Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / The Genius of America

The Genius of America -- How The Constitution Saved Our Country And Why It Can Again by Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes, Bloomsbury '07, $23.95, 296 pages, ISBN #1596911999. Index, source notes, abbreviations and bibliography, appendix, no illustrations.

"If men were angels," observed founding father James Madison, "no government would be necessary." But they're not, say the authors of this finely-wrought new book, and so "the framers had to recognize what people were really like and then design a government around that reality." Until then, experiments in democracy had expected selfishly minded people to rise above self interest to sacrifice for a common good.

Hofstra law professor Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes, executive editor of the International Herald Tribune, observe that the framers benefitted from a first hand look at human nature in the early years of independence: "...the people had nearly let their army starve in the field of battle. They had competed, one state against another, for the upper hand in trade. They had profiteered and stolen and refused to work together."

So, they argue, the founding fathers took a gimlet-eyed approach to drafting a constitution that recognized how men were made, not how we might like them to be made. Their approach: "To impede change until enough people supported it. To force people to the middle. To encourage compromise. To spread power around so that....the few could not oppress the many, and the many could not oppress the few."

While Americans currently grow frustrated with "gridlock, partisan politics and special interests," the authors call for restoration of our "Constitutional Conscience," recognizing that "our democracy is a fragile construct that requires both an understanding of its history and a commitment to participation."  In so doing, they argue the importance of "valuing political process over product." It is worthy of note that, at 220 years, America is the oldest democracy in history. We must be doing something right.

Book Alert / After the Reich

After the Reich -- The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh, Basic Books '07, $32, 618 pages, ISBN #0465003370. Index, further reading, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

For more than a half-century, American schoolchildren have been taught that one of their country's finest hours came in the wake of the German defeat in World War II, when the Allied forces united in the rebuilding of Europe. British journalist Giles MacDonogh attempts to stand that proposition on its head in a tendentious new book that argues Germans bore the brunt of horrific war crimes perpetrated by the Allies, to wit:

" *  2.3 million German civilians died violent deaths after the cessation of hostilities, and 1.4 million German POWs died in captivity.

   * Nearly all of the famous extermination and concentration camps -- Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt and Dachau -- were reused after May 1945 by the Allies. German prisoners died here in droves.

   * The Americans used torture to extract confessions in their prison in Schwabisch Hall. Of 139 prisoners examined later, 137 had their testicles destroyed.

   * On April 17-18, 1945, French soldiers raped at least 600 women in the small Black Forest town of Freudenstadt, before going on to Stuttgart where they raped another 3,000 women and eight men. Additionally, it is estimated that the Russians raped 20,000 women in Berlin."

MacDonogh, author of biographies of Kaiser Wilhelm and Frederick the Great, claims to have drawn from "a vast array of contemporary first-person accounts" in his revisionist narrative. He argues that the postwar experience in Germany bears "deep parallels" to the present situation in Iraq.

Book Alert / The Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine -- The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, Metropolitan Books '07, 558 pages, ISBN #0805079831. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

At the time of the Iraqi invasion in 2003, President Bush spoke of the anticipated "shock and awe" the Saddam Hussein regime would experience, causing it ultimately to topple. But it was not only the Iraqis who felt shock and awe; the manmade disaster caused a shock effect in America as well and offered a signal opportunity for American business to rush in and exploit the resultant chaos. Predictably, leftist journalist Naomi Klein devotes much ink to the Halliburton Corporation, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, which profited wildly from contracts to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure in the wake of the invasion.

Klein doesn't see Iraq as a stand-alone example of what she calls "the shock doctrine" but rather the fruition of an economic strategy devised some 35 years ago by the late University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who first learned how to exploit a large-scale government crisis when he advised Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s. "Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy -- taax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation," she writes.

Along the way, Friedman's classrooms created a diaspora of like-minded economists, spreading the shock doctrine throughout  the world. Along the way, it picked up such followers as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. She explains "how moments of collective crisis -- 9/11, the tsunami, or Hurricane Katrina for example -- have been used as opportunities for rapid-fire corporate raids on societies reeling from shock," a phenomenon she labels "disaster capitalism."

Klein's remedy for shock treatment is information that will allow societies to anticipate it in the wake of disasters and thus make them shock resistant. Klein is a columnist for The Nation and The Guardian and the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.

"Barack Obama Does Not Say Much About His Years in New York City." Why Not??

The New York Times:

Barack Obama does not say much about his years in New York City. The time he spent as an undergraduate at Columbia College and then working in Manhattan in the early 1980s surfaces only fleetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer in the metropolis, the outsider searching for a way to “make myself of some use.”

He tells of underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods” bring their dogs to defecate on the block. He takes a job in an unidentified “consulting house to multinational corporations,” where he is “a spy behind enemy lines,” startled to find himself with a secretary, a suit and money in the bank.

He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job — work he went on to do in Chicago — though a former supervisor remembers him as “a star performer.”

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Where Have You Gone, Joe Torr(agio)?

The New Yorker:

"The Red Sox and the Colorado Rockies wrap up their World Series this week, at last delivering a winner at the end of a season of spectacular losses in baseball. The art of losing isn’t hard to master, as Elizabeth Bishop told us, and for stretches in the late going this year it seemed as if the teams and the players were only out there to illuminate the maxim.

"In the divisional playoffs, the first round of the postseason, the Cubs, the Phillies, and the Angels all went down in the minimum three straight games, while the Yankees struggled to a lone win against the Cleveland Indians and then disappeared, losing their adulated long-term manager, Joe Torre, in consequence. The Mets, viewed for a time as the best team in either league, contrived to lose twelve out of their last seventeen games on the schedule—a feat unmatched and unimagined in the pastime—and lost first place in their division to the Phillies on the final day of the season and, with it, a place in the playoffs.

"Elsewhere, the San Diego Padres, one strike short of attaining their own post-season slot, instead surrendered a game-tying triple to Tony Gwynn, Jr., a Milwaukee Brewers rookie, and eventually saw the game and (after a one-game playoff) their hopes slip away. A week before, Padres manager Bud Black, while attempting to pull Milton Bradley (the outfielder, not the Parcheesi board) away from an argument with first-base umpire Mike Winters, inadvertently threw him to the ground and lost him for the rest of the year with a torn ACL.

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Book Alert / Prophet of Innovation

Prophet of Innovation -- Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction by Thomas K. McCraw, Belknap/Harvard '07, $35, 719 pages, ISBN #0-674-02523-7. Index, illustration credits, no bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"For capitalism, and for Schumpeter personally," writes the author, "nothing was ever stable. Uproar was their only music." Its essence, he says, is a process he called creative destruction. For some, the obliteration of the old and the innovation needed to create the new is a bloodless exercise in which lost careers, even lives, are little more than collateral damage.

Not to Schumpeter, says McCraw, even though the iconic economist thought of himself very much a conservative. "Schumpeter abhorred some of the banalities of business culture and revered the artistic attainments of the Old World. He knew that creative destruction fosters economic growth but also that it undercuts cherished human values. He saw that poverty brings misery but also that prosperity cannot assure peace of mind."

McCraw finds Joseph Alois Schumpeter, who lived from 1883 to 1950, to have been "to capitalism what Freud was to the mind: someone whose ideas have become so ubiquitous and ingrained that we cannot separate his foundational thoughts from our own." To tell his story, the Harvard Business School professor emeritus divides his narrative into three chronological sections: Part I -- L'Enfant Terrible, 1883-1926: Innovation and Economics; Part II -- The Adult, 1926-1939: Capitalism and Society; and Part III -- The Sage: 1939-1950: Innovation, Capitalism, and History.

Out in Paperback / William James -- In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

William James -- In The Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson, Mariner '06, 622 pages, ISBN #0618919899. Index, principal sources, source notes, grouping of b&w images.

"If this life be not a real fight," said William James, "in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight -- as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem."

Such is the remarkable epigraph of William James's biography, which won the Bancroft Prize. In an interview, author Robert D. Richardson describes James's importance to American culture:

Why is William James, who died almost a hundred years ago, still important today?

William James has three big claims on our attention. First, he was one of the founders of modern, physiology-based psychology. Second, he is a key figure in American philosophy, giving us both pragmatism and radical empiricism. Third, he made religion possible for educated moderns by his insistence that real religion is not churches, creeds, scriptures, and priests, but the personal religous experience of the individual. Taken as a whole, his work is a major underpinning of American individualism. He was also a great teacher and a great writer, though in a way entirely different from his famous novelist brother, Henry."

It begins to sound like William James means something to you personally. How?

He is one of the people I go to for help, for guidance, for strength to get through a bad day. Like Marcus Aurelius, Samuel Johnson, Thoreau and Emerson and Erik Erikson, William James is someone I read when things get tough, when I get confused, depressed, or lost. To borrow a phrase from the great Quaker leader Rufus Jones, William James has laid his mind on me.

In a passage History Wire found particularly insightful, James tells of a theory of emotions he discovered along with a Danish psychologist named Lange, to the effect that emotions follow events rather than precede them. "We are afraid because we run, or sad because we weep, not the other way around. This has huge practical implications. "If we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves," says James, "we must assiduously,  and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate....Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame (straighten up!) and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw."

Book Alert / Love Entwined -- The Curious History of Hairwork in America

Love Entwined -- The Curious History of Hairwork in America by Helen Sheumaker, UPenn Press '07, 250 pages, ISBN #0812240146. Index, source notes, selected bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The kind of hairwork described in this engaging book doesn't involve your hairdresser crafting an Afro or streaking locks to match one's outfit. When the author thinks of hairwork, she thinks of a largely extinct 19th century art, in which hair of living or dead family members might be turned into commemorative artwork -- woven into jewelry, for example, or wall decorations.

Helen Sheumaker, who teaches American studies at Ohio's Miami University, describes hair's use in lockets, bracelets and brooches. A man might use his deceased wife's hair as a fob from which to carry his pocket watch. One enterprising artisan crafted a tea set made entirely of hair. In a day when women had limited career horizons, the author says, "Hair working offered entrepreneurial opportunity in the 1860s and 1870s."

Sad Parting For Dolly Parton And Porter Wagoner

Los Angeles Times:

"Porter Wagoner, the blond pompadoured, rhinestone-encrusted personification of Nashville tradition, host of the longest-running country-music variety show in TV history and mentor to Dolly Parton, died Sunday night of lung cancer. He was 80. Wagoner died at a hospice in Nashville, according to an announcement on the Grand Ole Opry's website.

"Parton recently went to a Nashville hospital to visit the man who inspired her best-known song, 'I Will Always Love You,' after their acrimonious career split in the mid-1970s. She described him then as very weak, but said Wagoner 'had his wits and joked around,' and she vowed she would sing with him again at the Grand Ole Opry when he was ready. Wagoner was released from the hospital Friday and transferred to hospice care.

"A little more than a year ago, Wagoner had been seriously ill after suffering an intestinal aneurysm, but defied a dire medical prognosis and recovered sufficiently to mount a career comeback that led to appearances last summer on 'The Late Show With David Letterman' and an opening slot at Madison Square Garden with upstart rock band the White Stripes, whose members are ardent Wagoner fans."

Impossible Dreamers 1967 -- Remember Mike Andrews And Reggie Smith?

The Boston Globe:

"Denver - They appear together on their Topps rookie card, the second baseman and the center fielder who started together in the World Series. Before there was Dustin Pedroia and Jacoby Ellsbury, there were Mike Andrews and Reggie Smith, who played for the Sox Impossible Dreamers in 1967.

"'It's funny, but I'd never related it before to Reggie and myself,' Andrews said yesterday from his home, where he'd just finished watching the Patriots crush the Washington Redskins. 'Maybe because Reggie was around all season and Jacoby just came up.

"But I think Dustin, coming up for a World Series contender, there was this expectation of being good right out of the chute. Here you are, on a contender with only a few holes, and you're one of them. The pressure on him was a lot more than on me. We were 100-to-1 shots, and with me, it was 'Let's see how this develops.'

"'Dustin, with all the media and TV, his face is in front of us every night. Back then, we had maybe one game a week on TV. He's in a whole different world, on stage all the time. The pressure is a lot greater."

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