Category Archives: economics

by Joel | 1 July 2026 · 12:33 am

Changing USSR Nationality Policy

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 18-21:

The USSR began its life with massive affirmative action for the non-Russian cultures outside the Russian Federation. But cultural Russification of the borderlands returned in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Stalin emerged as Lenin’s sole successor and began preparing the country for war. One reason for the change was industrialization, which, given Russian control of the all-Union party, came with the advance of Russian as the language of administration, science, and technology. Another reason was accommodation of the Russians as the largest nationality in the now Soviet empire, along with concern to integrate the non-Russian nationalities culturally so that they would not switch sides in the coming war.

In Ukraine, the largest non-Russian republic of the USSR, the change of nationality policy was signaled by show trials against the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The first such trial, which took place in 1929, was followed by an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres and the peasantry, which reached its peak during the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33. A number of key Ukrainian communists committed suicide, while others were dismissed from their positions and jailed. As many as four million people were starved to death as part of a concerted campaign to crush the peasant resistance to the collectivization and maximize grain delivery for Soviet industrialization. In the month leading up to the start of the famine, Stalin warned his associates that such measures were needed to prevent loss of control over Ukraine. The Holodomor turned Ukraine, previously known as the breadbasket of Europe, into a land devastated by famine.

World War II led to another shift in Moscow’s policy toward the nationalities. Although Russocentrism was not abandoned, more manifestations of Ukrainian and other non-Russian patriotism were allowed. The Soviet takeover of Poland’s eastern provinces following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 was justified as liberation of fellow Ukrainians and Russians from Polish capitalist oppression. It was also celebrated in ethnic terms as the reunion of western Ukraine and western Belarus with the corresponding Soviet republics. The old imperial reunification paradigm was back, dressed this time in Ukrainian and Belarusian clothing. After Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, non-Russian nationalism was mobilized once again, especially in Ukraine, to encourage patriotic resistance to the German invasion. Once German forces occupied all of Ukraine with the assistance of their Romanian and Hungarian allies, Moscow did not mind promoting the Ukrainian language, culture, and history to mobilize resistance and inspire the loyalty of more than six million Ukrainians drafted into the Red Army. The Ukrainian card was also played at home and abroad to justify the military takeover and annexation of western Ukrainian lands ruled by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the interwar period.

In 1914 the Russian army had captured the city of Lviv, then under Austrian rule, justifying it as liberation of fellow Russians—that was the tsarist authorities’ official term for the local population. As World War II drew to an end, the Soviets played not the Russian but the Ukrainian national card when they integrated Lviv into the Ukrainian SSR, although the city was largely Polish in ethnic composition, with Jews (largely exterminated during the Holocaust) as the second-largest ethnic group.

While the authorities were eager to exploit Ukrainian ethnicity to justify Soviet westward expansion, they did not welcome or tolerate every expression of Ukrainian patriotism and nationalism. The radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formed in the western Ukrainian lands during the interwar period, was considered particularly dangerous. Its members were known to the Soviets as Banderites: their leader, Stepan Bandera, and some of his followers were imprisoned in German concentration camps after a failed attempt to declare an independent Ukrainian state in alliance with Germany and against the USSR in the summer of 1941. The Nazi occupiers, who regarded Slavs as subhuman, deported more than two million Ukrainians to Germany as slave laborers and persecuted Ukrainian patriots of every description.

The two branches of the OUN, one led by Bandera, the other by his less-known rival Andrii Melnyk, turned against the Germans by the end of 1941. In 1943 the Bandera faction assumed leadership of the 100,000-strong Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a guerrilla force that fought against the Polish Home Army and the Nazis and, later, against the Red Army for control of western Ukraine. The Ukrainian nationalist insurgency was not completely crushed until the early 1950s, the last years of Stalin’s rule, earning the designation of the strongest and longest-lasting movement of resistance to the Soviets anywhere in east-central Europe.

The Soviets did their best to discredit the Ukrainian nationalists by condemning their early collaboration with the Germans and exposing the participation of some OUN members in the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Poles during the German occupation of Ukraine. They also made major concessions to the Ukrainian language, which became dominant in western Ukrainian government institutions, replacing Polish. But the Sovietization of western Ukraine was carried out mainly by repression. Not only the captured fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army but also civilians suspected of helping the insurgents were resettled or deported en masse to gulag camps in the Russian SFSR, making Ukrainians the largest ethnic group of political prisoners in the Soviet Union—a phenomenon documented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, food, Germany, labor, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, war

by Joel | 17 June 2026 · 8:59 am

Three Polities of Kyivan Rus’

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 83-86:

THE AUTHORS OF the Primary Chronicle (the laborious task of recording events and commenting on them passed from one generation of monks to another) had to reconcile three different historical identities in their narrative: the Rus’ identity of the Scandinavian rulers of Kyiv, the Slavic identity of the educated elites, and local tribal identity. While the Kyivan rulers and their subjects adopted the name Rus’, the Slavic identity associated with that name, not the Scandinavian one, became the basis of their self-identification. Most subjects of the Rurikids, who ruled their realm from the Slavic heartland, were Slavs. More importantly, the dissemination of Slavic identity beyond the Kyiv region was closely associated with the acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium and the introduction of Church Slavonic as the language of the liturgy, sermons, and intellectual discourse of Rus’. Christianity appeared in both the Slavic and non-Slavic parts of the Kyivan realm in the garb of Slavic languages and Slavic culture. The more Rus’ became Christian, the more it turned Slavic as well. The Kyivan chroniclers incorporated local history into the broader context of the development of the Balkan Slavs and, more broadly still, into the history of Byzantium and world Christendom.

On the local level, tribal identity gave way slowly but surely to identification with local principalities—the centers of military, political, and economic power associated with Kyiv. Chronicle references to the lands surrounding princely towns replaced references to indigenous tribes. Thus, the chronicler refers to the army that sacked Kyiv in 1169 as consisting of people from Smolensk instead of Radimichians, residents of Suzdal instead of Viatichians or Meria, and natives of Chernihiv instead of Siverians. There was a sense of the unity of all the lands under the rule of the Kyivan rulers, and despite conflicts and wars between Rurikid princes, the inhabitants of those lands were considered “ours,” as opposed to foreigners and pagans. The key issue was recognition of the authority of the Rus’ princes, and when some of the Turkic steppe nomads accepted that authority, they became referred to as “our pagans.”

The political and administrative unification of the diverse tribal territories entailed the standardization of their social structure. At its very top were the princes of the Rurikid dynasty, more specifically the descendants of Yaroslav the Wise. Under them were members of the princely retinue—originally Vikings but also increasing numbers of Slavs who merged with local tribal elites to form the aristocratic stratum called the boyars. They were warriors, but in times of peace they administered the realm. The boyars were the main landholding class, and depending on the principality, they had greater or lesser influence on the actions of the prince. Church hierarchs and their servants were also among the privileged.

The rest of the population paid taxes to the princes. The townspeople, who included merchants and artisans, had some political power that they exercised at town meetings, where they decided matters of local governance. Occasionally, as in Kyiv, or quite regularly, as in Novgorod, such meetings influenced the succession of local princes. The peasants, who accounted for most of the population, had no political power. They were divided into free peasants and semifree serfs. The latter could lose their freedom, usually because of debts, and reclaim it once they had paid their debts off or after a certain period. Then there were the slaves—warriors or peasants captured in the course of military campaigns. The enslavement of warriors could be temporary, but that of peasants was permanent.

…

The change in the geopolitical aims of the Kyivan princes, from Yaroslav the Wise to Andrei Bogoliubsky, reflects the reduction of their political loyalties from the entire realm of Kyivan Rus’ to a number of principalities defined by the term “Rus’ Land” and eventually to peripheral principalities that grew strong enough to rival Kyiv in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Historians look to those principality-based identities for the origins of the modern East Slavic nations. The Vladimir-Suzdal principality served as a forerunner of early modern Muscovy and, eventually, of modern Russia. Belarusian historians look to the Polatsk principality for their roots. And Ukrainian historians study the principality of Galicia-Volhynia to uncover the foundations of Ukrainian nation-building projects. But all those identities ultimately lead back to Kyiv, which gives Ukrainians a singular advantage: they can search for their origins without ever leaving their capital.

Leave a comment

Filed under Belarus, economics, labor, language, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Scandinavia, Ukraine

by Joel | 2 June 2026 · 12:15 am

Language Lessons in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 26-27:

Our language instructor gave us directions to a landmark in the center of town, and we soon realized the directions had been intentionally complicated so that we’d have to ask questions of locals. Away from headquarters, we passed a yellow, onion-top church and were then sucked into the central bazaar, an outdoor black hole of discount merchandise. Anyone dealing any type of transaction came at us with booming Slavic accents, as if their words need only enter our physical space to stun us and take control of our wallets. I considered buying cheese, batteries, soap packets, tin cups for drinking, but managed to pass through without losing money.

Vendors conversed with their friends in shouts from stall to stall. Flip-flops, light machinery, dried fish, bulk tea, clothing, duplicates of keys, endless buckets of salted cheese, olives, rice, cucumbers, tomatoes, liters of wine in reused soda bottles. These vendors were the types who’d ridden with me on the bus in the morning—old babushkas selling whatever they had too much of at home. Grandchildren ran wild in the corridors of the bazaar, dashing in between, behind, and under the vendor stalls with their rubber toy guns.

It seemed everyone in the capital spoke only Russian. Romanian might have been spoken at home among family members, but Russian was the language of money, spoken openly at shops and on the streets. And though I understood the majority of volunteers sent to Moldova would learn Romanian in order to serve the poorest communities, I didn’t envy them. Unlike other colleagues, Jesse and I would never complain about policemen and bazaar women refusing (or unable) to speak Romanian, checks from all restaurants presented in the Cyrillic alphabet, and host families only speaking an angry-sounding foreign language to them at home, expecting them to respond to the sharp sounds as though they were dogs.

The din of commerce activity decreased once we left the maze of the bazaar. We hadn’t yet asked directions, still waiting for someone who appeared within our age range to approach. A girl walked fast and picked up speed as we addressed her, perhaps to shorten our opportunity to harass her. But she stopped shortly after passing us, having responded to the softness and insecurity in our accents. She pointed toward a busy intersection a block away and seemed disappointed that we ended our conversation by wishing her health and happiness. I think she wanted to tell us her name. At the intersection a woman selling popcorn perked up when she heard our accents and pointed across the street to a sidewalk art sale. At the art bazaar a man selling Russian stacking dolls said we were on the right track and asked where we were from, and recommended dolls to match any personality. He thought our accents sounded Polish. A block farther we stopped another girl and she pointed across the street to our destination.

McDonald’s.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, education, language, Moldova, nationalism, Romania, Russia

by Joel | 26 May 2026 · 12:14 am

Demise of St. Lawrence Island, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 235-238:

One of Hooper’s responsibilities was to patrol the capes and islands of Alaska in search of rum merchants, whose illicit trade in alcohol was proving disastrous to the natives. It was in the service of that responsibility that in late June, Captain Hooper stopped at St. Lawrence Island, an ice-gouged crescent of volcanic rock set in the middle of the frigid sea, directly west of the mouth of the Yukon River. Part of America’s Alaskan territory, St. Lawrence Island was nearly a hundred miles long and some twenty miles wide. Three years earlier, the island had had a population of more than fifteen hundred Yupiks, living in a dozen well-established villages scattered along the coast. Theirs was an ancient, thriving culture built principally on the walrus hunt. But then, in a single winter, the populace had been nearly extinguished by some sort of disease or famine.

Around six o’clock on the evening of June 24, 1881, Hooper anchored the Corwin along the south coast of the island, beside a small Eskimo village. The captain, along with Muir, Smithsonian naturalist Edward Nelson, and the ship’s physician, Irving Rosse, rowed toward shore in a small boat, scanning the terrain with their field glasses. The island, said Muir, was a “cheerless-looking mass of black lava, dotted with volcanoes, covered with snow, without a single tree.” Landing the lifeboat, they strode across a gravel beach and then a spongy surface of snow-dusted lichen and moss. Here and there, blooming heaths and other bright wildflowers peeked through the snow. But when the men approached the village, there was no one to be seen. “We began to fear,” said Muir, “that not a soul was left alive.”

…

WHAT, PRECISELY, HAD happened on St. Lawrence Island? Many whalers suspected an epidemic of some kind, but others believed the mass death was caused by the complete failure of the Yupiks’ hunt in the summer and fall of 1878—which, in turn, was caused by an abundance of rum and whiskey illegally sold to the St. Lawrence Islanders by American traffickers. With alcohol around, Yupik life had ground to a halt—“as long as the rum lasts,” wrote Hooper, “they do nothing but drink and fight.” Drunkenness, said Muir, had “rendered them careless about the laying up of ordinary supplies of food for the winter.” Indeed, near one of the huts, Hooper counted eight empty whiskey casks.

Then an extremely severe winter followed, with far more ice than usual, which made it harder to find seals and whales. By early 1879, the Yupiks all over St. Lawrence Island had begun to starve. They ate their own sealskin clothing, and the walrus-skin coverings of their huts, and the walrus-skin membranes of their boats. This temporarily satisfied their cravings but made them violently ill. With nothing else left to eat, they butchered their dogs until they ran completely out of food. In twos and threes, the villagers of St. Lawrence Island began to die.

The numbers across the island were staggering: More than one thousand people—two-thirds of the population—had perished in 1879, the same year the Jeannette had set sail and cruised right past this island on her way to the pole. The conventional explanation addressed only part of the mass starvation. Alcohol and the severe winter were certainly factors—alcohol, especially. But something far larger had been taking place that made this colossal famine a certainty: Over the previous decade, American whalers in the Arctic, seeking to augment the value of their cargo, had turned to harvesting walruses in astoundingly high numbers. Throughout the 1870s, American whaling vessels had taken as many as 125,000 walruses from the Bering Strait region. The slaughter had proved to be a lucrative sideline to the whaling business. The whalers cooked the animal’s blubber into oil and hacked off the tusks to sell in ivory markets as far away as England and China. In a single season in 1876, more than 35,000 Bering walruses were killed.

Compared to the risky rigors of Arctic whaling, “walrusing” could be ridiculously easy. Rather than wielding lances and harpoons from tippy open boats, the whalers had discovered that they could simply clomp onto the ice with rifles and shoot large numbers of walruses point-blank in the head. Then the butchering, flensing, and boiling could begin. Firing up their try-pots aboard ship, the whalers could render more than twenty gallons of oil from the blubber of a single mature bull. In less than a decade, this industrially efficient slaughter had largely destroyed the Yupiks’ primary source of food and the seasonal hunting life upon which it was based. By the 1880s, the walrus was nearly extinct in large swaths of the Bering Sea.

Leave a comment

Filed under disease, drugs, economics, food, U.S.

by Joel | 20 May 2026 · 6:31 am

Edison and Arctic Light, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 170-173:

Collins was befuddled. It was true that he had never tested the lamps in San Francisco, but in Menlo Park he had seen with his own eyes how brilliantly they worked, illuminating Edison’s lab with a “light greater than three thousand candles.” Why weren’t they working now? De Long put Melville on the problem. After taking Edison’s device apart, the engineer concluded that it must have gotten doused during the turbulent crossing of the Bering Sea. He dried out the apparatus, then tried uncoiling all its wires and reinsulating them, but it was no use: Not even Melville, the Jeannette’s crafty Vulcan, could get the thing to work.

A few days later, Dr. Ambler told De Long of a curious dream he’d had about Edison’s lamps. In the dream, Sir John Franklin, the long-lost British explorer, had come aboard the Jeannette for a tour. Dr. Ambler led Franklin all over the ship and told him excitedly about Edison’s electric lights, an invention that, of course, wasn’t even dreamed about in Franklin’s day. But Franklin bluntly interrupted him. “Your electric machine,” he said, “is not worth a damn.”

“I begin to fear that Franklin is right,” De Long wrote. “Edison’s light is irretrievably worthless. Time enough has been lost in trying to make this machine of use.” Perhaps it was Edison’s fault, but De Long placed much of the blame on Collins. In any case, the lamps had “gone ‘where the woodbine twineth,’ ” as De Long put it—which was to say, into the junk pile of oblivion. Disgusted, he told Collins to box up the lamps and stow them in the hold. Collins was despondent, his mood as black as the unlit Arctic.

And so the days grew shorter and colder—and the natural light ever more feeble. The sun slowly slipped from the polar skies. On November 16, it left altogether and would not return for several months. Spermaceti candles and oil lanterns would have to suffice. So much for Thomas Alva Edison and his company’s pledge about “lighting the North Pole.”

For the next seventy-one days, the Jeannette would be cloaked in darkness.

…

On the night of October 21, 1879, Edison was experimenting with a filament made from carbonized sewing thread. A vacuum bulb fitted with the new filament was arranged on a small platform in the lab. When power was supplied, the lamp burned, unflickering, for an hour, then two hours, then three. Edison, having grown tired of the experiment after slightly more than forty hours of steady light, ramped up the power until the filament finally sizzled and burned out.

“The electric light is perfected,” Edison crowed to the New York Times. Although this wasn’t quite true, his incandescent bulb was now well on its way to reality—and already it represented a quantum leap over the arc lamp system he had sold to De Long. His company had also made significant improvements in the reliability of its dynamos: The model Edison provided for the Jeannette expedition had caused endless problems for his customers, but after he overhauled the design, subsequent generations of his dynamo had proved admirably dependable.

By November, having applied for a patent for his incandescent lamp, Edison tried out a new filament made of carbonized bamboo. It burned true for more than twelve hundred hours. By December Edison was making public demonstrations and taking his first commercial orders. “We will make electricity so cheap,” he said, “that only the rich will burn candles.”

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, energy, science, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 17 May 2026 · 12:17 am

Mare Island Navy Yard, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 105-107:

Captain De Long scrutinized his weather-beaten ship in the golden California light, going over every valve and fitting, every strake of her long hull. He wondered where her weaknesses lurked. Were there rotten timbers? Leaky seams? The smallest flaw could mean his death, and the deaths of the men who would serve with him in the Arctic. The Jeannette had survived the trip—had performed admirably, in fact—but he knew she was not ready for the coming battle with the ice. There was still much work to be done, and only a few months in which to do it. To withstand the pressures of the pack, the Jeannette would have to be reinforced in a way that no Arctic-bound vessel had ever been reinforced before.

For most of the month of January 1879, the ship lay moored at the Mare Island Navy Yard, near San Francisco, awaiting inspection from a specially appointed board of naval engineers. Mare Island was the only Navy shipyard on the West Coast, a place where new vessels were sometimes constructed and where the existing ships of the Pacific Squadron routinely came in for maintenance and inspection. It was a complex of foundries, pipe shops, machine shops, pitch houses, sawmills, smokestacks, and derricks clustered around a floating dry dock, all of it set on a marshy island where the Napa River emptied into a remote estuary of San Francisco Bay.

Each morning, the bell announced the start of the shift, and the crews of tradesmen—carpenters and coppersmiths, tinsmiths and teamsters, plumbers and painters, caulkers and coopers—went about their smoky, cacophonous work. Mare Island was the western outpost of America’s burgeoning might, the well-equipped repair shop of her still tiny but soon to be ascendant Navy, which was slowly converting from canvas to steam, and from wood to metal. Perched atop the headquarters building was a copper-sheathed statue of an American eagle, the huge bird cocked at an angle toward the water, as if to bid farewell to the nation’s ships as they ventured to the far reaches of the Pacific.

Many great ships had been launched or overhauled at Mare Island—brigs, monitors, corvettes, schooners, sloops of war. But the shipyard’s most storied fixture throughout much of the nineteenth century was the old Boston-built fifty-four-gun frigate the USS Independence, which, according to one Navy historian, was for nearly seventy years “as much a part of the Mare Island waterfront as the seagulls.”

Among the warships moored beside the yard, the slender Jeannette looked fragile and unobtrusive. When Navy engineers commenced a formal study of her, they were not impressed. To withstand the ice, they thought, the Jeannette still needed a considerable amount of work—on her hull, especially. How this exploring yacht, as the Pandora, had survived three journeys in the Arctic was a mystery to them.

Of course, these men were paid to be cautious, and they knew their recommendations would carry little consequence within the Navy hierarchy, especially since Bennett would be covering all expenses. Still, the engineers’ assessment was sweeping: Decks would have to be ripped out, they declared, bulkheads constructed, new boilers installed, coal bunkers rearranged, the entire hull reinforced with additional layers of planking. They talked of adding ambitious networks of beams and braces. As their checklist of repairs and renovations kept growing, they envisioned a price tag as high as $50,000.

De Long was shocked, even though he knew many of the repairs were necessary, and even though he and his men would be the beneficiaries of the contemplated improvements. He saw deep trouble in the engineers’ recommendations. “We must stop them,” he wrote, “or they will ruin us.” While Bennett rarely blanched at a bill, De Long believed it his duty to make sure the engineers did not concoct unnecessary repairs in order to swindle the faraway—and notoriously profligate—publisher. “I consider your interest identical to my own,” De Long wrote Bennett not long after his arrival in California. “I am laboring to keep down expenses with as much zeal as if I were to foot the bills instead of you.”

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, industry, labor, military, nationalism, science, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 15 May 2026 · 12:31 am

Centennial Exhibition, 1876

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 55-57:

Throughout the first week of July 1876, the week of America’s hundredth birthday, the nation’s attentions were focused on Philadelphia. Not only was the City of Brotherly Love the place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed a century earlier; the city was hosting a world’s fair, which, on this sultry summer week, was drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe. The Centennial Exhibition, host to thirty-seven nations, was situated on a campus of nearly four hundred acres in Fairmount Park, across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. It was America’s first world exposition, and by summer’s end nearly ten million people would have come to gawk at the nearly thirty thousand exhibits nestled inside the fair’s 250 pavilions and halls. The grounds were so sprawling that a newly devised elevated rail system—an early type of monorail—was used to shuttle crowds back and forth between two of the most popular buildings.

The crowds had come to be dazzled, and they were not disappointed. Among the many new creations on display were the Remington typewriter, an intricate stringed apparatus called a Calculating Machine, and a curious gizmo that a bearded Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell was calling his “telephone.” (Bell would read from Hamlet’s soliloquy at one end of the hall, and attendees at the other could plainly hear the inventor’s voice issuing from a little speaker. “My God, it talks!” exclaimed one prominent visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil.)

All summer the exposition had been the talk of the land. James Gordon Bennett had been to the fair several times, and he’d made sure his best reporters stayed in Philadelphia to work the grounds and cover the comings and goings of dignitaries from around the world—the lords and monarchs, the authors and artists, the scientists and railroad magnates. The Herald ran Centennial Exposition stories every day—in fact, by special arrangement, thousands of copies of Bennett’s paper were printed on an enormous press right on the grounds. Young entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse and George Eastman could be seen at the centennial, hungrily prowling the exhibits for ideas cross-fertilized with other ideas. The twenty-nine-year-old Thomas Edison was there, too, showcasing a strange little device called the electric pen. Another brilliant American inventor, Moses Farmer, drew crowds with his electric dynamo, which he used to power a set of artificial lights—called arc lamps—that blazed through the Philadelphia night.

There were other puzzlements and oddities. At the Japanese pavilion, a miraculously fast-growing pea plant called kudzu was unveiled to an unsuspecting Western world. Elsewhere, the crowds could gaze upon new works by Rodin, listen to concerts played on the world’s largest pipe organ, or marvel at the immense handheld torch of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Lady Liberty (the rest of her was still under construction in France). It was here, at the Centennial Exhibition, that the American masses were introduced to a new condiment called Heinz ketchup, to a fizzy sassafras concoction sold under the name Hires Root Beer, and to the perfect novelty of a tropical fruit, served in foil with a fork, known as a banana.

BY FAR THE most popular attraction of the exposition, however, was Machinery Hall, a cavernous greenhouse structure that covered fourteen acres—nearly three times the square footage of St. Peter’s Basilica at Vatican City. The hall was a temple to machines of all kinds, and it thrummed and whirred and whined with the operation of countless pumps, turbines, generators, lathes, saws, and ingenious new fixtures of tool-and-die equipment. The floor was packed with aisle after aisle of inventions—most of them American, many of them revolutionary. There was, for example, the Line-Wolf Ammonia Compressor, a contraption for making ice. There was the Brayton Ready Motor, a practical early prototype of the internal combustion engine. There was a seven-thousand-pound pendulum clock manufactured by Seth Thomas that was calibrated to control twenty-six other clocks interspersed throughout the hall. There were new kinds of locomotive brakes, new kinds of elevators, and improved versions of the rotary cylinder press.

But the most extraordinary thing about Machinery Hall was the great motor that powered everything else. The Grand Central Engine, sometimes simply called the Centennial Steam Engine, was the largest engine in the world. Weighing more than 650 tons, constructed by the brilliant American engineer George Corliss, it supplied free steam power, via a network of underground shafts totaling a mile in length, to the more than eight thousand smaller machines on display throughout the hall.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, industry, nationalism, science, U.S.

by Joel | 8 May 2026 · 7:33 am

Robbing a Bank in London, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 356-357:

SNEYD HAD MOVED from the Heathfield House to the New Earls Court Hotel only a few days before. Though the little hotel was just around the corner, on Penywern Road, the weekly rent was cheaper and the accommodations a little nicer. Besides, Sneyd thought it prudent not to linger too long in any one place—especially after his aborted jewelry store stickup in Paddington.

The hotel was a four-story walk-up, with Doric columns and a blue awning covering a cramped vestibule; it was near the Earls Court tube stop and Earls Court Stadium, where Billy Graham had recently conducted a series of wildly successful crusades. For another week, Sneyd remained faithful to his usual nocturnal schedule, keeping to his brown-wallpapered room all day, receiving no calls, and taking no visitors. “He was nervous, pathetically shy, and unsure of himself,” the young hotel receptionist, Janet Nassau, later said. Feeling sorry for him, Nassau tried to make conversation and help him out with a few currency questions. “But he was so incoherent,” she said, “that nobody seemed able to help him. I thought he was a bit thick. I tried to talk to him, but then I stopped myself, I was afraid he might think I was too forward—trying to chat him up.”

For Sneyd, a far bigger worry than the peculiarities of British money was the fact that he scarcely had any money at all; his funds had dwindled to about ten pounds. But on June 4, the same day he called the Daily Telegraph journalist Ian Colvin, Sneyd worked up his courage and resolved to finally dig himself out of his financial straits.

That afternoon he put on a blue suit and pair of sunglasses. Then, at 2:13 p.m., he walked into the Trustee Savings Bank in Fulham and stood in the queue until, a few minutes later, he approached the till of a clerk named Edward Viney. Through the slot, Sneyd slid a paper bag toward the teller. At first, Viney didn’t know what to do with the rumpled pink bag. Then, on closer inspection, he saw writing scrawled across it.

“Put all £5 notes in this bag,” the message demanded. Viney caught a faint glimpse of the man’s eyes through his shades and realized he was serious. Glancing down, he saw the glinting nose of a revolver, pointed at him.

Viney quickly emptied his till of all small denominations—in total, only ninety-five pounds. Sneyd was displeased with his slim pickings, and he leaned over the counter and craned his neck toward the adjacent till. “Give me all your small notes!” he yelled, shoving his pistol toward the teller, Llewellyn Heath. In panic, Heath backpedaled and kicked a large tin box, which produced a concussive sound similar to a gunshot. The noise startled everyone, including Sneyd, who leaped away from the counter and sprinted down the street. Two tellers took off after him, but he lost them, ducking into a tailor’s shop, where for five minutes he feigned interest in buying a pair of slacks.

At Trustee Savings Bank, Edward Viney surveyed the premises and realized that the robber had left his note behind, scrawled on the pink paper bag. When the bobbies arrived, Viney handed them the bag—upon which, it was soon discovered in the crime lab of New Scotland Yard, the robber had left a high-quality latent thumbprint.

Leave a comment

Filed under biography, Britain, economics, migration, science, U.S.

by Joel | 6 May 2026 · 12:07 am

James Earl Ray’s Family

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 336-337:

AT FBI HEADQUARTERS during the first week of May, the search for James Earl Ray appeared to be going nowhere but backward—back into the creases of Ray’s biography, back into the mix of stunting environments and stifling influences, back into the genesis stories of a lifelong criminal. By relentlessly interviewing and reinterviewing Ray’s family and acquaintances, the FBI had hoped that some stray piece of information would break loose, some random fact that would lead agents to Ray’s hiding place. But the strategy didn’t work. Instead, the FBI men, with journalists following close on their heels, began to assemble something altogether different: an exceedingly strange and sad portrait of a man who’d grown up in a cluster of depressed towns along the Mississippi River, in the heart of Twain country. It was a severe story, a heartbreaking story—but one that was thoroughly American.

The Ray clan had a hundred-year history of crime and squalor and hard luck. Ray’s great-grandfather was an all-around thug who sold liquor to Indians off the back of a wagon and was hanged after gunning down six men. Ray’s beloved uncle Earl was a traveling carnival boxer and convicted rapist who served a six-year prison sentence for throwing carbolic acid in his wife’s face.

Throughout James Earl Ray’s life, the despair was panoramic. The family suffered from exactly the sort of bleak, multigenerational poverty that King’s Poor People’s Campaign was designed to address. Living on a farm near tiny Ewing, Missouri, the Rays were reportedly forced to cannibalize their own house for firewood to get through the winter—ripping it apart, piece by piece, until the sorry edifice fell in on itself and they had to move on, to a succession of equally shabby dwellings up and down the Mississippi.

The Ray children, predictably, were a mess. John, Jimmy, and Jerry were all felons, but that was just the start of the family’s disappointments. In the spring of 1937, Ray’s six-year-old sister, Marjorie, burned herself to death while playing with matches. The two youngest Ray siblings, Max (who was mentally disabled) and Susie, were given up for adoption after Ray’s father abandoned the family in 1951. A decade later, Ray’s kindhearted but overwhelmed mother, Lucille, then fifty-one, died in St. Louis from cirrhosis of the liver. Two years after that, Ray’s eighteen-year-old brother, Buzzy, missed the bridge in Quincy, Illinois, and plunged his car into a slough of the Mississippi River, drowning himself and his girlfriend.

Then there was Melba—perhaps the saddest and most disheveled of the Ray children. An emotionally disturbed woman who shouted obscenities at strangers and spent much of her time in mental hospitals, Melba made local news a year before, in 1967, when she was found dragging a painted, seven-foot cross down a major street in Quincy. “I made it to keep my sanity,” she said, by way of explanation. “After what happened to President Kennedy and the war and all, I had to turn to Jesus.”

Melba, when interviewed, said she hardly knew her older brother James Earl. “He liked being clean,” she dimly recalled. “He always kept his hair combed.”

As the FBI agents took note of the misery that pervaded the Ray family history, the biggest question mark was Ray’s father. Who was the patriarch of all this pathos? Whatever happened to the man? On prison forms at both Leavenworth and Jeff City, James Earl Ray had consistently declared his father “deceased,” noting that he’d died of a heart attack in 1947. But soon the FBI learned that, on the contrary, Ray’s sixty-nine-year-old father was alive and well and living as a recluse on a little farm in Center, Missouri, not far from Twain’s childhood home of Hannibal.

Leave a comment

Filed under biography, disease, drugs, economics, U.S.

by Joel | 23 April 2026 · 12:06 am

Assassin’s Lair, Memphis, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 145-147:

JUST ONE BLOCK west of the Lorraine, on South Main Street, stood a tumbledown rooming house run by a middle-aged woman named Bessie Brewer. The sign in front of the soot-darkened brick building at 422½ Main blandly announced APARTMENTS/ROOMS beneath an advertisement for Canada Dry’s Wink soda—THE SASSY ONE.

A resident of Bessie Brewer’s rooming house would later describe the place as “a half-step up from homelessness.” Its long corridors were narrow and dark, with blistered walls and cracked linoleum floors that smelled of Pine-Sol. Mrs. Brewer’s establishment was a haven for invalids, derelicts, mysterious transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks—rheumy-eyed souls who favored wife-beater T-shirts and off-brand hooch. Mostly white middle-aged men, they blew in on wisps of despair from Central Station a few blocks to the south and from the nearby Trailways and Greyhound terminals.

The guest rooms were upstairs on the second floor, above a grease-smeared joint with striped awnings called Jim’s Grill that sold Budweiser and homemade biscuits and pulled-pork BBQ. Rich smells from Jim’s kitchen curled upstairs, coating the flophouse tenants in a perfume of charred carbon and year-old frying oil. The tiny rooms, furnished with scuffed Salvation Army furniture, sweltered through the heat of the afternoon, even though many of the windows were crammed with ventilation fans that vigorously thunked away. For eight bucks a week, Mrs. Brewer’s tenants were satisfied with what they got and rarely complained. Among the long-term guests in her establishment were a deaf-mute, a tuberculosis patient, a schizophrenic, and an unemployed drunk who had a deformed hand. A homemade sign on the wall near Mrs. Brewer’s office admonished, “No Curseing or Foul Talk.”

AT AROUND THREE o’clock that afternoon, Eric Galt spotted Mrs. Brewer’s shingle on South Main and pulled the Mustang up to the curb alongside Jim’s Grill. A few minutes later, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, looked through the grimy plate-glass windows and saw the Mustang parked out front.

Galt had apparently been casing the neighborhood for the past half hour or so and noticed something: some of the rooms at the back of Mrs. Brewer’s rooming house enjoyed a direct view of the Lorraine Motel. He observed that while a few of the rear windows were boarded up, several remained in use; their panes, though dingy and paint smudged, were intact.

Galt stepped out of the car, opened the door at 422½ Main, and climbed the narrow stairs toward Bessie Brewer’s office. At the top of the stairs, he opened the rusty screen door.

Galt rapped on the office door and Mrs. Brewer, her hair done in curlers, opened it as far as the chain would allow.

“Got any vacancies?” he asked.

A plump woman of forty-four, Mrs. Brewer wore a man’s checked shirt and blue jeans. She had been the rental agent at the rooming house for only a month. The previous manager had been forced to leave after a sordid incident that was covered in the local papers: apparently, he’d gotten into a quarrel with his wife and ended up stabbing her.

Mrs. Brewer appraised the prospective tenant. Slim, neat, clean shaven, he sported a crisp dark suit and a tie and looked to her like a businessman. She wondered why such a well-dressed person would show up at her place—and what he was doing in such a raw part of town. “We got six rooms available,” she said. “You stayin’ just the night?”

No, Galt replied, for the week.

Mrs. Brewer promptly led him back to room 8, a kitchenette apartment with a refrigerator and a small stove. “Our nicest one,” she said. “It’s $10.50 a week. You can cook in there.” Galt glanced at the room without venturing inside and shook his head: this room wouldn’t do. The window was on the west side of the building, facing Main and the Mississippi River. “No, see, I won’t be doing any cooking,” he mumbled. “You got a smaller one? I only want a room for sleeping.”

Mrs. Brewer studied Galt. He had a strange and silly smile that she found unsettling. She described it as a “smirk” and a “sneer,” as though he were “trying to smile for no reason.” She padded down the hall to 5B and turned the doorknob, actually a jury-rigged piece of coat-hanger wire. “This one’s $8.50 for the week,” she said, throwing open the door.

Galt stuck his head inside. The room had little to recommend it—a musty red couch, a bare bulb with a dangling string, a borax dresser with a shared bathroom down the hall. A little sign over the door said, “No Smoking in Bed Allowed.” The ceiling’s wooden laths peeked through a large patch of missing plaster. Yet one attribute immediately caught Galt’s eye: the window wasn’t boarded up. A rickety piece of furniture partially blocked the view, but with just a glance he could see the Lorraine Motel through the smudged windowpanes.

“Yeah,” Galt abruptly said, “this’ll do just fine.”

Mrs. Brewer did not bother to mention that her last long-term tenant in 5B, a man known as Commodore Stewart, had died several weeks earlier and the room had not been rented since. She was happy to fill it again, but being naturally suspicious, she was a little surprised by how quickly her new guest had made up his mind.