Category: History

Imperial Passivity of the Holy Roman Empire Allowed Liberty and Diversity

(p. C7) On Aug. 6, 1806, an imperial herald decked out in full court regalia galloped purposefully through the streets of Vienna to a magnificent medieval church at the center of the city. Once there, he ascended to the balcony, blew his silver trumpet and declared that the Holy Roman Empire, an institution that had lasted for more than 1,000 years, was no more.
. . .
But because the empire never evolved into a viable nation-state, many scholars and politicians regarded it as a failure. The Germans in particular (including the great 19th-century historian Leopold von Ranke) blamed the empire for the fact that Germany remained a “delayed nation” that was only unified (through Prussian machinations) in 1871.
Yet it was precisely this lack of political centralization, Mr. Wilson argues, that provided the empire with its greatest strength. Imperial passivity meant that individual rulers and states were largely left alone to govern as they wished. And all subjects had the right to appeal to the emperor if they believed their rights had been trammeled upon. Jews, for example, were given imperial protection as early as 1090; and though forced to live as second-class citizens during much of the empire’s history, many viewed its dissolution as a catastrophe.
Political fragmentation also had cultural benefits. Unlike France and England, with their single capital and monarch, the Holy Roman Empire had numerous kings, courts and centers of patronage. The result was a remarkably wide distribution of educational and cultural institutions, one that is still observable in the former imperial lands. It was probably also no coincidence that both the printing press and Europe’s first mail service were launched within the fragmented empire or that the imperial territories experienced higher levels of economic growth than regions of Europe with more centralized control.
. . .
Though far from perfect, the empire lasted for as long as it did because it strove to provide the two things most hoped for in a state: liberty and security.

For the full review, see:
MARK MOLESKY. “The Strength of a Weak State; In the Holy Roman Empire, individual rulers and states were largely left to govern as they wished.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 21, 2016): C7.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 20, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Wilson, Peter H. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution Murdered a Million Chinese

(p. A5) A fur coat that kept a family’s three children warm at night, seized and still in the home of their tormentors. A 5-year-old’s finger, broken while fleeing from the scene of a terrifying beating. A stone memorial in a village to a “good” family that was largely wiped out.
These are some of the things readers recalled when asked how their families were affected by the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval unleashed by Mao Zedong half a century ago that left a million or more in China dead and many more traumatized. In dozens of responses, the message was clear: People remember. Families talk. The imprint of old fears remains. Those who suffered teach their grandchildren that it is safer to work hard and keep quiet. “The Cultural Revolution is over,” wrote Huang Xin, a reader from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. “But the Cultural Revolution is never far away.”
Here is a selection of the responses. Some have been condensed and edited for clarity, or translated from Chinese.
. . .
Jonathan Yang, 32, New York
As a first-generation Chinese American, I heard at great length about my mother’s struggles to survive her “bad upbringing” (wealthy) and how her family was decimated when she was 8 years old. Growing up in work camps, her adolescence was robbed and although she was lucky enough to escape China under political asylum under Nixon’s open-door policy, the trauma of the revolution lingers in her to this day.
Her stories captivated me. However, they did not seem real because we were never taught how horrendous China’s history was in school. We were taught relentlessly about atrocities such as slavery and the Holocaust, but somehow China’s dark past never seemed to be part of our education. To say this is a disservice is an understatement. Americans for the most part have no idea how heinous Mao’s regime really was. The sheer numbers as compared to slavery and the Holocaust are at least tenfold. Yet there is no memorial, no education. It is almost as if this history does not matter.

For the full story, see:
“After Half a Century, the Imprint of China’s Cultural Revolution Is Still Deep.” The New York Times (Tues., MAY 17, 2016): A5.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold and italics in original online version.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 16, 2016, and has the title “Readers Respond: The Cultural Revolution’s Lasting Imprint.” Where there are differences in the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

More Evidence that Once-Dynamic Florence Is Now Stagnant

(p. C1) New research from a pair of Italian economists documents an extraordinary fact: The wealthiest families in Florence today are descended from the wealthiest families of Florence nearly 600 years ago.
The two economists — Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti of the Bank of Italy — compared data on Florentine taxpayers in 1427 against tax data in 2011. Because Italian surnames are highly regional and distinctive, they could compare the income of families with a certain surname today, to those with the same surname in 1427. They found that the occupations, income and wealth of those distant ancestors with the same surname can help predict the occupation, income and wealth of their descendants today.

For the full story, see:
JOSH ZUMBRUN. “Florence’s Rich Stay Rich–for 600 Years.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., May 20, 2016): C1-C2.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 19, 2016, and has the title “The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago.” Where there are minor differences in the two versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The Barone and Mocetti working paper, is:
Barone, Guglielmo, and Sauro Mocetti “Intergenerational Mobility in the Very Long Run: Florence 1427-2011.” Bank of Italy Working Paper #1060, April 2016.

“Liberated People Are Ingenious”

(p. C1) Nothing like the Great Enrichment of the past two centuries had ever happened before. Doublings of income–mere 100% betterments in the human condition–had happened often, during the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, in Song China and Mughal India. But people soon fell back to the miserable routine of Afghanistan’s income nowadays, $3 or worse. A revolutionary betterment of 10,000%, taking into account everything from canned goods to antidepressants, was out of the question. Until it happened.
. . .
(p. C2) Why did it all start at first in Holland about 1600 and then England about 1700 and then the North American colonies and England’s impoverished neighbor, Scotland, and then Belgium and northern France and the Rhineland?
The answer, in a word, is “liberty.” Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious. Slaves, serfs, subordinated women, people frozen in a hierarchy of lords or bureaucrats are not. By certain accidents of European politics, having nothing to do with deep European virtue, more and more Europeans were liberated. From Luther’s reformation through the Dutch revolt against Spain after 1568 and England’s turmoil in the Civil War of the 1640s, down to the American and French revolutions, Europeans came to believe that common people should be liberated to have a go. You might call it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
To use another big concept, what came–slowly, imperfectly–was equality. It was not an equality of outcome, which might be labeled “French” in honor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Piketty. It was, so to speak, “Scottish,” in honor of David Hume and Adam Smith: equality before the law and equality of social dignity. It made people bold to pursue betterments on their own account. It was, as Smith put it, “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.”

For the full commentary, see:

DEIRDRE N. MCCLOSKEY. “How the West (and the Rest) Got Rich; The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 21, 2016): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 20, 2016.)

McCloskey’s commentary is based on her “bourgeois” trilogy, the final volume of which is:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Forrest McDonald Defended Founders and Entrepreneurs

Forrest McDonald wrote one of the first detailed accounts of the life of Samuel Insull, an entrepreneur who helped to develop electric utility systems in the United States, and who was persecuted by the FDR administration.

(p. 20) Forrest McDonald, a presidential and constitutional scholar who challenged liberal shibboleths about early American history and lionized the founding fathers as uniquely intellectual, died on Tuesday [January 19, 2016] in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
. . .
As a Pulitzer Prize finalist in history and a professor at the University of Alabama, Dr. McDonald declared himself an ideological conservative and an opponent of intrusive government. (“I’d move the winter capital to North Dakota and outlaw air-conditioning in the District of Columbia,” he once said.) But he refused to be pigeonholed either as a libertarian or, despite his Southern agrarian roots, as a Jeffersonian.
. . .
In “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution” (1985), which was one of three finalists for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in history, he pronounced the founding fathers as singularly qualified to draft the framework of federalism. He reiterated that point when he delivered the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecture in Washington in 1987.
“To put it bluntly,” Dr. McDonald said then, “it would be impossible in America today to assemble a group of people with anything near the combined experience, learning and wisdom that the 55 authors of the Constitution took with them to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.”
. . .
Dr. McDonald wrote more than a dozen books, including biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-Span’s “Booknotes” in 1994, Dr. McDonald revealed that he typically wrote in longhand on a yellow legal pad and in the nude. (“We’ve got wonderful isolation,” he said, “and it’s warm most of the year in Alabama, and why wear clothes?”)

For the full obituary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Forrest McDonald, 89, Critic of Liberal Views of History.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., Jan. 24, 2016): 20.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 22, 2016, and has the title “Forrest McDonald, Historian Who Punctured Liberal Notions, Dies at 89.”)

The McDonald book mentioned by me way above, is:
McDonald, Forrest. Insull. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Today Is 16th Anniversary of Our Betrayal of Elián González

GonzalezElianSeizedOn2000-04-22.jpg“In this April 22, 2000 file photo, Elian Gonzalez is held in a closet by Donato Dalrymple, one of the two men who rescued the boy from the ocean, right, as government officials search the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, early Saturday morning, April 22, 2000, in Miami. Armed federal agents seized Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives before dawn Saturday, firing tear gas into an angry crowd as they left the scene with the weeping 6-year-old boy.” Source of caption and photo: online version of JENNIFER KAY and MATT SEDENSKY. “10 years later, few stirred by Elian Gonzalez saga.” Omaha World-Herald (Thurs., April 22, 2010): 7A. (Note: the online version of the article is dated April 21, 2010 and has the title “10 years after Elian, US players mum or moving on.”)

Today (April 22, 2016) is the 16th anniversary of the day when the Clinton Administration seized a six year old child in order to force him back into the slavery that his mother had died trying to escape.

New Libertarian Consensus?

(p. A17) In “Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order,” Mr. Piereson argues that America has undergone three earthquakes in its history: the Jeffersonian revolution, which ushered in a long period of dominance of a new anti-Federalist party; the Civil War, which vanquished slavery and set off the ascendancy of northern Republicanism; and the New Deal, which dramatically expanded the size and intrusiveness of the federal government in Americans’ lives. “In each period, an old order collapsed and a new one emerged . . . the resolution of the crisis opened up new possibilities for growth and reform,” he writes. Looking out at our paralyzed and polarized polity, he argues that we are on the brink of yet another collapse–but this one might not have a happy ending.
Mr. Piereson, a hero of philanthropy who faithfully spent the Olin Foundation out of business after supporting the work of think tanks, small magazines and groundbreaking scholars like Allan Bloom and Charles Murray, views the Obama presidency as the beginning of the collapse of an 80-year consensus, forged in the post-World War II years. That consensus “assigned the national government responsibility for maintaining full employment and for policing the world in the interests of democracy, trade, and national security.” Such a consensus, which “is required in order for a polity to meet its major challenges,” Mr. Piereson argues, “. . . no longer exists in the United States. That being so, the problems will mount to a point where either they will be addressed through a ‘fourth revolution’ or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”
. . .
A system failure is only a matter of time. At some point, what Democrat Erskine Bowles has aptly labeled “the most predictable crisis in American history” will be upon us, as the federal government defaults by one means or another on its unpayable promises. A revolt of the betrayed elderly, or of the plundered young, could be the catalyst for Mr. Piereson’s revolution. Perhaps even sooner, one state rendered destitute by reckless government spending and public pensions will attempt to dump its hopeless debt problem on the rest of the union. Which of these scenarios is most likely? Which most dangerous? Could the fourth revolution manifest itself in a separatist movement by states where majorities feel culturally estranged and disinclined to pick up the tab for the extravagance of less responsible states? Could the growing number of citizens professing economic conservatism coupled with libertarian social views be the front edge of a new consensus?

For the full review, see:
MITCH DANIELS. “BOOKSHELF; America’s Next Revolution; The U.S. has experienced three earthquakes: the Jeffersonian revolution, the Civil War and the New Deal. Are we on the brink of another?” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 15, 2015): A17.
(Note: ellipses within paragraphs, in original; ellipsis between paragraphs, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 14, 2015,)

The book discussed in the review, is:
Piereson, James. Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order. New York: Encounter Books, 2015.

“Ordinary People Should Have a Go”

(p. A11) The classical archaeologist and now big-picture historian Ian Morris, whose last book argued that war is good for you, now explains why coal is too. In “Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels,” Mr. Morris puts “energy capture” at the center of human values since the Ice Age, through three eras: the Foragers to begin with; the Farmers after about 8,000 B.C.; and, in the past few centuries, the Fossil Fuelers.
. . .
A culture favorable to liberty and dignity for commoners came out of the Reformation and 16th-century Holland, spread to Britain and Britain’s colonies in the 18th century, and resulted after 1800 in an explosion of ingenuity.
This Great Enrichment, which Mr. Morris acknowledges but does not explain, increased income per head not by the 100% or 200% of earlier efflorescences but by anything from 2,000% to 10,000%. Routine materialism of Mr. Morris’s sort can’t explain the most important secular event in human history. He wants to pin it all on energy capture. The correct story is one of ideas of human equality changing, starting with a conviction novel in the 17th century in northwestern Europe that ordinary people should have a go. This led to massive innovation, among which was energy capture. We do not have a fossil-fuel civilization. We have a free and ingenious one.

For the full review, see:
DEIRDRE MCCLOSKEY. “BOOKSHELF; Oil on Troubled Waters; In this telling, progress is explained by the rising use of fossil fuels. Yet the Industrial Revolution was powered by water, not coal..”The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 6, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 5, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, The University Center for Human Values Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

George Washington as Entrepreneur

(p. C7) While Washington was only an adequate battlefield general, Edward G. Lengel, who oversees George Washington’s papers at the University of Virginia, makes a strong case in “First Entrepreneur” that he was a superb military administrator–skills he learned as a young man serving in the French and Indian War as an aide-de-camp for commanding officers. By carefully monitoring all aspects of the complex business of running a military operation, he held his ragtag army together despite a frequent lack of money, clothing, weapons and food. Without Washington’s management, the Continental Army would likely have disintegrated and the Revolution fizzled out. Mr. Lengel brings needed attention to this vital and neglected aspect of Washington’s generalship.
Washington was also a superb administrator of his own assets. Born to modest wealth, he married into much more and worked hard and creatively to maximize his return on investment. By the end of his life he was one of the new country’s richest men.
Tobacco, the cash crop that had brought prosperity to Virginia, was declining in profitability by the mid-18th century. It exhausted the soil, and prices had been falling on the British market. Washington began to rotate and diversify his crops, import better seed, and exploit Mount Vernon’s other assets, such as the springtime fish runs up the Potomac.
By the end of his life, Washington was not only growing new crops but manufacturing as well, turning his wheat production into both whiskey and flour. When the American inventor Oliver Evans developed a new, more productive type of flour mill, Washington quickly installed one. When the king of Spain sent him a donkey, named Royal Gift, Washington put him to work fathering mules, which were more efficient than horses at farm work. As Mr. Lengel makes clear, Washington was always a bottom-line man, a fact that makes this often remote figure more human.

For the full review, see:

JOHN STEELE GORDON. “Washington Discovers America; Washington traveled through all 13 states to promote the newborn federal government.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Feb. 13, 2016): C7.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 12, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Lengel, Edward G. First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His–and the Nation’s–Prosperity. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2016.

Federal Government “Deputized” the Ku Klux Klan to Enforce Prohibition Against “Immigrants, Catholics and African-Americans”

(p. C4) . . . in her new book, “The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State” (W. W. Norton), the historian Lisa McGirr tells anything but a nostalgic story. The 18th Amendment, she argues, didn’t just give rise to vibrant night life and colorful, Hollywood-ready characters, like Isidor Einstein, New York’s celebrated “Prohibition Agent No. 1.” More enduringly, and tragically, it also radically expanded the federal government’s role in law enforcement, with consequences that can be seen in the crowded prisons of today.
In The New York Times Book Review, James A. Morone writes that the book “could have a major impact on how we read American political history.” In a recent email interview, Ms. McGirr, a professor at Harvard, discussed Prohibition’s political legacy, the surprising enforcement role of the Ku Klux Klan and the character from her story she’d most like to have a drink with. Below are excerpts from the conversation.
. . .
Q. You argue that Prohibition gave rise to today’s “penal state.” How did that happen?
A. By birthing a new national obsession with crime, Prohibition — and the violence that came with it — pushed the federal government in the direction of policing and surveillance. This was the moment that saw the first national crime commission, the birth of the Uniform Crime Reports, an expanded prison system and the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The F.B.I. also won expanded authority.
. . .
Q. You describe how the Ku Klux Klan helped enforce Prohibition in places like Williamson County, Ill., where federal authorities deputized its members to conduct sometimes deadly raids on distilleries, bars and private homes — taking particular aim at Italian immigrants. What made the Klan such an ally in the war on alcohol?
A. The Klan sold itself to white Protestant evangelicals as a law enforcement organization, winning droves of recruits with its promise to clamp down on bootlegging. There were plenty of Klansmen who imbibed, but that did not stop them from leveraging the law to target the drinking of the presumed enemies of white Protestant nationalism: immigrants, Catholics and African-Americans.

For the full interview, see:
JENNIFER SCHUESSLER, interviewer. “A Word with Lisa McGirr; Throwing a Cold Splash on Prohibition Nostalgia.” The New York Times (Thurs., DEC. 31, 2015): C4.
(Note: ellipses added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date DEC. 30, 2015, and has the title “Lisa McGirr Discusses ‘The War on Alcohol’ and the Legacy of Prohibition.”)

The book under discussion, is:
McGirr, Lisa. The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2015.

Those on the Scene Matter for Outcome of Crisis

Amanda Ripley has argued that in many disasters, it is not the well-trained “first responders” who matter most for the outcome, but those who happen to be close to the scene. The problem is that often the “first responders” do not arrive soon enough to save lives or head off the crisis. The story sketched in the passages quoted below, seems to be another example for her thesis.

(p. B1) “We had a one-minute warning,” recalled Dr. Lax, a mathematician who was the director of the university’s computer center at the time. “The son of a friend ran in” and shouted that the demonstrators were coming for the computer, he said. “It was too late to call the police and fortify.”
. . .
Jürgen Moser, a mathematician who was the director of the Courant Institute, the university’s prestigious math research center, tried to stop the demonstrators when they swarmed into Warren Weaver Hall. According to a chapter in a biography of Dr. Lax by Reuben Hersh, Dr. Moser, who died in 1999, said he was “pushed and shoved around, and was unable to deter them.”
. . .
After a two-day occupation, the protesters decided to end the takeover. But they did not carry out everything they had taken in, as two assistant professors, Frederick P. Greenleaf and Emile C. Chi, discovered when they ran in.
“We thought, ‘Let’s go take a look before the place gets locked down,’ ” Dr. Greenleaf recalled last week. “They had knocked the doorknobs off the door so you couldn’t open it.”
But there was a small window, high up in the door, and they peered in. “We could see there was an improvised toilet paper fuse,” he said. “It was slowly burning its way to a bunch of containers, bigger than gallon jugs. They were sitting on the top of the computer.”
. . .
Already, he said, smoke was curling under the door.
He and Professor Chi grabbed a fire extinguisher in the stairwell.
The only way to douse the fuse was to aim the fire extinguisher under the door. The only way to know where to aim it was to look through the window in the door, which was too high for whoever was operating the fire extinguisher to look through and aim at the same time.
So one functioned as the eyes for the pair, sighting through the window and directing the other to point the fire extinguisher up or down or left or right. “In a minute, we had managed to spritz the fuse,” Dr. Greenleaf said.

For the full story, see:
JAMES BARRON. “Grace Notes; The Mathematicians Who Saved a Kidnapped N.Y.U. Computer.” The New York Times (Mon., DEC. 7, 2015): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 6, 2015, and has the title “Grace Notes; The Mathematicians Who Ended the Kidnapping of an N.Y.U. Computer.”)

The Ripley book mentioned above, is:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.