Reflection on Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore by James T. Patterson

               I picked this book up to take a break from a very long book about the Holocaust that I’m reading that has been difficult to get through. This book sort of picks up where the last one I finished, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970’s and the Last Days of the Working Class, left off, though it’s not as good as the latter, which was 11/10 amazing. This book covers political, economic, and social issues and is part of the Oxford History of the United States collection, which I can officially vouch for since about a year ago I read the Glorious Cause, the part of the series that addresses the Revolutionary War. Very informative, undergraduate level books that give you a good sense of the times.

               There is some overlap with Stayin’ Alive early on, discussing the economic state of the country, which faced a “Great Recession” from 1973-1975, a term I used to think had only ever been applied to our recession in 2008. This book further drives home the point that busing was a critical political issue across the nation, as whites did not want to bear the costs of integration. They also just didn’t want to integrate. It’s amazing to see the development of the private schools as white parents pulled their kids out of integrated public schools all across the nation and sent them to whiter, private schools. In Boston, for example, in 2003, minorities were 86 percent of public school students. It reminds me of another form of racialized secession, like in the Civil War. It is toxic that segregation continues and it seems like stronger forces are needed to integrate, but to do so in a much more friendly and reasonable way.

               The book also discusses the parallel revolutions that occurred. First, the sexual revolution in the late 1960’s freed women and men to have premarital sex with more partners, especially as birth control became more common. However, a counter-revolution occurred, reaching its peak in the 1990’s of politicized Christianity, “The Moral Majority.” People got divorced more and had more children out of wedlock.

               At the same time, money was being funneled into politics like never before. The average cost of winning a seat in the Senate in 1976 was just $600,000 but by 1990 it was $4 million and I assume much higher today. What was the trigger for this? Libertarians often argue that there’s so much money in politics because government is so big that it is worthwhile for corporations to buy it out but I wonder if there were similar increases during massive increases in federal government spending during World War One, the New Deal, or the Great Society. I would think they’re wrong because the period 1976-1990 is marked by a dramatic reduction of taxes, federal employees, and the size of government. I bet it has to do with campaign finance law, specifically the laws passed in 1974 that I can’t remember the name of (Buckley-Valeo?).

               In the last book I read, I came away with the impression that Nixon was the basis of modern Republican campaigning strategy. Likewise, it seems like Gerald Ford was the basis of Republican high-level staffing from 1974-2009. He hired guys like Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Powell in his administration and those guys would go on to do very big things in the Republican party. The continuities in the Republican party are very consistent. For example, Republicans, at least since Nixon, love the strong man. When Khmer Rouge soldiers kidnapped the American crew of the ship Mayaguez, President Ford sent a rescue team after them and it was a huge failure. They lost more men than had originally kidnapped and didn’t even rescue the hostages. Ford eventually got them back by negotiating, but despite the failure, or maybe because of it, Ford had a huge surge in popularity, people admiring his show of steel. Maybe it’s all Americans, and not just Republicans.

               Despite praising FDR in his inaugural address, Reagan was no FDR. He would cut income taxes multiple times, doing the bulk of the work in getting the top bracket’s rate from 70% in 1981 down to 35% by 2004. Reagan also maintained Nixon’s electoral victories all across the country, winning the business owners in the East, White identity-politics voters (what’s this code for?) in the South, and small-government types in the West who wanted more land in private rather than federal hands. Despite lowering taxes, Reagan ran up deficits by spending $2 trillion during his eight years on the military, and though a smaller percentage of the budget than during the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, “Defense” was taking up 25% of the federal budget. What made Reagan such a special Cold Warrior was that he believed the Cold war could be won. I had thought this was a standard opinion but the author points out that most experts, including CIA officials, failed to predict the demise of the Soviet Union, and many were fine with a perpetual state of Cold War. All Reagan had to do was conceive of an end and will it.

               The culture war of the 1960’s continued to be fought through the 1980’s and 1990’s through issues like abortion, AIDS, gay marriage and service in the military, music censorship, teaching evolution in schools, black power, sexual freedom, and drug use. By the time we look at the 1990’s it feels like its become the preeminent issue in domestic policy, and today the “culture war” affects foreign policy through support of Palestine or Israel, admission of Muslim refugees, and the debates on immigration. If The 1960’s set the “war” in motion, then by the 1990’s it was the strongest force in politics, really only growing stronger as I reflect on the politics of my own life until today, in 2018. It seems like all the biggest issues now that our country faces are social issues about who is to be accepted and who is not to be accepted and what behavior will be tolerated, relating to racial issues, gender issues, religious issues, and more. The 1960’s and 70’s were a sort of pivoting from issues of class and with the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90’s, social issues became everything by the end of the Clinton administration. IT seems like the cultural conflict remains unsettled today, though the left-wing made serious gains in LGBT rights and continues to push forward on legalization of Marijuana. However there is little progress on racial issues, which have seemed to remain at the status quo, though the fighting it worse, like trench warfare.

               America hit its stride economically in the 1980’s and 90’s with tons of optimism in the power of capitalism from the bounce back in the 80’s and the fall of Communism in the early 90’s. In 1999 (as the dot com bubble inflated), teenagers were asked how much money they expected to earn at 30 years old, with the median answer being $75,000, or three times the median salary at the time. It must have been a rude awakening for the economy to crash down on those teenagers not even ten years later. I bet that had a very big impact on their outlook on the world.

               The book then discusses the Clinton years, which appear similar to the Carter years in that Clinton conceded economic policy to conservatives in the Republican Party, but different in that Clinton was a more clever politician than Carter. Clinton was actually able to play the middle successfully where Carter failed but he was still punished brutally by the Republicans even though he was doing their bidding. He was basically a corrupt womanizer, but in politics what else is new? The Republican leaders like Gingrich were doing the same and Dennis Hastert was a child molester. Despite huge economic success, Republicans remained energized and unwilling to give an inch, winning the House in 1995 for the first time since 1955. Democrats remained willing to give up everything they had fought for over half a century for, approving personal income tax cuts as well as cuts to the capital gains tax, which almost exclusively benefits high earners. Clinton and other Democratic leaders continued to bleed the labor unions, once their strong allies and the backbone of the party, with NAFTA, proposed by Bush 41 and confirmed by Clinton, it helped corporate bosses move more jobs out of the United States. By 2001, only 13.5% of American workers (and 9% of those in the private sector) were members of unions. No major political party represented the economic interests of the working class, so they identified with the party that represented their social/cultural interests. Generally, this was the more conservative Republican Party.

               Despite what looked like big success, Americans in general did not feel more successful, even if the stock market was quadrupling in value in just a decade. This was because the real buying power of wages, despite a 90 cent increase in the minimum wage in 1996, continued to decline. Since the 1970’s, the decline in standard of living for White, working class men was especially bad, as wages declined while people of color and women entered the workforce and unions declined, creating intense competition in the labor market. It was ironic then that a lot of standard-of-living items got better. By 2001, any American that wanted color TV had it, the vast majority had microwaves, washing machines, cable TV, and AC, and the majority had personal computers and cars or trucks. These items became cheap enough for most Americans to buy, though almost all wage/income increases went to those who were already the richest. In 2001, the United States produced 22 percent of the world’s output, while Great Britain produced only 8% of world output at the height of its empire in 1913.

               This book was a very good read though it took me a little bit to get through the first chapter. It’s well-written and helped bring me up to speed on why our country was the way it was going up to 9/11, which was when as a child I started to develop consciousness of history/politics going on around me. To really complete my reading from the late 60’s onward I need something on the Bush and Obama administrations now. But for now I’m reading the Chernow biography of George Washington and I feel kind of complete on recent American history for the time being. Anyway, this book was great and very approachable. 8/10 would recommend.

Reflection on Stayin’ Alive: The 1970’s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson Cowie

This is a top-notch book. “Stayin’ Alive” tells the story of the 1970’s as a transitional decade for the working class, touching on all aspects of the times, going in-depth into the songs and music, the economic debates, and the intraparty wrestling at the Democratic conventions of 1968 and 1972. I’ve been blown away by the similarities to the current political moment and the early 70’s and the story of the loss of class consciousness and the beginning of the current culture war is very well told. Ultimately, it’s the story of the change from the New Deal era to the current nameless era that pivoted with Nixon and peaked with Reagan, emphasizing small government and the lowering of working people’s wages. You can sum it up in one statistic: “The weekly earnings of non-supervisory workers increased 62 percent between 1947 and 1972 before stagnating indefinitely thereafter.”

               The book starts with several case studies of work stoppages and strikes in the late 60’s and early 70’s. It paints a picture of some really big potential for labor, as there was huge consciousness of the need to fight as the decade began. One big reason for this was that a new generation was working in the mines, the mills, and the factories. These were no longer immigrants or “ethnic whites” who had come desperate for any job. These were their sons, who after seeing the youth movements of the 1960’s didn’t just want jobs but wanted good jobs. The new generation fought to achieve union leadership but faced stiff opposition from the union establishment, the worst of which was the murder of insurgent union leadership candidate Jock Yablonski on December 31, 1969. The author clarifies that this “reawakening” that occurred in the rank-and-file was not a renewal, but a breaking apart of old bonds that had kept the New Deal society together. Unlike the 1930’s, when there was unity, labor was just one part of many social movements in the late 1960’s and quickly found itself torn apart by cultural issues and foreign policy debates.

               The second chapter covers the nitty gritty of political machinations, focusing on three men- George Wallace, the virulent racist who advocated for the working class as an independent in 1968 and a Democrat in 1972, George McGovern, Bobby Kennedy’s chosen heir and leader of the “New Left” (hippies), and Richard Nixon. It really surprised me how suddenly the book changed in format and content, but it did so really well. It covers not only how the Democrats were defeated in ’68 after spending 28 of the previous 36 years in power, but how the coalition of the working class fell apart. It began with Wallace’s campaign in 1968, that made a very strong 3^rd party showing, taking five southern states, though losing the urban north largely due to a labor campaign against him. When the 1972 election came around, it was a heated three-way battle between McGovern, Wallace, and a guy named Muskie, who was supported by the unions. McGovern was able to secure the nomination, but significant numbers voted for Wallace, drawn by his opposition to bussing programs, and labor hated McGovern despite his impeccable voting record. This hatred was mainly cultural, as McGovern was supported by more affluent hippie-types, while George Meany, who hated Communists, golfed with Richard Nixon. The Republicans successfully stuck McGovern with the 3 A’s: Amnesty (for draft-dodgers), Acid (confusing it with Marijuana), and Abortion. It was very successful. The unions refused to endorse a candidate and Wallace couldn’t run as an independent after being shot and paralyzed by a would-be assassin. Wallace’s voters flocked to Richard Nixon, as the busing issue tore the democrats apart. Busing was a big issue because while liberal elites supported the integration of the races, it tended to be implemented so that working-class families’ kids were the ones sent to worse schools. Working-class people knew this and fought against it, partially out of racism and partially out of being forced to lower their children’s opportunities. It set white, blue-collar northerners with southerners against blacks and upper-middle-class liberals. 1972 became a purely cultural contest as the unions supported a Republican who wanted to destroy them to avoid the social connections to the “New Left.” The failed McGovern campaign would make cowards out of future Democrats, caving to Republicans on the economy and criminal justice issues for the three to four decades that followed. Richard Nixon lectured his advisors, “The real issues of the election are the ones like patriotism, morality, religion—not the material issues. If the issues were prices and taxes, they’d vote for McGovern. We’ve done things labor doesn’t like. We’ve held wages down. But they’ll support us for these other reasons.”

               Something that shocked me in this chapter was how much labor hurt itself with official support for the Vietnam War. George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, the biggest union at the time, was chiefly responsible, as he was staunchly anti-Communist and backed LBJ’s war all the way, even when it became Nixon’s war. He wasn’t unopposed, but he wasn’t completely alone. Many union men were angry that their sons were sent to fight a seemingly pointless war, but many others (with some overlap) were also contemptuous of the hippies and draft-dodgers who opposed it, especially when it came to the college deferment, as union men didn’t go to college and rich kids did.

               The third chapter is titled “Nixon’s Class Struggle,” and moving on from the failure of the McGovern campaign, covers the triumph of Nixon and his forging of a new political coalition that would last at least until today. It’s an age-old battle. While FDR rallied the people against economic elites who wanted to form an “industrial dictatorship,” Nixon put the blame on a “liberal cultural elite” who want to take your money and give it to someone who doesn’t work. From reading this, I’ve learned a lot about how much of a political workhorse Nixon was, spending, according to his close advisors, about 50% of his time on policy issues and the other 50% on “nonsubstantial aspects of the presidency,” AKA politics- stuff like proposing something popular he was against so he could get Democrats to stop it and put the blame on them. He even secretly had his people hurt the moderate Muskie campaign so he would get to face McGovern, calling New Hampshire voters and telling them that they were Muskie supporters from Harlem and spreading fake news alleging that Muskie supported busing. He wanted to face McGovern to emphasize the culture war.

               The fourth chapter is called “I’m Dying Here,” and covers the culture of the New Left that emerged from the 60’s and supported McGovern along with its failure to build any real political power in the 1970’s. The fundamental issue was (and still is) condescension. John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival said it best (quoted in the book), “when it comes to doing the real crap that civilization needs to keep going, who’s going to be the garbage collector? None of us will.” The problem with the hippies being in the same movement as labor is that the hippies looked down on labor as doing meaningful tasks and living unfulfilling lives. It wasn’t completely off—after all, nobody liked to work in difficult, blue-collar jobs, but folks like it even less when you look down on them for doing so. The hippies and a lot of the social left today managed to achieve their enlightenment by leaving the rest of the pack and separating from society, rarely acknowledging that it is a privilege to do so. They were and are college-educated and never worked with their hands. Why should a working class person respect someone who thinks they’re stupid. It wasn’t the working class that left the hippies, it was the hippies that left them. That division is still strong today with Trump and the modern social liberals who look down on his supporters as ignorant racists who are being fooled into supporting someone who lowers the taxes on the rich and degrades the social safety net. What they’re seeing isn’t people being tricked, but people showing you the price they’re willing to pay for respect and dignity—for a political leader who tells them that they matter. The New Left made a tremendous error that forced them into submission to the true elites—the wealthy.

               This chapter also tells a short story about Carroll O’Connor who played the resentful, working-class Archie Bunker on “All in The Family,” a hit TV show where he was the conservative member of the silent majority in the family. The irony was that when a strike broke out among the electrical workers on set, everyone was willing to break the strike except him. All the other actors, who were younger and more socially liberal, were fine breaking the strike while O’Connor claimed to be incapable of making himself do so. He said, “I could no more go into a building and work with scabs than I could play handball in a church.”

Chapter five is called “A Collective Sadness,” referring to an essay written in 1974 decrying the failure of the left against Richard Nixon and economic conservatives. It returns to the conservatives and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, who began to force wages down with their newfound power. The 1970’s witnessed two recessions and a lot of inflation, for which the two rival explanations were external supply shocks from oil or excessive wages. To this day people argue, but I think that generally people take sides on this sort of thing based on what they already thought, and not on evidence. It was the political opening that businesses were waiting for. They put the blame on the unwillingness of the post-war welfare state to allow its citizens to suffer, arguing that recessions were necessary to keep inflation from running too high. Businesses and management were reinvigorated and used the new Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1971 to dramatically expand their presence in Washington, with the number of business Political Action Committees quadrupling from 1974-1978 and corporations with offices in Washington, D.C. quintupling from 1968-1978. GM only had three staffers lobbying Congress in 1968—by 1978 they had 28. Business achieved total control of the legislative process by the end of the 1970’s after labor peaked in power in 1968 and squandered it. The first thing on the agenda was explicitly stated by U.S. Steel’s Roger Blough, who said “The No. 1 domestic problem of this country is the effect of the wage push on the total lives of everyone.” It is hard to imagine a man so evil that he would ever describe the number one problem in a country as people earning too much money for their hard work. Well the plan worked, and you’ve seen the chart on the internet—since the mid-1970’s, the top 20% of earners have gotten immensely rich and the rest of us have had our wages stagnate at real 1970’s levels. That’s the cost of failure in 1972. Over 40 years of stagnation.

The same chapter also covers the New Left’s push for racial equality in the 1970’s and the problems it ran up against. Despite the left succeeding in integrating the work force, they could not save the working class. In 1974, there were 38,096 African-American steel workers, but only 9,958 by 1988. In electrical trades, blacks increased in representation from 5.3 to 8.4 percent, but in real numbers declined by forty percent. This happened to women too, who gained in the amount of money compared to what men earned, but largely from the fact that men were facing lower wages. In the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)’s Bess F. Young case, an employer explicitly and successfully argued that he fired two black employees not because they were in a union (which would be illegal), but because they were black. 25 years later one could readily be fired for union activities but discrimination was illegal (though still widely practiced). This is another huge failure, as the trade resulted in major gains for management, weakness for labor, and minor gains for minorities. The real progress would be gains for both labor and minorities or at least maintaining labor at the level it was. The culture issues would also split women in the working class from more affluent, liberal, upper-middle-class women. For example, 94 percent of pro-choice women worked outside the home, and half of them had incomes in the top 10 percent of working women in the nation while 63 percent of pro-life advocates did not work outside the home and those that did were unmarried. One researcher explained that, “A social ethic that promotes more freely available sec undercuts pro-life women in two ways: it limits their abilities to get into a marriage in the first place, and it undermines the social value placed on their presence once within a marriage.”

               Chapter six deals with the Carter administration and its failure to do just about anything. The major issue is that Carter conceded to the Republicans that wages were too high and would not work with Democrats to strengthen labor. The Carter years were a key opportunity for labor to bounce back but they couldn’t convince their own president to help them. They tried to pass full employment legislation, but Carter wanted to appear to be on labor’s side, not actually be on their side. He allowed Republicans, who were more energized than ever with big business on their side, to amend the bill into a meaningless, symbolic paper and then, after all of that compromise, the Republicans, emboldened, still shot down the bill. Very reminiscent of modern politics. In the late 70’s, the push began for lowering taxes that would become a rallying cry under Reagan in the 80’s. The Democrats, points out the author, conceded the entire economy to the conservatives, and the left wing produced no ideas to fight with, allowing Republicans, Southern Democrats, and Conservative Democrats to lower wages and reduce inflation, giving birth to today’s massive wealth gap. None of this improved the economy quickly enough for Carter and cost him his base, prompting Ted Kennedy to attempt to primary him in ’80 and for him to lose the general election that year. Between 1949 and 1979, the inflation adjusted average hourly wage for production workers rose 75 percent, but between 1979 and 2005 it rose just 2 percent.

               The seventh chapter returns to cultural issues, like Saturday Night Fever and Taxi Driver, the big movies of the time, as well as Disco and the anti-disco movement. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, but it is really impressive how the author weaves together economic issues alternated with cultural issues, because the shift of the working class to the Republican party and its disappearance in the consciousness of America really relied on both. One interesting point was that when Elvis died in 1977, America lost the last cultural reference point that everyone agreed on. He was an icon of the working class and of a better, more traditional time, so his loss was painfully felt.

               The eighth chapter points out that the working class is not dead, though the industrial working class is much diminished. Today’s working class is in places like Wal-Mart, people working retail in jobs that are safer (thanks to unions) than those of the past but often equally boring and menial and this time without union representation increasing wages. In the future, if there is to be another working-class coalition to be formed, it cannot be based on one sector of the economy, as it was based on manufacturing and industry alone in the mid-20^th century. It has to be a flexible and accommodating movement with a “diversified portfolio” of people that it represents. It went underappreciated in the book that labor was not just vulnerable because social liberals left it behind, but because the American industrial job was at risk no matter what from a globalized, free-market economy.

               In conclusion, this has been a really enlightening book and I feel like I just finished a college course. This is such good reading for understanding today’s politics and it really clarifies the details of what actually happened in the 70’s to give birth to the modern gilded age that was conceived under Nixon, born under Reagan, came of age under neoliberals of both parties until we reach what I hope is its senile end with Trump.

Reflection on CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping by Kerry Brown

               This is a pretty solid book if you’re looking to learn about the modern Chinese Communist party and its leader, Xi Jinping. I approached it wanting to learn more about modern China and I thought a good way would be through a book about Xi, and I was right. However, the book was a little tough to get through despite being less than 300 pages long. It’s missing something extra to make it readable, but maybe that has to do with the subject who largely seems like a boring guy. “Boring guy” is probably the exact image the Party wants for its leaders though, so I guess that’s on purpose. Another fault with this book is that it was published in 2015, two years before the 19^th Party Congress when Xi consolidated power, not naming a successor and setting himself up to change the constitution so that he can rule past the end of his two five-year terms that end in 2022. I would recommend finding a new biography published after this or a revised addition to get additional information about Xi’s more recent aspirations instead of reading this.

The most interesting stuff that happens in Xi’s life are probably the recent consolidation of power and his early experience with being “sent-down.” Xi’s father was one of the OG Communist Party members who was a successful general in the north of China and Mao’s right-hand-man and held the crucial position of censor. However, this all came crashing down when he allowed a novel to mention Gao Gang, an enemy of Mao. The elder Xi was pushed out of government and was very lucky to be left alive in a time when 60,000 were purged and 1,000 were killed. While most modern Chinese leaders lives during the Cultural Revolution are secret and obscured because of their participation in the Party’s horrible crimes, Xi Jinping’s life is well-known because he was on the right side. He was sent to do manual labor on farms during his teenage years and while there applied several times to become a member of the Party, successfully entering on his tenth try. Xi has used this experience to his advantage, being the first Chinese Communist since Mao to have a “life story” that he uses to connect to the people.

               The book really drives home the importance of the shift that happened in 1978, two years after Mao’s death. The author writes, “before 1978 the core task of the Party was to effect cleansing of the class ranks through mass campaigns and class struggle. Its ethos and language of power were wholly different from those of the Party after 1978, which accepted that economic production and growth were the keys to success and national strength.” The reforms made by Deng Xiaoping really changed everything and were solidified in 2001 with China’s entry into the WTO, drastically expanding markets. However, state owned enterprises (SOEs) remain critical to the state because they provide the state’s biggest cash flow. Taxation on persons and corporations makes up less than half of the Chinese government’s income- the majority comes from SOEs. The author writes that “after 1978, it was all about becoming wealthier and better off, even if that meant living with social differences. In essence, this can be understood as a transition from ideological to material goals.” That’s why 1978 is such an important year- China stopped caring about ideology and started caring about economy.

               The author ends by stating that Xi’s power comes directly through the Party and that he is only powerful through it, stating that “on this basis, he is no Mao.” Looking at these words three years later, I would not be so sure. Now that Xi is presumably set to reign for longer than his allotted ten years and has his own “Xi Jinping Thought” enshrined in the Communist Party’s constitution, things have changed. Remember the hierarchy of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics—the only name ever put next to the word “thought” was Mao Zedong’s. I’ll end this with two good quotes from the book:

“It is quite common to argue that the elite may do [what they do] out of cynical greed. Yet a cynic who believes in nothing is unlikely to be greedy. It does not take much to provide the objective biological needs of Homo Sapiens […] That is why cynics don’t build empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of population – and in particular large segments of the elite and security forces – truly believe in it.”  - Yuval Noah Harari

“Politics is often about trying to negotiate about who will pay, and how, spreading the risks and burdens today, with the promise of returns sometime tomorrow, or in the future.”- Kerry  Brown, Author

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In the 80’s the Chinese oligarchs, all wanting their family to get ahead but realizing the need for merit to win the day agreed to allow one son from each family go into politics but no more
• Today the one true opposition to the leaders of the party is the hardcore left wing that holds up Mao as their idol and wants to expand State Owned Enterprises (SOE)
• The book often compares Xi to Pope Francis as the leader of a “faith” of over a billion people and often discusses how the Chinese Communists look to the Catholic Church as a model for their own growth, mainly impressed by its 2,000-year survival

Reflection on Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

This book is essential reading. One of the best history books I’ve read. If you’re interested at all in American history or economic history or the great inventions of the last 200 years you won’t be able to put this book down. “Americana” covers American economic history in some 30-odd chapters, each named for a product, invention, or economic organization, including tobacco, cotton, steam, rail, unions, flight, and more. Srinivasan writes it in an incredibly engaging way, covering each topic like a novelist telling the stories of boom and bust for inventors and investors, often, as a book about capitalism should do, getting into the nitty-gritty of who was investing in what and when. Overall, it’s the best book I’ve read since “The Looming Tower” or “Maps of Time.” In this post I kind of missed most of the 20^th and 21^st centuries because I got tired of writing but here it is:

The Struggle Between the Free Market and Regulation

               The major theme of the book is the eternal struggle between the forces of unbridled capitalism and wealth generation and those of democracy and constraints on capitalism’s excesses. The author makes a nuanced argument and effectively shows that at no point in American history was there ever a truly free market. The greatest successes have balanced the two ideas or chosen one in some places and another somewhere else. Consider the earliest settlers of British America: the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Virginia Colony:

The first economic system practiced in the Massachusetts Colony was a sort of proto-Communism, with all food belonging in common to the community and company. This failed as no one had a motivation to do work, and once they switched to everyone growing their own, they produced much more food.

In Virginia, the opposite happened. Virginians quickly determined that they could make the most money through tobacco, which became almost the entirety of the crop they harvested. This resulted in food shortages putting them on the brink of starvation. As a result, the answer was economic regulation- the governor ruling that ever man must plant two acres of corn to ensure his entire food supply before planting any tobacco.

The trend continued throughout American history. For example, where would Carnegie’s U.S. Steel have been without the 28 dollar-a-ton tariff on British steel? At the time, Carnegie was selling at 68 dollar-per-ton, so British companies would have had to sell at 40 including shipping, which was impossible.

               Many great capitalist successes are owed to government intervention. The steamboat developed out of a monopoly grant, the railroad benefitted from eminent domain, the telegraph was subsidized by the government early in its development, cotton had state-sanctioned slavery, and steel had tariff protection. While the automobile benefitted from no direct government regulations in its earliest development, it did benefit from the regulations the government put on people, requiring licenses and traffic rules. Although these rules made the barrier to entry higher, they increased confidence that the new invention could be safely used, making more want to buy cars.

The Exploitation of Man’s Labor

               The earliest major labor force in the colonies was the indentured servant, who agreed to work on a farm for a certain number of years in exchange for the payment of their passage to America and a small parcel of land upon the termination of the contract. In Virginia in 1625, indentured servants made up 487 people in the population of 1,227, or nearly 40% of the population. There were only 23 black slaves. Why so many indentured servants? First, England was very politically volatile from 1625 until the 1640’s due to King James’s death and the English Civil War; second, Spain and the Netherlands controlled the sea and the slave trade, as it was most profitable to send slaves to sugar plantations closer to the equator, which were bigger and closer to Africa- a slave ship could make a round trip journey from West Africa to Brazil in the time it would take to get to Virginia one way. In the first half of the 17^th century, ¾ of the white settlers to arrive in Virginia were indentured servants.

               The calculation began to change in the later 17^th century as the political situation stabilized in England and Virginia started to run out of land, as there was only so much good land that could be promised to new settlers each year. By the end of the century the slave population was skyrocketing from just 2,000 in Virginia in 1670 to 16,000 in 1700 and growing fast. As new colonies were formed, they used land grants to attract settlers. South Carolina for example, granted 150 acres per family member, but counted slaves as family members. This dramatically increased the value of having a slave in South Carolina and by 1720 the majority of the colony was African slaves, “a condition that would hold for generations.” Increased cotton production, especially thanks to the invention of the cotton gin, resulted in the rise of Louisiana and Mississippi, and African slaves produced so much cotton for their White planter overlords that the American South was supplying 70 percent of the world’s raw cotton.

               Slavery made a ton of money and the Civil War was the only way to end it at the time. After all, the nearly four million slaves in the South were worth $2.8 million collectively, while the longest railroad in America, the Illinois Central, the most valuable industrial asset in the pre-war North, was worth just a billion dollars, slightly over a third a value of the slaves. The country could not pay the Southern Planter class for its slaves because the value was worth forty times the federal budget at the time. The war was about slavery- more for the South than the North. South Carolina’s “official declaration of the causes of secession” explicitly referred to the “election of a man… whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” Other states, like Mississippi and Georgia did not refer to slaves themselves, but rather to billions of dollars “of our property,” which can only refer to human property being that valuable.

               Cotton was the life and death of the South and in the Civil War it was death. Perhaps the biggest reason the Union beat the Confederacy was due to the naval supremacy it used to blockade the Confederates, preventing them from exporting their cotton and funding the war effort. This led to a dramatic increase in cotton production in British Egypt and India, doubling their production in just 6 years. It was so significant that “historians of Egypt still rank the American Civil War among the most crucial events in [Egypt’s] 19^th century history.”

Connecting the Country

               The earliest settlements in British America were generally cities based on rivers, such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. In the South, there was Charleston, but generally fewer cities, as the area was more agricultural than commercial. Most transport into the mid-19^th century used waterways that were especially plentiful in the Mississippi drainage basin, extending from Western Pennsylvania to states further west like Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, and Minnesota in the North to Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana in the South. Using steam boats, it was quicker to ship goods from Pittsburgh to New Orleans by river than it was to ship them to Philadelphia by land.

               Thanks to massive government investment, the country started to build networks of canals to connect its rivers in the early 1800’s, the most famous of which is the Erie Canal. The canal meant that goods from Cleveland could be in New York in days thanks to the Hudson, connecting the Midwest with the Northern Atlantic States and New England. It allowed a small town named Chicago to grow from just 30,000 people to over a million in 40 years.

               The canals gave birth to a new form of transportation, as the steam engines used on steamboats were put to use in the first railroads. Their financial backing, government bonds, was also put to work in railroads, so that steamboats, canals, and railroads all formed as public/private partnerships, with the government “setting in place the infrastructure, reconciling federal and state laws, permitting limited liability, and defining and balancing the conflicts of property rights” enabled a free-ish market to thrive.

Today in American Capitalism

               The current state of American capitalism is defined by the last 40 years of running trade deficits and the popularization of neoliberalism, encouraging free trade throughout the world; the two phenomena are closely related. As America is a rich country, it can afford to buy goods more cheaply elsewhere that labor costs are lower, encouraging American money to flow out of the country. The neoliberal theory makes purely economic sense in its prescription to maximize comparative advantage across the world, but economic considerations are just a part of the equation. While all Americans were once producers and consumers, increasingly we are consumers and service providers at best. Because of the open markets that have dominated the last 50 years of world economics, countries have specialized; consumer consume products that they do not produce, and producers produce products that they do not consume. This kills part of the soul. People can’t be so isolated from their own communities. Producing Nike shoes for Americans thousands of miles away cannot be very morally satisfying for a Vietnamese worker as neither is it morally satisfying for the American to buy such a foreign good.

               This book has made me reflect on the warped state of the current American political scene, where extremist Reaganites like Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan advocate for eliminating massive parts of government that provide huge benefits to the economy. It’s reminded me that they are far from the mainstream and that they are not “conserving” any older US tradition. The true American capitalist tradition involves significant state spending and intervention, as the democracy wrangles with the market to create something extraordinary. To go to far to one side is dangerous, and those who would attempt to eliminate government’s role are far more radical than those who would attempt to augment it. Increasing the role of government in society has been the most successful economic trend in American history. Making the American worker stronger makes America stronger. Making the American corporation stronger makes America stronger. Retracting government’s role to allow the market to handle itself is reckless, ahistorical, and a radical position that has no basis in patriotism and would weaken us greatly.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Mayflower left England in September 1620, but not all were religious pilgrims, in fact half of them were settlers that came along for the ride but were not members of the Puritan church. Within 6 months, half of those who came on the Mayflower were dead, including Mayflower Compact author John Winthrop’s wife.
• George Washington had a company that attempted to build a canal to link the Potomac to the Ohio River, and therefore the Mississippi, but the plan never came about.
• Germany faced revolution, like most of Europe, in 1848, which was a major cause of German immigration to the USA, with over half a million arriving from 1852-1854 alone, when there was no coherent American immigration law.
• One of the new phenomena of the industrial age was over-production. In the agrarian age there was rarely such a thing as overproducing food, but in the mid to late 1800’s governments failed to provide “shock absorbers” for over-production.
• Why was the Panama Canal needed? After the Mexican-American War, the USA gained control of California and discovered gold in 1849. People flooded in during the gold rush over land. By the turn of the century California and the West were well-populated, but “on sea, the nautical distance from Charleston, South Carolina to Santa Barbara, passing below the southern tip of South America, was greater than the distance from Monterrey, Mexico to Shanghai.
• There are many reasons to hate the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act, among other things. But I learned that it also incentivized magistrates to rule that ex-slaves should return to their masters, as they were paid 10 dollars for expenses for ruling that one was an escaped slave, but only 5 dollars for ruling that they should be free.
• While the saloon died out with Prohibition, until then, it provided a major social element, cashing checks, and serving as a mailing address for new arrivals (immigrants etc). It was a crucial element of machine politics, especially of the Democratic Party.
• Andrew Carnegie offered to reimburse the American government the $20 million it paid for the Philippines if the USA would give them their independence.
• In 1916, the Model T cost $360, so that you could earn the car in just 72 days of labor.
• The government’s budget ballooned in World War One from $734 million in 1916 to $12.7 billion in 1918 and would never again fall below $3 billion. The war also affected the development of the airplane. 416 airplanes were produced in 1916 and in 1918 over 14,000 were made- all but nine for the US military.
• The Levitt and Sons homebuilders’ company of “Levittown” fame refused to sell homes to blacks.
• The Federal Housing Administration would ask underwriters to appraise residential neighborhood quality, with the primary factor being economic stability and the second OFFICIALLY being “protection from adverse influences” to avoid “infiltration” from “inharmonious racial groups.”
• The 1980’s was when the major transition happened where stock ownership became so democratized and decentralized that CEOs, who were managers, had more influence than many stockholders, a condition that continues to this day.

Reflection on Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine DeLoria, Jr.

This is not like the history books I usually read. Custer Died for Your Sins is a book really of its time, which is late 60’s America and is an effort by a major Indian leader, the Director of the National Council of American Indians (NCAI) to chart the future of the movement for Indian rights. I really liked the way it was written because it was sarcastic and had a lot of personality. There’s even a whole chapter titled “Indian Humor.” It is a little dated but holds up well and isn’t too long, under 300 pages. I’m just gonna put some passages here because I liked them. This post is just not gonna be organized really.

“There are a number of white organizations that attempt to help Indian people. Since we would be better off without them I will not mention them, except to comment that they do exist.”

“People often feel guilty about their ancestors killing all those Indians years ago. But they shouldn’t feel guilty about the distant past. Just the last two decades have seen a more devious but hardly less successful war waged against Indian communities.” (In reference to “termination” pursued by the federal government in the 1950’s and 60’s.”

“Indians are equally certain that Columbus brought anthropologists on his ships when he came to the new world. How else could he have made so many wrong deductions about where he was?
               While their historical precedent is uncertain, anthropologists can readily be identified on the reservations, Go into any crowd of people. Pick out a tall gaunt white man wearing Bermuda shorts, a World War II Army Air Force flying jacket, an Australian bush hat, tennis shoes, and packing a large knapsack incorrectly strapped on his back. He will invariably have a thin sexy wife with stringy hair, and IQ of 191, and a vocabulary in which even the prepositions have eleven syllables.”

“The current joke is that a survey was taken and only 15 percent of the Indians thought that the United States should get out of Vietnam. Eighty-five percent thought they should get out of America!”

DeLoria Jr. also talks a lot about the differences between blacks and Indians, often in relation to the Civil Rights Movement, which was active, as he was writing less than a year after King was assassinated. He talks about how whites view blacks as pack animals and Indians as wild animals. He excluded the blacks from the economy, politics and society, not allowing them to rise from their position. With the Indians it was the reverse, forcing them to become white through Christianity and European customs.

Miscellaneous Facts

• Scalping was introduced to the Americas by the English in the French and Indian War.
• One of the biggest tribal issues of the time was fishing and hunting rights. White sportsmen would hunt and fish for trophies, diminishing stocks that Indians depended on for food and life.
• Harry Truman appointed as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs Dillon Myer, who began the termination program in 1950. He had been in charge of Japanese internment camps during World War II and was selected for his experience with minority groups.
• Indian tribes can sue the government and win damages, but the government would still decide through legislation how to spend it.
• Tribal termination was some really horrible stuff. When Congress would want to terminate a tribe, they would have the tribe hold a referendum to approve it. This did not require any number of members to participate, so a majority could be formed of 50 from a tribe of 5,000. After the referendum, the land would be appraised and sold, so that the Indians would vote on selling before they knew the price because Congress is presumed to act in good faith towards the Indians.
• Most tribal names mean the People, First Men, or Original People.

Reflections on Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy

Caesar is a really complicated guy. He was very talented as a general and in basically everything he did, and I have a lot of sympathy to his populare political moves. Basically, he fought against the Roman aristocracy and helped the poorer people on the fringes of Roman society. He also gave clemency to his enemies and treated people well. However, he committed what we would today call a genocide in what was then called Gaul (France) and Britannia (England).  He also had a hand in destroying the Republic, a form of government that is nice; although essentially an oligarchy ruled by the wealthiest, it at least offers a version of democracy. We gotta remember thought that his role was by no means something that only he could have done. The Republic had already been screwed up royally by Marius, Sulla, Saturninus, Cinna, Catiline, etc. and there was always another one of these aristocrats trying to do what Caesar did. Obviously everyone has their own style of doing things, but I cannot imagine that Pompey winning the Civil War would have reverted Rome to its old Republican virtues. Just wasn’t gonna happen. In sum, it’s hard to have one opinion about the guy politically because he would not fall into any of our modern political categories and because its hard to say how he would have been different from other Romans at the time, especially since he was assassinated only having been dictator for like two years.

Reading this has made me feel a lot better about American democracy. When you read through the life of Caesar, what stands out is the insane amount of bloodshed in Rome throughout his life. In the week and a half when Caesar triumphed four times, he claimed to have slain over one million enemies of the republic. Over the course of his life the Republic seems to have spent as many years in civil war as in peace, and you get to see how the Republic ends because all the republican senators are killed during these wars. So, when you look at the USA in 2018 we are still doing much, much better.

As for the book itself, at points it reads like a novel and is spectacular. At about 600 pages though, there are definitely a few parts worth skimming. The highlights for me were the fleshed-out details of the battles and the way the author gives you the fuller context of Roman life in the 1^st century BC. I would recommend to anybody who wants to learn more about the period and Caesar himself. I stopped reading and picked it back up again after a few weeks because I was more interested in the period than in Caesar but I’m glad I returned to it.

Miscellaneous Facts

Caesar was a womanizer on a pretty big level. He banged basically every Roman aristocrat’s wife or sister of that generation. Poor Marcus Brutus, from Shakespearean fame “et tu Brutus,” had a mom and a sister who both had affairs with Caesar.

The book mentions that Alexander the Great, with whom Caesar is often compared, only took part in five pitched battles and three major sieges plus many smaller encounters. Caesar, on the other hand, fought 50 battles in his life, a record that wouldn’t get beaten until Napoleon came around, some 1,850 years later. I almost don’t believe those numbers for Alex though and I need to do more research on that.

Reflections on Battle: A History of Combat and Culture by John A. Lynn

Battle is book with an interesting premise. It’s a history of war but from a cultural perspective, meaning that it talks about some specific battles and tactics but always in the context of how different societies viewed them. Foe example, Middle Ages knights viewed archers and crossbowmen with contempt, but in ancient India, the bowmen were the most honored on the battlefield. The book covers different periods and locations, from classical warfare in Greece, China, and India to the scourge of global terrorism today. The chapters I found the most interesting were on Egyptian military doctrine from the first war against Israel in 1948 until the October War of 1973 and the chapter on the role of cultural differences in the war in the Pacific in World War 2.

“Perfected Warfare”

One theme throughout the book is the concept of perfecting warfare to become a perfect form of combat. The Greeks developed many rules about the conduct of war and battles, essentially restricting it to being fought in the open plains and valleys of Greece, not the mountains, and limiting the number of missile weapons used. In the Middle Ages, Christians developed a sort of “perfected warfare” in the crusades by fighting Muslims, making conflict religious, a guarantor of heaven. Also in the Middle Ages, knights developed the tournament, where they jousted and fought in melees and were rewarded with kisses from ladies. The author calls this the most perfected warfare as it is completely controlled and filled with feasts etc.

The Evolution of Modern Warfare

One of the most interesting features of the book is where it covers the changes from the 18^th to 19^th centuries in warfare, which featured the rise of the citizen army over professional armies. The professional armies themselves, as ruled by Louis XIV-XVI, Frederick of Prussia, and other leaders developed out of the small forces led by aristocrats in the Middle Ages and were still dominated by aristocratic officer who paid for their own units’ existences. There was contempt for common soldiers, as one French minister of war referred to them as the “slime of the nation.”

In these forces, combat was dominated by packed together units of soldiers alternately firing. This happened to prevent soldiers from deserting and to concentrate fire. Weapons were still not accurate as to force soldiers to hide behind cover. The big shift to soldiers becoming skirmishers hiding behind cover was thanks to the “levee on masse,” when all single, young, French men were called to service, doubling the size of the French military and providing French generals (including Napoleon) with a motivated and large force that was less prone to desertion. With this, they would spread out and take cover to fire at enemy forces.

Egypt and Israel

The chapter on Egypt was really interesting to me because it felt very connected to modern day and is deals with an area I’m particularly interested in. After the Six-Day War, Egyptian and Jordanian military forces explicitly reflected that the origin of their problems lay in Arab culture. This happened in a few ways. One was that Arab officers did not want to admit the shame of defeat or at least wanted to mitigate it so they would exaggerate Israeli troop numbers or not even tell their superiors they were defeated at all. The problem was so bad that in the more successful Egyptian effort in the October War, they got their information by tapping into Israeli comms, as the Israelis had the better information about Egyptian troop movements than Egyptians themselves. Another Arab cultural issue that came to the fore was a deference to authority to a fault. Unlike in American military culture, where junior officers are highly encouraged to take initiative and are given much flexibility, Egyptian officers seemed incapable of doing so. They wouldn’t even move tanks during combat, stopping them like stationary pillboxes instead of maneuvering around their enemies. The Egyptians cleverly accounted for this by planning their October 1973 operation to the most minute details, leaving no room for error. They ran the same drills for months in full view of the Israelis so that when the final, real buildup came, the Israelis didn’t expect an actual invasion and the Egyptians had each practiced their part a million times.

Interestingly, we can look at the October War as a victory for both Egypt and Israel as the victory satisfied Egyptian pride and gave Sadat the political capital to negotiate a true peace with Israel with recognition and all. It was a military stalemate that ended up granting political victory to both sides.this

Conclusion

Overall the book was good though a little wordy and academic at points. He also made what I thought was a really picky distinction about cultural differences and racism and what affected what in the Pacific Theater of WWII. It was overall good and a few chapters would probably make good reading for a college class but otherwise this book is pretty esoteric.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The West’s military revolutions
• The breeding and harnessing of horses for war
• The transition from bronze to iron
• The evolution of the war galley
• The refining of gunpowder and guns
• And the arrival of the broadside firing vessel
• Marine Corps tactics are heavily influenced by Chinese war literature
• In 1960, Literacy in Egypt was 26 percent, 15 percent in Iraq, and 36 percent in Syria. By 1990, however, Egypt was up to 48 percent, Iraq at 60, and Syria at 64.
• At 2:40 pm on September 11^th, Rumsfeld was already talking about going after Iraq. George Bush pressed analysts who told him there was no connection to find a connection on the very next day.
• In April 2003 53% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11 and by September that number was at 69%. W has gotta be one of the worst leaders of any country ever.
• Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 brought less than half the American troops to Iraq that Desert Storm had in 1991.