January 2011

Economists from Adam Smith on have written about the evils and dislocations that monopolies bring to an economy. What has been much less written about over the years, however, are the evils of monopsony.

In the interest of saving wear and tear on 300,000 dictionaries, let me hasten to offer a definition. A monopoly is any entity that effectively controls the supply of a commodity. A monopsony, on the other hand, controls the total demand for a commodity.

Obviously, monopsonies are much rarer than monopolies. The only one I ever enjoyed happened years ago when I was traveling in Greece. A photographer, quite unasked, snapped pictures of the members of a tour I was on, and the next morning, he went from table to table in the hotel dining room, offering eight-by-ten glossies at outrageous prices and doing a brisk business.

John Demos can do something that no one else I’ve read can do as well: bring to empathetic life the distant world of the New England Puritans. He has done it before, several times in the pages of this magazine, as well as in his Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (winner of the 1983 Bancroft Prize) and A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in the Plymouth Colony.

Bernard A. Weisberger replies: Let me see if I’ve got Governor Lamm straight. He couldn’t solve all the problems of crime, welfare, schooling, and unemployment in Colorado during his tenure, and it would have been much easier without those darned immigrants on welfare and in jail. He has nothing to say about those legally admitted, naturalized, and working; does he make a distinction? What other “undesirables” can he scapegoat? Will the nation’s problems go away if we stop admitting a million immigrants a year —less than half of one percent of our current population? And are there no methods of population control other than removing the welcome mat for the upwardly striving and oppressed of the world? Lamm calls that a “policy,” which to me is like calling self-government a policy. Should we give that up now, too, because we aren’t the same country we were a century ago?

Weisberger’s “history” of American immigration brought a tear to my eye. I’m crying because so much of it is bogus history. Some “historians” insist on repeating a modern-day immigration mythology, woven since the mid1950s. When will the public ever hear a historically truthful and meaningful account of the impacts and politics of the history of American immigration, based on its actual contexts and time frame?

Weisberger’s version of American history is designed to reinforce a modern-day political notion that immigration restrictionists can have no moral standing. It’s the “see, look what someone said about your grandmother” strategy, and it’s really designed to ensure that all Americans will think only one way about immigration, his way.

On a languid summer’s day in 1912, an Altenburg, Missouri back yard achieved a summary moment of grace with an unidentified family’s newest possession, the Meisner Rocker Swing. That was the point of this photo, an advertisement wrapped around what in today’s unlovely word is known as “lifestyle.” And if Paul J. Lueders, the photographer, managed to reach beyond the sales pitch, so much the better. Still, Lueders carefully drew the viewer’s eye to the product name, incised on the rocker’s side in the exact center of the picture.

Lueders’s grandson, Paul Hemmann, sent in the photograph and traced its story for us: “The Meisner Brothers had my grandfather take these pictures to promote their new business. During the early 1900s they had a profitable building-supply store at Altenburg, Missouri, and in 1912, they started to manufacture several types of porch and lawn furniture that M. D. Meisner had designed and patented.

Frisbees sail about in the Circle now, tossed by students in their jeans and sneakers, or cutoffs and shorts with tank tops when Poughkeepsie’s weather permits. So it’s true, kind of: The more things change, the more they remain the same. Here in the Circle is where were played the first baseball games for women in the history of the country, of the world.

“They are getting up various clubs now for out-of-door exercise,” wrote home Annie Glidden of Vassar Female College’s first class, her letter dated April 20, 1866. “They have a floral society, boat clubs, and base-ball clubs. I belong to one of the latter, and enjoy it highly I can assure you.”

Bernard Weisberger appears to believe that the cause of the recent wave of anti-immigrant sentiment is that the majority of Americans resent “aliens.” While I do not doubt that for some this may be the case, others want them gone because they are an economic burden.

We currently have a recession in California, and we are very concerned about the costs to our state caused by the millions of immigrants. Mr. Weisberger states that “the evidence of the actual economic effect of immigration is inconclusive,” quoting a Business Week article that states that “the U.S. is reaping a bonanza of highly educated foreigners.”

Now let me get this straight. Because Bernard A. Weisberger says that immigration was once an asset (“A Nation of Immigrants,” February), it means that it must always be an asset? Because concern about immigration once had elements of xenophobia, this means all concern about immigration is xenophobic?

History teaches me that public policy is never static. Is it not possible that policies that made sense when we were a relatively empty continent in an uncrowded world no longer make sense in a crowded continent in a crowded world?

For the twelve years I was governor of Colorado, immigration made most of our problems worse. It further burdened an already overburdened school budget. A significant portion of our jails are filled with the foreign-born. Our experience is that immigrants are much more likely to be on welfare.

by Lynn Sherr and Jurate Kazickas, Times Books, 592 pages, $18.00 . CODE: RAN -15

The authors published their original version of this fifty-state guide in 1976. Now they’ve gone back to fill in the picture, demonstrating again that “no state in the Union is without its female contribution to our national heritage, but you wouldn’t know it from reading most standard tour books.”

From the first entry under “A”Athens, Alabama, with its plaque on a church wall memorializing a former slave who toured Europe as one of the Jubilee Singers—down to the last listing, where the Torrington, Wyoming, Burge Post Office is named for Ethel Burge, a single homesteader who opened the town’s post office, this is a browser’s delight. Not surprisingly, houses predominate: Margaret Sanger’s home in Fishkill, New York, Amelia Earhart’s birthplace in Atchison, Kansas. But there are also the less expected memorials, including a bridge, a cave, a hospital, and the nation’s first kindergarten, all of which mark the struggles and accomplishments of American women.

by George Cooper, Pantheon, 272 pages, $23.00 . CODE: RAN -14

George Cooper, a former professor of law at Columbia University, has rescued a sensational nineteenth-century New York murder case by telling it through original diaries, reportage, letters, and courtroom testimony. Behind the jealous-husband-slays-wife’s-lover story Cooper finds four interesting, accessible people: an adventuring newspaperman, Albert Deane Richardson; his mistress, the actress Abby Sage; his wife, Lou; and Sage’s husband, Daniel McFarland, who, after divorcing her, shot Richardson dead in the counting room of the New York Tribune in November 1869.