Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

Mary Todd Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and the Queer History of the Old Clothes Scandal

In 1867, less than three years after the assassination of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, his (now widowed) wife and former first lady, Mary, traveled to New York in hopes of securing funds to cover her mounting expenses. Having acquired a significant amount of debt prior to her husband’s reelection and finding herself in an even more tenuous financial situation following his untimely death, Mary Todd Lincoln had resigned herself to selling off pieces from her famed wardrobe, which throughout her time in the White House had garnered much praise and attention. She was joined in this venture by the modiste who had designed much of the clothing Lincoln was looking to auction off, a formerly enslaved seamstress by the name of Elizabeth Keckley. The two had become acquainted after Keckley’s work for several notable D.C. society women (including the wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis) brought her to Lincoln’s attention in the months leading up to the American Civil War.

Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House: Elizabeth Keckley, Dolen Perkins-Valdez: 9780989609272

Over the next several years, Mary and Elizabeth established a fruitful working relationship and a complex and intense personal one. Publicly, the dresses Keckley designed for Lincoln brought much-needed acclaim to the first lady and ensured a robust clientele for Keckley. Privately, however, the dynamics between the two women were much more uneven and often far less reciprocal. By her own account, Keckley was regularly called on to navigate Lincoln’s mercurial moods and bouts of despair, which frequently took Elizabeth away from her sewing business. In fact, after Lincoln’s 1867 plan to quietly sell off her clothing was discovered and quickly turned into a media spectacle, Mary retreated to her home in Chicago and left Keckley behind to contend with the fallout.

The following year, in an effort to salvage her former employer’s reputation (and likely her own), Keckley published a memoir detailing the events leading up to what had come to be known as the Old Clothes Scandal. It proved a compelling text entitled Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. The book begins with a brief chronicling of Keckley’s years in captivity, beginning with her time in Virginia where she lived for much of her childhood, enslaved by the family of a Col. Armistead Burwell. Keckley spent her early years acting as nursemaid for Burwell’s young daughter before being sent to live with another of the colonel’s children during her formative years. Eventually, after multiple relocations, an ill-advised and ultimately short-lived marriage, and the birth of her first and only son, George, Keckley was able to purchase her freedom, after which she settled in Washington, D.C.

Behind the Scenes, however, moves very quickly from this account of Elizabeth’s youth and early adulthood to focus largely on her relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln—a fact that likely contributed to the immense backlash the text received upon publication. In the months following her memoir’s release, Keckley faced vast amounts of public censure stemming from several overlapping sources; firstly, the modiste’s (mostly generous but nonetheless critical) observations of the Lincolns’ private affairs perhaps inevitably triggered anxieties amongst postbellum elites about the possibility of their own domestic staffs engaging in similar forms of public exposure. Secondly, Keckley’s work came at a time when post-Civil War racial tensions were especially high, and ongoing questions about which narratives of slavery and freedom would be sanctioned might have colored readers’ perceptions of the text. This is especially true given that many readers may have unwillingly seen themselves reflected in Mary Todd Lincoln’s often exploitative and self-interested treatment of Keckley. The third and final potential factor in the pushback against Behind the Scenes, however, is perhaps the most telling.

Appended to the final pages of the text are multiple letters from Lincoln, written to Keckley during the height of the Old Clothes Scandal. Her messages are erratic and frantic, and this, along with reports that these letters were published without the consent of either Lincoln or Keckley, magnified concerns that the book constituted a violation of Mary’s privacy. However, it is also possible that reactions to the text in general and Lincoln’s letters in particular—including the former first lady’s purported anger at her long-time confidante and ultimate decision to permanently end their relationship—were not solely rooted in the belief that the missives were of too personal a nature to be made public. The intimate, at-times cloying, and potentially queer undertones of Lincoln and Keckley’s exchanges might also have played a part.

This subtle subtext underlies much of Keckley’s work, including the passages in which the seamstress comments on her former patron’s appearance, noting that Mary “had a beautiful neck and arm, and low dresses were becoming to her.” By her own admission, Elizabeth’s employment with Lincoln involved her spending “much of her time at the White House, often returning home only to sleep or give brief instructions to her employees”—a revelation that highlights the unusually extensive access Keckley had to her client. Given this, the question of what intimacies may have passed between the two women in the hours and days they spent alone in the first lady’s room (often with Mary in various states of undress) might have been a pressing one for readers attempting to parse Keckley’s later literary divulgences.

Portrait of Elizabeth Keckley; captioned: Madam Elizabeth Keckley, Modiste to Mrs. A. Lincoln — *Portrait of Elizabeth Keckley. Source: Documenting the American South*

Much has been written about the Victorian-era notion of “romantic friendship,” within which nineteenth century women often formed amorous attachments to one another that sometimes lasted for years at a time and survived marriages, interstate moves, and intense scrutiny. Little of this scholarship, however, has considered the ways race likely shifted the dynamics and raised the stakes of such affiliations, with relationships like the one that developed between Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Todd Lincoln occupying a space of ambiguity. On the one hand, Lincoln’s words to Keckley indicate that the two shared a close connection, with Mary writing more than once about her desire to spend time with Elizabeth and emphasizing “how hard it [was not to] see and talk with” Keckley as the two struggled to recover from their failed New York venture.

On the other hand, given their wildly divergent social positions, it is unlikely that an intimate or “romantic” friendship between the two would have been viewed as permissible; indeed, it is possible that Lincoln’s concern over this very perception may have informed her outsized response to Keckley’s memoir and contributed to her son’s attempts to obstruct its distribution. After all, what were readers to make of Lincoln’s frequently suggestive notes to her former modiste, including her insistence that she eagerly awaited the day she could repay Keckley’s many kindnesses “in more than words?” Despite a public life marked by scandal, dismissal, and persistent rumors of madness, it would seem that even for Mary Todd Lincoln, the potential insinuation of interracial queer connection might have been a bridge too far.

After the publication and subsequent condemnation of Behind the Scenes, Elizabeth Keckley led a relatively quiet life, serving as an instructor at Wilberforce College and participating in multiple public service and fundraising efforts. Having lost, on a personal level, her access to Lincoln’s cache of social capital and, on a professional level, the patronage of the bulk of her former clientele, Keckley found herself living out her final days in relative poverty at Washington D.C.’s National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children. Though this reality is often romanticized in retellings of the famed seamstress dying with a portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln hanging over her bed, what it actually underscores are the disparities underlying the whole of Keckley and Lincoln’s relationship—disparities not even the promise of queer connection, and intimacies conducted behind the scenes, could surmount.

Notes:

Parts of this article are reprinted from Lyons, Candice. “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space.” Feminist studies 47, no. 1 (2021): 15–33

Candice Lyons is a Ph.D. candidate in The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and a 2021-2022 Black Studies Dissertation Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her recent pieces “A (Queer) Rebel Wife in Texas” (2020) and “Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation” (2020) can be found on Not Even Past. Lyons’ writing can also be found in the 2021 E3W Review of Books, for which she served as special section editor. Her 2021 Feminist Studies article “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space” is the winner of the 2020 FS Graduate Student Award.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory

Between 2007 and 2015, I traveled with small groups of Armenians from the diaspora who were “returning” to a place they had never been. Each one was seeking the hometown or village lost to their own parents or grandparents who had survived the Armenian genocide of 1915. And so, although we were traveling mostly in the east of modern Turkey, it was “Historical Armenia,” their lost Ottoman Armenian homeland that they saw outside the windows of their mini-buses.

From the map of Historical Armenia traveled by pilgrims, in House in the Homeland ©Carel Bertram

For the most part, these “return travels” have been led by Armen Aroyan, who dedicated his life to this difficult quest, and whose help was sorely needed. Driving through eastern Turkey, he could lead us on unmarked and unpaved roads, and following his own knowledge or instincts, could find villages now emptied of Armenians, possibly emptied of any architectural remains at all, and whose names had been changed to erase their Armenian past.

*Pilgrims search for their houses. Left to Right: Marash, Sivas, Marash. Photos by the author, Carel Bertram*

Together with some few precious hand-drawn maps used to locate former houses, these travelers carried luggage filled with “survivor items”: photographs, title deeds, insurance receipts, and letters sent from a lost place in the “before time.” One traveler, Mary Ann, brought a copy of a 1911 painting of her ancestral town of Yozgat made from memory by her great uncle who had left for Philadelphia in 1910. I used it as the cover for my book.

Each of these items had a story to tell and a claim to make. But most of all, these travelers carried stories, ones they had heard from their older family members about this place, making their attachments especially profound. For them, their own town or village represented “the homeland,” and if they found it, they hoped to find their ancestral house, which they considered its beating heart.

Because all were seeking spiritual solace, most called these journeys pilgrimages, and referred to themselves as pilgrims. Having traveled with them, I do, too. The result of my journeys with them is A House in the Homeland, Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory, (Stanford University Press), which shows the many ways by which they created a pilgrim’s reward. Grounded in an ethnographic methodology, A House in the Homeland is based on a unique archive and a compelling theoretical structure with its own vocabulary and poetic vision. Fittingly, its publication date coincides with April 24th, the day set aside to commemorate the Armenian Genocide.

An Ethnographic Methodology and a Unique Archive

I travelled on over a dozen pilgrimages to “Historical Armenia” with Armen Aroyan and thus watched well over 100 individuals experience their homeland towns and villages. Some actually found their houses, but many found only a fragment – a gate, foundations, a tree or a fountain, or even the house’s footprint.

*Bob and Steve stop at the entrance to Yozgat, confirming its existence—and that they had arrived.* *Photo by Armen Aroyan*

Two cousins, Bob and Steve, did not have sufficient clues to find their ancestral house in the town of Yozgat, but an ethnographic museum in a historically Armenian neighborhood worked as a proxy. It seemed close to the descriptions that they had heard about it, and its status as a museum meant they could enter. Inside, in a room that had no guard, they hid a photo of the family who had escaped several years after the genocide. The museum held no information about any Armenian connection.

Pilgrims on other trips did the same thing, but I could not understand these actions fully just by watching or, as it turned out, by their telling me that they “had brought their families home.” Spending at least ten days with each pilgrim group allowed for many conversations as well as a building of trust. But what allowed my ethnography to be so productively granular was the sustained conversations that followed, many still ongoing, and many leading to permanent friendships. While working on A House in the Homeland, I could make phone calls or send texts or emails to many pilgrims, including the cousins, Bob and Steve, as I tried to untangle and contextualize the story behind their transgressive act.

*Bob in front of the ethnographic museum in Yozgat that became the cousins’ proxy house. Photo by Steve Barsamian*

Over time, Bob and Steve sent me a variety of materials, but only in later conversations did I learn that they owned an unpublished oral history of their survivor uncle Avedis, one of the relatives who had finally escaped from Yozgat. On reading it, I found it to reveal an astonishing family history that became a full chapter in my book, for it made clear that their poignant act, while seemingly so similar to others who had sequestered secret photos, pointed to a distinctive meaning that served their individual spiritual needs. Only my large archive of pilgrim experiences allowed for such similarities to emerge, and only its depth allowed these to be evaluated in the context of the pilgrims’ memory stories, which is what these photos represented.

An archive of this size holds a lot of stories, but I was able to enlarge it even further by adding the experiences of several hundred other pilgrims with whom I had not traveled. This was done through their descriptive books, journals, memoirs, blogs, letters, and creative works. Many of these travelers were among the several thousand pilgrims who had traveled with Armen Aroyan over the years, and my information about them includes some of the videos ^⁠he took of their pilgrimages, now housed at the University of Southern California’s Institute of Armenian Studies. Important, too, were the articles that they sent him for his collection of pilgrim experiences, The Pilgrim Speaks, which is currently unpublished. Furthermore, I was able to contact many of these people who often became important pen-pal informants, some even friends, widening the breadth and deepening my stratified archive’s record of individual, shared and communal memory and sensibilities.

Some of these materials document pilgrimages that predate these contemporary trips. In A House in the Homeland, I also analyze the journeys of actual survivors, whom I term “natives”– to separate them from the “descendants,” the children and grandchildren who form the central part of my observations and insights. Although the survivors who wrote these pilgrimage memoirs were gone, I was able to speak with many of their children. Thus, this archive documents the affective reach of homeland for two dispossessed cohorts, one just before and one closely following its loss.

Memory, Memory-Stories, Assembled and Re-assembled Memory

The houses that descendant pilgrims searched for evoked all the emotions held by exiles forced from home: warmth, wholeness, fear, trauma and rage. But what drove the urge to find them was memory. Yet it was clear, almost by definition, that a memory of their houses or of the genocide was only applicable for the earliest pilgrims, those native pilgrims who had once lived in those houses. By having information from both groups, however, I was able to construct a new category of memory that differentiated pilgrims who were the direct descendants of these survivors from the survivors themselves. I term this descendant category memory-stories because the memories these descendants brought with them were stories that they remembered hearing from their relatives from the survivor generation. Furthermore, because the descendant pilgrims themselves had no firsthand memories of the houses and places they sought, the emotional burden ascribed to those lost houses was in large part a resonance of the pilgrims’ emotional attachment to these survivor family members. Additionally, these stories, told and heard in the diasporic host-land, which, in this study was usually the United States, meant that these memory-stories were as place-related as those of the survivor generation; but rather than being linked to villages, they were linked to places like Racine, Watertown, Fresno, Glendale, Philadelphia, and New York City. Most critically, then, this approach addresses both survivor memory and descendant memory-stories as wholly autobiographical, bringing to light how the autobiographical content of the descendants’ memory is always in construct with the host-land.

The accumulation of these memory-stories is what makes up what I term each descendant’s “assembled memory,” the affective history of their homeland that they have assembled as their received truths across generations. For Bob and Steve, the memory of their house came from memory-stories from their survivor parents and grandparents that told of how most of their individual families, having perished, lived together in Yozgat for several years after the genocide in relative affluence, but in painfully compromising circumstances that included living as Muslims.

The photo that was left by the cousins in their proxy house Yozgat. Media, Pennsylvania, before 1953. 3rd from left: Steve’s grandmother, Makhrouhi. 5th from left, Bob’s mother, Armenhouie. Photo by Armenhouie’s brother, Avedis

Gesturing to Mircea Eliade’s work on the sacred and Gaston Bachelard’s on the poetic reverie in which memory operates, I suggest that the pilgrims’ memory-stories seem to “erupt” (Eliade would say “irrupt”) into consciousness when pilgrims find their houses, or the places where they must once have been. As these stories activate and then flood their reverie, the place is given a sacred quality as it invites interactions with their elders whose spirits are there, but whose stories they know from the diasporic host-land. It is in this transcendent opening that rituals emerge. For example, on arriving in the southern Anatolian village of Hasanbeyli, Alidz found that memory-stories arose to identify the sacred realm of her house —that “was from my childhood inscribed on my soul,” —through a treasury of stories heard from her grandmother when they lived together in Beirut. This led to a flood of daydreams and reveries:

I’m sitting next to my grandmother

my eyes on her sewing basket and colorful wools

I’m eight years old.

Alidz, led by Armen Aroyan and traveling with her cousins, performed a pilgrimage ritual that I call “communion,” in which they shared a meal and prayers with the spirits of their grandparents at the place where they had lost their past. Having made Hasanbeyli into the village where they shared communion with their family, they returned with a new memory added to the one of violent loss, and softening some of the rage they almost could not bear.

Rituals, then, are one of the ways that, when these memory-stories arrive at the place where they had taken place, the pilgrims’ actions cause memory to be re-assembled.

Bob and Steve’s ritual was the placing of their photo as an ex-voto: an expression of gratitude that their family survived spiritually, able to live again and flourish as Armenians in Pennsylvania. That is, their action was not meant to intervene in the lives of their ancestors, magically allowing them to reclaim the lives they had been denied. Instead, it was meant to impact the meaning —and thus their memory— of place by bringing the history of the house up to date. When the cousins left Yozgat, it was with a feeling of elation, for their house now held the photograph of a healthy, reconstituted family as visual proof of the miracle they had become.

In this way, as pilgrims make their past homes present, A House in the Homeland identifies the many prongs of pilgrims’ agency, but especially as they insert themselves into a positive narrative of the house, which forever more will include their own affective experiences. For some, for example, the ancestral house was identified as theirs by a sudden sign from an elder’s spirit, for some, singing their ancestors’ beloved songs in their ancestral houses made them believe that their ancestors were singing with them. It is these experiences that actuate the re-assembling of memory, for as pilgrims become actors in their house’s narrative, the story includes them, too.

On returning home, the cousins hosted an extended family reunion, with a slide presentation that offered their family an updated Yozgat, now to be imagined and remembered with a particular house that radiated the faces of their Pennsylvania family. It was only by being in Yozgat that the cousins’ memory-stories could activate a transgressive agency capable of intervening in the arc of their homeland history, and one that could be take root in the future.

A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory

The Book: A UT Story

The foundation of my work is my archive of over 400 pilgrimage experiences, plus extensive contextualizing historical research. But for the picture of the pilgrims’ engagement to emerge, I would need time to organize my material, compare earlier pilgrimages to what I knew of later ones, and explore my hunches. Fortuitously, I was selected as a Fellow at the Institute for Historical studiers at UT Austin, for the academic year 2013-14. There, under the supportive direction of Seth Garfield, its fellows gathered to further each other’s work on the theme, “Trauma and Social Transformation.” I already had a group of Austin friends and colleagues, as I had been a lecturer, sponsored by UT’s Center for Middle East Studies and the Department of Art and Art History for the three years following the earning of my doctorate in 1999. My dissertation, then unknowingly, had been a preparation for A House in the Homeland, for I had written about vernacular Ottoman architecture, especially those beautiful houses like the ones that Bob and Steve’s Ottoman Armenian merchant families had lived in.

While teaching in Austin, I honed my dissertation into a book that followed how, as the Ottoman empire lost its footing, and Western ideas and concrete apartment houses were taking over the landscape, those beautiful houses began to grow in the Turkish imaginary as an icon of lost Ottoman Turkish values. When I left UT Austin for San Francisco State University, Imagining the Turkish House, Collective Visions of Home was in the good hands of Jim Burr who saw it to publication in 2008 by the University of Texas Press. It was my first effort of tracing the history of the attachment between memory and place.

During my 2013-14 fellowship year in Austin, as I conceptualized A House in the Homeland, it seemed that the Armenian pilgrims I had come to know had much in common with their Turkish counterparts in Imagining the Turkish house. Both were products of the tumultuous end of the Ottoman empire, and for both groups, continuity with traditional values was often rooted in their ancestral houses. But Bob and Steve’s house and the house of every pilgrim who searched for their own, had not been lost to the exigencies of time but to traumatic exile, and to the brutal deaths of their families. Furthermore, modern Turkey had denied Armenians a link to their own history, first by permanent expulsion, second by denying that there had even been a genocide, and third, although this is hard to reconcile with the second, by the nation’s relentless propaganda that branded the pilgrims’ ancestors as traitors to the state, asserting that the Armenians had somehow deserved their fate. Thus, the pilgrims’ houses were at the center of not merely a transformative, but a catastrophic historical experience. A House in the Homeland shows how countering displacement and trauma by poignant performances in their home spaces made their experience part of an affective historical analysis.

*The author in an Armenian house in the Anatolian town of Kharpert. The house is now an ethnographic museum. Photo by a passer-by.*

Writing about this process for “Not Even Past” brings this journey full circle. Not only are these words of William Faulker, and the title of this monthly offering from UT’s Department of History, apt for many historians, but they are almost prescient to the many like myself who speak to a universal need to bring the past into the present, whether to heal its wounds or to do the hard work of intergenerational continuity. Certainly these words are true for the Armenian pilgrims chronicled in my book: With luggage filled with family documents and photographs, they established a soulful sense of personal ownership of what history had denied them; by performing rituals of their own creation, they animated their houses’ spiritual powers; and by singing its songs and dancing its dances in the places of their origins, they linked their ancestral houses to their host-land homes, where they had learned them and where they will live on. Moreover, by inserting themselves into the origins of their stories, they built new memories into their pasts, and forged new connections for their future. They could not heal the genocide, an impossible quest, but, perhaps, they could create a past they could live with.

Carel Bertram is Professor Emerita in Middle East and Islamic Studies, Dept. of Humanities, San Francisco State University. Her MA in Near Eastern Studies was taken at the University of California at Berkeley, her PhD in Islamic Art History at UCLA. Trained in the visual culture of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman era, she uses art, architecture, cities, literature, ethnography and oral histories to study how we use space and place to represent ourselves in the world; and also how it is that the memory of places creates a particular historical consciousness, especially when remembering a home lost to time or exile.

Review of The Men Who Lost America: British Command during the Revolutionary War and the Preservation of the Empire (2013)

Several years ago, while visiting Jamestown, Virginia, I had an epiphany; this isn’t American history, it’s English history—these people were English, and the America they strived within was a space more than an entity. Of course, this all changed with the American Revolution. So for obvious reasons, Yorktown, not far from Jamestown, didn’t give this Englishman the same sense of kinship. It may well have done so if I had read Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s excellent The Men Who Lost America before visiting.

book cover for The Men Who Lost America eBook by Andrew O'Shaughnessy | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster UK

The cleverness in O’Shaughnessy’s work is found in the simplicity of its lens—reassessing the American Revolution through the lives of those who lost it rather than those who won. Two striking insights arise from this approach. First, the British did not lose America because of elite and illiberal buffoonery. Adopting a multi-biographical approach, O’Shaughnessy demonstrates that Lord North, John Burgoyne, Sir Henry Clinton—even Cornwallis and George III—were educated and capable men, cognizant of the latest and most sophisticated military strategies of their era. To suggest otherwise, as much historiography has done on both sides of the Atlantic for over 200 years, undercuts the spectacular achievements of the Revolutionary army.

Second, British logistics worked as effectively and efficiently as they could under the circumstances. However, “under the circumstances” is the operative phrase here – as much as O’Shaughnessy attempts to shy away from any form of determinism, he shows again and again that this was a war that Britain simply could not win. This is despite the fact that they prevailed in most of the major battles and occupied every American city of note, including New York, Boston, Savannah and Charleston.

Why was this so? Because, O’Shaughnessy argues, Britain chose to prosecute the war with “an army of conquest not of occupation,” meaning that the colonial rebels (remember, they weren’t Americans yet) could always flee, replenish their ranks, and regather their strength. Often, British success simply reinvigorated rebel recruitment drives. Meanwhile, the British use of billeting and foraging, as well as their recruitment of runaway slaves and indigenous warriors, did much to galvanize rebel resistance.

The appeal of O’Shaughnessy’s tome (nearly 500 pages in 9-point print) is its fresh perspective on a well picked over subject. Quite delightfully, he turns the American Revolution into English history, which it is – just like Jamestown. And for Americans, there is the new perspective of encountering George Washington as a factor rather than an agent. He shows up again and again in The Men Who Lost America — a problem needing to be solved, an elusive frustration, a precocious upstart, and (finally) the grave digger for British power on the continent. As such, Washington is cast in an altogether different light—he is someone being thought about rather than thinking, a mind to be reacted to rather than a mind reacting, a thorn rather than a rose.

*Washington at the Battle of Trenton, by E.L. Henry.*

Despite the book’s originality and narrative luster, it ends on a strange, anti-climactic note, with allusions to the rather catch-all explanation of all British colonial mishaps—that London always cared more about other possessions than the one it was losing. In the last few paragraphs, O’Shaughnessy pivots to late 18^th century British successes on the Indian subcontinent, though this would have been scant consolation to George III. Ireland was surely as important a factor as India for the British ruling class, as was keeping Canadian and Caribbean possessions. In this sense, many British war aims were in fact achieved. Furthermore, it is obviously inappropriate to think of Indian subjugation as some kind of imperial silver lining of the American Revolution. But Britain clearly did learn a great many lessons about soft power and modern war, while at the same time not exhausting itself before Napoleon and his eventual empire entered the picture.

This is ultimately what O’Shaughnessy misses, or at least does not emphasize strongly enough: the American Revolution was in some ways the beginning of British ascendancy on the world stage—and it was built on the thinking and action of men like North, Clinton and Rodney, most of whom saw their careers and reputations recover during the French Revolutionary Wars. What really gets going in 1776, or at least after 1787, is British ascendancy to the world stage. Furthermore, this ascendancy was built upon the rejection of military authoritarianism, which was so prevalent on the European continent during the second half of the eighteenth century. As O’Shaughnessy demonstrates again and again, British elites who prosecuted the war thought it was unwinnable—but they thought so precisely because they had no interest in constructing a continental style military regime of occupation and repression. There is much discussion of the sacrifices made by Americans on the altar of their emerging national identity during the Revolutionary War. Perhaps not enough is said about how many Englishmen did the same.

Primary Source: The Pirate Zheng Yi Sao and a Fine Press Publisher

This and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved.

Wednesday the 20th of September 1809 was not a good day for Richard Glasspoole. For one, he woke up stranded in a boat, with the wind threatening to blow him towards an uninhabited island somewhere in the South China Sea. There were also eight other people in the boat with him, and it was their third day crowded together. Fortunately for Glasspoole, Wednesday would be the last day he would spend in the boat. The same day, Richard Glasspoole was captured by pirates.

The account of what happens next was published in an intriguing volume now held at the Harry Ransom Center.

Richard Glasspoole, *Mr. Glasspoole and the Chinese Pirates* (London: The Golden Cockerel Press, 1935), p. 5. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 709 G55 1935.

Piracy had been present in East Asian waters for centuries. From the wakō pirates of the 14th to 16th centuries who raided Chinese and Korean coastal settlements, to the Noshima Murakami of the Seto Inland Sea who claimed legitimacy and charged a fee for passage through their waters, East Asian piracy had passed through numerous waves. By the time Glasspoole and the others in his cutter were captured, piracy, especially in the South China Sea, was dominated by a single intriguing but also elusive figure: Zheng Yi Sao, a name that can be translated simply as Wife of Zheng Yi. Her rise from being sold as a sex worker in Canton to pirate queen of a fleet numbering 70,000 pirates makes her arguably the most successful pirate in history.

In 1801, Zheng Yi Sao was either captured by pirates or joined them voluntarily, depending on the sources one prefers. Either way, she married a pirate captain named Zheng Yi, and took over running the administrative side of his fleet. At this point, the pirates that would one day form Zheng Yi Sao’s confederation belonged to distinct groups, with their own leaders, grudges, and target preferences. They had been privateers licensed by the Tây Sơn dynasty in Vietnam to fight against Qing China. When that dynasty collapsed, the former privateers decided to make the transition into full-fledged piracy. After three years of disorganization and chaos, the pirates eventually united under the Guangdong Pact of 1805.

In this pact, the pirates agreed to a remarkable level of regulation and bureaucracy. For example, the pirates were now divided into separate squadrons, each identified by a differently colored flag. Each vessel was also required to have a registration number to be painted on its bow. This is a surprising level of organization for a pirate fleet given that pirates were ostensibly attracted to the prospect of living outside of normal societal conditions. For example, if the ships had registration numbers, then there must have been a ship registry and a registrar whose job it was to keep accurate records. When we think of pirates, we probably think of raids, sword fights, cannons, and adventure—not the image of someone hunched over a desk sifting through records .

Zheng Yi Sao was not a signatory to the Pact of 1805, but at this point she had been married to Zheng Yi for four years, and had become a powerful figure within his fleet. We do not know her precise role in crafting the pact or what ideas that Zheng Yi voiced actually came from his wife. When Zheng Yi died in a storm in 1807 and Zheng Yi Sao took power in the Guangdong Confederation, she wrote a new pirate code of her own, which bore some striking resemblances to the Pact of 1805. It is probably safe to say, therefore, that, at the very least, she recognized the value of certain ideas in the pact.

A key provision of Zheng Yi Sao’s code was the formalization of the distribution of plunder and wealth. Whenever a ship or squadron took a prize, that force got to keep twenty percent of the plunder as a bonus. The remaining eighty percent would become part of the common fund and was used for the maintenance and resupply for the entire fleet. This rule managed to balance incentivizing pirates to take loot while also ensuring enough supplies for the entire fleet. The effect of this was that even unsuccessful ships were well supplied and vessels in the Guangdong Confederation were always able to bring their full force to bear, without having to worry about conserving ammunition. Despite a fleet of over 1,200 ships and 70,000 pirates, Zheng Yi Sao found a way to keep all ships armed and all pirates fed. Such a logistical achievement, illustrates both how accomplished the Guangdong Confederation was at taking prizes, and the sheer administrative powers of Zheng Yi Sao herself. To a sailor, especially a pirate, in the early 19th century, knowing that they had food and fresh water for the next few weeks at least provided the confidence and security needed to sail into danger.

Why then, if Zheng Yi Sao’s fleet was so powerful and her fortune so vast has she been forgotten when most people talk about pirates? Misogyny and historiograpical biases obviously play a role. Historians studying pirates have typically focused on the so-called “Golden Age of Piracy” in the Caribbean, with figures such as Stede Bonnet, Blackbeard, and Henry Morgan occupying the popular imagination. Some historians who have written about the Guangdong Confederation, have tended to leave Zheng Yi Sao out of the narrative, and instead focus on her adopted son/husband Zheng Bao. Another challenge to telling her story is the fact that pirates generally did not keep formal log books, and what records the Guangdong Confederation did keep do not survive to this day. This makes it difficult to find primary sources about Zheng Yi Sao’s pirates. Those that do survive were typically written by Europeans who were captured and ransomed writing about their experiences. These captives are obviously not going to be taken to the head of the entire confederation, so most of them only ever saw the leader of a handful of vessels and believed that person to be the one in charge.

Richard Glasspoole, *Mr. Glasspoole and the Chinese Pirates* (London: The Golden Cockerel Press, 1935), p. 23. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 709 G55 1935.

This brings us back to Richard Glasspoole and the predicament he found himself in. The capture and ransom of Europeans was fairly standard practice for the Guangdong Confederation. They would seldom engage a fully armed European or American warship in combat, but when a weak or undermanned vessel was isolated, they would use their superior knowledge of the geography to hide behind islands and quickly capture and plunder vessels. Glasspoole and his men, adrift in a lonely cutter, were easy prey.

Glasspoole spent nearly three months as a captive. During that time he witnessed many raids, and even participated in one himself in exchange for a lower ransom price. Glasspoole’s testimony is incredibly valuable in trying to ascertain the everyday life of pirates in the Guangdong Confederation. Most of his correspondence was reproduced in a collection of primary sources titled Further Statement of the Ladrones on the Coast of China originally published in 1812. However, while this text contained an abridged account of Glasspoole’s capture, presented without context or explanation, it was mainly a description of shipboard pirate life.

Detail of the colophon in Richard Glasspoole, *Mr. Glasspoole and the Chinese Pirates* (London: The Golden Cockerel Press, 1935), p. 59. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 709 G55 1935.

His narrative correspondence was not given careful, exclusive consideration until it was printed by Owen Rutter, Robert Gibbings, and the Golden Cockerel Press. The Golden Cockerel Press was a fine printing press in the UK in the early twentieth century. It began life as a cooperative, yet when it failed to return much money, the original founders decided to shut it down. This angered the wood engraver Rober Gibbings, who was a fan of fine printing and had worked with the press before. Gibbings, saddened by the failure of the business, purchased it for £1,050 in 1924 and became its sole manager. The first book published under his leadership, partially completed when he purchased the press, returned £1,800. Gibbings ran the press through its boom times, managing the printing of and engravings for classic works such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. By the 1930s, however, the Great Depression had hit, and the market for fine printing had collapsed. Gibbings then sold ownership to a group looking to get into the printing world. One of those partners was a man named Owen Rutter. Gibbings stayed on as the press’ manager.

Rutter was a man obsessed with all things maritime. He served as a magistrate in North Borneo, Sabah today, and had fallen in love with the Pacific Ocean. As a partner working with the Golden Cockerel Press, Rutter edited and published several books about the mutiny on the HMS Bounty. Rutter would find primary sources, edit them, and write the introduction, and Gibbings would create engravings. While the engravings may seem mild by today’s standards, in the ’30s they shocked the press’ readers. Their emphasis on violence and, occasionally, erotic imagery became part of the identity of the Golden Cockerel Press. They were willing to publish images that other publishing houses would not. The engravings in the Glasspoole text certainly fit this trend, but they also lean into distinctive sinophobic tropes including featuring a menacing Chinese male figure.

In 1935 the Gibbings/Rutter Pair combined to publish Glasspoole’s narrative account of his capture by Zheng Yi Sao’s pirates, intercut with some excerpts from other relevant documents, such as the captain’s log for the Marquis of Ely, the ship Glasspoole was an officer on, and some of the deliberations on how much ransom to pay for Glasspoole and his crew.

The book itself is striking. The cover is bright yellow, with an illustration of a Chinese pirate repeated in an almost dizzying pattern. The untrimmed and uneven leaves are made of high quality paper, very much in line with other fine press books.

The volume is not a long one, only about fifty pages of print in a large font and with ample margins. And Glasspoole’s narrative only takes up about thirty pages of that. Almost half of the book is given over to Rutter’s introduction, both of Glasspoole and of Chinese piracy in general. Rutter had previously written a book about piracy in the South China Sea, The Pirate Wind: Tales of the Sea Robbers of Malaya, and thought of himself as an expert on the topic.

This period saw xenophobic “yellow peril” imagery that painted China as a terrifying and threatening place. At the same time, there was also considerable sympathy for China as it suffered from Japanese imperialism. Rutter’s introduction walks a line between respect for the Guangdong pirates and outright racist stereotyping.

Crucially, Rutter does acknowledge Zheng Yi Sao as the true power in the Guangdong Confederation. He also includes a shortened translation of her pirate code, taken from an 1830 book by Yung Lun Yuen. Rutter describes Zheng Yi Sao as “a remarkable woman” and praises her for using “her authority with firmness and discretion.” Rutter seems to be sympathetic towards the Guangdong pirates, though he, Gibbings, and Glasspoole all revel in descriptions of village raids.

Rutter also makes some unsubstantiated historical claims, such as stating that the “pirate chief” Glasspoole describes as the leader of the Red Squadron which captured him was likely Zheng Bao. In all likelihood, however, Glasspoole probably never met Zheng Bao or even saw the entirety of the Red Squadron. The man Glasspoole describes as the chief was probably the leader of a collection of a small handful of ships.

Glasspoole’s estimate of the number of war junks in the Guangdong Confederation is extremely low, he estimates 200 rather than the more likely 500, meaning that Glasspoole probably never got a full sense of the scale of the confederation’s operation.

It is likely that the man Glasspoole names “A-juo-Chay” is Zheng Bao, as he says that when this figure surrendered, he did so on the condition of a pardon and to be “made a Mandarine of distinction.” Since Zheng Bao was given a military commission upon his pardon, it seems likely that A-juo-Chay is Zheng Bao, rather than, as Rutter suggests, Zheng Yi Sao. Rutter may well have been an expert on all things HMS Bounty, but he was hardly an expert in the Guangdong Confederation

This is not a scholarly account. Rutter had seemingly read a single book on Zheng Yi Sao and was a maritime enthusiast rather than a historian. He was also looking to sell books. The graphic images described by Glasspoole presented an excellent opportunity for Gibbings to create some of his trademark risqué engravings. Rising tensions in China as Japanese and Chinese forces fought skirmishes before the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 may also have played a role. The introduction paints a picture of Chinese people as ferocious in combat.

Only 315 copies of Mr. Glasspoole were printed, and fifteen were kept in reserve. It is an artifact of two centuries, bound up with the romanticism, ideas, and anxieties of both.

Jacob Parr is an undergraduate majoring in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is interested in naval history during the age of sail, as well as baseball, both past and present. He is writing his undergraduate thesis on the Texas Navy. Jacob plans to pursue law school in the fall of 2023.

Remembering Pinochet: Dictatorship, Power, and Pushback

For the plebiscite of ‘88, Chile had its first political campaign in fifteen years. La Campaña del NO tried to make it fun. We all had many dark tales to tell, and maybe a moral obligation to tell them, but sad stories don’t get votes. Moreover, a very fine line, invisible to carabineros, divided protesting and campaigning. Opposition supporters had to resort to clever strategies. We would drive around with their windshield wipers on, on a dry day. Like saying “no” by moving your index finger from left to right. The cops couldn’t exactly arrest you for using your windshield wiper.

If you had to use the horn, the cadence was ta-tá, ta-tááá. It sounded like the slogan, y va caer—literally, it’s about to fall—the wishful refrain that had been around since the ‘70’s, calling for the military government to implode. Our efforts fell short of actual revolution, but we had to start somewhere.

I drove an old, white Renoleta at the time. That was the local nickname for the Renault 4, the archetypal poor man’s car. Pragmatic French engineers had stripped it down to the basics. Mine only had one wiper, because the other had gotten stolen. Even so, me and my car, we did what we could to topple the tyrant.

Most people with cars were voting, SÍ. That meant another ten years of Augusto Pinochet; so, you had to be careful with the wipers in Vitacura. Communist car like mine, it could be the plumber or the electrician, but it couldn’t stay parked on the street overnight, not in the barrio alto. If your wiper came on, the cops might not touch you, but you could get hit by a reactionary rock from the teenaged children of Chile’s blue bloods. Santiago’s pseudo-aristocrats called themselves the GCU, Gente Como Uno, “folks like us.” They didn’t like Tío Augusto, not really. They found him bull-headed and unrefined. But his ruthless violence kept them in power.

The political conglomerate campaigning for the negative option called itself, La Concertación por la Democracia, or just, la Concertación, for short. With nothing else to do, the parties, both radical and moderate, had spent the entire time since 1973 subdividing into smaller and smaller factions and arguing about ideological minutia. By 1986, the time had come. We had to get over it. Even die-hard capitalists wanted a change. Monthly protests had made neoliberalism at gunpoint bad for business, and fatal for tourism.

Pinochet poses in his office in the attitude of a statesman, pen in hand as if about to sign some important decree. The dictator is flanked by two Chilean flags and behind him is a portrait of Diego Portales, his predecessor as Minister of War and one of the founders of the Republic. — *General Augusto Pinochet photographed in his office. The dictator is flanked by two Chilean flags and behind him is a portrait of Diego Portales,* an early proponent of oligarchic authoritarianism in Chile. *Source: Magazine of the Chilean Air Force, July – September 1974*

The coalition sprouted fully formed out of the brain of Raúl Troncoso. He had pulled strings behind the scenes since the ‘60s. In the ‘80s, he took some pretty big risks to get that bulky rocket off the launching pad, including personally smuggling briefcases full of cash from Europe for the purpose of toppling the Pinochet regime without firing a shot. And he pulled it off.

Troncoso had served as chief of staff for President Eduardo Frei in ’64. He became an advisor to Eduardo Frei (the younger) when he became President in ’94. On October 16, 1998, Pinochet got arrested in London, where he had gone with his wife for a minor surgical intervention and major shopping expedition. He had been indicted in Spain. Ironically, as Minister of the Interior for the younger Frei, it became Troncoso’s job to defend Pinochet from extradition to Spain when Judge Baltazar Garzón wanted to put him on trial for torture, murder and conspiracy.

Why didn’t they just ignore it and let him go to jail in Spain? Love thy enemies? Better to love that one from as far away as possible. The official story affirmed that Chilean courts should have jurisdiction and that the former dictator could only be properly tried at home. Which was silly, because obviously, that wasn’t happening. There was a strategic detail, though, in which Troncoso’s genius shined. Every decisive action has a backlash. A general election loomed. If Pinochet went to jail in Spain, the far right could win the election, and roll back the delicate and hard-won transition to democratic rule.

During that historic crisis, Ministro Troncoso came to the Holy Week Retreat at the prestigious Colegio San Ignacio. It was Good Friday. A famous Jesuit with an impressive pedigree would speak to the crowd about the glorious passion and death of an insignificant leftist guerrillero from Galilee. As a new teacher, I got to hand out pointless flyers at the door.

Raúl Troncoso (center) escorts U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen (right) as he inspects the troops during a ceremony at the tomb of Bernardo O'Higgins, Liberator of Chile, in Santiago, Chile, on May 25, 1998 — Raúl Troncoso (center) escorts U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen (right) as he inspects the troops during a ceremony at the tomb of Bernardo O’Higgins, Liberator of Chile, in Santiago, Chile, on May 25, 1998. Source: United States Department of Defense

So many carnivores from the aristocratic jungle, gathered together in the classy new gymnasium shouting, crucify him. The stench of expensive perfume and weighty family names stored away for centuries in moth balls overwhelmed the humble senses of Renoleta drivers. The usual gym-shoe fragrance on any afternoon of adolescent boys’ basketball paled by comparison.

All aflutter, Teresita, organizer of the event, came running up in high heels, whispering with patriotic urgency that Raúl Troncoso was outside, and he wanted to talk to me. She imagined everything. That I was the CIA point man, and an important drop was about to be made on the school playground. That the Minister of the Interior needed a trusted translator to communicate with the House of Lords. That I was about to be deported by order of President Frei for high treason. She seemed excited. I told her I could see him in five minutes. When I ran out of flyers.

Raúl Troncoso was not very tall and bald. Beside Frei senior, who loomed extraordinarily tall with feet so big that no shoes purchased in Chile ever fit him, he looked comical. Frei senior gave patriotic speeches to all of Chile from the ancient balconies of power. Troncoso stayed out of view, but he told the President precisely what he had to say and how. Frei’s Cyrano. Politics for Troncoso was like music was to Mozart. He was a genius.

We had never met before. He asked me, you know who I am?

Yeah, I said. Sebastian’s dad. His youngest, Sebastian, sat in the second row of my sophomore English class. The minister and I did not talk about London, Lords or lawyers. He wanted to talk about his kid. The uncanny statesman was also a good father. If all politicians were like that, comrade, the world would be a different place.

Protest in favor of Pinochet's extradition in Córdoba, Spain, ca. 1998 — Protest in favor of Pinochet’s extradition in Córdoba, Spain, ca. 1998. Source: Javi S&M

Pinochet returned directly to Chile, without passing go, without collecting two hundred dollars. And without stopping in Spain to answer for the very serious charges leveled against him there. The House of Lords had decided to send him to Spain, but the Minister of the Interior got his colleague, the Home Secretary, to intervene. Jack Straw accepted the argument that the Retired General was in poor health and mentally incompetent for trial. And, that Chile was competent to try him on those same counts, exercising the jurisdiction that belonged to the sovereign nation where the crimes had been committed. The arguments seemed to contradict each other, but the Lords liked the part about sovereignty.

Dirty laundry should be done at home. That was a local proverb. That was Pinochet’s defense, and the reason why he came home. The old man arrived at the airport. For the benefit of the press corps, he stood up from his wheelchair, like Lazarus raised from the dead, no longer the drooling idiot the Minister of the Interior had claimed him to be, and marched triumphantly across the tarmac to a waiting bullet-proof limousine. While all the whole wide world looked on in dismay.

Pinochet was insufferable. Eighty-four years old and still messing with the entire planet like a kindergartener urgently in need of a spanking. Faking sick to get out of detention. That’s what we teach in our schools, comrade: Hacerse el huevón. It’s a classic Chilean expression, something like playing the fool. Clever Chileans know how to strategically pretend they are fools to get their way. In England, they called that corruption. In Chile, it was a hand well-played.

The Chilean courts resolved not to prosecute. Again. Pinochet was judged medically and psychologically incompetent. And still in control of dedicated hit-men who didn’t mind arranging accidents for judges and their families. And then, the Retired General, darling boy of all the anti-Castro Cubans, granted an exclusive interview to CNN in Miami. He told María Elvira Salazar of Channel 22 that he wasn’t a dictator, he wasn’t sorry, he was really a very good person, and he had never ordered the murder of anyone. Yeah, right.

Pinochet could have said anything in Miami. He had saved Chile from the Marxist devil, so Cuban expats worshipped the ground he walked on. But, without realizing it, he had stepped in a big stinking pile of fresh wet manure. After the interview aired, the courts in Chile revoked the ruling that had legally proclaimed him a drooling idiot, and they charged him with torture and murder and kidnapping, again. Dirty laundry should get washed at home, but sometimes it gets put away without getting washed at all, and it starts to stink.

The hidden fact was that not jailing Pinochet was one of the tacit agreements of the transition. His underlings would be charged, and a few of them would even go to prison. Pinochet could be indicted, but not jailed. He died in 2006 with 400 cases pending. And several million dollars on deposit at Riggs Bank in Washington, the origin of which no one could explain.

Pinochet Account Identification, appendix to Money Laundering and Foreign Corruption: Enforcement and Effectiveness of the Patriot Act – Supplemental Staff Report on U.S. Accounts Used by Augusto Pinochet. Source: U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

It wasn’t fair, and everyone knew what was going on. Many questions were left unresolved. It was a tactical retreat on the political chessboard. It had been decided, long ago, before the arrest in London. The victims of the Pinochet government would have to suck it up, and society would turn the page and move on. In the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of traditional power, powerful men of left and right had decided that the mothers of the disappeared would never know the truth, that they would pay the price for peace. We could never know where they were because that would mean we had to recognize how they had gotten there. We were to proceed as if nothing had ever happened. We were supposed to just collectively play the fool.

Chess is the ultimate Masonic power game. In Uruguay, masonic institutions—basically, all institutions—give not-so-subtle signs of their lodge affiliation by installing black and white tile in the entryways. In the form of a chessboard. On which you are required to stand. So that you will never forget that it is the kings and queens and bishops who make the power moves, and that pawns like you exist to get sacrificed.

Pinochet was a Freemason. Allende was, too. They belonged to the same lodge and that was the reason that Allende selected Pinochet to be his Commander in Chief. It wasn’t about his politics. The Chilean military, traditionally, didn’t have politics. Allende chose Pinochet because of the undying personal loyalty expected of fellow lodge members.

It could be assumed that, after the coup, because of his betrayal, Augusto was no longer welcome in the lodge. But of course, by then, he didn’t need a lodge. By then, he had all the powerful connections he would ever need. He had the GCU, the CIA, and the Opus Dei.

Some think that Opus Dei was the traditionalist Catholic response to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Too much social doctrine, they said, not enough Latin, incense and fancy robes. After the Council, Opus did call for a return to strict observance. But the Opus Dei predated the Council. It was the Catholic backlash to Spanish Freemasonry.

Before the Spanish Civil War, Freemasons had carefully situated themselves in strategic positions. They controlled commerce, public administration and education. Except for a few who managed to escape on ships bound for Chile and Uruguay, all Spanish Freemasons—all of them Republicans, which in Spain in 1930 meant, Marxists—were lined up against brick walls and shot by Franco’s men. To save Spain, the monarchy and the Catholic church, they said.

Spanish society was left without technocrats, civil servants or teachers. They asked themselves, how can we fill all those slots, and guarantee a Catholic, conservative, traditional Spain for the rest of eternity? And Opus Dei was born. Literally, the work of God. It functioned on the model of Freemasonry—a network of connections, invisible to non-members, set on controlling everything that counts—but with sacraments. Bishops moved across the board diagonally, comrade, but they always stood beside the king and queen.

From the beginning, Opus Dei in Chile latched onto the Pinochet government. It grew and became powerful. Augusto knew the drill. He had been a Mason for a long, long time. With a pinch of incense offered to the statue of the Immaculate Conception, he could gather the entire flock into his corral and confirm them as Chile’s rightful ruling class. He needed them because the CIA would grow tired of him, eventually, and he knew it.

Christian Democrats did not run with Freemasons or Opus Dei. So, why did Raúl Troncoso play chess with them? Why didn’t he recommend to Eduardo Frei that the House of Lords be allowed to make their own aristocratic decision and let Pinochet be someone else’s problem for a while? In Spain, guilty memories from Franco’s regime—and the conquest of the New World—needed purging. Pinochet would have gone to prison. It sure would have felt good.

It looked terrible for Troncoso, flying back and forth to London to defend the tyrant. But he wasn’t running for office. He insisted that Frei’s government should do everything possible to keep Pinochet out of Spain, and it wasn’t even to protect the international image, so all-important for tourism and foreign investment. It was because he knew that the elections in ’99 were going to be close. And he was right. It was a real nail-biter. If Pinochet had been jailed in Spain, patriotic moderates would have run to the polls to vote for UDI, the party of Pinochet’s Opus Dei.

It wasn’t about compassion for an octogenarian. It was about patriotism. Chileans distrusted foreigners in general. Too many centuries spent in isolation, living far across the sea and behind the tall mountains. But what really got them going, aside from fútbol matches, was the notion of being treated like savages. Como indio, as they would say. The key detail was that Judge Baltasar Garzón from Spain had argued before the House of Lords that Pinochet could never receive a fair trial in Chile. Which was true. That has already been decided.

In Spain, the assumption was that he still had a lot of residual power in Chile. That was true, too. He had power over courts and judges and lawyers. People were still afraid of him, and rightly so. But what voting Chileans heard was that a Spanish judge said that Chileans are too uncivilized to hold a fair trial. That would have made good people of moderate leanings vote for the extreme right. Troncoso had picked that up, and he had figured out a way to bring Pinochet home. Tío Augusto would have his moment at the airport, but nobody would care after that. Or so he hoped. Chess was not a religion for the Christian Democrats, but they did know how to play.

Raúl Troncoso died of cancer in 2003. It was an insidious type of cancer that hides in your guts until it’s too far along to do anything about it. He was sick for a few months, and he died at home. It wasn’t in the news until he was dead. Like Popes in the Vatican, who are always in perfect health until they are not breathing anymore. Sebastián knew his father was dying. He asked me to please keep it a secret, which I did. He missed his dad, after that. Raúl Troncoso was a wonderful father, a shrewd politician, and a courageous patriot, in his most clever way.

Chile’s wounds have yet to heal. The pawns on the chessboard still get played, but good people do what they can. They hope for the day when someone can do more.

Born in Texas, Nathan Stone lived more than thirty years in Chile. He is now back in Austin, working on a dissertation about Chile, and how we remember the revolutionary years.

A False Dawn? A Review of The Dawn of Everything

As its title suggests, The Dawn of Everything is an ambitious book. The authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, (one whom passed away while the book was in press) survey the whole past life of biologically modern humans in an effort to broaden the ambit of modern social thought. They aim to thereby open up the possibility of a more progressive future for humankind. The book is therefore at once a critique of Western thought, a manifesto, a work of social theory, an academic polemic and many other things. It is also often written with an arch humor. Thus chapter headings consciously echo those of the nineteenth century novel.

Cover of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

But The Dawn of Everything has a serious purpose. It presents itself as a critical alternative to contemporary ‘big history’ as found in, for example, in the work of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and others. It is also a trenchant critique of the standard issue “Western Civ” undergraduate survey textbooks of the 1960s or 1970s. This critique is a running thread through the entire work. The book thereby performs a valuable task in transmitting important new ideas to a mass audience while countering glib generalizations about human social organization, ‘hard-wired’ attitudes to sex, etc. current in the media and in pop psychology. Historians, archeologists and anthropologists have been developing such critiques for several decades. But they have worked too often as ‘lone scholars sniping from the walls/ Of learned periodicals…’ (W.H. Auden). I am fairly certain that their works have never been on the New York Times’ best-sellers list as The Dawn currently is. That by itself is a valuable contribution to public understanding. It is an important pinprick to overblown cliometric models and ‘Just So Stories’ about the Rise of the West that have sold millions of copies or won Nobel prizes in their day.

But despite a breeziness that makes for easy reading, The Dawn is not an easy book to review even with the aid of colleagues[1] (who bear no responsibility for anything in this review!) The difficulty stems not only from its length: 500 pages of text and 200 of references (in the hard copy). It also contains several different books and genres intermingled within it. I will try to untangle these themes and analyze them in sequence.

Alternative history of proto-humans

The first theme is an alternative history of the archaeology of the genus homo, beginning from its African emergence some two million years ago. That is followed by a focus on its only surviving species, sapiens, the one to which I and all readers of this review belong. They report the now accepted idea of the early diversity of hominin species in Africa was followed by the development of different, but also now extinct sub-species beyond the African continent. They mention, but do not explore the fact that all these other varieties of ‘homo’ somehow became extinct leaving modern humans. They are now the only extant hominid species anywhere on earth. Graeber and Wengrow, otherwise ready to speculate, do not ask why this happened. Extinction of one species soon after the arrival of another can occur by direct predation or by competitive exclusion from the only available niches. The latter seems more likely, though members of homo sapiens have, from time to time, also directly preyed on and eaten each other. Our ancient forebears are unlikely to have been more scrupulous with other hominins. But that was probably not the major mechanism of extinction. Competitive exclusion is likelier. It implies scarcity. The path to extinction would go by way of malnutrition and reproductive failure. This is therefore contrary to any idea of a generalized ‘primitive affluence’. These ecological explanations for the disappearance of an initial diversity are not explored.

The views of both popular and academic exponents of social evolution as driven by scarcity and competition are however flattened out and frequently attributed to an unnamed ‘anyone’ who thinks about human history. If this anonymous ‘anyone’ does not believe in a Rousseauvian primitive egalitarian simplicity, then they have chosen to believe in a Hobbesian world where individual humans in a state of nature engage in violent predation upon each other unless restrained by the strong arm of the despotic state. The state, Graber and Wengrow argue did not emerge as necessary consequence of agriculture. Agriculture had existed on a smaller or larger scale for thousands of years without giving rise to anything like a state. There was, as they say “no ‘original’ form of human society…” This is a very defensible argument already made several times in the past few decades.

Plants and animals changed the people who ate them

The next important theme they address is the role of agriculture in shaping human society. They suggest on a very limited basis that agriculture began as recreation and was periodically abandoned by choice in order to protect leisure and freedom. The academic commonsense derided here is that agrarian settlement led ineluctably to private property, the patriarchal family and the state. Instead, Graeber and Wengrow argue that agriculture was often rejected by those well able to farm who however chose not to do so. They point to societies that settled down to agriculture – sometimes for centuries – but then abandoned it to return to either a pastoral nomadic or foraging life. They are right that reluctance to fully adopt farming could arise from reluctance to accept subjection. Karl Wittfogel wrote of Inner Asia that sometimes “women, children and war captives tilled some few fields near a campsite, but “the dominant members of the tribe, the adult males stubbornly refused to abandon their hunting, fishing or herding activities.” Leisure and freedom were not open to everyone. Wittfogel continued that the “many primitive peoples who endured lean years and even long periods of famine without making the crucial changeover to agriculture demonstrate the immense attraction of nonmaterial values, when increased material security can be attained only at the price of political, economic, and cultural submission.”

Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power cover

But the rejection of agriculture cannot always be explained by Graeber and Wengrow’s preferred explanation of a human choice to live free. They do not explore the low productivity of early agriculture or its vulnerability to attack as a reason for periodic abandonment. In arid areas, protracted drought – combined perhaps with attacks from other starving peoples could drive farming communities into extinction. And so, as Debuys says, abandonment of fixed settlements “is a theme shared by all the [American] Southwest’s ancient civilizations.” In medieval Europe, seed-yield ratios for the principal cereals were barely three or four-fold: that means that one-third or one-fourth of an average harvest had to be kept for seed. Farming was thus extremely vulnerable to small changes in yield. Peasants driven by hunger to eat their seed-corn would be faced with the looming choice of starving to death, wandering away to gather wild foods or seeking life as debt-slaves in some hierarchical system that still had supluses. In North-Western Europe, only the ‘agricultural revolution’ of the eighteenth century broke through the medieval productivity ceiling and produced secure surpluses that allowed the enlargement of cities and manufacture.

History of ideas

Complementing The Dawn’s critique of ‘Rise of the West’ narrative is a new history of ideas that seeks the origins of major intellectual breakthroughs that supposedly constitute the foundations of the American republic. These, they argue could not be conceived by European theorists until their thought was pollinated by Native American thought. The Wendat statesman Kandiaronk was the true begetter of The Spirit of the Laws. The authors ignore that many New England settlers came from precisely the Protestant confessions where ideas of universal human rights and even the equitable sharing of land had bubbled up during the English Revolution. Christopher Hill exhaustively analyzed these in a famous book titled The World Turned Upside Down.

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

Nor were early Europeans the Eurocentric caricatures that they appear as in this book. Eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire were certainly enthused by Jesuit reports from China, as Graeber and Wengrow mention. But this only followed on millennial fascination with India. More than 50 years ago, Gottschalk and Lach’s textbook pointed to an ancient and enduring Greco-Roman fascination with Asia and the ascription of many virtues to its inhabitants. This continued through the Renaissance. For Rabelais (d.1553) “the Brahmans of India [were] exemplary wisemen (sic).” The Tudor Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More (executed by Henry VIII in 1535) cited an old Hellenic tradition that Alexander had consulted the Brahmans of Taxila because they lived in a perfect commonwealth guided by virtue. Even after classical times, the search for Oriental wisdom that Trautmann calls Indophilia permeated early colonial rule in India. Graeber and Wengrow denounce Eurocentrism but themselves rarely look at any history beyond the two sides of the Atlantic.

It was, according to the book, only after having been schooled by the Native Americans that the French intelligentsia were, for the first time, able to ask questions about the origin and fairness of inequality. The indigenous critique had been “a shock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation” that Enlightenment thinkers were only now capable of exploring. Indigenous North American men and women by contrast, had long debated the values that should guide human societies. They had already rejected the idea of rebuilding of centralized, authoritarian models such as those of the Classic Maya and Cahokian. The possibility that the disintegration of these large societies resulted from famine or environmental degradation rather human volition is not seriously entertained. Graeber and Wengrow admit that the exact causes of the abandonment of the great centers of these and other cultures is unknown. But they argue that what remained was a deep North American tradition of political thought and debate introduced to the French by men like Kandiaronk. After experimenting with divine kingship many (though not all) Native Americans had ended up prizing personal freedom above all. These free peoples were consequently horrified by the political life of the French. Their critiques of the slavish subjects of Louis XIV or XV revolutionized the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau. Ultimately, these thoughts were very imperfectly adopted by the rebellious colonists on the Atlantic coast of America who have claimed the credit for them ever after.

It is very likely that the Native American peoples had traditions of oratory and debate as a preliminary to collective decision-making. That has been argued at least since Schoolcraft in 1847. They likely found French military and civil discipline strange and distasteful. Warrior democracy however, is a recurrent historical phenomenon, often appearing alongside, or in response to, states. It would therefore be present in the North American woodlands too. But Tacitus’ Germans (c.100 CE) similarly gathered in tribal assemblies for major decisions. “When the multitude think proper, they sit down armed. Silence is proclaimed by the priests, who have on these occasions the right of keeping order. Then the king or the chief, according to age, birth, distinction in war, or eloquence, is heard, more because he has influence to persuade than because he has power to command. If his sentiments displease them, they reject them with murmurs; if they are satisfied, they brandish their spears. The most complimentary form of assent is to express approbation with their spears.” The contemporary Pakhtun or Pathan jirga assembly is, mutatis mutandis, another manifestation of the same phenomenon. In all such settings, polished oratory will emerge as a necessary element of leadership.

The other side of tribal life is inter-tribal violence. This is both assumed and glossed over in The Dawn. Native American wars were, Graeber and-Wengrow assure us, ‘mourning wars’ waged only to assuage the grief of relatives of those slain in previous episodes in the cycle of vendettas. They do not consider that the cycle could have continued endlessly. The Germanic tribes figured out a system of compensation for blood (wergild) exactly to prevent such conflict from escalating. Nor can the category of ‘mourning war’ explain the protracted conflict over beaver hunting grounds that resulted in the near-extinction of Kandiaronk’s own Wendat people. John Richards has, however described how “cultural inhibitions” against over-hunting failed to compete with the allure of European trade goods. “Algonkian material culture became dependent on French trade goods. Iron tools and kettles replaced those of stone, wood, bark, and bone. Harquebuses and pistols replaced bows and arrows in hunting and warfare… By 1649, the terror stricken Hurons, weakened by their inability to grow food because of raids, burnt their own villages and dispersed as refugees…”

Graeber and Wengrow do not explore why the introduction of European trade goods should immediately result in wars for control of the best beaver hunting grounds. The process is casually mentioned in the throwaway phrase ‘notorious Beaver Wars’. These were however, ethnocidal conflicts between indigenous peoples that ended in the disappearance of some of them. They were waged so that the winners could secure a monopoly over the supply of furs to the Europeans in exchange for valuable objects that the native peoples could not make. The logic of maximizing market returns by force was therefore intuitively grasped by Kandiaronk’s contemporaries. Indeed, The Dawn states that this monopolistic strategy was known earlier. The “Attiwandaronk appear to have been monopolizing trade to the south and through it to the Chesapeake Bay and beyond…” until 1600. It is certainly true that the wide distribution of material objects across entire continents in prehistoric time does not automatically signal the presence of commodity trade. But violent monopolization of markets with the consequent monopoly profits for the successful aggressor indicates either prior knowledge of or a quick adoption of the worst aspects of capitalism.

A Speculative History of Anthropology

A more academic field is the history of anthropological thought. Graeber and Wengrow read an idiosyncratic selection of anthropologists – some cited approvingly and some critically – to support the idea that many human societies have debated their governance practices and have consciously changed them from time to time. They also draw significant ideas later applied to processual archaeology, such as seasonal alternation of habitats and lifeways. But they suggest that even later ‘folk’ rituals kept historical memories of seasons of freedom alive. They therefore revive nineteenth century readings of myths and folk-rituals as relics of past societies. Not surprisingly, saturnalias and carnivals, and similar instances of the ‘world turned upside down’ feature in this book. Initially, they are deprecated as ‘folk egalitarianism’ of no great significance. But the endnotes sometimes take a more sympathetic view that carnivals preserved ancient seasonal alternations of societal organization. They also propose that myths can be ‘read’ as reflecting past historical processes.

This is indeed what Edwardian armchair theorists such as Sir James Frazer, author of the famous (or infamous) Golden Bough proposed. He receives a sympathetic reading in the book. So do structural theorists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, who famously dipped his toes in field work only once before moving to the comfort of the seminar room. Between them, these two provide a significant part of the conceptual frame of The Dawn. But the book ignores Lévi-Strauss’ comments about the desperate dry season hunger of the Nambikwara, even though its authors otherwise borrow copiously from his work. On the other hand, the ethnographic model developed on vacation trips among the Nambikwara by Claude Lévi-Strauss is taken as accurate. He in fact confessed in a footnote that he could not speak the Nambikwara language, nor could he secure the services of an interpreter. Instead, he was mainly reporting conclusions from conversations conducted in mime and a mixture of indigenous words with French and Portuguese terms. In fact, Lévi-Strauss’ field work has been shown to be shoddy and much of his description a projection of his own theories in separate research by Aspelin and Price near fifty years ago.

*Claude Lévi-Strauss (far left) at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Source: Museu Nacional Brasil*

Graeber and Wengrow are also strongly sympathetic to the nineteenth century theorists from whom they derive their ideas of primeval matriarchy and common property. Sir Henry Maine’s idea that Germanic peoples originally owned land in common is assessed favorably. But his contemporaries, Marx and Engels find scant mention: this is obviously because they were both evolutionist and determinist. They were determined to find scientific socialism and abhorred utopian thinking. For Engels, matriarchy and primitive communism have both existed, but only in ancient times, the childhood of mankind. The program of voluntarism that propounded in The Dawn would be alien to Classical Marxism.

Given its continuous emphasis on earlier human society as ever open to refashioning, The Dawn has to argue that we can only explain radically different societal organizations in terms of people’s conscious organizational choices. On the North American Pacific coast, each society performed “a mirror image of the other.” Native Americans who prized hierarchy even created indigenous slave societies and thereby demarcated themselves from those that valued freedom. Why the slaves did not flee to the latter is left unexplained.

Cover of Tribe and the State in Asia through Twenty-Five Centuries by Sumit Guha.

The process of separation is what the authors call ‘schismogenesis’, the seemingly spontaneous division of human societies into ‘culture areas’. That phenomenon has however long been studied in anthropology under the simpler title ‘boundary-making’ processes. Fredrik Barth wrote a half-century ago that it was control of the boundary that mattered. It was “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses.” Boundaries require policing of entry and assignment of status. Both imply imbalances in coercive power. Barth described how specific gate-keeping mechanisms had permitted the expansion of Baluch communities at the expense of Pakhtun ones for example. Weak Pakhtun family groups or individuals could be accommodated as dependents or clients. As a result, Baluch societies were strongly authoritarian and easily formed kingdoms when placed as overlords over an agrarian population. But Barth and many others also pointed to the formation of tribes out of simpler societies as a reaction to the encroachment of kingdoms. Tribal entities could both destroy and build kingdoms. The lovers of freedom do not always protect the freedom of others.

Cover of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries by Fredrik Barth

The program

A key idea that informs the entire work is the notion of a manifesto – and implicitly – a program. This asks readers to widen their imaginations and dream again of a better, more just social order to replace the fraying neo-liberal consensus that rules on both sides of the Atlantic today. It is especially aimed at ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) – a phrase made famous by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The Dawn argues that human groups have developed many alternatives through recent history. Readers should not succumb to fatalism. Humanity had found the answer in the past but has gone astray in the present, they declared in the New York Times.

Despite the title of the op-ed, the book begins by clearing away the idea that equality – often understood as equality in income or wealth – should be the highest value. They see this as a red herring, declaring that inequality is such a slippery term, and that “egalitarian society” can have no definite meaning. They instead propose freedom as the best principle for human societies, since free peoples can invent and change their institutions. They assert that “three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.” Their own vision of true freedom is suggested by what they attribute to indigenous peoples. “What we can now see is that the first two freedoms – to relocate, and to disobey commands – often acted as a kind of scaffolding for the third, more creative one.”

But the necessary conditions for these are left unexamined. Take relocation: after the democrats deserted the Cahokian culture, they declare, “hundreds of miles of river valleys around it, lay entirely devoid of human habitation.” Even if the Native Americans did this by choice (and not owing to population collapse or climatic insecurity) such abandonment is a luxury that the near eight billion humans on earth today cannot afford.

Unexplored themes

As I have mentioned, neither the English Levelers and Diggers of the 1650s or the riot of alternative ideas in the first decade of the French Revolution are addressed. Also neglected is the actual outcome of both. These were a military dictatorship followed by restoration of the previous dynasty in England and a series of sanguinary short-lived dictatorships (each claiming the embody Rousseau’s Universal Will) in France. That revolution was followed by the enlightened but endlessly bellicose despotism of Napoleon. Instead of considering serious historical conservatives like Jacob Talmon, Graeber and Wengrow simply attack anonymous straw men – the “many conservatives” who held Rousseau personally responsible for the guillotine.

The second unexplored problem is that of the coordination of economic activity in complex – and nowadays, global organizations. The goods moved today are now vital inputs of farming or luxuries become necessities, like smartphones, tea or cocoa. They also include vital production inputs such as fuel and fertilizer. The channels of commerce – undersea cables, harbors, communications satellites, airports, railroads, highways, pipelines – have been constructed through decades with vast expenditures of money and labor. Graeber and Wengrow do not value this physical infrastructure nor prize the social systems that created it. For them an always available open exit is the essential part of freedom. That choice – open to be made singly or en masse at any time – would preclude the building of any durable infrastructure. No big ships or costly harbors or railroads; no oil wells or pipelines; no Congolese mines for cobalt or Chilean ones for lithium; nor will there be Chinese factories making millions of electric cars or smartphones. No large scale transfers of food, whether as aid or trade. Kandiaronk supposedly declared that adopting his free and simple way of life would merely cause the death of “nobles, merchants and priests.”

Today, many others would also die on the streets, including university professors too…

Disregarding academic protocols

Despite denouncing ‘cherry-picking’, the book – though written by two distinguished scholars– consciously avoids the standard academic protocols of the academic world today. They carried out this project as a labor of love alongside their more routine academic publications. They therefore felt able to disregard some of the conventions when necessary. They declare that if they had actively cited and refuted specialists in different fields that they traverse during the course of this wide-ranging survey they would have written a book or two or three times as long as the current one.

Instead, they have mainly mapped what they believe happened and pointed out flaws in others’ arguments only where these reflected more widespread misconceptions. Cavalier disregard allows them to introduce their own surmises and thus give birth to their own family of misconceptions. As it is, “imagine” is one of the most widely used verbs in this book. The limits to others’ imagination are frequently invoked as evidence. For example, “it is hard to imagine” that Montesquieu did not learn of Native American political ideas from the delegations that came to Paris. In general, the authors consciously accept or massage the evidence for arguments that they support, while criticizing, deriding – or more often, ignoring, those they dislike. Equally, there is occasionally presentation of established academic findings with a ‘Gee-whiz, whoda thunk it!’ air reminiscent of that triumph of American marketing, Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

But their disregard of established protocols goes further more than once. Take the claim that contemporary American office workers work more hours “overall” than medieval European serfs did. This turns out to be based on the sociologist Juliet Schor’s book, cited without page number. But while Graeber andWengrow refer to ‘serfs’ even their incomplete endnote refers to “peasants”, Schor actually refers to adult male laborers (The Dawn n.17, Chapter 4; Schor, 1991: 45). Not all male peasants were serfs: and outdoor work in the fields or mines demands considerable effort that cannot be long-sustained. Nor does the weather allow it. It is therefore not comparable to contemporary American machine-supported and indoor work. Having made a claim unsupported by even their own shaky reference, Graeber and Wengrow then cite it as a proven fact and even ‘know’ what the “average medieval baron” would have considered a reasonable demand upon his serfs. Neither baron nor serf are mentioned in the source cited! This does not prevent the authors from wrapping themselves in the authority of the Social Sciences when needed and parading hundreds of endnotes to awe the reader.

‘Heterarchy’ or the Separation of Powers

The Dawn is also a critique and re-theorization of an old debate in the social sciences: the one around the emergence of the “state”. As Morton Fried wrote fifty years ago, the question has long been a favorite one. “Why have people permitted themselves to be seduced, bilked, murphied or otherwise conned into relinquishing a condition of egalitarianism for one of inequality?” The major target of this critique is the widespread idea that the adoption of sedentary agriculture led inevitably to economic differentiation, urbanization, autocracy and the rise of the state.

Graeber and Wengrow offer a complex idea of what is today called a state. A state, they argues, is constituted by the contingent overlap of three principles – the control of violence, plus a system of information and enforcement through bureaucracy and possession of charisma by a succession of leaders. Each of these three, they claim has separately conferred authority in various places and times. But no one of them was equivalent to the modern state: consequently the search for “the origins of the state is a fool’s errand”.

They continue that the capacity for an effective monopoly of violence had long been found in the centers of ruling power, whether in the Americas or Eurasia. It might be arbitrary and tyrannical, but its reach could not extend far from the center. The appearance of an information apparatus enlarged this range, but did so at the expense of the sovereign’s power, secluded as she or he was behind a screen of officials. Finally, another form of dominance was that embodied in a dynastic sovereign. It is connected with the heroic culture exemplified in the Homeric epics. The modern state is thus a “confluence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – that have different origins. Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together…”

The agents of history in this part of The Dawn are either humans in general or impersonal ‘forms’ that capture each other in a vaguely neo-Hegelian way. But the excavators of Catal Huyuk (Anatolia) and many other large settlements such as the Harappan cities invoked the simpler concept of ‘heterarchy’ to understand the governance of the complex systems that they uncovered. This concept appears only once in The Dawn – as an afterthought in the very last endnote in this book. That note does recognize that many of the societies reviewed favorably in the book could be termed ‘heterarchies’, meaning their governance ran along parallel, mutually balanced sources of authority. The concept is important: it represents an evolved compromise between collective governance and individual autonomy. This institutionalization of cross-cutting and independent authorities has a familiar name in the American political system. It is called the Separation of Powers and was consciously instituted by the makers of the American constitution adopted in 1790.

But the authors are clearly not admirers of the US nor of its constitution. In an implausible stretching of categories, they claim that even elected heads of state – like the President of the United States, have been selected by charisma and not true democratic choice. Modern elections they declare, are just a repetition of the old aristocratic contests for prizes, but now just re-labeled ‘democracy’. If indeed open election and charismatic dictatorship were exactly the same, we would never see military coups and authoritarian governments such as have befallen most members of today’s United Nations. And Donald J. Trump would still be in office today [2024].

Ultimately therefore, this is a stimulating but flawed book. It compels the reader to grapple with novel ideas and connects far-flung themes. It forces ideas that that usually siloed in their little scholarly niches into conversation with each other. But the reader is also forced into researching and fact-checking across many diverse fields. The process is slow and exhausting, if educative. And the book’s arguments fall apart under scrutiny. It is ultimately a repetition of a familiar literary exercise, the imagining a better world, a utopia, somewhere in the forgotten past of our species.

[1] Adam Clulow, Brian DeLay, Alan Tully and Isaac Ullah

Introducing Dr. José Manuel Mateo

By Camila Torres-Castro

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s recorded presentations. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. The conference recordings and connected articles can be found here.

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Las grabaciones de la conferencia y los artículos relacionados se pueden encontrar aquí.

Dr. José Manuel Mateo will be one of the contributors to the 2022 Lozano Long Conference which will be held in honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. The conference, titled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives”, will take place online on Thursday, February 24 and Friday, February 25 2022. The following is an introduction and overview of Dr. Mateo’s work, written in the hopes of bringing the reader closer to some of his intellectual and historiographic contributions in preparation for the conference.

Dr. Mateo’s interest in the work of José Revueltas arises when he was still an undergraduate student at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where he became interested in Revueltas as a literary figure more so than a political and historical one. Since then, he has devoted his academic career to the study of Revueltas’ contributions to Mexico’s literary tradition and, more specifically, to his critical and essayistic body of work. Dr. Mateo holds a MA in Mexican Literature and a PhD in Literature, both from his lifelong alma mater, UNAM. He is currently a professor and researcher at Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, where he continues to explore Revueltas’ work and his role within Mexican letters.

José Revueltas is without question one of the most important writers and political thinkers in Mexican history. Born in 1914 in the northern state of Durango, Revueltas comes from an illustrious family of artists: his siblings were Silvestre, a composer and musician, Rosaura, an actress, and Fermín, a painter. Revueltas created an extensive body of work that comprises 24 volumes that include narrative, essay, poetry, and so forth. Throughout his lifetime, Revueltas held many intellectual relationships with other Latin American writers and thinkers such as Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda, which Dr. Mateo explores in his series of edited volumes titled Tiempo de Revueltas. A lifelong dissident and prominent political actor, Revueltas died in 1976 in Mexico City. Dr. Mateo will be presenting on the José Revueltas Collection, one of the most important archival collections that are housed at the Benson, and sharing his vast knowledge on the writer’s work and life with us.

The work of Dr. Mateo proposes a rupture of canonical ideas around the production of knowledge. He re-examines the work of José Revueltas and Ricardo Flores Magón, for example, to situate them as prominent essayists within a literary establishment that did not consider them so. The fracture proposed by Mateo is especially clear in his discussion of the role of Flores Magón, a man considered first and foremost an ideologue and a “founder of newspapers” (Mateo 2019, 13)^[1], who nevertheless produced a body of literary work that undoubtedly makes him a pillar of Mexican essayistic currents.

In this crusade against orthodox aesthetics and restrictive perspectives on literary creation, Mateo himself has published his own poetic work and a collection of short stories titled Nadie se llama Caín (Literatura UNAM, 2019). He has also edited and annotated some of Revueltas own screenplays, namely El luto humano and Los treinta dineros, which were recently edited by UNAM in 2021. Here is where Dr. Mateo’s work and mine converge, for we both push against rigid notions of literary disciplines that insist that one thing is just one thing, and nothing more: we both disrupt the traditional idea of “genre” to open up the signifying possibilities of any given text. In this sense, Revueltas’ work provides a blueprint for ethical and political lessons that are urgent even in the present day, showing us that it is possible to think beyond pre-established limits.

Talking to Dr. Mateo in preparation for this piece, I asked him about an issue that has always caught my attention: the fact that the Mexican National Archives (AGN, which stands for Archivo General de la Nación) are housed within the walls of Lecumberri, a former prison also known as El Palacio Negro due to its gruel living conditions. José Revueltas himself was imprisoned there, and other famous inmates include Leon Trotsky’s murderer, Ramón Mercader, and muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. The structure of Lecumberri is a prototypical panopticon: arranged around a central patio that overlooks the galleys, which makes it an oppressive structure that reifies the centralization of knowledge and power that Revueltas so vehemently criticized. To this, Dr. Mateo responds with a protest chant: “cada cuartel, una escuela”, every barrack a school, which indicates the desire to transform spaces of physical and intellectual repression into places devoted to the life of the mind. This social demand has become true in some cases, like Lecumberri itself or the colony in Islas Marías, where Revueltas was also imprisoned twice during his youth. The repurposing of the prison, or the redefining of a present without walls that Revueltas fought for until his dying breath.

In short, Dr. Mateo is a fierce defender of the right to think, and “to think the unthinkable”, which is reflected in his thorough analyses of Revueltas’ work. “Que los consensos no se conviertan en losas que impidan seguir pensando”, he tells me, when I ask him what we can learn from Revueltas nowadays. It is clear that the need for critical thought is more pressing than ever, and that the fight for widespread access to knowledge is still ongoing.

As previously stated, Dr. Mateo will be participating in the 2022 Lozano Long Conference in honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, entitled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives” at UT Austin in February 23-24, 2022.

^[1] Mateo, José Manuel. Espectros del ensayo: José Revueltas y Ricardo Flores Magón. UNAM, 2019.

Texas State Historical Association – “Teaching Texas History in an Age of Hyper Partisanship” and “Forgetting and Remembering: Why Does Searching for an Accurate Past Provoke Backlash?”

Editor’s Note: If you have questions you would like answered at the live Q&A sessions on February 25th, please submit them here.

These two panel discussions, “Teaching Texas History in an Age of Hyper Partisanship” and “Forgetting and Remembering: Why Does Searching for an Accurate Past Provoke Backlash?”, were recorded by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) in late January 2022.

The TSHA was formed on the University of Texas at Austin campus in February 1897 and has been meeting annually about that time ever since. Under the guidance of George P. Garrison, for whom the building that houses the Department of History at UT is named, the TSHA gathered together women and men dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of Texas.

In 2021 the TSHA was compelled to meet virtually, but we still held our approximately forty sessions online, and continued our robust discussion. This year, 2022, we are able to meet in-person at the AT&T Center on the UT campus on February 24-26. Yet we learned something from our online experience. If you record sessions and make them available online, interested viewers can watch them at their own pace and reflect on what has been said in a less rushed way than a typical busy conference permits. For this reason, the leadership of the TSHA decided to record and make available in advance of the meeting these two special sessions. To create a fully interactive experience, we also decided that the panelists would gather in-person on Friday, February 25 at the annual meeting to answer questions.

These sessions are dedicated to the Fellows of the TSHA, a group of distinguished historians who have been added to ever since 1897. Just in case you imagine that the TSHA never changes and still reflects the vision of the Anglo elites who argued that Texas deserved special study in and of itself, let me make two important points. Starting in 1912 when the name of our journal was changed to the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, the TSHA has worked to connect Texas and Texas history with ideas, places, events, and currents of thought beyond its borders. As it did so, the membership and leadership of the TSHA grew beyond the old Anglo elite to include a far more representative and diverse group of both professional historians and those outside the academy.

“Teaching Texas History in an Age of Hyper Partisanship” and “Forgetting and Remembering: Why Does Searching for an Accurate Past Provoke Backlash?” illustrate both the successes of moving beyond a myopic focus on Texas exceptionalism dominated by Anglo elites and the struggles and tensions that remain part of that transformative process. They are another down payment in the ongoing effort to place Texas and all Texans in the Southwest and beyond.

Special thanks go to Emilio Zamora and Light Cummins who chaired these two panel discussions. The other panelists– John Moran Gonzalez, Bernadette Pruitt, Lilliana Saldaña, George T. Diaz, Bryan Burrough, Peniel Joseph, and Monica Muñoz Martinez– have joined Zamora and Cummins in giving us the gift of their life experiences and careful reflections on studying, teaching, and bringing to the public the best and most accurate history.

If you have questions you would like answered at the live Q&A sessions on February 25th, please submit them here.

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Review of The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (2022)

While most Americans are likely to think of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) in connection with the Vietnam War, Johnson himself wanted to be remembered in terms of his domestic achievements in the form of the Great Society. Lacking in many accounts of LBJ are his policies toward the rest of the world. In The End of Ambition, Mark Atwood Lawrence brings into focus U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, by focusing on the Third World, with the notable exclusion of Vietnam, during LBJ’s tenure. Few scholars are better positioned to undertake this study. Lawrence is currently the Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum and an accomplished scholar specializing in the Vietnam War and more broadly in the history of U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s. As an historian steeped in the politics of the era, Lawrence addresses an important shortfall in scholarship on the Johnson Administration and U.S. foreign policy in general.

book cover for The End of Ambition : The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era

Lawrence begins by considering the legacy bequeathed to LBJ by John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). Johnson began his presidency by committing to JFK’s agenda and maintained much of his team. This proved problematic as JFK had often failed to establish clear objectives or priorities and seemed to lack a fixed set of guiding principles. In Lawrence’s words the Kennedy administration was a “conglomeration of tendencies, rather than [an] executor of a core set of ideas.” Lawrence reviews the Kennedy Administration’s approach to four countries—Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia—and one region—Southern Africa—to provide context for his investigation of the Johnson administration’s approach. Supporters of Kennedy might object to Lawrence’s critical portrayal of the JFK administration as lacking context and depth. However, considering Lawrence’s focus on LBJ’s foreign policy pertaining to the Third World, he does an admirable job in providing the right amount of context critical to a nuanced exploration of LBJ’s approach to the third world, without overwhelming the reader.

LBJ’s ambitions in the domestic context were clear, as was his desire to focus on domestic affairs over foreign policy. In line with this basic intent, the Johnson administration adopted a distinct approach to the Third World that, for better or worse, resolved the ambiguities of JFK’s administration. LBJ sought to lower U.S. ambitions in the Third World and reduce risk while shoring up U.S. control over global affairs by establishing or bolstering cooperative regimes. Despite the judgment of many, including LBJ himself, that he lacked foreign policy expertise, LBJ’s approach to international affairs was rooted in intellectual tendencies distinct from those of JFK, not ignorance. Where JFK sought to transform, LBJ sought to manage. Still, Lawrence points out that LBJ was more visionary than JFK in areas that today we refer to as transnational issues. Further, while LBJ’s ambitions in foreign policy may have been tempered by his desire to focus on domestic affairs, he nonetheless displayed the state-building impulse of the 1930s in both the domestic and foreign arenas. This might be expected based on LBJ’s admiration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and LBJ’s desire to bring to full fruition the wider new deal program.

Five case studies form the heart of Lawrence’s book, covering U.S. policy toward Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. Central to LBJ’s foreign policy in each of these case studies was a desire to minimize U.S. burdens so as to not further distract from efforts in Vietnam as well as Johnson’s broader goal of advancing the Great Society program. This was the key driver in the LBJ administration’s bringing to power, or enhancing relations with, often authoritarian regimes that could effectively govern and reduce the potential for conflict or communist advances while acting in concert with U.S. interests more broadly. In Brazil, LBJ presided over transformative events and constructed a new relationship with a military regime that effectively dismantled Brazilian democracy. The administration’s patterns and policies in Brazil informed his approach to the Third World for the duration of his tenure. These tendencies included favoring the development of constructive change and democracy over the long-term by countering the danger’s posed by communist movements.

A general labeled "anti democratic rulers" says to President Johnson: "Where I'm in charge, there's absolutely no danger of democratic government being subverted." — This cartoon by Herb Block was published in the Washington Post on May 3, 1965, a few days after U.S. Marines landed in the Dominican Republic to bolster a friendly regime. The cartoon hints at the Johnson administration’s attraction to reliable authoritarian leaders across the Third World. Source: The Herb Block Foundation

With India, LBJ shared Kennedy’s hope that resistance to Chinese expansion would serve as a basis for cooperation, but by early 1966 he was losing hope for reasons including India’s lack of support for U.S. actions in Vietnam. In LBJ’s approach toward India, we see another principle emerge: the emphasis on economic development more so than military assistance. This certainly held true in the case of U.S. policy toward Iran. There was also a China angle in enhancing relations with Tehran as a hedge against Islamabad’s improving relations with China.

In Indonesia, the rise to power of the military led to the “evisceration of the world’s third-largest communist party.” Still, among the countries explored, Indonesia was the most resistant to U.S. influence. The Johnson administration wisely opted for a low-key approach, playing the long game by building influence in select elements of the Indonesian military and society. LBJ and his team viewed Indonesia as a success story that gave American leaders renewed confidence that the Vietnam War was achieving important results even absent a clear military victory. Johnson felt that if the United States had not taken a stand in Vietnam the countercoup in Indonesia in 1965 and the defeat of communism would not have come to pass.

A meeting of the National Security Council on January 7, 1964, reached consensus on the need to keep providing aid to Indonesia despite Sukarno’s provocations. CIA Director John McCone sits at the far end of the table, with Budget Director David Bell to his right and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to his left. Around the table in a clockwise direction are Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, President Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, an unidentified official, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Source: LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

Even though Southern Africa held less strategic importance to the United States, it provoked more political controversy. This was based on intersections with the U.S. domestic context, specifically civil rights. Here Lawrence’s case study differs in that it involves a region, not just a nation, though Rhodesia is the primary focus. Despite the differences, the same patterns and policies were clearly in evidence including a desire to minimize U.S. direct involvement, particularly any type of military involvement. Vietnam was certainly a consideration, but one can also appreciate a sense of realistic assessments and expectations regarding the importance of the region and what U.S. power could accomplish. Although one could argue that an appreciation of U.S. constraints emerged only due to Vietnam, such a judgment seems to underestimate LBJ’s priorities. It is likely that LBJ would have opted for such an approach even absent Vietnam as his priority was the Great Society. In fact, Lawrence’s work supports the contention that LBJ had across a broad basis a preference for restraint overseas and action on the home front.

Lawrence not only covers this history of foreign policy during a critical period in American history, but he also considers patterns and precedents. The title of the book may be mildly misleading in this regard. Lawrence asserts that the United States is shaped by the competing impulses of worldmaking and self-interest. In this context Lawrence asserts that the United States has faced multiple inflection points in which it curbed its worldmaking ambitions in favor of a narrower pursuit of its self-interest. It might be more accurate to say that the United States tempered its ambition, but that the pattern that Lawrence alludes to in the ebbing and flowing of American ambition remains intact and returned with a vengeance in the 1990s.

Lawrence’s volume raises many important issues including the relationship between domestic and foreign policy that in total represent the national interest. There are few case studies as potentially rich in this regard as LBJ’s basic dilemma – Vietnam vs the Great Society. Such a study would provide additional context and understanding of the priorities and rationale guiding how the Johnson administration faced the rest of the world, aside from Vietnam. For scholars of the Cold War, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, and U.S. foreign policy toward the third world more generally, Lawrence’s The End of Ambition makes an invaluable and much needed contribution.

Bryan Port is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin and a civil servant with the Department of the Army assigned to U.S. Army Futures Command as a strategist. He is a historian of the United States focusing on U.S. intellectual history. His research interests include the construction and application of the idea of national interest as well as grand strategy. Bryan holds a M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University and a M.S. in National Security Strategy from the National War College. His ongoing research centers on American progressive leaders and thinkers of the first half of the 20th century.

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