Horizon

That other quagmire

Interesting summary here of a book on the U.S. spiral into Southeast Asia that says a number of surprising things about wars both Vietnam and Cold. Historians here want to dig in?

Lion's Teeth

The Royal College of Surgeons of England offers us the story of Winston Churchill's amazing dentures, touting them as the dentures that saved the world.

Churchill's original denture was made from vulcanite (hardened rubber). This was uncomfortable to wear, and as a result it spent more time in Churchill’s pocket than his mouth. On one occasion he sat on and broke it, necessitating a frantic repair. A cast-gold replacement was made. Subsequently a second version was made, with a larger palate which was more comfortable to wear. Although the initial designs had cast gold clasps these were replaced in subsequent versions by soldered platimum clasps.

Some Damn Fool Thing in the Balkans: Thoughts on the Origins of the Peloponnesian War, Part II

Do we need profound causes to explain the Peloponnesian War, or indeed anything else? Technically, no. It is quite possible to strip Thucydides’ work of all reference to his “real reason”, and still possess – for certain purposes, at least - an adequate causal explanation of the outbreak of hostilities in 432 BC. The sequence of actions leading up to and resulting from the crises at Epidamnus and Potidaea do explain, in a strictly mechanistic way, why Athens and Sparta went to war. Similarly, an Origins of the First World War could be written that was nothing more than a narrative of the Sarajevo assassination and the diplomatic chain of events that followed it from June 28 to August 4, 1914 – a chronicle of ambassadorial meetings, communiqués, and mobilization announcements. There would be nothing ‘wrong’ with such a treatment; its factual accuracy would be unimpeachable. And yet we would find it inadequate. Why?

Because we are not really interested in what caused the Great Wars – Peloponnesian and European – in a procedural sense. David Hackett Fischer’s observations on causality may help to explain why:

There are many different kinds of causal explanation, and they have different requirements and different uses. The specific kind of causal explanation a historian employs must be selected according to the nature of the effect to be explained and the nature of the object of the explanation ... most of the trouble historians get themselves into in causal explanation consists in asking one kind of causal question and seeking another kind of causal answer. [David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought. Harper, 1970, p. 186.]

The problem, then, with a processional account of 432 BC or 1914 is that it is answering a question (“what caused the war?”) that is really a footnote to a deeper inquiry – what made war possible, or likely, or inevitable in the first place? It is perfectly reasonable to argue that the First World War was ‘caused’ by Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur failing to turn down the correct Sarajevo street on a sunny June day: the weakness of such an explanation is not that it is false, but that it tells us nothing useful. Had the Archduke’s entourage possessed better navigational skills, would general European war have been averted for a season, or a decade, or forever? Only by introducing the “real reason(s)” for the war can we hope to address that far more challenging question – not forgetting that the events of the July Crisis, the only real-life model we have, can provide valuable testimony. Specific and profound causes are complementary, then: the former are less inherently interesting, but they are vital inasmuch as they shed light on the latter.

Thucydides famously proposed a two-tier profound cause for the Peloponnesian War: the growth of Athenian power, and Sparta’s response motivated by fear. The History wishes to leave us in no doubt that this fear was authentic and justified. Thucydides goes to considerable lengths in his digressive Pentecontaetia to underline Athens’ military, diplomatic and economic expansion in the period leading up to the outbreak of war, and its unstated but evident determination to supplant Sparta as the principal city-state of Hellas. This point is made most explicitly in Thucydides’ preliminary remarks before the description of the 432 BC Allied Congress at Sparta, which bear repeating at length:

In these years the Athenians made their empire more and more strong ... the Spartans, though they saw what was happening, did little or nothing to prevent it, and for most of the time remained inactive, being traditionally slow to go to war ... finally the point was reached when Athenian strength attained a peak plain for all to see and the Athenians began to encroach upon Sparta’s allies. It was at this point that Sparta felt the position to be no longer tolerable and decided by starting the present war to employ all her energies in attacking and, if possible, destroying the power of Athens.

Sparta, then, waged a deliberate but reluctant and defensive war of pre-emption, knowing that its window of opportunity to act was shrinking and that if it maintained its customary policy of restraint then Athens’ comparative advantage would grow so large as to be unassailable. Like Wilhelmine Germany in 1914, Sparta believed (correctly, in Thucydides’ view) that it faced a grand strategic threat of envelopment; that Athens, having defeated the smaller members of the Peloponnesian League in detail, would eventually move on to the destruction or neutralization of Sparta entirely. It ought to be stressed that Thucydides drew no moral conclusions from this scenario, or from Sparta’s decision to prevent it. His political world is a brutal zero-sum game in which “the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept”. To introduce issues of right and wrong is a category error; Thucydides would have applauded Bismarck’s remark that the Austrians in 1866 were no more wrong in resisting Prussia’s actions than Prussia was in taking them. In that sense, then, the Peloponnesian War is part of a tragic, inevitable cycle in which one state’s star rises and another’s falls, the only unforeseeable factor being whether the failing power will defy or submit to its fate.

(To be continued)

Plundering Hackensack

I haven't stumbled across any howlers about American tea plantations or the medium-build George Washington, so here's the first detailed instance of plundering I've found in Johann Conrad Döhla's diaries:

22 March, 1780 During the evening, after tattoo, I went with a strong command. It was drawn from all the regiments which lay here in New York and consisted of four hundred men under the command of the Scottish Major Kleevlington and Captain Tannenburg of the Hessians. We were carried in boats across the North River to the province of New Jersey. then we marched almost the entire night, at the quickest pace and as silently as possible, mostly through forests. Toward three o'clock in the morning we reached Hackensack, a large and beautiful settlement consisting of about two hundred houses. This village was attacked and all houses were immediately broken into and everything ruined; doors, windows, boxes, and chests, everything lumped together and plundered. All the males were taken prisoners, and the townhall and some other splendid buildings were set on fire. We took considerable booty, money, silver pocket watches, silver plate and spoons, as well as furniture, good clothing, fine English linen, good silk stockings, gloves and neckcloths, as well as other expensive silks, satins, and other materials. This village of Hackensack lies sixteen English miles from New York and has rich inhabitants.

23 March, 1780 At daybreak we again marched out of Hackensack. We wished to proceed two miles further to Pollingtown, a small city where we hoped to capture a rebel command of two hundred men. However, because we were betrayed by spies and the rebels came against us from all sides, we had to begin the return march. They would have taken all of us prisoners, because they were five or six times stonger than we were, if Colonel Emmerich of the English had not joined wiht us four hundred light infantry and jaegers. On the previous day they had been transferred across the North River beyond Kingsbridge and were to have supported us during the attack on Pollingtown. He covered our flank as soon as he had joined us, and we slowly pulled back under a steady fire, which lasted more than six hours. During this time we threw away or discarded most of our furniture booty. At eight o'clock in the evening we again arrived at New York, after the enemy had followed us to the water of the North River. From this expedition we had dead three Scots, eleven English and Hessians, and Private Bär, of our regiment, made prisoner.

On this day my life was exposed to many hundreds of bullets. My booty, which I had been fortunate enough to retain, consisted of two silver pocket watches, three silver buckles, one pair of women's white cotton stockings, one pair of men's summer stockings, two men's and four women's shirts of fine English linen, two fine tablecloths, one silver food and tea spoon, five Spanish dollars, and six York shillings in money, eleven complete mattress covers of fine linen, and more than two dozen pieces of silk fabric, as well as six silver plates and one silver drinking cup, all tied together in a pack which, because of the hasty march, I had to throw away.

Marriage à la Mode

Stephanie Coontz has written what I think is the most sensible article I can remember reading about the revolutionary changes taking place in marriage, without for once either glorifying or excoriating them.

"The revolution in marriage has transformed how people organize their work and interpersonal commitments, use their leisure time, understand their sexuality, and take care of children and the elderly. It has liberated some people from restrictive, inherited roles in society. But it has stripped others of traditional support systems and rules of behavior without establishing new ones."

102

Can't believe it took a throwaway item not worth linking to, and on the Huffington Post yet, to remind me that Saturday was George Orwell's 102nd birthday. Without whom the 1980s and many other things would have been far worse.

Some Damn Fool Thing in the Balkans: Thoughts on the Origins of the Peloponnesian War

Inspired by Ben's quotes from Polybius, and in the absence of any original material, I'm going to do what any self-respecting broadcaster does during the summer: show reruns. Or at least retreads, anyway. Here is the beginning of a little squib I knocked together a couple of years ago on Thucydides' opinion of the Treaty of Versailles (yes, I did mean to say that). More on request.

“The Peloponnesian League affirms and Athens accepts the responsibility of Athens and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Peloponnesian League and its nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Athens and her allies ... “

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, truncated as it is by the author’s death, does not record whether Lysander’s ultimatum to the defeated Athenians in 404 BC included a “War Guilt” clause along the lines of the Versailles Treaty’s notorious Article 231. Whether or not the Spartans demanded such an explicit admission of blame from their enemies is therefore unknown, though the ruthless Greek attitude to power suggests that any such acknowledgment would have been meaningless; Athens’ sin was to have lost the war, not to have started it. But Thucydides certainly considered war origins to be important, and he was dissatisfied with the conventional wisdom on the subject; in that sense his History has parallels with the publications of the German Foreign Office’s Kriegsschuldreferat, or War Guilt Section, in the aftermath of Versailles. In the German case, revision of the prevailing explanation for the war’s origins had immediate political implications; Article 231 was the logical keystone of all the punitive measures enacted against Germany in 1919, and its fracturing would compromise the stability of the entire, hated, Versailles system. Thucydides’ motives were doubtless more intimate. Unlike Weimar Republicans, post-war Athenians placed the blame for the catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of their own former leaders. Above all, they blamed Pericles, the leading democratic statesman in 432 BC, for his truculent refusal to negotiate with the Peloponnesians – his unwillingness to revoke the Megarian Decree, for example, a minor concession that could, it was argued, have forestalled war entirely. As one of Pericles’ devoted supporters, Thucydides perhaps saw himself honor-bound to defend his fallen captain from these charges. But one senses in Thucydides a deeper frustration with the orthodox historiography of the war than the mere settling of personal reputations can explain. Hence his stress in the Introduction to the History that the “real reason” for the conflict was not simply the accumulation of superficial grievances - Epidamnus, Potidaea, Megara – that the warring sides built up to justify their actions to their allies, but rather “the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta”. To Thucydides, this fundamental collision of forces made war not simply possible, but inevitable.

Thucydides’ insight into the difference between symptomatic and profound cause, possibly derived by analogy from the medical distinction between aitiai, or “apparent”, and prophasis, or “true” explanation for disease, has, in the words of one classicist, “long and justly been recognized as one of the great discoveries of the historian’s science.” [Meier, Christian, Athens: A Portrait of the City in its Golden Age. Metropolitan, 1998, p. 451.] When and why the author of the History came to this discovery is unclear, however. Some scholars have suggested that the “real reason” is a late inclusion to the text of Book One that Thucydides added because of his increasing unwillingness to accept that an event as momentous as the “greatest disturbance in the history of the Hellenes” could have been set into motion by an obscure row over colonial privileges. [See the discussion in George Cawkwell, Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. Routledge, 1997, p. 20-22.] This fallacy of identity, that great events must necessarily have great causes – that the conventional explanation for the war is not merely inadequate, but unseemly – is advanced by Thucydides’ catalog of supernatural omens; “violent earthquakes”, “frequent eclipses of the sun” and “extensive droughts” all accompanied the fighting, he tells us, as did of course the great plague that killed Pericles. The skepticism he later demonstrates about the divine significance of that epidemic contrasts strangely with his uncritical treatment of portents in the Introduction. Thucycides may have been reacting emotionally as well as rationally to the problem of the war’s outbreak, then, but his conviction that there was more to the origins of the Peloponnesian War than the surface details would allow remains no less significant or mysterious. [In any case, we are just as susceptible to the fallacy of identity today. “The perfectly ordinary civil war in a remote and unimportant town on the fringes of the civilized world could hardly have led to a great war ex nihilo.” (Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Cornell, 1969, p. 353.) Well, couldn’t it? Kagan goes on to make a persuasive case that the war did have deeper causes, but his initial claim surely need not be accepted prima facie.] As Josiah Ober points out, what is most intriguing about the History is that one “is forcefully reminded of how difficult it really is to grasp and to explain exactly what factors actually cause great historical events.” [Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton, 1998, p. 77.]

The Ten Commandments and the ACLU

Probably the most enjoyable part of reading David Hackett Fischer's new Liberty and Freedom is stumbling across interesting historical tidbits. Who knew that a broken pitcher was a specifically feminine image of emancipation?

One of those bits of historical trivia seems timely after yesterday's rulings. Fischer covers the founding of the ACLU in the wake of the Red Scare and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. In his portrait of Arthur Garfield Hays — general counsel for the ACLU in the twenties — Fischer lists Hays' rather surprising "Ten Commandments for Civil Rights":

1. The right to speak and hear and print and read
2. The right to be arrested, which set the due process of law in motion, and protected against the worst abuses of police and vigilantes
3. The right to associate and to refuse to associate
4. The right to personal prejudices, and not to like or employ Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Negroes, Communists, or Nazis
5. The right to privacy
6. The right to persuade and refuse to be persuaded; the right to be a nuisance, other fellow has a right to refuse to associate with you
7. The right to bargain, in every activity of life
8. The right to obey your conscience as to oaths, flags, soldiering
9. The right to be provocative and to be protected from mobs
10. The right to assert your own idea of Americanism

A few of those "commandments" have fallen into disfavor or suffered Third Amendment-like obsolescence, but they're still an interesting read.

Kelo

I know that Martha did a round-up of opinions last Friday on Kelo v. New London. Found this CJR piece from yesterday that also puts it in perspective.

…In 1954, the court held in Berman v. Parker that Washington, D.C. could condemn a department store in fine condition for a larger economic development program in which some of the land would be leased or sold to private parties. In Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, decided over twenty years ago, the court supported this precedent by upholding Hawaii's decision to enact a land distribution program to combat the "social and economic evils of land oligopoly." This unanimous decision upheld the court's prior understanding of public use as public benefit, and the court's "deference to legislative judgments in the field."

And while seemingly expanding the scope of what constitutes public use, in Kelo the court also left open the opportunity for states to regulate public takings more rigorously. The majority wrote that "nothing in our opinion precludes any State from placing further restrictions on its exercise of the takings power." That deference to a state legislature's superior ability to address complex matters can hardly be taken as an unbridled expansion of the definition of eminent domain.

The NEA and Gitmo

I figure this blog needs some dramatic intervention before it turns into my history commonplace book. In that vein, here's a week-old Christopher Cole editorial from the LA Times blaming the ACLU for Koran desecration in Guantanamo. I disagree with the author's conclusions, but think he does have a point here:

If it's true that some U.S. personnel were disrespectful of the Koran, to what extent did the left's rigid defense of Serrano and Fleck influence their actions? Many of our troops were children or preteens during the Serrano controversy. If a young person is told that desecrating a holy symbol is a positive act that not only celebrates but actually safeguards our constitutional freedoms, isn't it likely that this young person, once grown up, might have no problem desecrating a religious symbol, especially if that desecration is carried out in the name of a greater good, like national security?

Döhla on Washington

Continuing with my Hessian, here's Döhla's description of George Washington. I'm pretty sure that Washington was actually pretty tall, and have no idea who Döhla may be identifying as his son. Also, Bobby's not going to like part of the description.

As this American field commander plays an important role in the present war, and already so many incorrect descriptions of his person have been made, therefore I will share the following from a believable American description of the person and character of Washington.

This great General Washington is of medium but respectable height, has a martial face, and although already old, namely more than fifty, he is still in good, blooming health. His entire bearing is very reserved and careful, not profuse in words, and more loving of loneliness than great sociability, in order to use the time for thought and speculation. Therefore, he often rides out entirely alone on a favorite white horse. Outside the camp he has no more than a single servant, and when he returns to camp he is accompanied up to his tent by only a few riders of his Light Horse, or Light Cavalry. At New York he often visits his field and camp posts all by himself, and often converses with a sentry a full quarter of an hour. When he as something great and important on his mind, he allows, even then, only a few, but the best and most intelligent officers whom he trusts to come to him, and sends his suggested plan at the same time around to a few others in order to solicit, in this manner, the advice of each individual without having superimposed his judgement.

He is not the least bit proud or arrogant, often speaks kindly and in a friendly manner with a sentry just as with a staff officer. Toward strangers he is reserved, even if they are recommended to him by Congress. He sharply punishes all negligence in duty, but toward recruits he is kind and forgiving until they have mastered the exercises and the Articles of War. Toward spies he has a great abhorrence, although he himself must often employ the same. The Indians and savages, because of their cruel barbarities, are disgusting to him.
He is soft-hearted and seldom attends military punishments, and then only with displeasure, and he either pardons the criminal or takes another way to avoid such unpleasant sights.

The art of war is his primary study. His suggestions are well thought out. He is especially careful in all situations to ensure a retreat. His chief characteristics are decisiveness, stability, patience, and secretiveness. He rewards good conduct on the spot. Toward the prisoners who fall into his hands, he is very humane and attentive to their good treatment.

In eating and drinking, supposedly he is very moderate, and his relaxation and pleasure consists of having a few glasses of punch. Also, he is married and has a beautiful wife, who accompanies him at all times with the army in the field. He also has a son, seventeen years old, who is already a lieutenant colonel in the French service.

Paragraph breaks added.

Polybius on Cause vs. Pretext

A recent discussion about the Downing Street memos on HNN left me feeling a bit stupider and wishing the participants had read Polybius:

Some of those writers who have recorded the history of Hannibal and his times and have tried to identify the causes of this war between Rome and Carthage have cited as first cause the Carthaginian action in laying siege to the city of Saguntum, and as its second their crossing of the river Ebro in contravention of their treaty with the Romans. I could concede that these events might be described as the beginnings of the war, but should by no means agree that the constituted its causes. On the same analogy one might as well say that Alexander the Great's crossing into Asia was the cause of his war against Persia, and Antiochus' landing at Demetrias the cause of his against Rome, neither of which assertions is correct or even plausible. For how could anyone maintain that these actions were the causes of the war in question, when in the case of the Persian war many of the plans and preparations had been made by Alexander, and some even in the lifetime of father Philip, and in that of the war against Rome, by the Aetolians long before Antiochus arrived?

Such theories are put forward by those who cannot grasp the distinction — still less its magnitude — between a beginning, a cause, and a pretext, and overlook the fact that the cause comes first in a given chain of events and the beginning last. The word beginning I shall use to refer to the first attempt to execute and put in to action plans which have already been decided; and the word cause to those events which influence in advance our pursposes and decisions, that is to say our comceptions of things, our state of mind, or calculations about them and the whole process of reasoning whereby we arrive at decisions and undertakings.

Greek Dreams

Last night I dreamt about blogging for the first time. Alan Allport finally came out of seclusion to post a challenge. It seems that his absence was due to spending the summer term brushing up on Ancient Greek, and he'd come up with a quiz for the rest of us.

Well Alan, I may not remember much more than ho-he-to, but I'm game. Bring it on!

A Hessian on the Revolution

Part in preparation for next week's Independence Day festivities, partly as an attempt to drive out the noise of a nearby table of enthusiastic Esperantists, I've typed up Johann Conrad Döhla's account of the causes of the Revolution. Döhla was a Hessian private who took extensive field notes of his experience and elaborated on them upon his return to Anspach-Bayreuth. Click more to see his account.

Already in the year 1773 the quarrel broke out between America and England. England, whose Parliament has to be understood, wanted the citizens and inhabitants of the thirteen colonies or provinces of North America , which were under the protection and direction of England up to this time, to pay more taxes and help bear the cost of government. To this end, England sent them tea, which they were to buy at a very high price, in order to get more use and income from the land. But, since the Americans raised enough of the best tea, which the inhabitants had in abundance, they objected to the idea of accepting the tea and sent a written petition to the King and Parliament in order to be spared buying this tea. However, they also sent the ship with the tea, and enough money to cover the value of the tea, back to England, where it was unloaded.

This upset the Parliament in England quite a bit, so that it immediately sent other ships loaded with tea to America, especially to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, in South Carolina, with the shapest orders and printed instructions in all four ships that they should accept this tea at once or, failing this, they should be prepared to be held as disobedient insurrectionists and rebels and actual enemies in the English view, and drawn into war on land and sea, and brought under a heavy yoke. Many of the rights and privileges that they had had from England for a long time were taken away, and they were put under new restrictions. But the Americans allowed this to be spoken into the wind, and secured help from France, which already some years earlier had put a flea in the ear that they would be generously supported. Spain also encouraged them in order to annoy England. As a result, things went so far that the Bostonians, or New Englanders, entered the port of Boston and burned the English ship with its tea, and thereby openly rebelled against England. The other tea ships were not accepted either, but again sent back. These ships arrived in November and December 1773.

Thus the quarrel in America continued, and the war had its beginnings. On 13 May 1774, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage arrived in Boston with some ships and troops from England to straighten out hte situation with the Americans and on the orders of King and Parliament, to investigate the burning of the tea ship. However, as he could straighten out very little with the unruly Americans, the port of Boston was closed on 1 June 1774 on orders of Parliament, and no American ship was allowed to enter or leave this port.

On 5 September 1774 the first meeting of the American Congress took place in the capital at Philadelphia. The Congress consisted of men, two or three from each province, who were sent as representatives of the colonies. The President thereof was Hancock. The first belligerent act was initiated by the English in America at Lexington in North Carolina on 19 April 1775, when a number English soldiers plundered some Americans, and as the inhabitants resisted, some of them were killed and wounded.

Why I Love Linguists

Who was it said the mark of a true science is its ability to analyze bad science fiction films?

Oh, right. That was me.

Orwell question

Pls forgive a quote-sourcing question but this is bugging me: didn't he say someplace, maybe in *Wigan Pier*, that the worst abuses (wrt social conditions, inequality, etc.) are always said to be safely over and to have happened about forty years back?

Dreaming

As I wait for the unexpected post-high-school-graduation-depression to pass, I think of the advice my daughter and her classmates were clobbered with on commencement day. Follow your dreams. Do what you love. Find your passion.

We track nearly everything in this country, but one stat we don’t have is the number of dreams that get killed every year.

We encourage young people to pursue their dreams, but we don’t equip them with the answer to one troubling question. How does one find his passion when passion is a luxury?

I’d give graduates this advice:

Be patient. You are never too old to have a dream.

Remember that a dream does not have to pay the bills.

Don’t make the mistake that what you do for a living defines who you are.

But then, sometimes I fail to distinguish between advice and the weary hopefulness of a man haunted by his dreams.

Diary of a K

For the Kafka devotee who has everything, Maud Newton suggests this Diary-Translation-A-Day site.

Cubicle Sim Earth, sort of

Here's a consolation for Bobby.

Lies, Lies, Beautiful Lies

I feel a little sorry for the three folks at Newsday and Hoy who were busted yesterday for inflating circulation numbers. Oh yes, people lost money and it’s all very unseemly, but I can’t help regretting the current state of lying and it’s fall in public esteem.

Everyday we hear about people being thrown in jail for lying, and I have to wonder what this teaches our children. Will they grow up believing they should never lie, that a lie is always a bad thing? However will they get through school and jobs and personal relationships without the benefit of a good lying technique?

We like to say that nobody ever feels good about telling a lie, but the truth is that I always feel better getting out of a sticky situation regardless of how I managed to escape it. I often feel some remorse for not being entirely truthful; I never feel anything but relief when I avoid trouble. And it’s usually my finely honed lying skills that save the day for me.

So the next time you’re about to call the district attorney to report someone who has diminished your earning power through their lack of candor, you might want to pause and consider the youth of America.

O, To Brightly Shine

For you professional writers, a warning that maybe you need to lower your expectations. Not everybody gets to be a star, so you need to cut your publicist some slack.

“Most authors don't have a realistic basis of just how serious the competition for publicity is,” remarked the publicity director of a major literary imprint, who asked to remain anonymous. “Most reviewers at major media get, on average, 300 books a week. The amount of books produced has increased while the amount of book coverage (not to mention sales) has decreased. Most authors desperately want their books to sell and would like to make livings by writing and publishing, but the sad reality is that probably 5% of authors in print are able to do that. Who do they blame? The publicists. We're the caboose on the train and as a result become the scapegoat for just about everything.”

(via Bookslut)

Time Off for Low Market Value

Bruce Kercher's paper on convict transportation offers this:

The contractors were supposed to take all the convicts offered by the courts in Britain or Ireland, putting them at risk of being stuck with those of lower value. There was no such risk in the carriage of slaves and indentured servants, among whom they could select whom to carry. It is likely, however, that some merchants quietly released un-profitable convicts in Britain or Ireland rather than sending them on to America as they were legally required to do.

Stuff Really Happens

The Nation reports that W. Mark Felt was assigned the task of discovering the identity of Deep Throat.

This placed Felt, who as the FBI's associate director oversaw the bureau's Watergate probe, in an unusual position. He was essentially in charge of investigating himself. From this vantage point Felt, who had developed espionage skills running FBI counterintelligence operations against German spies in World War II, was able to watch his own back and protect his ability to guide the two reporters whose exposés would help topple the President he served.

(Via Mobylives)

Land Grants

Martha's discussion of land tenure has got me thinking about Fatal Shore again. While the assignment system was in a sense the lineal descendant of seventeenth-century indentured servitude in the New World, there were some important differences.

The thing that surprised me most about the assignment system was the notion of a "ticket-of-leave." These were paroles granted around four years into a seven-year sentence, or six years into a fourteen. Hughes writes of cruel masters provoking servants into punishable acts in order to get an extra year's labor out of them by delaying the grant of the ticket. In Virginia, remissions of sentence were rare, since masters had a property right in the full term of their servants' labor. This didn't quite sate their appetite for labor, however, and the laws reflected that. Morgan writes: "The penalty for killing a hog was 1000 pounds of tobacco or a year's service to the owner and 1000 pounds or a year's service to the informer". Similarly, the penalty to a maidservant for childbirth was an additional two years added to her service, presumably to reimburse her master for labor lost.

Hughes paints a picture of the rise of an Emancipist party in Australia, fighting for the rights of freedmen. I suppose the same could be said of the dynamics behind Bacon's Rebellion, except that the control over land was essential there. What value does owning land have if you neither cultivate it nor rent it? According to Morgan, it pays by depriving other people of its use:

[A nominal planting] sufficed to establish a man's claim to a tract, however large. As a result, the land still appeared to visitors to be "one continued wood." John Clayton in 1684 observed that "every one covets so much and there is such vast extent of land that they spread so far they cannot manage well a hundredth part of what they have"

Managed or not, the acres were owned. And the servants who became free after 1660 found it increasingly difficult to locate workable land that was not already claimed.

. . .

Perhaps more important than the actual rent obtained by Virginia's landlords was the effect of the artificial scarcity of land in keeping freedmen available for hire. If a man could not get land without paying rent for it, he might be obliged to go back to work for another man simply to stay alive.

The Victorian bureaucracy regulating land grants in Australia isn't described in detail by Hughes. I gather that the system of political patronage responsible for assigning "government men" was also responsible for land grants, with all the arbitrariness and cronyism that entails. Given the alternative, that might have been a good thing.

Restatement of the Obvious

Two good examples this week. The first is from FIRE's weblog, on censorship in the academy (via Cliopatria):

Censors are, almost by necessity, individuals with power. A president of a university cannot be censored by a student. That person may dislike what the president says, and he may argue vociferously that the president should be silent, but he does not have the actual authority to silence the president

The second is from ChristianityToday's commentary on the Perry/church flap:

However, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who spoke before Perry at the rally signing ceremony, says he's disenfranchised: "The issue is there is intolerance against Christians in America who simply want their voices to be heard," he said.

Note to Perkins: Simply having your voices heard is what the 250 or so protesters who showed up outside the Calvary Cathedral gym got. You're not being heard; you're being obeyed. You know that "seat at the table" you're always asking for? Might want to take a look at that cushy chair you're sitting on. When people treat you like Big Brother, it doesn't make much sense to keep complaining that you're the ignored red-headed stepchild.

China Rising

China’s state-owned tobacco industry provides 60 million jobs and 10 percent of national tax revenue.

Two-thirds of Chinese men are smokers, and surveys show that as many as 90 per cent believe their habit has little effect on their health, or is good for them.

Little wonder that Western tobacco companies are hungrily circling the Chinese market, lobbying eagerly for entry into this lucrative market of 360 million smokers, the biggest market in the world.

Dual Colons

I've been working on a little PHP project at home lately, and stumbled across the :: operator. What's so special about it? It's called "Paamayim Nekudotayim", as you'll discover when you accidentally put a double colon where you shouldn't:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in index.php on line 5

It turns out that "paamayim nekudotayim" is Hebrew for "double colon." And if my Hebrew isn't too rusty, the -ayim ending is the dual marker, making PHP the only programming language in existence that uses the dual number.

A serious history question

As some folks here know I'm working on a project about the Klamath Basin, an area at the edge of the inland West that has a traumatically eventful history and surprisingly fresh connections to its own pioneer days. Just for example, there are people still living who received grants of government land for homesteading as recently as 1949.

My own idea of small-town local history comes from Massachusetts, where the land had been pretty much parceled out to private owners by the end of the 18th century. So the notion of freshly breaking fertile ground to the plough during the Truman Administration boggles my mind. But is it really at all unusual in the inland Western U.S.?

It would be helpful to hear on this subject from people with experience of other regions, especially in the U.S., about the way people in small towns think of their local formative events. For example, I've read that some Southerners discuss the U.S. Civil War as though it were a recent development. And Jonathan Raban's Bad Land discusses a part of Montana where a railroad planted a whole string of towns in too-thin, too-dry earth well within the 20th century.

But homesteading in 1949? Isn't that a little unusual?

Something to Gnaw On

"The logic of the market escapes me. Organic Monterey Jack at our local health food market is very nearly twice the price per pound of cooked frozen chicken strips at the Trader Joe's four blocks away."

OK, I'll bite, chew, and digest, Martha. What's illogical about this?

Many A Truth Is Said In Brain Farts

Joel just said "Bush and Major" when he meant "Bush and Blair" and I realized it didn't sound strange to me either. A sign of something more than transatlantic ignorance I think.

Nice Talk

Via Sean McCann at The Valve, Ralph at Cliopatria offers a fine example of the art of vilification from the pen of Eugene Debs. Contrast that with this specimen provided by Maud Newton the other day (its authenticity cannot be confirmed).

Pleasure Spots

From today's Independent:

"For more than two decades it was a living hell for anyone Joseph Stalin deemed to be "an enemy of the people", but a Siberian mayor believes it is now time to cash in on his region's dark history - by reopening part of the Gulag for fee-paying tourists.

Mr Shpektor told one American newspaper that blueprints for the camp had already been drawn up and an appropriate location, the site of an abandoned camp, identified. All he needed, he added, was to raise the necessary funding. Crucially he did not say how much tourists would have to pay in order to relive an experience that millions would rather forget."

Having said (or quoted) all that I am inclined to think, based on the vagueness of the plans, that this is a publicity stunt rather than a serious proposal. But then I am an eternal optimist.

Orwell book

FYI, Tom Cushman of Wellesley posted an item to the Scottish Newsgroup last month about a forthcoming book of Orwell-related essays. The book has a tiny blurb in the catalog at Paradigm Publishers. T. Cushman and John Rodden edited the thing together, which sounds promising. He says Amazon is offering a "deep discount" on it and essayists include Christopher Hitchens and Jonathan Rose.

Utopia

Interesting, and very Orwell-like in discussing the rhetoric of idealism: Terry Eagleton on Russell Jacoby on Utopia in the Nation spring books issue.

Oprah and Faulkner

Maud Newton does a nice bit this morning on Oprah’s choice of three Faulkner titles for her summer reading club. I found Light in August a grind, and As I Lay Dying a sort of grotesque joy ride. But The Sound and the Fury is a pleasure to read. True, I had a college instructor walk me through it the first time. After that it just got better with each reading.

We Don't Get It

Saturday’s NYT had this article on Japan’s energy efficiency drive. A good example of government, business, and consumers getting on the same page.

We won't even sacrifice the 65mph limit on our interstates.

Surging oil prices and growing concerns about meeting targets to cut greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels have revived efforts around the world to improve energy efficiency. But perhaps nowhere is the interest greater than here in Japan.

"It's like squeezing a dry towel" for the last few drips, said Katsumi Tomita, an environmental planner for the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, maker of the Panasonic brand and known for its attention to energy efficiency. "The honest feeling of Japanese people is, 'How can we do more?' "

Happy Birthday Thomas

And, oh yeah, it's anniversary season for D-Day and Tienanmen Square and stuff.

Discuss.

Maud Newton

I'm becoming a fan of Maud Newton's blog. She reports today on publisher placement fees and the decline in bookstore browsing. I know it will be of interest as some of you, in your devotion to online shopping, are contributing to the demise of the local bookshop.

Common Toads

I drove home today with my mind racing — full all the crazy-making ranting that comes from unfortunate intersections of personal and political. At the second-to-last stoplight, I noticed that the guy in the truck behind me was singing. To his basset hound.

Giving Planet Earth a bad name

Hard to tell, but this ghastly ad may have been part of the Craigslist outer space transmission(s). What do you suppose they think of us on Alpha Centauri by now?

A Wessex Lad

Thomas Hardy, born today, 1840. When was the last time anyone here read a Hardy novel?

The first time, a friend and I hiked six miles from the bottom of Bala Hill to my father’s hunting camp in Mullyville. It was early February, and we weren’t hunters, but a couple of twenty-year-old headtrips who wanted to indulge ourselves for a few days in the bitter cold. I’m not sure it got above ten below while we were there. In the mornings we could slide down the slope in front of the camp in our moccasins, the snowcrust was so hard and fast. We spent hours roaming the beaver flows, and an equal amount of time inside, feeding the stove, reading, and inducing appetites. One afternoon a beaver trapper on a snowmobile, bearing a gift of bourbon, stopped by for a visit.

I had a copy of Tess of the d'Urbervilles that I bought for ninety-nine cents off a remainder table. Didn’t know a thing about Hardy, but it looked important, and even thirty years ago, a buck wasn’t much of a risk. I finished it that trip and read the rest of the major novels within the year. Haven’t been able to read a word of him since.

Joy of Slashdot

I love Slashdot. In addition to article titles like "Europe Home to Majority of Zombies", you have comments like this:

**note: this is all from memory of a (single?) online news story quite some time ago, the facts may be significantly different that I have implied**

Fischer on Internment

In honor of Martha's conference today, here's part of Fischer's chapter on the subject in Liberty and Freedom:

In the Hawaiian Defense Command, Air Corps General Delos Emmons decided differently for a much larger population of Japanese Americans. Nearly 2,000 aliens and citizens were arrested for cause in Hawaii, but Emmons ordered that nearly 175,000 Issei and Nisei should remain free. Emmons used many arguments, among them that the labor of Japanese Americans was necessary for the economy of the island and important to the war effort. He also spoke of civil liberties, decency, and fair play. As a consequence, a majority of Japanese Americans in the United States and the territories were not interned — a story that has yet to find its historian. It was an act of courage and conscience by Emmons. He defied the United States Navy, top leaders in the War Department, and many western politicians, at heavy cost to his career. We remember the story of 120,000 Japanese Americans from four western states who were cruelly confined during the war. But we have forgotten the story of a larger number of 175,000 Japanese Americans who remained free. Mainly these decisions came down to two men. General John DeWitt yielded to panic and hysteria on the West Coast. General Delos Emmons found the courage and wisdom to go another way in Hawaii.

Goat Cheese, round umpteen

Via Atrios, a screed at Americablog about whether "the left" is afraid of money. Discussion there goes on to consider whether distrust of money is a good thing, or a pathology, or an abdication of power. My (likely predictable) comment is here. Wot's yours?

Far Cannon

The naming of Deep Throat yesterday may not have been an earth-shaking event, but I’m still sure I heard a distant rumbling. This Watergate timeline provides a concise history (the links to the stories don’t seem to work, but you don’t want all the details anyway).

I know most folks here have no recollection of the affair. Well, let’s put it this way: there was no distant rumbling then – I thought the world was splitting apart.