Category: History

FDR’s Attorney General Warned Black Newspapers That He Would “Shut Them All Up”

(p. 12) . . . as the former Chicago Defender editor and reporter Ethan Michaeli shows in his extraordinary history, “The Defender,” the Negro press barons attacked military segregation with a zeal that set Roosevelt’s teeth on edge. The Negro press warned black men against Navy recruiters who would promise them training as radiomen, technicians or mechanics — then put them to work serving food to white men. It made its readers understand that black men and women in uniform were treated worse in Southern towns than German prisoners of war and sometimes went hungry on troop trains because segregationists declined to feed them. It focused unflinchingly on the fistfights and gun battles that erupted between blacks and whites on military bases. And it reiterated the truth that no doubt cut Roosevelt the most deeply: His government’s insistence on racial separation was of a piece with the “master race” theory put in play by Hitler in Europe.
This was not the first time The Defender and its sister papers had attacked institutional racism. That part of the story begins with Robert S. Abbott, the transplanted Southerner who created The Defender in 1905 and fashioned it into a potent weapon.
. . .
The black press was considerably more powerful and self-assured by 1940, when Abbott died and his nephew John H. Sengstacke succeeded him.
. . .
Things stood thus in 1942, when Sengstacke traveled to Washington to meet with Attorney General Francis Biddle. Sengstacke found Biddle in a conference room, sitting at a table across which was spread copies of black newspapers that included The Defender, The Courier and The Afro-American. Biddle said that the black papers were flirting with sedition and threatened to “shut them all up.”

For the full review, see:
BRENT STAPLES. “‘A ‘Most Dangerous’ Newspaper.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., JAN. 10, 2016): 12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JAN. 4, 2016, and has the title “”The Defender,’ by Ethan Michaeli.”)

The book under review, is:
Michaeli, Ethan. The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Panopticon: “Bentham’s Most Infamous Idea”

(p. C6) Perhaps the most fascinating chapter of the book, highlighting Mr. Crawford’s ability to mix philosophy and reporting, is the one about the panopticon. The idea of an annular building with a central observation tower was conceived by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). The utilitarian is known most superficially by students of and visitors to University College, London, as the eccentric who willed that, after his death, his body be preserved seated on a chair in a glass case.
Mr. Crawford fleshes out the story, noting that, in fact, the smartly dressed Bentham figure that sits inside a glass display case today is actually a skeleton of the man, his head a wax replica of the real one that did not survive the preservation process. When I was a regular at University College one summer, I was told that the cabinet holding the “Auto-Icon” (Bentham’s term) was rolled over to the lecture hall on occasion, something that I don’t recall witnessing.
The author’s real purpose in discussing Bentham’s most infamous idea is to describe the utopian–or dystopian, depending upon one’s point of view–concept. In one embodiment, it took the form of a rimless wagon wheel, in which someone situated at the hub could oversee activities in all directions, making the layout ideal for insuring that workers in a factory did not take more breaks than allowed, inmates did not misbehave in a prison or students did not cheat on an exam.
Bentham’s insight was that the mere fact that those being observed knew that they were being watched would cause them to alter their behavior for the better. Could Bentham have imagined that his idea would form the foundation of our surveillance society? Looking at our culture today–with its CCTV, smartphones and so on–to some it surely seems that we live in a permanent panopticon. “All this,” Mr. Crawford writes, “from a ‘simple idea in architecture.’ “

For the full review, see:
HENRY PETROSKI. “What Goes Up.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 11, 2017): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 10, 2017, and has the title “The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings.”)

The book under review, is:
Crawford, James. Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings. New York: Picador, 2017.

Brits Saw America “as a Place to Dump Their Human Waste”

(p. 11) . . . , Isenberg — a historian at Louisiana State University whose previous books include a ­biography of Aaron Burr — provides a cultural ­history of changing concepts of class and inferiority. She argues that British colonizers saw their North American empire as a place to dump their human waste: the idle, indigent and criminal. Richard Hakluyt the younger, one of the many colorful characters who fill these pages, saw the continent as “one giant workhouse,” in ­Isenberg’s phrase, where the feckless poor could be turned into industrious drudges.

For the full review, see:
THOMAS J. SUGRUE. “‘Hicks’ and ‘Hayseeds’.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., JUNE 26, 2016): 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JUNE 24, 2016, and has the title “A Look at America’s Long and Troubled History of White Poverty.”)

The book under review, is:
Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016.

Mokyr Credits the Great Enrichment to a Culture That Values Scientific Inquiry

(p. A13) Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” Thomas Hobbes proclaimed in 1651, and it had been that way ever since humans had inhabited the Earth. At the time Hobbes wrote those words, life expectancy averaged about 30 years old in his native England and income per person typically was around $5 a day (in 2016 dollars). Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the Great Enrichment that followed, the typical subject of Queen Elizabeth II lives to almost 80 and has an income of over $100 a day. Perhaps more impressively, most people in the world today face the prospect of living at least that well within a generation or two.

What brought about the Great Enrichment? And why did it all start in England? Joel Mokyr, in his fine book, attributes it to the unique and productive culture that evolved there. It was a culture that welcomed change and favored scientific inquiry that spurred radical technological improvements.

. . .

According to Mr. Mokyr, three factors led to the ultimate triumph of the new modern search for scientific truth over the largely inaccurate “science” of the ancients. First, Europe’s fractured political environment was a blessing: Scientists who were banned or ostracized in one political jurisdiction fled to other locales more tolerant of their views. The controversial Franciscan monk, Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564), for example, was often in trouble and moving to evade authorities, leading him to flee from Italy to Switzerland and later, England, Poland and Moravia. Second, the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press around 1440 enormously lowered the cost of widely disseminating knowledge over large areas. Third, an extraordinary intellectual community evolved–Voltaire and others called the Republic of Letters–that made the dissemination of new information (through letters to fellow scientists) obligatory for anyone who wanted to gain respect in the growing international community of scientists.

For the full review, see:

RICHARD VEDDER. “BOOKSHELF; The Genesis of Prosperity; What brought about the Great Enrichment? And why did it start in England? It had a culture that embraced change and scientific inquiry.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 11, 2016): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 10, 2016.)

The book under review, is:

Mokyr, Joel. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Graz Schumpeter Lectures. New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press, 2016.

“Fear Moved Aside to Make Room for Hope”

(p. B11) Joyce Appleby, a distinguished historian and author who argued that ideas about capitalism and liberty were fundamental in shaping the identity of early Americans, died on Dec. 23 [2016] at her home in Taos, N.M.
. . .
Dr. Appleby, a former journalist who began her Ph.D. training at 32 while caring for three children, rose to the top ranks of the discipline, serving as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
. . .
In books like “Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s” (1984) and “Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination” (1992). Dr. Appleby argued that the revolutionaries were more individualistic and optimistic than they had been given credit for.
John Locke and Adam Smith had as much influence on founders like Jefferson as the radical Whigs — if not more, she said. In her view, the revolutionaries believed that the public good would arise out of the harmonious pursuit of private interests in a market economy.
“For me, liberalism had entered American consciousness as a potent brew blended from 17th-century entrepreneurial attitudes and the Enlightenment’s endorsement of liberty and reason,” Dr. Appleby said in the 2012 lecture. “Because nature had endowed human beings with the capacity to think for themselves and act on their own behalf, representative government seemed the perfect fit for them.
“Rather than classical republicanism’s fixation on social traumas, liberalism was optimistic, moving forward with the rational, self-improving individual who was endowed with natural rights to be exercised in a widened ambit of freedom.”
Or, as she put it in a 2007 essay on the intellectual underpinnings of American democracy, “Fear moved aside to make room for hope.”

For the full obituary, see:
SEWELL CHAN. “Joyce Appleby, Scholar of Capitalism and American Identity.” The New York Times (Fri., January 6, 2017): B11.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 2 [sic], 2017, and has the title “Joyce Appleby, Historian of Capitalism and American Identity, Is Dead at 87.”)

The Appleby books mentioned above, are:
Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, Anson G. Phelps Lectureship on Early American History. New York: NYU Press, 1984.
Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Hitler Could Not Face Reality (or His Conscience?) Without Opiates and Cocaine

(p. C1) Given the sheer tonnage of books already devoted to the Nazis and Hitler, you might assume that everything interesting, terrible and bizarre is already known about one of history’s most notorious regimes and its genocidal leader. Then along comes Norman Ohler, a soft-spoken 46-year-old novelist from Berlin, who rummages through military archives and emerges with this startling fact: The Third Reich was on drugs.
All sorts of drugs, actually, and in stupefying quantities, as Mr. Ohler documents in “Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany,” a best seller in Germany and Britain that will be published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April [2017]. He was in New York City last week and sat for an interview before giving a lecture to a salon in a loft in the East Village, near Cooper Union.
. . .
. . . the most vivid portrait of abuse and withdrawal in “Blitzed” is that of Hitler, who for years was regularly injected by his personal physician with powerful opiates, like Eukodal, a brand of oxycodone once praised by William S. Burroughs as “truly awful.” For a few undoubtedly euphoric months, Hitler was also getting swabs of high-grade cocaine, a sedation and stimulation combo that Mr. Ohler likens to a “classic speedball.”
. . .
(p. C4) “There are all these stories of party leaders coming to complain about their bombed-out cities,” Mr. Ohler said, “and Hitler just says: ‘We’re going to win. These losses make us stronger.’ And the leaders would say: ‘He knows something we don’t know. He probably has a miracle weapon.’ He didn’t have a miracle weapon. He had a miracle drug, to make everyone think he had a miracle weapon.”
Lanky and angular, Mr. Ohler quietly conveys the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in his book, which has a chapter titled “High Hitler.”

For the full interview, see:
DAVID SEGAL. “How Hitler’s Henchmen Were Kept Hopped Up.” The New York Times (Fri., December 10, 2016): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Dec. 9, 2016, and has the title “High on Hitler and Meth: Book Says Nazis Were Fueled by Drugs.”)

The book mentioned in the interview, is:
Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Jewish Medical Inventor Invested in Human Capital Because That “Could Never Be Taken from Me”

Louis Sokoloff’s son Kenneth authored, or co-authored, important papers on how patents aided invention in the 1800s.

(p. A21) Dr. Louis Sokoloff, who pioneered the PET scan technique for measuring human brain function and diagnosing disorders, died on July 30 [2015] in Washington.
. . .
. . . he leapt at the opportunity when he won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, guided by his grandfather’s advice.
“He advised me to choose a profession, any one,” he wrote, “in which all my significant possessions would reside in my mind because, being Jewish, sooner or later I would be persecuted and I would lose all my material possessions; what was contained in my mind, however, could never be taken from me and would accompany me everywhere to be used again.”
. . .
Dr. Sokoloff’s wife, the former Betty Kaiser, died in 2003, and his son, Kenneth, an economic historian, died in 2007.

For the full obituary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Louis Sokoloff, Pioneer of PET Scan, Dies at 93.” The New York Times (Thurs., AUG. 6, 2015): A21.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date AUG. 5, 2015.)

The Good Old Days Were Grim

(p. A15) In “Progress,” the Swedish author Johan Norberg deploys reams of data to show just how much life has improved–especially over the past few decades but over the past couple of centuries as well. Each chapter is devoted to documenting progress in a single category, including food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the environment, literacy and equality.
In response to people who look fondly on the “good old days,” Mr. Norberg underscores just how grim they could be. Rampant disease, famine and violence routinely killed off millions. In the 14th century, the so-called Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population. Five hundred years later, cholera outbreaks throughout the world led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and even killed a U.S. president, James Polk.

For the full review, see:

MATTHEW REES. “BOOKSHELF; Bending the Arc of History.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 13, 2016): A15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 12, 2016,)

The book under review, is:
Norberg, Johan. Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. London, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2016.

When Winston Churchill Met Mark Twain

(p. C13) . . . [a] pleasant immersion in America’s political history is Mark Zwonitzer’s “The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism.” It is a story of a friendship that flourished in spite of differences about momentous issues of war, peace and national identity. All of Mr. Zwonitzer’s pages are informative and entertaining, but none are more so than those recounting the meeting between the 65-year-old Twain and a 26-year-old British parliamentarian at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan in 1900. Suffice it to say that Twain and Winston Churchill differed vigorously about the Boer War.

For Will’s full book recommendations, see:
George F. Will. “12 Months of Reading.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 10, 2016): C13.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 7, 2016, and has the title “George F. Will on Stalin’s last spy.”)

The book recommended, is:
Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

How Englishness Developed

(p. C12) . . . , “The English and Their History” by Robert Tombs, takes the reader through the entirety of English history–from the Angles and Saxons to the present day. Remarkably, Mr. Tombs limns over a millennia of history without putting you to sleep. And lurking throughout is a fascinating and timely concept: how Englishness as an identity developed through the centuries.

For Vance’s full book recommendations, see:
J.D. Vance. “12 Months of Reading.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 10, 2016): C12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 7, 2016, and has the title “J.D. Vance on an epic history of England.”)

The book recommended, is:
Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

Intellectuals Embrace Despair

(p. A23) Public conversation is dominated by people’s ahistorical insistence that this country is sliding toward decline. As Arthur Herman writes in his book “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” “The sowing of despair and self-doubt has become so pervasive that we accept it as a normal intellectual stance — even when it is directly contradicted by our own reality.”

For the full commentary, see:
Brooks, David. “The Age of Reaction.” The New York Times (Tues., SEPT. 27, 2016): A23.

The book quoted in the above passage from the Brooks commentary, is:
Herman, Arthur. The Idea of Decline in Western History. New York: Free Press, 1997.