September 15, 2007
Forbes Turns 90 Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:55 PM EST Readers may enjoy knowing that the first issue of Forbes magazine was published 90 years ago today. Forbes Inc. is the parent company of American Heritage and AmericanHeritage.com, so this is a family event of sorts. While Forbes was certainly not the first American publication to devote itself principally to business coverage, that it premiered on the eve of the Jazz Age and soon inspired competitors like Fortune (which Henry Luce launched in 1930) and Business Week (McGraw Hill, 1929) is probably not without significance. The 1920s were, after all, a period of dynamic economic growth and innovation. Between 1921 and 1924 America’s gross national product skyrocketed, aggregate wages rose steadily, and the United States, which entered World War I a debtor nation, emerged as Europe’s largest creditor. Wealth seemed to breed innovation. It took more than a hundred years for the U.S. Patent Office to issue its millionth patent in 1911; within 15 years it had issued its two-millionth. There was, in short, a lot of business to be covered. Forbes also managed to tap a growing market for celebrity coverage in an age when businessmen were regarded as celebrities. In the decade following World War I, the average number of profiles that The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers published nearly doubled, and while leaders of industry now had to share column space with key figures in entertainment and sports, the growth of celebrity journalism only made a product like Forbes all the more viable. In publishing, timing is everything. Ninety years ago, B. C. Forbes was right on time.
September 15, 2007
Wodehousiana II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:40 PM EST Like every civilized, decent, God-fearing, English-speaking individual, I love Bertie and Jeeves (now nearly a generic term for “manservant”) and the other denizens of P. G. Wodehouse’s antic imagination. I especially remember for some reason a line—I haven’t the faintest idea which book it’s from—in which Bertie describes a local restaurant as being “owned by a branch of the Borgia family.” But it is as a Broadway lyricist that I especially appreciate him. Fredric Smoler writes, “A lot of American popular culture would not have existed without him. He collaborated with Cole Porter on Anything Goes, frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern (he wrote the lyrics to Show Boat’s “Bill”) and Guy Bolton.” Indeed, Wodehouse’s contribution to the history of the Broadway musical has never received its due. “Bill” is certainly his best-known song, probably because it was dropped from the now mostly forgotten Oh, Lady! Lady!! and later inserted in the immortal Show Boat (its lyric slightly tweaked by Hammerstein). But he wrote many others that became standards, such as “As the Clouds Roll By,” and “The Land Where the Good Songs Go.” One of my favorites is “Tulip Time in Sing Sing,” where Wodehouse treats a well known institution a few miles up the Hudson from Manhattan as a sort of college, much loved by its alumni: How I wish that there I’d waited,
Wished I’d never graduated,
For the memory of those days still stirs me so.
And the birdies every Spring sing,
Aren’t you coming back to Sing Sing
Where you used to be so happy long ago? We were just a band of brothers,
Each as good as all the others.
As the humblest sort of sneak thief you might rank,
But when you’d been there a week, well,
We were treated as an equal
By the high and mighty swells who’d robbed a bank. But he did more than write good lyrics. Wodehouse’s partnership with Guy Bolton (who wrote the librettos) and Jerome Kern in what are known as the Princess Theatre shows during the years of World War I changed muscial comedy profoundly. Musicals in the first years of the twentieth century were usually either operettas, set in Europe, with princes falling in love with milkmaids and such, or straight plays with songs inserted here and there that had nothing to do with the plot. Often major stars had a contractual right to do their particular shtick, such as play the ukulele, at a particular time. But the Princess Theatre, 104 West 39th Street, was tiny, only 299 seats. Therefore there was no room for elaborate costumes, scenery or theatrical effects and no money for major stars. For shows to make money there, they had to rely on the plays themselves. The Princess Theatre shows were set in contemporary America (period costumes are expensive) and, while the plots hardly plumbed the depths of the human soul, involved people who were neither milkmaids nor princes. And the songs had something to do with the plot. The result was something very new indeed. The critics liked what they saw. George Kaufmann, no mean playwright himself (he and Ira Gershwin would win the first Pulitzer for drama ever awarded to a musical) wrote: This is the trio of musical fame,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern:
Better than anyone else you can name,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern. Dorothy Parker wrote that “Wodehouse, Bolton, and Kern are my favorite indoor sport. . . . I like the way they go about a musical comedy. . . . I like the way the action slides casually into the songs. . . . I like the deft rhyming. . . . and, oh, how I do like Jerome Kern’s music.” Younger writers and musicians flocked to the Princess Theatre to see these brightly original shows and were greatly influenced by what they heard. Both Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin owe much to the witty, intricate rhymes of Wodehouse, who brought Gilbert and Sullivan wordplay to America. Oh, by the way. The rehearsal pianist at the Princess Theatre at one point was a teenager named George Gershwin. I wonder what ever happened to him.
September 14, 2007
Time for a New Deal Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:25 PM EST Readers might be interested in an article by Andrew Jakobovics in the online edition of The New Republic. The associate director of the Economic Mobility Program at the Center for American Progress, Jakobovics finds striking parallels between the current mortgage market crisis and the crisis faced by millions of Americans in the early 1930s. Before the New Deal, most mortgages were short-term and non-amortizing and included a large, backloaded balloon payment. Most homebuyers thus acquired very little if any equity in their houses, unless those houses rose in value, and they relied on refinancing and new debt to pay off the end-of-term balloon payments. When credit dried up in the early years of the Depression, homeowners were unable to refinance and faced foreclosure. Sound familiar? Jakobovics urges a new program similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, which used government funds to issue long-term amortizing loans to replace existing mortgages. In order to qualify for refinancing, applicants had to demonstrate a history of responsible debt payment and an ability to afford the new loan. Ultimately, the HOLC bailed out about one million property owners. The banks were happy to go along, for as Jakobovics explains, “in order for the HOLC to issue a loan, it needed to pay off the existing liens. This potentially posed a serious problem, as HOLC loans were never to exceed 80 percent of the appraised value of a property, which was often below the outstanding loan balance. The HOLC had to convince the existing lenders to accept those losses. The HOLC was able to succeed because it made lenders an offer they couldn’t refuse: A government guarantee of four percent interest in the amount of the new loan, which was worth far more (even at a reduced valuation) than the zero percent they were effectively getting from delinquent loans. Add to that the cost of servicing, foreclosure, and disposition, the decision was a no-brainer.” Ultimately the HOLC reduced its operations as another New Deal agency, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), used mortgage insurance to cajole lenders into offering customers long-term, amortizing mortgages with little money down. Jakobovics makes a case for a similar program today. Economists estimate that a house loses 0.9 percent of its value for every foreclosed property within an eighth of a mile. As in the 1930s, the government has a clear interest in seeing that billions of dollars in wealth do not vanish in a general foreclosure epidemic. Jakobovics’s article is a fine example of applied history, and I’d strongly recommend it to our readers.
September 14, 2007
The Golden Age of Toots Shor: An Interview with Kristi Jacobson Posted by Allen Barra at 12:05 PM EST The 1977 obituary in The New York Times for Bernard “Toots” Shor noted that New York’s mot famous saloonkeeper was “a magnet, around which flowed any of the special streams of New York’s greatness.” Those streams included athletes, movie stars, writers, and politicians—virtually anyone who was well-known and successful in New York. In the 1957 noir cult movie favorite Sweet Smell of Success, Tony Curtis’s predatory publicist, Sidney Falco, makes his important connections with Burt Lancaster’s powerful gossip columnist, J. J. Hunsecker, at Shor’s place. Kristi Jacobson, Shor’s granddaughter, has crafted a fascinating documentary portrait of Toots, tracing his life from South Philadelphia to success in New York, using film clips, TV segments, still photographs, and interviews with such luminaries as Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Whitey Ford, Frank Gifford, Gay Talese, and a score of others. Her film, Toots, is not just a biography of a man but a portrait of a city, a culture, and an era. The movie opens in New York City today, and Ms. Jacobson spoke with us about it and its subject from her office in the Soho neighborhood of New York. Toots Shor has to be the most famous saloon in American history. More celebrities mingled there and rubbed elbows with each other than at any other bar in America. Why was this? What was it about Toots and his bar-restaurant that attracted the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Joe DiMaggio, and Frank Sinatra? I have asked myself the same question for years. I’ve often wondered what Toots, an uneducated “bum,” had in common with men as accomplished and disparate as Eisenhower, Hemingway, Sinatra, DiMaggio, and Hoffa. Toots had a rough-hewn charm, a straight-talking no-nonsense honesty, and a sincere love of fun. But I think ultimately the saloon’s place in history was the result of a perfect confluence of person, place, and time. The period in New York between the 1940s and 1950s was a unique time, and Toots and his saloon embodied the era—the post-Prohibition, post–World War II period when people wanted to let off steam and really have a good time. And his attitude toward life, friendship, and drinking gave people—famous and common—a place to feel at home. New York at that time was just emerging as the capital of the world, and the kinds of people who made up the fabric of New York City were a lot like Toots—tough, children of immigrants, who came to New York with little more then some loose change in their pockets and dreams of a better life. Toots’s belief that “a saloonkeeper is the most important person in a community” also played a role, in that he took the job very seriously and built not just a saloon but a community unlike any other. He was the first one there in the morning and the last to leave at night. At Toots’s, “drinking hard” was required, and loyalty, friendship, or “palship,” as he called it, was paramount. As he said to Mike Wallace in a 1959 interview, friends meant so much to him that it was “nearly a photo finish” between friends and family in his life. Since Toots took his friendships so seriously, he protected those who were celebrities, and as Peter Duchin says, “If you tried to get an autograph from someone at Toots, some waiter would break your leg!” Celebrity culture had not gotten so out of control then. His saloon also cut across class lines, since for him “class” was judged by how loyal, decent, and honest a person was, and because of his own humble background he respected above all those who, like him, came from nothing. He revered athletes and sportswriters above all, and the feeling was mutual. Toots’s was the ultimate clubhouse during a very special time in our history. Watching your film, one gets the impression that a large part of the saloon’s appeal was that it embodied the New York sports culture of the 1950s. Baseball players like Mickey Mantle, boxers like Joe Louis, football players such as Frank Gifford, they all hung out at Toots’s and seemed to feel at ease there. Do you think your grandfather was a sports fan per se, or was he more interested in the men who played sports? Both. He was definitely a diehard sports fan. He loved nothing more than a good game, or a good fight, or a good race. He felt that sports were the backbone of American life, and that any good citizen should have a devoted interest in them. He even marked events in his own life by sports. When did he open his restaurant? “I signed the lease on September 15, 1939—the day Tony Galento beat Lou Nova in Philadelphia.” His first wedding anniversary? “One of the biggest upsets in football happened that day,” he said of November 2, 1935. “Notre Dame beat Ohio State. What a game! Notre Dame scored two touchdowns in the last minute and a half of play.” But it was more than just sports fanaticism. He had tremendous respect for athletes, and I think he also strongly identified with them. As Peter Duchin says in the film, “though [Toots] loved Joe DiMaggio, who was the most famous ballplayer, as much as he possibly could, he still would love somebody else who was a great polo player. He revered the sportsmen.” I think part of that was that most athletes of that era were working-class, tough-as-nails kids who, with a good dose of talent and sheer will, scrapped their way out of their neighborhoods and into professional sports, and eventually into sports stardom. Likewise, these athletes saw a similar story in Toots, who was proud of his background and his upbringing as a street fighter in the streets of South Philadelphia. Toots made a point to talk to, and often console, both big-name athletes and younger ones who were struggling. Joe Garagiola tells a great story in the film about the time Toots came to sit with him on the stairs of his restaurant: “There was the big, famous, successful restaurateur sitting with a .220-hitting catcher, listening to my problems. There was no gain for him. He was taking care of, if I can say it now, a scared kid who didn’t know where to go.” I think it is difficult to separate the two—his love of sports and his interest in the men who played. Another story comes to mind that never made it into the film but is one of my favorites: After a game in 1945, Toots rushed back from the Polo Grounds after watching Mel Ott hit his 500th home run. He arrived at his saloon to find Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, at one of the tables. Toots introduced himself and chatted until Ott arrived, flush from his achievement. “Excuse me, Sir Fleming,” Toots said, “but I gotta leave you. Somebody important just came in.” On one remarkable occasion, Chief Justice Earl Warren was at one table and Frank Costello, perhaps the most notorious organized crime figure in America, was at another. If the account I heard is correct, they tipped their glasses and smiled at each other. What do you think it was about your grandfather’s saloon that made it a kind of neutral territory for two such people? I think the way Toots treated people in his joint had an effect on how people treated each other in the place too. It is, when I think about it, quite remarkable that among Toots’s closest friends were men who operated on such opposite sides of the law. But Toots didn’t think anything of a scene like this. To him, they were just his friends. It was another day, another coupla pals. It all made perfect sense to him, and others seemed to follow along. The tone was set by Toots that all were welcome (unless he didn’t like you, of course) and that was that. It was also a different time—some call it a magical time—when these guys, who all rose to power together from the Depression and Prohibition, respected each other in a way that’s difficult to imagine today. Everyone I interviewed for the film described Frank Costello as a dignified man who commanded an incredible amount of respect from others. I try to imagine a situation today that would be comparable, and I come up with nothing. I find it absolutely fascinating how accessible these people were then, and that a moment like this could even be possible. To celebrities like Mike Wallace, Whitey Ford, and Frank Gifford, the sale of your grandfather’s restaurant in 1961 marked the end of an era. And most of the customers never felt quite at home in the second incarnation of Toots’s saloon. What was it about the 1960s that he couldn’t quite adjust to? It seems to me that it was everything about the 1960s that Toots couldn’t, or wouldn’t, adjust to. The sixties were of course a time of great change, not just in the world and the United States, but especially in New York City. Toots had no tolerance for drugs or rock music or the excessive wealth and attitude that athletes were beginning to acquire. The downtown club scene, Studio 54, and the people who went there—these were not the crowd that Toots catered to or wanted in his saloon. People were moving to the suburbs, and TV had a huge affect on nightlife. Instead of adapting to the changes, Toots thought his attitude toward life would in the end prevail, that he could stick it out, and people would keep coming to his joint. As we know, that was not the way it worked out. Unlike the rest of us, though, this didn’t upset Toots. ”I started off broke, so I’m no worse off now,” he said with a laugh in 1975. The 1960s may have led to the demise of his restaurant, but Toots remained strong-willed until the very end.
September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:25 PM EST Josh Zeitz blogged that he had recently been interviewed by the Times about “a recent report that showed New York City’s non-Hispanic white population growing after several decades of sharp decline; at the same time, the number of immigrants in New York City, both the foreign-born and their children, is approaching levels last seen at the start of the twentieth century.” Josh notes that other American cities—he mentions Washington, D.C., and Newark—are witnessing comparable changes. Fred Allen replied that his parents, just back from Europe, reported that the difference between New York and a lot of European cities is not the presence of immigrants—there are a lot of immigrants in many European cities—but the American immigrants’ pleasing sense of ownership of the streets they bestrode. On his parents’ account, European cities feel as if they are inhabited by people who “look like a ghettoized underclass, stuck in the outskirts of the city, segregated from mainstream life.” On the strength of a trip to Queens last December, this seems to me like a partial but trivial exaggeration. I was in search of good kielbasa, a form of Polish sausage. An older woman in my friend’s hometown from whom my friend’s mother had bought homemade kielbasa had stopped making the stuff, and my friend had heard that in Polish neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn you can find pretty good sausage. You can indeed, along with fine pirogi, babka, and smoked trout, etc., and in one part of Queens you can buy all of these things in a neighborhood where the ATMs have screens with instructions in Polish, the newsstands sell only Polish publications—scores of them—and there are a remarkable number of perfume shops, which seems to be a Polish as well as a French thing. There are good and amazingly cheap Polish restaurants, where only Polish was spoken other than to us, ditto butchers and grocers, in one of which the butcher returned change to my friend with one of the few Polish phrases I know, one that more or less means “thank you, noble Lady,” not a phrase one commonly hears in other New York City shops. So it is not true to say that in New York City immigrants are never segregated from mainstream life to any degree. This was partial segregation, but it was only partial—people clearly living there had jobs in Manhattan, because the place was much quieter on a workday than on a weekend—and it was cheerful. No one seemed irritated at us for entering Polish turf, which would not be the case with a number of immigrant neighborhoods in European cities (and for that matter in 1920s Chicago, when my father grew up there). What happens to people in neighborhoods like that one in Queens? One tiny piece of anecdotal evidence: Over the past decade and change I have known New Yorkers who have employed successive Polish cleaning ladies. The first one in the series was a young woman who curtsied and called some of her employers “noble sir.” After two years, she was gone. She had gotten a job as a draughtsman in a machine shop. My guess is that curtseying and calling her employers “noble sir” vanished soon thereafter, and old-world atavistic charm aside, I am not sorry for that. The successor she recruited cleaned apartments for a number of years and then became an engineer, and the third one also moved on. The current one in the series is still cleaning apartments, but my guess is not forever. As these women move on, their English improves, and other things change too. They become Americans. Somehow, we have helped make them so; there is clearly some sort of push-pull, but the eerie gift we have for doing our part of this is clear when you think about the competition. Americans, who pioneered the mass production of automobiles, are sometimes gloomy about how other people now do this very effectively, to our apparent hazard. The Japanese, for example, make fine cars, but they are not good at making Japanese people using anything other than the most traditional method—and they do not even care to try. The Germans are also dab hands at mass-producing cars—they could not do this very effectively when it was a question of mass-producing tanks, and a good thing too, but now they clearly have it licked. But they cannot make Germans very well, other than from existing stock. They are ambivalent about trying, and maybe when they try more wholeheartedly they’ll do better, but the smart money is not taking any bets on it. Americans, on the other hand, are very effective at making more Americans out of any and all material. Then the new Americans make other things. I today read that 40 percent of American scientists were born in the European Union, which seems high but not impossible, and I am certain that a fair amount of other American scientists were born in places like India and China and Korea. I do not know quite what they make, or will make, but my guess is that the People’s Republic of China is likely to be very unhappy if it ever decides to invade Taiwan, and one reason for that is the high probability that some of the things new Americans make are going to be doozies. I posted back in July about the P47, a very effective machine a couple of immigrants designed in the early 1940s. The strategic consequences of American receptivity to immigration is a longstanding theme in our history. We should not be surprised by the things new Americans invent, because they are, after all, people with practice: they began by remaking themselves. Somehow we let them do it. Why are most host countries so much less good at this? I’m not sure. During nativist panics we repeatedly forget that we are good at this, or insist that this time it is different, but so far we have always been wrong. Nowadays the anti-nativists also tell a different story: America is and has always been a salad bowl and not a melting pot, we have usually been cruelly unwelcoming, and so on. And much of that is true—at least until you look at the phenomenon in comparative perspective.
September 13, 2007
Bonapartism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST Alexander Burns posts that if General Petraeus takes the advice of the New York Sun, “to tell Congress that he needed its full support for the Iraq war, and that if he didn’t receive it he would resign and run for President,” he would be taking “an essentially Bonapartist course of action.” I don’t think General Petraeus would have been well-advised to take the Sun’s advice, but in the extremely remote possibility that he had, he would not, in my opinion, have been acting in a Bonapartist fashion. The historical Bonaparte eventually seized power with (and held it by reliance on) armed force, and his nephew, who won a national presidential election, subsequently mounted a successful coup d’état, later relying on plebiscites rather than contesting elections (although there was a very late phase of “liberal empire,” with an elected legislature having some power). Outside of the stricter Marxian rhetorical traditions, I think Bonapartist mostly means generals seizing power, and holding it, by means of bayonets; inside the Marxian traditions, there are some important additional implications, but the use of bayonets rather than ballots alone is still part of the idea. The Sun, as far as I can tell, while abrasively and stupidly suggesting that Congress stop criticizing the administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq, is not suggesting the use of violence to overturn the Constitution. Nor am I sure that demanding that Congress support the war or see Petraeus resign and run for President would be fairly comparable to MacArthur’s behavior in 1951. MacArthur was insubordinate to his commander-in-chief; Petraeus has not been, and if he made such a remark to Congress, giving his professional advice and mentioning the right he shares with many of his fellow citizens (to run for the Presidency), he would not necessarily be committing the military offense of insubordination; for one thing, I can imagine his Commander in Chief approving his remarks. Mr. Burns also quotes Niall Ferguson saying that 1951 was “perhaps the only moment in its history that the American Republic came close to meeting the fate of the Roman Republic.” I do not know the context, but Niall Ferguson seems to be making a bombastic and ridiculous remark. If 1951 was in fact our closest approach to a century of civil war culminating in centuries of despotism, and I have no reason to think otherwise, we have no great cause for alarm. At the time, people who were closer to the horrors of the last century thought they saw something more genuinely dangerous in MacArthur’s ambitions than most of us do when looking back more than 50 years later, in the same way that Huey Long looked more like Hitler if you were an excitable contemporary living in the Bronx than he does to us now. Then again, “close” may mean something to the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University that it does not mean to other speakers of English. As for extremely irritating remarks made by American generals, ones that comport very ill with democratic government, I’d pick the general who announced that President Clinton would not be physically safe if he ventured onto that general’s army base. At the time, I wanted Clinton to send the Secret Service to interrogate this general, who was apparently harboring traitors in his command. I probably overreacted—but not as much as Professor Ferguson seems to have done, with the benefit of a lot more hindsight.
September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST Fred Allen quotes Kenneth Jackson, a leading historian of American cities, who observed of his trip to Croatia, “There they all look alike and they’re killing each other. Here, we’re all different and we live in peace.” As Jackson would be quick to point out, there is a difference between peace and integration, and it’s worth remembering that today’s ethnic communities—be they Dominican, West African, Chinese, or Mexican—are no more self-segregated and self-contained than Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods in mid-twentieth-century New York. In my book White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Postwar Politics, I explain that in 1930 roughly three-quarters of all Jews in New York City lived in neighborhoods with populations that were at least 40 percent Jewish. Availing themselves of a massive boom in the construction of apartment buildings and two-family houses, particularly in the outer boroughs (Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens), Jews followed the new subway lines to neighborhoods that were actually more ethnically segregated than the places of first settlement commonly portrayed in immigrant literature and film. This trend toward residential segregation along ethnic lines yielded a sharp rise in the general Jewish index of dissimilarity—measuring Jews against the residual population—from 0.38 in 1920 to 0.58 in 1930. Residential patterns held relatively steady in the Depression years, with the Jewish dissimilarity index dropping to 0.56 in 1940, a relative decline of only 3 percent. Twenty years later, in 1960, the index stood at 0.48, representing a larger (14 percent) though not drastic decrease in Jewish residential concentration. In other words, Jewish residential concentration showed remarkable staying power, even as popular and scholarly writers were announcing the end of ethnicity. Like their Jewish neighbors, New York’s Italians and Irish continued to segregate themselves residentially throughout the first decades of the postwar period. Data from the 1960 census indicate that the general citywide dissimilarity index for the Irish was 0.37, and for Italians it was 0.39. Within these insular communities, patterns of work and education worked to further segregate different immigrants from one another, with most Jewish children attending public schools and many Catholic kids attending parish or diocesan schools, and with Jews gravitating to the retail and wholesale sectors, and Irish and Italian Catholics entering blue-collar fields. Just as European immigrant communities in from the 1840s through the 1960s coexisted peacefully but separately, today’s newcomers have carved out entire sections of American cities as distinct ethnic enclaves. Paradoxically, America’s success at accommodating diversity might owe to the willingness of successive generations of urbanites to embrace the “salad bowl” model of pluralism, in which the constituent parts of the recipe retain their distinctive characteristics, rather than the “melting pot” model, which enforces a homogeneous (albeit collaborative) scheme on newcomers. Impressionistically, it seems that countries like France, which expect immigrants to embrace a single national identity, have the hardest time forging national unity. For what it’s worth, the melting-pot and pluralism models were developed by two Jewish immigrants—Israel Zangwill and Horace Kallen—in the early twentieth century. One hundred years later, we’re still having the same discussion.
September 13, 2007
Wodehousiana Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:30 PM EST The admirable website Arts and Letters Daily, which sometimes links to AmericanHeritage.com, comprises columns of links. The extreme right column contains links to “Essays and Opinion”; to that column’s left are links to reviews (“New Books”); one more column to the left are links to “Articles of Note”; and on the extreme left are a series of columns, one atop another. Many of them are links to the front pages of newspapers, magazines or blogs, but near the top there is also a column titled “Note Bene,” which usually links to more whimsical pieces. The top of the “Note Bene” column is now occupied by a piece described as “Wodehouse Types”, and if you follow the link you arrive at a meditation on a recent Daily Telegraph obituary of Lord Michael Pratt, a gentleman described by the Telegraph as “one of the last Wodehouseian figures to inhabit London’s clubland,” with the assertion that “he will also be remembered as an unabashed snob and social interloper on a grand scale.” The piece goes on to note that “The epithet ‘Wodehousian’ is raising eyebrows, in this online newsgroup and perhaps in the more literary corners of clubland itself.” The eyebrows are raised because some seem to think that Lord Michael Pratt was too unpleasant a character to make his way into a Wodehouse novel. Anthony Gottlieb, author of the piece, demurs, pointing out that Wodehouse managed, among sketches of other fairly nasty characters, a pretty effective parody of the British fascist Oswald Mosley (Wodehouse’s Mosley figure is named Roderick Spode). P. G. Wodehouse, who lived 93 years and published 96 books, is probably best remembered for creating the character (and brilliant first-person narrative voice) of Bertie Wooster, the quintessential British upper-class twit, who is repeatedly saved from comic disasters—often marriage to a beautiful but maddening girl—by his butler Jeeves. Bertie and Jeeves probably descend from Plautus, where the upper-class twit and the clever slave were perfected although not invented. The two seem peculiarly English, but they are in fact immensely popular other places—for example, Wodehouse sells amazingly well in India, was once loved in Hungary, and, among other places in America, in Brooklyn, where my mother first ran across him. I was in my early teens when she commended him to me—we were both poking around a public library in Westchester—and more than 40 years later I now teach him; he makes a nice companion to Plautus. Wodehouse raises the question of the presence of British literary culture in America, and in a special way. America began as a set of British colonies; British literature has always been part of our literature, bids fair to remain so for the foreseeable future, and is a component of the literature Americans read in a way other world literature is not—for one thing, we read it without translation. The parity with American literature (maybe the near-primacy) of British literature in America is not simply a function of the coercive powers of schoolteachers; many Americans still find British popular and canonical literature all on their own. When I was a kid, a lot of people still ran into The Prisoner of Zenda, and many of my students have still found Jane Austen. Wodehouse seems to me to be a special case, in two senses a peculiarly hybrid author. First of all, he died an American citizen, and for that matter spent most of his long life living in either American or France. He spent some time in Hollywood and for the last part of his life lived on Long Island. A lot of American popular culture would not have existed without him. He collaborated with Cole Porter on Anything Goes, frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern (he wrote the lyrics to Show Boat’s “Bill”) and Guy Bolton, and a lot of his writing was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. But Wodehouse seems to me to be a hybrid author in another sense, which is that from early on he wrote with an American audience in mind. He was popular here from near the beginning of his career, and he set some novels and stories in Hollywood that were consumed by British as well as American popular audiences. He worked with comic types from both cultures, and displayed them for the pleasure of vast audiences on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as at least one shore of the Indian Ocean). It would be absurd to deny Wodehouse’s Englishness, but it would be foolish to forget that Salman Rushdie admired him as much as Eveyln Waugh did—or that my mother, who was a resident of Crown Heights when she discovered Wodehouse, was one of tens of millions of Americans who have loved him as much as either of those two ever did. There are literary inventions from the purely popular as well as the high literature of other nations who are also part of our mental worlds—some characters of Dumas, certainly, and Cyrano—but the field is mostly British. American popular creations have been exported in mass quantities, of course, so the traffic is two-way. And in some cases, like Wodehouse’s, the two-way traffic is conducted by (and within) a single writer.
September 13, 2007
American Caesars Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:50 PM EST There’s a report in today’s Independent that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the man currently directing American forces in Iraq, “expressed long-term interest in running for the US presidency when he was stationed in Baghdad, according to a senior Iraqi official who knew him at that time.” This story follows a feature in Mother Jones earlier this week that reported: “Petraeus’s leadership qualities, combined with his role as the Bush administration’s last hope for saving face in Iraq, has set off speculation that the general could run for office some day—possibly the presidency, in 2012.” Whether Petraeus actually has any political ambitions, there are people who hope he does. Last week, the New York Sun published an editorial urging Petraeus to tell Congress that he needed its full support for the Iraq war, and that if he didn’t receive it he would resign and run for President. The Sun’s editorial, which I think could be charitably called insane, counseled an essentially Bonapartist course of action. If Petraeus had threatened Congress this week, it would have undermined America’s long tradition of subordinating the military to the elected, democratic branches of government. It would not, however, have been entirely without precedent. The episode in 1951 in which President Truman fired General MacArthur for insubordination, only to have MacArthur return to the United States to lead a public relations offensive against him, is well known. What’s less well known, however, is that MacArthur actually attempted the course the Sun prescribes for Petraeus. After the famous New York parade in his honor, which drew millions of viewers, MacArthur intended to drum up support for a presidential bid with a speaking tour in Texas and a campaign to draft himself for the White House. But when Gen. Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that MacArthur’s desired strategy in Korea would have left Europe vulnerable and engaged the United States in “the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy,” the so-called “American Caesar” found his political prospects fatally damaged. Niall Ferguson has called 1951 “perhaps the only moment in its history that the American Republic came close to meeting the fate of the Roman Republic.” And indeed, no military officer since MacArthur has tried to defy civilian power so brazenly. Even General Petraeus, who some believe is too close to the President to be trusted as an independent assessor of the Iraq war, doesn’t seem interested in attempting such a dangerous stunt as the Sun suggested. “Caesar Petraeus” has a catchy ring to it, but—for now at least—the general isn’t biting. It would be best for the country, and for the good name of the military, if things stayed that way.
September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities II Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:35 AM EST Josh Zeitz, reflecting on the growing ethnic and racial diversity of American cities, writes, “Where this all leads is anyone’s guess, though as one who has written on ethnicity and urban life, I tend to see more good than bad in this story.” That brings to mind two recent remarks. One is what the Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson said to the New York Times reporter covering the new census data Josh was talking about. Jackson, just back from a visit to Croatia, said, “There they all look alike and they’re killing each other. Here, we’re all different and we live in peace.” My own parents also just returned from Europe; they visited Milan, Basel, Strasbourg, and Cologne. They loved all those cities, and on their return, my mother said, they were struck anew not only by the unique energy of New York and its tremendously varied population, but also by how all its foreigners and immigrants “act like they own the place.” At first I feared she was saying something negative. Oh, no, she explained. The Muslims you see in France, or the Turks in Germany, look like a ghettoized underclass, stuck in the outskirts of the city, segregated from mainstream life. Nobody looks like an underclass in New York. Everyone looks like they are seizing an opportunity that America alone offers them. It’s a very heartening thing to come home to.
September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:10 AM EST Yesterday I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Sewell Chan, a reporter for The New York Times who contributes regularly to the paper’s City Room blog, which is devoted to metropolitan issues. Chan was interested in a recent report that showed New York City’s non-Hispanic white population growing after several decades of sharp decline; at the same time, the number of immigrants in New York City, both the foreign-born and their children, is approaching levels last seen at the start of the twentieth century. A byproduct of these demographic developments has been a slight relative drop in the black population. New York is not the only city undergoing such change. In Washington, D.C., African-Americans composed 71 percent of the city’s total population in 1970; today, they account for 57 percent. Whites, whose share of the capital’s population fell from 65 percent in 1950 to just 27 percent in 1980, now compose 38 percent of its residents. As in New York, much of the difference can be accounted for by the growth of Asian-American communities. Likewise, in Newark, a classic study in postwar white flight, the arrival of Portuguese and Hispanic immigrants has brought the black population down to about 53 percent. On the local level, the reentry of non-Hispanic whites and the arrival of new immigrants into existing black urban neighborhoods is no doubt highly disruptive, though in many ways the same can be said of the arrival 50 years ago of large numbers of black immigrants into previously white-ethnic neighborhoods like Brownsville, Flatbush, and Canarsie. On a macro level, we may be witnessing the end of what the funk artist George Clinton famously termed “Chocolate City” in his 1975 hit song of that title. “We didn’t get our forty acres and a mule, but we did get you, C.C. . . . God bless C.C. and its vanilla suburbs.” As in the early and mid-twentieth century, some of America’s largest urban centers are once again host to a tremendous amount of ethnic and racial diversity. Even sweeping categories like “Hispanic” mean less than they once did, as today only one-third of Hispanic New Yorkers are Puerto Rican. Where this all leads is anyone’s guess, though as one who has written on ethnicity and urban life, I tend to see more good than bad in this story.
September 12, 2007
The Game That Changed Football Forever: An Interview with Frank Maggio Posted by Allen Barra at 02:15 PM EST In today’s football, the pass rules. But there was a time when the game was largely, in Damon Runyon’s phrase, “three yards and a cloud of dust.” In the early 1900s the game became so dangerous that President Theodore Roosevelt considered banning it. Football was saved by the forward pass, putting an emphasis on speed and skill and spread the action out. It took years, though, for the pass to win acceptance among the nation’s college football coaches. In Notre Dame and the Game That Changed Football: How Jesse Harper Made the Forward Pass a Weapon and Knute Rockne a Legend, Frank Maggio tells the story of the 1913 Army–Notre Dame game, after which nothing in football would ever be the same. I discussed it with him recently. The title of your book claims that the 1913 Notre Dame–Army game actually changed the course of the game of football. That’s a mouthful, but I have to say that you justify the claim. Can you give us a brief summation of why the game is such a landmark? The game was the first time the forward pass was used in such an extensive, dramatic, and successful fashion. It was extensive in its sheer quantity and quality. Gus Dorais completed 14 of 17 passes for 243 yards, unheard of statistics for that day and age and pretty good in today’s game. Notre Dame would like to have such passing success in their games this season. It was dramatic because it was the first time that long passes—20, 30, and 40 yards—had been thrown to receivers who caught them while on a dead run. In the past, passes were thrown to stationary receivers, and until 1912 a pass could not be thrown farther than 20 yards from the spot where the quarterback was standing. It was successful because it led Notre Dame to victory and immediate national recognition—as well as awakening the football world of the possibilities of the forward pass. What was the status of the forward pass prior to that game? The forward pass in its nascent form had been incorporated into the rules of football in 1906, and coaches, especially in the Midwest and South, were quick to see its potential. Its use, however, was limited, so it didn’t become a major weapon until 1912, when the restrictions were lifted. The Notre Dame–Army game of 1913 was not the first use of the forward pass, but it was the first extensive use of the pass after the rule changes. Also, it was the first effective use in a major game between well-known schools and in a major media center, New York. Because of those two factors the game received maximum publicity, and as one writer said, it “demonstrated the devastating potential of the forward pass.” So, though this type of passing might have been used earlier than November 1, 1913, it went unnoticed. The importance of the major media center cannot be overstated. The game received national publicity, and was immediately hailed by the press as a “landmark” game. What were the national reputations the Notre Dame and Army football teams at the time of the game? In 1913 the major powers in college football were in the East. Army was well recognized as one of those major powers. Others in that day, by way of example, were Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. Army’s 1913 loss to Notre Dame was their only loss in 1913. In 1914 Army was undefeated and declared national champions. Notre Dame, on the other hand, was virtually unknown in the East, or really anywhere else, with the exception of the Midwest. They were at that time a small, financially poor Catholic men’s school. 1913 was the first year Notre Dame had a professional football coach, Jesse Harper, and the first time they ventured out on the national stage. In 1913 Notre Dame went East and played Army and Penn State and went Southwest and played the University of Texas It was the first time a college team had attempted such a national schedule. And Notre Dame was undefeated in 1913. At what point did Jesse Harper and Notre Dame decide to make the forward pass their primary offensive weapon? Had they used it much before the Army game? Why did it catch Army so off-guard? Jesse Harper was very familiar with the forward pass prior to coming to Notre Dame. He had worked with it from the time it came into the rules in 1906 and used it extensively in his last two years at Wabash College, almost beating Notre Dame with the forward pass in 1911. However, in that game a successful touchdown pass by Wabash was nullified because it was thrown more than 20 yards. When Harper arrived at Notre Dame in 1913, the numerous restrictions on the forward pass had been lifted, and the football had been changed from its original oval-like shape to a more aerodynamic “prolate spheroid.” Both of these factors greatly facilitated the use of the forward pass. Harper’s 1913 Notre Dame team immediately began using it. The summer before the 1913 season, Harper had Gus Dorias, his quarterback, and Knute Rockne, his receiver, working with the pass during their summer jobs on Lake Erie. In the practice sessions, Notre Dame worked extensively with the pass and had great success in their first three games of the 1913 season. Army was the fourth game on their schedule. Army was familiar with the forward pass. In fact, their coach, Charles Daly, had been on the 1906 committee that brought the pass into the rules of football. However, the Eastern schools had virtually ignored it, and there was little or no scouting in those days, so Army had no idea that Notre Dame knew how to throw and catch the pass. Thus Army, prepared for a titanic struggle on the offensive and defensive line with the fighting Irish runners, was completely thrown off their game. Everyone knows that Knute Rockne went on to become the most innovative coach in football history and that he died in a plane crash in 1931. What became of the other famous participants in that 1913 game? As for Army, the men playing in the 1913 game were known in West Point lore as the class “the stars fell on,” because so many of them went on to be multistar generals in World War II. The two most famous were sitting on the bench during the 1913 game, namely Dwight Eisenhower and his roommate, Omar Bradley. Both were five-star generals at the end of World War II, and Ike, of course, went on to become President of the United States.
Of the Notre Dame players, Harper, whose later years are reviewed in my book, became a cattle rancher in Kansas. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1970. Rockne, of course, went on to become one of the greatest legends in the history of college football. His story is well known. Gus Dorais, the outstanding quarterback of the 1913 team, played some professional football but mostly distinguished himself as a coach. He coached college football for almost 20 years and was the head coach of the Detroit Lions from 1943 to 1947. He also was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach. Ray Eichenlaub, the powerful and very important fullback on the 1913 team, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1972. The rest of the team I have been unable to trace, so, to my dismay, there the story ends.
September 12, 2007
Eisenhower and Civil Rights Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST Apropos of the feature piece that I wrote week before last on Strom Thurmond’s historic filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, there is an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times by David Nichols arguing that President Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration gave strong backing to the bill, was a firm supporter of black civil rights. Nichols, a former dean and vice president of academic affairs at Southwestern College, and author of the recently released volume A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution, views Ike in a more sympathetic light than other scholars, who have described his performance on civil rights issues as laggard at best and harmfully negligent at worst. Certainly Nichols’s book is well-timed. This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s decision to deploy federal troops to enforce the Brown decision in Little Rock, Arkansas. There is still something to be said for the standard argument. Having grown up in a primarily white community and attended an all-white university (the United States Military Academy), Eisenhower was naturally sympathetic to the concerns of white Southerners. He opposed Harry Truman’s desegregation of the military, fearing it would disrupt morale, and he once told Earl Warren that Southern whites were not “bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negro.” In his private diary, Eisenhower wrote that “the improvement of race relations is one of those things that will be healthy and sound only if it starts locally. I don’t believe that prejudices . . . will succumb to compulsion. Consequently, I believe that Federal law imposed on our States . . . would set back the cause of race relations a long, long time.” When the Supreme Court issued its famous decision in Brown v. Board, the President told one of his speechwriters, “I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision sets back progress in the South at least fifteen years. . . . It’s all very well to talk about school integration—if you remember that you may also be talking about social disintegration. Feelings are deep on this, especially where children are involved. We can’t demand perfection in these moral things. All we can do is keep working toward a goal and keep it high. And the fellow who tries to tell me that you can do these things by force is just plain nuts.” It was this sentiment that led Eisenhower to remain ominously silent on the subject of school desegregation in the weeks and months following the court’s ruling—silence that many historians believe encouraged many Southern whites to embrace “massive resistance” and defiance of federal law. I haven’t read Nichols’s new book but am looking forward to doing so. He’ll have a tough case to make in recasting Ike as a great civil rights proponent, though I doubt that’s exactly what the book attempts to do. More likely, he seeks to temper some of the popular but unwarranted enthusiasm for the Kennedy administration’s civil rights policies, which were far more equivocal and cautious than public memory would have us believe, and to locate the roots of a quiet revolution in law and politics in the 1950s, rather than the 1960s.
September 11, 2007
Looking Back Six Years Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST As Fred Schwarz notes in today’s lead article, six years ago American Heritage produced a special issue devoted to considering the September 11 attacks in historical perspective. I wrote a piece for the magazine arguing that just as wars have sometimes given American policymakers license to restrict and violate constitutional liberties—prominent examples of this tendency include the draconian repression of German immigrants and left-wing unionists during and immediately after World War I, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II—they have also produced what the historian Bernard Bailyn termed a “contagion of liberty.” Bailyn was writing specifically about the American War of Independence, when Americans who used slavery as a metaphor to describe their relationship with Britain came to oppose chattel slavery as inconsistent with revolutionary ideals. I also pointed to the Civil War, which evolved from a fight for the sanctity of the Union to a liberation struggle. Writing in the days after 9/11, I suggested that “as in the 1770s, the 1860s, and the 1940s, today the exigencies of war—in whatever shape it ultimately assumes—afford Americans an opportunity in the form of a challenge. To keep the nation unified and to convince the world that its cause carries merit, the United States will have to articulate its purpose. As indeed the President began to do very soon after the attack, when, before a group of American Muslim leaders, he said, ‘America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens. . . . And they need to be treated with respect. . . . Those who feel . . . they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America. . . .’ We will have to make very clear exactly why American democracy is superior to dictatorship and theocracy, and this in turn will force us to examine our most deeply cherished institutions and beliefs. In the past, this exercise, although brought on by painful and urgent circumstances, has ended by giving us a more honest application of our founding ideals.” In my defense, I wrote that the war against terrorism presented an opportunity to strengthen the application of democracy in America. I didn’t say it would have this effect, though at the time, I was hopeful. Looking back after six years, this has sadly not been the case. The Patriot Act, which, among other things, allowed the government to investigate citizens’ library borrowing habits, and the administration’s decision to monitor citizens’ phone calls without first securing court warrants, are not shining examples of the “contagion of liberty.” Neither is the military prison at Guantanamo Bay likely to give us a “new birth of freedom,” let alone added security. As for Abu Ghraib, what is there to say, other than to note that we did not live up to our stated ideals? Of course, one shouldn’t overstate the case. The administration’s bizarre claims of executive privilege and its effective abrogation of international treaties are bad, but nowhere near as egregious as the internment of tens of thousands of citizens. Still, looking back on my article, I’m saddened by the opportunities that we, as a country, have lost over the past several years.
September 11, 2007
September 11 and Hindsight Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:35 AM EST Fred Schwarz’s lead piece on this site today describes the issue of American Heritage published in the aftermath of 9/11, for which the articles had to be written within a week of the attacks. I published an article in that issue, to which Fred Schwarz provides a link, and I followed that link with some apprehension. To my gratification and indeed astonishment, relatively little I wrote on that occasion strikes me as appallingly stupid now. At least one thought, though, seems to me to have been over-optimistic. I suggested that destroying a terror-sponsoring regime—the one at issue was the Taliban government then ruling almost all of Afghanistan, which had given shelter to bin Laden—might begin to make the sponsorship of terror less attractive to other regimes employing such tactics and proxies. In the light of subsequent history, this was a bad reading about the relationship between the Taliban and bin Laden. The former may have been the partial prisoner of the latter, rather than the latter the distinctly junior ally of the former. Also, while some positive effects of destroying a sponsor regime may have been visible at first—for example, some accounts suggest a brief period of covert Iranian overtures to the United States, and these overtures may have been further encouraged by the initial U.S. victory in Iraq—the sincerity and wholeheartedness of those overtures is disputable, as is the ability of those who made them to deliver the goods. Furthermore, subsequent U.S. difficulties in Iraq are widely said to have had the opposite effect to the one I hoped for, and are instead encouraging Iranian intransigence. Allowing an enemy to provoke you with impunity, or at the risk of only feeble and transient reprisals, does have the effect of encouraging further and greater provocations, but failed reprisals, reprisals that are perceived to have failed on a very grand scale, seem even likelier to produce further provocation. According to many accounts, the United States is now being driven out of Iraq by successful terrorism in significant part sponsored by Iran, and is being seriously harassed in Afghanistan by terrorism sponsored by elements within the Pakistani intelligence services, by terrorists permitted to shelter on Pakistani territory. This latter pattern may change, for the sponsored have recently begun murdering their sponsors, but the general tendency of events is to make terrorism look more and more like the magic bullet anyone can employ against the Americans or their allies. It is again claimed that it always works, and that the costs to the sponsor remain pretty low. If the United States is indeed driven out of Iraq by successful Iranian-sponsored terror, and/or is driven out of Afghanistan by neo-Taliban who are staging out of Pakistan, the chief price to be paid for that will be paid by Iraqis and Afghans. But we are likely to pay a price, as well, somewhere down the line, and maybe not very far down the line. The price may be much cheaper than staying in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it will not be wholly negligible. On the other hand, most people continue to acknowledge that leaving the Taliban in place while bin Laden continued his career as their visibly honored and ominously industrious guest would have been an almost inconceivably flaccid and foolish response to 9/11. Our subsequent attempt to reconstruct the government of Iraq is now widely taken to be proof that trying to do certain things is idiocy. Maybe so. It remains true that, as Christopher Hitchens likes to note, doing nothing does not mean that nothing will happen; it means that something else will happen. Knowing what not to do is not the same thing as knowing what to do. A poll reported in today’s New York Times suggests that many Americans remain unsure about what to do in Iraq. The Times itself seems to be surer, if not necessarily wiser.
September 10, 2007
Hitler’s Strategic Bombers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:35 AM EST John Steele Gordon asks my opinion of Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, which he found compelling. While I do not agree with every single thing Overy says in it, I greatly admire the book, have several times assigned it in two courses I teach, and particularly admire the chapters on bombing, the wartime economies, and the development of new technologies. Overy was originally an immensely impressive specialist on the German war economy and the air war, before branching out to other aspects of the Second World War, and I think those three chapters show that. Mr. Gordon goes on to remark that “had the Germans developed a strategic bomber, capable of heavy loads and long range, the ability of the Soviets to move their armaments factories eastward, out of range of the Luftwaffe, would have been greatly complicated.” I have seen other people speculate to this effect, but I am not sure I agree. Here’s why: The Ural bomber program, advocated by Walter Wever, the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, and cancelled after his death in 1935 by his successor, Ernst Udet (and not supported by Udet’s successor, Hans Jeschonnek), had produced two prototypes, the Dornier Do19, with a range of 1,600 kilometers, and the Junkers Ju89, with a range of 2,980 kilometers. If the Luftwaffe had deployed any strategic bomber in time for Barbarossa, it would most likely have been one or the other of these. How would they have fared? The distance from Moscow, which the Werhmacht never quite reached, to the great tank factory in the Urals, Chelyabinsk, is 1,919 kilometers, which means that had the Do19 actually gone into production, it would not have had the range to reach the Urals, even if the Wehrmacht had somehow held onto the outskirts of Moscow. The distance from Stalingrad, which the Wehrmact did reach, and most of which, to its sorrow, it for some months occupied, was 1,359 km, which still lets out the Do19, but Ju89s, had they gone into mass production, could have reached Chelyabinsk from either Moscow or Stalingrad. Off the top of my head, the only potential German escort fighter with the range to reach Chelyabinsk from Stalingrad would have been the Me110, a notoriously bad dogfighter. While most Soviet fighters were designed to fight at lower altitudes than the 22,000 foot ceiling of a Ju89, some could at least reach much higher altitudes (the MiG1, available in 1941, could reach 39,000 feet, the LaGG3, also available in 1941, could reach 33,000 feet, as could the Yak 1b, available in 1942), and had the Luftwaffe possessed Ju89s, Soviet designers would have produced fighters designed for higher performance at a suitable altitude—they were very good at their trade. In any case, fairly early in the war we had Lend-Leased the Soviets (among other aircraft) P39s, which had a ceiling of 35,000 feet. Unescorted World War II bombers flying by day and facing capable fighters were effectively on suicide missions; bombers escorted by badly outclassed fighters were in a comparable case (Bf110s used as escorts during the Battle of Britain were not quite flying coffins, but they were very badly outclassed); and for the first couple years of the war, bombers attacking distant targets by night were lucky to drop any bombs within five nautical miles of their targets. Even with significantly better accuracy, you had to drop an awful lot of bombs to do any damage, but Ju89s didn’t carry many bombs. The Ju89 had a theoretical bomb load of 1,600 kg (3,520 lbs.), compared to a B17G’s theoretical capacity of 17,417 lbs. (7900 kg) of bombs (while a B-17 rarely carried more than 2300 kg. In combat, we’ll never know what a Ju89 could actually have carried from Stalingrad to Chelyabinsk). The Luftwaffe was designed for ground support, which early on it did extremely well, and for achieving air superiority over the battlefield, which in 1940 it also did extremely well, so well that Germany achieved, in my opinion very much against the odds, the swift and cheap conquest of France and the resulting domination of the Continent. The resources this victory directly and indirectly secured in turn made Nazi Germany extremely formidable. With limited resources (and many calls on those resources), I think this was the most effective possible approach for the German air force. Had significant resources been diverted into building strategic bombers, that improbable 1940 victory would have been. I think, even less likely.
September 9, 2007
The Blitz II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST The book that caused me to abandon the conventional wisdom on the effect of bombing in World War II was Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, which I found compelling. It goes into much more than just the effects of airpower, of course. I’d be very interested in Fredric Smoler’s opinion of it. Overy makes the point that the allied bombing of Germany had significant military effects over and above the destruction of German manufacturing and transportation facilities it achieved and its morale effect on the German population. For one, it forced the Nazis to divert enormous resources in artillery and aircraft away from the Eastern Front, where they might have proved crucial to victory. And, of course, had the Germans developed a strategic bomber, capable of heavy loads and long range, the ability of the Soviets to move their armaments factories eastward, out of range of the Luftwaffe, would have been greatly complicated.
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