing Crosby seemed to like him (and that's really saying something).
The other dimension to this musical fault line is a racial one. The bebop artists who came of age in the forties had little patience for Armstrong's accommodationist sensibility. To a great extent, history was on their side, both in terms of Civil Rights politics and in giving a distinctively African American genre a new generational lease on life. But Armstrong was never exactly a patsy. He made international headlines in 1957 when he criticized President Eisenhower for his inaction on Civil Rights, and described segregationist Arkansas governor Orval Faubus as "an uneducated plowboy" (the Associated Press could not run with what he originally said). Perhaps more to the point, it's hard not to be awed by the sheer resilience of a man who started with nothing and became one of the gigantic figures of the 20th century, a global symbol of what was best in America. You don't attain those heights without strength and discipline, part of which involves being able to ignore slights.
Similar to his line on Armstrong's music, Teachout asserts that Armstrong did not pander to middle-class values. That's because he avowedly embraced them. Comparing the trumpeter to Horatio Alger, Teachout claims Armstrong's house in Queens "was the home of a working man, bursting with a pride not from what he had but what he did." He may be pushing his luck here in suggesting that Armstrong's lifestyle was anything like that of from his fictional Queens neighbor, Archie Bunker. But insofar as he's right, such a perspective serves as a reminder that conservative values have never been white property alone. Booker T. Washington was no patsy,either.
Teachout's encapsulation of Armstrong's life, offered in the introduction of Pops (a moniker he gave to virtually everyone he saw, whether he remembered their names or not) seems like a good way to end here: "He was a man of boundless generosity who preached the stony gospel of self-help, a ferociously ambitious artist who preferred when he could do what he was told, an introspective man who exploded with irrepressible vitality when he stepped into the spotlight, a joyous genius who confounded critics by refusing to distinguish between making art and making fun." God Blessed America when he gave us Satchmo.
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