October 8, 2007
A Dying Language Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:00 PM EST Many of the world’s languages are in deep trouble. There are about 6,000 of them at the moment, but they are dying out at the rate of one every two weeks as those who use them as a native tongue die and their children prefer to speak one of the major languages instead. Indeed, the top 20 languages in the world—as measured by number of native speakers—are now spoken by 96 percent of the world’s population. One language, of course, English, is rapidly becoming everyone’s second language and is now widely spoken in no fewer than 107 countries. If the world ever settles on a single language, it is highly likely that it will be English, which has numerous advantages as a lingua franca over and above being the world’s most widely spread language. The Wall Street Journal today carries a front-page story on one man’s crusade to save another dying language, Morse Code. Morse Code, of course, is not, strictly speaking, a language at all. It is a code that works perfectly well in any language that can be expressed in the Roman alphabet and, I imagine, can be adapted for other languages as well. But it is unquestionably dying. The federal government no longer requires competency in Morse Code in order to get a ham radio operating license. The Internet, cheap phone rates, and other technological advances have mortally wounded it. Morse Code was invented in the United States, by Samuel F. B. Morse. It was the only part of the Morse telegraph system that was wholly his creation, and a brilliant one it was. By noting the frequency of letters in English, Morse assigned dashes and dots to each letter, the most frequently used getting the shortest code. So E, the most common letter, is simply dot, while Z is dash dash dot dot. To Morse’s surprise, Morse Code proved so easy to learn that it was not even necessary to write it down: a trained operator could just listen and understand it by ear without “translating” it. Ham radio operators used to do exactly that, but there aren’t many Morse users left anymore. So a retired astrophysicist named Chuck Adams, who loved using a ham radio as a child, cooked up a software program that can translate books into Morse. If you would like to listen to, say, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in Morse Code, Mr. Adams will be happy to sell you a CD for a modest $10.50. It won’t save the Morse Code from ending up in the Smithsonian as Mr. Adams’s generation passes from the scene. But at least, like the grammars and recordings being created by linguists desperate to save dying languages from being utterly lost, it will preserve the sounds and rhythms of Morse forever.
October 8, 2007
Japanese Textbooks Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:15 AM EST An interesting story in today’s New York Times, “Okinawans Protest Japan’s Plan to Revise Bitter Chapter of World War II,” describes recent attempts by Japan’s Education Ministry to purge high school textbooks of embarrassing facts. The Japanese Education ministry has long had a reputation for minimizing Japanese atrocities against foreigners—recent changes have tended to suppress references to the Rape of Nanking, the sexual enslavement of Koreans, etc.—but the story in the Times explains that the Ministry is now sanitizing textbooks by purging or eliding discussion of the Army’s atrocities against people who are (nowadays, anyway) more or less considered Japanese. More precisely, the Ministry is removing references to the role of the Japanese Army in pressing or coercing Okinawan civilians into mass suicide, and in some cases murdering their families, out of fear of being raped and murdered by the approaching American forces. Previous accounts of the suicides—at least the ones I’ve seen—asserted the effectiveness of propaganda about the Americans as genocidal rapists, but the Times article states that there were no mass suicides by Okinawan civilians in villages that were not occupied by the Japanese Army. That suggests that on Okinawa, unlike on Saipan, propaganda without coercion was unlikely to produce many results. The Education Ministry is widely reported to worry that accurate history is incompatible with patriotism. This worry seems to me to be overblown. I think Japanese patriotism will wax, and inhibitions on the expansion of the armed forces wane, in response to escalating Chinese aggressiveness and bluster. Pacific (or militaristic) political cultures matter, and in many cases probably require certain versions of history to flourish, but popular access to an accurate history of the Second World War seems unlikely to forever forestall Japanese rearmament. The tendency to think that control of the past is attainable, and means control of the future, is pretty widespread—it is presumably part of the point of the Howard Zinn school of American history, as well as of the Japanese Education Ministry’s revisions of textbooks. This tendency probably reflects the omnipotence fantasies of historians (and Education Ministry types) more than it reflects reality. To pick a recent example, some EU-friendly histories tend to mute or otherwise blur the history of intra-European conflicts. I was intrigued to see a recent issue of an EU-financed magazine imply the equal plausibility of English beliefs that Louis XIV was running an ominously expansionist foreign policy, and French notions that he was the victim of English aggression fueled by Protestant bigotry. Further EU integration may come, or it may not, but in a modern democracy government propaganda does not go unchallenged, and an egregious example of it is generally more contemptible than it is alarming.
October 4, 2007
Vanished Countries Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:05 AM EST The homepage of this website always notes a few of each day’s anniversaries and links to a Wikipedia page containing a list of many more. If you followed that link yesterday, you learned that it was the anniversary of the creation of the kingdom of Yugoslavia, which is potentially misleading; what happened on October 3, 1929, was that a state called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, formed on December 1, 1918, changed its name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. “Yugoslavs” means “South Slavs,” which implies a common identity, an implication that in retrospect seems like a pious and wishful hope, although it seemed real enough when I was a young man. In 1929 Yugoslavia was troubled by particularly tense relations between its largely Orthodox Serbian plurality (just under 45 percent of the population in 1921) and its strong and militant largely Catholic Croatian minority (22.5 percent in 1921). The tensions did not subside with the change of name, and The kingdom of Yugoslavia disintegrated when the Germans invaded it in 1941. The cruelty of the German occupation (and the massive atrocities committed by the forces of the Croatian fascist state established by Germany) provoked an extremely energetic partisan movement led by Josip Broz, who became famous under his Communist Party code name, Tito. Tito, the only European partisan leader of the Second World War whose forces are thought to have more or less liberated their own country, in 1943 proclaimed what was variously known as the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, the Democratic Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, etc. Tito’s proclaimed state survived various attempts to destroy both him and it. Soon after the war Tito broke with Stalin, and he became something of a hero to many in the West. His rule was initially quite brutal, but serially seeing off both Hitler and Stalin was widely conceded to be a remarkable feat. One letter to Stalin apparently read “Stop sending people to kill me. If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.” As one American statesman declared at the time, Tito might be a bastard, but he was our bastard now. By 1970, when I visited Yugoslavia, Tito was admired for many reasons, probably more than he should have been admired for, but his apparently indisputable achievements included having built a fairly prosperous and relatively liberal Communist state. And there was not only a state called Yugoslavia; there seemed to be Yugoslavs. In 1970 I sat among them in a restaurant in Rijeka, eating a three-course state-subsidized meal that cost one dinar—eight and a half cents—and admiring the Yugoslavs who sat around me. Tito died in 1980, and Yugoslavia survived him by little more than a decade. At the end of the Cold War, the Republic of Yugoslavia collapsed in protracted, ugly, and brutal wars of secession, and eventually became what are now the separate states of Bosnia and Herzogovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Croatia; Bosnia and Herzogovina is itself divided into mutually-hostile regions, and another state, Kosovo, may yet emerge from what was once Yugoslavia. The disintegration began on June 25, 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence; on June 5, 2006, Serbia and Montenegro both declared theirs, in the wake of a plebiscite. I am pretty sure that Yugoslavia is the only country I have ever visited that subsequently disappeared; at least as painful, and just as shocking, is that what seemed to be a nationality disappeared with it. Poland disappeared between 1795 and 1918, but Poles didn’t, and as a result, Poland could be resurrected. Yugoslavia disappeared, and “Yugoslavs” disappeared with it, probably forever. Had Yugoslavians always been a fiction, an identity enforced first by Serbian military power, than by Tito’s power, and finally, and briefly, by fear and inertia? I don’t think so—I think Yugoslavia could have gone either way—but I could easily be wrong. In either case, the history of a name, Yugoslavia, reminds us that while we are very frequently told that federal structures are the rule in Europe, and will increasingly be the rule elsewhere, and that nation states are a thing of the past, none of this is necessarily true. And proclamations about the direction history is inevitably taking should be met with the gravest skepticism.
October 3, 2007
Alternate Civil Wars Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:55 AM EST Brisbane, Australia, is 14 hours ahead of the city in which I live, so getting up this morning to participate in a discussion on an Australian radio program meant a phone call at an early hour. But the topic, a question of alternate history, fascinates me, and the particular question—what would have happened had the United States lost the Civil War, and the Confederacy established itself—is one of the two hardiest counterfactuals in the canon of alternate history (the other is a victorious Hitler), so I was eager to see how Australian academics and radio hosts think about it. It turned out that the Australian historian thought that one effect would probably be a weaker and distinctly more isolationist United States. In the real world, where the United States is currently both hegemonic and interventionist, it is easy to see the fascination of an alternate historical path in which the United States is a backwater. But is an independent Confederacy really a plausible first step on such a path? A few months ago I blogged about the conclusion of Harry Turtledove’s 11-volume series of novels on a victorious Confederacy, and in November of 2005 I published an essay on this website on what was at that point the whole of the Turtledove cycle. Turtledove, as far as I know the best-selling American author of alternate history, offers a vividly imagined alternative to the view that a successful Confederacy would have meant the United States playing less of a role in world affairs. Turtledove assumes that the Confederacy would have won its independence because of British and French intervention, at least to block the United States’s naval blockade of the Confederacy. Since the blockade was a crucial part of the Anaconda Plan that in real history did finally strangle the rebellion, British and French intervention does seem a likely part of any Confederate victory. It is Turtledove’s great insight that this would have plausibly entailed the swift entry of both the United States and the Confederacy into the European balance of power, soon to change because of the rise of the newly unified German empire. In Turtledove’s world, the Confederacy becomes an Entente ally, the United States in reaction a German ally, and when the First World War breaks out, it extends to this continent. Trench warfare sets in, and the United States slowly and gruelingly conquers Canada and is eventually successful against the C.S.A., taking Kentucky, Oklahoma and part of Texas. Defeat radicalizes the C.S.A., which over the next two decades becomes a state reminiscent of Nazi Germany, and when the Second World War breaks out, it, too, extends to this hemisphere, and ends with the final conquest of the C.S.A. The Australian academic seemed to think that the rump United States left after a Confederate victory would have had the relative power of Canada. That seems a bad guess. The current United States is five times as populous as Britain or France, and if, as seems extremely likely, the rump U.S.A. would have continued to industrialize and to have had around three times the population of the C.S.A., a fully-mobilized rump-U.S.A. would still have dwarfed the military power of any other belligerent during the First World War. A world in which the United States was actively engaged in international politics before 1890 would certainly have been very different from either real history or history as imagined on today’s radio program. It is Turtledove’s insight that the Allies might well have lost both world wars with the United States divided, but that the European powers that might have succumbed to fascism in such a world would not necessarily have been the ones who were so infected in the actual world. The phone connection to Australia was shaky, and they dropped me from the show after 20 minutes, so I never got to hear whether the Australians thought the C.S.A. would have abolished slavery on its own. In Turtledove’s world, that is what happens, and a lot of alternate Civil War histories assume the same thing. I’m not so sure. The academic work that won William Fogel a Nobel Prize demonstrated that American slavery was increasingly profitable. Bruce Catton reviewed that work for American Heritage, and I later interviewed William Fogel for the magazine on a different subject. Since slavery was profitable, maybe it would have continued. Had it done so on the eve of the European conquest of most of the world, the example of successful race-based slavery in an apparently modern society (the C.S.A.) might have made European imperialism even uglier. One of the greatest works of alternate history, S. M. Stirling’s Draka trilogy, anatomizes an illiberal and deeply racist modern society with what is in effect slave-manned industry. How plausible was such a future? There is evidence on both sides, and Stirling’s trilogy caused some bitter disputes. A lot of people want to imagine that an irresistible course of history doomed the C.S.A. and slavery. There is a good chance that Grant and Sherman were the ones who accomplished that, and that they could have failed, with very, very bad consequences. So I certainly wish that phone line to Brisbane had held up—I’d love to know where the Australians think that alternate path could have ended.
October 2, 2007
Abraham Lincoln, Southern Conservative: An Interview with Orville Vernon Burton (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 07:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. “The Populists,” you write, “were the last of Lincoln’s people, the last whose concerns for racial justice and millennial perfection were based on faith in the goodness of the common man.” Were the Populists a mere fringe group, or did they have lasting impact on the government’s racial and social policies? The Populists were not a fringe group but a viable third party. I painted the Populists with a broad brush, but I found in them real potential for continued strength—except for the seemingly inevitable politics of division. Divisions existed among the various coalitions composing the movement. Midwestern and Western Populists were very different from those of the former Confederacy. Race relations among Populists continued to be very divisive. The goals of industrial labor could clash with the goals of small farmers. It is ironic that when urbanization and industrialization were growing at such a rapid pace and revolutionizing the country, the momentous political protest movement began with farmers who were being left behind. Just as America was becoming decidedly more urban and industrial, abandoning its Jeffersonian heritage of the independent farmer, it was those very farmers who launched the most significant third-party protest. And yet, very much like Lincoln, all Populist groups believed that people, rural and urban, black and white, should be rewarded for hard work. Also, like Lincoln, they believed in the rule of law and a fair system, especially a fair economic system. I use Lincoln as a fulcrum to understand the period of history after the Age of Jackson. During the Age of Lincoln, family, community, and church were responsible for morality; henceforth, government became the conservator of moral order. In one of Lincoln’s wonderful stories, from an 1859 letter, he tells how two drunks in long overcoats got in a fight and afterwards discovered that in the tussle they had ended up exchanging overcoats. Lincoln argued that the party of Jefferson and Jackson had done just that with his own Republican Party. Republicans were “for both the man and the dollar, but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.” The Populists were the last group to place the man before the dollar. The Populists were also the last political party before the modern civil rights movement that centered much of its energy on the question of African-American polity, one of the issues that defined the Age of Lincoln. I end this period with the demise of the Populist Movement, because that marked a fundamental change in attitude between government and citizenry. Also changed forever was the world of mass politics. Whereas Abraham Lincoln addressed his audiences at length as one concerned citizen to another, politics became more professional. The barbecues, parades, and rallies for the entire community, where speakers educated, entertained, and established a real personal bond with their electorate, passed away with the Populists. Government became more businesslike and bureaucratic. More and more Americans seemed increasingly content to leave government to the legislators and education to the new universities. As social problems grew ever more complex, public officials and private citizens grew to rely upon a range of new professional organizations for information, guidance, regulation, and policy. A new faith in science and experts replaced millennial idealism and belief in the common citizens’ ability to solve problems. Having been driven to the excess of civil war by religious fervor to rid society of its sins, now experts would regulate those excesses. The end of the Populists signaled the end of power for a yeoman class who sought to extend the personal, virtuous, face-to-face social relations they had grown up with as rural, evangelical Protestants. With the party’s demise went the hope of restructuring the American economic system along more egalitarian lines. Future reform efforts would take a less millennial approach. New reformers would not trust and encourage the spark of God in the spirit of the common man. Whether the Progressives of the early twentieth century or the New Dealers of the 1930s, reformers would seek to control and rein in both the masses and the magnates. Whereas Populists wanted fair elections so that all could vote, including African-Americans, modern reformers looked to a bureaucratic state to regulate and to control, not trusting the instincts of the common folks but only of the “best people.” Nationwide, reformers were obsessed with lower orders (immigrants, African-Americans, poor workers) voting. Reforms in the electoral process purposefully entrenched ruling elites. Disfranchisement, or more technically franchise restriction, was the product of an attempt by the upper and middle class to restrict the franchise of those people who were most prone to vote Fusionist or Populist. Aims centered on protecting freedoms and voting rights for African-Americans, and for all citizens, lost out to expanding the interests of corporations and trusts. Today the term “populist” is sometimes used to slander a candidate, suggesting that he is provincial or appealing to the populace instead of listening to the studied experts. Sad to say, the divisions that fractured the Populist Party still reverberate today. As the historian C. Vann Woodward showed in his biography of the Populist leader Tom Watson, this idealistic agrarian reformer became a race-baiting, anti-Semitic demagogue. Yet there is no evidence in the scholarship or in the Populist literature itself that Populists were any more anti-Semitic, anti-black, or anti-foreign than any other group in the society at the time, and there is some evidence that they were less so. Populist ideals also still reverberate. Just as in the Age of Lincoln, moral choice, democratic citizenship, and equality still mingle. “Determine that the thing can and shall be done,” wrote Lincoln, “and then we shall find the way.”
October 2, 2007
Abraham Lincoln, Southern Conservative: An Interview with Orville Vernon Burton (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:55 PM EST Just when it seemed as if there was nothing new to say about the most written about American President, we have Orville Vernon Burton’s
The Age of Lincoln (Hill and Wang, 432 pages, $27), winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2007 Heartland award for nonfiction. A successor to Arthur M. Schlesinger’s classic The Age of Jackson, The Age of Lincoln shows how, in the words of James McPherson, “the ferment of religious reform merged with the dynamism of free-labor capitalism to forge a Northern political culture that triumphed over the South and slavery.” Professor Burton portrays Lincoln as a product of his time and of Southern yeoman culture, and how that shaped his political thought before and during the Civil War. Burton talked to us from his home near the University of Illinois–Champaign, where he is a University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar. The interview is appearing in two parts. Though Lincoln was born in Kentucky, he is almost never thought of by historians as a Southerner. One of the most interesting aspects of your book is its reappraisal of Lincoln’s Southern heritage. How did this shape his views on freedom and slavery? Walt Whitman described Lincoln as belonging to all the states, “not the North only, but the South—perhaps belongs most tenderly and devoutly to the South, of all; for there, really, this man’s birth-stock. There and thence his antecedent stamp. Why should I not say that thence his manliest traits—his universality—his canny, easy ways and words upon the surface—his inflexible determination and courage at heart? Have you never realized it, my friends, that Lincoln, though grafted on the West, is essentially, in personnel and character, a South-ern contribution?” Others have also claimed Lincoln for the South. In both The Clansman in 1905 and The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln in 1913—the latter dedicated to Woodrow Wilson, “our first Southern-born president since Lincoln”—Thomas Dixon pictured Lincoln as a Southerner, but in a very different sense than I do, as a Southerner dedicated to preserving white supremacy. Dixon uses part of the Whitman quotation above as an epigram for the second book. So, why do I think this is important? Because Lincoln’s Southernness had a huge impact on his personality, ambition, sense of honor, and his views on freedom and slavery. To get away from the slavery system, the Lincoln family had moved first to Indiana and then to Illinois. Seeing slavery first-hand in Virginia and Kentucky gained Lincoln’s father, and Abraham after him, a lifelong antipathy to the institution. Decades later Lincoln recalled the sight of enslaved men chained together on a Mississippi riverboat, and he doubtless compared their grim journey to vibrant New Orleans with his own. That memory of slavery and freedom counterposed, gliding along life’s river together, was “a continual torment,” he declared. As often as he saw such scenes, they always had “the power of making me miserable.” Although he was no stranger to racial prejudice, he embraced the Golden Rule of labor’s uplift: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” Liberty for Lincoln was more than a question of enslaved or free. In 1858 the elite white Southerner James Henry Hammond explained to the U.S. Senate how every society required a laboring foundation, or “mudsill class,” if others were to attain the fruits of higher civilization. This class, according to Hammond, had little prospect of ever rising from its degraded state. The mudsill theory ran counter to Abraham Lincoln’s view of labor. Thus Lincoln as a yeoman Southerner in the northern Midwest pointed out in September 1859 that most people were neither hirelings nor capitalists. “Men, with their families—wives, sons and daughters—work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.” Growing up poor, with homesteading as a way of life, he respected hardworking, less wealthy, but self-reliant Southern men and women. Lincoln here espoused a Southern ethic both conservative and radical, rooted in the deeds of men and women and in the toil they performed; he found no one “more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty.” Just as he desired to rise to a station of independence and honor by his own labors, he would not—indeed with any honesty could not—withhold that opportunity from others. As a Southern yeoman, Lincoln insisted on a new understanding of liberty: equality of opportunity in the race of life. His belief in equal opportunity would continue to evolve until he was ready to assert the still astonishing claim that race was politically inconsequential, that African-Americans were citizens and entitled to equal protection under the law and full political rights. In the more than 140 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, Americans have argued as to whether it was primarily a war measure or a justice measure. Would it be fair to say that you would regard it as both? While I definitely regard it as both, I believe it was first and foremost a war measure. Because the Constitution sanctioned slavery, the President had no legal authority to free slaves as a measure of justice. Yet as a military measure, the commander-in-chief had the authority to confiscate rebel property. It was the Confederates who insisted that slaves were property, consistent with the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. By the autumn of 1862, Lincoln was desperate for more soldiers. However moral, complex, and far-reaching this decision, he understood very well that the Emancipation Proclamation was a weapon of war. And it was an effective one. African-Americans volunteered in the Union armed services and met critical manpower needs. At the same time, Southerners had to put an even greater emphasis on controlling their enslaved population, leaving less time and money available for the war effort. Moreover, emancipation ended any question of European intervention. With Northern articulation that the war was now about the moral issue of slavery, the English and French decided that it was not in their interest to recognize the Confederacy’s independence. Although it was a war measure, I agree with Lincoln that it was a justice measure as well. He hated slavery all his life. When Lincoln addressed Congress, he spoke about how, “in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” He understood that emancipation dovetailed with a larger, millennial understanding of what was at stake in the war. You make a strong case for Lincoln as both a conservative and a radical. How did his vision of the United States that could emerge from the ruins of the war differ from that of his contemporaries? First, a disclaimer. If I were a prophet, I would certainly make more money than I do as a historian. Nevertheless, I do believe things would have been much different had Lincoln lived through Reconstruction. He was a careful, calculating, masterful politician. As you remember, when he answered Horace Greeley’s call for abolition, “The Prayer of Twenty Million,” Lincoln had already made the decision to issue an emancipation proclamation. When he wrote to Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that,” he was taking a brilliant political stance that calmed conservative fears while paving the way forward for what he had already determined to do. This is indicative of how he worked politically, bringing the rest of the country to positions that he had already moved to and was already acting upon. Thus, although we can really never know how his vision for America would have emerged following the war, we do have some evidence for speculation. Often as an expert witness for minorities in voting rights or discrimination cases, I have had to make what is called a “totality of circumstances” argument when there is no “smoking gun.” In the case of Lincoln, I believe that I can make a very good “totality of circumstances” case for how Lincoln’s vision would have differed from his contemporaries’ and how we would have had a different United States emerging from the Civil War. Lincoln appointed Salmon P. Chase, a rival and thorn in his side, to be Chief Justice because Chase would champion rights for African-Americans. The incorruptible William Lloyd Garrison also understood how Lincoln’s logic worked, and when he congratulated Lincoln on the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, he was confident that Lincoln’s efforts would continue: “I am sure you will consent to not compromise that which will leave a slave in his fetters.” Many have faulted Lincoln’s general amnesty plan as too lenient, but what they miss is his faith and belief in the common man, the yeoman and poor white in the South, to do the right thing, and in his own ability to convince them. His general amnesty was for those who would take an oath of loyalty to the United States and pledge to obey federal laws pertaining to slavery. He would not provide amnesty to officials and military leaders of the Confederacy. I have argued throughout The Age of Lincoln that it is a commitment to the rule of law that guided Lincoln’s thinking. That, of course, is both conservative and radical, depending on how the rule of law is used. Lincoln was conservative to believe in the rule of law, but radical to argue that the rule of law applied to all. Of course, he would not have understood the terms “radical” and “conservative”; those are the judgments of a historian. But for Lincoln the rule of law meant the enforcement of fair play, a level playing field. When white Southern extremists used the law unfairly to justify terror, as they did during Reconstruction, I believe he would not have stood for it. We see over and over again his sense of fair play and his abhorrence of extralegal violence. For example, when he was the commander of the militia company in the Black Hawk war, men in the company captured an elderly Native American and were determined to kill him. Lincoln threatened to fight anyone who injured the innocent Indian. And this master politician, this Father Abraham, savior of the Union, would have the gravitas and the cachet to lead the people in a vision of an America as a land of opportunity and fair play for all. As he so often did, he could explain to his fellow Americans, including non-elite Southern whites, how the Constitution had to ensure that personal liberty be protected by law. Lincoln claimed before the war that “those who would deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under a just God, cannot long retain it.” Near the end of the war, he commented upon the essential need “in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.” The goal of reconstructing government on racial equality, while far more wide-ranging, was never predestined for failure, and I believe that with Lincoln overseeing his vision it would have succeeded. His enemies agreed. When John Wilkes Booth heard Lincoln speak on April 11, 1865, Booth used what I believe was the correct logic to interpret Lincoln’s vision: “That means nigger citizenship.” We have less evidence for Lincoln’s vision of worker rights in a new industrial America. He encouraged corporate growth in order to win the war, but I prefer to think that his sense of fair play would have dictated his vision in labor relations also. The same pattern of commitment to fairness under the law, I believe, would have been applicable to the excesses of unbridled capitalism and the plight of the industrial worker.
October 2, 2007
The Plane That Didn’t Win the War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 AM EST Yesterday was the anniversary of the first flight of an American jet aircraft, the Bell P-59 Airacomet. The event took place, amidst great secrecy, on October 1, 1942, and the event is as good as a secret now, because almost no one has ever heard of it. The Airacomet was an experimental jet fighter, although not a very good one—it had poor engine response and reliability, as did all early turbojets, and with a top speed of only 413 mph, while the world’s first deployed jet fighter, the German Me 262, had a top speed of 541 mph. The P-59 never saw combat, nor did any American jet during the Second World War. The United States did not undertake a crash program to develop a jet fighter, whereas the Germans did, and they managed to build a considerable number of Me 262s (more than 1,400, of which perhaps 200 saw combat). We won the war anyway, and thereby hangs a tale. One of the most common World War II counterfactuals asks what would have happened had Hitler not inhibited the development of the Me 262, the world’s first operational jet fighter, by insisting that it be redesigned as a bomber. The implications appear suitably vast: Hitler’s Europe has been described as “a fortress without a roof,” but with more jet fighters, wouldn’t the Luftwaffe have swept the B17s and Lancasters from the skies, then savagely contested the air over Normandy, letting Rommel drive the Allies into the sea? The answer is no, because while the Allies didn’t always have the most advanced military technology, they often had the most cost-effective technology. Germany was the first state to develop and in some cases deploy a number of novel military technologies; these included ballistic missiles with inertial guidance systems, cruise missiles, wire-guided missiles, and jet aircraft. In addition to the Me 262, there were prototypes for other hypermodern warplanes, including one, the Go229, that looked like a flying wing, and might have functioned (if inadvertently) as a stealth fighter. The Me 262 was appreciably faster than any allied aircraft in level flight, and as the terse maxim of air-to-air combat has it, “speed kills”: A much faster aircraft fights at its own discretion. Had the Me 262s wrested command of the air from the Allies, this would have cancelled what is often said to have been the greatest American and British military advantage in the fight against Hitler. The German army and its admirers have often insisted that superior German combat skills would have crushed the soft and clumsy Western Allies, had the latter been denied their hordes of unopposed fighter-bombers. So what went wrong? Not what a lot of people have claimed, because it is not true that Hitler first ordered the Me 262 to be redesigned as a bomber, thereby appreciably slowing its development, then insisted that it be deployed in the role of fighter-bomber, seriously delaying its appearance in fighter units. The “redesign” of the Me262 simply attached pylons to the airframe to allow it to carry a few bombs. This required no great design work and was completed while the engineers went about the very arduous task of debugging the Jumo 004, the turbojet engine that would power the Me 262. As for deployment, Hitler issued his edict in May 1944 and rescinded it the following September—at about the same time as the Jumo 004 entered mass production. Since the effective operational debut of the aircraft depended on the availability of production engines with a reasonable running life, it is doubtful whether Hitler’s edict delayed that debut by more than a few days. Shortages of nickel and chromium to make high-temperature alloys for the Jumo 004 seriously delayed, and finally crippled, the Me 262. The turbine blades, which were exposed to temperatures over 700 degrees Celsius combined with tensile stresses of up to 15 tons per square inch, developed “creep”—the metal deformed and the blades lengthened—and the flame tubes slowly buckled out of shape. As a result, the preproduction Jumo 004 had a running life of 10 hours. When the engine went into mass production, the engine life had been extended only to 25 hours. Also, given constraints on industrial capacity, more Me 262s would have meant a lot fewer conventional fighters, so the Luftwaffe would still have been in bad trouble somewhere. Had the Me 262s shown up earlier, and in greater numbers, the Allies would almost inevitably have accelerated development of their own jets, the Meteors, Vampires, and Shooting Stars—and British jet engine technology was superior to the German. But they didn’t have to, in part because the Me 262s had to survive the tactics evolved by Allied pilots flying excellent conventionally powered aircraft. Allied pilots hit the German jets on the way up, before they reached their top speed, and smashed up their airfields. Germany also had problems producing jet fuel in large quantities, very serious maintenance difficulties, and more problems training large numbers of pilots, ground crew, and mechanics for a radically new aircraft. Germany had no natural rubber, the jets landed at speeds of 150 mph, and synthetic rubber tires were not up to the stresses. Leaving aside the difficulties of the new technology, the questions of opportunity cost, cost-effectiveness at the margins, and potential Allied responses were intricate and, from the German point of view, not encouraging. Why, then, does the Me 262 haunt the alternate histories? Perhaps the legend spread because Allied domination of the skies over Western Europe has remained an invaluable sop to German military self-esteem. More comforting to recite that the numberless Jabos (fighter-bombers) doomed the German army, no matter how skillfully it fought, than face the interesting fact that American, Soviet, and British troops got steadily better over the course of the war, and Germans worse (in the Vosges and the Ardennes in 1944, United States troops stymied German offensives without benefit of vast airpower or numerical superiority). For Americans, among whom the myth of the Me 262 as a potential war-winner has had a very hardy life, the Me 262’s aura may have a culturally determined plangency. We imagine that our own technological superiority, especially in aircraft, still the most glamorous and “modern” military machines, is part of the natural order, an extension of the muskets that routed the Iroquois or the revolvers that won the West. We enjoy imagining ourselves as Edison’s heirs, the nation of tinkerers, Connecticut Yankees who vanquish cruel and proficient warrior foes with irresistible science. A world where our enemies had the better warplanes may look like the world turned upside down, macabre and perversely fascinating. So we should remember that we tested a jet fighter relatively early in the war, found it wanting, and designed a number of devastating propeller fighters. When we did build the military technologies of the future—atomic bombs are the most famous—we made terrifying weapons, but a lot of what we designed and built, and of what our allies designed and built, was the logical development of existing technologies. As the historian Richard Overy once put it, Germany tried to fight a 1940s war with what would become the technologies of the 1950s, and that was a very bad idea. The P-59, correctly identified as an idea whose time had not quite come, is only an obscure footnote to history—which is a tribute to the wisdoma of the American planners who decided to scrap the plane.
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