Monsters That Become Our Monsters Are Still Monsters

Title: Operation Paperclip

Rating: 5 Stars

If there is such a thing as a good war, most people would think World War II (OK, probably not if you’re German or Japanese). It seemed to be a pretty good example (especially in today’s murky world) of good guys and bad guys. The Nazis, with their black uniforms and death head insignia, seemed to be straight out of central casting evil. You read about them raining rockets down upon citizen population, their death camps, their use of slavery, their human experiments, and even how advanced they were in building chemical weapons, and it becomes even more apparent how evil the Nazi regime was.

What if I told you that, after this evil threat was vanquished, the United States, the white hatted good guys in this conflict, took a look at some of these guys doing absolute evil and thought, we need to get them on our side?

I’m not talking borderline evil guys that were mid level bureaucrats that somehow got caught up in the Nazi furor or that reluctantly joined the Nazi party because they saw no other means of career advancement.

Nope, I’m talking head honchos. I’m talking about Nazis that reported directly to Himmler or Goering. I’m talking Nazis that were some of the very early members of the Nazi party, that had no trouble condemning fellow Germans to the Gestapo for not being sufficiently Nazi or that started every meeting with a Nazi salute and a Heil Hitler. I’m talking about Nazis that personally led chemical weapons programs, that knowingly used slave labor, that knowingly acquiesced to brutal, deadly, torturous human experiments on those they considered subhuman (and denoted such experiments as being done on ‘large pigs’). I’m talking about men that rained death upon London.

All of these people (there was at one time a thousand people on the list) were secretly brought to the US or to American facilities.  Their black magic science was now performed in support of the good guys. Provided with lucrative and important jobs, they had work visas and a path to citizenship. Several achieved great fame.

Considering the extreme revulsion that the average American felt to Nazis in general at that point in time, let alone high ranking ones that knowingly did evil acts, this was necessarily kept very secret. This was Operation Paperclip and the US government was so sensitive to this becoming public knowledge that elements of it were classified for over forty years. In many cases, the federal government actively conspired with the former Nazis in question to generate a cover story to prevent this knowledge from leaking out to the public.

Why did this happen? Well to begin with, there was still a war in Japan to win. Some of the Allied military commanders, amazed at the deadliness and quantity of Nazi chemical weapons, dreamed of using such weapons on the Japanese to forestall the horrible cost of a land invasion. The use of atomic weapons eliminated that need.

However, the US rapidly became convinced that the Soviet Union was bent upon world conquest. Seeing the Soviets scoop up Nazi facilities and scientists convinced the US that it must respond in kind. This despite the fact that over twenty-five million Soviets were killed in World War II, so global domination wasn’t exactly on their menu. On the other side, the Soviets were equally convinced that the US would like nothing more than to bring about its downfall. In this state of mutual paranoia, Nazi scientists that should have been harshly dealt with for their wartime actions were instead given a pass into the American middle class. Even today, we’re still finding new 100 year old former Nazis to bring up on war crimes but we let an entire generation of German scientists effectively off of the hook.

What kind of men are we talking about?

Well, there’s Fritz Hoffman. For the Nazis he worked on developing the nerve gas Sarin. This would be the nerve gas that would later by used by Assad against his Syrian people and by terrorists in the Tokyo subway attack. For the US, he helped developed VX, the nerve agent that was at the center of US chemical warfare, and even later, Agent Orange.

Let’s not forget Hurbertus Strughold. He became so prominent that even now he’s known as the Father of Space Medicine. He had connections with the medical personnel at Dachau, where prisoners were operated on without anesthesia, forced to drink salt water, and immersed in freezing water. It was in his notes that investigators realized that large pig experimentation actually meant human. At his laboratory, experiments were done on epileptic children.

The most famous Operation Paperclip alumni is Wernher Von Braun. He was a key figure in the US missile program. He was the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, received the National Medal of Science, and became nationally popular when appearing in a Walt Disney film series. In his Nazi times, he led the design and development of the V-2 program. At the underground rocket factory at Peenemünde, slave labor was heavily used. Some 20,000 enslaved people died working at the factory. Von Braun went to the Buchenwald concentration camp to personally select slave labor. There is some evidence that Von Braun ordered workers to be flogged. At least one set of hangings took place during his time there.

In terms of moral ambiguity, possibly the most notorious case was Walter Schrieber. He was the Surgeon General for the Nazis. From that post, he had knowledge of all medical experimentation being done, including chemical warfare. At best a slippery character, he was first captured by the Soviets and testified against Nazis during the Nuremburg war crimes. Later, he escaped from the Soviets under murky circumstances and reappeared in the West. Despite his background as a high Nazi official and suspicions of him being a Soviet double agent, US government succeeded in bringing him over to the states. After ten years, there was finally enough public controversy around him that, with federal encouragement, he fled to Argentina, where he lived in peace until his death.

A case can be made that Operation Paperclip was in the US national interest. The fact that the US spent decades going to great lengths to conceal it demonstrates how immoral the leaders knew this decision to be.

War! What’s It Good For? Depressions!

Title: Freedom From Fear

Rating: 4 Stars

If you’ve been reading the last several blog articles, you’ll know that I’ve been reading Freedom From Fear. It’s part of the Oxford History of the United States. This series is, at least at this time, planned to be published in twelve parts. Nine of the volumes are already available. With the exception of one, they are all pretty mammoth, averaging around 900 pages each. This is the second one that I’ve read. The other is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which I think is the best one volume history of the Civil War.

This volume covers the Great Depression and World War II (essentially the years 1929 through 1945). In the past week or so, I’ve written two other posts as I’ve read. One was about the start, cause, and effect of the Great Depression. The second post was about FDR’s response to it via the New Deal. This post will focus on World War II.

Before I start that, here’s a few words about the book. There’s certainly a historical throughline in these years. Even so, as written, this work is really two distinct books. The first twelve chapters are focused on the Great Depression and the New Deal. The final ten chapters are nearly exclusively World War II. I believe that Kennedy makes a historical argument for this by claiming that essentially the New Deal was dead by 1938. FDR overreached with his attempts to pack the Supreme Court and the new Congress was no longer willing to be bullied by the executive branch. No new New Deal initiatives were going to come about despite FDR’s efforts. In my opinion, the book suffers from disconnectedness due to having such two distinct halves.

Regarding the World War II section of this history, I wasn’t too clear how much I was going to learn. I’ve now read several WWII histories. WWII is one of the foundational events of the modern USA. Everyone thinks of it as the Good War. WWII veterans have been lionized as the heroic generation.  Even though I didn’t learn anything really critical while reading, I still found it interesting.

One thing that surprised me is exactly how isolationist the US was in the time before Pearl Harbor. I knew that that thread definitely existed but I didn’t understand how strong and pervasive it was. The US Congress passed several laws that left FDR severely hamstrung. Some of these laws forbade trade with a country at war. Even if trade was allowed, the trading country had to provide cash upfront. As Britain and, later, the Soviet Union were reeling under the Nazi peril, there just wasn’t a lot that the US could do to help. FDR didn’t really have a lot of options other than to prepare Americans by using his fireplace chats to highlight how dangerous the world was getting. You really do end up getting the feeling that he was waiting for nearly any kind of pretext that would allow the US to join the fight against fascism. However, Kennedy gives absolutely no credence to the idea that FDR somehow ‘allowed’ Pearl Harbor to happen to serve as that pretext.

Another thing that I didn’t realize is exactly how active the German U-Boat activity was off the Eastern coast of the US. Citizens from the shore could see ships burning. The U-Boats basically had a  open hunting license on freighters until the Allies finally came up with an effective convoy response.

During WWII, the US had the historical reputation of being the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’. This is certainly true. The US produced an overwhelming amount of material that was used to support all of the Allies. What I found interesting is that Kennedy explicitly mentioned the political and economic advantages of performing this role.

First of all, it dramatically reduced American casualties in comparison to the other Allied countries, specifically the Soviet Union. While the US was dramatically ramping up its manufacturing base in preparation to supplying war material, the Soviets were being bled dry in a brutal war of attrition. During WWII, the Soviets suffered some 24 million dead. Over 10 million of those were soldiers. Compare that to the US. The US suffered around 400,000 casualties. Nearly all of them were soldiers.

This disparity caused serious friction among the Allies. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war effort for nearly three years before the second front was opened on D-Day in June of 1944. Stalin, already prone to paranoia, couldn’t help but believe that the US was intentionally slow rolling opening this second front in hopes that the Nazis and the Soviets would bleed each other dry.

The economic advantages were equally obvious. As the only Allied power that was not directly threatened by the Nazis, the US could ramp up its manufacturing to an almost unimaginable level. While the other nations were tearing themselves up, the US was prospering. Consumer spending was increasing in the US even as defense spending was so dramatically ramped up. While the standard of living of all other nations fighting in WWII plummeted during the war years, the US standard dramatically increased. Kennedy is definitely one of those historians that believe that it was WWII that ended the Great Depression. It ended it not just economically, but emotionally. The war effort and its great success gave the people of the US the enthusiasm and confidence that they had been lacking in the 1930s. By the end of the war, the US was producing nearly half of the world’s manufacturing and over half of the world’s electricity.

One other thing that I found interesting was Americans’ evolution on bombing. In the early stages of the war, the US was adamant against mass indiscriminate bombing. Americans condemned not just the Nazis and their London Blitz but also the area bombing initiated by the English. It was thought to be uncivilized. At some point in the war, this thinking changed. As Curtis LeMay said, “I’ll tell you what this war is about. You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.” By the end of the war, Americans were intentionally designing bombing raids to create firestorms intended to kill as many people as possible in Tokyo. When the decision was made to drop the atomic bomb, the advisory group took a total of about ten minutes debating alternatives before recommending using it on civilian populations. This is a long way from where the US started.

Coming out of the war so strong laid the groundwork for the American century to come. Even today we are still enjoying the benefits that came out of it.

What Was The Big Deal?

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I’m currently reading Freedom From Fear, by David M Kennedy. It’s the Pulitzer prize winning history of the period of time encompassing the Great Depression and World War II. Earlier, I’d written about the causes of the Great Depression and Herbert Hoover’s response to it. In this post, I’ll talk about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Just as a warning, I’m not going into the alphabet soup of all of the new acts and programs that were started. It quickly becomes confusing and if you’re so interested, I’d advise reading Freedom From Fear (or just reading the New Deal Wikipedia entry).

Like most Americans, I know about the New Deal and can point to things like Social Security as one of its products. I really couldn’t tell you how effective it actually was at fighting the Great Depression or, for that matter, when it really even ended.  This book, mammoth as it is, goes into great detail.

One fact that I learned was that the Great Depression not only caused economic pain for many but also exposed economic pain for so many others. During the economic booms of the 1920s, a good third of the population was left behind. Some 40,000,000 people lived in poverty. There was the rural poor, some ninety percent of them still living in houses with no indoor plumbing or electricity. There was the elderly, no longer able to work but with no social net to help them. They were fortunate if they had relatives that they could live with. There were the people of color that were almost entirely ignored. The sharecroppers in the South were in bondage to landowners that was little different than slavery.

It was also in the Great Depression that we got to see the dark side of American individual exceptionalism. If our national ethos was that people that became rich did so because they worked harder, smarter, or were just better than everyone else, what does it say when such great numbers of the population fall into poverty so dire that they have trouble getting food and shelter and might go years without full time work? Even during this time when the structural problems of unfettered capitalism became so publicly exposed, the general attitude among many was still that somehow this large bulk of unfortunate Americans somehow became stupid or lazy. Interestingly enough, this attitude was often shared among the unfortunate as well. This attitude was a big reason why the New Deal went to substantial lengths to ensure that only the ‘worthy’ poor would qualify for assistance.

When FDR was inaugurated in 1933, the country was at a crisis point. Some five thousand banks had failed, exposing the weakness of the American banking system. Unemployment was somewhere around forty percent. Those lucky to be employed often faced reduced hours or a cut in hourly pay. This led to reduced spending. Reduced spending led to increased unemployment and reduced wages, which in turn led to further reduced spending.

Into this stepped FDR. His buoyant and apparently inexhaustible optimism and energy was a tonic that the country needed. The first 100 days of his administration, working in a special Congressional session, was a whirlwind of activity. In comparison to the torpor of our country’s national mood, this energy proved infectious.

There wasn’t a consistent economic philosophy in the New Deal programs. At various time, the administration encouraged inflation and price controls, deficit spending and budget balancing, promoting consumption and discouraging investment, and farm acreage reduction and land reclamation. This reflected the fact that FDR himself did not have a consistent economic philosophy. A real world politician, he was constantly trying to balance competing interests. This balance led to practices that often seemed contradictory.

If there was a consistent theme surrounding the New Deal programs, it would be security. This would take multiple forms.

There was bank security. The Glass-Steagull Act separated conventional banking from the riskier investment banking. Banking accounts were now federally guaranteed. This minimized the possibility of future bank runs. Even before the Great Depression, there would be on average several hundred bank failures a year. After the passage of the act, there would be fewer than ten a year.

There was finance security. The wild west era of Wall Street came to a close. Firms now had to publicly disclose their financial statements and have them independently audited. This made the buying and selling of securities more fair and rational.

There was housing security. Before, there was hardly any home ownership. It usually required the buyer to pay the full amount or put a significant percentage down and pay off within a couple of years. Now, independent appraisals were required. The FHA guaranteed mortgage loans. Lower down payments were required and mortgages could be paid off over a thirty year period. Home ownership increased from one quarter of Americans to closer to two thirds.

There was work security. Unemployment insurance became available. Work relief programs put millions of people (everyone from plumbers to artists) to work on the government payroll. For those too old to work, an old age pension was now provided. Interestingly to me, there was, besides the obvious humanitarian benefit, a more practical benefit to youth labor laws as well as old age pensions. One of the big causes of the Great Depression was overproduction. This overproduction of goods led to unemployment and lowered wages. By removing the elderly and the very young from the labor pool through these laws, it reduced the labor pool, which in turn drove up demand for labor, which in turn increased wages, which in turn increased consumption, which addressed the overproduction problem. Instead of the deflationary vicious cycle, this enabled a more benevolent consumption cycle.

What’s interesting here to me is that none of this was particularly radical. At best, what the New Deal did was to put some guard rails that made capitalism more honest and less risky. In doing so, not only did capitalism survive but these very guard rails made it healthier. They provided a level playing ground with rules that allowed many more people to participate and to flourish within the system.

The New Deal was certainly not perfect. For instance, during the 1930s, the unemployment rate was never below fourteen percent. That’s amazing to contemplate. It took World War II to set the US on its course to become an economic juggernaut.

The New Deal was brutal to sharecroppers. Sharecroppers, working in abject poverty, eked out a living farming land that others owned. To solve the overproduction problem, the New Deal paid land owners not to farm. Since the sharecroppers didn’t own the land, they were often summarily evicted from their land by the landowners who were being paid by the government not to farm.

Sharecroppers were disproportionately Black. In another blow to Black Americans, the original Social Security excluded farm workers and domestic workers. You probably only need one guess to figure out which population was overrepresented in these occupations.

The New Deal was over by 1937. FDR overreached with his attempt at packing the Supreme Court. The legislature rebelled against this. At the same time, conservatives had begun to unite against further programs. For example, there was serious misgivings about establishing a minimum wage. This was especially unpopular in the Southern states, where Southern politicians believed that their lower wages were their only advantage against the much more powerful and prosperous North. After 1937, FDR never again really had the initiative for further programs.

From a broad perspective, the New Deal ushered in several new ideas. The federal government became much more activist. It was no longer shy about aggressively intervening into situations that previously would have been handled, if at all, at a state level or, more commonly, letting Adam Smith’s invisible hand somehow eventually sort it out. By taking a broader approach, new segments of the population, like rural communities and immigrants, began to see the role that the federal government could have and thus began more actively participating in the political process. Finally, setting a level playing field and a set of consistent rules led to outcomes that allowed the benefits of capitalism to be spread more widely.

The Demon Dog Has A Challenger

Title: Everybody Knows

Rating: 5 Stars

When it comes to modern noir writers, Jordan Harper is my favorite. His short story collection, Love and Other Wounds (written about here), is one of the most amazing set of stories that I’ve read (Knockemstiff by Donald Roy Pollock is its only serious competition). Each and every story absolutely bristles with action and mayhem. His novel, She Rides Shotgun, is a similarly high octane adventure that features, of all things, a teddy bear. If you haven’t read either of these, I strongly recommend them.

When I saw that Harper had just released another novel, I had incredibly high expectations. The bottom line is that he met them all.

The novel features two protagonists. One is Mae. She is what is known as a black bag publicist. If there’s a dead body found in a celebrity’s bed, she’s the one that’s called to develop a cover story. When an actor on a drug binge shows up the day before a film starts shooting sporting a massive black eye, she’s the one that’s called to save the actor’s career. As she’s gotten better at her job, she’s lost whatever morals or values she might have once possessed. Now, it’s all about doing whatever necessary to fix your clients’ problems and get as much money as she can.

The other character is Chris Tamburro. He was a cop for many years. With his huge size and aggression (fed by cocaine and steroids), he was a natural fit for one of the brutal LA County police squads terrorizing neighborhoods in the name of justice. Caught trying to steal a pound of cocaine from a police evidence room, he escaped prison but lost his badge. Now forty-one years old, he makes his living as a fist. He is a person that puts the hurt on someone that has somehow crossed a person in power.

Mae and Chris were once an item but now are still friends. They consider themselves part of what Mae calls The Beast. It’s a web of intrigue that is threaded throughout the entire LA scene. The Beast controls everything and is implacable. Your only choice is to be part of The Beast and hope that it doesn’t eventually spit you out.

One day, Mae is invited to a secret meeting with her boss, Dan. He offers her the chance for a major score. It’ll be incredibly risky, but if it pays off, Mae would be able to quit and start her own firm. She decides to join him. At their next meeting, Dan was to explain the details of the plan. Before that happens, Dan is shot down and killed in what appears to be a carjacking gone violently wrong.

Even though devastated by the death, Mae figures out just enough of what Dan was doing to start thinking that she can take over and still cash in. Knowing that she can’t do it along, she brings in Chris.

As they begin to unravel the mystery, it becomes clear that they are seemingly striking at the heart of The Beast. It quickly becomes dangerous for them as they struggle to save themselves and also get rich in the process.

Since it is such a new book and so much fun to read and experience, I won’t spoil more details.

This is a wonderful example of LA noir. You see the beautiful weather, the billionaire moguls, and the flawless celebrities. Underneath that gilded façade lies a darkness. There are wealthy, powerful men casually using and abusing young women. There is an army of security forces ready to ruthlessly quash any challenge to the status quo. Sons of the rich rule with the same mien as crown princes. Politicians are in the pockets of the powerful. LA County police is effectively a set of organized gangs. There are small fry criminals trying to scratch out a living that will be ruthlessly murdered if their dreams of scoring become too grand.

In short, it’s a Hobbesian world where a life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

In other worlds, it’s the world of James Ellroy. Self described as the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, he is the master of LA Noir. The four novels that comprise his LA Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz are all ferocious works of fiction. Writing in staccato sentences, his deeply troubled, morally challenged characters live a live wire, tight rope existence. His style is not for everyone and I wouldn’t want to subsist just on that literary diet, but I find his novels thrilling and compelling to read.

Jordan Harper is the author that I’ve read that comes closest to matching Ellroy in intensity, cynicism, and depravity. I can only hope that his literary career has the same longevity of Ellroy’s.

Leopold And Loeb In Real Time

Title: Rope

Rating: 3 Stars

Rope is kind of a strange Hitchcock film. It essentially disappeared for a while after it was released. It was one of five films (including, amazingly enough, Hitchcock classics Rear Window and Vertigo) whose rights were held exclusively by Hitchcock. When he died, the rights were inherited by his daughter. Therefore, there was a several decade period where Rope was essentially not publicly shown.

If known today, it’s because of its gimmick instead of plot or characters. The film takes place in essentially real time. I say essentially because apparently Hitchcock did do some tricks like speeding the sunset so that the film seemed longer than its 80 minute running time. Even so, the film seemingly unfolds in real time. If you’re watching the film, it appears to be four long takes. Now, in those days, a movie camera could only hold ten minutes of film. Therefore, Hitchcock had to employ various sleights of hand to make it seem as if two takes were actually one long scene.

In the first scene, two young men (Brandon and Phillip), convinced of their greatness and that that greatness leaves them immune to laws, strangle one of their friends. They then place his body in a chest in their living room. That night they host a dinner party. Guests include the murder victim’s father and fiancé. They also invite their former prep school housemaster Rupert (James Stewart). He was their intellectual mentor and Brandon, at least, believes that Rupert would approve of their actions.

Even more brazen, at the dinner party they serve the food from the top of the chest. Phillip is clearly the weaker of the two. He’s easily discomfited and gets drunker as the night progresses. The murder victim’s father and fiancé become increasingly worried about his absence as the night progresses. On the other hand, Rupert, even as he continues to espouse Nietzschean philosophies of the superman (ie great men being above common law),  becomes ever more suspicious of his proteges. This heightens Phillip’s concerns while increasing Brandon’s superciliousness.

By the end of the film (spoiler alert for a 75 year old film), Rupert has figured what Brandon and Phillip have done, discovered the body, disarmed them of a gun, and is waiting for the police to arrive to take them away forever. The perfect crime of the two super geniuses falls apart within an hour or two.

From the plot summary, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the play upon which it was based was inspired by Leopold and Loeb. I’ve written about them before. Leopold and Loeb were two young men that kidnapped and murdered one of their younger classmates. They were both mentally gifted and from wealthy families. They (specifically Loeb) became obsessed with committing murder. Leopold, in love with Loeb, agreed to plan the murder in return for sexual favors. Despite their brilliance, their plan immediately fell apart. For instance, Leopold managed to lose his very unique glasses where the body was found. It was only legal heroics by Clarence Darrow that kept the two from the gallows. Loeb was murdered in prison while Leopold was paroled after thirty years in prison.

Although little remembered now, the Leopold and Loeb case held a cultural fascination for decades. The murder took place in 1924. Rope was released in 1948. The novel Compulsion, a thinly veiled fiction based upon the crime was released in 1956 (this novel inspired the career of the great LA crime noir writer James Ellroy). If you’re interested, I wrote about Compulsion here. Decades later, thinly disguised films and novels were still being released about the case.

As just said, there was a gay love component to the Leopold Loeb relationship. In the novel Compulsion, this was made fairly explicit. The play that inspired this film also made this explicit. However, with the Hays Code still in place, there was no way that this could be openly portrayed. Attempts have been made by later critics to mine a gay subtext to this film. If it’s there, it’s hidden away pretty deeply.

Apparently, of the Hitchcock films in which he appeared, this was Stewart’s least favorite. He felt that, during filming, the mechanisms involved in executing the long takes (eg movable sets) shifted the focus of the film from the characters to the camera work. To me he seemed miscast. Stewart doesn’t exactly have the air of a radical school headmaster. His speech at the end, after he has exposed Brandon and Phillip, is an almost Mr Smith type monologue where he refutes all of his previous teachings that were the inspiration for the murder. It felt tacked on.

Although I’m sure technically impressive in 1948, Hitchcock’s tricks to seamlessly merge scenes together seem pretty primitive by today’s standards. In several cases, the film zooms into the back of a man’s black suit as the segue to the next scene. If you’re looking for it, it is pretty obvious.

Because it takes place essentially in real time within the confines of one apartment (most of the action takes place in one room), it feels much more like a filmed play than a film.

I’ve seen several films that have used the gimmick of long takes. There is the film Locke, starring Tom Hardy, that takes place entirely within one car trip on a English motorway. The plot unfolds as Hardy’s character takes and makes phone calls.

There is the Russian Ark, which was filmed in one take as a narrator wanders through the Hermitage museum in Saint Petersburg. The focus is much more on imagery than plot or character.

Victoria was also filmed in one take using one camera. It’s a crime caper film, so it actually does have things like a plot and characters. Even more amazing, the film moves through many locations, including car rides and climbs to rooftops. It truly is a breathtaking technical cinematic achievement.

That’s the thing. In all of these cases, if it wasn’t for the novelty of long takes, these films would have never hit my radar. None of these films is particularly noteworthy on any other merit.

I would place Rope in this same category. It’s not a bad film and it is technically impressive. It just pretty much exists because I think Hitchcock wanted to know if he could pull it off. It’s a directorial feat but not that great of a film.

Hoover Gets A Bad Rap

I’ve just started reading the Pulitzer Prize winning book by David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear. It’s part of the Oxford History of the United States. It zeroes in on the years between 1929 and 1945. Since this encompasses both the Great Depression and World War II, it’s a suitably mammoth book. It’s going to be a while to get through it.

I’ve just completed the first chapters that discuss the causes of the Great Depression and President Herbert Hoover’s response to it. I’d thought that I’d take just a little break and write down my thoughts before continuing on.

Probably like most, I had a pretty surface level understanding of the Great Depression. If I had to summarize, it’d be something like the stock market crashed on Black Thursday. This panic started the Great Depression. President Hoover, stuck in conservative ways of thinking, waited for natural economic forces to bring the economy back as it had in every other previous depression. It took the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to initiate a program of governmental activism to get the economy started again.

It turns out that essentially all of this is grossly simplified, if not actually wrong.

First of all, not only was there a Black Thursday (10/24/29, when the market dropped 11%) but there was also a Black Monday (10/28, when the market dropped 12%) and a Black Tuesday (10/29, when the market dropped another 12%). Some institutional investors stepped in and the market rallied. It started to decline again but then went through a multi-month recovery that continued through April of 1930. It then went through a steadier decline before bottoming out on July 18, 1930 (at an almost unimaginable Dow level of 41.22; compare that to the current level of around 34,000), having lost 89% of its value. It wasn’t exactly a one day lightning bolt.

Even that much of a drop did not cause the Great Depression. The fact is that, for all of the talk about shoeshine boys giving stock tips to Joe Kennedy, Americans generally were not invested in the stock market. There were previous crashes that caused havoc on Wall Street that had a much more modest effect on Main Street. It wasn’t stock valuations that caused mass unemployment.

As can probably be imagined, there wasn’t just one cause. First of all, there was a huge disconnect between American manufacturing and consumption. Simply put, we were making way more things than we could possibly consume. In such a case, the usual approach is to increase exports to other markets. However, the US had passed some pretty extreme protectionist trade (the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act) policies. This caused other nations to retaliate. Therefore, the usual export markets were closed, so we were sitting on a lot of unused inventory. What happens in that situation? Well, to move inventory you lower prices and reduce manufacturing. Lowering prices can dampen wages while reducing manufacturing causes layoffs. If people are laid off or have their wages reduced, they accordingly reduce their spending. Reducing spending causes reduced consumption. Reduced consumption causes increased inventory. And so and so on into an economic death spiral.

Andrew Jackson abolished the National Bank way back in 1833. Without this centralizing force, the US banking industry grew into a gallimaufry (a wonderful word that I just discovered!) of assorted banks of various quality. With little banking regulation in place, the banks were little prepared when their struggling customers began to demand their cash. A cash run at one bank would quickly lead to panic runs at other banks. Banks began to fail at ever increasing rates. This strangled the economy even more.

There were also problems beyond our shores. The Versailles Treaty was a disaster. Germany was both burdened by a war debt and economically strangled. It had no hope of paying its debts to the victorious Allies. The Allied countries of WWI in turn owed huge loans to the US. This led to an absurd situation in the 1920s of the US loaning money to Germany so that it could pay loans to the Allied countries so that they could pay loans back to the US. Once US banks started failing, this financial circle jerk seized up.

In response, desperate to stay on the gold standard, countries began to raise interest rates and to cut government spending to balance their budget. As we now know, doing these two things restricts money supply and the very last thing that you want to do when you are in a recession or a depression is to restrict the money supply. Doing so restricts consumption and low consumption is precisely what causes these economic events and makes them spiral worse.

All of that to say that, by the time 1932 rolled around, countries were in the midst of a devastating global depression. A depression that was not caused just because the Dow took a hit one day in 1929.

My second big misconception was about Herbert Hoover. The conventional narrative is that he was a free market purist that advocated letting natural economic forces set things right again.  According to Kennedy, this is quite wrong and manifestly unfair.

First of all, Hoover seemed to be the perfect man for the job. He was a famed engineer. He literally wrote the book on mining engineering. His great humanitarian mission to feed the starving Belgians in World War I was acclaimed. His work at the Versailles Treaty impressed everyone (even though his ideas did not make it into the final treaty). He was a detail oriented technologist. What better man to have in charge when your broken country is in dire need of fixing?

Unfortunately he had two serious flaws. One is that his strength as a technologist was equally opposed by his weakness as a politician. The other flaw, perhaps a result of his Quaker religion, was his belief in selfless volunteerism instead of government mandates.

The fact is that he was actually an activist President with a broad vision of federal expansion into areas in which it’d never previously functioned. He started with a program to help farmers. As the economic crisis deepened, he began to think even broader. Several of his ideas prefigured the New Deal.

However.

He was predisposed to expecting business to step forward and execute these programs on their own because of their obvious benefits. In the early days, this actually happened. However, as the crisis deepened, businesses focused instead upon their own survival and abandoned cooperative programs.

Even if he was so inclined to direct federal action, his lack of political skills would have doomed his efforts. There were potentially progressive Republicans and Democrats that could have banded together to pass legislation, but he was not able to bring them together.

This brings us to another cause that I’d never previously read. In a previous post, I’d talked about how political parties sometimes acquired a near stranglehold on the Presidency (the Virginians of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe being a great example). Well, if you take a slightly broader look at Presidential elections, there was one huge megatrend. From 1860 through 1928, there were a total of eighteen elections. Except for Grover Cleveland’s and Woodrow Wilson’s two terms, these were all won by Republicans (1864 National Union was basically Republican). Republicans won 14 out of 18 elections in 68 years.

Therefore, even though the country was in a serious crisis, the Democratic party was not at all interested in giving a lifeline to Hoover. Their primary purpose was to tar Hoover (and by extension, the Republican party) with all of the stench of the Great Depression. Even after Roosevelt won the election in November, as the country continued to crater, Roosevelt passively sat by as Hoover somewhat plaintively and desperately tried to include him. This continued on until Roosevelt was inaugurated in March of 1933.

If I’ve gained nothing else from reading Freedom From Fear, I now at least have a more accurate understanding of the causes and the course of the Great Depression.

Lick The Boot

Title: Thank You For Your Servitude

Rating: 4 Stars

I don’t know, maybe I’m getting over the travesty of the Trump Presidency. I’ve read a couple of other books from that period and they ended up triggering me with rage. This one did not leave me all that angry. Sure, when you read about Lindsay Graham or Ted Cruz as they abandon any principles that they might have ever had to cozy up to power, it’s a bit maddening. Given that, I was not left in a fit of rage.

Perhaps some of this is due to the sardonic attitude of Mark Leibovich. He was also the author of This Town, a piercing look into what passed for Washington DC culture during the Obama administration. As such, he is a decades long denizen of the Washington DC ‘swamp’. In this book he has entire conversations with various subjects about who in Washington DC ‘gets the joke’. To be sure, Leibovich gets the joke and writes about it in a very entertaining fashion.

This covers the period from the campaign through Trump’s Presidency and concluding with the insurrection and the Republican party later attempts to somehow deny that their people had invaded the Capitol to override a legitimate election because their strongman leader told them to.

This is a pretty lightweight book. Its purpose isn’t to dive deep into the madness of the Trump administration. What Leibovich is much more interested in is how Trump managed to subvert an entire cohort of Republican leaders into absolute servitude. Trump managed to do this in two ways.

One way was to bring people into proximity of power that would never, in any other administration, have had that opportunity. Sean Spicer as press secretary. Reince Priebus as chief of staff. Kellyanne Conway as presidential advisor. Hell, Mike Pence as Vice President. This is not exactly the A Team. Knowing that Trump was their one ticket to power, they were willing to countenance any act of self degradation as long as, at the end of it, they could add a line to their resume. Priebus was forthright about it. He would just keep muttering to himself six months. He knew that lasting six months as chief of staff would unlock a lucrative future for him as a DC insider. It was a price he, along with the others of his ilk, was very willing to pay.

The other way was just to overwhelm his opposition. Republican leaders like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Lindsay Graham all started out by denouncing the Trump candidacy. They said the things out loud that needed to be said and, lo and behold, when he became President, they all came to pass. Without exception, their tail curled between their legs, they came back to the fold and pledged complete obeisance to Trump.

Lindsay Graham, a true DC swamp creature, was explicit about it. It seems strange that he ran for President because he seems to be more interested in proximity to power than the actual exercise of power. He nakedly sacrificed all self respect just so that he can play golf with Trump and talk to him on the phone. As far as I can tell, the only reason why Graham wants to be senator is to be a senator. He seems to have no dreams or aspirations beyond that. As he is quoted in the book, “If you don’t want to be reelected, you’re in the wrong business”.

This is not exactly a profile in courage. They all knew (as in, they were ‘in on the joke’) what a nightmare the Trump administration was but they just couldn’t stop worshipping at the Trump altar and run the risk of losing their job title.

Another thing that was interesting to read was how exhausting managing Trump was. Whenever some bad news hit and Trump became enraged, the all hands effort wasn’t to manage the crisis but how to get Trump in a better mood. Apparently Hope Hicks was the master of this. Leibovich was in a meeting with Trump and Hicks where Trump was bragging about his 70% approval rating. Clearly this was bullshit and Leibovich shot a questioning glance at Hicks. She just shook her head slightly. Later, Leibovich found that the 70% approval rating was from a poll taken of just Tennessee Republicans. Anything to keep the narcissist’s appetite fed.

Even so, there was a small number of people that stood up to the onslaught. Nearly all of them faced death threats and most were driven from office. The two most significant politicians calling out the emperor’s nudity was Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney. For their pains, Cheney was driven out of office and now has to have security in her home state of Wyoming, the state that before all of this madness treated her family as royalty. Mitt Romney just averted meeting up with the mob on the day of the insurrection. In addition to death threats, he is regularly publicly accosted by MAGA supporters. It’ll be interesting if he seeks reelection and what will happen if he does. 

Here’s the thing. The environment of the DC elite is an inbred, cloven hoofed, cloistered society. No matter what party is in power, these elite feed at the trough. Leibovich himself is an example of the rot. He is the court jester writing at the margins entertaining the mighty and powerful as they frolic. The environment needs to be shaken up if not uprooted. 

But it’s clear that the narcissistic, deeply insecure, incoherent, incompetent, lazy, and morally bankrupt Donald Trump was not the antidote. Instead he exposed the absolute venality of an entire generation of Republican politicians and brought into being an entirely new generation made in his own image.

It remains to be seen if the party can be cleansed or if I have to desperately vote Democratic for the rest of my life just to avert disaster.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Title: Man With A Camera

Rating: 5 Stars

Number nine on the Sight and Sound greatest film list is a silent film. Given that, your first reaction could very well be, OK, which Chaplin film made the cut? Gold Rush? City Lights? Well, then you learn that the film is not by Chaplin. You will probably then next think that it must be a Buster Keaton film. The General, right? Well, no. If you were given a hint that it was actually a Soviet era film, then you’d say, of course, it must be Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein.

Well, those are all great guesses, but they’re all wrong. Number nine on the list was a film called Man With A Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it either.

To make you question the list choice even more, what if I were to tell you that the film has no intertitles (ie cue cards), no actors, no plot to speak of, and is over an hour long? Does that make you run screaming from the room cursing the elitist pretentious critics that make up the Sight and Sound poll?

I was kind of in that frame of mind. Now having watched it (it’s available on youTube), even if I don’t quite believe that it’s the ninth greatest film ever made, I have to admit that it was a pretty amazing film.

First of all, the film is technically amazing. It’s as if someone from the present dropped into 1929 equipped with modern filmmaking techniques. Quoting now from its wiki page, the film uses, and in some cases, invents (deep breath): multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals. It has something like 1,775 shots. The technical complexity of the film is, quite simply, astonishing. It’s worthwhile just to watch the film maker’s mastery.

Although, as I said, there’s no plot to speak of, visually it appears to me to be the day in the life of a city. It starts in the morning with people waking up, eating, catching a tram, and starting their day. As the day progresses, people work at various jobs or run errands. At the end of the day, people take trams home or go out for the evening. There you see people lying at the beach, playing at a carnival, at a soccer game, or at a track and field tournament.

You see people across their entire life span. There are newborns at a hospital. There is a open casket funeral. There are couples in various states of agitation lining up to get their marriage certificate. There is a woman prostrate with grief in front of a tombstone. There is a woman giving birth. When I mean giving birth, you quite literally see the baby being born. Especially for a 1929 film, there are surprising instances of natural nudity.

You see people at a variety of jobs. The mass manufacturing of the mechanical age is well represented here. You see people doing what appears to be quite dangerous jobs. The camera closes in to capture the danger. You also see jobs of mind-numbing drudgery. At the cigarette factory, you see a woman endlessly form cigarette boxes as the assembly line moves along at inexorable, breathtaking speed. There are several scenes of banks of telephone operators furiously connecting phone calls at a breakneck pace.

To me, especially surprising was the film highlighting obvious class distinctions. You see desperately poor people sleeping on park benches or scrabbling around for food. At the same time, you see what appear to be women of leisure sitting at a spa getting their eyebrows done.

Considering the fact that this was 1929, when Stalin was, if not quite in totalitarian dictator mode yet, certainly on the ascendant, I think that this film makes a bold political statement. It belies the Soviet myth of a classless society. There are rich people and poor people. There are people living hard lives of toil while others have lives of leisure. There are several wide shots that show masses of people scurrying around as if they are ants in a colony. As I watched, I wasn’t sure if I was viewing a Stalinist vision of a city on its way to socialist perfection or some kind of oppressive Kafkaesque nightmare.

I did a quick bit of research on the director Vertov. Although he doesn’t ever appear to get into serious trouble during the Stalinist regime, by the time Soviet Realism had completely taken hold he had taken a step back and was no longer in active film making.

Another interesting aspect to the film was that it was seemingly meta, if not actually postmodern. The film starts with an audience coming into a movie theater to take their seats. At various times, the film cuts to the audience watching this very film.

I said that the film has no characters. That’s kind of a lie. The actual cameraman (you know, the one with a movie camera), Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman, appears in the film. Yes, the cameraman filming the movie appears in the film itself. Usually it shows him going to fairly extreme efforts to get a shot. You see him filming from a moving car. You see him taking wide, panoramic shots perched at the top of a bridge. You see him laying down on tracks as a train goes over him.

The question of course is, if that’s the cameraman, then who the hell is filming him? The scenes of the cameraman standing in a moving car filming the occupants of another car must have been filmed by yet another cameraman in yet another moving car.

Hence my claim that this film has postmodern elements. As it is creating its art, it is exposing the work behind its creation.

For me, the key to enjoying this film was coming into it understanding that this was going to be an unconventional film. If you come in expecting a typical film, you’ll probably stomp out in anger. However, if you do just a bit of research before to understand where the film is coming from, I think that you’ll appreciate it.

Several years ago, I watched La Jetée (which is, incidentally, number 67 in the Sight and Sound poll). I primarily watched it because it served as the inspiration for the odd but enjoyable time travel film starring Brad Pitt / Bruce Willis called 12 Monkeys. La Jetée is a 28 minute long film that is composed almost entirely of still photos. Accordingly, it was an odd viewing experience.

With films such as these, understanding what you’re in for, at least for me, makes it a much more accessible and enjoyable experience.

A Party Without Plurality

This is another post from the Presidential history geek. One of the things that I find interesting that really isn’t discussed much is how rarely the Republican candidate for President actually wins the plurality of the vote nowadays. Sure, I understand that at the election level that it doesn’t matter. A candidate can lose by millions of votes as long as they win just a few more votes than the other candidate in a very small handful of swing states (eg Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona).

Even so, it seems striking to me that, since 1992, the Republican candidate has only won the popular vote once (when George W Bush beat John Kerry in 2004). Over the last 30 years, over a total of eight elections, the Republican candidate has won once. Republicans were able to thread the electoral college needle twice in those years and win the Presidency despite losing the popular vote, so they ended up in the more respectable position of winning three out of the last eight elections. If it wasn’t for the electoral college, people would be writing think pieces about the death of the national Republican party.

I’m not here to advocate for the abolishment of the electoral college (although I certainly have done so before). Those are the rules of the game and the Republican party is playing by those rules, fair and square. It does lead me to wonder about the future of a party that seems not to be particularly interested in even trying for a plurality of votes at the national level. Is the fact that such a party has been fairly successful with this strategy a positive or a negative for our country? It’s at least food for thought.

No, what I’m here to write about today is to figure out how much of a historical anomaly this is. Under the 225 years or so that we’ve been operating under our current constitution, has there been such a period where one party or the other has dominated in such a fashion?

Well, the short answer is no.

Here’s the longer answer. 🙂

Although never as long as this, there have been times where one party has been dominant. Let’s discuss.

First of all, after the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson defeated the Federalist John Adams and then the Federalist Andrew Hamilton was shot dead in a duel, the Federalist party kind of fell apart. For Jefferson’s two terms, and then Madison’s two terms, and then Monroe’s two terms, the Democratic-Republican party ruled supreme. In fact, Monroe was so unopposed that one person voted against him in the electoral college just so that Washington would continue to be the only unanimously chosen president. Let’s call this case the Virginia faction.

So, the Democratic-Republican party won the electoral college and the popular vote six consecutive times. Impressive. In 1824, John Quincy Adams ran for president as a Democratic-Republican against Andrew Jackson. Jackson was also a Democratic-Republican but the fact is that he was already against the party and shortly afterward formed the Democratic party. Adams lost the popular vote to Jackson but neither party got a majority in the electoral college. The race was decided by the House. Whether for corrupt reasons or not, Henry Clay threw his support to Adams and Adams was elected even though he lost the popular vote (the first time it ever happened),

So, that’s case number one. The Democratic-Republican party won the electoral college seven consecutive times but only won the popular vote six times. After Jackson’s formal split, the Democratic-Republican party ceased to exist.

Case number two is Andrew Jackson. He won the popular vote in 1824 but lost the electoral college. He won both the popular vote and the presidency in 1828 and 1832. His Vice President, Martin Van Buren, won on his own in 1836. He then lost to a Whig candidate in 1840. Jackson (known as Old Hickory) had a protégé named James Polk (known as Young Hickory). Polk won the Presidency in 1844. He served one term and retired. Thus ends the Jackson wave of candidates. Over six presidential elections, Jackson and his minions won the popular vote in five of them.

Case number three is the Republican party and the Civil War. Lincoln won two terms (although technically his second term was under the National Union party, but who were they kidding?), followed by Grant winning two terms. In 1876, the Republican Rutherford Hayes lost the popular vote to the Democratic Samuel Tilden, but in a truly corrupt act, a couple of Southern states agreed to throw their electoral count over to Hayes if that administration agreed to backoff from Reconstruction. In 1880, the Republican James Garfield won the election. That ended the Civil War streak of Republican wins. Like with the Jackson faction earlier, they won the popular vote in five out of six elections. Let’s call this the Civil War faction.

Case number four takes us all of the way to the Great Depression and the New Deal. This one is pretty easy to explain. Franklin Roosevelt won four consecutive terms and Harry Truman won one of his own (in all cases winning both the popular vote and the electoral college). So, in this case, the Democratic party won five consecutive elections. Let’s call this the New Deal faction.

That brings us to the last case. As the nation kind of collapsed socially, economically, and militarily in the 1960s, the Democratic party lost its way and the Republican party found their way (in a fashion). This led to the Republican Richard Nixon’s two election wins, interrupted by the Democratic Jimmy Carter’s win, and then followed by three more Republican wins by Ronald Reagan (twice) and George HW Bush (once). All victories were both in the popular vote as well as the electoral college. Like with the Jackson and the Civil War cases earlier, the Republican party won the popular vote five out of six elections. Let’s call this the hippy-reaction faction.

So, what does all of this tell us?

One is that, in terms of the popular vote, we are in the current longest dry spell (or alternatively, winning streak) in our country’s history. The Democratic party’s streak of winning the popular vote in seven out of eight elections is unparalleled.

The first case, the Virginia faction, was brought about because of our country’s immaturity as a democracy. When the Federalist party collapsed, apparently no one really knew or cared about creating an alternative party so they were essentially unopposed.

In the Civil War case and the Great Depression case, even though the opposing party did not completely collapse, they were in dire shape. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Democratic party was derisively known as Confederate sympathizing Copperheads. During the Great Depression, the Republican party simply had no answer to the New Deal that was also attractive to voters.

It’s interesting that the Jackson factor started their long run on the heels of the Virginia faction’s long run. In fact, it was Jackson’s popular vote victory (even if he didn’t win the electoral college) that brought up the demise of the Democratic-Republican party.

You can argue that a similar thing happened during recent times. Democratic Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush in 1992, thus marking the end of the hippy-reaction faction and marking the beginning of the faction currently in place.

How will this end? Who knows? In normal times, you’d think that a party that consistently loses popular votes would morph its positions accordingly to more popular positions or, barring that, simply fade away (I’m looking at you Know Nothing party!). It does seem that the modern Republican party thinks that it’s found some electoral college secret code that allows it to win (nearly) half the time without actually going to the trouble of trying to represent the will of a plurality of voters.

Will they try again in 2024? Will it work? Stay tuned!