A History of the Classical Greek World 478-323 BC (Second Edition) by P.J. Rhodes

    I was looking for something to teach me more about the Peloponnesian War, how Sparta and Athens fell, and the connection between that time to Alexander. This book definitely delivered. There might have been too many in-line citations and it was a little dry, but I thought it's method of covering the history was really cool. Instead of being purely chronological, it followed a generally chronological path while exploring different topics. 

Greco-Persian Relations

    Something that comes through in this book is that the relationships between the Greeks and the Persians varied tremendously. At different times, Sparta, Athens, and other states would align themselves with and against Persia. The Persian Wars are significant because all the Greeks briefly united against Persia, but before and after that Greeks allied themselves with Persia. The Greeks who most opposed Persia most consistently were the Asiatic Greeks in modern-day Turkey, but mainland Greeks often tried to use Persia against each other. 

    Major developments in Greece were a result of Persian involvement with the Greeks. The Delian League was formed by Athens expressly to protect Ionian Greeks/Asian Greeks from Persia after the Persian Wars, a time when Sparta and its Peloponnesian League, the incumbent Greek power, was unwilling to stand up to Persia.

Sparta and Athens and the Peloponnesian War

    Sparta was a city ruled by two kings, with a council of elders and also an assembly of citizens. In the 500s, the state began to elect overseers who took over domestic functions from the kings. After conquering Messenia in the 8th century BC, Sparta enslaved its people, referred to as helots, and kept them as slaves until 370 BC, when Sparta was defeated. This enslavement required all Spartan men to form a class of militaristic land-owners, whose primary purpose was to keep the slaves down and conquer more land. Sparta had about 8,000 adult male citizens during the Persian Wars, but by its end in 371 BC at the Battle of Leuctra, Sparta had just 1,300, of which 400 died in that battle. This inability to create more citizens through births or grants of citizenship eventually doomed Sparta.

    Athens became a major trading site in the sixth century and started to become a major player in the Greek world around the time of the Persian Wars, helping the Ionians in Asia Minor in 498 to rebel against the Persians and fighting the Persians at Marathon. In 480-79, Athens was sacked by the Persians, but Athens was ready to start leading Greeks again with the Delian League not long after. In the fifth century, Athens became the richest Greek city, since Sparta was rich in land and agriculture, but not in trade. 

    Once war began between Athens and Sparta in 431, Sparta attempted to gain assistance from Persia, but was unsuccessful until 412. They fought a war of attrition, in which hoplites were not so importance since much of it was fought on rough terrain. There were only actually two major hoplite battles throughout the war at Delium in 424/3 and Mantinea in 418. The war proceeded similar to other Greek wars, in which Sparta invaded Attica in the spring, destroyed the crops, and hoped the Athenians would be forced to come out of the city to confront the Spartans and be defeated. However, Athens, led by Pericles, only used cavalry to harass the attackers, but did not confront them. Long walls, built in the 450s and 440s now connected Athens to Piraeus, its port, and Pericles convinced the Athenians to abandon the countryside and use their sea control to import food. They should try to keep control of their overseas empire, but not increase it. Animals were sent out to live on islands. The author argues that Pericles likely believed that by waiting out the Spartans, he could get them to quit, but they proved more persistent than expected. These invasions were not the all-out war that we think of today. Sparta invaded almost every year from 431 to 425, but did besieged Plataea instead of Athens in 429, turned back in 426 because of earthquakes, and returned after just fifteen days in 425. The longest invasion only lasted forty days in 430. This did not cause enough damage to knock Athens out of the war like it would have done to weaker city-states. 

    At different times, both Athens and Sparta sued for peace, but each refused the other because they thought they had the advantage, which was true, and didn't think the peace was the best deal they could get. Athens was struck by a plague from 430 to 426/5, which killed even more people than it would have because they were cramped inside the city. It killed about a third of the hoplites and cavalry and probably a similar amount of Athenian civilians. Pericles died of that plague in 429. The war was "kind of" paused from 421 to 414 by the Peace of Nicias before resuming. During that pause, Athens and Sparta still fought one another, but just at a lower intensity level.

    The turning point in the war came in the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily to intervene in a conflict at Syracuse. Thucydides called it the greatest success for the victors and the greatest disaster for the defeated in Greek history. The Athenians wasted massive amounts of money, lives, and ships on the expedition and it turned the war decisively against them. The Athenians seemed to think that during the Peace of Nicias that they would have the bandwidth to intervene in a Sicilian conflict, but they were obviously proven wrong. Something interesting about the siege of Syracuse is that it was a massive construction project. Both attackers and defenders built a series of walls to gain angles on the other and protect themselves during the siege. 

    Athens' exhaustion at Syracuse led to eventual defeat ten years later. The final terms demanded that Athens destroy its long walls to the Piraeus, lose all but twelve ships and all overseas possessions, and take back its exiles and become a subordinate ally of Sparta. The first period of the war, known as the Archidamian War from 431-421, confirmed that Athens was invulnerable to Sparta so long as it maintained sea superiority. Similarly, Athenian attempts to destabilize Sparta were unsuccessful. So the Peace of Nicias, if truly implemented, would have benefited Athens by maintaining the status quo. However, it was not fully implemented, and a low-level conflict remained. Athens squandered its resource advantage in the Sicilian expedition, and when the Athenians backed a Spartan rebel, Sparta agreed to a deal with the Persians to let the Persians have the Asiatic Greek territories in exchange for support against Athens. Within just a few years of Sparta's victory, the other Greek states were forming an anti-Spartan alliance.

    Athens' democracy collapsed twice, once in 411 and again in 404 at the end of the war. I am honestly confused by those events and will need to read something else about how and why that all happened. After the war, Sparta resisted Persian attempts to make good on their agreement to hand over the Asiatic Greeks to Persia, but Sparta eventually acquiesced in 386. This gave Sparta control of Greece, but it would only last until 370, when Thebes rebelled and defeated Sparta once and for all. Sparta's land had been concentrated in the hands of the few, reducing the number of citizens who received top-notch military training, and by the end was a shell of its former self for lack of citizen manpower. In the end, I would probably say that the Peloponnesian War was a pyrrhic victory for the Spartans that left a power vacuum in Greece to be filled by Philip II of Macedon.

The Macedonians

    Philip became the leader of Greece through military and diplomatic force. He reformed his military, equipping the foot soldiers with the sarissa, a spear that was twice as long as Greeks were using before, from 9 feet up to 18 feet. Philip also maintained a variety of forces that he used year round, not citizen soldiers who would only fight in the summer when not harvesting, a weakness of the Spartans. Because he was king and there was no democracy, Philip was able to use his forces without getting permission, which also made him faster and empowered him to act in secrecy. As a non-military leader, Philip drained the plain of Philippi, opening it to agriculture, and his conquests enabled him to found cities that he could use to grant land as a reward to allies. After capturing Amphipolis and Philippi, Philip controlled critical gold and silver mines, and his coinage became the most desirable in the Greek world. He confronted a Theban-Athenian alliance but defeated them.

    However, having united Greece under his banner, Philip was assassinated just before setting out to conquer Persia. His son, Alexander, who had commanded infantry in battle before, took his place. The Greeks, led by Macedon, portrayed the conquest of Persia as a revenge for Persia's fifth-century invasion of Greece. After 330, when Persepolis was destroyed, Alexander portrayed himself a legitimate "King of Asia," not the Emperor of Persia. He appointed Persians at satraps and used eastern troops. He also have Darius a royal funeral. Alexander adopted Persian forms of dress and attempted to extend the practice of proskynesis, the practice of prostrating oneself and kissing the ground in submission, to his followers, which was resisted. He and all his courtiers took Persian wives in 324 (although only one marriage would last). However, Alexander did not observe the cult of Ahura Mazda, and satraps led by Europeans were treated more like places to be garrisoned or looted. Alexander also saw himself as more and more godlike. His mother, who claimed descent from Achilles, also claimed after falling out with Philip that Alexander's father was not Philip but Zeus. Alexander even went to an oracle to ask about his divinity, but it seems like the answer he got is not recorded in this book at least. It seems lucky for Alexander's historical legacy that he died at his peak, since Greece was already on the point of rebellion and he may have found himself fighting rebels instead of conquering more lands had he not died.

Conclusion

    Good book although a little dry. I liked getting the connections through this period. Next I would like to explore something more focused on Athenian government over this same period now that I have the survey of the big events involving Greece as a whole.

Miscellaneous facts:

• The earliest account of the life of Alexander the Great is from the first century BC.

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

    For this reading of The Federalist Papers, I used Clinton Rossiter's list of the essentials, which amounts to 21 of the 85 articles. They are Federalist #'s 1, 2, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 23, 37, 39, 47, 48, 49, 51, 62, 63, 70, 78, 84, 85. Of The Federalist Papers, 51 articles were written by Alexander Hamilton, 29 by James Madison, and 5 by John Jay. Of those that I read, 10 were written by Hamilton, 10 were written by Madison, and 1 was written by Jay.

    In Federalist #10, Madison discusses factionalism, asserting that "the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS." Factions that do not amount to a majority are discounted, as they can "clog the administration," but not "convulse the society." Majority factions, however, are far more dangerous because they can direct the democratic government in their favored direction. This doesn't seem particularly offensive in the modern day since, duh, that's how a democratic republic works, but I guess I get the fear in 1788. In Federalist #14, Madison distinguishes a democracy from a republic in that a democracy is what we refer to today as direct democracy, administering the government themselves, and a republic is just representative government, defined in #39. His answer to this "problem" of majoritarian rule is to use representative democracy, instead of direct democracy, to make sure the majority does what is "right." He also argues in #10 that, contrary to then-common misconception, a republic works better over larger territory and population than smaller. Madison asserts that in smaller groups, it is easier to get a majority and to execute plans, whereas over a larger population, it is more difficult to "concert and execute their plans of oppression." Something else interesting that Madison points out in #14 is that almost every state had some frontier to the west, and that therefore they all needed each other's protection. The threat of war with Native Americans created a force favoring more federal authority. It also makes sense to favor a federal authority since the states expanding westwards would have been drawn into conflict with each other and would've gone to war without some higher regulating authority.

    In #15, Hamilton addresses the primary deficiency of the Articles of Confederation, which is that contributions by the states were voluntary. With this, states gave less and less to the national government until it was effectively unfunded. "Each State, yielding to the persuasive voice of immediate interest or convenience, has successively withdrawn its support, till the frail and tottering edifice seems ready to fall upon our heads, and to crush us beneath its ruins." Continuing in #16, Hamilton points out that only the federal government can discipline states, which lack the power to discipline each other. States could try to do so, but ultimately have no levers to pull except those that we are familiar with in international relations today, such as war or sanctions. The federal government can rule the states by law. The states can only rule one another by force. Moreover, there is a threat of inaction on the part of the states when a federal act requires state enforcement, as the Articles of Confederation required. States need only not act or act evasively to defeat federal measures under the Articles, defeating the purpose of a national government.

    I thought that #23, by Hamilton, was the clearest argument for a strong national government. In it, Hamilton gives four reasons to create a national government: "the common defense of the members; the preservation of the public peace as well against internal convulsions as external attacks; the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States; the superintendence of our intercourse, political and commercial, with foreign countries." These basically come out to national defense, interstate policing of rebellions, and regulation of interstate and international commerce. In order to establish the national defense, the national government must raise armies and fleets and then support and manage them. He goes on to say that (and the capital letters are his, not mine): "These powers ought to exist without limitation, BECAUSE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO FORESEE OR DEFINE THE EXTENT AND VARIETY OF NATIONAL EXIGENCIES, OR THE CORRESPONDENT EXTENT AND VARIETY OF THE MEANS WHICH MAY BE NECESSARY TO SATISFY THEM." He continues that, "The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed. The power ought to be coextensive with all possible combinations of such circumstances; and ought to be under the direction of the same councils which are appointed to preside over the common defense." I think this is a forceful and strong argument for a strong national government.

    In #51, Madison discusses the structure of the new government, and extolls the virtues of its checks and balances. In this one, we get the famous quote: "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflection on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." It is critical, when establishing a strong national government, to tie it to the will of the people, so that that majority will is what sets policy. However, what is interesting is that Madison views the legislature as the predominating branch of government that has to be restrained. In the 21st century, most people would say it is the executive that predominates, as Congress is mostly dysfunctional and takes cues from the President. I wonder if this might result from an overcorrection, as implemented by dividing the legislature into two houses. Hamilton, in #70, however, emphasizes "energy in the executive" in creating good government: "It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy." He goes on to emphasize the importance of embodying the executive in one person, rather than multiple, so as to more easily determine who is to credit and who to blame for actions of the government. In a system with two consuls, or a multi-person judiciary, it is harder to figure out who should be voted out of office. However, one unanticipated consequence of the Constitution is that I think the separation of powers may have the same effect, where people vote out the President for things that Congress did and vice versa. In addressing the judiciary in #78, Hamilton also anticipates Marbury v. Madison, pointing out that the Constitution restricts legislative authority, and that such restrictions must be preserved by a judiciary, "whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing."

    I'm glad I finally read The Federalist Papers, and I found it really interesting to see which portions totally apply today and which are less applicable with the passage of time. It is so interesting to see the founders arguing for a new government based on comparisons to ancient republics in Rome, Greece, and medieval Italy. Additionally, I find it really impactful how the articles are so totally in favor of a strong central government. I knew that would be the case, but I found it even more in favor of central government than I anticipated since do many originalists are so in favor of power for the states.

78 hamilton

    

Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead by Jim Mattis and Bing West

             Call Sign Chaos was an even better book than I thought it would be. Public figures’ memoirs can be pretty weak because they don’t want to offend and want to make sure they are telling their side of history. In some ways, Mattis’ book has those flaws. He almost entirely skips over his childhood and young life, more or less emerging as a battalion commander in Operation Desert Storm out of thin air. Similarly, his life ends before he joins the Trump administration, with only oblique references to that time. In some sense, that is more tactful, but as a reader I would have definitely enjoyed digging deeper into those morally difficult times. He also never dealt with his time as a member of the board of Theranos. But despite those shortcomings, the book reads like a leadership manual, with Mattis extolling the virtues of reading heavily, knowing the people who work for you, and other major leadership lessons.

            Chief among all the leadership lessons Mattis delivers in the book is to train your subordinates well, deliver clear intent to them, and to empower them to act without returning for your permission. Mattis quotes heavily from British Field Marshal Viscount Slim, who fought with General Joe Stilwell in Burma in World War Two, especially with regard to this lesson. Slim wrote that “acting without orders, in anticipation of orders, or without waiting for approval yet always within the overall intention, must become second nature in any form of warfare…. Acting without orders … yet always within the overall intention.”

            With regard to the presidents he served under, Mattis’ clear favorite is George HW Bush. He is the only president that Mattis regards as truly successful in war and foreign affairs. Of Clinton he has no comment. Of Bush 43, Mattis admired the direction he lead in, but expressed frustration that the messages he passed up the chain seemed to go unheard and that the United States was left rudderless after the initial Iraq invasion. Obama he felt was weak and too timid in the Middle East. And clearly he strongly disliked Trump, but we don’t get a lot from him about Trump.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Mattis spent a night in jail while a student at Central Washington State College for underage drinking. That definitely seems like the sort of thing that would stop you from becoming an officer these days.
• “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
• Mattis is known as CHAOS due to a tongue-in-cheek comment made by then-Lieutenant Colonel John Toolan, who wrote it out as, “Does the Colonel Have Another Outstanding Solution?”
• Mattis closed staff meeting by insisting that someone put him on the spot with one hard question before they finished. This helped him know what kept his subordinates up at night and helped him identify weak spots in the scheme of maneuver.
• Clearly General Mattis views General Zinni as an important mentor to him, as he mentions turning to Zinni several times for advice.
• Mattis cites a conversation with then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2010 in which Biden was very insistent on withdrawal from Iraq as quickly as possible, foreshadowing the withdrawal from Afghanistan a decade later.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

    The Warmth of Other Suns stood out among the books I read this year as a masterpiece. Wilkerson does what all good historians aim to do and seamlessly weaved a cogent history of the Great Migration into the lives of three individuals who lived it. They were Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who journeyed from Mississippi to Chicago, George Swanson Starling, who went from Eustis, Florida, to New York City, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who migrated from Monroe, Louisiana, to Los Angeles. The story extends through their whole lives in "the old country" all the way through their travels to the new worlds of the north or west and their eventual deaths at old ages in the 1990s and 2000s.

    Many black southerners were still picking cotton in a sharecropping system well into the middle of the 20th century, and we are introduced to Ida Mae doing so in the 1920s. At that time, the gold standard for picking cotton was to pick a hundred pounds a day, which would net you fifty cents. Ida Mae could never do it. "It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers, a hundred pounds of lint dust." And it required being stooped over all day, picking seven thousand bolls to reach a hundred pounds, picking past the branches seven thousand times a day with cramped hands and an aching back. After ten or twelve hours, the pickers could barely stand up straight after stooping all day. Worst of all, sharecroppers often made no money or found themselves owing at the end of the year. When the harvest was done and it was time to settle up with the plantation boss, he would deduct the expenses that he was "owed" by the sharecroppers, and would somehow always end up paying them a pittance if at all. More often, it would turn out that they were even, or that somehow the sharecroppers owed money. In the 1930s, 80% broke even or stayed in debt at the end of the year. This entrapped people in a cycle of de facto slavery.

    But sharecropping picking cotton, while significant, was not the only major job for blacks in the South at the time. George Starling picked oranges in Florida. But after he went to Detroit during World War Two, he got used to fair wages for hard work, not having to step off the sidewalk when a white person walked by, and not needing be subservient to whites at all times. He ended up getting in trouble in Florida for leading orange-pickers to demand higher wages for their work, effectively unionizing them. Southerners returning from the North would end up having a huge impact on the Civil Rights Movement. After spending a summer or a few weeks or however long in the North, these returned laborers were often the strongest advocates for the end of Jim Crow.

    The Great Migration began in World War One when the North opened up after the war "cut the supply of European workers that the North had relied on to kill its hogs and stoke its foundries. Immigration plunged by more than ninety percent, from 1,218,480 in 1914 to 110,618 in 1918, when the country needed all the labor it could get for war production." Then, Southern blacks were the best possible workers because they spoke the language, were used to hard work, and were also unschooled in labor organizing. Initially, steel mills, railroads, and packinghouses sent labor scouts to recruit blacks to come North. Southern states and towns banned these recruiters, but after the initial wave, they were unnecessary since the word had already spread about better wages up North. In the 1910s, about "550,000 colored people left the South," more than in the entire half century following the Emancipation Proclamation.

    And why is the book called The Warmth of Other Suns? Wilkerson writes that, "In the winter of 1919, when Ida Mae was still trailing her father out to the field, George and Pershing were learning to crawl, and the first wave of migrants was stirring to life, ... Edwin Hubble, working out of the University of Chicago, looked through one of the most powerful telescopes of his time.... Hubble identified a star that was far, far away and was not the same sun that fed life on Earth. It was another sun. And it would prove for the first time in human history that there were galaxies other than our own, that the universe was much bigger than humans had ever imagined, that there were, in fact, other suns." The migrants from the South were those original explorers who found out that there were better ways to live in America than under Jim Crow, and who returned to the South to spread the good news that there was a way to live in America with dignity while being black. In doing so, they opened up new galaxies for African Americans. One of the most impactful perspective-changing things in the book is how Wilkerson directly compares African Americans to Sicilian, Swedish, and other European immigrants essential seeking out the same American dream. The book encapsulates the essence of what it means to strive for something better and tells the story of millions perfectly through three individuals. It is a must-read.

Miscellaneous:

• In 1919, a colored soldier named Wilbur Little returned home from WWI to Blakely, Georgia. A group of white men demanded that he take off his uniform at the train station and walk home in his underwear. He refused, and then a mob attacked him a few days later and beat him to death on the outskirts of town, still wearing his uniform.
• Dr. Robert Foster, one of the three migrants whose story is told in the book, was Ray Charles' doctor, and the song "Hide Nor Hair" is partially about him.
• Prince Edward County, VA, closed its entire school system from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate.
• Studies conducted in the 1930s found that after four years in the North, the children of black migrants to New York scored nearly as well as northern-born blacks who were at the same level as white children. This study helped form the basis of the Brown v. Board ruling, meaning that those migrants would have a decades-long impact back where they had come from. 

The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis

    The Quartet was an excellent book and exactly the sort of thing I was looking for to answer questions about why a constitutional convention was held and how the Constitution was formed during those months. Starting with the negatives, I didn't enjoy when Ellis got polemical about his problems with originalism, which I thought were heavy-handed. At first, I thought he had good perspective, writing about how this was "an exercise in anthropology over time rather than space," but it became too much for me. I also just looked him up and see that he lied about having seen combat in the Army in Vietnam. Not great. But the book speaks for itself. It is a concise, step-by-step history of the drafting, signing, and ratification of the Constitution, told through the perspectives of George Washington, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, all prominent federalists.

    The Articles of Confederation had the critical flaw of failing to collect taxes during and after the Revolutionary War. One problem was that taxation was based on the value of land, as South Carolina threatening to withdraw from the Articles of Confederation over the counting of slaves for taxation purposes. The Articles solved the problem by making land the basis of taxation, not people. John Dickinson had led a committee that presented a drafted Articles of Confederation to Congress on July 12, 1776, which was ratified in 1777. But in the ensuing debate, the already weak-federal-government proposal became even weaker, removing Congressional authority over foreign policy, the western borders, and any semblance of sovereignty, which was explicitly given to the states. Most problematic of all was that taxes were voluntary, resulting in a massive debt. In 1781, for example, Congress asked for $3 million from the states and received only $39,138.

    

    Alexander Hamilton made the first major call for reform of the Articles in July 1783 while a delegate to the Confederation Congress, and then drafted a resolution calling for a convention to amend the Articles. He listed major defects, most prominently that there needed to be stronger executive and judicial branches, that the legislature needed to be empowered to tax (not just request money from the states), and the foreign policy and treaty-making power should be given to the national government. But he found no support at that time for his proposals. And for two more years, several proposals to amend the Articles were floated by never got any steam, including proposals by James Madison and Charles Pinckney. It wasn't until September 1786 that a breakthrough came at the Annapolis Convention which the Confederation Congress approved as a way to discuss rules regarding interstate commerce. Only five states showed up: Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. They were without a quorum. Hamilton seized the opportunity to call for a more national government. It was obvious that there was a failure of government at this point, as they could not even gather a quorum to discuss interstate issues, and Hamilton would claim that there was unanimous support within the Annapolis delegations for a future convention with a large mandate to discuss all the most salient issues in Philadelphia in May 1787, which the Articles Congress endorsed in February 1787.

    

    This time, a quorum would arrive, with only Rhode Island not sending a delegation. It was probably helpful to the national cause that Shays' Rebellion, fought over a lack of payment for service in the Continental Army from August 1786 to February 1787, showed the weakness of the Confederation. Meanwhile, Madison spread the word that Washington would attend the Constitutional Convention. It wasn't true, but it helped build pressure for it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Washington had not refused to go out of any disagreement with the national cause, but only because he preferred retirement. Indeed, his presence was critical, as he was the most popular statesman in the country and was also radically nationalist/federalist.

    

    Jay and Madison both had much stronger ideas for the power of the federal government than what actually came to pass. Both wanted the national government to have a veto over all state laws, and both favored the supremacy of national authority, rather than the mix that we ended up with. They also favored totally proportional representation, not equal representation by the states. Additionally, instead of having state legislatures elect their senators, the Virginia Plan would have allowed them to propose candidates among whom the House of Representatives would have chosen. In the process, Madison invented federalism. Writing to Washington, he said, "I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities when they can be subordinately useful." This fallback position would be adopted, and then Madison would come to vigorously support it during the ratification debates of 1787-88.

    Critically, the Constitutional Convention unanimously adopted the one-state-one-vote structure of the Articles Congress, which, in retrospect, all but guaranteed that the most radical national plans would fail.  Another important procedural decision was that the proceedings occur in absolute secrecy, without journalists or spectators in attendance, even posting sentries at the doors and prohibiting delegates from discussing the debates in public or in correspondence. The national cause was favored, however, by an anti-federalist boycott of the process. In mid-July, the Convention hit a wall when it became clear that the small states would block the federal veto of states laws and proportional representation in the legislature. The Connecticut Compromise made representation proportional in the House and by state in the Senate. Madison was initially pessimistic, but Washington was alright with it, writing to Lafayette that "it was probably the best that could be obtained at this time."

    Importantly, the Confederation Congress silently accepted Article VII of the Constitution, which declared that the new government would go into effect after nine states ratified the Constitution. This was in direct violation of the rules of the Confederation, which required unanimous approval from the states. But it would have been impossible to get Rhode Island to ratify, and there were other states like Virginia and New York that were no guarantees. But they just did it anyway, as Rhode Island boycotted the ratification process just like it boycotted the convention.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Constitutional Convention met in the old Pennsylvania State House, the same place the Declaration of Independence was signed, now known as Independence Hall.
• The 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention were on average 44 years old, with 29 having college degrees, 29 having law degrees, 35 having served in the Continental Army, and 42 having served in the Continental or Confederation Congress.
• By 1789, Madison was so influential that Washington asked him to draft a letter to the members of Congress, expressing his desire to work closely with them. And Congress, not knowing Madison had really been the ghostwriter, requested that Madison write the response.
• Madison didn't stay a federalist, and became much more in favor of states' rights in his continued representation of Virginia in his career.

Stalin (Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928) by Stephen Kotkin

    Something disappointing in the book is that there is so little information about Stalin's internal life as a young person. We get a good amount of information, but I think that a lot was censored by Stalin himself or information was otherwise destroyed. One interesting comparison the author makes though is that like Hitler, Stalin nearly joined the church as a young man, and became a nationalist as a teenager. But unlike Hitler, Stalin abandoned Georgian nationalism for socialism. Stalin was a good student, but became a troublemaker. He didn't publish widely until he was a grown man. Kotkin points out that Lenin and Trotsky spent the First World War writing extensively, but that Stalin left no wartime thoughts. 

    My notes in the book tended to be more about the events of Russian history than Stalin's actual life. The main events of his young life seem to be his journey into becoming a communist, joining Lenin's Bolshevik faction, committing various crimes to raise funds for Lenin, and being internally exiled to Siberia during the First World War. While there, he impregnated a thirteen-year-old who he vowed to marry when police intervened, but then betrayed his promise and did not marry her. The child died shortly after birth.

Maybe I will come back to this, but I am going to just publish without any serious notes because I am too busy for this right now.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Over more than four centuries from the time of Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, Russia expanded on average fifty square miles a day.
• As of 1719, Russia was 70% "Great Russian" (a term that excludes the "Little Russians" we call Ukrainians. and more than 85% Slavic, but by the end of the 19th century, Russians were just 44% of the empire and Slavs 73%
• At its height, the Russian Empire had several million more Turkic speakers than the "Turkish" Ottoman Empire due to its sheer size.
• "Bolshevik" means majoritarian and "Menshevik" means minoritarian. This was a big propaganda coup that Lenin achieved after losing a vote at the 1903 Russian socialists' congress, in which he refused to accept the outcome of a vote he lost.

Part III: Collision, page 586

Notes to Page 244

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze

Germany's Economic Conditions Before the Nazi Rise to Power

    Under Otto von Bismarck, Prussia united the German states into Germany and defeated France in 1871 to become the country in charge of continental Europe. With France defeated, it faced three other international "big dogs." To the east, the Russian Empire was undeveloped, but controlled massive tracts of land that it was settling and also had a very large population. To the west, the United Kingdom was a not-very-large island, but it controlled land all over the world and was the world's largest empire. And across the sea, the United States loomed large as the nation that was not yet a superpower at the end of the 19th century, but was clearly fated to be. At the time of German unification, Germany and the United States had approximately the same size populations and America was only about one-third more productive than Germany despite its far greater bounty of land and resources. By the late 1930s, US output was twice that of Germany's and by 1943, before allied aerial bombardment started to really pummel Germany, the US was producing almost four times as much as Nazi Germany. But who should we compare Germany to? In Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger convincingly argued that Germany was actually fated to become the strongest power in Europe, but that in its haste to do so, it delayed itself with two world wars. Indeed, as soon as Germany reunified in the 1990s, it was once again the largest economy in Europe. But Tooze points out that German leaders were not only unsure that this would happen, but that they compared themselves to the United States, not to other European powers. To make Germany a country with a US-size economy would require a Hail Mary (or a Heil Maria?). Moreover, what has been unstated, but I am thinking of now, is that part of Germany becoming the biggest economy in Europe is that it could do so only once the structure of the EU/EC was created, along with NATO, providing economic and military security. Anyway, what is important to note is that Hitler was thinking about an epic struggle with the United States, not just the United Kingdom. 

    In the spring of 1930, Germany's social democrat-led government was toppled, having chosen to continue to try to pay off Germany's Versailles-debt by enacting budget cuts. This was unpopular, and Hermann Mueller "was to be Germany's last Social Democrat chancellor for almost forty years." The new minority government was a right-wing government led by Heinrich Bruening. The Bruening government was forced into deflation to pay off the debt by the logic that a more valuable Reichsmark would make debt payments more manageable. This plus budget cuts and tax increases crashed the economy. Between June 1930 and February 1931, unemployment rose by 2.1 million, double the normal seasonal increase, and in the September 1930 election, Hitler's Nazis raised their share of the vote from 2.5 to 18.3 percent, gaining 107 seats to become the second largest party in the Reichstag. At this time, French Prime Minister Aristide Briand, flush with gold, offered Bruening a way to comply with the Young Plan for debt repayments- long term loans to replace the short-term that could cripple Germany. But Bruening refused, instead announcing an attempt at an Austro-German customs union in March 1931. Without a foreign loan, Bruening forced through another round of deflation, and then announced in June 1931 an aggressive demand to end German reparations for WWI, which spread fear in international markets that Bruening would announce a unilateral moratorium, precipitating a bank run. Even more deflation came in December 1931, and Bruening also ordered mandatory cuts in wages, salaries, prices, and interest rates along with further decreases in government spending and increases in taxation. In the winter of 1931-32, bankruptcies increased dramatically.

    Seeing this crisis, Britain and France agreed to end Germany's reparations payments on the condition that the Americans cancel the debts that Britain and France owed to the United States in July 1932. This was done without US consent. Britain made one more payment in December 1932, but France, Belgium, Poland, Estonia, and Hungary just defaulted on their US loans. In January 1933, Germany still owed 19 billion Reichsmarks to foreign creditors, with at least 8 billion owed to the United States. In July 1932, the Nazis won their largest electoral triumph (after Bruening was ousted), winning 37.2 percent of the vote. Despite this, they remained in opposition, and declined to 33% of the vote share in November 1932, the electorate disappointed by Hitler's failure to take office. Nazi timing was good, however. Hitler would finally be handed the keys to government in January 1933, as the economy was starting to improve. With German reparations already forgiven the previous July, demand for German bonds strengthened, opening up new means to get cash into the German economy. Indeed, in December 1932, the Berlin institute for business cycle research declared that at least the process of contraction was over, and The Economist's Berlin correspondent reported that Germany was making its way out of the economic doldrums at that time. The editorials that ran on New Year's Day 1933 were mostly optimistic about the German economy. But due to the miscalculations of ultra-nationalist conservatives, Germany would be sent down a different path- an economic recovery would come, but so would a war that would destroy Germany. Embittered by being ousted from government in December 1932, ex-Chancellor Papen worked with the agrarian lobby and the more aggressive elements of the military to pressure the aged President Paul von Hindenburg to form a new government founded on National Socialism, giving Hitler the Chancellorship.

The German Economic Recovery with Hitler in Power

    On April 19, 1933, the United States unilaterally abandoned the gold standard and allowed the dollar to depreciate. The UK and most of the world would go on to do the same, inflating their currencies to save domestic industry. From April to August 1933, the dollar fell by 30% against the Reichsmark. Germany decided not to follow in the path of inflation. This would make Germany extremely uncompetitive on the world export market, but would seriously reduce the debt burden that German confronted. Germany maintained the gold standard for this reason, but also for the symbolic reason that it showed a certain reliability and a break with the hyper-inflationary recent past. Hitler set out a policy in August 1933 to fight unemployment through civilian work creation, but the main focus would be rearmament, the central objective of nationalist politics.

    Germany's recovery under Hitler would be based on refusing to pay debts while using that money to rearm itself. In December 1933, Germany unilaterally announced reductions in payments to foreign creditors from 50% (it had already done this before, halving what its burdens really were) to 30%. Britain and the US temporarily brought Germany back to making its payments in full by making threats in January 1934. With tentative agreement reached, Germany refocused on arms. By the second year of Hitler's government, over 50% of German central government expenditure on goods and services was dedicated to military spending, rising to 73% by 1935. At the same time, Germany pursued work creation schemes that were responsible for 30% of a reduction in unemployment of 2.6 million people from February 1933 to March 1934. Rearmament was most successful in aeronautics. In 1932, the German aircraft industry employed just 3,200 people producing no more than 100 aircraft per year. Less than ten years later, the industry employed a quarter of a million people who turned out over 10,000 of the most sophisticated combat aircraft in the world every year. Germany pioneered the process of turning planes from skeletons with canvas over them into full metal machines. German radio production also doubled from 1934-42.

    On Monday, February 20, 1933, Goering and Hitler invited 25 of Germany's top businessmen to a private meeting to "explain his policies." In the meeting, Hitler gave his view of the political situation, and told them that "private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy," and that a new phase in his struggle would begin after the election on March 5. Hitler did not take questions, but he left no doubt that he planned to put an end to parliamentary democracy, crushing the German left by physical force. Hitler left the meeting, and Goering made the ask for money, clarifying that this sacrifice was not so bad since it would be the last election "for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years." Seventeen large business groups would make large donations to the Nazi cause, the largest coming from IG Farben, Deutsche Bank, and the mining industry association. This large cash injection came at a time when the party was severely short of funds an enabled the Nazis to win the election on March 5, increasing their vote share from 33% to 44%, which they could combine with their allies, the German National People's Party, to reach 52%. It came just six days after the Reichstag fire, and it was the last election in unified Germany for over sixty years.

    Tooze argues that agrarian policy served as the economic justification for Lebensraum. Germany was more densely populated than other developed countries and less agriculturally efficient. This created a natural decision to move more people to the cities and use technology to increase efficiency in agriculture. But seeing great moral virtue in being farmers, and being aggrieved at the results of WWI, the Nazis instead decided that what they needed was not to be more efficient but to get more land. Germany refused to accept its place in the world as a medium-sized workshop economy dependent on imported food. Instead, the Nazis sought to become a self-sufficient economy, which could not be done in such a small area as Germany was. Indeed, if Germany wanted to redistribute all its farmland, there would only be enough to provide each of Germany's 3 million farming families with just 13 hectares. Germany was just not large enough to support such a large farming population at the standard of living of people living in cities without some major change. German agronomists at the time determined that to achieve full self-sufficiency at the current standard of living, Germany would need to add 7-8 million hectares of farmland to the 34 million already within its borders. So Germany was forced to choose two of the following three: peace, a high standard of living, and self-sufficiency. It chose war, which Hitler had always wanted.

War in Europe

    Tooze contends that by the late 1930s, it was inevitable that Germany would start a European war, since otherwise the entire rearmament would be meaningless. The internal pressure for Germany to go to war only compounded as Germany felt the effects of raw materials shortages. These shortages, themselves caused by the intense rearmament, increased the desire to go to war in order to gain more raw materials; additionally, if Germany was running up against the limits of its industrial capacity, that meant that it was peaking in its power, and should take advantage in a war at that moment of peak production, and not wait until it had a lesser comparative advantage. Shortages meant that by 1937, the Luftwaffe was reducing its aircraft expansion program, and that aircraft production trended down from April 1937 to the summer of 1938. Germany was stuck in a balance of payments issue, and simply did not have the funds to purchase more raw materials from abroad.

    One way that Germany attempted to resolve its balance of payments problem was by confiscating Reichsmarks from those who emigrated from Germany. But this just conflicted with its policies attempting to force Jews to emigrate from Germany. While many did, many others chose to stay rather than have all their wealth confiscated as they left. But they got more creative. After Kristallnacht, the Nazi government demanded that the Jewish community pay for the costs of cleanup, forfeit insurance claims, and also pay a fine of one billion Reichsmarks, presumably for having provoked the rioters by existing. The Nazis then banned Jews from economic life- no more retail, no more crafts, no more trade fairs, and no more holding any positions of authority in any firm. At the Evian Conference, the European states debated what to do about this issue, but there was no appetite for actually resolving the issue by taking Jewish refugees, since those refugees would have all their property confiscated when they left Germany, arriving in their new homes with nothing.

    Additionally, Germany ran into a labor shortage, especially in farming. In 1938, the German government negotiated with Poland to admit 60,000 harvest helpers. Once Germany invaded Poland, it used 300,000 Polish prisoners of war to help with the harvest. By 1940, it was using any unemployed Poles. These workers were made into a force of slave labor. And they were starved. While the Germans rationed 2,600 calories per German in 1940, inhabitants of Poland's major cities were allotted just 609 calories and Jews only 503. By the end of the year, the numbers for Poles increased to 938 calories daily while for Jews it was reduced to 369. 

    In the Phone War, it was still Hitler's goal to land a knockout blow quickly. Interestingly, Tooze notes that initial German war plans against France in 1940 involved limited objectives in a modified Schlieffen Plan. But in February, two officers were shot down over French territory with a briefcase containing the plans. The Germans then changed their plan to a bold encircling move through the Ardennes forest, proposed by General Erich von Manstein. Thus, the blitzkrieg victory in France was not some great plan but something improvised to solve a problem that would have gone unsolved if chance had not intervened. But knocking France out of the war was not enough, as England still stood against Germany at war. By September and October of 1940, German public opinion was turning against the war. Meanwhile, in the United States, the public was gaining confidence in a British victory.

    It was because of Germany's swift victory in France that American policymakers were frightened enough to start to seriously support England. At this point, Tooze argues, Germany's defeat was destined. Once American industrial might was brought to bear, Germany couldn't stand a chance. By the end of June 1940, London was expecting delivery of 10,800 aircraft and 13,000 aero-engines over the next eighteen months (in addition to Britain's own production of 15,000 aircraft). Meanwhile, Germany only produced 10,826 aircraft in 1940 and would only increase to 12,000 in 1941. In 1940, the US produced 6,019 military aircraft, of which 2,006 went to Britain and 557 to France. In 1941, the US produced 19,433 military aircraft, of which about 5,000 went to Britain. In 1942, the US production skyrocketed to 48,000 and then hit 85,898 in 1943. This trajectory was unstoppable. Hitler was lucid enough to understand this. On December 17, 1940, he proclaimed to his war leaders that they needed to resolve all continental European problems in 1941, because by 1942, the United States would be in a position to intervene decisively in the war. At that point he was correct, but still delusional in thinking that he could simply resolve his European problems before the end of 1941. In his most insane move, he would invade Russia in the summer of 1941.

World War

    Germany invaded Russia in June 1941. It did so without being ready. Because of low birthrates during World War One, 85% of those between 20 and 30 years old who were fit for military service were already in the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941, and 640,000 had to be granted draft exceptions due to their importance to the war economy. The best German manpower was committed, therefore, to the initial assault, and there would be no reserve to draw on if German could not win a swift victory in the East.

    The Germans planned a campaign of mass murder in the Soviet Union. Notes from a May 2, 1941 meeting record that "1.) The war can only be continued, if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war. 2.) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that man millions of people will die of starvation. 3.) The most important issues are the recovery and removal of oil seeds, oil cake, and only then the removal of grain." German leaders were recorded expecting at least 20-30 million Soviet citizens to die. Initially, they thought they could starve the populace by simple requisitioning all available grain and "shutting off" the cities, but they soon found out that people don't want to be starved and will find a way to live. The only large groups that the Germans were able to kill by simply withholding food were those confined in captivity: urban Jews in ghettos and Soviet prisoners of war. Those Jews not immediately murdered by Einsatzgruppen were banned from food markets and from purchasing eggs, butter, milk, meat, and fruit. The Wehrmacht systematically starved its prisoners to death. By December 1941, the Germans had held 3.35 million prisoners, but only 1.1 million were still alive and just 400,000 in good enough condition to work. Of the 2.25 million who died, at least 600,000 had been shot and the rest died of natural causes. T

    he Nazis couldn't afford to both feed their prisoners and feed a massive army needed for conquering all of Europe. They were short on labor and food, problems that compounded each other. This would cost them dearly during the invasion of the Soviet Union, as the Nazis killed about 7 million potential workers over the course of the war. So the Nazis needed labor to run the economy with all their best men away at war. But they wouldn't accept Jewish labor in large numbers because of the genocidal program. These two ideas could have balanced each other out, but the Nazis were also short on food, and decided to work Jews to death while feeding them the minimum to slowly starve them. They decided to cut the Polish ration off in March 1943 while cutting off the Jewish ration months earlier in the autumn of 1942. By the end of 1942, only 300,000 Polish Jews were left alive, about ten percent of the prewar population.

    Meanwhile, Germany lost its manufacturing advantage over Russia during the course of the invasion. Despite suffering major territorial losses, the Soviet Union out-produced Germany in almost every category of weapons. In small arms and artillery, the Soviet Union out-produced Nazi German 3:1, in tanks it was 4:1, and in combat aircraft it was 2:1. This allowed the Red Army to withstand the second invasion in 1942 and then counterattack at the end of the year. This advantage was temporary--by 1944 Germany had closed the gap in every category--but it was critical in saving the Soviet Union from collapse and changing the battle lines. Tooze is also very down on Albert Speer's wartime "miracle" of armaments production. He argues that it wasted energies on tanks that were better spent on aircraft and that the positive results were largely delayed benefits from previous officials. The U-Boats created by the end of the war were extremely good, but they were not sea-worthy in time to actually fight in the war.

Conclusion

    Tooze finishes the book by discussing why Hitler would choose to go to war with England and France and then with the Soviet Union and the United States. Coming from the perspective of armaments and the war economy, Tooze points out that by the summer of 1939, Hitler was aware that his long-term efforts to prepare for war with the Western powers had failed. Instead of making him deterred from conflict, it left him feeling that he had a short period to take advantage of the temporary edge he had due to those efforts that would not last. Therefore, he secured his eastern flank through a deal with the Russians and struck while he had a temporary advantage. Moreover, Hitler was ideologically motivated to go to war, since he felt that "world Jewry" was closing in on him, and he needed to strike first. This book was an astoundingly thorough examination of the German war economy, which in turn helped explain German decisions before and during World War Two. I would highly recommend.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The United States already accelerated the program that became the Manhattan Project before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
• More than one-third of the boys born in Germany from 1915 to 1924 were either dead or missing by 1945. For boys born from 1920-25, the number is 40%.
• The Allies extracted substantially greater reparations from Germany after WWII than after WWI. The Soviets dismantled 30% of East Germany's capital stock and forced the East Germans to pay the costs of occupation and reparations to the Soviet Union, which totaled 13% of national income in 1953. The West Germans were treated more leniently, but were forced to make payments until 1992 that totaled 90 billion Deutschmarks.