Reflection on Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America by Juan Gonzalez

               I loved this book. My only thing to change is that it would be longer. Harvest of Empire provides a very unique look at the phenomenon of Latino immigration to the United States and shows how much of it was caused by the USA’s own policies, which many Americans now regret, as evidenced by the entire Donald Trump presidency to this point. Gonzalez analyzes American intervention in Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the Panama Canal all the way through NAFTA. The book really goes through a full explanation of how Latinos came from being a relevant group in America, to disappearing (at least from Anglo view), to reemerging as the nations predominant ethnic and linguistic minority. The book is very well organized into roots, covering the basis of American interventions in Latin America that would weaken those countries, branches, covering the different groups of Latino immigrants to the USA, and Harvest, the results of the inclusion of Latinos in the USA. This book is very, very critical to understanding the history of the United States. Below are the questions I tried to answer.

What is the “Harvest of Empire”?

               The Harvest of Empire is the thesis of Gonzalez’s book and refers to the idea that the United States is reaping what it sowed decades and even centuries ago. This is to say that the policies of political intervention, economic domination, and cultural diffusion have led to countries with weak governments, dysfunctional economies, and cultures that look often to the United States as a beautiful, wealthy paradise. As a result, the people of Latin America will certainly try to move to the United States.

Is the rise of Latino immigrants going to lead to Spanish-language supremacy?

               No. The book discusses the fact that Latinos are unlike any ethnic group that came to the United States due to their language. Unlike Italians, Irish, Germans, Russians, and Swedes, Dominicans, Mexicans, Cubans, and Colombians (among others) share a language. This makes them into one cohesive group that we often refer to as “Hispanics.” However, most Latinos in the United States feel that learning English is necessary to living a good life, and even Latinos outside the country feel the same way. This means that while they may not abandon Spanish, they are extremely likely to adopt English.

How was the colonization by England different than that by Spain?

               In short, the English invested more in their colonies while the Spanish focused more on exploitation. While the English sent families to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Spanish sent single men in armies to South and Central America. This resulted in Spaniards having children with native women and African women who came as slaves, however, instead of treating everyone equally, they created an underclass of non-white peoples who suffer to this day for the color of their skin. They had a rate of illegitimate births close to fifty percent, much higher than anywhere in Europe. The English Colonies largely avoided this in the more prosperous North, though it certainly occurred in the southern colonies.

               As a result of this racial disparity, White Spaniards rarely did any hard labor, and became, much like the White property owners in Virginia and other states in the South, moneyed landowners who exploited the rest. In the northern states, all did work and created a more durable, egalitarian society.

               As the two regions developed, the Spanish mayorazgo made a family’s landholdings legally indivisible, handed down to the eldest son. Because properties could be added together but not split, mergers of older estates combined to increase and never decrease the holdings of the wealthiest landowners. In the English colonies it was completely different. Over there people would buy and sell property in a free market, keeping things more fair and also creating a new economy based on real estate sales.

In many ways the Spanish colonies are very similar to the old South of the USA, but the northern states set the English colonies apart. They had public education among the congregational churches while the Jesuits were removed from the Spanish colonies, along with the education they provided, in 1767.

               “Latin America,” as the author writes, “became a land of social inclusion and political exclusion.” While English America developed strong and diverse economic and political systems, it remained racially intolerant. The racial intolerance of both regions affected each one greatly. However, if you decide you absolutely must be a racist bigot, it is better to be one in a country without many of the people you hate. After all, what motive did white Latinos have to build the public education, infrastructure, and institutions of the countries they lived in? “Of 13.5 million people living in the Spanish colonies in 1800, less than 3 million were white,m and only 200,000 of those were peninsulares, born in Spain.” The men who rebelled against Spain were in constant fear of 80% of their own population, a condition that was not present in the USA at anywhere near the same level. They were racists and saw no value in their darker-skinned co-citizens. In the United States, or at least in the North, racist whites built all of those public systems because they felt that they were building them for white people. Both English and Latin America were significantly damaged by racism of the white, European-descended peoples and continue to hurt themselves with racism. Only by defeating racism can any of the “New World” countries gain prosperity.

How did NAFTA affect Latino immigration to the United States?

               In short, NAFTA made it much easier for capital to flow across bothers but not so much for people (at least in any legal way). Factories in the United States moved across the border to Mexico, and the Mexican workers at that factory soon learn that they can move to the United States for better wages. To quote the book, “Each day, the worker devours the Spanish-language magazines and newspapers that are easily available in the cities and which glorify life in the United States. The worker quickly learns she can earn ten times the salary she gets in the maquila doing the same job in a factory across the border. Eventually, filled with her new consciousness and disgusted with her dead-end shantytown existence, the worker saves up the money to pay a coyote and risks the trip to El Norte.” Because managers considered Mexican men harder to control, they hired as many women as possible, who had rarely worked outside the home before, therefore doing nothing to solve the unemployment problem in Mexico, so the push factor remained, driving migrants to the United States.

               Capital flowed to Mexico in massive waves, as US, Canadian, and European banks poured in more than $30 billion, controlling the financial sector. While in 1997, foreign firms controlled just 16% of Mexico’s banking assets, by 2004 that number was up to 82%. Just two banks, BBVA Bancomer (owned in Spain), and Banamex (owned by the American Citigroup), controlled 48% of all banking assets.

Miscellaneous Facts and Good Quotes from the Book:

• “The occupation turned the country and the city of Córdoba into the Western world’s premier center for the study of science and philosophy, while the fighting engendered a hardened warrior ethos in the hidalgos, Spain’s lower nobility. It was those hidalgos who later rushed to fill the ranks of the conquistador armies in the New World. The wars provided vital practice in colonization, with Spanish kings gradually adopting the practice of paying their warriors with grants from land they recovered in battle. Finally, La Reconquista reinforced a conviction among Spaniards that they were the true defenders of Catholicism.”
• “By the late 1500s, a mere century after the Conquest began, scarcely 2 million natives remained in the entire hemisphere. An average of more than 1 million people perished annually for most of the sixteenth century, in what has been called “the greatest genocide in human history.” On the island of Hispaniola, which was inhabited by 1 million Tainos in 1492, less than 46,000 remained twenty years later.”
• “90 percent of the Indian population was gone within half a century of the Puritan landing on Plymouth Rock; the Block Island Indians plummeted from 1,500 to 51 between 1662 and 1774; the Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard declined from 3,000 in 1642 to 313 in 1764; and the Susquehannock tribe in central Pennsylvania nearly disappeared, falling from 6,500 in 1647 to 250 by 1698.”
• Peach trees were introduced to the Americas by the Spanish.
• In the United States, for instance, the first federal census in 1790 reported that “free coloreds” were less than 2 percent of the population, while black slaves were 33 percent.40 The same proportion of free blacks to slaves was roughly true in the British, Dutch, and French Caribbean colonies. But the opposite trend prevailed in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, where free blacks or coloreds outnumbered slaves, with perhaps 40 to 60 percent of free blacks able to purchase their emancipation outright.41 The viceroyalty of New Grenada, which included Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, had 80,000 slaves and 420,000 free coloreds in 1789.42 Cuba had 199,000 slaves and 114,000 free coloreds in 1817.43 By 1872, free coloreds composed 43 percent of Brazil’s population, outnumbering both pure whites and black slaves.
•  Simón Bolívar traveled the United States in 1806
• While 25,000 Americans died in the Revolutionary War, 600,000 died in Mexico and Venezuela lost half of its nearly one million residents. The book doesn’t give me the number for all the countries, but the wars were much bloodier in Latin America.
• “By the time Díaz was overthrown, U.S. investment in Mexico totaled $2 billion. Led by the Rockefellers, Guggenheim, E. H. Harriman, and J. P. Morgan, North Americans ended up controlling all the country’s oil, 76 percent of its corporations, and 96 percent of its agriculture. The Hearst family, whose newspapers and magazines routinely lauded Díaz, owned a ranch with a million cattle in Chihuahua. U.S. trade with Mexico, which amounted to only $7 million in 1860, jumped tenfold by 1908. By then, the United States was consuming 80 percent of Mexico’s exports and supplying 66 percent of its imports.”
• The first major settlement of Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico was Oahu, Hawaii.
• To build the Panama Canal, 150,000 West Indians went migrated to Panama, whose population had been just 400,000 people beforehand.
• During the Great Depression, every Latin American country except for Haiti defaulted on its loans.
• WWII had a big impact on Puerto Ricans, who fought at a disproportionate level during the war, maing them feel that they deserved all the rights of citizenship.
• Ybor City was created as a company cigar town by Cuban emigres in 1885.
• From 1952-1980, the only way you could get asylum in the United States was by claiming to flee from Communism and nothing else.
• In the riots after the Rodney King murder, there were more Latinos arrested in LA than African Americans.
• “That tranquillity was shattered on April 9, 1948, with the assassination of the charismatic Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. The murder so enraged his supporters that mobs attacked and burned Bogotá in the worst urban riot in Latin American history, leaving two thousand dead and millions in property damage. That touched off ten years of brutal civil war between Liberals and Conservatives, a bloodletting so horrific that all Colombians simply refer to it as La Violencia. No one knows how many died. Estimates range from 180,000 to more than 200,000, making it far more devastating, given Colombia’s size, than the U.S. Civil War. Death squads, called pájaros, roamed the countryside on orders of the landed oligarchy, butchering any farmer suspected of being a Liberal, while guerrilla bands of Liberal Party supporters targeted the biggest landowners.”
• “Between 1973 and 1979, according to one study, those who said they planned to return to Cuba if Castro should be overthrown plummeted from 60 to 22 percent.”
• “Thus by 1995, the mayoralty in four of the country’s largest cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia—had passed from a liberal or moderate black incumbent to a more conservative white leader. In each case, Hispanic voters shifted in significant percentages from the previous black mayor to the new white candidate, and each time the argument of those who switched sounded the same: “We weren’t treated as equal by the black leaders.” Meanwhile, the failure of Jesse Jackson to expand his Rainbow Coalition through a third presidential campaign in 1992 left the movement organizationally adrift at the national level. Even as the number of black and Hispanic leaders in Congress reached a record number, the cohesiveness of the alliance fractured, especially as black voters along with whites grew increasingly uneasy about the country’s population of Hispanics and Asians. In November of 1994, for instance, a majority of black Californians voted for Proposition 187 to cut off all public benefits to illegal immigrants. Thus, the Rainbow Coalition was dead as a vehicle for a new progressive alliance by early 1995, even though Jackson never officially declared its demise but simply folded it into his old Operation PUSH organization.”
• “The major problem is that those contributions are unevenly distributed between federal and local governments. In New York State, for instance, immigrants, the bulk of them Latinos, made up 17.7 percent of the population in 1995, earned 17.3 percent of total state personal income, and paid 16.4 percent of total federal (including Social Security), state, and local taxes. The problem was that 69 percent of those taxes went to the federal government, while only 31 percent remained in local coffers. A similar study in 1990–1991 of illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County overwhelmingly showed that they contributed $3 billion in taxes, but 56 percent of the money went to Washington, while the local costs of dispensing health care, education, law enforcement, and social services to the county’s illegal immigrant population far surpassed the immigrants’ contributions.”
• Mexican illegal immigrants, who are from 3-10 percent illiterate, tend to be more literate than average Mexicans, who are 22 percent illiterate.
• The USA is the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world with 41 million speakers of the language, following Mexico, Spain, Argentina, and Colombia.
• On the first US Census in 1790, 8.7 percent of Americans spoke German as their first language.
• Louisiana’s second governor, Jacques Villere, spoke no English and always addressed the legislature in French.
• Loopholes in the US federal tax code have led more than 110 of the Fortune 500 companies to plant subsidiaries in Puerto Rico.

Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (Kindle Locations 1306-1310). Penguin Books. Kindle Edition.

Reflection on The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances Fitzgerald

               This is a book about white evangelical movements, mainly as a way to understand the modern Christian right wing of American politics. It was a really deep look into movements I had not yet understood and still need to learn more about. This post is a little disorganized but basically I tried to answer a few critical questions. There is A LOT to learn about Evangelicals but I think the best way to sum it up is that they are a critical part of the United States’ history and their teachings are always in a state of evolution. I gained a new appreciation and respect for Evangelical people and Evangelical thought.

Who were the early Protestants in the United States?

               The earliest Protestant evangelicals existed and spread their teachings well before the United States existed. They were Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, the most prominent of the first generation of preachers to cross colony lines and united the colonies on something larger, in this case, the evangelical denominations, meaning those who evangelize, seeking out new converts. They were the Baptists, the Methodists, and Presbyterians.

               Edwards began by telling people what they already believed, which was that they were sinners and needed to repent. However, he did so in a more dramatic and intense language that had ever been used before. In addition, he taught something new- that instead of “renewing covenant” and preaching obedience to ministers, Edwards taught that each person can have an individual relationship with God and that Christ would receive all who received his teachings and grace. This revival, where most had been short-lived, lasted for years and years all over New England, challenging the dominance of the older “Congregationalist” Puritan churches. It was also more emotional. Edwards write that true religion required “A sense of the heart.” With the arrival of Englishman George Whitefield in 1739, the revivals spread through all the other colonies too. Whitefield was an itinerant preacher, who went sailing all over the eastern seaboard, spreading similar messages to all the colonies.

               These early American Protestant denominations refused to pay taxes arguing liberty of conscience. They practiced civil disobedience and their struggle would form the basis of the religious exemption to income taxes in the United States as well as the separation of church and state. These upstart denominations spread easily in the New World because the Anglican Church AKA The Church of England sent few ordained priests to massive parishes and therefore did not meet the spiritual needs of the new Americans. By 1776, there were twice as many evangelicals in the South as there were Anglicans, a religious split occurring before the political split. The First Great Awakening continued until the American Revolution and penetrated all levels of society with new, individualistic Christianity that upset established churches.

               The Second Great Awakening had an even bigger impact and came out of western states like Kentucky and Tennessee at the turn of the century. This is when the Methodists had their biggest impact, building a hierarchy of church officials, but recruiting laymen with grade-school education to minister as well. The Baptists however, spent the Second Great Awakening building the opposite structure, a confederation of independent churches that would split and form together based on doctrinal differences or the need to create a larger, more powerful organization. The Presbyterians began to fracture on the frontier as they proselytized further. In 1831, the farmer William Miller predicted that the end of the world would come in 1844- when it didn’t, those who still had faith formed the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Upstate New York was a fertile religious breeding ground, the most famous of its productions being the Mormons who would move west to what is now Utah. By 1850, over 33% of religious adherents were Methodists, 20% were Baptists, and 12% were Presbyterians.  Evangelicals made up the majority of the country’s religious practitioners.

When did Northern and Southern churches split?

               The issue of slavery was the cause of the splits in different churches in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1844, the Methodist General Conference excommunicated a Southern Bishop who had slaves and the Baptist General Convention declared it would not instate any missionary not committed to emancipation. That same year, southern Methodists and Baptists broke off to form the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and the Southern Baptist Convention. This led to southern evangelicals advocating much more for slavery based on racial inequality and from cherry-picked bible quotes.

How did evangelicalism evolve in the 20^th century?

               It had seemed to many that fundamentalism was done for after the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 that fundamentalism was dead, but while educated people certainly thought so, fundamentalism grew through the radio and tent revivals all over the country, yet even at this time, literalism was derided as an exaggeration made by secular folks. It was considered perfectly acceptable in fundamentalist circles that the Bible be read metaphorically. After World War Two, Americans “poured into churches and synagogues” as they started families and chose to raise their children in religious teachings. This was when the fundamentalist Billy Graham began to resuscitate an old word, “evangelical,” to describe his movement. It defined itself as, to quote author Frances Fitzgerald, “a conservative Protestant who had been ‘born again.’” The fundamentalists would become a subset of Evangelicals and both would become a powerful socially conservative movement in the late 20^th century. 

               Early in the 20^th century, another movement formed out of the South and Southwest “among the poor, black and white,” called Pentecostalism. The author writes that “their distinctive belied was that all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, like speaking in tongues, prophesying, and healing, were available to believers today as they were to the apostles at Pentecost.” The Pentecost, by the way, refers to the descent of the Holy Spirit to meet the apostles after Jesus’s “Ascension.” They became a very influential movement, spreading a far as Latin America. They would be included in the Evangelical “tent” by the end of the millennium.

               These varying denominations began, by the end of the 1970’s, to form confederations of interests that combined to push social issues in Congress. They were helped by Billy Graham, who was uniting the northern and southern conservative Protestants and Oral Roberts, who was spreading Pentecostalism. Pentecostal thought spread to Latin America rapidly and by the 1980s there were more Pentecostals in Latin America than the United States. By 1979 19% of all American adults identified themselves as Pentecostals or charismatics, “though only 4 percent spoke in tongues.” Charismatics are known for having an ecstatic religious experience, speaking in tongues, and healing.

               The evangelicals did not oppose abortion laws in principle, and during the 1960s the Southern Baptists supported the liberalization of state laws against it. In 1968, a symposium of prominent evangelical physicians and theologians wrote that personhood began at birth. However, in the 1970s, Christian conservatives organized and were energized like never before. Jerry Falwell’s wife, Beverly, founded the Concerned Women for America, an antifeminist organization organized in prayer circles of seven and prayer chains of fifty that asked its members to send a small number of letters, a small amount of money, and a small amount of phone calls every year. It was an excellent grassroots organization.

               Thanks to this level of organization, Christian conservatives gained a huge level of influence in the Republican party, but were disappointed when their influence failed to transform into meaningful policy (with the exception of the Defense of Marriage Act). At some point in the 2000 election, leaders abandoned the fight for a constitutional amendment against abortion and struggled to fight against gay marriage, which would become legal in 2013. The movement foundered in George Bush’s second term and it became Bush, rather than any pastor, who was the leader of the movement. In the 21^st century the Democratic Party sought to increase the relevance of the Christian left, holding several “faith panels” and “faith caucuses” at the 2008 convention. They made little headway with white Christian conservatives but showed a new willingness to attract religious voters.

Who are today’s major evangelical players?

               The author writes that Billy Graham was “the first truly national revivalist since George Whitefield,” who was active 200 years earlier. He helped to forge a religious alliance against Communism and his greatest achievement was the founding of the “evangelical” ideology, combining conservative white Protestants from the North and the South for the first time since the split in 1844. Graham talked about nations as instruments of God and Satan, introducing the idea that Communism was a tool of Satan. He would often make conditional statements about the end of the world but never committed fully to them. He influenced Eisenhower, as the president added “under God” to the pledge of allegiance and adopted the slogan “In God We Trust.” He earned few converts but united and consolidated conservative white Protestants in a way never done before. Graham struggled with segregation, sometimes integrating his sermons and sometimes not, but generally following the prevailing laws of wherever he preached, and never allowing segregation again at his events after  Brown v. Board.

               Oral Roberts was a major Pentecostalist preacher who became very popular in the 1950’s, using radio and TV stations he owned to spread his sermons. He realized that the most reliable funds came from direct mail solicitations and from the mid-1950s onward he emphasized prosperity teaching and evangelism, rather than healing people and laying hands on them to cure sicknesses and disabilities. Instead he would send “deliverance cloths” with a suggested donation, and promised “spiritual, physical, and financial” rewards to his flock.

               Jerry Falwell began the Old Time Gospel Hour at 22 years old in 1956 and would eventually build his church of just 35 members into a mega-church. He would also found Liberty University in 1971 as a place of higher learning for conservative Christians. However, he is probably most famous for founding the “Moral Majority,” an influential lobbying group, in the late 1970s, that was the first major effort of evangelicals to be recognized as a political force. Falwell was able to galvanize the Christian right against Jimmy Carter’s attempt to deny Christian schools tax-exempt status due to their segregationist practices.

               Pat Robertson was a Southern Baptist and a charismatic and characterized a new generation of religious leaders who defied the old boundaries and preached an inerrant bible. They generally came from the South and Southwest. Where Falwell had just made a TV show, Robertson created the Christian Broadcast Network (CBN), reaching thirty million households via satellite by 1985.

               Rick Warren gained renown as the answer to the Christian right as a left-wing evangelical, giving the invocation at Obama’s inauguration and supporting the fight against climate change as an issue of biblical proportions. He also spoke out against poverty as a Christian issue, claiming that conservative opposition to welfare programs was wrong.

Conclusion

               The Evangelicals became a powerful conservative force in the late 20^th century and maintain that power today. Their roots are truly at the heart of America and the movement, despite being conservative, is constantly changing. Today, as a result of their close alliance with the Republican Party, it seems that they’ve lost influence, their alliance backfiring to turn them into solely a faction of the Republicans. The Republicans have absorbed them to the point where the biggest Christian leaders are Republican office holders.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Horace Bushnell- Argued that “words are not thoughts.” He was against literalism and felt that the words that represent love, sin, salvation, and justice are extremely fluid and that changing times change definitions.
• For most of American history through the nineteenth century, the clergy had headed universities. However, in the 1890’s, religion was relegated to “Divinity Schools,” and thanks to standards of objectivity, universities were secularized.

Reflection on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman

               This is a funny book. It’s the memoir plus some collected lectures of Dr. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist who worked at Los Alamos on “The Bomb” in World War Two. Yet despite having some very serious credentials, he is a very wacky guy. In the book he details, for example, how he learned to crack safes while working at Los Alamos and would regularly steal military secrets to show his superiors that if an amateur like him could learn how to crack their locks, they weren’t very secure. The book is the story of his life told in these little short stories that are usually just a few pages long, the main theme being that he’s a trickster. He likes to find tricks that help him learn something (often trivial) or that help him fool someone.

               This isn’t going to be like a real, in-depth reflection because the book is very loose and has very little holding it together. I’m just going to share some parts I liked. For example, he writes, “Many years later, when I was at Caltech and lived in a little house on Alameda Street, some ants came around the bathtub. I thought, ‘This is a great opportunity.” I put some sugar on the other end of the bathtub, and sat there the whole afternoon until an ant finally found the sugar.” He had decided to do some experiments on how ants find their way around and goes into detail describing his informal testing and findings in the bathtub.

               He also had some kind of trick where he would declare himself to be a bloodhound, ask someone to handle one book or one empty coke bottle of many and return it. Feynman would sniff around and figure out which one it was using only his smell, while everyone else thought there would be some kind of trick, he was just demonstrating the power of the human nose. I have tried this with chairs and it did not work and I embarrassed myself. People’s hands smell very different, and it’s apparently very helpful if the person who handles the object is a smoker or has perfume.

               There is a very dark spot in this book and it’s Feynman’s treatment of women, which is honestly garbage. There are maybe two chapters of the many in the book that describe him being interested in prostitutes and saying of women that you have to “treat them like crap.” It was incredibly disappointing because the book had been so good! His advice was nasty and made the whole thing a lot more unpleasant. I’m not sure if I’d want to recommend the book honestly after that.

               In his later life, Feynman made money semi-professionally as an artist and as a drummer, which was cool to see someone reinventing themselves late in life. I enjoyed his old-school Jewish humor and with the exception of those two chapters on women, the book was great. He’s very entertaining and the book is easy to read.

Reflection on Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

               Cleopatra: A Life stands out among the many books and biographies I’ve read for its style. Stacy Schiff includes beautiful descriptions of palaces, feasts, halls, ships, and regal clothing to the point where you can really see, feel, smell, and touch these things that are now long gone, buried under earth or sea, or in a museum. For example, Schiff writes, “From a distance Alexandria blinded, a sumptuous suffusion of gleaming marble, over which presided a towering lighthouse. Its celebrated skyline was reproduced on lamps, mosaics, tiles. The city’s architecture announced its magpie ethos, forged of a frantic accretion of cultures. In this greatest of Mediterranean ports, papyrus fronds topped Ionic columns. Oversize sphinxes and falcons lined the paths to Greek temples. Crocodile gods in Roman dress decorated Doric tombs.” Since there is actually extremely little reliable information in the historical record about Cleopatra, there is a lot of beautiful filler like that, stealing the show.

Was Cleopatra an effective and clever ruler, or did she fall due to her own failings?

               I came to the conclusion that she was extremely intelligent and played her situation as well as she could have possibly done. She ended up picking the wrong horse in Marcus Antonius (Marc Anthony) but the same quality that made him lose to Octavian made him a useful ally to Cleopatra. He was malleable- a better follower than a leader- and he was in charge of the East, giving him access to great wealth and Asiatic armies, but not to the hearts of the Roman people. Cleopatra was very smart in how she got Caesar onto her side and she chose correctly in Antonius, but he failed her. He was clever tactically but not strategically and got stuck at Actium where Octavian was able to defeat him. Cleopatra never had a choice in allying with Antonius as he was given the East in a deal made with Octavian, giving him jurisdiction over her. In addition, only he would be moldable for Cleopatra. Octavian was famously controlling of others and himself and likely would not have been so generous to her.

               In sum, Cleopatra seems to have played everything right but lost anyway. She really needed her ally and military leader, Antony, to come through, but he was crushed in Parthia, won a meaningless victory in Armenia, and was beaten badly by Octavian at Actium. He did not fulfill his end of the bargain.  

               Cleopatra had been especially effective in making an entrance and being in control of her image. When she offered Antony dinner at Tarsus, she astounded him and his entourage with lights hanging in tree branches, “thirty-six couches with rich textiles,” a table full of gems and gold, beautiful flowers, and aromatic perfumes. At the end of several feasts, she gave all these things as gifts to Antony and his friends, certainly making a strong case to ally themselves with her, as perhaps more gifts would come.

Was Cleopatra a good ruler for the average Egyptian?

               It is hard to tell with regards to this. Cleopatra was the last Ptolemaic pharaoh (the rulers who came from Macedonia descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s top generals) and she was the only “Ptolemy” to actually learn to speak Egyptian. I think that shows some level of connection with the people. Inscriptions boast that there was no famine during her reign, but that usually had no basis in fact and all rulers aimed to portray their reign so nicely. All of our reliable sources on Cleopatra came from Romans, so it’s really hard to get a read on the Egyptian perspective. I think the verdict is still out though it’s likely that her intrigues affected mainly those living in the capital, Alexandrians, by bringing in great wealth during her reign and great violence at the beginning when she and Caesar sheltered together in her palace.

               The way that the Ptolemaic Egyptian economy worked is astounding. Schiff, the author, mentions that it has been compared to the USSR in the sense that it was a complete command economy. Schiff writes, “Most land was royal land… Only with government permission could you fell a tree, breed pigs, turn your barley field into an olive garden.” When you’re here, you’re family.

How did Cleopatra affect the Roman civil war at the time?

               Cleopatra begins as someone who was affected by Roman civil war. It happens when some of her brother’s courtiers killed Pompey, Caesar’s rival, thinking it would endear them to Caesar. It did not. Either because Caesar was aggrieved at the loss of his frenemy or because he had wanted to appear magnanimous in showing mercy or because he felt like only a Roman should kill a Roman, he was furious. Maybe it was a combination of all three. Anyway, it resulted in him and Cleopatra with some of Caesar’s men holed up in the palace while the Alexandrians attacked them. Finally reinforcements came and Caesar won, deciding in the process to make Cleopatra queen. He would bring her back to Rome for a time, but she returned to Egypt when he was assassinated.

               Cleopatra really started to figure into the civil wars of Rome as an influencer when she began her relationship with Marc Antony. She became his consort and helped him to gather a large coalition to fight against Octavian. After all, Marc Antony only spoke Latin and a little bit of Greek while Cleopatra spoke nine languages. She handled the diplomacy and he handled the military. However, Cleopatra was a problem for Antony’s PR because it made him look unfaithful to Rome that he was so faithful to a foreign queen. She was critical to Antony’s military power, though Antony squandered it at Actium.

What was Cleopatra’s personality like?

               By the time she was a woman she was certainly pompous. She had already carried on an affair with the most powerful man in the known world and was the ruler of the richest land known, and the oldest. She was very much in control of her emotions. This is not to say she wasn’t emotional- like many eastern women of the time, in grief she wailed and clawed at her breasts. It is to say that she knew when to exercise emotion. She had no fear of death. She methodically tested poisons on prisoners to identify one that would kill her quickly and painlessly. This is partially why it is very strange to thing she killed herself with an asp, as was propagated by Octavian after her death. She would have never entrusted her own death to a wild animal that would cause great pain. She almost certainly used a poison and Octavian was likely very frustrated that he would not get to march her in a triumph through Rome.

Conclusion

               I came away with the feeling that Cleopatra was a really smart woman who did almost everything right and lost anyway in the face of Rome, but what a ride it was. In a short life (I don’t think she hit forty years old) she became incredibly rich and powerful and made all the right moves. She lived an exciting life and saw all the greatest sites of the Mediterranean and the book is very entertaining. It’s a really accessible book too, so I think it’s especially good for someone who’s not necessarily as obsessed with history as I am and just wants a good, true story.