Author Archives: Joel

by | 19 June 2010 · 6:19 pm

U.S. Economic Recovery Prospects, 1934

From The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 2007), Kindle Loc. 3321-3353:

Lillienthal and the TVA’s engineer, Llewellyn Evans, sailed to Britain to study something new that the United States might copy: what the Britons called their “grid,” which used power from both private and public companies. “The problem of linking public and private companies is similar to that of the Tennessee Valley,” Lilienthal told a reporter in New York at the Hotel Roosevelt before he sailed. In fact the UK grid owed some of its efficiencies to Sam Insull [a Chicago entrepreneur then facing prosecution by the FDR administration, but later found not guilty on all counts], who had advised Westminster repeatedly. The British press saw irony in the fact that Lilienthal of the TVA wanted to have a look at it. Lilienthal, the Electrical Review chuckled, said he was looking for a man of “seasoned specialized judgment, such as [Mr. Lilienthal] regards as essential for determining future policy in the States, but circumstances have deprived the American people of his experience and that of his associates.”  

THE BRITISH WERE ON TO something. Another reality was becoming clear that summer of 1934: the drama of the prosecutions and the spring cleanups was hiding something. While the Norris Dam and other New Deal projects might be ahead of schedule, the economy was not, at least not in the sense of being where it had been before. The American Federation of Labor had reported in late spring that 780,000 workers who had been reemployed by the National Recovery Administration in the autumn had been unemployed again by the spring of 1934. William Green, the AFL’s leader, began fighting with Richberg at the NRA over employment numbers: the AFL wanted industry, not relief agencies, to solve the economic problem. The job had to be done, and it had to be partly Richberg’s, since, challenged Green, “We cannot indefinitely support one-sixth of our population on money borrowed against future taxes.” There were still nearly eleven million unemployed. And the Dow was heading in the wrong direction; it would spend the summer below the 100 mark of the preceding winter. Looking up, the New Dealers were taken aback. “The Depression was refusing to disappear,” Tugwell later wrote of the whole period.

Roosevelt now regrouped. Midterm elections were that November. The prosecutions had originally been about punishing financiers for the crash. If Insull’s debentures had lost all their value, then Insull must be guilty. But now the prosecutions and investigations should also be about justifying the New Deal, economically and morally. The Fireside Chats would help. Roosevelt and others had noticed that the medium of radio really did seem to create a new reality, separate from the reality of old politics. If voters focused on the voice and the message, and not the tardy recovery, that might carry the Democrats forward.

It was a hope that the administration concentrated on—for even as government lawyers prosecuted, they were also finding themselves on the legal defensive. The National Recovery Administration, for instance, was under fire in Congress, and from business, as a bureaucracy out of control. A report submitted to the fifty-seventh annual meeting of the American Bar Association noted that by June 25 of 1934, some 485 codes and 95 supplements had been approved by the president and 242 more by the Administrator for Industrial Recovery. In the period of a year, 10,000 pages of law had been created, a figure that one had to compare with the mere 2,735 pages that constituted federal statute law. In twelve months, the NRA had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.

To survive, Richberg and the Justice Department warned—accurately—that the NRA must pass review by the Supreme Court, and soon. In any case, the law required renewal by Congress in 1935. Its constitutionality was a big question: could such a large program really be legal under the Constitution’s commerce clause? Marking Constitution Day in September, the New York Times commented that in regard to such legislation, “the winds of controversy over this issue are already rising.” With the election coming up, the New Deal had to score victories in national politics; if it couldn’t win a genuine return to prosperity, then it might succeed with the negative victories of bringing down the villains.

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by | 17 June 2010 · 1:19 pm

Fumigating the Polynesian Voyagers, 1995

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 65-66:

In 1995 three Hawaiian canoes sailed south to the Society Islands, met a contingent of three other South Pacific canoes, then sailed to the Marquesas and north again to me Big Island of Hawaii, for the first time retracing the original route of discovery of the Hawaiian Islands.

This historic voyage encountered only one significant problem. Three days before the canoes were due to arrive home, the crew radioed Honolulu with news that they were suffering the painful bite of some undetected insect. Entomologists were consulted. The suspects were narrowed to three: the nono, a tiny, vicious blackfly that plagues beaches of the Marquesas and doomed those islands’ resorts; the punkie midge, a no-see-um half the size of the nono that also haunts the Marquesas; and a biting midge known in French Polynesia as the white beach nono. The first is native to the Marquesas; the latter two arrived in Polynesia sometime between 1920 and 1950. All three are functionally identical—with mouths like scissors, they bite holes in the victim’s skin, producing welts that if scratched can quickly fester. A single nono fly can inflict five thousand bites in an hour. After securing a blood meal, the fly retreats to a crevice in any nearby decaying organic matter—waterlogged wood a coconut husk, the hull of a Polynesian voyaging canoe—to reproduce. Its larvae emerge several days later to begin the cycle anew. With these facts in mind, Honolulu newspapers treated readers to several days of midge coverage, disagreeing only as to whether the midges posed a worse threat to the tourist industry than the brown tree snake, or merely an equivalent one. Cynics whispered of a midge conspiracy, of midges planted aboard the canoes by an environmental group eager to publicize the dangers of alien species in Hawaii.

Riding a strong headwind, a biting midge can cross fifty miles of open ocean. To forestall such an event, and despite prime sailing conditions the six voyaging canoes were ordered to a halt some two hundred miles south-southwest of Hawaii’s Big Island, Hawai’i. The following morning, after much wrangling over which government agency should take responsibility for a nuisance insect that is neither an agricultural pest nor strictly speaking, a public-health threat, and which in any event now sat in international waters, a Coast Guard plane dropped thirty-six aerosol cans of pyrethrin, an insecticide made from daisies, into what were now heavy seas. The canoes’ holds were emptied, clothes and equipment sprayed with disinfectant, the hulls scrubbed four times with seawater, the sails keelhauled. Everything organic was tossed overboard: religions carvings, palm-frond baskets, breadfruit seedlings wrapped in coconut husks, and traditional foods like sweet potato, taro leaf patties, and poi—which crew members perhaps were happy to see go, as they later confessed a preference for sausage and Spam. Inspectors from the Hawaii Department of Health then boarded the canoes and sprayed everything again. A series of triumphal celebrations had been planned to mark the voyage’s end. Instead, the canoes were escorted into Hilo Harbor, sprayed once more, and enclosed in fumigation tents. A crowd of two dozen, including several customs and immigrations officials, greeted them.

Health and agriculture inspectors still do not know what sort of midge they nearly encountered; the cleaning, spraying, scrubbing, and fumigation had left no trace of them. Other survivors were discovered, however, including four species of fly, two species of ant, a cockroach, two spiders, a book louse, a parasitic wasp, a beetle, several snails, some live shrimps, a gecko, two species of eye gnat, and a scale insect that in some parts of the world is considered a serious agricultural pest. Some time afterward the chief of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture was heard expressing nostalgia for the days when state inspectors could walk down the aisles of arriving aircraft and fumigate freely, as they still do in New Zealand. As for the canoes, they reached their destinations. The Hawaiian crews sailed to warm homecomings on Maui, Molokai, and Oahu. The Cook Islanders disembarked, showered, and dried off with one hundred and fifty donated towels. The Tahitian voyagers, though they had a fine canoe, never arrived; in fact, they never embarked. They had failed to apply for U.S. visas, and were gently advised to stay home.

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by | 11 June 2010 · 12:18 pm

Guam: New Predator, New Prey

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 31:

In simple ecological models, the relationship between a predator and its prey is straightforward, Malthusian. In the classic model, there are rabbits and there are lynxes eating rabbits: the lynxes thrive, reproduce, spawn more hungry lynxes—so many that soon there are fewer and fewer rabbits, fewer lynx meals, eventually fewer lynxes. The lynx population declines, the rabbits slowly recover their numbers, and the cycle of eating and eaten, supply and starvation, begins again. The situation on Guam is altogether different. Even after the forests were emptied of birds, the snake continued to thrive. Its numbers are down: approximately twenty-four snakes per hectare, from a hundred per hectare in the late 1980s. That is a major drop, yet twenty-four snakes per hectare is still four times more dense than even the most snake-infested plot of Amazon jungle. Campbell said, “That’s like having a gob versus a big gob.” Now the snakes subsist on skinks and geckos. And the skinks and geckos are not disappearing. In fact, because they are no longer preyed upon by birds, they are more abundant than ever. The snakes have found a renewable resource, the gustatory equivalent of solar energy. And there is evidence to suggest that the snakes are reproducing faster too, giving birth at a younger age. Few biological invaders, once they have gained such a solid foothold in their new habitat, subsequently disappear from it entirely. Any hope that the snake would eat itself out of existence appears equally groundless.

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin meditated on the impact that house cats might be having on the surrounding countryside. If there were more cats, there would be fewer mice. With fewer mice burrowing into the hives of their favorite snack, the bumblebee, there would perforce be more bees buzzing about, gathering nectar, pollinating the local blossoms—most notably the blossoms of Trifolium pratense, the common red clover, which depends exclusively on the bumblebee to complete its reproductive cycle. In short, more cats would mean more red clover. “Plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations,” Darwin wrote.

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by | 11 June 2010 · 11:25 am

The Zen of Ecological Niches

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 135-136:

For Charles Elton and many of his successors, biological invasions were a way to probe and characterize the way that ecological communities are assembled and held together. The ecosystem was studied as a sort of organic machine—a system—of semi-interchangeable parts, or, to borrow another analogy, a kind of corporate economy maintained by organisms with defined ecological jobs. By studying the arrival of foreign workers and the consequent displacements, the notion went, a scientist could figure out the overall corporate structure: the various job descriptions, the interoffice competition, the company bylaws, the glue of market success and longevity. Critical to this schema is the job itself, the ecological niche—a concept that has receded from meaning over the years with every new attempt to clarify it. Today, one can speak of a habitat niche (the range of habitats in which a species can and does occur) or a functional niche, the “role” or “place” of a species in a community—a notion further divisible into trophic niche (the relationship of the species to its food and enemies) and resource niche (which spans things utilized by the species, like nesting sites). As a conceptual tool, the niche has effectively dropped from the modern ecologist’s belt. “Niche,” Mark Williamson summarizes in his book Biological Invasions, “is useful in a preliminary, exploratory description, but becomes difficult to pin down in particular situations.”

Whatever a niche is exactly, successful invasion, in Elton’s schema, allegedly involves occupying an empty one. But, many biologists counter. what does it mean for a niche to lie “empty”? If a niche is an ecological job that takes up food or resources, and such a job is going unfilled in an ecosystem, the community would show side effects; it would soon be overwhelmed by waste or unused food. So for such a job opening to exist yet not harm the community, by definition it must be a job that involves no interaction whatsoever with other community members—like one of those jobs the boss’s kid fills on summer vacation, only less productive. But if that is the case. any invader entering this empty non-job would have no impact on the system—which clearly isn’t what happens with many invaders. “If you take the view that there are no empty niches,” Williamson writes, “the invasion of communities cannot involve occupying empty niches,” Some ecologists contend that in saving that an invader occupies a vacant niche, what is meant is that an invader plays a new functional role in the community, not that it doesn’t use resources previously used by other species. The brown tree snake fits this definition; in coming to Guam, it declared itself top predator of an ecosystem that for eons had run perfectly well without such a top executive. Under these terms, Williamson writes, successful invasion becomes a matter of always, often, or sometimes entering a niche that can be full, empty, partly full, or partly empty—terminology that begins to suit the term itself. Williamson concludes, “It is to some extent a matter or the meaning you want to put on the word ’empty.'”

At the very least, invasion biology has made it clear that the conflicts and interactions that transpire between species in an ecosystem are too fluid and dynamic to be meaningfully described by a static term like niche. To introduce niche theory is to propose a koan: Does an ecological niche exist before on invader arrives to fill it? Meditatively interesting, perhaps, but useless in forecasting. “We are still unable to recognize a vacant niche except by carrying out the tautological experiment of introducing a species and seeing if it becomes established,” one biologist notes. Williamson adds, “The extent to which a niche is vacant is, in practice, a post hoc explanation. Post hoc explanations are neither intellectually satisfying nor much use in prediction.”

This book is engagingly written, but contains a lot of little factual errors.

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by | 7 June 2010 · 2:47 pm

American Travelers Meet Stalin, 1927

From The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 2007),
Kindle Loc. 1305-60:

The appointment hour, 1:00 p.m., came without further vacillation by the Kremlin. Robert Dunn, John Brophy, and Paul Douglas all went for the interview. So did Louis Fischer, an American who was writing pro-Soviet articles for left-wing American periodicals out of Moscow at the time. So, as it turned out, did a journalist who was visiting Moscow for the New York Times, Anne O’Hare McCormick.

Those who did attend kept notes. Douglas: “Recalling the deeds of terror that had been committed there throughout its history, I shivered as we entered Red Square and then went through the gates of the Kremlin.” A small pockmarked man met them in a cloakroom; Douglas assumed it was an attendant. But the man took the head place at the table. It was Stalin. “His low brow was clear under a square-ish brush of black hair that made his head look oddly cubist,” wrote Anne O’Hare McCormick. “He looked like any of a million Soviet workingmen,” commented Fischer. “Deep pockmarks over his face,” read Fischer’s notes; “low forehead”; “ugly, short, black and gold teeth when smiles.” Whereas Trotsky had worn white, Stalin wore khaki. Douglas thought he saw a private’s uniform, Fischer a civilian suit. The pants legs he stuck into high black boots. Fischer sought to capture the moment in every medium possible. In his notebook, next to the words, he made pencil sketches of the leader’s head.

The group expected an hour with the leader. They got six and a quarter. One thing struck them even before the meeting started: Stalin’s charm. He was not dashing like Trotsky, but he seemed in a way more genuine. What came through was that Stalin had done his homework and touched on the issues that interested them—workers’ insurance, for example, Douglas’s pet research area since the days of the loggers. Stalin knew all about La Follette’s strong 1924 showing. A questioner asked how Stalin knew that the Russian people were behind him. He answered that the Bolsheviks would never have come to power if they were not popular; today heads of unions were all Communists, again a fact that reflected grassroots support.

Stalin also took time to emphasize that his government was an ethnically diverse one, with a Ukrainian, a Byelorussian, an Azerbaijani, and an Uzbek in the central executive committee of the Soviets. There were also, Fischer would later write, questions about religion: must a Communist be an atheist? Yes, Stalin answered, and even as he answered, church bells across the street rang. The guests laughed, and Stalin smiled—as if to signal the tolerance he could not articulate officially.

Stalin also rejected the notion that U.S. Communists worked “under orders” from Moscow as “absolutely false”—itself a lie. As the group drank lemon tea from a samovar, Stalin made his case: the Soviet Union and the United States might trade together even if they had different systems—the new doctrine of Socialism in One Country.

Fischer reported that no one but a serving woman entered the room during the course of the meeting; she brought cheese, sausage, and caviar sandwiches. (Brophy reported tea and cookies.) There must have been an interpreter and stenographer present. After several hours the guests made an attempt to go; Stalin would not permit it. Instead he turned the tables and asked questions of the delegates. The transcript of these questions, published within a week in Pravda, give as clear a snapshot as any document of the tactical and strategic goals of Soviet foreign policy. Stalin wanted to make the point that he had a genuine labor following in the United States, and he wanted to sideline those organizations that had sidelined him—with the aid of his interlocutors. He had already skewered the anti-Communist American Federation of Labor. Now he set about doing so again: “How do you explain the fact that on the question of recognizing the USSR, the leaders of the American Federation of Labor are more reactionary than many bourgeois?”

Brophy allowed that the AFL had a “peculiar philosophy.” Dunn took time to point out that the AFL was too close to capitalists—especially Matthew Woll, AFL vice president. Brophy was the one who spoke the last formal words of the visitors to Stalin before they departed. In Stalin’s official transcript, the travelers gave the Soviet leader what he sought, a form of U.S. blessing: “The presence of the American delegation in the USSR is the best reply and is evidence of the sympathy of a section of the American workers to the workers of the Soviet Union.” As the group left, Douglas spied a bust of Karl Marx, with full beard, in the corner. Contemplating it, he was startled to feel a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was Stalin. They joked about whether Marx had worn a necktie.

Several of the travelers sensed that they had been used to an extent they had not foreseen: “we realized that in his speeches he was talking over our heads to the newspapers, in answer to Trotsky,” Brophy would write. Anne O’Hare McCormick, confused, retreated to racialist imagery for her report: Stalin, she said, was a hybrid of east and west, almost “Occidorient in person.”

The vessel that returned the group home to America was not the President Roosevelt this time but the Leviathan. The irony of that name may not have escaped some of them. On shipboard, Silas Axtell, the lawyer, bitterly objected that some of the other labor people on the trip were producing a report far too positive. As he later recalled, “The whole report was written with such a solicitous and affectionate regard for the welfare of the dominating group in Russia, whose guests we had been, and the impression from reading the report was so different from the one I had received, I could not possibly subscribe to it.” Douglas likewise quarreled with Robert Dunn over the content of their joint essay. Dunn was painting the picture too rosily, Douglas maintained. Later, he discovered that Coyle had diluted his discussion of civil rights in the published report.

Axtell and Douglas may have been thinking of another intellectual pilgrim who had met Stalin before them: Emma Goldman. Goldman had had every reason to accept what she saw in Russia; the United States of Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge was unlikely to welcome her back. Yet when she learned that Stalin was imprisoning her beloved fellow anarchists, she had grown skeptical. And when the Bolsheviks—led by the same Trotsky of the white suit—bloodily put down their fellow Communists in Kronstadt in 1921, she had turned against the Soviet Union entirely. “I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise,” Goldman wrote. Though she really had nowhere to go, she left Communist Russia and shortly published a monograph on the false freedoms of the Soviet Union, My Disillusionment with Russia.

A decade after Emma Goldman’s experience, and five years after the 1927 delegation, Arthur Koestler, a young Communist, would also be repulsed. He found that the Soviet Union had developed a neat trick for bribing young intellectuals. Through its State Publishing Trusts it would buy the rights to a book or article—with a different payment for an edition in each one of the Soviet Union’s multiple languages. Koestler reported selling the same short story to as many as ten different literary magazines, from Armenian to Ukrainian. The place really was, he would note ironically, “the writer’s paradise.”

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by | 3 June 2010 · 8:50 pm

American Travelers in the USSR, 1927

From The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 2007), Kindle Loc. 1196-1250:

TO MAKE LANDFALL IN EUROPE was a relief for the travelers. Here at least the economic facts did not contradict their reform concepts so profoundly. There were some bumps along the road. In Warsaw they felt a jolt when their guide, Albert Coyle, acknowledged that he had misplaced the trip funds. In Dortmund, Tugwell got bored and skipped a meeting with trade union people at a steel plant to go to an art gallery. But from the time they met Soviet trade union leaders at the Polish-Soviet border, the travelers felt their spirits rise. This would indeed prove the junket of all junkets. It didn’t hurt that their hosts gave them first-class treatment—free transportation, cheap or free hotel service, and so on. And there were to be meetings with leaders—Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, the Russian prime minister, Leon Trotsky, already out of the Kremlin’s inner circle but not yet exiled, and others of high rank. For the travelers, who were at best respectable but not themselves of national rank at home, these introductions in and of themselves made for a high. There is nothing headier than finding one is more recognized abroad than at home. And that was not all: rumor had it there would be meetings at the highest level, perhaps even with Stalin himself.

The travelers’ enthusiasm was only strengthened by what they saw in the first few days. The failures of the economy were not all visible. Indeed, if one squinted, things looked almost reasonable in Soviet Russia. Lenin, before dying, had instituted his New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed the survival of small artisans. The economy had finally begun to regain pre–World War I levels. The brutal collectivization of agriculture and the famines of the 1930s were still to come. The Soviets for their part tried to burnish their own reputation with unfavorable references to America. Everywhere the travelers went, Brophy would later note, they heard about Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been executed while the travelers were in Russia, just as predicted. For days after the execution, the towns the travelers arrived in were draped with banners hung in honor of Sacco and Vanzetti, “victims of ‘American capitalism.’” To the travelers it seemed that Russia understood what the land of Babbitt did not.

Roger Baldwin, who had corresponded with Vanzetti until his death, was deeply impressed with what he saw. Baldwin understood that Stalin’s Russia had a dark side. He didn’t enjoy his time in what he called this “irritating place.” But Russia still seemed somehow farther along than the narrow Massachusetts that could put the anarchist pair to death. Baldwin gave Leo Tolstoy’s son letters he had received from Vanzetti so that Tolstoy might post them for Russians to see at a state bank. As he wrote of Russia, Baldwin’s own conclusions were hopeful. “Everybody is poor together,” he wrote to his mother. “There is much discontent, much regulation of life, but not much terrorism or repression except of the old upper classes.”

For the high-spirited Tugwell, part of the trip was about having a good time. Half a century later, Stuart Chase would write Tugwell, asking whether he recalled when “you, Bart Brebner and I were the ‘Three Musketeers’ in Moscow in 1927.” At one point the group split up, and Tugwell traveled down the Volga on a barge, insisting that his interpreter and captain teach him a folksong about a Russian Robin Hood, “Stenka Rasin.” In exchange Tugwell taught the Russians “Beulah Land.” He rode in private railway cars—“ancient but gaudy” first-class wagons-lits from the days of the Romanovs—through Cossack country. Tugwell kept notes; he dined out. He wondered, as he always did when he was abroad, whether his life was on the correct path: after another preceding period overseas he had taken leave from academia for a year to farm beside his father before deciding the move was a mistake. The more earnest Douglas, himself considerably distracted by his own dying marriage, at one point reproached Tugwell for his lack of gravity.

But when it came to their work, Tugwell, like the other travelers, was serious enough. Committed to researching agriculture reform, he fought off offers to see factories and demanded visits to farms instead. He noted, first of all, that while conditions were still terrible within the Soviet Union, they were probably improving: “The manor houses are gone; only the drab villages remain,” he wrote, concluding that “here is a bit more to eat of a little better quality. There is a radio in the village hall. There is more wood for warmth,” he would later write. New England might be slowly dying; the Soviet Union to his mind represented “a stirring of new life hardly yet come to birth.” He loved the idea of economics being made subservient, itself like a serf, to the good of the rural village: “with us, prices are a result; in Russia they are agents of social purpose.” Tugwell insisted on more visits and was duly granted them.

Tugwell found himself admiring the active role of the Soviet government toward farming. He liked the idea of the agronom, the farm manager or bureaucrat, who oversaw a set of farms or a region. The Russian farmer, he noted, “suffers from price-disadvantage, it is true; but so also do farmers all over the world.” Tugwell pointed out a difference from the United States: in Russia, the farmer’s challenges were the subject of genuine government controversy. “There is a disposition to do something about it. Can this be said of the U.S. government?”

Most of all, however, it was the villages that impressed Tugwell. Many had not yet been collectivized, but they were still relatively cooperative compared to rigidly fenced New England. This cooperation he perceived to be natural, indeed, inevitable—“cooperation is forced in the nature of things.” In his own childhood, there had been similar cooperation. He remembered traveling over New York’s Ellery hills to a friend’s house with his father, only to find the family not at home. The pair had fixed a meal from what they found in the buttery nonetheless, a fact which did not bother their hosts, when they returned, in the slightest. That was the way things were, in the old agricultural community. Under the czars, Tugwell noted, village farmers too had shared—“Russia was communal in this sense long before it was persuaded to Communism in the Marxian sense.”

Tugwell believed that what remained of private arrangements also needed to be ended; it was time for “abandoning the old one-man, one-plow method.” After all, in a big communal field “a tractor can go as far and fast as it is capable of doing without the bother of fence corner turnings. Socially, the village has great advantages if it is not too closely built or too big.” Further rationalization might work if only the stubborn peasant would cooperate. And even though he disliked the Soviet dictatorship from the start, he was struck by the authority of Russian propaganda and its enormous success. Always, the Russians they met up with “told us what our country was like.” This simultaneously horrified the progressive in Tugwell and pleased the efficiency expert in him: “I knew from then on how determined dictators come to manage a people.”

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by | 29 May 2010 · 9:50 pm

Revisiting the 1920s & 1930s

From The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 2007), Kindle Loc. 145-88:

It is time to revisit the late 1920s and the 1930s. Then we see that neither the standard history nor the standard rebuttal entirely captures the realities of the period. The first reality was that the 1920s was a great decade of true economic gains, a period whose strong positive aspects have been obscured by the troubles that followed. Those who placed their faith in laissez-faire in that decade were not all godless. Indeed religious piety moved some, including President Calvin Coolidge, to hold back, to pause before intervening in private lives.

The fact that the stock market rose high at the end of the decade does not mean that all the growth of the preceding ten years was an illusion. American capitalism did not break in 1929. The crash did not cause the Depression. It was a necessary correction of a too-high stock market, but not a necessary disaster. The market players at the time of the crash were not villains, though some of them—Albert Wiggin of Chase, who shorted his own bank’s stock—behaved reprehensibly. There was indeed an annihilating event that followed the crash, one that Hoover never understood and Roosevelt understood incompletely: deflation.

Hoover’s priggish temperament, as much as any philosophy he held, caused him to both misjudge the crash and fail in his reaction to it. And his preference for Germany as a negotiating partner over Soviet Russia later blinded him to the dangers of Nazism. Roosevelt by contrast had a wonderful temperament, and could get along, when he felt like it, with even his worst opponent. His calls for courage, his Fireside Chats, all were intensely important. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—in the darkness, Roosevelt’s voice seemed to shine. He allowed Cordell Hull to write trade treaties that in the end would benefit the U.S. economy enormously. Roosevelt’s dislike of Germany, which dated from childhood, helped him to understand the threat of Hitler—and, eventually, that the United States must come to Europe’s side.

Still, Hoover and Roosevelt were alike in several regards. Both preferred to control events and people. Both underestimated the strength of the American economy. Both doubted its ability to right itself in a storm. Hoover mistrusted the stock market. Roosevelt mistrusted it more. Roosevelt offered rhetorical optimism, but pessimism underlay his policies. Though Americans associated Roosevelt with bounty, his insistent emphasis on sharing—rationing, almost—betrayed a conviction that the country had entered a permanent era of scarcity. Both presidents overestimated the value of government planning. Hoover, the Quaker, favored the community over the individual. Roosevelt, the Episcopalian, found laissez-faire economics immoral and disturbingly un-Christian.

And both men doctored the economy habitually. Hoover was a constitutionalist and took pains to intervene within the rules—but his interventions were substantial. Roosevelt cared little for constitutional niceties and believed they blocked progress. His remedies were on a greater scale and often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad. A number of New Dealers, Tugwell included, had been profoundly shaped by Mussolini’s Italy and, especially, Soviet Russia. That influence was not parenthetical. The hoarse-voiced opponents of the New Deal liked to focus on the connections between these men, the Communist Party, and authorities in Soviet Russia. And several important New Dealers did indeed have those connections, most notably Lauchlin Currie, Roosevelt’s economics adviser in later years, and Harry Dexter White, at the Treasury. White’s plan for the pastoralization of Germany takes on a new light when we know this. Lee Pressman and Alger Hiss duped colleagues in government repeatedly.

But few New Dealers were spies or even communists. The emphasis on that question is in any case misplaced. Overall, the problem of the New Dealers on the left was not their relationship with Moscow or the Communist Party in the United States, if indeed they had one. Senator McCarthy was wrong. The problem was their naïveté about the economic value of Soviet-style or European-style collectivism—and the fact that they forced such collectivism upon their own country. Fear of being labeled a red-baiter has too long prevented historians from looking into the Soviet influence upon American domestic policy in the 1930s.

What then caused the Depression? Part of the trouble was indeed the crash. There were monetary and credit challenges at the young Federal Reserve, and certainly at the banks. Deflation, not inflation, was a big problem, both early on and also later, in the mid-1930s. The loss of international trade played an enormous role—just as both Hoover and Roosevelt said at different points. If the United States had not raised tariffs at the beginning of the decade and Europe had not collapsed in the 1930s, the United States would have had a trading partner to help sustain it. Part of the problem was the challenge of the transition to industrialization from agriculture. Part was freakish weather: floods and the uncanny Dust Bowl seemed to validate the sense of apocalypse. With money and the weather breaking down, men and women in America felt extraordinarily helpless. They were willing to suspend disbelief.

But the deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace. Government management of the late 1920s and 1930s hurt the economy. Both Hoover and Roosevelt misstepped in a number of ways. Hoover ordered wages up when they wanted to go down. He allowed a disastrous tariff, Smoot-Hawley, to become law when he should have had the sense to block it. He raised taxes when neither citizens individually nor the economy as a whole could afford the change. After 1932, New Zealand, Japan, Greece, Romania, Chile, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden began seeing industrial production levels rise again—but not the United States.

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by | 27 May 2010 · 6:47 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Kamaboko heisha

While poking around looking for something else in my Spahn & Hadamitzky Japanese Character Dictionary: With Compound Lookup via Any Kanji (Nichigai Associates, 1989), I came across a wonderful, but sadly obsolescent compound, 蒲鉾兵舎 kamaboko heisha, which seems to be yielding to a katakanago loan from English: クォンセット kuonsetto ‘Quonset hut’. A Quonset hut is a Kamaboko(-shaped) barracks. Nice image.

The 舎 sha of 兵舎 heisha ‘barracks (lit. soldier-lodge)’ also occurs in 牛舎gyuusha ‘cowshed’, 鶏舎 keisha ‘chicken coop’, 犬舎 kensha ‘dog kennel’, 豚舎 tonsha ‘pigpen’, and 田舎 inaka ‘countryside (lit. paddy-lodge)’. It indicates a fairly rustic or rudimentary sort of accommodation.

The kanji components of 蒲鉾 kamaboko ‘boiled fish paste, fish cake’ are less straightforward. The 鉾 hoko is a kind of heavy pole weapon more commonly written 矛, which Spahn and Hadamitzky gloss rather loosely as ‘halberd‘, which has a much more complicated head on it. I suppose the fish paste is (or was) extruded into long spears before being cut and packaged into standard blocks.

The character 蒲 is usually pronounced gama and means ‘cattail, bulrush‘ (although many people seem to confuse it with 蝦蟇 gama ‘bullfrog’). A couple of summers ago in Japan, we met two of my wife’s former students who hailed from 蒲郡 Gamagōri on the coast below Nagoya. One tutored English and the other tutored Italian, and they both admitted to being mildly embarrassed to tell people they were from an outlying district whose name can be translated as ‘Cattail County’.

The principal Sino-Japanese reading of 蒲 is FU, as in 蒲団 (usu. 布団) futon, but it can also occur in a crazy kanji representation of tampopo ‘dandelion’, 蒲公英, which is usually written in kana.

Even though its use may be fading with regard to Quonset huts, the modifier かまぼこ型 or カマボコ型 kamaboko-gata ‘kamaboko-shape’ still thrives as a descriptor of all manner of semicylindrical objects, like some kamaboko-gata pataa ‘mallet putters’ in golf.

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by | 26 May 2010 · 6:09 am

Who Toppled Mossadegh?

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 2154-75:

History has charitably characterized the Mossadegh period as a democratic revolution in the making. But Iranian politics was not then truly moving in the direction of liberal democracy. Mossadegh talked of reducing the power of the Shah but was amassing power in his own hands and was quick to cross the constitution when it suited him—including dismissing the parliament in 1953. Far from liberal democracy, Iran seemed to heading for the familiar story of an elected Third World politician riding the wave of nationalism and transforming himself into an authoritarian ruler, leaving his country broken in the process.

As Mossadegh stepped up tensions with Britain, cutting off diplomatic relations in October 1952, the British government requested U.S. assistance, suggesting that the United States collaborate in overthrowing Mossadegh. The Truman administration refused to take direct military or diplomatic action against Iran, fearing that Mossadegh was naïve about the Soviet threat and too close to the communist Tudeh Party, which had backed Mossadegh’s election. Cold war paranoia fueled fear that Iran would join the Soviet sphere of influence. Shortly after Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency in the 1952 election, he approved a plan for the CIA to sponsor a propaganda campaign to foment protest against Mossadegh, allocating $1 million in funding to the plan (of which not much more than $60,000 was eventually spent), which was dubbed Operation Ajax.

The CIA urged the Shah to execute his constitutional authority to remove Mossadegh from office, but he resisted doing so, and in a preemptive move, Mossadegh, who had learned of the intentions against him, announced that he was dissolving parliament and he organized a national plebiscite to affirm his hold on power.

His extreme moves ignited further agitation against him, and the crisis came to a head when, in August 1953, the Shah finally did formally dismiss Mossadegh from power. When Mossadegh refused to step down, the Shah fled the country to Rome, appointing retired General Fazlullah Zahedi prime minister. With Mossadegh still in charge and the Shah gone, however, the Anglo-American plan failed and the crisis deepened. Massive protests erupted in the streets of Tehran and around the nation, with brutal fighting breaking out between pro-Shah and pro-Mossadegh factions. Four days later General Zahedi, widely popular in the royalist military, led troops to storm the capital in a second coup attempt. Mossadegh surrendered to Zahedi the next day, and the Shah was reinstalled in power. It has been common wisdom that the CIA did all the heavy lifting for the coup, but in reality it was General Zahedi, taking advantage of the growing popular apprehension with the worsening situation, who planned and led the second coup that won the day.

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by | 20 May 2010 · 6:23 pm

Three Past Outbreaks of Major Violence in Thailand

Hong Kong-based security consultant G. M. Greenwood offers some historical perspective on Thailand’s current turmoils in an article in the Asia Sentinel (19 May 2010) under the discouraging headline, Reconciliation or Retribution in Thailand: The odds are on retribution.

Thailand has experienced three major violent political upheavals in the 35 or so years before the present crisis began. All can be linked, and while each offers a differing insight into how the state has responded to being challenge, context makes them unreliable indicators of the country’s direction in the coming days and weeks.

  • On 13 October 1973, months of anti-government protests against the armed forces’ dominant role in government culminated in a huge demonstration in Bangkok. The following day troops attacked the protestors, killing at least 75 people and wounding hundreds of others. King Bhumibol directly intervened, superficial order was restored and the three politicians seen as largely responsible went into exile overseas.
  • On 5 October 1976, leftist students at Bangkok’s Thammasat University protesting against the killing of two students by rightists a few weeks earlier were attacked by well-organised militia personnel. The official death toll among the students, many of them the children of the elite, was 45 but hundreds more were widely believed to have subsequently murdered. Many fled into the bemused arms of the then revolutionary Communist Party of Thailand, whose fighting strength was drawn from the same northern rural communities that remain the hinterland of today’s reds. The subsequent anti-communist campaign by the Thai military was accompanied by a wave of extrajudicial killings that have been largely forgotten outside these communities.
  • Between 17 and 20 May 1992, at least 44 people were killed and hundreds injured when troops fired at demonstrators protesting against efforts to make a prime minister of a military leader who had seized power in a coup the previous year. In addition to acknowledged casualties, many of them drawn from the higher social classes, at least 100 people were presumed killed by the security forces after the immediate unrest. When containers were found on the seabed off the Sattahip naval base at the head of the Gulf of Thailand in 2009, there was widespread speculation that they might contain the remains of the missing of ‘Black May.’ The fact that they did not has not diminished the belief that the state is capable of killing its opponents.

These precedents, rather than vague talk of compromise and national unity, are likely to guide the actions of the Red Shirt activists and their countless thousands of supporters across the country as they prepare for the aftermath of the loss of their key redoubts in Bangkok. For them, any outcome to the crisis that erodes their present strength will be resisted.

The problem for Abhisit and his allies is as much cultural as political. While democratic institutions are developing roots across the region, the concept of ‘loyal opposition’ is still regarded as an oxymoron by many local politicians. It is within this context that an overly soft line against the Red Shirts will be interpreted by UDD activists, Abhisit’s opponents within government, the military and pro-establishment People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) Yellow Shirts as a sign of weakness rather than a display of pragmatism.

Nevertheless, an effort is likely to be made to re-emphasise the narrative that distinguishes the Red Shirt leadership from the ‘misguided misled.’ In this model, the red rank-and-file would be allowed – even helped – to return to their communities, accompanied by a chorus extolling their virtues as loyal but unwitting dupes of toppled Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his clique.

via RealClearWorld

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