by | 6 October 2006 · 5:38 pm

The U.S. National Disaster of 1927: Mississippi Floods

NO OFFICIAL FIGURES summarize the deaths and flooding along tributaries from Oklahoma to West Virginia, but along the lower Mississippi alone the flood [of 1927] put as much as 30 feet of water over lands where 931,159 people—the nation’s total population was only 120 million—had lived. Twenty-seven thousand square miles were inundated, roughly equal to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined. As late as July 1, 1.5 million acres remained underwater. Not until mid-August, more than four months after the first break in a mainline Mississippi River levee, did all the water leave the land.

An estimated 330,000 people were rescued from rooftops, trees, isolated patches of high ground, and levees. The Red Cross ran 154 “concentration camps,” tent cities, in seven states—Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. A total of 325,554 people, the majority of them African-American, lived in these camps for as long as four months. An additional 311,922 people outside the camps were fed and clothed by the Red Cross. Most of these were white. Of the remaining 300,000 people, most fled; a few cared for themselves, surviving on their own food and on their own property.

Deaths occurred from Kansas, where thirty-two towns and cities were inundated, to West Virginia. Officially, the Red Cross reported 246 people drowned; the U.S. Weather Bureau reported 313. (The Red Cross confidentially warned [Commerce Secretary Herbert] Hoover its figures on deaths were “not necessarily reliable.”) Official sources attributed an additional 250 deaths indirectly to the flood. But the death toll almost certainly ran far higher. It was impossible to know how many bodies were buried beneath tons of mud, or washed out into the Gulf. The head of the National Safety Council estimated deaths in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta alone at 1,000.

The Red Cross estimated direct economic losses at $246,000,000. The U.S. Weather Bureau put direct losses at $355,147,000. Unofficial but authoritative estimates exceeded $500,000,000; with indirect losses, the number approached $1,000,000,000, large enough in 1927 to affect the national economy.

The river itself left a legacy. The Mississippi carried only 1,500,000 cubic feet of water per second past New Orleans to the sea, while the artificial crevasse in St. Bernard carried 250,000 cfs. An additional 950,000 cfs moved down the Atchafalaya to the Gulf; had the Mississippi River Commission closed the Atchafalaya, as it had wanted to do, the increased Mississippi flow might have destroyed New Orleans.

The enormous Atchafalaya current helped create a new problem. Before the Civil War, one could cross the head of the Atchafalaya at low water on a plank 15 feet long. The river had long since enlarged, and the 1927 flood further scoured the channel, widening and deepening it, making the Atchafalaya hungry for still more water. It began threatening to claim the entire flow of the Mississippi, luring the Mississippi away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans….

For months the flood dominated the nation’s newspapers. For months, every single day the New York Times ran at least one story on the flood. For nearly a month, every day it ran a flood story on page 1. It was page 1 in Seattle, page 1 in San Diego, page 1 in Boston, page 1 in Miami. In the interior of the country, in the Mississippi valley itself, the story was bigger. Newspaper editors later overwhelmingly named the flood the greatest story of 1927, even though on May 22, Charles Lindbergh had, temporarily, driven the flood off the front pages of their newspapers.

But if [President Calvin] Coolidge did nothing, Hoover did everything. For months hardly a day passed without his name appearing in a heroic and effective posture, saving the lives of Americans. He was the focus of newsreels, of magazine feature stories, of Sunday supplements.

SOURCE: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry (Touchstone, 1998), pp. 285-287

1927 was also the year in which Babe Ruth set a new record by hitting 60 home runs in a season.

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by | 5 October 2006 · 9:49 pm

Japan Missionaries and the Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, even more than the Sino-Japanese War of the previous decade, opened new doors for Christian witness in Japan. Prime Minister Katsura Taro, whose first wife was a Christian, went out of his way to assure missionaries and pastors that Japan’s war against a so-called Christian nation in no way implied an anti-Christian stance on the part of the government. The YMCA was permitted to minister to soldiers at the front, and churches were given access to military hospitals where the wounded were cared for. A few Christians, notably Uchimura Kanzo, opposed the war as unjust, but the vast majority supported it with enthusiasm, thereby demonstrating their loyalty as Japanese subjects.

The effects the war had on Southern Baptist work were mixed. At Moji, from which the majority of men and munitions were sent to the front on the Asian mainland, and to which many sick and wounded were evacuated, the war had “a decidedly demoralizing effect,” reported Maynard, “causing many to neglect their church duties.” At Sasebo, headquarters of Admiral Togo‘s fleet (which won the war for Japan by destroying the Russian fleet sent from the Baltic Sea), the congregation virtually disappeared, for nearly all the men were connected with the navy. The church’s rented quarters had to be returned to the landlord. Security in the town was so tight that no missionary was allowed to enter, though Pastor Ozaki was able to minister in homes and hospitals. The work at Nagasaki was similarly hampered. Among those drafted into service were the Sunday school superintendent and Pastor Sugano’s wife, a Red Cross nurse who served aboard an army hospital ship. Without a tear, it was reported, Mrs. Sugano left her two-year-old daughter in the care of the sick father and a feeble grandmother.

In Kokura, where the Mission now had a new chapel seating 125, a gift from Maryland Baptists, the war gave a boost to the work. “The physician in charge of the three military hospitals at this place,” said Maynard, “being a devoted Christian, gave us every facility for reaching the sick and the wounded.” The physician even preached in the Baptist church several times. Tens of thousands of Scripture portions and tracts were distributed, and a number of conversions were reported. Afterwards the Baptist Sunday school received a lacquer cup and a letter of thanks from military headquarters in Tokyo.

In Kumamoto the story was much the same. “The war has in no way retarded the progress of our work,” wrote Harvey Clarke, “but our sympathy for those in distress seems to draw us closer to the people.” The missionaries were permitted to conduct services in the military hospitals and to deal personally with the soldiers. For this ministry each was given a bronze medal. Lucile Clarke ministered so effectively through her singing and her genuine interest in the soldiers that she received from the emperor a silver cup bearing the imperial crest. She treasured the award as long as she lived. It can be seen in retrospect, however, that such actions on the part of the government helped to blind the missionaries to the injustices and ultimate consequences of Japan’s growing involvement in Korea and China. This “first victory of yellow armies over white,” followed by dissatisfaction with the spoils of war, paved the way for Japanese imperialists to “restore Asia to the Asiatics.”

SOURCE: The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889-1989, by F. Calvin Parker (University Press of America, 1991), pp. 64-65

Academic area specialists have similar problems these days.

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by | 4 October 2006 · 6:00 pm

Baptist Evangelical Preoccupations in Japan, 1880s

In their approach to evangelism, Baptist missionaries gave priority to Bible translation and literature distribution…. The chief reason for the preoccupation with Scripture translation was the conviction that the Greek word for baptism should be rendered by a term clearly denoting immersion. The time and resources devoted to this effort could have been more fruitfully invested in churches or schools, for Japanese Baptists eventually adopted the interdenominational translation of the Bible in preference to the immersionist version….

Unlike the other denominations, Baptists were reluctant to utilize Christian education as a means of evangelism, for they sought more immediate results through direct means. True, most Baptist missionaries taught pupils informally, and by 1888 four schools had been started for girls. But no school was established for boys until 1895, when Duncan Academy opened in Tokyo. The delay was costly, for Christian schools–34 were reported in 1882 and 72 in 1888–produced the majority of converts in the 1880s. At a time when churches bore the onus of foreign colonies, the schools, being compatible with the traditional value system, served as a spearhead for the gospel and the “birthplace of the church.” It has even been argued that “the Christian school was the only field of Christian evangelism that could be called successful.”

Lacking a boys’ school, Baptists failed to attract and develop strong Japanese leaders–with two exceptions. One was Kawakatsu, a proselyte from Ballagh’s group of converts. The other was Chiba Yugoro, who was sent to America for college and seminary training. Baptists had no seedbed of leadership like the Yokohama schools conducted by Hepburn, Ballagh, and Robbins Brown [Presbyterians who founded Meiji Gakuin University]. There was no Baptist equivalent of the Kumamoto Band, converts of Leroy Janes in Kyushu [many of whom went on to Doshisha University in Kyoto], nor of the Sapporo Band, followers of William Clark [“Boys Be Ambitious”] in Hokkaido. From such dynamic teachers came the early giants of Protestantism in Japan.

SOURCE: The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889-1989, by F. Calvin Parker (University Press of America, 1991), pp. 18-19

From what I understand, the Southern Baptist International Mission Board is once again concentrating almost all its foreign mission efforts on “church-planting” rather than schools. It no longer pays salaries for the foreign professors at the Southern Baptist Seinan Gakuin University seminary, as it used to from its earliest days.

UPDATE: In googling references for this, I discovered that a true giant among missionary educators—of both Japanese and Americans—died in April this year (while I was in Japan). He was a man of my father’s generation, whose kids were classmates and schoolmates and worthy successors—third generation MKs. My heart goes out to them. Elaine Woo of the Los Angeles Times wrote an obituary worth reading in full. Here’s how it starts.

When Otis Cary interrogated Japanese prisoners during World War II, he softened them with gifts of magazines, cigarettes and chocolates. He broke through their reserve with humor. And he spoke to them in flawless Japanese — shocking from a blond-haired American.

Cary spoke like a native because he was one — the son and grandson of New England missionaries in Japan. With missionarylike ardor, he proselytized for the Allied cause, convincing many of the prisoners to cooperate in efforts to end the war and help rebuild Japan as a democracy.

“Prolonged contact with Americans in the prison camps clearly had an impact on many prisoners, and for none more than those influenced by Otis Cary,” wrote Ulrich Straus, a former diplomat whose study of Japanese prisoners of war, “The Anguish of Surrender,” was published in 2003.

Cary, 84, who died of pneumonia April 14 in Oakland, Calif., played a unique role in U.S.-Japan relations during and after World War II. He was one of the 1,100 Japanese linguists trained by the Navy to serve as interrogators, translators and interpreters after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. For more than four decades after the war, he bridged cultures as a professor of American studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto.

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by | 3 October 2006 · 8:06 pm

Shia Syncretism and Parallels Elsewhere

In the days of the British Raj in India, Ashoura was an important date on the calendar of colonial officials, who inevitably had to contend with Shia customs and procession routes that raised Sunni hackles and, at times, Hindu objections…. Every year British administrators would brace themselves for fights and riots and negotiate Shia procession itineraries and rules of conduct for each community. Today British administrators do much the same thing in Northern Ireland, when the late spring and summer “marching season” sees groups such as the Protestant Orange Lodge approach with demands to process through Catholic neighborhoods.

Ashoura’s powerful focus on sorrow (azadari) and pageantry has a parallel in Catholic Lenten rituals, such as the Holy Week and Good Friday “Way of the Cross” processions and Passion plays that preface Easter Sunday observances in many places. Even the more extreme practices of some Shias, such as shedding one’s own blood through a small cut on the scalp, resemble rituals such as those of the Penitentes, a lay Catholic brotherhood originally formed on the Iberian Peninsula. In rural southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, Penitentes hold special Holy Week reenactments of Christ’s sufferings. They wear crowns of thorns and carry heavy crosses, and are even tied to the crosses and raised from the ground. Shias congregate in husayniyas (abodes of Husayn)—known as imambaras (courts of the imam) in South Asia—where they pray, chant, and lament Husayn’s death. This too has a parallel in the Penitentes’ moradas (places of worship), where they mark the sufferings of Christ.

Ashoura is a time of commemoration and penance for the vices and errors of humanity. The first Ashoura observance appears to have taken place in 684 C.E., four years after Husayn’s death, when a group of penitents gathered at Karbala with blackened faces and torn garments. Every year since, the Shia have shown that they continue to share in the day’s sorrow. Scholars have drawn attention to the resemblances between the rituals of Ashoura and pre-Islamic Iranian and Mesopotamian rites celebrating cosmic renewal, as well as rituals surrounding the death of Dionysus in Greek mythology and Osiris in Egyptian mythology. The Shia’s narrative of sorrow and faith was similarly enacted in the perennial language of ancient civilizations.

Over the years and the miles, the Shia faithful have adapted Ashoura to variations in local culture. As a result, an observance at Lucknow, in northern India, looks quite different in some ways from one in Nabatiye, in southern Lebanon. In Iraq, hundreds of thousands walk long distances to Karbala, sometimes in scorching summer heat, much as Catholic pilgrims still march between the cathedrals of Notre Dame de Paris and Chartres in France. Ashoura in northern India reflects contact with Hindu symbols and festivals. Many of its practices, while recognizable to local Hindus, would seem strange in the eyes of Shias from the Middle East.

Elephants led the processions of the royal Ashouras in Lucknow in the nineteenth century, and the crowd carried large replicas of the grand Shia places of worship in Lucknow and Iraq on their shoulders for many hours…. In Awadh in the nineteenth century, Hindus routinely participated in Ashoura. They adopted Husayn as the god of death, “his bloodstained horse and severed head lifted aloft on Umayyad staves presenting no less terrible an aspect than Kali Durga with her necklace of skulls.” Hindu influence shaped Ashoura rituals—for instance, extending the festival to ten days, the same as the festival of the goddess Durga. In Hyderabad, in southern India, it is customary for Hindu fakirs, with red streaks painted on their faces, and equipped with drums and whips, to walk in front of the main Ashoura procession. They flagellate themselves as they ask onlookers for alms in Imam Husayn’s name. Incense sticks burn in urns, in the tradition of Hindu religious gatherings in congregations for prayers or the reading of dirges. Hindus come to these meetings dressed in the saffron color of their religion, which provides a sharp contrast to the black worn by Shias. Before leaving, the Hindu visitors stoop over the urns and rub the ash of the incense on their eyelids, paying homage to Imam Husayn and receiving his blessing in the ways of their religion.

SOURCE: The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future, by Vali Nasr (W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 45-48

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by | 2 October 2006 · 8:21 pm

The Cultural Revolution Hits Seinan Seminary in Japan

In the fall of 1970 [the year right-wing novelist Mishima Yukio committed ritual suicide] the [cultural] battlefield shifted to the seminary campus in Fukuoka, where most [Japan Baptist] Convention ministers were trained. The seminary was–and is–a part of Seinan Gakuin University, which was plagued by student rebellions in 1969…. The rebellions were nationwide in scope, affecting private and public universities alike, though carried out by a militant minority and not by the majority of students. At Aoyama Gakuin University (Methodist) in Tokyo and Kanto Gakuin University (American Baptist) in Yokohama, the theology departments became so involved as to self-destruct over a period of time. Neither has been reopened. Belatedly, though no less ominously, a group of dissident students at the Fukuoka seminary called a strike in September 1970.

The seminary had 34 students: 23 in the theology department of the university and 11 in an unaccredited Bible school. The striking students numbered only 10 at first and never exceeded 11, but they forced the cancellation of all classes until January 1971. With the backing of a few area pastors, they assailed the faculty for not speaking out jointly against the Vietnam War, the Security Treaty, the Baptist congress, Expo ’70, and government efforts to nationalize Yasukuni Shrine, where the war dead are enshrined. A theology that does not address such issues is invalid, the students declared; any evangelism that does not attack the evil structures of society is incomplete.

These social activists declared that the seminary was bankrupt and not salvageable, that the faculty should resign en bloc to clear the way for a new beginning. George Hays had the misfortune of being seminary dean at the time. On October 7, citing “two instances of misunderstanding related to the language,” he resigned the position, no longer confident that he could negotiate with the students. Hays was succeeded by Professor Sekiya….

Numerous meetings were held, some of them loud and boisterous, in quest of reconciliation. Position papers were demanded of each faculty member, and each was interrogated as though an accused heretic at an inquisition. No exceptions were made of the three missionary teachers: Hays, Bob Culpepper, Vera Campbell. Culpepper returned from an emergency furlough in November 1970, in the midst of the turmoil, and went on trial as the others had done. All three handled themselves well and helped the seminary to survive. When the new school year opened in Apri1 1971, however, total enrollment was down to 22. Not until the next decade did it reach 34 again.

Ozaki Shuichi has said that the most tragic result of the strike was the loss of some very promising students to the gospel ministry. If so, a close second was the loss of Ozaki himself to the seminary faculty. This New Testament scholar, second-generation preacher, and sometime interpreter to Billy Graham resigned during the struggle. Consequently, he was scathingly denounced as irresponsible and harassed by late-night phone calls. Dean Sekiya also got calls at night. The harassments came to an end when Ozaki’s daughter Yoko, the seminary librarian, was struck and killed by a train–an apparent suicide. So great was the shock that 16 years were to pass before Ozaki accepted an invitation to speak at the seminary, though he lived in Fukuoka all this time.

SOURCE: The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889-1989, by F. Calvin Parker (University Press of America, 1991), pp. 238-240

Nowadays Seinan [‘Southwestern’] Seminary is independent of the (U.S.) Southern Baptist Convention, which since the 1970s has imposed stricter doctrinal controls at all the major seminaries in the U.S. (Southern in Louisville, Southeastern in Wake Forest, Southwestern in Fort Worth, and New Orleans). Seinan Seminary pays the salaries of several former missionaries who would likely have trouble passing the current SBC creed tests.

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by | 2 October 2006 · 4:29 pm

The Sixties Hit Southern Baptist Families in Japan

In 1967 the [Japan Baptist] Mission had voted to encourage couples whose children were grown to consider work opportunities in outlying areas. But no pressures were ever applied, and the clustering of missionaries in central areas continued to bother [Japan Baptist] Convention strategists. Sizing up the problem, one Mission wit compared missionaries to manure. “When spread out,” he said, “they do good; when piled up, they raise a stink.”

Unlike the ’50s, when several couples in outlying areas taught their own children with Calvert School materials and in a few cases sent them to Japanese schools, in the ’60s most parents insisted on living near an English school, and a few demanded a particular school. A major reason for this trend was the growing emphasis on quality education in America, especially as it affected Baptist colleges and universities. A number of Baptist schools that formerly accepted any high school graduate had grown selective, some of them highly selective. To be assured of acceptance, MKs [= missionary kids] now had to submit good SAT or ACT scores.

American military schools were still available in several places, including Fukuoka, but their number was decreasing. To fill a void or meet new needs, international schools had been established in Kyoto (1957), Sapporo (1958), Hiroshima (1962), and Nagoya (1963). Some years would elapse before these schools could offer the higher grades. Most children of high school age, and some of middle school age, attended one of the older schools in Tokyo, Yokohama, or Kobe. Dormitory facilities were available at Christian Academy in Tokyo and Canadian Academy in Kobe, as noted earlier, but not at Tokyo’s American School in Japan, the choice of many parents. So in 1962 the Mission opened its own dormitory in Mitaka near ASIJ.

Baptist Dormitory, as it was called, looked like a dream come true. Built by Homat Homes, the neat and spacious two-story building accommodated a dozen or more students of both sexes in middle or high school. Sadly, the operation was soon plagued with troubles, dashing the dream of a Christian home environment for MKs. The supervisors were changed rather often, and some of them were quite the opposite in discipline and manner. Some were considered too strict and some too permissive. The parents and the trustees sometimes clashed on how the dormitory should be run or how a controversial rule should be worded. It was agreed, for example, that smoking should be strictly prohibited in the dormitory and on the premises. But should a student be retained who smoked off the premises, in violation of the Japanese law forbidding the use of tobacco by minors? The trustees said no, which caused a family to move to Tokyo against their wishes. So divisive and irresolvable were various issues that twice during the decade the trustees voted to close the facility. Each time they then yielded to parents’ demands that it be kept open. To complicate matters, sometimes a parent with a child in the dormitory served as a trustee, contrary to what some considered a sound administrative principle. At any rate, the dormitory was sadly disruptive of the Mission’s fellowship.

The MK problem came to the fore in a shocking manner at the 1969 Mission meeting. The meeting was held July 29 to August 1, not at Amagi Sanso, but at the Kokusai Takamatsu Hotel on Shikoku. On the closing night some of the young people held a “drinking party” in the hotel annex where they were staying. Descriptions of what took place ranged from “drinking only a tiny amount of whisky in a coke” to heavy drinking that left the imbibers “dead drunk” and “staggering.” Some children who witnessed the scene “spent the night sitting in the hall, afraid to return to their room.” The incident caused grave concern throughout the Mission for its effect on the smaller children and on the Christian witness in Takamatsu.

That autumn the dormitory supervisors sent five boys home for one week because of improper conduct. Subsequently the trustees expelled three of the boys for the remainder of the school year. The charges included smoking, theft of several items (even an airplane propeller from a nearby airfield), wrongful possession of dormitory keys that provided access to the girls’ section, obscene writing and speech, damage to property, and intimidation of younger boys with threats of bodily harm. Some parents expressed regret that they had opposed the closing of the dormitory years before. At the end of the 1969-70 school year, in which 12 students had been accommodated, the dorm was closed “for lack of applicants.” The facility was turned into a guest house and later sold.

SOURCE: The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889-1989, by F. Calvin Parker (University Press of America, 1991), pp. 232-233

A couple of the decades covered in this book intersect a lot with my own biography. I was part of the inaugural class at Kyoto International School, which began as Kyoto Christian Day School, using Calvert School curriculum materials. Although I didn’t attend ASIJ, I later caused my share of trouble at another school’s dormitory during the Sixties.

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by | 29 September 2006 · 9:09 pm

A Step at a Time: From the Baltic to the Caspian

One of the best compilers and translators of multilingual sources on strategic developments in areas near the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas is David McDuff’s A Step at a Time, with multiple posts on the escalation of tensions between Georgia and Russia (scroll down), conflict in Chechnya, elections in Estonia, Karelian refugees in Finland, and long-term developments in the former Soviet Union. For example, here’s an excerpt he quotes from a keynote speech (pdf) by former US State Department and CIA analyst Paul Goble at the Jamestown Foundation‘s recent North Caucasus Conference.

If the Russian Federation is at a turning point, and I believe that it is and I believe that the borders will change in a variety of ways, and I think they will change largely due to the actions of the Russians and Russian desires, as we’ll see. And this leads me to my one good piece of advice for today: don’t buy any maps. Buy stock in companies that print maps and you’ll make money.

But it’s equally important that Islam, too, is at a turning point. Indeed, if you understand the Muslim view of what happened in the Soviet Union in 1991, you can see a direct line from there to September 11th and you can understand why Muslims who were ethnic Muslims who didn’t know very much about their identity and what their faith was about turned to Islam in the ways that they did.

The collapse of the Muslim project after the French Revolution and the colonization of the Muslim world, which was more or less complete except for Egypt and Afghanistan by 1922, left the Muslim world with the question: if we’re right, how come we’re losing? And there were three answers. God’s time isn’t our time so we wait it out. The second answer was, we are wrong; we’ve got to be radical secularists. And the third is, back to basics: Allah, Sharia – the people who become the fundamentalists.

As long as there was a Soviet Union supporting the radical secularists, and please remember it was the Soviets who were doing that, the third category were in jail. Once the Soviet Union could not do that, those people emerged. And with the Muslim reading, or some Muslim reading anyway, of 1991 you saw a very different set of messages for people who were Muslims. These were in many ways – and this is another argument, different, but just to point it out for you – I believe that Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus will be over time the prime recruiting area for a radical fundamentalist Islam. Why? Because people there know they are Muslims, but don’t know exactly what it means and therefore they are prepared to listen to people who tell them exactly what it means.

I remember a conversation I had with Dzhokhar Dudaev, the first president of Chechen Ichkeria. And Mr. Dudaev said to me, Mr. Goble, I’m a good Muslim I pray three times a day. Well I was very polite and deferential [to] the senior official and didn’t point out that a good Muslim prays five times a day, but he didn’t know. He had been in the Communist Party since the age of 18 and was a major general in the Soviet Air force.

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by | 29 September 2006 · 6:13 pm

New Orleans in the 1920s

In the mid-1920s, the Vieux Carré, or French Quarter, was mostly a gritty working-class slum where people spoke French as often as English. Women lowered baskets to the street to grocers who loaded them with food and added a pint of gin. Artists and writers had taken to the area, seduced by its cheap rents. Oliver Lafarge wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning Laughing Boy there; Faulkner began writing there, encouraged by Sherwood Anderson, who entertained visitors like Theodore Dreiser, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, and Bertrand Russell. One of Anderson’s friends even wrote a book about Paris without ever having visited it, instead using New Orleans as his model; Parisians read it, Anderson reported, with “delight.” The smells of the docks hung over the whole area: sickly sweet rotting bananas—the United Fruit Company was the single largest user of the port—and the more intimate smell of the dozens of bakeries making bread. The finest restaurants—Antoine’s, Galatoire’s, Arnaud’s, Broussard’s—were there, and so were working-class cafés. In Jackson Square at Billy Cabildo’s, for 50 cents one got an enormous bowl of homemade soup, boiled beef, an entree, dessert, and coffee. The square itself was surrounded by hedges where prostitutes took clients.

Downriver from the French Quarter lived working-class whites. They made their living from the port, from sugar and timber mills, from great slaughterhouses.

The social elite … lived upriver in the great homes on St. Charles and in the Garden District. There maids waxed the grand ballrooms by sitting on towels and sliding across the floor…. On Canal Street at Katz & Besthoff drugstore, soda jerks delivered ice-cream sodas to cars parked on the street. Well-dressed doormen at Maison Blanche and Holmes department stores knew all the chauffeurs and called for them by name as their employers came out….

Only recently, jazz had been born from deep in the bowels of the city; its beat emerging from the African jungle into Congo Square, then spreading to the whorehouses of Storyville, where Jelly Roll Morton and the Spasm band, possibly the original jazz combination, and a little later Louis Armstrong, played. At its peak, Storyville had had two newspapers and its own Carnival ball, and the best houses had advertising brochures….

From the city’s earliest days New Orleans had close ties to the money centers of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, London, Paris. English bankers began living full-time in New Orleans in the early 1800s.

As a result, before the Civil War, on a per capita basis New Orleans was the wealthiest city in America. In the 1920s it remained—by far—the wealthiest city in the South. Its Cotton Exchange was one of the three most important in the world. Its port was second only to New York. Its banks were the largest and most important in the South. According to a Federal Reserve study, New Orleans had nearly twice the economic activity of Dallas, the South’s second-wealthiest city, and between double and triple that of Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, Louisville, Richmond, or Birmingham.

SOURCE: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry (Touchstone, 1998), pp. 213-215, 219

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by | 27 September 2006 · 6:18 pm

The Thai Coup and the Jihadist Insurgency

The milblogger who authors The Adventures of Chester has compiled an interesting take on what the Thai military coup might portend for dealing with the jihadist insurgency in the south of Thailand.

News reports indicate that there were a number of reasons why Thailand’s military decided to overthrow Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra last week, but the most interesting among them was a disappointment with his strategy toward the Muslim insurgency in the south. From The Australian:

THE Royal Thai Army will adopt new tactics against a militant Islamic uprising, following the coup that sent Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted prime minister, into exile in London last week.

According to sources briefed by the army high command, Mr Thaksin’s bungled response to the insurgency in southern Thailand, which has claimed 1700 lives in two years, was a critical factor in the generals’ decision to get rid of him.

Military intelligence officers intend to negotiate with separatists and to use psychological warfare to isolate the most violent extremists, in contrast to Mr Thaksin’s heavy-handed methods and harsh rhetoric….

When Mr Thaksin, a former policeman who made his fortune from telecommunications, came to power in 2001, he broke with the old order. He put police cronies in charge of the southern border and shut down two intelligence clearing centres.

Soon, reports in the media alleged that corruption, smuggling and racketeering were rife.

In January 2004, militants raided an armoury and started a killing spree. They have murdered Buddhist monks, teachers, hospital staff and civil servants – anyone seen as representing the Thai state. The army has seemed powerless to halt the chaos.

But at the same time Zachary Abuza, a political science professor at Simmons College in the US, and author of a forthcoming book about the Thai insurgency, offers a more nuanced take:

Will the CDR [Council for Democratic Reform] and interim administration be better equipped to deal with [it]? At the very least, there will be less political interference in counter-insurgent operations and fewer personnel reshuffles and policy initiatives from an impatient “CEO prime minister.” Second, the CDR is likely to implement many of the recommendations of the National Reconciliation Council that Thaksin had blatantly ignored. Though the NRC’s recommendations alone will not quell the insurgency, they will have an important impact in regaining the trust of the Muslim community. Third, [coup commander-in-chief Gen.] Sonthi [Boonyaratglin] has expressed a willingness to talk with insurgents, though to date only PULO has offered to talk and the aged leaders in Europe have no control over the insurgents. And many in the military establishment including Sonthi, himself a Muslim, have publicly refused to see the insurgency for what it is, denying it any religious overtones or secessionist goals. Nor is the political situation likely to alter the campaign of the insurgents. If anything they may step up attacks in an attempt to provoke a heavy-handed government response. The Muslim provinces have been under martial law for over two and a half years, with little to show for it but an alienated and angry populace.

UPDATE: The Head Heeb has a characteristically thorough and comparative analysis of what he headlines The Bertolt Brecht coup.

All this leads to some concern about what the new constitution might contain. Boonyaratglin has promised that it will make the government more accountable, which is a good thing on its face; the former constitutional framework allowed Thaksin to accrue far too much personal power and was often ineffective in providing institutional checks and balances. The trouble is that it isn’t clear who will hold future governments to account. If the early signs are any indication, the military may impose a paternalistic, royalist-praetorian constitution in which unelected oversight agencies and councils hold the balance of power and the army and the throne are the final arbiters of political acceptability. Thailand may come out looking, at least in the near term, like Turkey up to the 1980s or Fiji today.

The Thai coup, in other words, carries more than a hint of Bertolt Brecht’s “Solution – that, the people having forfeited the military’s confidence, Boonyaratglin decided to dissolve it and elect another. Granted, he is unlikely to do so as literally as Stalin did, but he has evidently concluded that the people – who, after all, elected Thaksin – can’t entirely be trusted with democracy for the time being. Therefore, politics will be banned until the people – or, more specifically, institutions like the legislature and media through which the people expresses its will – are reordered to the military’s satisfaction and the balance between representative and non-representative organs is adjusted. As in Turkey or Fiji, the military doesn’t intend to dissolve the people very often, but it will ensure that their institutions are established in such a way that they don’t risk losing their guardians’ confidence.

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by | 26 September 2006 · 9:22 pm

Rise, Spread, and Fall of State Sovereignty

The classic state system is said to have emerged with the treaties of the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years War. In these treaties the secular claims of German princelings were recognised above the religious claims of the Papacy. There was no secular right of external power above the sovereign. This formal recognition of the principle of territorial sovereignty became the basis of an interstate system of international relations. Although there was the beginning of an interstate system, there was no international law in the modern sense as the rights of sovereignty were restricted to the European powers. While interstate relations were regulated between mutually recognised sovereign states in the West, there was no explicit framework of international society, which formally limited the exercise of state sovereignty. The regulation of interstate relations could not go beyond voluntary agreements between a select group of sovereign states. These treaty agreements were based upon interests of preserving state power through strategic alliances and the limited geo-political stability of a balance of power.

The age of the classic ‘anarchical’ state system, with no limits to the sovereignty of the major powers, was also the era of colonialism. The states included in this interstate system were those that could exercise power in the international arena through ruling over their territory and defending it from the claims of other sovereign states. It was, therefore, also quite logical and consistent to see that in those areas outside Europe, which could not demonstrate ’empirical statehood’, sovereignty could not apply. Under this system the right of intervention in the affairs of other states was granted to states which were capable of acting on, and enforcing, this right: the Great Powers….

The Westphalian model of state sovereignty had its critics throughout the modern era, particularly as the leading non-Western states modernised and grew in importance. The fear of Western decline and the need to stabilise growing international society led to new experiments in international relations. The first Hague Conference, in 1899, saw the attendance of China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia and Siam. Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 was a powerful shock to European imperial confidence, because this confidence was closely bound up with a notion of racial superiority. The second Hague Conference, in 1907, was the first international gathering of modern states at which non-Europeans outnumbered the Europeans. The descent of European powers into the barbarism of the First World War did much to undermine the idea of Great Power international security. The fear of imperial decline and the expectation of resistance from the colonies led Western policy-makers to speed the process of transformation away from ‘might is right’ towards international law in an attempt to contain the threat of war between the Great Powers as well as anticipated anticolonial revolt.

The First World War settlement began the process of developing a legal concept of sovereignty as opposed to the Westphalian concept of sovereignty based on power. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, US President Woodrow Wilson affirmed the principle of national self-determination for the newly created states of Central Europe. The attempt to legalise or formalise international relations was a direct consequence of the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires during the war and the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The Soviet leader Lenin’s declaration of the right of nations to self-determination and the Soviet Union’s propaganda linkage of war with the imperialist outlook of the Great Powers put the Western policy-makers on the defensive. Instead of the discredited system of international power politics, post-First World War international relations became legitimised on the basis of formal equality between states….

The League of Nations initiated the process of formally restricting the sovereignty of the Great Powers. For example, colonial powers were no longer entitled to act as they liked but were mandated to advance the interests of their subject peoples. The mandate system, which implied that colonial rule could only be temporary, was the first open admission that empire was no longer a legitimate political form. However, the concept of sovereign equality was still a heavily restricted one, and the West rejected Japan’s attempt to include a clause on racial equality in the League of Nations’ Charter. The major European imperial powers were not in a position to consistently uphold the rights of sovereign equality….

After the Second World War, the United States’ dominance of the world economy enabled the construction of a new system of international regulation…. The discrediting of international regulation based on power and colonial domination led, through the two World Wars, to one based on sovereign equality. The Nazi experience and the rise of non-European powers had undermined the elitist ideologies of race and empire and led to the defensive acceptance of a law-bound international system…. The political pressure on the leading world powers meant that the 1945 settlement preserved in the principles of the UN Charter, was a decisive moment in the transformation of the Westphalian system. The sovereignty of the Great Powers was restricted, while the right of sovereignty was granted to new states which would have failed the Westphalian test of ’empirical statehood’, and hence have been dismissed as ‘quasi-states’.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 123-126 [reference citations removed]

Since the early 1990s, international relations have been transformed through the development of new norms and practices established with the intention of protecting human rights by extending the reach of ‘international justice’. Justice and rights protection no longer stop at the borders of the nation-state…. The establishment of The Hague tribunals, dealing with crimes committed during the Bosnian war and the civil conflict in Rwanda, the House of Lords judgment against Pinochet, and the international indictment against a sitting head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, are all held up to indicate the trend towards ‘international justice’ and the prioritisation of human rights.

The extension of ‘international justice’ has reflected a widely welcomed decline in the legal weight attached to state sovereignty as a barrier to external judgement and intervention in a state’s affairs. State sovereignty, the recognition of self-government and autonomy, is perceived to be increasingly dangerous or inadequate for many states and peoples. International intervention in Iraq, the decision to extend international regulation in Bosnia, and the establishment of protectorates in Kosovo and East Timor are seen to herald a new set of precedents that suggest a modified approach to state sovereignty. De facto rule over a territory is no longer held to legitimise the denial of justice or the abuse of human rights.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond, p. 120

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