August 24, 2006
Counterfactual Munichs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon wonders what the situation was regarding British radar installations in the fall of 1938, noting that they came in very handy in 1940. I am up on Cape Cod and away from my books, so what follows is off the top of my head, for which I apologize. With that caveat: I do not think that Chain Home, the radar installations that indeed came in handy in the summer of 1939, had been completed in October of 1938. Nor do I think this would have mattered too much in a war that began at that time. Among other things, Chain Home allowed the Royal Air Force to forgo scattered forward air patrols, which might have been chewed up by the (initially) numerically superior Luftwaffe fighters. Instead, radar allowed the RAF to see the big raids coming, and commit its forces accordingly. But a war that began in late 1938 would not have seen Germany in possession of those forward bases for some time (if ever). Over that time, Chain Home would presumably have been completed.
Until forward bases were conquered, though, German fighters could not have escorted bombers to southern England. They simply lacked the range. In this alternate war, by the way, German bombers could not have been based in Norway, which Germany would yet not have occupied, and this would have significantly simplified the RAF’s problems when defending Britain. But those problems would in any case have been much simpler, because unescorted daylight raids would have been suicide, as the RAF would shortly discover in the history that actually happened, and night raids might have had trouble hitting within five miles of their targets, as the historical RAF would also discover (although electronic navigation aids would be developed by both sides). German bombers were in any case not very good at strategic bombing. The early-war Luftwaffe was brilliantly effective when used for its intended purpose, which was to function as flying artillery for mechanized forces, but lacked the equipment and the doctrine for strategic bombardment.
In any case, I found a number of John Steele Gordon’s later remarks on Munich and counterfactual history quite interesting. He writes, “Had Chamberlain and Daladier made it plain (by mobilizing the Royal Navy, calling up reservists, burning embassy papers, etc., etc.) that they absolutely would go to war over Czechoslovakia, Hitler might have pulled back.” I agree. It is admittedly hard to have any confidence about the likeliest consequences, had Hitler done so; all that seems clear is that he would have been in a somewhat weaker position inside Germany and, in the near future, a much weaker military position in Europe. In our history, he used the Czech reserves of gold and foreign currency to get out of immediate economic difficulties and continue rearmament, and used the Czech weapons he seized in March of 1939 to help conquer first Poland, then the Netherlands, Belgium, and France; in this alternate history, neither the money nor the weapons (a fair number of tanks, and infantry weapons which equipped all or part of 20 divisions) would have been available.
On the other hand, Mr. Gordon says, “I think France was doomed regardless of when war broke out. The nation’s spirit was broken. Neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia would ever have invaded Germany had war come about, so Hitler could have safely moved many divisions and slammed into France with more than enough force to break that broken nation.” There I disagree. I agree that the Czechs were unlikely to invade Germany, but the war that might have broken out in October of 1938 was scheduled to begin with a German assault on Czechoslovakia. Germans who surveyed the Czech defenses in the Sudetenland, after they had been abandoned, thought an attack would have been ruinously expensive.
I don’t know what Polish war plans would have been, had they gone to war in 1938; I don’t know if anyone knows. In 1939 or later, Poland might have stood on the defensive and waited for a French attack into the Rhineland, which did not come in our 1939, other than in the most halfhearted fashion. When Germany did attack Poland in our September of 1939, with the Czech state and its formidably well-equipped army gone, the Poles inflicted 50,000 casualties. Had the Poles been fully mobilized in 1939—they went to war with only two thirds of their forces mobilized—they would have inflicted more. In 1938, against much weaker German adversaries, they would almost certainly have inflicted many more. Had war broken out later, much would depend on whether the Poles had modernized their once-formidable air force with aid from their Western allies, whether that air force had been caught on the ground, whether the Poles had modernized in other respects, what German forces would have been available to attack Poland while others screened not only France but the Czechs, etc. It is unlikely that an alliance of France, Britain, Poland, and Czechoslovakia would have operated efficiently or aggressively; the French were determined to have other people do the fighting, the Poles and Czechs mistrusted each other, and the British were also very reluctant to see any repeat of the Western Front of World War I. This suggests that Germany might have picked off first Poland, then Czechoslovakia, at significant cost, but after that the most probable Allied plan—stand on the defensive while building up military strength through mobilizing the vast resources of the British and French empires, while starving resource-poor Germany through blockade, then going over to the offensive— might well have worked. After all, something like it worked in 1918.
What about the idea that France was already broken? It was for a long time the fashion to argue that the French Third Republic was conquered because it was politically rotten. This argument was initially deployed by both the French left and the French right, for different political purposes, and picked up in the English-speaking world, where it was very widely popularized by William Shirer. There is a pretty good case that the reverse was true: The Third Republic became rotten because it was conquered, i.e., we should not reason backwards from Vichy to see a defeatist, illiberal France, thus mistaking consequences for causes. By the time war broke out, Daladier had restored French morale and to a large degree unity. After war broke out, there was something of an economic miracle, and French output was very impressive. The stories about Communist sabotage of war production seem to have been Vichy propaganda. The Air Force was finally modernizing (by May of 1940, the French had built although not yet deployed large numbers of better aircraft than the German aircraft they would have faced), and in May of 1940 the French air force inflicted significant losses on the Luftwaffe. A fascinating argument by Ernest May (Strange Victory) argues that swift and crushing defeat that concluded the historical campaign was a case of the vastly improbable happening, then being taken to have been inevitable. At least one very great historian still thinks the 1930s French were indeed politically enfeebled (Eugene Weber, in The Hollow Years), while other very good historians have over the last couple of decades made the opposite case.
The controversy is interesting for a lot of reasons. Here is one of them: People seem to cling pretty tenaciously to the idea that the Third Republic was doomed, and they generally assume that its doom was over-determined, that it had profound underlying political causes. At some level, people seem to want the French to deserve what happened to them. My belief is that France fell for almost purely military reasons: Her generals and some of her troops were out-thought and out-fought, and they were terribly unlucky. My hunch is that most of us do not like to think about how much luck matters in history, and we do not like to think about how much proficiency at war may be a relatively independent variable in determining great and tragic outcomes. Because of bad generalship and worse luck, a staggering number of people died. An earlier age might have had less trouble than we seem to have in understanding why.
August 23, 2006
Media Bias Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:30 PM EST A few thoughts on liberal media and media bias: First of all, I usually don’t watch too much TV news; I read a fair number of newspapers on-line, but TV news seems an inefficient and time-consuming way to get the news, compared to reading. Since much of what has been said here has been about TV news, my fellow bloggers have been discussing something in part outside my daily experience. On the other hand, during the second half of the 1980s and part of the 1990s I knew a fair number of news producers, and a few reporters and executive producers, in this country and in the UK, and I have known more such people since. We socialized a lot, and I informally (in one case, formally) advised people at a couple of the networks on, among other things, the background to the SALT II talks, which they had to cover. They knew very little about nuclear weapons, and rather than displaying conventionally “liberal” views on the subject, they were instead bewildered that anyone cared enough about the subject to have worked up any detailed knowledge of it. In general, their attitude about what ought to be on the news was captured by their slogan “If it bleeds, it leads.” They always insisted that a fire was the best possible subject for a news broadcast—great pictures. In some cases, politics actually bored them, although covering it was their job. I suppose most (although not all) of them were politically liberal, but that really did not seem to affect much of the way they appeared to do their jobs. They cared enormously about ratings, about the changing pay structure of their industry, and about the technical nature of their business; they were a lot less ideological, and a lot less Left, than most academics; they were alternately amused and disgusted by what was then called PC. The fact that it leads if it bleeds can have powerful but probably unintended political consequences. In Iraq, Lebanon, or the Occupied Territories, civilians killed or wounded in air strikes almost certainly intended to hit someone else bleed, and lead. This can create the impression that the Americans and Israelis are fundamentally in the business of killing civilians. It is impossible to visually dramatize the intricacies of most questions—for example, the questions of whether the Lebanese state and the Palestinian Authority need to enforce a monopoly on violence, and on the relationship of a monopoly on violence to the privilege of sovereignty. Television is by its nature able to cover some subjects and not others. If you can trust Human Rights Watch, some 25 of around 3000 sorties unjustifiably, recklessly, and indiscriminately killed Lebanese civilians. The air strikes that didn’t did not as predictably get onto the news—although it is relevant that Hezbollah is less than helpful in getting reporters to those scenes. It is not easy to visually dramatize the problem of determining culpable error and degrees of culpability. Is the resulting coverage expressing a bias? If so, the simplest way to describe that bias is to call it a bias for the accessible visual story. Reporters themselves may have their politics affected by the resulting coverage, which may subsequently influence their ideas of what the real story is, but again, that later bias is in part a consequence of the nature of the medium, not itself the origin of choices about what the medium first transmitted. Are the news media generally much afflicted with liberal bias? My sense is that some of them are, on some questions, but there is striking evidence for the reverse proposition. My most vivid sense of this came during the Clinton presidency, when supposedly ‘liberal’ papers like The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times regularly hounded Clinton about alleged financial scandals grouped together as ‘Whitewater.’ Eventually, perjury and fellatio turned up, and yielded an impeachment, but for a good long time there was nothing much to show for all that muckraking, which didn’t make them lay off. The New York Times didn’t display any perceptible liberal bias in the Wen Ho Lee business—rather the contrary. If John Steele Gordon wonders why at least some liberals think that there is no great liberal bias in the media, part of the answer, I think, is all that very assiduous Clinton-baiting. In the wake of Watergate, a lot of reporters wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, even if Clinton wasn’t a very plausible Nixon. They were and remain broadly contemptuous of politicians, but that is not, for my money, a particularly liberal quality. If media people seem to enjoy thinking about themselves as people who see through things, rather than as people who look into things, they do not always have an ideological filter for who and what they want to see through. The self-description and its unexamined assumptions can be questioned, but this problem is not exactly liberal bias. In one of his recent posts, John Steele Gordon writes that “what’s needed, obviously, is diversity of opinion (and respect for opinions other than one’s own—not exactly a common feature among ideologues).” You can get diversity of opinion by trying to insure it within a news organization, or by multiplying the number of news organizations until you get some with different biases. We nowadays have the Fox network and talk radio, which do seem to have broken any possible liberal monopoly on the news media. I would have preferred to have gotten diversity through the first option, but the second may have to do. For whatever it is worth, in my admittedly limited experience people at Fox have a far sharper sense of ideological mission than do people at the ‘liberal’ networks, while people at the one Murdoch paper I know have a more explicit sense of ideological mission than do most people at The New York Times. If you have lived abroad, what is most striking about the American press is still how much (in comparative terms) it thinks it strives to appear neutral and maintain a separation between news and opinion. This was not always the case—I have the impression that before the 1950s, the American press was unabashedly partisan, generally very venomously so. The perception that the press is partisan probably shocks us because we are heirs to a relatively new tradition, where it is not supposed to be. It is also worth thinking about how much press biases matter in determining political outcomes. FDR faced what was on balance a savagely hostile press (although he was good at charming reporters). It got worse over time, but FDR kept winning elections, and if I remember correctly, by increasing margins.
August 23, 2006
Counterfactual Mediterranean Campaigns Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon speculated that “in 1940, what Hitler should have done was ignore Britain, which was effectively out of the war anyway in terms of offensive capability. Instead, he should have insisted on Tunisia’s being under German occupation; told Mussolini that Germany would ‘help’ in the conquest of North Africa (translation: get the hell out of the way); and taken largely defenseless Suez. Once he had Suez, the Royal Navy would have been forced out of the Mediterranean (because it couldn’t have been supplied through the Strait of Gibraltar), making that sea an Axis lake; the oil fields of the Middle East would have been his; Turkey and Greece would have had to do his bidding; and, bingo, he’s on Russia’s southern flank as well as her western one. Game, set, and match. How’s that for armchair generalship?” In my opinion, not that good, although a fair number of people have argued something similar, and it is worth thinking this through. My objections: Had Hitler insisted on occupying Tunisia, there is a real chance on Vichy never happening—instead, France might well have fought on from its Empire, which is what Reynaud, the Prime Minister, wanted to do, and what Churchill hoped for. One of the things that secured the Armistice was a German promise to leave the French Empire intact and the French navy alone. If Hitler hadn’t, and Reynaud had prevailed, the Axis seems likelier to have swiftly lost Libya than gained all of North Africa, and the Royal Navy would have been much less hard pressed around the world if it had possessed a large Free French Navy. If Germany had gained Tunis by threat and still gotten the armistice, could a German army have easily taken Suez? Egypt was at that moment indeed very lightly held. But possibly not. It would have taken some time to get a mechanized and motorized German army to Egypt, so British forces would almost certainly have been built up, with no invasion threat to pin them down—or even with the (receding) threat of invasion, Churchill sent precious armored units to Egypt. What would have had a great effect was what proved crucial in our history: Port capacity in most of Libya and Egypt was too feeble to supply a larger army than the one Rommel actually commanded (it was, after all, often too feeble to supply the army Rommel did command). There was no railroad in much of this area, and everything had to move by truck, including the gasoline for those trucks (German logistics normally depended on significant use of rail and horses; only British and American armies, and later Soviet armies, were entirely motorized and mechanized). A very interesting early essay on this problem is a chapter in Martin van Creveld’s pathbreaking Supply and War, one of the first great books on the history of logistics. If Germany could have supplied an army of a sufficient size, that army still might not have made it to Suez. It was usually easy for mechanized German armies to flank clumsier British forces when desert fighting necessarily meant an open flank, but the relatively narrow passage between the sea and the impassable Qattara depression made a position that could not be flanked. It has never been easy to dislodge British troops from such a position. Memorable attempts to do so run from Agincourt to El Alamein, and include celebrated Spanish examples and a very famous Belgian one. In the Second World War, German armies only looked irresistible when they fought in circumstances that played to their strengths. If Hitler had gotten to Suez, would the oil fields of the Middle East have been his? Iraq and Saudi Arabia were far away—as the great WWII historian Gerhard Weinberg has observed, conquering the Middle East looks most plausible when you restrict yourself to small-scale maps. British troops could reach Iraq by sea; German troops would have had to cross a lot of trackless desert. Getting much of the oil back to Germany in the face of the Royal Navy would have been no picnic. Getting Greece to do Germay’s bidding might have been possible—Metaxas’s dicatorship was ideologically sympathetic. Getting Mussolini to play along would have been tricky: In our history, Mussolini invaded Greece against Hitler’s wishes, and if Italy had been robbed of what looked like its chance for glory in Egypt, Mussolini would have been even balkier: Mussolini was at that point self-consciously waging a parallel war, rather than being an obedient junior partner. And by the way, keeping the Italians out of Egypt would have been tricky, too: Only crushing defeat made Italy accept German aid in North Africa, and Italians actually fought very well under Rommel, so keeping them out would have had a significant cost. Getting Turkey to do Hitler’s bidding would have been trickier yet. In our history, Turkey seems to have followed Ataturk’s alleged deathbed advice of 1938: Stay out until the last minute, then join whichever side England in on. Even very impressive German successes failed to alter Turkish fidelity to that advice: When Germany seemed about to take Stalingrad and had already seized some of the oilfields in the Caucuses, those Turks who thought it was time to ally with Germany were silenced by Inonu, Ataturk’s successor: ‘Wait until the Germans get to Batum, then ask me again.’ Being on Russia’s southern flank might also have been a debatable advantage. Russia’s southern flank was composed of mountains, and more mountains. Germans did not fight particularly effectively when attacking into mountains, rather than defending in them, and supplying those Germans would have been a misery. Russians fought very effectively when defending mountains (also cities, swamps, etc.) All of the above points to an oddity about most counterfactual history of the Second World War. Almost all of that voluminous genre explores the chances of Germany doing better than the historical Germany did. But the more you think about it, the larger one possibility looms: In our history, Germany did a lot better than she might have done, had her enemies been even a little luckier, or a little less self-destructive. Almost no alternate history explores the possible worlds we might inhabit if the Allies had gotten a few more of the breaks.
August 23, 2006
Studies Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:50 PM EST Joshua Zeitz offers a study that demonstrates liberal bias in the media. I’m happy to have it, needless to say, although I haven’t had time to look at it closely and I have no opinion on it. But it set me to thinking about “studies” in general. Some of them are attempts by social scientists to quantify and objectify what is basically unquantifiable and unobjectifiable, and need to be taken with considerable quantities of salt. My favorite example comes from a book by Charles Murray called Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. It tries to quantify genius (one cannot accuse Mr. Murray of aiming too low). It does this by looking at sources, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries in various fields, and ranking those mentioned in them by the number of mentions. (It’s more complicated than that, so I invite the reader to look at the details of the methodology in the book.) Now, it so happens that I have a particular and deep interest in what is usually called the “American popular song,” and in the source of so many of the standards of that genre, the Broadway musical. This form flourished from the early 20th century (Jerome Kern’s staggeringly beautiful “They Wouldn’t Believe Me,” 1913, is often considered the first standard) until the Beatles era, with a few late entries, such as Kander and Ebb (Cabaret and many others) and, of course, Stephen Sondheim. So, naturally, when the editor was kind enough to send me a copy of the book, I wondered how the great composers of this form stacked up among the geniuses of music in general. Beethoven and Mozart both get 100, J. S. Bach, curiously, only 87, and Haydn 56. King Henry VIII—who may or may not have written “Greensleeves”—gets a 2. It turns out that George Gershwin rated a 6. Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern rated 1. Frederick Loewe, the composer of My Fair Lady and three other shows of some, but much lesser, note, also rated 1. Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls, among many others), didn’t make the cut. This makes absolutely no sense whatever. Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers are, by orders of magnitude, the most important composers in terms of the history of the development of the Broadway musical, taking it from a mere trivial entertainment to a major art form. Richard Rodgers is, at least according to the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, the most frequently played composer of all time. Frederick Loewe, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the least musically interesting of the major Broadway composers. It is his sometime partner, Alan Jay Lerner, whose altogether wonderful lyrics lift their songs out of the ordinary. What accounts for this absurd result? Two things, I think. First, musical encyclopedias and dictionaries (13 of them were consulted) are written by musicologists, and musicologists are notoriously snobbish about music that is—ugh!—popular with the vulgar plebes. If you don’t know what a diminished seventh is, you can’t possibly know what music is important. As Rodgers and Hart explained, “Finer things are for the finer folk / Thus society began. / Caviar for peasants is a joke, / It’s too good for the average man.” So while Paul Hindemith, whose name and music, I am confident, are unfamiliar to the vast majority of Americans today, gets a 19, Irving Berlin (“Irving Berlin has no place in American music,” Jerome Kern once said, “Irving Berlin IS American music”) gets a 1. The fact that Irving Berlin is played endlessly, and Hindemith hardly at all, is regarded by all too many musicologists as a point in Hindemith’s favor. I have no doubt that the reason Gershwin rates a 6, while the other four of the “big five” Broadway composers rate a 1 or a 0, is that Gershwin sometimes wrote in classical forms and therefore could be taken seriously, while, say, Richard Rodgers was just a tunesmith, not to be considered in the same breath as, say, Giacomo Puccini. (Historical note: The Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar refused to allow Puccini to turn his play Liliom into an opera, fearing that he would be forgotten and only Puccini would be remembered. But he had no problem with allowing Rodgers and Hammerstein to turn the play into a Broadway musical. The name of the musical? Carousel. Molnar today is forgotten; Carousel and its extraordinary score most certainly are not.) Second, musicologists tend disproportionately to be German. And Fritz Loewe was born in Berlin. The point of all this is that these studies can produce data that is very useful ammunition in the give and take of argument. They don’t always make any sense.
August 23, 2006
When Elephants and Donkeys Fight, the Gnats Get Strained Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:45 AM EST I hesitate to get in between John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz for fear of being hit with all the spitballs and water balloons they’re lobbing back and forth. But I think this whole question of media bias is really one of definition. As we can see from the way Gordon shuns the label “conservative” and Zeitz admits only to being “somewhat liberal,” everybody locates the center close to his or her own opinions and evaluates the media using that frame of reference.* This reminds me of a manuscript we once received from a professor at a Canadian university. The subject was Harry Truman, and the author’s thesis was that everybody thinks Truman grew up poor, when in fact he was middle-class. The reason for this misapprehension, the author said, is that in America, you’re considered either rich or poor; there is no middle ground. We didn’t buy the article for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the basic premise is false. It’s true that Truman came from a modest background, but I don’t know anyone who thinks his family had to beg for crusts of bread on the street. But if the premise was a straw man, the professor’s explanation of it was even more wrong. In America, the popular myth is not that everyone is either rich or poor; it’s that everyone is middle-class. I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon, probably from the 1930s, that takes place at the graduation exercises of a wealthy boarding school. I don’t know if Helen Hokinson drew it, but it’s the type she would have drawn. Amid all the trappings of money and power, a young man standing at the podium gazes out over the well-dressed crowd and says, “. . . whilst we, the great middle class, are slowly being ground between the upper and nether millstones.” I had a friend in college whose father was a doctor. His family owned several homes and took frequent and expensive vacations, and I once ventured to suggest that they were rich. My friend looked at me like I was crazy. He explained that you can’t call yourself rich unless you have enough money to affect the movements of financial markets (or some such thing; this discussion took place late at night). Coming from the wealthy end of things, he was aware of degrees and distinctions of richness that I had never imagined; and similarly, people whose families had to scrape to get by will say, “No, we weren’t poor—we always had food on the table and a roof over our heads . . .” I think the same sort of thing is at work in the media-bias debate: Economically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as middle-class, and politically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as centrist. One reason may be that if you feel strongly about politics, you spend much more time reading commentators on your own side than those on the other. So you will be deeply familiar with fine distinctions within your tribe while tending to lump together everyone in the other tribe. People who are quite far to the left or right will say, “Who, me? I’m no liberal/conservative—not like those nuts who want to ban private schools/throw gays in jail” (or whatever wacky cause is being argued on the more feverish websites at the time). A similar phenomenon explains why it’s easier to visually tell apart members of your own race than those of a different one. That’s why Josh Zeitz can seriously assert that The New Republic is even-handed and The Weekly Standard is “an ideological rag.” In fact, if you read The Weekly Standard (or National Review, for that matter), you will see vigorous debate over immigration, religion, abortion, drug legalization, and many other topics, including the advisability of various past, present, and future wars. Now, I’m not saying that TWS is without flaw. While it hasn’t had a Stephen Glass episode, it does publish many articles just as lame as Michael Lewis’s paean to his wife’s rear end (which TNR published in 1994), and its spotty fact-checking lets through plenty of errors just as embarrassing as “In George Orwell’s 1984, the pigs took over” (as TNR asserted in 1984). But the two publications are equally open-minded and equally rigorous intellectually. For better or worse, TWS is to the right exactly what TNR (which has published a few articles by Josh over the years) is to the left. Josh doesn’t see this because his vantage point on left makes him acutely aware of all the internecine disputes in his own backyard while distancing him from the variety of opinion among conservatives, to the point where he can dismiss them all as what his fellow academics would call “the Other.” I think the same is true of John Steele Gordon and most other people who care enough about politics to assess the level of media bias. As Gordon admitted in a recent post, we strain at gnats that come from the opposing team while swallowing camels that come from our own. And that’s why the question of whether the media is biased can’t be answered definitively—one person’s bias is another person’s truth-telling. * yes, this is a popularized technicality from physics, but I couldn’t think of a better way of putting it.
August 23, 2006
Guano and Empires III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes that an exception to the rule that you can either conquer resources or buy them is the case of what he calls strategic resources. He adduces the case of Wilhelmine Germany and nitrates before the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. I am not sure why this is an exception, since Germany faced the following choices with nitrates: buy them or conquer them. Since conquest was vastly improbable, until that scientific breakthrough the best policy was to stockpile enough explosives and fertilizer to wage and win a war, and if this could not be done, avoid war with a superior naval power. In the event, Germany and Japan had shortages of strategic materials when contemplating war in the late 1930s, and at that point bought and stockpiled strategic materials. Both eventually ran down their stockpiles, although in the short term both managed to conquer more of the strategic materials they’d hoarded to win their first great victories (Japan conquered more oil in the Netherlands East Indies, Germany conquered the rich iron ore of Lorraine, and by that and other conquests overawed other suppliers of strategic materials, among them Rumania, Sweden, and the Soviet Union). My guess is that Mr. Gordon means that when a resource is strategic, you cannot count on buying it in wartime, and that is true, which is why people in such a situation who need to import those materials from overseas, when contemplating war with greatly superior naval powers, should think twice, then think some more. You can always try to build a better navy than the other fellow, or build a big enough navy to make him think twice, but that policy has at best a mixed track record: Germany tried it in the run-up to the First World War, thereby insuring British enmity and defeat. Japan tried it in the run-up to the Second World War, which did make Great Britain a bit cautious about provoking the Japanese, but this policy did not make the US all that cautious, so Japan tried conquering the resources. A wise but sadly ill-remembered old British maxim is always worth recalling: Nothing is as expensive as the world’s second-best navy. John Steele Gordon also “think(s) the Chinese attitude toward trade has been fashioned by its history”. I think many Chinese attitudes are fashioned by China’s history, but that this particular attitude has been fashioned by way of contemplation of other people’s histories. It seems possible that the Chinese subscribe to a particular interpretation of the relationship between trade and economic growth and think that in the wake of the Second World War, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan became rich because of neo-mercantilist policies rather than in spite of them, so they may be tempted to obstruct access to their own markets while thinking that they are successfully exploiting access to other markets. If so, the Chinese now believe in trade but not free trade, and may also think that you cannot necessarily buy some strategic materials in peacetime, if other purchasers are a lot richer, let alone in wartime, if they have larger navies. If the Chinese indeed think these two things, it will be very interesting to see what they do. They may believe that you can play the neo-mercantilist game for a long time if the other fellow is foolishly addicted to free trade. This is almost always a mistake, for one reason or another: sustained neo-mercantilist behavior can weaken other peoples’ commitment to free trade, thus in the long run hurting everyone, and neo-mercantilist theory can make you waste a lot of money: in Japan’s case, I think the lion’s share of state subsidies actually went to the hopelessly inefficient mining industry, and to cutting-edge projects like HD analog TV and 5th generation artificial intelligence (both of them notorious failures). Free traders believe that a neo-liberal world economy in the long run makes everyone richer. It is not enough for them to be right: other people have to agree with them. If the Chinese do not agree, they will also, in all likelihood, build a much bigger navy—and if they try that any time soon, it will probably be the second-best navy in the world. Finally, John Steele Gordon thinks “that, given its political baggage, the word imperialism should be either restricted entirely to the late nineteenth-century European race for empire or abandoned altogether.” I sympathize with some of his exasperation—the Mughals did indeed have an empire, as did, in a different sense, Stalin, and it is admittedly irritating to be told the contrary in a loud and imperious tone. But the subject of comparative imperialism is pretty interesting, and I think expanding and complicating our thinking about imperialism is better than junking the word.
August 22, 2006
Hillary Goes Electric Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:00 PM EST In a blog entry earlier today, John Steele Gordon wrote: “If newsrooms were populated almost entirely with people who had had posters of Barry Goldwater on their walls while they were growing up, they would suffer from exactly the same problem,” i.e., ideological bias. This has very little to do with his main point, but it’s interesting to note that in 1964, 17-year-old Hillary Rodham, who of course later married Bill Clinton, was a fervent Goldwater supporter, even knocking on doors in her Chicago suburb to campaign for him. Something seems to have happened over the next four years to make her reevaluate her views—though the folks at Daily Kos would say that she hasn’t changed much at all. To be sure, 1964 was a year of transition for many people—in fact, that year is the subject of the forthcoming October issue of American Heritage. Fans of this blog will be excited to learn that Joshua Zeitz has written an overview of 1964 for that issue, while John Steele Gordon contributes a piece on the 1964 World’s Fair. On a similar subject, and since it wouldn’t be an official Fred Schwarz post without mentions of punk rock and baseball, I’ll tell you that one of the most jarring moments in the recent Ramones documentary, End of the Century, came when Johnny Ramone, the band’s lead guitarist (who had an extensive baseball-card collection, by the way), said that he had been a Nixon supporter as far back as the 1960 election. What’s strange here is not that the man responsible for the distinctive sound of “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” and “Teenage Lobotomy” was a conservative; this was already fairly well known. That he’d been that way as early as 1960, though, when he was 10 years old and I was not yet born—that took a while for me to comprehend. And he stuck with it, proving that Hillary Rodham Clinton has been much more changeable over the years than Johnny Ramone in both politics and hairstyle. With Hillary, it’s mostly been a case of her adjusting to the times, whereas with Johnny, the times have come to him. I knew punk rock had irrevocably gone mainstream in the late 1980s, when I started hearing “Blitzkrieg Bop” on the P.A. system at Yankee Stadium. I’ll admit that I was guilty of some Hillary-style apostasy myself as a youngster. My first experience with baseball came in the fall of 1969, shortly after my family returned from a year abroad. At the time, everyone in my Long Island elementary school was crazy about the Mets, so I went along with the crowd and cheered them to a World Series victory. But late that season I had also seen a couple of Yankee games on television, and they seemed so pathetic (this was at the nadir of what Yankee fans call the Horace Clarke Era) that I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Over the winter I thought it over and decided that I sympathized more with the losers, so I switched to the Yankees, and I’ve been rooting for them ever since. Strange but true—I cast my lot with the Yankees because they were underdogs. After all, they hadn’t won the pennant since the ubiquitous year of 1964, and as far as I (born 1961) was concerned, that might as well have been the year Columbus landed. To conclude this ramble, I will throw in a couple more notes related to 1964. First, on the subject of people shying away from political labels, I recall what Bob Dylan sang that year: Now, I’m liberal, to a degree
And I want everybody to be free
But if you think I’ll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I’m crazy. In recent years Dylan has expressed admiration for Barry Goldwater, but back then he was still working to build a career, and he certainly knew what his audience would like. As you will read in our October issue, 1964 was the last year when it was easy to divide the world neatly into good (liberal/folkie/peacenik/northeastern/intellectual/bohemian) vs. bad (Eisenhower/businessman/southern/pop/conservative/square). The next year Dylan went electric and LBJ invaded Vietnam and riots broke out, and the whole thing started to collapse. Things must have seemed much clearer back in 1964. In fact, if you buy the CD of Bob Dylan’s 1964 concert at Philharmonic Hall and read Sean Wilentz’s self-loving liner notes, in which he worshipfully praises not only Dylan himself but also all of the elect who were brilliant and perceptive enough to be fans of his back then (including the teenaged Sean Wilentz), you’ll see that some people think it’s still 1964. Oh, and the other thing about 1964? Just that, to make this an even more typical Fred Schwarz post, I’ll bring in the book I’ve been reading lately. In this case it’s Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. Recently I was staring at the cover and noticed that the title contains the first names of both major presidential candidates in the 1964 election. I know I’m not the first person to point this out, but it’s an example of something we were discussing a few weeks back: coincidences and what we tend to read into them. Surely no one would suggest that William Makepeace Thackeray was clairvoyant enough in 1844 to predict the candidates in an election 120 years later. Yet many coincidences that seem equally unlikely and have equally innocent explanations are taken to mean much more. There, I think that clears out my notebook. If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.
August 22, 2006
Media Bias Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST Any scientist worth his Bunsen burner will tell you that it is when the data agrees with your hypothesis that you must be extra vigilant not to be led astray by it. If the data is contrary to your hypothesis, you will always double-check it. But when it agrees, it is a natural human tendency to say, “Aha! Just as I suspected,” and run with it. This human tendency is manifest far beyond the realms of science, of course. Bigots reinforce their beliefs by noting every instance that supports their bigotry but overlooking those that don’t. Political conservatives leap upon every example of fuzzy-headed liberal thinking but ignore the equally frequent instances of conservative rhetorical blather. Joshua Zeitz writes that “most media employees are liberal in their voting habits, but it does not show that the media has a liberal bias.” Maybe that is true on Vulcan, but back here on dear old planet Earth it is not. Liberals have feet fully formed of clay; they are, like the rest of us, miserable sinners. So when they see something that is agreeable to their philosophy, they have the all-too-human tendency to say, “Aha! Just as I suspected,” and run with it. And, of course, some don’t even bother to try to be objective. Here’s what Dan Rather—as powerful a newsman as could be found, at least until he tried to pass off obvious fakes as genuine documents in hopes of defeating George Bush—had to say on March 16th, 1995: “The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor.” That’s what liberal-to-a-man CBS News calls fair and balanced. I wonder what the visual was. Photographs by Jacob Riis perhaps. If newsrooms were populated almost entirely with people who had had posters of Barry Goldwater on their walls while they were growing up, they would suffer from exactly the same problem. What’s needed, obviously, is diversity of opinion (and respect for opinions other than one’s own—not exactly a common feature among ideologues). Liberals are often obsessed with diversity. Schools, corporations, neighborhoods, other people’s private clubs, must be meticulously diverse in terms of sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. But when it comes to diversity of opinion, liberals say, “. . . Oh, look at that bird over there. Isn’t that interesting?” They can’t change the subject fast enough. A newsroom where everyone votes Democratic? What’s the problem? Liberals aren’t biased. A political science faculty that is made up entirely of members of Americans for Democratic Action? So? They’ll give everyone a fair shake. After all, they’re liberals! Anyone want to buy a really neat-looking bridge over the East River?
August 22, 2006
Peter Jennings Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:20 AM EST Alexander Burns, our crack researcher/blogger/writer/jack-of-all-trades, has managed to locate the transcript of the ABC News report that John Steele Gordon mentioned last week. I stand by my demand that big claims be backed up with real evidence, and I don’t think Mr. Gordon initially met the burden of evidence. But lucky for him, Alex was able to produce the goods. In the transcript, dated early 1999, Peter Jennings refers to “Senator McConnell of Kentucky, very determined conservative member of the Republican party,” “Senator Rick Santorum, one of the younger members of the Senate, Republican, very determined conservative member of the Senate,” and “Mr. [Bob] Smith of New Hampshire, also another very, very conservative Republican intending to run for the presidency.” At no point did Jennings describe any of the Democratic senators as liberal, left-wing, or otherwise left of center. I’ll cheerfully concede the point: Jennings was singling out conservatives. I’ll add for good measure: John Steele Gordon remembered it right.
August 22, 2006
January 7, 1999 Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:20 AM EST In their emerging discussion about the (liberal?) media, both John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz have made reference to an ABC News Special Report from January 7, 1999. This edition of ABC News is a favorite example of those, like Bernard Goldberg, who seek to demonstrate media bias in favor of the left. I have located a transcript of the original ABC broadcast, which contains some information that will help inform the dispute at hand. During the broadcast, Peter Jennings and a group of commentators (Linda Douglass, Cokie Roberts, and Sam Donaldson) and guests (Jeffrey Toobin, Bill
Kristol, George Stephanopoulos, Terry Moran, and Michael Beschloss) discussed the beginning of the Senate’s trial of Bill Clinton. They began by talking about the divisions within the Senate, particularly over the question of whether witnesses should be included in the trial. Eventually, president pro tempore Strom Thurmond swore in William Rehnquist to oversee the proceedings, and the senators were called to sign an oath of impartiality. Mr. Gordon is right that, during the signing of the book, Peter Jennings identified several Republican senators as conservative. One was Bob Smith. Mr. Gordon is incorrect, though, in suggesting that he might have chosen “half a dozen other very conservative senators” as examples of Jennings’s ideological labeling. Jennings only identified two other senators as “conservative”: Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum. He also mentioned that John McCain’s politics leaned to the right. That, though, was in the context of a corny joke about the Arizona senator being left-handed, but “more right than left in his politics.” Context is important, too, for the other cases in which Jennings pointed out GOPers’ conservative politics. Joshua Zeitz has suggested one explanation for the identification of Bob Smith as a conservative: At the time, the senator was complaining that his party had abandoned its conservative underpinnings. The transcript of the broadcast suggests another reason: Smith was hoping to run for president, and Jennings was observing that an official with national ambitions would benefit from having such “strong political views.” This is hardly a disparaging mention of Smith’s conservatism. In pointing out the conservatism of Senators Santorum and McConnell, it is interesting to note that Jennings called each man a “very determined conservative.” In the context of the broadcast, this description functioned less as an ideological label than as an illustration of each man’s place in the impeachment debate. Republican commentator Bill Kristol had only a few minutes earlier finished describing the struggle, within the GOP caucus, between “moderate Republicans” and hard-line impeachment advocates like House Judiciary
Committee chairman Henry Hyde. Kristol argued that the moderates were deferring to the more implacable conservatives—”determined” supporters of impeachment like Santorum and McConnell. Jennings was identifying these two members as major actors within the dominant faction of the Republican caucus. That’s not bias; that’s accurate, relevant information. John Steele Gordon may very well be right that there is bias in the media. But in scholarship, as in law, such an argument requires evidence. Mr. Gordon included one piece of evidence and passed the argument on to Fred Barnes. As it turns out, that one piece of evidence is not evidence of anything at all. On the basis of their 1/7/99 broadcast, Jennings and his fellow ABC panelists could more effectively be criticized for being obsessed with describing senators’ hair than with pillorying their conservatism (John Kerry has “all that nice hair;” Fred Thompson is a “slightly balding character.”) Maybe that can be the subject of Bernard Goldberg’s next book.
August 21, 2006
Helping Out John Steele Gordon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:00 PM EST Mr. Gordon seems so agitated about liberal media bias that he’s having trouble constructing a good argument. I know I shouldn’t do this, but out of a sense of collegiality, I’ll help him out. In late 2005, two professors—Tim Groseclose, a political scientist at UCLA, and Jeffrey Milyo, an economist at the University of Missouri—published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, based on a scientific study they conducted of media bias. Devising an ideology gauge based on the same criteria that the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) uses to assign liberal and conservative scores to lawmakers, Groseclose and Milyo assigned 21 research assistants to score a wide range of news media, from 1995 to 2005. Of the 20 major media outlets they studied, 18 registered left of center. I’m going to give the study a read. It sounds fascinating. Mr. Gordon might give it a read, too. That said, the study rated the Drudge Report as slightly left of center. I’m open to the idea, but that fact alone raises an eyebrow. Note to Mr. Gordon: This would have been good evidence of liberal media bias. It’s much better than a made-up transcript of an ABC news report. One might even call it better scholarship than a made-up transcript of an ABC news report.
August 21, 2006
The Proof Is In The Evidence Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:35 PM EST Mr. Gordon advises me to “argue like a scholar, not a lawyer.” This is amusing, in that I have taken Mr. Gordon to task for committing what is arguably one of the cardinal sins of scholarship: boldly asserting a big idea without providing an iota of real evidence. Several days ago, in support of his contention that the media has a liberal bias, Mr. Gordon tried to reconstruct from memory the transcript of a Peter Jennings report that he recalls seeing in early 1999. He cannot quote directly from that transcript, because he has not located or cited it. Neither, I might add, is that transcript available on Lexis-Nexis. I searched but could not locate it. This isn’t to say that the transcript doesn’t exist somewhere. But if he wants to advise me on the exigencies of good scholarship, Mr. Gordon should either produce his evidence or concede that he has none. The second scrap of evidence that Mr. Gordon cited to prove liberal media bias is a speech by Fred Barnes, a conservative columnist and commentator. Barnes’s speech made an intelligent argument. But it was not a scientific survey or poll. It was an opinion piece, as Barnes himself admitted when, toward the start of his remarks, he said: “My topic today is how the mainstream media...stacks up in terms of the latter two journalistic standards, fairness and balance. In my opinion, they don’t stack up very well.” To be fair, Barnes (but not Mr. Gordon) invokes ample evidence. But this evidence doesn’t necessarily prove his point. 1) Barnes cites studies by Peter Brown and Hugh Hewitt that show that the vast majority of journalists at mainstream outlets voted for John Kerry and/or Democratic candidates for state and federal office. This proves that most media employees are liberal in their voting habits, but it does not show that the media has a liberal bias. I’m somewhat liberal myself, and I teach history. That doesn’t mean that I teach history with a liberal bias. 2) Barnes points out that many young journalists at The New Republic, a center-left magazine of news and opinion, have gone onto successful careers at large newspapers and magazines. By contrast, he claims that journalists who begin their career at The Weekly Standard have enjoyed no such luck. There’s a good reason for this. Compared with The New Republic, The Weekly Standard is an ideological rag. TNR is and has long been a maddeningly heterodox publication. It freely allows writers from conservative magazines like The Weekly Standard and The National Review to contribute pieces in its print and online publications. It encourages debate over liberal sacred cows (like abortion rights) and taboos (like school vouchers). It invites leading scholars to write its book, film, and art reviews. It was an early proponent of Bush’s Iraq War and has since subjected itself to intense scrutiny over that position. You’ll find no such intellectual rigor or even-handedness at The Weekly Standard. TNR places its reporters at good magazines because TNR is a good magazine. I have no problem with The Weekly Standard. It’s a good organ for conservative and neo-con opinion. But its mandate and program are different from that of TNR. 3) Barnes suggested that the mainstream press demonstrated unspeakable bias in its reporting of the Cindy Sheehan story last summer. Even if we concede his point, one could just as easily point to the mainstream media’s uncritical acceptance of the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had WMDs, and that the U.S. had rock-solid evidence to this effect. The NYT, after all, ran more than a few Judith Miller stories in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, and no reporter more dutifully printed the administration line than Judith Miller. 4) As further evidence of liberal media bias, Barnes pointed to a “well documented book written by a man named John O’Neill—himself a Swift Boat vet—who went into great detail about why John Kerry didn’t deserve his three Purple Hearts, etc. . . Normally in journalism, when somebody makes some serious charges against a well-known person, reporters look into the charges to see if they’re true or not. If they aren’t, reporters look into the motives behind the false charges—for instance, to find out if someone paid the person making the false charges, and so on. But that’s not what the media did in this case. The New York Times responded immediately by investigating the financing of the Swift Boat vets, rather than by trying to determine whether what they were saying was true. Ultimately, grudgingly—after bloggers and FOX News had covered the story sufficiently long that it couldn’t be ignored—the mainstream media had to pick up on the story. But its whole effort was aimed at knocking down what the Swift Boat vets were saying.” I ran a Lexis-Nexis search and found that the terms “John Kerry” and either “Swift Boat” or “Purple Heart” appeared in 53 separate NYT articles in 2004. The first article that cited the Kerry controversy appeared on April 21 and showed Kerry very much on the defensive. Another eight generic articles, tracing the he-said, she-said aspects of the controversy, ran between May 5 and August 20. Only then did the NYT run a full exposé of the anti-Kerry attacks. So Barnes is wrong. It took the NYT four months—and nine articles, which, to the chagrin of the Kerry campaign, repeatedly aired O’Neill’s charges—before the paper began systematically reporting on the links between the Republican party and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. I have no doubt that Barnes genuinely remembered history otherwise. But the facts do not bear out his contention. Like Mr. Gordon, he was working on memory, rather than hard research. In closing, Mr. Gordon points to a poll that reveals many journalists are worried about the absence of conservatives in the newsroom, but this poll proves no bias in the actual work that journalists do. So I repeat my challenge: show me the bias.
August 21, 2006
What Liberal Media? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:30 PM EST Mr. Zeitz gets very nasty when one of his sacred philosophical cows gets criticized. He should learn to practice a little comity. He should also argue like a scholar, not a lawyer. Scholars argue to find the truth. Lawyers are paid to win the argument and the truth be damned.
He writes, “In fact, I didn’t miss Mr. Gordon’s point. I understood it quite well. It wasn’t that complicated.”
No it wasn’t, but he still doesn’t get it, or doesn’t choose to. I realize now that by picking Bob Smith over half a dozen other very conservative senators I could just as easily have chosen, I gave Mr. Zeitz the opening he needed to ignore the thrust of my argument. He seized it with lawyer-like glee.
He writes, “He thinks that liberal bias runs rampant in the mainstream media. But the only evidence he was able to muster in favor of this charge was an unsupported, paraphrased anecdote about Peter Jennings and Sen. Bob Smith.”
See what I mean? It wasn’t an anecdote about Peter Jennings and Senator Bob Smith. It was an anecdote about Peter Jennings and the entire United States Senate, of which Bob Smith constituted one percent of the membership. “Able to muster”? Have I had a stroke that no one has told me about? What I wrote at the end of the post—it wasn’t that long a post and Mr. Zeitz might have done the readers of this blog the courtesy of reading to the end of it before rushing off to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade annual bingo game—was “I could go on and on, but fortunately I don’t have to.” I then invited readers to look at a speech by Fred Barnes, which noted much more evidence.
I realize that Fred Barnes is the executive editor of The Weekly Standard and therefore, as far as Mr. Zeitz is concerned, Beelzebub. But for those less ideologically blinkered, I still recommend it.
Mr. Zeitz writes, “Conservatives (and Mr. Gordon, who quotes freely from the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Weekly Standard, but who resists being labeled a conservative) . . .” I don’t read The Weekly Standard regularly. I think the last time was when I went to their tenth-anniversary lunch last year—hey, a free lunch is a free lunch—and received a copy. I am not a conservative, because I subscribe to no ideological bundle of pre-packaged ideas. Ideology for the most part is what half-wits use to give themselves the illusion they can think. Mr. Zeitz seems to think that since I don’t take communion at his church, I must do so at the only other church in town of whose existence he seems to be aware. Gilbert and Sullivan made fun of the false dichotomy between liberals and conservatives as far back as 1882, when Gilbert wrote in Iolanthe,
“Now Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative." Mr. Zeitz writes, “But they [those wascally conservatives, as Elmer Fudd would say] rarely produce solid evidence of this bias. In this case, Mr. Gordon charged bias. He offered evidence. I showed that his evidence simply doesn’t prove his case.”
No, he looked at one piece of the evidence, found something irrelevant he could use to dismiss it, and did so.
He writes, “I’d also recommend Eric Alterman’s book, What Liberal Media? Alterman is certainly no nonpartisan. He’s a very liberal columnist for The Nation. Alterman’s bias aside, his book is solidly researched and certainly goes a long way in disproving the ‘liberal media’ bugaboo.” Yeah, right. Mr. Alterman is so far to the left that he thinks the media as a whole is wildly biased towards the right. Ninety percent of journalists in the national media, according to poll after poll, vote for the most liberal candidate in the race, but Mr. Alterman thinks they are all clones of Bill Buckley. And he argues like a lawyer: Any evidence that fits his thesis is included; any that doesn’t is not. I could give an anecdote or two, but Mr. Zeitz would probably zero in on a comma fault, so instead I will just recommend the following, supplied by a kindly reader of this blog, from Reason Online, the Pew Research Center, the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, and National Review Online.
August 20, 2006
Chamberlain and Munich II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:45 PM EST I will gracefully give way to Fred Smoler’s obviously far greater knowledge of the historical literature regarding the military situation in Europe in 1938. Let me point out, however, that the figures of 5 and 47 for the number of operational Royal Air Force squadrons in 1938 and 1939 come from William Manchester’s biography of Churchill. Since he was on the go-to-war-in-1938 side of the argument, I assumed they were accurate. Obviously they were wildly off. I wonder what the situation regarding British radar installations was in the fall of 1938. They came in very handy in 1940.
August 20, 2006
What Liberal Media? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:45 PM EST In response to my last post, John Steele Gordon wrote: “Mr. Zeitz seems to have completely missed my point. I wasn’t talking about Senator Bob Smith. . . . What I was talking about was that Peter Jennings characterized many Republicans according to how conservative he perceived them to be. But he didn’t characterize a single Democrat, no matter how liberal. They were all just Democrats.” In fact, I didn’t miss Mr. Gordon’s point. I understood it quite well. It wasn’t that complicated. He thinks that liberal bias runs rampant in the mainstream media. But the only evidence he was able to muster in favor of this charge was an unsupported, paraphrased anecdote about Peter Jennings and Sen. Bob Smith. As I pointed out, there was very good cause for Jennings to label Smith a very conservative Republican. I think it’s Mr. Gordon who misses my point, and my point is about evidence. Conservatives (and Mr. Gordon, who quotes freely from the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Weekly Standard, but who resists being labeled a conservative) like to bandy about the charge of “liberal media bias.” But they rarely produce solid evidence of this bias. In this case, Mr. Gordon charged bias. He offered evidence. I showed that his evidence simply doesn’t prove his case. If Mr. Gordon has better evidence of liberal media bias, he should produce it. If he doesn’t, I’d suggest that he either run a Lexis-Nexis search to find a transcript of the Jennings commentary that he was paraphrasing (I tried but couldn’t locate the transcript), or that he visit Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt’s library maintains an extraordinary video archive of televised American news reports, running back to the 1970s. It’s an invaluable resource for historians of modern U.S. history. Visit the site here. There is a good counter-point to be made—to wit, that mainstream media bias exists, but that it is conservative bias. Liberal muckrakers at www.mediamatters.org keep a running tab of conservative bias in print and broadcast media. I’m not a devoted reader of the site, but its editors certainly do a thorough job of documenting the conservative tilt of many mainstream print and broadcast journalists. I’d also recommend Eric Alterman’s book, What Liberal Media?. Alterman is certainly no nonpartisan. He’s a very liberal columnist for The Nation. Alterman’s bias aside, his book is solidly researched and certainly goes a long way in disproving the “liberal media” bugaboo.
August 20, 2006
On Chamberlain and Munich Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:05 AM EST Fred Schwarz posts that John Steele Gordon has been defending Chamberlain’s decision not to fight for Czechoslovakia. I followed the links Fred posted, and they seem to contain only excerpts of what John Steel Gordon wrote, but one thing John Steele Gordon does write is, I think, absolutely wrong. In the post Fred links to, John Steele Gordon argues that “the biggest problem was air power . . . no invasion was possible as long as the Navy controlled the sea. . . . But by the 1930’s control of the sea was not possible without control of the air above it, and here Britain was far, far weaker than Germany. Had Hitler gained control of the air over the Channel for even a couple of days, he could have put an army on British shores and then Britain, with its weak army, would have been doomed. . . . So the growth of the Royal Air Force in these months, growing from 5 to 47 squadrons as Manchester states, was crucial. Britain could not have survived otherwise . . .” This is perfect nonsense, although nonsense with an interesting history of its own, of which more later. The figure of a total of 5 RAF squadrons in October of 1938 is absurd. According to the official history of British war production, in September of 1938 there were 30 operational fighter squadrons. Without hunting up the exact figures for October 1938, the figures for January of 1939 should do: 135 RAF squadrons. The number of fighter squadrons actually went down, to 27, because obsolete aircraft were being retired (the first Spitfires were delivered to fighter squadrons in 1938). As background, one of the greatest intelligence failures of the 1930s was the Allies’ often gross overestimate of the Luftwaffe’s strength. At the time of the Munich crisis most RAF and Luftwaffe aircraft were obsolete, and both sides were in the throes of rearmament. If both sides had fought with what was on hand, my memory is that Britain and France combined outnumbered German combat aircraft by something like 4:3, and that ratio excludes the not-insignificant Polish and Czech air forces. The catastrophic overestimate was fostered by sustained German propaganda and disinformation. There is no excuse for being taken in by that exercise more than 60 years on. The best book—by a very long chalk the best book—on the merits of fighting Hitler in 1938 rather than 1939 is by Williamson Murray, an excellent and celebrated military historian. That book is The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939, published by Princeton University Press in 1984. Anyone wanting to develop an informed opinion of this question should read Murray, or failing that a professional review of his book. The equally able and equally celebrated military historian Brian Bond did one in the English Historical Review, and there are others. By the way, neither of these men are the “liberals” Mr. Gordon so enjoys pillorying, nor are they the tenured Marxists he also mentions. At any rate, in 1938 the Luftwaffe was simply not ready for war. I have never read a professional study of the Luftwaffe that argued otherwise. Had it been ready for war, the relative strength of the Czech Army (and probably the Polish Army, which Polish historians think would have fought if Britain and France had, despite Poland’s animosity toward Czechoslovakia, and her territorial disputes), plus the relative strength of the French Army would have made it extremely unlikely that Germany could have quickly secured the bases that would have allowed her fighters to even reach the Channel, let alone contest it for any length of time. One reason, among many: If the war had broken out in October, the tanks Germany possessed would not have been able to do the only thing that made them truly formidable, which was impose a tempo of operations unmatchable by their adversaries. In 1938 German armor was not only relatively sparse, it was not designed to fight lightening campaigns during a European winter (neither was 1939 German armor). Suppose that the Wehrmacht did the impossible and somehow conquered both Czechoslovakia and France by June of 1939, the date by which (against all odds) it actually did that. Could the Luftwaffe have covered an invasion of Britain? Even a year later, in the summer of 1939, the Luftwaffe’s aircraft would have had no deployed air-launched torpedo, and most of its bombs would still have been 50-kilogram fragmentation or general-purpose bombs, which could not have pierced the deck armor of a Royal Navy light cruiser. In 1938, contrary to Mr. Gordon’s assertion, control of the Channel was more than possible without control of the air. That would also be true in 1939 and 1940. And if Germany had gotten control of the Channel, she could not have moved many troops across it. She did not have the sealift. If she had moved troops across it, she could not have supplied them. Professionals who have modeled the logistics of a 1940 Sea Lion—I mean professional militaries—have agreed about this since joint British-German war games in the 1960s. A very interesting recent book on the likely fate of a cross-Channel invasion in 1940—crushing defeat—gives the Germans every break by assuming that the RAF lost control of the Channel and that the Royal Navy declined to contest it. The book was published in 2004 (it is Martin Marix Evans’s Invasion! Operation Sea Lion, 1940), and anyone wanting to get a sense of some of the logistical obstacles facing a 1940 Sea Lion should read it. So where did this implausible defense of Chamberlain at Munich come from? It began in the early 1970s with Tory apologists like Maurice Cowling, who detested both the rise of the Labour Party after the war and the Social Democratic welfare states of postwar Western Europe, who mourned the loss of empire, and who did not admire Churchill for having waged and won the war that created our world. In the postwar world, there have been some on both left and right—their numbers seem to be increasing—who do not admire the Allied leaders of the Second World War, or accept what were long taken to be that war’s most urgent lessons. Cowling and his followers attempted to redeem Churchill’s disgraced opponent Chamberlain. Simultaneously, Munich became an analogy in both the Cold War world and the post-Cold War world, and as an analogy was detested on the left, where Churchill was not much admired for a host of reasons. The mutual hostility to Churchill made for an unwitting and unholy alliance, but that alliance has not yet managed to redeem Chamberlain at Munich.
August 19, 2006
Peter Jennings Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:00 PM EST Mr. Zeitz seems to have completely missed my point. I wasn’t talking about Senator Bob Smith. (I agree that Bob Smith was politically on his way around the bend at this point, which is why he is now in well deserved retirement in Florida.) What I was talking about was that Peter Jennings characterized many Republicans according to how conservative he perceived them to be. But he didn't characterize a single Democrat, no matter how liberal. They were all just Democrats. How conservative each Republican senator was was completely irrelevant to the proceedings, which was the taking of an oath to judge fairly and on the evidence. Unless, of course, one believes that conservatives can’t be trusted to observe their oaths while liberals unquestionably can be.
Peter Jennings, entirely unconsciously I’m sure, was being a good deal less than fair and balanced—to coin a phrase—in his coverage.
August 19, 2006
More on Self-Interest Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon and Josh Zeitz have said some interesting things about “self-interest”; John Steele Gordon has also recently posted on the notion of elites. He seems to think that Josh defines “self-interest” in narrowly economic terms, and that I similarly define “elite.” I don’t think this is an accurate characterization. Josh wrote of a preference of some white workers for racial status at the expense of economic interest—he called this a preference for “psychological wages”. While that phrase adapts economic language, it does so precisely to avoid a narrowly economic notion of self-interest. I defined elites as “groups with greatly disproportionate political power, or very high status, or very high income”, so income came last. John Steele Gordon also offered an expansive definition of self-interest, writing that “Mother Teresa was pursuing her self-interest in the slums of Calcutta, because she would have been miserable doing anything else. Self interest encompasses the totality of what human beings need and what they seek. The pursuit of self-interest, in other words, is simply what Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness.” I have a lot of sympathy for John Steele Gordon’s attempt to complicate our sense of what people may see as their self-interest, and I also have some reservations, because I think so broad a definition risks expanding our conception of self-interest too radically, and may diminish its value as an analytical tool. And it risks tautology, without necessarily achieving it. Some will say, okay, people seek whatever they think will make them happy—well, what else would they ever seek? Economics began as a discipline that assumed that a more narrow notion of self-interest could explain people’s motives and clarify their best course of action, at least once people began to value material condition more, and social rank and the ascetic manifestations of the religious impulse less. Economics was a discipline that would allow people to raise their material status, and it assumed that this would increasingly be what people cared to do. They would be more and more likely to pursue a particular form of happiness, and find it. This simplifies a lot about people, in the interest of explaining a lot about people. This does not mean that the founders of economics were right about people, but there are some reasons for hoping that they were right. If people have to choose between superior racial status and greater wealth, we want them to value greater wealth the more highly. If they cannot come to make that choice, they will never be reconciled to the defeat of the Confederate States of America or the Third Reich. We sometimes want them to value material well-being over what they see as moral excellence, because if they do not Hezbollah will never cease valuing the destruction of Tel Aviv over the preservation of South Beirut. These are great simplifications, but simplifying is part of what theories do. My impression is that people in modern societies often mix their preferences. While they may sometimes seek superior racial status over material well-being, they often think they are choosing both simultaneously. Australian white trade unionists supported racial exclusion of immigrants to keep up their own wages by limiting the supply of labor. So far, they seem to have been wrong. Australians now enjoy a higher standard of living than they did in the 1950s. If superior racial status turns out to be the same thing as wealth over the long run, we’re in trouble; if they are generally opposed ends, between which people must choose, we at least have a chance. So while we tend to complain about greed, and mourn the loss of the passion for honor, the eighteenth-century founders of economics thought that the world would be safer if people valued honor less and riches more. They had a case.
August 19, 2006
Guano and Empire II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:00 PM EST A few comments on this very interesting topic.
1) As Fred Smoler writes, you can either conquer resources you need or you can buy them. That’s usually true, unless the resource is strategic in nature. In the nineteenth century, Britannia did indeed rule the waves, and the sources of the nitrates that were becoming ever more vital both for war (to make gunpowder and, later, other explosives with) and agriculture (for fertilizer) were located overseas. Expansionist Wilhelmine Germany realized that its nitrate supply could be cut off by the Royal Navy at any time, rendering Germany militarily impotent, not to mention hungry. The result, in the first decade of the twentieth century, was the Haber-Bosch process for turning atmospheric nitrogen (about 80 percent of the air we breath is nitrogen) into ammonia, from which all manner of nitrogenous compounds can be made.
Had the Germans not been so damned good at chemistry, they couldn’t have started World War I.
2) I think the Chinese attitude toward trade has been fashioned by its history. Because China was so vast and diverse and resource-rich, it had little need of foreign trade for much of its history. Further, it was the greatest industrial power on earth in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, running huge trade surpluses with Europe (that’s how “china,” meaning tableware, entered the English language) and being paid largely in silver because there were few European goods that could compete in the Chinese market. But by the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had made Europe, especially Britain, dominant in trade goods and overwhelmingly powerful militarily. China, with the Manchu dynasty in serious decline, was forced into an endless series of humiliating treaties, including being forced to buy opium from India. These treaties were not only humiliating, they were often commercially unfair, forcing China to sell cheap and buy dear.
3) “Imperialism” is a very loaded word, dating only to the mid-nineteenth century. At first it had both positive connotations (bringing civilization to the less fortunate races—whether they wanted it or not, of course) and negative ones (“That odious system of bluster and swagger and might against right upon which Lord Beaconsfield [Disraeli] and his colleagues bestowed the tawdry nickname of Imperialism”—London Daily News, 1898). But by the twentieth, especially after World War I, the connotations became almost wholly negative. And of course Lenin and his followers quickly turned imperialism into an attribute solely of the capitalist powers. Communist powers never practiced imperialism. Heaven forefend. The Poles, Czechs, East Germans, Hungarians, etc., had a rather different view of Soviet “liberation” of course.
Personally, I think that, given its political baggage, the word imperialism should be either restricted entirely to the late nineteenth-century European race for empire or abandoned altogether. After all, I have never been able to figure out why the fifteenth-century Moghul conquest of much of the Indian subcontinent is simply history, but the British Indian hegemony acquired (“in a fit of absent-mindedness”) in the eighteenth century is “imperialism,” unless there’s an agenda at work.
August 19, 2006
Peter Jennings: Liberal Elite or Insider? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST I disagree generally with John Steele Gordon’s characterization of the “mainstream media,” but more on that soon. In the meantime, it’s worth noting something about the example that he cites—of Peter Jennings’s identification of Bob Smith as “the very conservative Republican senator from New Hampshire,” as compared with his identification of Barbara Mikulski as simply a Democrat from Maryland. Mr. Gordon seems to be reconstructing Jennings’s commentary from memory, rather than direct transcript. Granting him some slack, and assuming that his seven-year recollection is accurate: In February 1999, when this commentary would have aired on ABC, Bob Smith—then a U.S. Senator from New Hampshire—was publicly threatening to leave the Republican party. He claimed that the Republicans were not living up to their conservative principles. True to his word, in July 1999, just a few months after the Clinton impeachment trial, Smith left the GOP and became an independent, threatening to run for President on a separate Conservative party line. Smith eventually returned to the Republican fold but was denied renomination in 2002. He now lives in Florida. My point is this: If Jennings identified Smith as “the very conservative Republican senator from New Hampshire,” he was probably committing a verbal twitch. Most viewers wouldn’t have appreciated what Jennings, the consummate political insider, surely knew—to wit, that Smith was a self-styled conservative maverick who already had one foot out the GOP’s door. Mr. Gordon should probably find a better example of media bias.
August 19, 2006
Chamberlain and Hitler Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:40 PM EST I am much flattered that Fred Schwarz chose to alert the readers of this blog to my conversation on Powerline over the last few days regarding the question of whether Britain would have been better off going to war in 1938 instead of making the infamous deal in Munich. Scott Johnson chose to end the discussion, which is his privilege (it’s his blog, after all), by giving Sir Winston Churchill the last word on the subject. But being willing, as usual, to rush in where angels might well fear to tread (Who is this Churchill guy, anyway?), I replied as follows (slightly edited by me this morning):
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Please let me point out that I am an unqualified admirer of Sir Winston Churchill as both statesman and writer. More than any other single person in the twentieth century, he saved the world. And he is, I believe, the only writer of nonfiction—the vineyard in which I labor—ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But that, of course, is part of the problem. First, the sheer power of his prose—not to mention the sheer pleasure of reading him--tends to overwhelm us. Second, he is one of the few major figures to both make history and write it. Caesar and Grant were two others. That’s pretty exalted company. Churchill was very aware of that duality. In 1944 he wrote to Stalin, “I agree that we had better leave the past to history, but remember if I live long enough I may be one of the historians.” Indeed he was. And he quite deliberately shaped his history to make himself look good, which is why it must be used with caution. I would highly recommend David Reynolds’s In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War.
The trouble with counterfactual history, of course, is that we never get to know how it would have worked out in the real world. It’s a bit like wondering how a backgammon game would have turned out if one of the players on the third roll had gotten 4-3 instead of 5-2.
Had Chamberlain and Daladier made it plain (by mobilizing the Royal Navy, calling up reservists, burning embassy papers, etc., etc.) that they absolutely would go to war over Czechoslovakia, Hitler might have pulled back. Instead they made it as plain as if they had told him in so many words that they would accept whatever it took to avoid war. Naturally, Hitler drove the hardest of bargains and that convinced him that he could do it again and again. Hitler was much more reckless after Munich. As Donald Kagan wrote in On the Origins of War, there is no surer means of preserving the peace than to convince your enemy that you are willing to go to war. We’ve had to learn that lesson, yet again, in recent years.
Personally I think France was doomed regardless of when war broke out. The nation’s spirit was broken. Neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia would ever have invaded Germany had war come about, so Hitler could have safely moved many divisions and slammed into France with more than enough force to break that broken nation. Then only the Channel would have stood between him and England.
(Of course counterfactual history is lots of fun. In 1940, what Hitler should have done was ignore Britain, which was effectively out of the war anyway in terms of offensive capability. Instead, he should have insisted on Tunisia’s being under German occupation; told Mussolini that Germany would “help” in the conquest of North Africa (translation: get the hell out of the way); and taken largely defenseless Suez. Once he had Suez, the Royal Navy would have been forced out of the Mediterranean (because it couldn’t have been supplied through the Strait of Gibraltar), making that sea an Axis lake; the oil fields of the Middle East would have been his; Turkey and Greece would have had to do his bidding; and, bingo, he’s on Russia’s southern flank as well as her western one. Game, set, and match. How’s that for armchair generalship?)
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By the way, there is no statue of Sir Winston Churchill in New York (or, for that matter, Washington, D.C., so far as I know). There certainly should be, and I have the perfect place for it, in New York at least. On the evening of December 13, 1931, Churchill, visiting the United States on a lecture tour, took a taxi to Bernard Baruch’s apartment on Fifth Avenue. Let off on the Central Park side, he was struck by a passing car as he jaywalked across the avenue and injured seriously enough to require a week’s hospitalization. He might easily have been killed. Had he been, who would have saved the world in 1940?
August 19, 2006
Guano and Empire Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:15 AM EST Fred Schwarz dates American imperialism to an 1856 law authorizing the seizure of territory containing vital resources, in the original case guano islands. Aware that the use of force in pursuit of bird excrement may seem quaint, even goofy, he explains the historical economic importance of bird excrement, and concludes by noting, “Yet even today, nations contest possession of barren rock outcroppings in order to establish ownership of underwater oil fields, occasionally firing shots in the process. Whether it’s wood, fish, crude oil, beaver skins, or any other indispensable commodity, people have always been willing to travel long distances and use all the machinery of national sovereignty to secure it.” Well, some people have, and some people haven’t, or more precisely, some people haven’t seen the necessity. They figured they could always buy the stuff on the open market. People who didn’t believe that strove for autarky—self-sufficiency in resources—and were often tempted by empire. Of course, people were tempted by empire for lots of reasons: national prestige (Wilhelmine Germany), a sense of civilizing mission (the British and French, among others), as a justification for the importance of the atavistic elites who commanded imperial expeditions (Schumpeter’s theory of imperialism), as a psychological compensation for defeat nearer to home (in my view, the nineteenth-century French in North Africa and then Indochina), to stabilize a chaotic frontier (a lot of nineteenth-century British imperialism), or out of what may or may not be mistaken economic ideas (a lot of people). For a good chunk of the twentieth century and a piece of the late nineteenth, imperialism seemed like good economics to a fair number of people. There were various perceived economic motives for empire at that time, a search for protected markets being pretty conspicuous. Some of the horrors of the twentieth century originated (in part) in pursuit of economic ends. Nazi and Imperial Japanese imperialists strove for autarky, and Germans and Japanese indeed traveled long distances in pursuit of indispensable commodities—as far, respectively, as Stalingrad and Guadalcanal. It is worth pondering the fact that postwar Germany and Japan, stripped of their empires and baffled in their search for autarky, are two of the richest countries in recorded history, just as Belgium is richer without the empire it seized in the Congo than it was when it was looting that territory. You can make a fair case that it really is a lot cheaper to just buy the stuff, especially if Spruance and Zhukov have any chance of turning up between you and the resources you’re trying to steal. Even if not—after all, Zhukov swiftly went on to win his political master a very considerable territorial empire—Axis powers stripped of their empires and generally ground to powder became fabulously rich, hopelessly richer than Zhukov’s posterity. For that matter, post-imperial Britain and France are vastly richer than they were as imperial powers. Economic theories of imperialism arguing that imperialism was a real if wicked road to at least temporary riches, perhaps the only road, nonetheless had a long post-World War II vogue, despite the example of Germany and Japan. This is probably because the influence of theory is not always quickly curtailed by the absence of compelling evidence: Lenin read Hobson, and lots of people read Lenin, and read him for a long time. Why they did that is perhaps for another post. If you look up “imperialism” in Amazon titles, you will find an amazing number of books that were in print in the 1970s and have been out of print ever since, and many of these books assume good economic motives for imperialism. It is of course possible to sincerely believe a bad idea and seek empire out of motives rooted in bad economics, although those older books did tend to assume that imperialism was (in the non-moral sense of the word) good economics, at least in the period we were assumed to be still mired in. But evidence sometimes does kill off or at least rough up a theory, and for most of the 1980s and 1990s books inspired by Marxian and neo-Marxian theories of empire tended to drop off the in-print lists. There were still books on imperialism, more and more of them, but they tended to be inspired more by post-colonial literary theory rather than by Marxian economics. Over the last few years, empires are again big business in academic and some trade publishing, although economic theories of empire-as-necessity are not all that prominent. That may change. I get the impression that the theory Fred Schwarz adumbrates—that if there isn’t enough of a crucial resource to go around, attempting to bid for the stuff may not work, and then you do what you have to do—may be a theory now embraced by Chinese elites, who figure that there isn’t an infinite supply of petroleum and they are going to need a lot more of it very soon. Last April I met a man who seemed to know a fair bit about how Chinese elites think. He doesn’t think Chinese elites have given up on the notion that trade is a zero-sum game, one where someone wins because someone else loses; he claimed that the Chinese know about the alternative theory and agree that the world would be much better if the alternative theory was correct, but they have grave doubts. I have heard from other people that the Chinese, along with a fair number of others, expect the near future to be one dominated by resource wars. This does not mean that they are right, and if they are right it does not mean that fighting for oil (and other resources) is good economics. But if people sincerely believe it, fight they may.
August 18, 2006
The Mainstream Media Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:35 PM EST I have mentioned several times on this blog my lack of respect for the “mainstream media”—The New York Times, Newsweek, CNN, CBS, etc.—and what I feel it has become, an echo chamber for the agenda of the left in this country. What I have always found most irritating was not the blatant bias so often on display, but the utter lack of awareness of the bias among the Pooh-Bahs of the mainstream media. Let me give you an example. When the Senate assembled in 1999 for the impeachment trial of President Clinton, the senators, because they would be functioning as a jury, had to swear to be impartial, etc. They did this by signing, one by one in the well of the Senate, a document to that effect. This ceremony was covered live, of course, by all the media, and the late Peter Jennings of ABC News identified the Senators as they signed. He would say something to the effect that, “signing now is Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, and behind her is Bob Smith, the very conservative Republican senator from New Hampshire, and now there’s . . .” He named all one hundred as they approached the document. Every single Democrat was identified simply by party. Many Republicans, however, were not only Republicans, but conservative or very conservative or ultra conservative Republicans. Peter Jennings, apparently, couldn’t see any difference between, say, Barbara Boxer and Joe Lieberman, but was keenly aware of the political distance between Lincoln Chafee and Bob Smith, and made sure the audience was clued in. I could go on and on, but fortunately I don’t have to. Instead I would invite the readers, and my fellow bloggers, to read a short speech by Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard that he gave at a Hillsdale College seminar last winter.
August 18, 2006
Something Chemical Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:30 PM EST A wonderful post by Fred Schwarz—”Something Chemical”—made me blush when I realized that I have used every one of the “popularized technicalities” he enumerates. This got me to thinking, probably in an attempt to extenuate my conduct. Fred’s post seemed to suggest that the propensity to use popularized technicalities reflects the age of the speaker. The popularized science of one’s formative years presumably tags drearily along until death, and the catchphrases did with the users. Fred further noted that the nineteenth century was in terms of both key discoveries and popularized science a chemical century, the twentieth the century of physics, and the twenty-first the century of biology. So why do I use pop phrases from all of them, at least in speech? It is of course possible that I am simply a magpie for scientifically illiterate cliché. Another possibility is that since I was born in 1951, not too far from the chemical nineteenth century but in the middle of the physical twentieth, and am still rubbing along in the first decade of the biological twenty-first, my life spans the three eras of cliché. Another possibility is that Waugh’s notion that popularized technicalities “gained currency from (their) ability to lend a quasi-scientific veneer to vague and ill-formed ideas” is not an exhaustive explanation of what is going on here. Some of the surviving usages are no longer popularized technicalities; they are dead metaphors, and thus they do not sound archaic. For example, people who say or write “bilious,” “sanguine,” ‘choleric,” or “phlegmatic” do not subscribe to Galenic medicine; people who say or write “saturnine” or “jovial” do not subscribe to astrology; people who say or write
“impetus” do not necessarily subscribe to Aristotelian physics or its fourteenth-century Paduan update—although they may, since 1980s polling of undergraduates (about what will happen to a ball balanced on a man’s shoulder if he runs forward) indicates that a lot of people are closet Aristotelians. So while I think those words indeed gained currency from their ability to lend a quasi-scientific veneer, they did not stay current for such reasons. I am not sure why some such phrases stayed current while others died, bit some clearly did. I also think that some of the popularized technicalities still mean something, although not quite what they originally meant. For example, people who say “it’s chemical” usually mean that they cannot give a rational account for a sentiment of sympathy, dislike, or sexual attraction. In the case of sex, our desires are not always explicable in any other terms. That is part of the comedy and sometimes tragedy of life. When people say, of sexual impulse, that it is chemical, they may be right without realizing it (as Fred noted, we are beginning to understand more about the relevant chemistry), but they are also right in a different, broader sense, and do realize it: They mean that what they are noting is neither rational nor ethical, that it is determined by something else, something they do not understand. They say “chemical” not to imply scientific knowledge they do not possess but to concede that lack of understanding. I think “chemical” is less commonly used of friendship than of sex because friendship is usually less mysterious; when non-carnal affection is as inexplicable as some instances of erotic excitement, we again say “chemical” for that good reason. People who say “acid test” probably think of the sort of acid they remember menacing Batman in old comic books—something that dissolved not only flesh but metal—and they mean that something that survives the acid test is strong and durable. I believe something passed the original acid test not by resisting dissolution but by undergoing it. The acid in question was aqua regia, and if a sample was gold it would dissolve. But people know what they think they mean when they say acid test, and the phrase does not bother me. As I wrote above, I blushed with recognition when I first read Fred’s post, then began to backtrack, insisting to myself that I was blameless. But I also realized that there are phrases I will not use, the misuse of which irritates me. I will not say “uncertainty principle,” because I know something about what it is supposed to mean, which is not the way it tends to be used. I am often irritated with myself when I say “quantum,” for a similar reason; when I am not irritated, is usually because I was careful not to misuse the word. I find “DNA” and “genome” when used as Fred describes irritating for similar reasons, and I do not think I have often done so. At least, I hope not.
August 18, 2006
For All You John Steele Gordon Fans Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:45 PM EST Our friend John is such a bloggin’ fool that one website isn’t enough for him. Over the last couple of days, he has been corresponding with Scott Johnson of Powerline about Britain’s policy toward Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. I don’t know what this says about John—probably that his greatest passion is for the truth—but even though Powerline is a conservative blog, he has managed to disagree with them. At the end of this post, John defends Neville Chamberlain, taking issue with Johnson’s assertion that the Munich Agreement of 1938 “assured that war, when it came, would be on terms more favorable to the fascists than they otherwise would have been.” John makes the case that if Britain had gone to war with Germany in 1938, it might well have been defeated. In a follow-up here, John expands on his discussion, addressing some points made by William Manchester in his biography of Winston Churchill. The back-and-forth between Gordon and Johnson is well worth reading, particularly today, when comparisons are being made between Europe in 1938 and the present world situation.
August 18, 2006
Lost at Sea II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST I, too, read with a shudder the article in yesterday’s paper about the Mexican fishing vessel that drifted across most of the Pacific for months before its crew was rescued.
Fred Schwarz recommends the American Heritage article by Walter Karp on the fate of the American whaling ship Essex, and so do I. For a longer treatment of a great story, I would also recommend Nathaniel Philbrick’s recent bestseller, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.
For an armchair small-boat voyage through much colder seas, there’s Caroline Alexander’s The Endurance : Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. Shackleton didn’t lose a man.
Of course, the granddaddy of all long-distance voyages in small boats in terrible circumstances was Captain William Bligh’s 3,600-mile voyage across the Pacific after the mutiny on the Bounty. Caroline Alexander has also written a fine book about that, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty.
But if you want your history from primary sources, you can’t beat Bligh’s own account, which was a huge bestseller when it was first published two centuries ago, The Mutiny on Board H.M.S. Bounty: The Captain’s Account of the Mutiny and His 3,600 Mile Voyage in an Open Boat. Whatever his deficiencies as a leader of men, Bligh was a very great navigator, and a fine writer. The book has been in print ever since it was first published, and there’s a reason for that.
There’s also a great first-person account of a three-month trip across the Pacific on a raft. The only difference is that in this case the crew volunteered for it. It is, of course, Thor Heyerdahl’s huge bestseller of the 1950s, Kon-Tiki. It was apparently a crackpot theory they were trying to prove, but it’s a great read.
August 18, 2006
Bat Guano Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:00 PM EST The era of American imperialism began 150 years ago today, on August 18, 1856. That’s when Congress passed a law enabling the United States to seize territory overseas to secure its supply of a commodity that was vital to America’s industry and military. The commodity in question was the excrement of birds and bats.
Guano, as this substance is called, is rich in nitrates and phosphates, making it an excellent fertilizer as well as a fine source of saltpeter for gunpowder. In the early 1850s, reports began to arrive of uninhabited islands in the Pacific that were rich in guano. To a nation that was expanding rapidly onto increasingly marginal farmland, they were an irresistible target for acquisition.
Over the next several decades American companies found, claimed, and sometimes mined guano on more than 50 islands. Some were simply abandoned when the guano played out; others were settled and remain U.S. territory to this day. In the latter group is Midway Atoll, which played an important role in trans-Pacific transportation for decades and was the scene of an immensely important, momentum-shifting battle with Japan in 1942.
In fact, as an article in our sister publication Invention & Technology recently noted, guano has been responsible for many major events in world history, including Civil War naval clashes and an 1879 war between Chile and Bolivia that the Bolivians are still sore about. In the 1950s, long after the guano boom was over, one company built a tramway a mile and a half long across the Grand Canyon to extract centuries’ worth of bat droppings from a cave. Even in the space age, bat guano was important enough as a propellant that NASA made a special requisition for it during the Mercury and Gemini programs.
To be sure, America’s first venture into empire building was fairly benign, being restricted to uninhabited islands that were not under any nation’s jurisdiction. Later, when people and disputed territorial claims entered the mix, things got stickier. Yet even today, nations contest possession of barren rock outcroppings in order to establish ownership of underwater oil fields, occasionally firing shots in the process. Whether it’s wood, fish, crude oil, beaver skins, or any other indispensable commodity, people have always been willing to travel long distances and use all the machinery of national sovereignty to secure it. The droppings of flying creatures are just one of the more unlikely examples of this rule.
August 18, 2006
The Nineteenth Amendment Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:30 PM EST Eighty-six years ago today, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to approve the Nineteenth Amendment, granting full suffrage to American women, thus clearing the way for Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby to certify the amendment’s ratification eight days later, on August 26, 1920.
At the time, many political commentators expected that women would forge a new and discrete constituency in American politics. They were sorely disappointed. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s women proved no more or less inclined toward any single party than their husbands and brothers. That much-anticipated gender gap didn’t emerge until years later. Today, of course, women break in favor of Democrats, where men break for Republicans.
How women’s rights advocates made the case for suffrage is at least as interesting as the effects of the Nineteenth Amendment.
At the famous Seneca Falls conference in 1848, early women’s rights activists issued a “Declaration of Sentiment” that borrowed directly from the Declaration of Independence in its claim that “all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The generation that lent their names to this creed had cut their political teeth on radical abolitionism. Stirred by the cry for an immediate and unconditional end to chattel slavery, women like Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott built a strong argument for women’s emancipation on the very same natural-rights foundation that informed the abolitionist movement. If all men were equal, weren’t men and women also equal to each other? If it was wrong to hold humans in bondage, wasn’t it also wrong to deny women the right to vote, hold property, sit on juries, enter the professions, and enjoy equal treatment in divorce and custody proceedings? The founders of the women’s movement thought so, and though suffrage was not on the agenda at Seneca Falls, many of the activists who converged on the town in July 1848 used natural rights language in subsequent appeals for the vote.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though, a younger generation of crusaders invoked a quite different argument for suffrage. According to prevailing wisdom, it was a woman’s natural role to provide a stable, soothing home life for her husband and to confer an ethical education on her children. Left to their own devices, men were easily given over to excess and decadence. In the absence of that civilizing influence, men would never learn to master their impulses and lead the kind of sturdy, disciplined lives that would make them good employees in a new industrial order. They would help men internalize the industrial discipline on which economic expansion relied.
Rather than fight the gender code, suffragists used it to their advantage. In a rapidly industrializing and urban nation where the line between public and private was often blurred, they claimed, a woman could not fulfill her duty to safeguard the domestic sphere unless she were granted political rights. “Women who live in the country sweep their own dooryards and either feed the refuse of the table to a flock of chickens or allow it innocently to decay in the open air and sunshine,” wrote the distinguished settlement-house founder Jane Addams in an article entitled, “Why Women Should Vote.” But in “a crowded city quarter if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed a tenement house mother may see her children sicken and die of diseases.”
Similarly, Rheta Childe Dorr affirmed in 1910 that “home is not contained within the four walls of an individual house. Home is community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do Home and Family need their mother.” In effect, the modern world was too complex to sustain rigid divisions between public and domestic spheres.
This rationale for equal suffrage resonated with many Americans who were prepared to grant women a role in politics but weren’t ready to reject Victorian notions about gender difference. In the years before World War I, at thousands of dramatic torchlight parades and petition drives, mainstream suffragists softened the potentially radical implications of their cause by insisting that women wanted the vote primarily to be better wives and mothers—not to engage in a power grab or to press unorthodox ideas on an unwilling nation. It proved a winning formula.
The question, of course, is whether suffrage activists won the battle but conceded the war. By basing their argument on the premise of gender difference—on the assumption that women were physically weak but morally strong when compared with their husbands and brothers—did these same activists set back the greater cause of women’s rights? Alice Paul, the founder of the National Women’s Party, certainly thought so. She preferred the old 1848 formula: equal rights based on equality, pure and simple.
The question of ends and means in women’s suffrage surely has relevance today. Contemporary political groups tailor their messages to poll data, and often this proves a good formula for electoral or legislative success. But in so doing they often shirk a much more difficult but (at least) equally important mandate—to change the way the public thinks about key issues in American democracy.
August 18, 2006
Pershing IIs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:15 PM EST John Steele Gordon calls Reagan’s handling of the situation in Lebanon “the worst foreign policy mistake of his Presidency.” That seems too harsh. What about trading arms to Iran to secure the release of hostages in Lebanon, thereby very predictably guaranteeing the taking of more hostages? That was quite an impressive mistake. George Schultz certainly thought that one was a doozy. Mr. Gordon may choose to think it part of the Administration’s Lebanon policy, but I think it can fairly be called part of its Iran policy, or its Nicaragua policy. For that matter, what about honoring Carter’s deal for the hostages, thereby suggesting that we are obliged to honor agreements extorted under duress, and failing to punish an act of war? With the regime that thus survived now apparently poised to secure nuclear weapons and threatening to use them, that looks to have been a truly ghastly mistake. How about supporting the murderous Galtieri dictatorship in Argentina to the degree that we remained officially neutral when it invaded the Falkland Islands? In terms of long-run consequences, admittedly a small mistake, but in terms of political morality, I think that one was truly odious. The Reagan Administration’s noisy contempt for human rights in El Salvador was also a very nasty mistake.
John Steele Gordon quotes his history professor on the vice of making simple things complex. That is a real vice, one some academics are indeed much prone to. There is also the vice of making complex things too simple. For example, John Steele Gordon’s writes that “the deployment of Pershing II missiles (over the collective dead bodies of liberals) had forced the Soviets to begin to negotiate seriously about its SS-20s.” There was in fact an interesting case to be made against deploying the Pershing II missiles, although in my view no case to be made against the parallel deployment of the GLCMs (the ground-launched cruise missiles), which were part of the same program for NATO, modernizing intermediate-range nuclear weapons based in Europe.
The Pershing IIs had originally been designed to use the then-new W85 warhead with a 5- to 50-kiloton variable yield or an earth-penetrator W86 warhead. The warhead was to be packaged in a maneuverable reentry vehicle with active radar guidance; the hard target capability and W86 warhead were cancelled in 1980, and all produced Pershing IIs used the W85, but the W86 could have been developed and retrofitted onto the missile, which was part of the problem. Another part of the problem was that the Pershing II had a 900-mile range, which meant that a forward-deployed missile did not have quite the range to hit Moscow (and its command-and-control bunkers), but it had almost that range, and with an easily-developed lighter warhead and/or an improved rocket motor, it would have easily reached Moscow. And the Pershing II was a very accurate weapon, with a CEP of 30 meters, that being the radius of a circle within which half of the warheads aimed at a target would strike, which also threatened Soviet command-and-control facilities. I remember reading that with slightly tweaked motor or warhead redesign, the Pershing II’s would have had a flight time to a Moscow target of something like three minutes.
The problem some people saw with the Pershing II was that because it was too accurate and had too long a range, it potentially threatened strategic stability. It looked like a weapon to be used as part of a decapitation strike. It might have encouraged the Soviet Union to go to a launch-on-warning strategy, and some intelligent and professionally competent people—not only Mr. Gordon’s maligned liberals—thought this made the Pershing II a very bad idea. I remember reading that the Pentagon had also taken this possibility seriously, and that the Pershing II’s rocket motor had been designed to have a shorter range than it might, to avoid being too destabilizing. The new theater weapons were supposed to balance the SS-20s by providing a comparable step on an escalation ladder, not to appear as weapons that might be part of a first strike, a possibility the Soviets might see as all the more threatening in the context of our investment in ballistic-missile defense. Generally speaking, American nuclear weapons were intended to deter wars with what was then our chief adversary, not fight them; a second strike capacity was crucial, but a first strike capability, against the Soviet Union, anyway, was potentially undesirable. This was one of a number of paradoxes that beset nuclear strategy.
In the event, these arguments against the Pershing IIs did not prevail. It may even have been the potentially destabilizing properties of the Pershing IIs that made the Soviet Union trade away its SS-20s for them in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty . If so, the Pershing II’s proponents were brilliantly correct. But that does not mean that all of the people who worried about potentially destabilizing nuclear weapons were “liberals.” In those days I knew people who designed nuclear weapons—for example, an Air Force colonel with two doctorates who had worked on the MX. I do not remember his opinion of the Pershing II, but I do remember what he thought of the weapon he had worked on: Properly based, he thought, it would insure strategic stability. Improperly based, which is to say based as the Reagan administration at one point proposed, in hardened silos, he thought it seriously increased the risk of a war that would kill his children. Like Senator Hollings’s remark, this remark was also made with a Southern accent, although not a broad one, nor one from the Tidewater. It remains one of the remarks I remember from those debates, although not exactly with “special fondness.”
August 18, 2006
On Faceless Enemies Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:15 AM EST Julie Fenster writes that in contrast to World War II, when American and British soldiers could identify the enemy and fight him, in Iraq GIs do not know who the enemy is. She then suggests that in Greece and Yugoslavia the German Army faced what would today be defined as terrorists—faceless civilians, who blew up trains and buildings. She concludes that “with no uniform in sight, trains and buildings suddenly blew up. And it just wasn’t fair then, either.” This is an extremely interesting and urgent topic, and what follows is going to be much less than exhaustive.
In response to Julie Fenster’s points: Terrorists can be variously defined, one rather old-fashioned and I think problematic definition including groups that wage war as what Julie calls faceless civilians. Under the 1949 Geneva Convention, which the United States signed, lawful combatants have to wear distinguishing marks—even armbands will do—but they are not allowed to be faceless civilians. Under the 1977 additional protocols to the 1949 Convention, which the United States has not signed, legal combatants are not required to wear distinguishing marks; they are rather required to bear arms openly in combat and on their way to the battlefield. If the battlefield is the city street, and the arms are borne openly for only a few minutes, people fighting by these rules have a very great advantage over their adversaries, one likely to eventually produce large numbers of civilian casualties and probably some atrocities at the hands of regular opponents, no matter how disciplined. In other words, I think the United States refused to sign the 1977 additional protocols for a good reason. I am less sure that it makes sense to define all irregulars who do not wear distinguishing marks as terrorists, because for my money terrorists are also usefully defined as people who make civilians their intended targets. Even that is not an unproblematic definition of terrorists. More on these points below.
As it happens, a very large number of states have signed the additional protocols, and the notion seems to have seeped into popular consciousness that people under occupation have a moral and legal right to fight as, say, the Iraqi insurgents fight. This has happened in part because of the almost universal moral prestige of the irregular forces that often fought the Nazi occupations without themselves wearing armbands, and in part because of the moral prestige, less universal, of the irregular forces that waged the wars of decolonization. People seem to think that Iraqi Sunni insurgents, the neo-Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas are fighting the same kind of war that the Italian and French partisans waged. That, I think, is false, because the Italian and French partisans, while they did blow up buildings and trains, did not target many if any German civilian women and children. For one thing, they could not easily reach any, but many of them would probably have had moral scruples about such methods. The comparison is to that extent misleading, and potentially morally disastrous. On the other hand, Greek, Yugoslav, and for that matter Soviet partisans could get at civilian opponents, and did—very rarely German civilians, but rather co-nationals who were political opponents or neutrals, the purpose of partisan terror being to frighten such people into cooperation and discourage cooperation with the occupiers. It sometimes worked.
When Julie Fenster says it wasn’t fair for Yugoslav or Greek partisans to blow up bridges wearing civilian clothes, she loses me, unless this is an irony at the expense of the notion of fairness in war. Nazi occupiers seem to me to have forfeited the right to fairness of that kind. But I do not think that the Prussian occupiers of 1871 France forfeited their right to fairness to anything like the same degree. Those Prussians did shoot some French irregulars, as Napoleonic occupiers had previously shot Prussian irregulars, but their conduct as occupiers did not reach Nazi levels, and the tactics of the irregulars did not reach modern levels of atrocity either. It was in those times and places a more restrained world than the one we live in. If the war in Iraq were conducted by both sides on those principles, there is a case that both sides would be better off, and there is also a case that the Iraqi irregulars would have a much smaller chance of victory, so many Iraqi irregulars would not take that deal. I think that the chances of Iraqi Sunni irregulars achieving their war aims are in fact very small, although their chances of driving out their American opponents are rather better—but that is not a matter for this post.
How about terrorists as people who target civilians? Allied air crew flying strategic bombers could not see the faces of their enemies, and knew that they were usually bound to kill some civilians. When they bombed France or other occupied countries, they killed Allied civilians; otherwise, Axis civilians. They in fact killed something like 800,000 Axis civilians in Germany and Japan alone. For the greater part of the war, U.S. air crews were not aiming at civilians—RAF aircrew did target civilian housing—but they knew they would inevitably kill a large number of them. Americans in Iraq usually take much greater pains to avoid killing civilians than Allied air crews took in World War II, in part because they can: Modern air-launched munitions are much more accurate than their World War II-era ancestors. Simultaneously, our standards have changed, to some degree admirably so, in others possibly in the direction of dangerous utopianism. Rules of war that make our defeat likely and the barbarization of some our soldiers likelier—this element of the 1977 protocols, which some commentators insist on, to bind Americans, as “customary international law”—are unlikely to survive, and arguably should not survive. In the fighting in Iraq, and in the recent fighting in Lebanon, some air attacks very notoriously hit civilians, although very few if any seem to be aimed at people known to be civilians by the air crews. Whatever their intentions, air crews are obliged not to be grossly, murderously careless. Their attacks are supposed to be proportionate (it is often much less clear what that means than some people seem to think), and attacks breach the laws of war if they are indiscriminate. Again, opinion differs on what makes a given civilian-killing attack careless, disproportionate, criminally negligent, indiscriminate, simply unlucky, or tragically necessary. As it happens, it is nowadays the fashion, at least in some quarters, to describe many World War II Allied bomber crews as terrorists. If they were, they used terror to effectively fight terrorist regimes, and their tactics were instrumental in defeating those regimes; I think that mitigates their offense, but it does make sharp distinctions between World War II and our current wars complicated. One possible distinction is that while people are very quick to compare their opponents to Nazis, relatively few of those comparisons are wholly persuasive. If there should be one rule for fighting Nazis and another rule for “normal” war, we may not have much confidence in people’s ability to tell which war is which, but the principle may nonetheless retain some intuitive plausibility.
American soldiers in World War II fought some of the war by rules—in general, the war in Europe—and another part of the war without rules—much of the Pacific war—because the Japanese army and to an extent the Japanese navy scorned the rules of war. In the air war, the rules were different from the ones we now consider binding, and we have different notions of which rules bind than do many other states. The German army of World War II scorned the rules most of the time in Eastern and Southern Europe but generally observed some rules when fighting Americans and Commonwealth forces. What does seem to be the case is that people who scorn the rules of war are unlikely to have them consistently observed by their opponents. That was true in World War II, and it is true today.
August 18, 2006
Lost at Sea Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:40 AM EST Yesterday’s paper had a story about some Mexican shark fishermen who got blown off course and drifted across the Pacific for nine months before being rescued. According to the article, they were confined to a 25-foot fiberglass boat the whole time and had to drink rainwater and eat the raw flesh of birds and fish to survive. Imagine spending a day like that, then multiply by 270, and you’ll have some idea of what they went through.
Yet however incomprehensibly agonizing their ordeal may have been, if there are degrees of awfulness, it must be conceded that the Essex whaling disaster of 1819-20 was even more horrific. As Walter Karp wrote in American Heritage in 1983, after a crazed sperm whale rammed the Essex and damaged it beyond repair, its crew of 20 set out in three fragile whaleboats for a tiny group of islands off the coast of Chile, more than 4,500 miles away. During the journey they suffered unimaginable privations, to the point where several men lost the will to live and voluntarily starved to death—whereupon their flesh was eaten by those they had left behind. There is no indication that the Mexican fishermen resorted to such an extremity, though, oddly, according to the Reuters report, five men set out in the ship and only three returned, but the survivors made no mention of the other two.
In these days of instantaneous worldwide communication, it may seem unthinkable that the men had no way to summon help, yet millions of fishermen worldwide go to work every day equally ill-equipped. And when you’re in a tiny boat all alone in the middle of a vast ocean, the gap between 2006 and 1820 must start to seem a whole lot smaller.
August 17, 2006
Reagan’s Reelection II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:30 PM EST Fred Smoler writes, “I do not find it too easy to assess the spiritual health of a nation, because I am not sure exactly [what] we are measuring, or how we could measure it.”
He is quite right that it is a difficult thing to measure. So is love, but we know it when we experience it. I had an American history professor, Lyman Burbank, who once defined sociology as “the science of making simple things appear complex.” This is a perfect example of exactly what he meant.
Smoler writes, “We were in better economic shape than we had been in in 1980, but 1980 had been a pretty rotten year for the economy.” True, but so what? 1932 was a really lousy year for the economy, so Alf Landon should have been swept into the White House in 1936? Come on.
He writes that Reagan made a dog’s breakfast of the situation in Lebanon, especially when seen in hindsight. He did indeed. It was the worst foreign policy mistake of his Presidency. Here’s a list of American presidents who did not make a serious mistake while in office:
Here’s the list again, in case you missed it:
It might be noted that the Soviet Union had ten thousand nuclear warheads aimed at the United States while Lebanon had none, and Reagan kept his eye on that ball. By 1984 the situation with the Soviet Union was clearly beginning to shift in our direction. Afghanistan was turning into the Soviet Vietnam, thanks to surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles supplied by Reagan. The deployment of Pershing II missiles (over the collective dead bodies of liberals) had forced the Soviets to begin to negotiate seriously about its SS-20s. Soviet general secretaries kept dropping dead in Reagan’s first term, so it was impossible to address broader issues, but Gorbachev could hardly wait to seriously negotiate when he came into office in 1985.
Speaking of Pershing II missiles, I remember with special fondness a remark by Senator Fritz Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina. He was asked his opinion of the “nuclear freeze” movement beloved of liberals, which would have given the Soviets a permanent advantage in medium-range missiles in Europe. His response was, in his broad Tidewater accent, “Where I come from, nuclear freeze is a dessert.”
August 17, 2006
Something Chemical Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:45 PM EST In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, published in 1944, one of the characters accounts for a drunkard’s addiction by saying, “It’s something chemical in him.” The narrator goes on to explain: “This was the cant phrase of the time [the 1920s], derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. ‘There’s something chemical between them’ was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was anything chemical in my friend.” Since Waugh wrote those lines, we have learned that many aspects of behavior can, in fact, be traced to “something chemical.” But he was correct in suggesting that the phrase, like most of what H. W. Fowler called “popularized technicalities,” gained currency from its ability to lend a quasi-scientific veneer to vague and ill-formed ideas.
Waugh’s remarks bring to mind a notion that was making the rounds a few years ago, to the effect that the nineteenth century was a chemical century, the twentieth was a physical century, and the twenty-first will be a biological century. This scheme may or may not be accurate in locating the shifting frontiers of science, but for what it’s worth, the same sequence, with something of a time lag, can be observed in an equally important area: scientific clichés. At the same time as Waugh remembered “chemical” being a ubiquitous catch-all, Americans and Britons were referring to a particularly severe obstacle or trial as an “acid test.” (One of the earliest nonscientific uses of that term in the Oxford English Dictionary is attributed to Woodrow Wilson, discussing the fate of Russia; the same example is cited in Fowler’s monumental Modern English Usage.) “Litmus test” for an inflexible yes-or-no criterion, “catalyst” for an agent of change, and “chain reaction” for a self-perpetuating process all seem to have come into vogue after World War II, with the era’s greatly increased emphasis on science in general.
Yet even as chemistry and its terminology flourished in the received idiom of postwar America and Britain, physics was getting ready to take its place. By the 1960s and 1970s it was common to hear people who had failed high school science using “quantum leap” to mean “increase,” or “critical mass” to mean “enough.” “Light year” became the standard term for any large distance (or, inaccurately, any long period of time), and when two people had a mysterious affinity, instead of there being “something chemical,” they were said to be “on the same wavelength.”
In the twenty-first century, however, such expressions are starting to take on the faintly comic air that attaches to anything once considered futuristic. Today the clichés of choice all have to do with molecular biology. A CEO or basketball coach is said to have “established the DNA of the organization,” and the secret or governing principle behind something is called its “genome.” Idiosyncratic tastes are described with phrases like, “I don’t have the gene for enjoying horror films,” and what once was metaphorically called a “carbon copy” is now metaphorically called a “clone.”
Fowler’s book was first published in 1926. I have the 1965 second edition, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, which contains considerable new material. Using the blogger’s prerogative I’m too lazy to hunt down a copy of the first edition, so I’ll just say that it was either Fowler or Gowers who wrote of popularized technicalities: “First, that the popular use more often than not misrepresents, and sometimes very badly, the original meaning; and secondly, the free indulgence in this sort of term results in a tawdry style.” The book lists a few chemical phrases that were common at the time, but none from physics except for a couple of astronomical terms that have since fallen into disuse. It does, however, devote an extended rant to the then-current tendency to sprinkle a conversation with psychological jargon. That’s because when the entry was written Freud was in vogue.
This all goes to show that whenever a scientific advance (or pseudo-scientific, in the case of Freud) becomes familiar enough, it will inevitably be oversimplified and adopted in casual speech by a novelty-seeking public. In this way, a society’s most overused clichés in any given era are a useful guide to what sort of science was hot at the time (or a few decades before). And from that standpoint, a scan of the journalese on display in any newspaper or website will reveal that the twenty-first century is shaping up as a very biological one.
August 17, 2006
Reagan’s Reelection Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:15 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes “Reagan’s political triumph is easy to understand: By almost any measure you care to use, except the growth of the national debt, the country was in better shape—often far better shape—than it had been in 1980, economically, geopolitically, and spiritually.” I do not find it too easy to assess the spiritual health of a nation, because I am not sure exactly what we are measuring, or how we could measure it. We were in better economic shape than we had been in in 1980, but 1980 had been a pretty rotten year for the economy.
As for geopolitical health, one aspect of that alleged health seems pertinent today: On April 18h, 1983, groups that later (in 1985) officially became known as Hezbollah, by almost all accounts acting in concert with Syria and Iran, sent a suicide bomber against the American embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people and wounding over 100 others. On September 20, proto-Hezbollah blew up the new American embassy, killing 22 people. On October 23, 1983, proto-Hezbollah blew up our Marine headquarters at the Beirut airport, killing 241 American servicemen and wounding 60 more.
President Reagan called these acts despicable and vowed to keep our troops in Lebanon—we would not be driven into the sea. His secretary of defense said there would be no change in our Lebanon policy. His Vice President promised that we would “not be cowed by terrorists.” On February 17, 1984, President Reagan started pulling out our troops, all of whom were gone by February 26. We had been driven into the sea, having been cowed by terrorists. Did this withdrawal at least appease Hezbollah and Syria? Within a few weeks, on March 16, Hezbollah kidnapped an American intelligence officer in Beirut and slowly tortured him to death; our officer was in their hands for 444 days. On June 14, 1985, a group linked with Hezbollah hijacked an airliner, in the course of which activity they beat and murdered an American serviceman. The hijackers were subsequently protected by the Lebanese government, one which had been established in the wake of the rout over which Reagan had presided.
In the wake of Reagan’s withdrawal of our forces, Lebanon became an uncontested Syrian colony, and Hezbollah went from strength to strength. There were a number of reasons for that last outcome, but the prestige Hezbollah gained from having pushed the United States into the sea is surely one of them. American military prestige in the Middle East did not (however briefly) recover until we expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. It seems reasonable to assume that one reason we had to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait was that loss of prestige. He did not think we would fight, no matter what the provocation. After all, Syria and Hezbollah had driven us into the sea.
So I do not think our policy in 1980s Lebanon was a break with Carter’s fecklessness in the face of the Iranian hostage crisis; I think it was in some respects a continuation of that fecklessness. Carter had the very partial excuse of trying not to push Iran into the Soviet camp, but Syria was already in the Soviet camp. What was Reagan’s excuse? Carter also had the partial excuse of wanting to walk very softly, which if a disastrous notion in the face of the seizure of our embassy in Tehran, at least possessed the modest virtue of sincerity. Reagan went in for a lot more geopolitical bluster and bombast. I agree that Reagan possessed a “sunny optimism,” which was to some degree infectious. In terms of our geopolitical position, I am not sure what, in 1984, he, and we, were so sunny about.
August 17, 2006
Liberal Elites II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST It is curious that both Joshua Zeitz, in regard to “self-interest,” and Fredric Smoler, in regard to “liberal elites,” think in such economic terms. I thought it was hard-hearted capitalists who reduced everything to dollars and cents.
I agree wholeheartedly that the power of the liberal elite to shape policy is greatly diminished from what it was 40 years ago. But that power is hardly extinguished and is often pernicious because the elite is so out of touch. Consider the NAACP. In its glory days half a century ago it led the fight for civil rights. Today it is merely a Democratic interest group masquerading as a civil rights organization. Its board and officers—the cream of the black establishment in this country—is deeply out of touch with the average black American. It is a safe bet that none of the children and grandchildren of the NAACP’s board go to the wretched inner-city schools where so many black children are condemned to get a third-rate education. School vouchers are wildly popular with inner-city families wherever they have been tried, because they provide a means of escape from these schools. But the NAACP is adamantly opposed to these programs, preferring to carry water for one of the Democratic Party’s most important constituencies, the teachers’ unions.
I also agree that university faculties, trade-book editors, and columnists for major news media on average don’t command the annual recompense of, say, hedge fund managers. But that makes the liberal elite no less elite, or, for that matter, elitist. Just for openers, these groups earn well above the average joe’s take-home pay. And those who get interviewed by reporters, write op-ed columns, and serve as talking heads on TV interview programs, have a form of power no hedge-fund manager can equal. Just as self-interest is not all about money, neither is power. They both come in many forms.
Liberalism is a political movement that from its very beginning has been an intellectual, and therefore by definition elite, movement, seeking a coherent and consistent political philosophy, although not finding it, to be sure. Marxists thought—and the 38 remaining in the Western world, all tenured professors, still think—that Karl Marx is the Newton of the human universe. Not even the blood of Marxism’s tens of millions of innocent victims, it seems, can wash away their conviction. But then Marxism is a classic case of what George Orwell called “an idea so stupid only an intellectual could have conceived it.”
It is also curious that just as the mass of the people have been becoming notably less liberal-influenced, the economic elite has been becoming much more so. In the 1930s the economic elite went to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt. But the once solidly Republican “silk-stocking” congressional district on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, one of the most expensive neighborhoods on the planet for the last hundred years, has been safely in Democratic hands since Ed Koch won the seat in 1969. Apparently the correlation between the precincts with high average per capita income and the precincts that were carried heavily by Ned Lamont—born very rich thanks to his Morgan-partner great grandfather—is very high. Lieberman, the son of a liquor-store owner, did best in working-class areas.
August 17, 2006
The Faceless Enemy Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 12:00 PM EST “I want to fight in a war like World War II, I want to fight an enemy, And this, out here . . . it’ s a faceless enemy.”
That was a quote from an Army sergeant on active duty in Iraq. I read it in Newsweek a day or two after the British foiled the plot to crash nine airplanes in mid-flight.
A day later I heard NBC anchorman Brian Williams giving time to the same yearnings: “Here in London Thursday,” he said on the evening news, “a World War II veteran seemed downright wistful when he told me: At least during World War II he knew whom to shoot at . . . based on the shape of their helmets. This new enemy wears no such thing.”
Maybe this is new—sort of—for Western Front types like British and Americans. World War II did have its clear-cut battle lines, separating Us and Them, but it also had terrorism, according to the current definition. Yugoslavia and Greece, as examples, were dizzied by civilian warfare: terrorism. And the enemy was certainly faceless.
In locales across the lesser-known war zones of WWII, just as today, and with no uniform in sight, trains and buildings suddenly blew up. And it just wasn’t fair then, either.
August 17, 2006
Barbecue and Liberal Elites Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:15 AM EST The one-sheet photocopied menu announces that Zagat voted Daisy Mae, at 46th Street and Eleventh Avenue, the best barbecue in New York City in both 2005 and 2006. A decade ago this would have been a derisory distinction. Thirty years ago, at least to my knowledge, there was almost no barbecue in this city’s middle-class neighborhoods or business districts. At that time barbecue was a verb rather than a noun in the Northeast. It meant to quickly grill hot dogs and hamburgers, maybe a steak, over charcoal briquettes. In the South and West, barbecue was a noun. It meant meat smoked very slowly over a hickory pit—I am told that a pork butt should take at least nine hours, a brisket fourteen. The difference between the verb and the noun is night and day.
As late as the 1970s, if you were from the Northeast or a lot of other places, you had to travel to find the noun. I ate it in every state in the former C.S.A., usually in the course of visiting Civil War battlefields, but the first authentic barbecue I ate in New York City was at Smokey’s, which was first located at 24th Street and Ninth Avenue. It was also the only barbecue most of my friends could find. I knew someone who moved to get within Smokey’s small delivery radius. Then a branch opened up at 94th and Amsterdam, next another somewhere in Midtown, and suddenly Smokey’s was gone, apparently a victim of over-expansion. There were some new places claiming to serve barbecue, but they didn’t smoke the meat—no hickory pits—and simply slathered a bottled sauce on it. It was a joke. A few years passed and Virgil’s arrived, on 44th just east of Broadway. Virgil’s was good, and after a while visitors from the barbecue belt had obviously heard about it; it was the only easily accessible barbecue in the city. When the fleet was in town, sailors jammed the place, and a businesswoman from Atlanta once stopped me in the street to ask for precise directions. Virgil’s still markets barbecue as regional cuisine, with jokey menus and a bit of country-kitsch decor, but they do not bother with that at R.U.B, down on West 23rd; barbecue now sells itself, without faddish accoutrements. Nowadays, good or excellent barbecue is available all over town—you can even get burnt ends at R.U.B.—and that Zagat’s poll means something. Barbecue suddenly seems to be a national rather than a regional food.
Will New York City barbecue be a mere fad and passing fashion? I recently ate at what I think must be the last fondue restaurant in the city, but fondue was pandemic in the seventies, around the time that you could buy crepes everywhere. Beef Wellington is gone, and I am not sure if I ever ate chicken à la king, which in my youth survived largely in comic anecdotes about provincial dining. Food fads based on American regional cooking also come and go. You can no longer find those Cajun joints that popped up all over the place in the nineties—and regional cuisines have no necessary ability to ever break out of their birthplaces; I have never seen a corn dog in this town, and I do not expect see that thing some Southerners serve between courses—it seems to be fruit cocktail in mayonnaise—make it north of Virginia. My guess is that barbecue is here to stay, because it is remarkably good. I have taken people from Madrid and Old Windsor to Virgil’s, where they wolf the stuff down while asking why American barbecue isn’t famous all over the advanced world. My guess is that it will be, and steadily lose its good old boy associations.
It occurs to me that this phenomenon may illuminate something we’ve been blogging about—the issue of liberal elites—and also shed a little light on a potentially misleading pair of neologisms, the blue-state red-state business. Liberals are defined as elites (often by people working for oil multi-millionaires, or Australians who own vast media empires) in an attempt to arouse resentments against them, and are polemically defined in terms of both consumption patterns and ideas. In both cases they are asserted to be out of touch with the rest of the country. Lattes are much impeached in this discourse, but when I changed planes in Albuquerque last August, I bought one without arousing hostile stares, and the probable liberals wolfing down barbecue in Manhattan are not doing so furtively and guiltily: we share much more of a common culture than this idiom acknowledges. New Mexico, where I bought that latte, is generally colored blue on maps predicting the destination of its electoral vote, but like almost all states it would more accurately be colored purple. It is colored blue because in a winner-take-all political system no graphic artist is paid to attend too carefully to better than 40 percent of the voting population in a state. Many Americans have similar views on a lot of what are described as the most contentious wedge issues, from abortion to gay rights. Aspects of our political system and political culture—the Electoral College, the gerrymandered congressional districts, the significant numbers of nonvoters, so that relative turnout via the mobilization of the most ideologically-committed decides elections—do not always encourage politicians to focus on this. The segmentation of our media markets may not always encourage editors and television producers to focus on it either. But it is real. “Liberal elites” eat a lot of what other Americans eat, and other Americans share many notions of justice with “liberal elites.”
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