Horses at Work

Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America
© 2008 Ann Norton Greene
322 pages

The quintessential image of horses in American history is the cowboy, of rough men moving cattle in the wilderness on horseback. But follow the cattle, and their destination is invariably the cities, for cowboys were actors in the industrial economy, moving cattle from ranches in the prairies to the railheads expanding throughout the west. Horses and industry were never far from one another; indeed, as Horses at Work bears out, horses and industrialization complemented the other, each allowing the other to flourish.  The 19th century was a golden age for horses, not in spite of but because of the burgeoning industrial economy.

Horses have been working companions for humans for millennia, for reasons the author details in the beginning of her work, evaluating them against their leading competitors, oxen and camels.   In the 19th century, however, they were successful beyond all prior imagining: never before had there been so many horses, and they were doing everything. Horses didn’t just pull carriages for wealthy aristocrats and up-and-coming merchants:   they tugged canal boats down their courses, and treading engines allowed them to power ferries as well. The same apparatus made horses the prime movers within early industrial technology.  Steam was their ally, not a threatening foe.  Rail lines could cut across distances, linking central points to one another, but they required horses to deliver goods to the consumer.  Horses created early industrial infrastructure and prospered from the opportunities it created, but they were also direct beneficiaries of its output.  The industrial system created a massive and steady supply of constantly-needed horseshoes, for instance, without which horses were at risk for lameness, and new wagons and tackle developed that made their work both less strenuous and more profitable for their owners.  Their growing numbers and economic ubiquity led to an intense amount of study, both in breeding and in science, with equine healthcare increasing in measure.  Eventually steam and horses would both run afoul of electricity, internal combustion, and political movements aimed at "cleaning up" the city, both by clearing out worker housing and getting rid of urban animal residents, The work of overhauling the economy's circulatory system would take time, however: horse populations peaked in the 1890s, even as electric rail lines, bicycles, and primitive automobiles were appearing, and didn't fall away significantly until the end of the Roaring Twenties.

Although written and published at nearly the same time as Clay McShane and Joel Tarr's The Horse in the City,  these two books do not step on one another's toes too much. Both address the role of horses in industrial America, but Horses at Work examines technical issues more in-depth -- the technology used in ferry and mill transmission, the development of stagecoach lines -- and features even rarer photographs.  The two books together are a perfect pair for understanding horses' impact on early industrial America.

Related:

• Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, Susan Strasser
• The Horse in the City, Clay McShane and Joel Tarr

Last Call

Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition 
© 2010 Daniel Okrent
480 pages

"Law and order should not ruin the lives of law-abidin' people! Like that stupid law of Prohibition they had in the old days. Gangsters had to go out there and open up speakeasies, so's  decent people could raise a glass." - Archie Bunker

Prohibition ranks as one of the strangest and most romanticized periods in American history, a period of over a decade in which Americans earnestly sought to deny themselves a pleasure enjoyed by mankind since the first hints of agriculture: alcohol.  In Last  Call, author Daniel Okrent takes the reader back into time to find out how it happened, what it was like, and how it mercifully ended.  A history of Prohibition could easily descend into mythologizing about the Mafia, but this is an account with considerable more body than that. Indeed, Okrent  connects the rise  and execution of Prohibition to deeper political forces that make the general politics of the time more comprehensible. 

How on Earth did the American nation come to deny itself the pleasures of the bottle?  Excess didn’t help: prior to widespread sanitation systems, beer,  wine, and other kindred spirits were the safest source of water, and because they were also fun to drink, they were easily abused, and especially after distillation made chronic inebriation cheap. Various groups within the nation – worried wives, Progressive moralists, guardians of the family – all advocated for temperance, but attempts to convey this into political action were undermined by the fact that their associations tended to pick up other political causes as well, atrophying by distraction. When Prohibition passed as a Constitutional amendment, ratified by the majority of state congresses, it triumphed because of its skillful management at the hands of the Anti-Saloon League.  The ASL, hereafter referred to as the League, combined various groups into one coalition, focusing them all on one common goal and steadfastly ignoring any other social issue.

 Other social issues were at play, however.  The coalition included nativist groups like the KKK, for instance, which saw the increasing population of Jewish and Catholic immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe as a threat to both Protestant religion and the American way of life. The League, as its full name indicates, had an especial grievance against saloons, which were not merely watering holes but the nucleus of immigrant communities. 70% of saloons were owned by first-generation Americans, and their halls were host to political organizations that gave new citizens a stronger voice in the public arena.   Prohibition’s rise is even more interesting, however, connected as it was with both the women’s suffrage movement and a landmark step in the growth of the Federal government, the income tax-establishing 16^th amendment.  The amount of female leadership within temperance and prohibition movements gave many suffragists their first experience in political organization and agitation, and the income tax amendment was a necessary first step for the war against booze. Without taxes on potable beverages, even the relatively small national government of the belle époque couldn’t fund its services. Soaking the rich, which politicized mobs liked the idea of, would provide enough revenue to only compensate for the decline in liquor taxation, but allow the government to reduce its tariffs to boot -- a boon for the working man. Prohibition was thus a cocktail of political causes. 

The execution of Prohibition itself, of course, is a legendary failure.  Had the brewers and distillers realized that the League was a serious threat, they may have rallied to stop it. But what massive business could be seriously threatened by some locals running around in bedsheets, or a crowd of campaigning women?  Despite its passage, Prohibition trimmed off at most a third of the overall consumption of alcohol. Individuals were subverting the law from the moment it went on the books., moving alcohol into the states from outside by plane, train, automobile, and a flotilla of rum-running speedboats.  Consumer markets quickly created products that would allow people to produce homemade alcoholic beverages --  a kind of grape concentrate, for instance, that if were supplemented with yeast, sugar, and a few weeks of peaceful darkness, would turn into wine.  Beer kits were also available, and completely legal within the law.  The amendment depended on enforcement by the states, but making a law isn’t quite as easy as enforcing it.  The fact that so many people were willing to blow raspberries at the law made widespread investigation and arrests prohibitively expensive, and some states never bothered.  Those which did  were undermined by networks of corruption that kept police wallets and the speakeasies full. Even when corruption wasn’t a problem,  the amount of people being hauled into court was.  Rather than wasting an enormous amount of time plodding through a trial, judges simply levied fines – and the bootleggers absorbed them, just as they would a tax had alcohol been legal. They even managed to buy their cars and speedboats back if they had been seized by the state.  None of the presidents at the time were strict enforcers – Harding was wishy-washy, Coolidge had no interest in meddling in other people’s business, and Hoover was slow to spend money. By the time the Federal government did begin intervening, the new sanctions proved to be too much, too late.  Tipplers were outraged by the fact that the government had abruptly decided to take the issue seriously, and as the Great Depression loomed, popular support saw the wisdom in creating more jobs and generating more revenue by uncorking alcohol once again.

The Last Call finishes as a superb history of the period; the author’s emphasis on political and social movements provides insight into the period in general, understanding that would have been missed had he simply dwelt gratuitously on the Mafia.  There’s a great deal to learn here, not only about the era but about the absurdity of the government attempting to manage people’s lives, including their spending habits.  Say what you will about the human race, we're an adaptable species that knows the truth of "where there's a will, there's a way".  

Related:

• Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, Iain Gately
• Drink: A Social History of America, Andrew Carr.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

Satisfaction Guaranteed: the Making of the American Mass Market
© 2004 Susan Strasser
348 pages

America was born of the frontier, its citizens people who by necessity often manufactured their own household requirements.  This was the case throughout most of the 19th century: even in cities where people could purchase articles like candles and clothing.  But by that century’s end, a revolution was in the process – a consumer revolution in which virtually every household good, from food to cleaning solutions, came from factories. Even more remarkably, however, those goods weren’t even coming from the factories through familiar faces at local groceries: they were entering the lives of people through new mail-order schemes and colossal supermarkets. Satisfaction Guaranteed examines how a few entrepreneurs transformed Americans’ lifestyles and marketplace.

Like Never Done and Waste and Want,   Satisfaction is chiefly focused on social history, and together the three examine various facets of Americans’ transformation from producers to consumers, of how a nation of nominally self-reliant farmers and merchants became one of employee-consumers and big business. Unlike her previous workers, however, here Strasser presents a critical business history, rather like Straight Out of the Oven or Cheap.  To explain the success of the new businesses, she demonstrates to readers how they created completely new business and marketing practices, like ‘market segmentation’ – targeting particular products within a brand to specific demographics.  Another novelty was that of the brand name or trademark, which could be used to build a reputation for quality. They also depended on new technologies and systems, either material (in the form of railroads that allowed for mail-order companies to flower and deliver cheaper goods through volume sales) or legal, like court decisions that made corporations easier to form and much more effective at managing interstate businesses. Strasser places the most emphasis on marketing, however, for it was marketing that introduced Americans to completely new goods (‘Oleomargarine? What kinda cow makes that?), marketing that coaxed them into trying it even when their local grocers didn’t want to stock it, and marketing that gradually lured them into not only using products, but becoming dependent on them. Marketing is why invention is the mother of necessity.

Although Strasser regards consumerism as wasteful, she doesn’t rail against the giants that promote it – indeed, depend on it. There are no villains in this piece, though she’s plainly sympathetic to the small businessmen, like the neighborhood grocers and general store managers, who were at first forced to keep goods on their shelves they had no experience with , and then driven out of business when large chains like A&P Groceries invaded. (Ads of the day directed potentials customers that if their local firms didn’t carry Crisco or the brand in question, they should forward the names and addresses of those firms to the corporation, who would see to it that the goods were offered for retail.)   The new branded products didn’t offer storekeepers much of a profit margin, and eventually corporations began seeing local retailers as obstacles to reaching as broad a customer base as they possibly could – and that was the goal: not meeting needs, but devising any way to create and capture new markets. Whereas once Americans produced things in-house to satisfy their needs, now they were consumers who bought whatever ensnared their interests – and following the ‘credit revolution’, they didn’t even need to be limited by what they could afford.

Strasser’s previous work has been lively yet comprehensive, and Satisfaction Guaranteed largely meets those standards.  Covering the intersection of business practices and lifestyle,  she focuses more on new approaches business management than on lifestyle, the usual center of attention,  which may broaden her audience to those interested in business in general.  This by no means detracts from its appeal as an introduction to the origins of mass consumerism in America, however.

Blood, Iron, and Gold

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World
© 2009 Christian Wolmar
376 pages

Outside of the wheel, the railways may be the single most influential form of transportation ever invented by human beings. This is a bold claim, but one encouraged by this excellent and engaging survey of rail transport's effect on human history. Originating in Britain, railways took the world by storm, crossing continents and knitting the world together with roads of irons. The rails became the backbones of economies, the skeletons on which new nations like Germany and Italy grew; economies were transformed and empires created to the sound of a steam whistle. The modern world is unthinkable without them, and even though the rise of automobiles and aiprlanes may have dimmed our appreciation for them, author Christian Wolmar believes trains are posed to make a well-deserved comeback.

Blood, Iron, and Gold is an ambitious and exciting work, spanning nearly two centuries and covering the birth and evolution of a worldwide transport system, one which leaves virtually no part of human society untouched: in attempting to relay their importance, Wolmar writes on war, politics, food, religion, economics, and industry on almost every continent. Despite the sheer breadth of this narrative, it's never overwhelming; he succeeds in maintaining a cohesive, fairly tight narrative throughout. While it bounds in fascinating trivia (Spain's first railways were built not in Spain, but in Cuba: the first transcontinental railroad was constructed by the United States,  but not in north America),  the true value of the book (beyond sheer entertainment value, which for me was through the roof) lays in the perspective it adds to the development of powerful nation-states and industrial economies in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The railways' integral role in the unification of Germany and Italy has been mentioned, but rails were also part of the fabric of British imperialism. The United Kingdom's position as a pioneer allowed it to wield an incredible amount of influence over the development of rails across the world, exporting engines, cars, drivers, planners, and even gauge standards; the metric of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is curiously ubiquitous. In Russia, the Trans-Siberian railroad provided an exercise in state planning on a massive scale, one which Wolmar believes influenced succeeding Soviet governments.  Wolmar doesn't shy away from the negative legacy of railroads -- the exploitation of labor to build them, the political corruption surrounding them in the United States, their use as a tool of the state to quickly put down riots -- but remains an enthusiastic supporter of the technology, both because of what they've done for us, and what they will continue to do. Railroads are our past, he writes, but also our future.

Our past; our future; but not quite our present. At the present moment, cars and planes reign supreme. Wolmar's history follows rail lines into the 20th century, as they begin losing traffic to their competitors, and examines why they failed to compete more effectively. The long attachment to steam technology is part of the reason, Wolmar believes: not only was this a technology companies were long used to, but one they had an enormous amount of capital already invested in. Diesel and electric engines were new and unproven, and without a guarantee of success, few companies were willing to take the leap of faith that was required of them. Throughout the history and his analyses, Wolmar is delightfully moderate. He scorns neither the free market nor centralization and central planning: nations and rail companies have experimented with both throughout their history with rails, and either alternative might be the best in a given situation. Despite the fact that railway transportation has been in decline -- especially tragic in the United States -- Wolmar believes that is on the mend. Not only are steadily rising oil prices making cars and airplanes look like an abysmal bargain compared to efficient rail lines,  but decades of increasing car ownership have resulted in unmatched congestion and sprawl; automobiles are increasingly unpopular. These views are not Wolmar's alone: in the United States, private rail companies are itching to get back into the passenger business, and for the first time in a half-century the cities are growing and the car-dependent surburbs shrinking. As oil becomes increasingly dear,  the human race is rediscovering the value of one of its best inventions.  I live in hope that I will see a rail renaissance in my own lifetime. For now, I shall read this book again and again to experience the triumphs of the past and imagine what future glories await.

Absolutely superb book: exciting, informative, and timely.

Related:
Nothing Like it in the World: The Making of the Transcontinental Railroad, Stephen Ambrose
Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back, Jane Holtz Keay

Unfamiliar Fishes

Unfamiliar Fishes
© 2011 Sarah Vowell
238 pages

For those accustomed to Sarah Vowell's usual approach to history -- one offering contemporary political allusions and biting wit -- Unfamiliar Fishes will seem decidedly straightforward. Her introduction describing 1898 as a perhaps more pivotal year for the United States than 1776 prompted me to think Unfamiliar Fishes would be a platform to criticize current foreign policy, but it truly is a straight history of the American annexation of Hawaii, one which serves as an introduction to Hawaiian history to boot.

Although her narrative begins in 1820, with the arrival of American missionaries keen on saving heathens, Vowell weaves in plenty of background information, starting from the union of the islands under a warlord. From there, Hawaii transforms into a beaten state in barely a half-century, its government taken over by puritans and ruthless industrialists. This is not a straightforward tale of good and evil, however:  savage warlords who oppress women deserve the misery that Puritanism brought, and staggeringly many Hawaiians were culpable in their own slow annexation -- like naive marks attracted to the idea of profit, playing poker with far more devious and ambitious men. Hawaii's history is a half-century of being hustled.

Vowell ends with the annexation of Hawaii at the hands of McKinley and Roosevelt, and revisits her idea of the ideals of 1776 being less important to American history than the greed of 1898.  Her ending chapter, quoting Henry Cabot Lodge's defense of the takeover, is positively chilling, as Lodge dismisses entirely the notion that the United States is a country built on the consent of the governed and defends that with examples from history -- exulting in how the rich and powerful have subdued the less fortunate multitudes time and again.  Class warfare is not a bogeyman dreamed up by Karl Marx.  The book ends on a  sad note, despite Vowell's usual attempts at humor.

Recommended for those curious about the aloha state.

Related:
The Spanish-American War, Albert Marrin

Disaster 1906

Disaster 1906: the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire
© 1967 Edward F. Dolan Jr.
172 pages

If, as some say, God spanked the town

For being over-frisky

Why did He burn the churches down

And save Hotaling's whisky?

-p. 175

Years ago I read a fantastic book called Disaster! The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906. A few years later I determined I wanted to buy my own copy of that book, but alas! Woe! My home library no longer had the book and I forgot the title of it. I hit Amazon, and this seemed like it might be what I was looking for.  It actually isn't, as I found out while reading the book and noticed that key elements from the masterpiece I remembered were missing -- like Enrico Caruso hearing of the volcano eruption in his hometown and thanking God he was in safe San Francisco, only to wake up to an earthquake and an inferno.

Disaster stories interest me, hence why my home library contains several books on the Titanic and why I've read various books on the San Francisco and Chicago fires, as well as the Galveston Hurricane. Part of this is what Augustine might call gross curiosity -- the appeal of looking at a car wreck -- but I'm also fascinated by the way people react when their world is completely eradicated and the society-as-usual  no longer exists. In Disaster 1906,  the sleeping town of San Francisco is visited by a mighty earthquake, and then ravaged for several days by fires which consume much of the city.  Communications are negligible, the water pipes are dry, and yet -- people survive. People freely gather together to help pick up the ruins, men from all walks of life join the fire brigades,  women empty their pantries cooking food for the newly-homeless, and a corrupt mayor  suddenly begins to fulfill his moral responsibilities as a public official and becomes a hero. And people are clever! They improvise! They fill the bathtubs with water before the cisterns leak completely dry, saving the water for use in fire fighting: they construct stoves of bricks and random metal grates.  Throughout the long night, as the fires burn and destroy homes, businesses, and all the hopes of tomorrow, people gather together and tell jokes: they sing and entertain one another, and when they day breaks they start picking up the pieces.

Disaster 1906 was probably written for younger readers given its length, but it's a fine introduction to the disaster and one written by someone who grew up in San Francisco, and who is so fond of the City by the Bay that his last chapter is devoted to  commenting on the rebirth of the city after the disaster, in which the wild child of the west coast grew into a Queen who astonished all the world at the Exposition in 1916, but who maintained her childish sassiness.

Related:

• Disaster! The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, Dan Kurzman
• The Great Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco, 1906. John Castillo Kennedy. I may have also read this one while trying to find Disaster!  I think my confusion in trying to find the book is warranted given how similar these three titles are. 
• Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco in the 20s and 30s, Jerry Flamm. One of my favorite books.

This is my fifth review in 15 hours, and while two of those were leftovers from last week and the week before last, it's still odd. Why do I go days without being able to progress in collecting my thoughts on a given book, and then have days in which it's easy?

Electric Universe

Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity
© 2005 David Bodanis
308 pages

When you're in the dark, and you want to see, you need

Electricity, E-LEC-TRICITY!

(School House Rock, "Electricity")

Every now and again, I misjudge a book and find it a superior surprise. I picked Electric Universe up thinking to read an introduction to electricity, but found instead a rich history detailing the human discovery -- and use of -- electricity which contains stories of curiosity, intellectual courage, romance, adventure, and wartime bravado. In addition to providing clear, picturesque descriptions of how electrical processes work, Bodanis examines how electricity has changed society as a whole from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age.

 Electric Universe is truly a multi-genre book.  I checked it out for the science, as my understanding of electricity is somewhat dim. Like Brian Silver in The Ascent of Science, Bodanis is talented at making electricity understandable at its most basic level,  then applying that explanation to technological applications. The science continues throughout the book, culminating in a chapter on biological nervous systems. Bodanis places a great deal of emphasis on the scientists and technicians who sought to understand and use the hidden powers in nature to illuminate, link together, and revolutionize the world. I never knew that Edison was a patent-breaking scoundrel,  nor did I realize that Nazi Germany had its own sophisticated version of radar. How has a movie not been made of the daring Würzburg raid, in which a scientist parachuted into occupied Europe, escorted by grizzled paratroopers, to take over a German radar installation, learn its secrets, and return to England? There's even a film-worthy moment of all-on-the-line drama when the raiders' retreat is blocked by German machine gunners, who are defeated the last moments by the reappearance of previously lost Scottish highlanders, firing their rifles and yelling out old Gaelic battle-cries.

Modern society is entirely impossible without electricity and the various technologies -- like radio and computers -- which developed from its understanding. The transformation of society through these technologies fascinates, and Electric Universe is a history of that transformation with human-interest stories to spare. I read it in two sittings, pausing only to go to bed for the night, and consider Bodanis an author of interest for the future. Electric Universe is a definite recommendation.

This Week at the Library (29 December)

Aside from the books I've already done full comments on, I also finished The Great American Wolf and The Golden Door.  My observations about them were shortish, so I decided to include them here instead of making seperate, strangely short posts.  The Great American Wolf by Bruce Hampton was placed in my library's Science and Nature section, though it's really more a history of human interaction with wolves in North America. I had no idea wolves were viewed in such a negative light: I've always been fond of them, seeing the grey wolf in particular as intelligent, sociable, and beautiful.  Though native Americans regarded the wolf as a magnificent creatures, Europeans have apparantly shared a long hostility toward them and the colonists who settled in North American acted on it. They regarded the wolves as pests and purposely sought to drive them to extinction -- though this changed in the 20th century, as conservationists and environmentalists pushed to save them.

I also read Isaac Asimov's The Golden Door, a history of the United States from Reconstruction following the Civil War through to the conclusion of the Great War. This period of history happens to be one of my favorites, and Asimov titled his book by drawing from Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus", engraved upon the Statue of Liberty in New York which welcomed so many immigrants.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I rather like the poem.  Asimov's history is breezily readable, suitable for younger readers as well as older ones who want an introduction to the period, a refresher, or some mild entertainment: I picked up some trivia while reading it. Asimov's istypically fair and more idealistic than cynical.

Next week's potentials:

• Seize the Fire, Michael A. Martin. I actually read this yesterday, but I meant for it to be "this" week's Trek reading. Because my library visit and TWATL post have occcured on Wednesday for so long, I tend to think of it as starting a new 'week'. 
• Over the Hills: A Midlife Escape Across America by Bicycle, David Lamb.  This is the third or fourth book I've read this year in which someone decided to journey across the continent, but the idea of throwing oneself into nature, of seeing where the road goes and having an adventure along the way, appeals to me.
• In a Sunburned Country,  in which Bill Bryson explores Australia.
• The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright -- because God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter was checked out. 
• The Burning Land, Bernard Cornwell. The most recent book in the Saxon Chronicles series, which means next week I'll have no Uhtred to enjoy. Whatever will I do?
• I also have a book on the weather, because on Christmas morning while watching the rain fall I realized that though I understand the water cycle, I have no idea what high- and low-pressure systems mean and why they bring the kind of weather they do. 

The Imperial Cruise

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War
© 2009 James Bradley
387 pages

They may be sovereign countries, but you folks at home forget

That they all want what we've got, but they don't know it yet.

(Billy Bragg, "Marching Song of the Convert Battalions".)

The Gilded Age may be characterized as the United States' coming of age, losing its innocence along the way. The former colony had by the early 20th century become an imperial state on its own -- collecting territories as though they were the spoils of some vast game of marbles. Following the end of the Indian Wars and the 'closing of the frontier', the United States looked outward -- to Cuba and the Philippines. This was the age wherein the United States became an industrial titan and a world power, and Theodore Roosevelt announced the US's entry into the big boy's club with the sailing of the Great White Fleet in late 1907: for just over a year, a large fleet of warships toured the world's oceans, demonstrating to one and all what the Americans were capable of. 

That fleet's voyage, however, is not the imperial cruise covered in this book. Bradley instead looks two years earlier, when a ship of diplomatic envoys made their way to Japan, Korea, and China after checking in on recent acquisitions like Hawaii and the Philippines. There, Roosevelt and his lieutenant, Secretary of War William Taft, made decisions that shaped Asia's history. They did so, Bradley believes, out of conviction in the White Man's Burden. According to Bradley, Roosevelt believed in the innate superiority of the Aryan race: the conquest of the world by the Anglo-Saxons proved it, and it was the Christian duty of Whites to spread the virtues of civilization across the world by any means necessary.  The Imperial Cruise is in essence a scathing condemnation of the United States' birth and expansion which sees the entire history of the US 'til that point as one great race war. This led Roosevelt in his arrogance to proclaim the Japanese "Honorary Aryans" and encourage them to establish a Monroe Doctrine of their own in the east, which put Japan on the course of empire herself -- a course that lead to Pearl Harbor when the Japanese Empire's ambitions succeeded Roosevelt's use for them.   "In this book I don’t so much write about Pearl Harbor, I only bring it up to say, what was the source of this explosion? Every divorce has a first kiss, I was looking for that first kiss...and I found that in the summer of 1905." (James Bradley, interview.)

Bradley makes three general claims: first, that the United States' expansion was motivated by something other than pure humanitarianism; two, that this expansion was fueled primarily by belief in white supremacism and imperial Christianity; and three, that Roosevelt went beyond the responsibilities of his office in sanctioning Japanese expansion in Korea and Manchuria.  Only the second claim is questionable to me, for as powerful as ideals -- even rotten ones -- are,  I see the wheels of history turning more on the basis of power and wealth; specifically, people attempting to accrue more of both to themselves.  Idealism is typically mere décor, justification. That the drivers of American history have been until the last half-century vicious racists is undeniable -- even those who tried to assume the high ground of Christian moralism are drowned by a sea of their own speeches, essays,and letters. I can believe that racism made waging war against others easier, but race as a primary motivation is too great a leap for me to make.

Aside from this, I think Imperial Cruise needs to be read: I only wish it were more effective. Bradley is a popular historian, and even the most uninformed of readers would be able to follow his narrative with ease: unfortunately, the narrative itself gets lost. Bradley starts with the cruise, then shifts to a history of the United States' conquest of Cuba and the Philippines. He returns to the cruise briefly, gives a history of Hawaii's own violent subjugation, and then proceeds to dip into Japanese history before finally returning to Taft's actions in Korea, China, and Japan. Imperial Cruise doesn't flow: it bounces cross the Pacific. Structuring a text with so much content is understandably difficult, but it doesn't appear to have been edited properly: Bradley repeats himself, and more than once I stopped to wonder why he was bringing this particular fact or quotation up again.

The book's weaknesses are disappointing, in part because the subject presents an opportunity to analyze American history critically, and draw lessons that Americans today would profit by: Taft and Roosevelt's repeated statements that the insurrection in the Philippines was almost over mirror Bush and Rumsfeld's  statements to the same effect concerning Iraq.  Done properly, the book could have forced readers to consider the United States' embracing of interventionist causes in the 20th century with a more critical eye -- and Bradley's publishing history (Flags of our Fathers, Flyboys)  would attract more mainstream readers than say, Howard Zinn, whose reputation discourages those less enthusiastic about criticizing American history from considering what he has to say. 

Related:

• Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire, a collection of articles, essays, and such written against American imperialism against the Phillipines and Cuba.
• Howard Zinn's People's History of the 20th Century
• Zinn's People's History of American Empire, which picks up at the close of the Indian Wars.
• Albert Marrin's The Spanish-American War, which is more apologetic than critical but still admits to the brutal treatment of the Phillipines by American forces. Interestingly, both Marrin and Bradley see McKinley as someone interested in peace, but beaten into submission by the press and warmongers like Roosevelt into sanctioning war against the Spanish. 

The Spanish-American War

The Spanish-American War
© 1991 Albert Marrin
182 pages

While still a sophomore in high school, I spotted a book titled The Airman's War in my school library and checked it out. It become a favorite, one of the first history books I ever purchased, and I have enjoyed both Marrin and early aircraft ever since. Recently he came to mind and I checked my local public library to see if they offered anything by him: they did, and this particular book gave me an opportunity to read Marrin again and refresh and strengthen what little I know of the war against Spain.

Marrin's story begins on the night of 15 February, 1898, when an explosion sank the USS Maine, anchored outside Havana. This incident, more likely an accident than a Spanish attack, was the seed out of which newspapermen like William Randolph Hearst manufactured a war -- using his power to inflame the populace and assault any politician who did not bellow for war. From there matters deteriorate, resulting in the American occupation of Cuba, the Philippines changing hands, and a lengthy, costly war against Philippine insurgents who -- surprise! -- were not impressed by their former ally's interest in the Philippines as a de facto colony.

The Spanish-American War, like most of Marrins' works, is written in a personal style. Stories focusing on the horrors of war and perils of soldiers are set inside a colorful narrative with generous background information that succeeds in not only making the war understandable, but in demonstrating the deforming nature of war upon individuals and society. This is especially evident in the chapter on the Philippine  War, where former allies begin indulging in ritual humiliation and torture of the other side, poisoned by lust and violence. Although never shying away from the horrors of war, Marrin tends to err on the side of patriotism -- informing readers that President McKinley opted to annex the Philippines not because he wanted to, but because he feared on their own the Philippines would fall to the British, Germans, or Japanese. (It seems to me that a garrison of troops and a naval base would have established American presence well enough, and the Philippine leader was so favorably disposed to the Americans that he offered ports and areas for bases.) Marrin's account of the rise of the Anti-Imperialist League also isn't exactly friendly: he seemed to stop just shy of giving the League a piece of his mind.

In all, a good read: I'd recommend it to those who think their knowledge of the wars deficient. Marrin's style lends his books well toward readers who are completely new to the subject.


Related:

• Weapons of Satire, a collection of writings by Mark Twain written against the annexation of the Philippines and the American war against Filipinos fighting for independence.  

Around the World in 80 Days

Around the World in 80 Days
© 1872 Jules Verne
160 pages

Like most highly-praised  western literature, I first read Around the World in 80 Days through the Great Illustrated Classics series, along with other Verne works. I’ve never read Verne as an adult, and decided to remedy that this week. Around the World seemed best,  as I was in the mood for a world-traveling adventure.

In the year 1872, Phineas Fogg made a bet with his friends at the local gentleman’s club, staking half his fortune -- £20000 -- that he could leave the club, take a train to the shore, board a ship, and travel completely around the world in less than three months -- in eighty days, in fact. His friends think they are taking their dinner companion for a sucker -- travel the world in eighty days? Even with steamships and rail-lines spanning continents, it’s simply not possible! There are too many variables to ensure success -- ill weather, for instance, or mechanical failure. Fogg coldly defends his premise and sets out along with his freshly-hired manservant, Passepartout.

Starting from England, Fogg sails through the Suez Canal, intending to travel across India by train and then take connecting steamers from China to Japan and there to the United States; a train across the continent, and a final steamer back to Liverpool. Fogg doesn’t think the odds are against him, although all the world does -- and so he dares the universe to do its worst. Even if storms, the Indian jungle, and Sioux raiding parties were not enough to derail Fogg's timetable, he departs England with a detective on his heels:  a policeman named Mr. Fix has decided that the eccentric Mr. Fog, a man of substantial means but no visible way of acquiring them, recently robbed a bank for £12,000 pounds and has set out on this bet to throw the law off his trail.

      I didn't expect a book from the 19th century to be such a breezy, fun read: I look forward to visiting Verne more. Verne is obviously writing for 1872's readers, who live in a world where a continent may be spanned in a week, where all the world is open to them provided their country has access to sufficient coaling stations: the narrator serves as a tour guide, excitedly lecturing on the geography and history of our characters'  waystations while Fogg stares resolutely toward the future (or to his schedule) and Passepartout stares at the surroundings in confusion and awe. All the varied landscapes of the world carry with them their hazards: some natural, and some fabricated. Passepartout learns that the hard way when he accidentally violates Hindu customs and barely escapes with his life.

   A trip around the world in eighty days may seem unremarkable to 21st century personalities accustomed to jet planes, but if readers can settle down into the age in which technological progress was first taken for granted, into a world being radically altered by steam power and nation-states with focused economies, they may stand breathlessly on the deck of a steamship beside Passepourtout and wonder at what is possible. Around the World is definitely one to recommend.

The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel
© 1907 Jack London
354 pages

(Mysteriously, my public library's 1907 copy of this book has survived a century of use, although its tattered pages testify that the years have been harsh on it. If it ever had a colorful dustcover of some kind, that has long vanished. My copy is a straight hardback, so this is lifted from Google Images.)

Jack London was the first serious author I ever read, my first novel being his The Call of the Wild. I've been meaning to read something else by him for years, and when I heard of The Iron Heel I knew I wanted to experience it.


The first thirty-three years of the 20th century witnessed the ultimate downfall of Europe's old aristocratic order and the rise of fascism, replacing the old monarchies with a terrifying new form of totalitarianism in light of liberal democracy's apparant failure to maintain prosperity. Cultural pessimism had become the order of the day, allowing sweeping new approaches that claimed to be rooted in older principles.

Imagine if aristocracy and classically liberal democracy fell to authoritarian states, but not to fascism. Imagine if the capitalist nations, rather than having their institutions infinitely maintained as liberal democracies aspired to do or being overthrown as socialists and fascists wanted, had simply been realized in full. Imagine that decades of the "hands-off" approach to economics, coupled with the tendecies of capitalism to magnify wealth expotentially and concentrate that wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer hands through competition, has resulted in the overwhelming majority of the United States' economy being owned by five large trusts who work together for mutual benefit. These trusts own the political machines that control the government, which might -- through "trust-busting" politicians and regulation -- by otherwise hinder their increasing power. These economic potentates control the resources of the land through the businesses and government, and as they grow they destroy the increasingly marginalized middle class and turn the general populace into industrial serfs, serving long hours for pitiful wages and utterly dependent on their masters for sustenance.

Penguin Classics cover.

This is the world of Jack London's Iron Heel, framed as a historical document complete with an introduction and running commentary from a historian centuries in the future. (Margaret Atwood may have borrowed this device for her The Handmaid's Tale.) The fictional author of the text is Avis Everhard, wife of Ernest Everhard: the man who predicts the coming of the Oligarchy and leads the revolution against it. At first he speaks only for members of the Socialist Party, but when his confrontations with the economic masters force them to abandon subtly in favor of outright tyranny -- using the state militias and private armies to oppress dissent and cause opponents to 'vanish' -- he becomes the leader of a nationwide proletarian revolution against the rule of the Iron Heel. He is martyred in the cause (as our historian informs us in the introduction), and the "Everhard manuscript" is Avis' tribute to him, written so that his role in routing the Oligarchy will not be forgotten. He is her idol, her "Eagle": a hero of humanity, full of passion and might. She writes with hope on the eve of a planned Second Revolt against the Oligarchy, although the framing device makes it clear to the reader that the Second Revolt is an even greater failure, resulting in the Oligarchy's global domination until its eventual downfall.

The Iron Heel is an interesting novel. It predates other dystopian works and introduces devices and themes used in the works* that followed, as is the case with the Atwood example. Like other dystopian novels, it functions as social criticism and as a warning to its reading audience of what may come if trends continue. London, writing in the Gilded Age -- the age of robber-barons and industrial slums -- warns against the possible total tyanny on the part of vast commercial interests.  London's flawless protagonist and the tone of the book's opening give it the feel of an author tract: the first 150 pages follow Everhard's rise as a socialist spokesperson, and through him London outlines his own grievances with the world of 1907 and why he believes in the socialist answer. Everhard addresses every class of society -- urging labor to defend itself, attempting to convince the waning small businessmen that they cannot turn back the clock of progress  Still, those pages caught my attention given my own political values and beliefs. Although this book is more than a century old, it grabbed my attention and did not let go, for I see London's concerns as still valid today. What would he make of the 'military-industrial complex', of media monoliths and their role in politics?

While the book is an interesting future/alternate history work in its own right and possibly the progenitor of a genre of fiction, it also serves to advocate for a vision of a better future, London's socialist vision in which conflicts of interests that lead to violence and hatred are removed completely. It's almost the Communist Manifesto for a mass audience, using the dialouge approach between Everhard and various audiences to explain Marxist criticism and socialist politics. It comments on London's world and ours in a decidely interesting way: definitely a book to  remember, revisit, and reccommend.


*The phrase "the iron heel" brings to mind George Orwell's 1984 quotation summarizing his dystopian world: "If you want a vision of the human future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."

The Gangs of New York

The Gangs of New York
© 1927 Herbert Ashbury
368 pages





A few weeks ago I opted to read Herbert Ashbury’s Gangs of New York to see what his writing style might be like. I have a strong interest in city life during the late 19th century, so a book set in that time period such as Gangs of New York is right up my alley.  The book was initially published in 1927, meaning before Prohibition and before organized crime as Americans perceive it in the form of the Mafia. The gangs presented in this book pretend to no sophistication: they are street brawlers who delight in a good fight as much as they do in making money.  Some of these crawlers make for interesting characters, like the hood who was never seen without a book in his pocket and who thought Herbert Spencer particularly good reading.

As I started in, I quickly realized that Ashbury’s work wasn’t the most readable book I’d ever picked up. It’s full of interesting information, but the information is presented as-is:  there’s little narrative here, which hurts the book. Even the slightest of narratives doesn’t just make the book easier or more “fun” for the reader: it helps the book communicate. In the chapter on tong wars in Chinatown, for instance, Ashbury tells what happens, but he does not explain what the tongs were or how they fit into immigrant society. Jerry Flamm did this in Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco’s Twenties and Thirties, and as a result I learned more in Flamm’s brief chapter on how San Francisco police officers broke the tongs of their day than in Ashbury’s longer chapter on tong history. The same is true of the gangs comprised of European immigrants: while Ashbury writes on what they did, he offers no explanation as to why they arose, although the reader can draw his or her own ideas out if they’re creative enough.

Because of this weakness, I wouldn’t recommend this for readers just starting to explore this period. The book’s genuine wealth of information -- including varied and bizarre characters and stories -- is of value to a more read student of the period, and it is to those readers I would recommend this work. Ashbury’s tone betrays the time in which he wrote this: his criticism often employs religious language, giving it an expressly moralistic flavor which I found more amusing than anything else. Ashbury’s words often have a shadow of racism about them, and they are particularly dark in the chapter on the tongs of Chinatown.

The book thus has its problems, but given the wealth of information here, is still very much useful to a student of the period. The book covers nearly a hundred years of history, and I was able to see the gangs evolve from collections of uniformed hoods who liked brawling to political bully-boys and “businessmen”.  Ashbury does a good job of portraying how bleak a place late-19th century New York was, and I think I leave the book more knowledgeable for having read it. Given that it’s such a straightforward account -- an expanded police blotter -- this will be better appreciated by those with more background knowledge.