Henry Wiencek, Author at Not Even Past

Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (1991)

by Kevin Baker

At the Battle of Stalingrad in January 1943, the German Wehrmacht looked hopeless. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had died, many were suffering from frostbite, and the Red Army had captured thousands more. Yet in the soldiers’ private correspondence, many ordinary troops expressed an undying loyalty and belief in Adolf Hitler. They still believed that he would somehow save them from complete annihilation. In Hitler’s Army, Omer Bartov examined how ordinary soldiers endured the Second World War. Even in the end, according to Bartov, the army remained intact, with limited mutinies compared to the First World War. In the face of complete annihilation at the hands of the Red Army, the Wehrmacht continued fighting in a “war of ideologies:” German cultural survival vs. “Judeo” Bolshevism. By focusing on the Wehrmacht’s clash with the Soviet Union, Bartov illustrates the soldiers’ greatest triumphs and horrific defeats while still maintaining their ideological ethos. Bartov concentrates on the Nazi indoctrination that happened long before the war, but, argues that, “it was during the war, and most importantly on the Eastern Front, that the Wehrmacht finally became Hitler’s army” (12). The lynchpin that kept the soldiers fighting in unspeakable circumstances was Adolf Hitler. Even when ideology and propaganda proved less effective late in the war, the soldiers believed that Hitler would still lead them to victory.

Bartov explains how the Nazis gradually eradicated many traditional army practices and transformed the Wehrmacht into Hitler’s army. Historically, until 1933, the German army remained a depoliticized separate entity from the state. He centers first on the traditional “primary groups” (soldiers that all came to the unit together) that bolstered unit cohesion and morale. Next, Bartov explains the importance of primary groups in the German army as expressions of esprit de corps and maintaining strong morale. After massive casualties during 1941’s Operation Barbarossa, replacements were too heterogeneous to form new groups and the Wehrmacht slowly lost its traditional formation. By emphasizing that primary groups only lasted a short while and most officers died, Bartov shows that these traditional roles did not play a significant part in maintaining cohesion and loyalty.

Bartov further argues that Hitler’s army endured the war through a perversion of discipline. The Wehrmacht leaders used draconian punishments and martial law to maintain order, which were new forms of discipline created by the Third Reich. The smallest infractions led to harsh penalties and any semblance of shirking or purposefully escaping death led to the death penalty. The harsh discipline resulted in a brutalization of the German army on the Eastern Front whereas the soldiers had carte blanche to terrorize the local populations with impunity. These two brutal aspects of war held the army together.

Finally, Bartov examines the role Nazi ideology played in distorting the soldiers’ perceptions of reality. Through memoirs, diaries and private correspondence by ordinary soldiers and generals, he shows that late in the war the soldiers “preferred to view the reality they knew best through the ideological factors of the regime” (8). During and after the Third Reich an inversion of reality took place. Soldiers concentrated on the physical hardships they endured while repressing and “normalizing” its inherent criminality.

Bartov posits that the army became an integral, not separate, entity of the Nazi regime. His study places emphasis on the Wehrmacht as the people’s army and a reflection of the civilian regime with its motivations, propaganda, and ideology. It became a tool of the regime and no matter the social or religious background of its members, Wehrmacht soldiers committed atrocities against those they perceived as “subhumans.” Even to the bitter end, their belief in Hitler’s “salvation,” held units together.

Photo Credits:

Adolf Hitler meeting with generals Friedrich Paulus and Fedor von Bock in Poltawa, German-occupied Ukraine, June 1942 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B24543 / CC-BY-SA)

Wehrmacht infantrymen in the Soviet Union, 1941 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1989-030-27 / CC-BY-SA)

Wehrmacht infantrymen marching across the Russian steppes, 1942 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-217-0465-32A / Klintzsch / CC-BY-SA)

Pipelines along Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Standard Oil in Louisiana

This is part of an occasional series of articles highlighting the fascinating collection of historical documents in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin.

by Henry Wiencek

The January 1919 edition of The Lamp, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey’s nationally circulated trade publication, marvels at the firm’s gleaming new refinery in Baton Rouge. After being spun off from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, the newly independent company was eager to grow its business in the Bayou State. And the Baton Rouge plant had done just that, becoming an enormous industrial concern refining over 40,000 barrels of crude each day.

This issue of The Lamp, which Standard Oil-NJ sent to its employees, stockholders, and outside subscribers, tries to assuage contemporary anxieties over big business by celebrating the economic development and social uplift occurring in Louisiana. Thanks to company investment, a productive and modern industry is replacing fallow cotton fields and the primitive, old ways they represent. The Lamp even presents Baton Rouge’s new refinery as an agent of Post-Reconstruction reconciliation, a harmonious project of regional collaboration between northern expertise and southern natural resources. Oil refining represents nothing less than societal transformation: a “New South” of productivity, sectional reconciliation and affluence, all brought to Louisianans by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.

Company photographs depict Louisiana as a landscape in transition—a space where farming is slowly giving way to modern industry. Under the title, “The Transformation of the ‘New South’ Under the Magic Wand of Industry,” two large horizontal photographs spread parallel across the page. The top image depicts a 1909 cotton plantation of overgrown weeds and ramshackle fencing set against a winding dirt road. The photograph directly below displays the same patch of land ten years later, where an enormous refinery dominates the horizon and bears no mark of any agricultural predecessor. This striking visual comparison offers a clear and proud juxtaposition: the old giving way to the new.

By working towards a future of economic modernity, Louisiana was also escaping a legacy of north-south antipathy. The Lamp depicts the refinery as a national project in which northern industry and southern land work in concert towards a productive future. “A Southern Business Home,” which discusses the company’s Baton Rouge headquarters, inscribes this language of regional partnership into the building’s very architecture. Elegant colonial windows look upon orderly refining processes and converging railway lines, creating a dynamic interplay between old world repose and modern productivity. Standard Oil-NJ’s headquarters physically embodies peaceful collaboration: the industry and expertise of the north working alongside the abundant lands and bucolic lifestyle of the south. Even as pipelines and factories consume more and more Louisiana bayou, the form and style of Standard Oil-NJ’s development promotes an image of peaceful coexistence with the southern landscape.

Yet despite all the enthusiasm for the company’s role in Louisiana, The Lamp also conveys a quiet anxiety as it ponders the bucolic, pre-modern past that industry is steadily replacing. Photographs and articles simultaneously celebrate industrial change and commemorate the people and lifestyles that are vanishing as refineries engulf plantations. In “Pipe Lines in the South,” C.K. Clarke, manager of the company’s Pipe Line and Producing Department, describes the intersection of industrial expansion and romantic traditions in Louisiana, whimsically imagining Standard Oil’s pipelines stretching within sight of Uncle Tom’s cabin. Although Clarke concedes that Louisiana’s old ways are incompatible with the modern world, he strikes a nostalgic tone as he considers the lamentable, if necessary, end to a romantic, pre-modern time.

For just a moment, The Lamp‘s narrative of progress and optimism pauses to consider the consequences of industrialization. The company publication creates a wistful historical record of the wild landscapes and wild characters of the “Old South” before they disappear—a kind of strange recompense for its own role in their destruction. Changes in land use represent progress, but also the end of an era. To be sure, this is a “history” told entirely on company terms, reinforcing the backwards and fundamentally un-modern character of old Louisiana. But it does suggest that Standard Oil-NJ officials were, at very least, conscious of their public—and historical—image. The Lamp accordingly presents company men not as mindless capitalists, but as thoughtful stewards of the past, rightly or not.

Amidst a national climate of anti-monopolism and trust busting, The Lamp unapologetically promotes the benefits of big business in Louisiana. Articles and photographs celebrate rapid changes to the state’s landscape as symbols of progress and betterment. Pipelines and refineries engulfing cotton fields augur a “New South” of industry, profitability and sectional reconciliation.

But for all the confidence its narrative exudes, The Lamp cannot help but consider what is being lost in the march to modernity. Company officials remain deeply fascinated by the vanishing “Old South” and the nostalgia it conjures. At certain moments, The Lamp reads like a romantic history book, chronicling the quaint ways of the old bayou before it becomes just another factory. While the employees of Standard Oil-NJ are undoubtedly proud of their work in Louisiana, they remain highly attuned to contemporary fears over industrialization and its potentially corrosive impact on American society. The Lamp is ultimately both confident and defensive: optimistic about the future Standard Oil-NJ is creating and nostalgic for the past it is destroying.

Photo Credits:

Selected pages from the January 1919 edition of The Lamp

The ExxonMobil Historical Collection

di-09040, di_09041, di_09042

The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin

***

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Stephen F. Austin’s 1835 bookstore receipt

For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920-1964 by Barbara Weinstein (1996)

by Eyal Weinberg

In this rightfully celebrated book, Barbara Weinstein explores the efforts of São Paulo’s industrial elite to shape and control the Brazilian workforce from the 1920s to 1964 through two government-established yet privately-controlled public agencies—the National Service for Industrial Training (SENAI) and the Industrial Social Service (SESI). Founded during the 1940s, these agencies were the vessels through which Paulista industrialists, technocrats and educators advanced their agenda of “rationalized organization” and “scientific management,” promoting the idea that professional authority and technical expertise were necessary to modernize Brazilian society.

Employing discourse analysis to examine an astounding number of primary sources—interviews, newspapers, bulletins, periodicals and government records—Weinstein traces the origins, roles and reception of SENAI and SESI. She begins by reviewing the influence of early twentieth-century ideas about work organization such as Taylorism, Fordism and applied psychology on São Paulo’s new generation of postwar industrialists. Her analysis of newspapers published by the industry’s associations demonstrates how a “rationalization discourse” that emphasized national progress through industrial development, began to appeal to influential figures. They “found rational organization a guide to the construction of a sanitized, orderly urban society in which they would provide the crucial technical expertise.”

The Brazilian state was never preoccupied with mediating labor demands until Getúlio Vargas’ presidency. During Vargas’ Estado Novo, however, the regime enacted federal legislation to regulate labor and capital, and to resolve workers’ grievances. Industrialists, for their part, did not appreciate the state’s efforts to control their businesses and protect workers’ rights.Out of that conflict came SENAI (Serviço Nacional de Aprendizagem Industrial) in 1942 and SESI (Serviço Social da Indústria) in 1946, both decreed by the federal government but operated by associations of industrialists. SENAI, self-defined as a “practical training” agency, promoted scientific management and vocational training; SESI, which Weinstein considers more ideologically motivated, administered welfare and educational programs that aimed to battle the influence of leftist and communist-leaning labor initiatives.

Propanganda poster of Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas meeting young children (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Volleyball game at a SENAI industrial school between students from Curitiba and Londrina, 1950 (Image courtesy of The Scientific Electronic Library Online)

The nuanced examination of SENAI and SESI programs is perhaps the most fascinating part of the book. More than examining the ways in which workers’ skills and behavior were shaped, Weinstein illuminates the workers’ role in constructing the hegemonic relationship between the laboring and the industrialist sectors. Through training sessions, SENAI instilled the “appropriate” conduct of workers at the workplace, creating skilled (and semiskilled) workforce that raised levels of productivity. Accompanying this, SESI established recreational sports clubs, which according to Weinstein aimed not only to win the loyalty of the working class but also to prevent militant workers from organizing and consequently damaging productivity. Yet the agencies’ concern was not limited to what was happening on the factory floor. SESI also intervened in the household, where social workers, counselors and magazines both advanced the “proper ideals” and responsibilities of the housewife, father and children, and promoted budget planning as a solution to workers’ grievances regarding low wages. Good management was seen as the perfect panacea.

Children learn blacksmithing at a SENAI industrial school, sometime between 1943 and 1950 (Image courtesy of The Scientific Electronic Library Online)

These initiatives were successful in preventing intense class conflict between 1920 and early 1960s. Weinstein demonstrates that industrialists were not the only ones to adopt the rationalizer’s discourse. Workers and labor leaders were not only receptive to programs that offered secure salaries and occupational health, they also took pride in their role as key agents of progress, modernizing the Brazilian economy and society. By the early 1960s, however, labor organizations began to show signs of defiance to the process of cooptation and intervention in factory life. In response to workers’ unrest, industrialists turned to support an authoritarian ideology. The change was expressed through SENAI and SESI covertly supporting the 1964 military coup, and embracing the repressive programs of the regime for “social peace.” On the other hand, the industrialists’ modernization project—aimed to create a progressive and productive labor force—did not necessarily produce submissive workers. As Weinstein notes in her concluding chapter, a surprising number of SENAI graduates played leading roles in the revival of labor activism during the 1970s and 1980s, among them former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Contemporary photograph of the São Paulo building housing the SENAI and SESI agencies (Image courtesy of Eyal Weinberg)

For Social Peace offers a large-scale, yet in-depth, analysis of the development of the urban laboring sector in Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century and the role the Brazilian industrialist elite played in the country’s modernization process. Its nuanced interpretation, illuminating both workers’ acceptance and their uncertainties regarding the efforts for rationalism and progressivism, is still, seventeen-years after its publication, a well-deserved foundation to the field.

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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Darcy Rendón’s review of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life

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A Historian Reads Machiavelli

by Jeremi Suri

“I judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of half of our actions, but also that she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern. And I liken her to one of these violent rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plains, ruin the trees and the buildings, lift earth from this part, drop in another; each person flees before them, everyone yields to their impetus without being able to hinder them in any regard. And although they are like this, it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging.”

Machiavelli offers many kinds of advice to the modern prince: manipulate fear, spread benefits among the population, seek broad counsel, and take strategic risks. He envisions a strong and wise leader who protects the interests and freedoms of his people. Machiavelli also hopes that the modern prince will employ ambitious, experienced, and intellectual advisers, like himself.

For historians and our students, there are also many valuable passages in Machiavelli. Among them, Machiavelli’s reflections on the struggle between fortune and will – what historians often call “structure” and “agency” – are particularly worthwhile. The Florentine thinker describes the historical tectonics that even the most powerful figure cannot resist: shifts in military capabilities, economic advantages, and basic human demography. These historical tectonics are not deterministic, but they are too powerful and too dependent on past actions for anyone to change them in the short term. The prince must understand context and adjust. This is basic historical humility.

1558 fresco depicting the 1529-30 Siege of Florence (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Machiavelli combines this humility with a clever recovery for greatness in human agency. Amidst the historical tectonics of any time, there are spaces where choices can have a huge effect. Machiavelli’s Florence could not turn back the rise of French military and economic power, but it could reorganize itself and nurture qualities (“virtues”) to prepare for the actions of the powerful monarchy in the north. Leadership, for Machiavelli, came from studying the historical tectonics, anticipating what they would mean for the future, and identifying choices that could improve preparation. He knew that sixteenth-century Florence’s strategic options were limited, but he also saw ways that the leaders of the city-state could maximize benefits and limit suffering with forward-looking decisions. To look forward, however, meant understanding how the future would likely emerge from the trajectory of change starting in the past.

1532 Florentine edition of The Prince (Image courtesy of NPR/Donato Pineider)

We study history, among other reasons, because it helps us as citizens to understand the forces that shape our lives and identify how we can make a difference. Every successful person that I have met, in any field of endeavor, has reflected on what Machiavelli called the fundamental struggle between fortune and will. It is unresolvable. It is not susceptible to mathematical formulas, simple principles, or glib models. It is a timeless struggle, but it is different with every person and in every moment. We study history so we can decide for ourselves how we see our place and purpose in a historical continuum that rushes before our eyes, where we are hoping, at best, to catch a good wave.

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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Alison Frazier evaluating some “Lightly Fictionalized” books about the Italian Renaissance

And Ben Breen revealing the importance of clothing the Renaissance era

The Longhorns’ Resident Historian

By Nicholas Roland

Most days Clyde Rabb Littlefield may be found busily managing a real estate investment and property management business from a small office adorned with Longhorn sports memorabilia in the historic Robinson-Rosner building in downtown Austin. Littlefield holds two degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (B.A. ’53, M.A. ’57), neither of which is in the field of history, but everyone who knows him knows that Littlefield is first and foremost a historian, with a particular interest in the early history of the institution that he and his family have been intimately connected with for over a century.

Photograph of Clyde Rabb Littlefield standing next to a plaque memorializing his father — Clyde Rabb Littlefield standing next to a plaque memorializing his father.

As a native of Austin and two-time alumnus of UT, Littlefield bleeds burnt orange. In fact, his connection to the University of Texas is genetic. His father, Clyde Littlefield, was a legendary athlete and coach for the Longhorns. The elder Clyde was one of a duo of famous, albeit unrelated, Littlefields who left a significant mark on the University of Texas. George Washington Littlefield (1842-1920), a member of the Board of Regents and important early donor to the University, endowed the Littlefield Fund for Southern History, the iconic Littlefield Fountain, and the sometimes controversial South Mall statuary on the Forty Acres campus. In contrast, Pennsylvania-born Clyde Littlefield (1892-1981) began his career in Austin in the fall of 1912 as a freshman student athlete from the oil boom-town of Beaumont, Texas. By the time he graduated in the spring of 1916, Littlefield was a twelve-time letterman, an all-Southwest Conference athlete in football and basketball, an all-American in basketball, a conference hurdles champion in track, and had equaled the world record in high hurdles in 1914. According to his son, Littlefield only lost one race during his entire collegiate career. After a brief stint in the Army followed by some high school coaching, he returned to Austin and coached football, basketball, and track until 1962, winning twenty-five Southwestern Conference titles in track and field and two conference titles in football. Clyde Littlefield’s most enduring legacy at UT is the Littlefield Texas Relays, a major national track and field event. A campus road adjacent to the track stadium bears his name and he is memorialized in the Longhorn Hall of Honor and on a plaque located at the gate to Mike A. Myers Stadium.

Having virtually grown up in the shadow of the UT Tower, it was only logical that Clyde Rabb Littlefield would become a Longhorn himself. Upon entering the University in the fall of 1949, he enrolled in Air Force R.O.T.C., a new program on campus resulting from the Air Force’s establishment as a separate military branch in 1947. “Well,” recalls Littlefield with a laugh, “when I joined ROTC as a freshman it was not popular. And then the following summer the Korean War broke out, and to avoid the draft it became popular!” He graduated in the spring of 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in Government. After commissioning as an Air Force officer, Littlefield received orders to Korea and soon found himself on a troop ship crossing the Pacific Ocean. Arriving shortly after the cease-fire took effect on the Korean Peninsula, Littlefield’s unit decided that it needed a historian and he recalls that “they discovered that I minored in history.” This fortuitous discovery would have a major impact on Littlefield’s career for decades to come.

Second Lieutenant Littlefield was soon slotted as a unit historian, an assignment that proved very memorable for the young officer. After being assigned to Advance Headquarters in Seoul, Littlefield remembers being sent to the Demilitarized Zone in a Jeep with an armed escort to carry an important message to the United Nations commander: a North Korean MiG had been shot down in the first major incident after the July 27, 1953 cease-fire. He recalls that during this incident, “They didn’t trust electronic communications, so that’s why they sent me.” An assignment to Headquarters also meant that Littlefield had the opportunity to travel widely in East Asia and the Pacific. During his service in the Air Force he visited the Philippines, Japan, Thailand, Macaw, Hong Kong, and Iwo Jima in both official and unofficial capacities. Upon completion of his Active Duty service, Littlefield made the ten-day Pacific Ocean crossing to the United States on a troop ship.

A postcard view of UT's West Mall, ca. 1940 — A postcard view of UT’s West Mall, ca. 1940 (Image courtesy of The UT History Corner)

After returning to Austin, Littlefield pursued a master’s degree in Government at UT, graduating in 1958. His thesis, “American Assistance to Japan, 1945-1956,” was inspired by his experiences in war-torn East Asia, especially his realization that “in California seemingly so much concrete was around, relative to Japan or Korea.” After receiving his M.A., Littlefield worked briefly for Hughes Tool Company in Kansas, and subsequently found a job as a civilian historian for the Department of the Air Force. He continued to work as an Air Force historian for the next twenty years, retiring in 1980. Along the way Littlefield was able to continue his love of travel, living in such locations as Los Angeles, Kansas City, Wiesbaden, Germany, Honolulu, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C. His stint in Hawaii encompassed Vietnam War operations and he later authored a white paper on the proposed B-1 Bomber while working in Washington, D.C. Upon retirement, Littlefield returned to his hometown and embarked on his current career in real estate investment and property management. Littlefield laughs when recalling the changes he found in Austin when he returned: “You know I naively thought when I was moving back here from [the] Washington, D.C. area that I was going to know everybody! Because when I was growing up we only had one high school, well one white high school anyway. So even though it was very large you tended to – if you didn’t know of somebody you knew somebody who knew somebody type thing. But of course, when I got back that didn’t exist at all.”

Clyde R. Littlefield’s interest in history did not end with retirement from the Air Force. Today he spends much of his free time researching the first decades of The University of Texas, exploring the origins of Roundup, Bevo, and “The Eyes of Texas” as well as the origins and fates of a wide range of individuals who shaped the early history of the school. In 2004 his research produced a book on the early history of Kappa Alpha, his fraternity while a student at UT. He has spent so much time at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History that he now sits on the advisory board for the internationally renowned archive.

Photograph of UT students gathering under the UT Tower to celebrate the annual Gone to Texas Night — UT students gather under the UT Tower to celebrate the annual Gone to Texas night (Image courtesy of Austin American-Statesman)

Through his research and his own lifetime of experience at UT, Littlefield has seen many sweeping changes. The athletics program has evolved from the days of student club teams that played and sometimes lost to prep school squads to a professionalized department generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year. Littlefield recalls that the friendship between his mother and Rowena Bible, wife of Coach Dana X. Bible pre-dated Bible’s move from Texas A&M to UT, noting that “in those days people knew each other pretty well. There weren’t too many … extra coaches running around shall we say.” Overall, until recent decades athletics were “more amateurish, less commercial. Remember, we didn’t have commercial television here until the 1950s. I think the timing of any game was not driven by television. And it was very predictable. I remember, let’s say a football game, you almost always knew when it was going to start. Because that was the set time,” he concludes with a chuckle. The growth of the University itself has been equally astounding. Littlefield’s believes that “when I was in school and before, I think the University was more personal. And I’ve got the impression today it’s much more bureaucratic.”

Massive growth in the state of Texas, the city of Austin, and at UT have combined with wide ranging social changes to render the UT of 2013 a vastly different place from the slowly desegregating campus Clyde R. Littlefield encountered as a freshman in 1949, to say nothing of the small town university his father Clyde Littlefield entered in 1912. Whatever the future holds for The University of Texas, one thing is certain – the Littlefield name will remain synonymous with the Forty Acres, as it has for the past century.

Photo Credit:

Clyde Rabb Littlefield by Nicholas Roland

Braided History

by Joan Neuberger

This braided watch chain comes from a private archive. Similar family archives often end up in the collections of local historical museums or even national repositories like the Library of Congress. This archive is housed in a box in my closet.

My archive contains documents my father collected about our family history, old photo albums going back to the early 20th century, a daguerreotype from even earlier, and some very odd objects, including this watch chain, which is made out of human hair.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, men and women in the US, following the Victorian British fad, wore watch chains, earrings, and brooches made out of hair, often as mementos of loved ones who had died or gone off to war. Unlike a memento mori, or a reminder that death is inevitable, relics such a loved one’s hair suggested the persistence of life even after death.

There is something of the religious relic in the hair ornament: a piece of the body that endures after death that can be both venerated and consoling. But we keep precious religious relics like the bones of saints in houses of worship. Hair jewelry was worn on our own bodies.

Now it seems creepy to weave adornments out of something so carnal. What changed?

Major cultural shifts are notoriously difficult to explain, but a few of the possibilities for explaining our modern distaste include the arrival of inexpensive Kodak cameras that allowed people to keep evocative reminders of loved ones that were free of actual body parts.

The popularization of psychoanalysis and the sanitation of death practices made our desire for proximity to other people’s dead bodies seem a little neurotic. And the carnage of World War I may have diluted our interest in the elaborate mourning rituals so popular in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world.

My mother kept this hair chain in a leather glove box. We don’t know whose head provided the hair or who made it. But it was an object of fascination for her as a child, as it was for us: a mysterious but intimate link to the people in our past.

Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism by Thomas W. Devine (2013)

by Michelle Reeves

Henry Wallace, according to Oliver Stone’s Showtime series, Untold History of the United States, was a true American hero, a lover of peace, and a gentle soul whose leadership could have saved the world from the Cold War. While no one has ever accused Stone of historical accuracy, his past work did not lay claim to documentary status. So how well does Stone’s interpretation comport with the historical record? As Tom Devine’s new book, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism, makes clear, Stone’s view of Wallace is deeply misleading and based on an extremely selective reading of the sources. In fact, as Devine shows, Wallace was an astoundingly naïve politician, and he has remained a fairly obscure historical figure because he did not have much to contribute to American politics, beyond a pie-in-the-sky utopianism that was completely out of sync with the realities of his era.

Though the scholarship on the Red Scare and McCarthyism is extensive, that on Popular Front liberalism is decidedly less so. The historiography of Wallace’s campaign, moreover, tends to downplay or misunderstand the role of American communists in the Progressive Party. Devine provides a timely corrective by examining the alliance between the communists and the progressive left and illuminating the destructive influence of the U.S. Communist Party. Declaring the incipient fascism of U.S. domestic policy the greatest threat to world peace, the communists simultaneously denounced the Truman administration’s foreign policy in the harshest possible terms. Because anticommunist liberalism developed in response to the growing pro-Soviet orientation of Popular Front organizations, the communists deserve the lion’s share of the blame for the rancorous divisions that afflicted postwar liberalism.

Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace and Ellison D. ‘Cotton Ed’ Smith of the Senate Agriculture Committee meeting in Washington, January, 1939 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Drawing on a wealth of oral interviews, in addition to archival and news media sources, Devine explores the Wallace campaign’s critique of American Cold War policy. In Wallace’s view, American imperialism and domestic fascism represented a far greater threat to world peace than did the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. The Marshall Plan was nothing but a Wall Street plot to dominate foreign markets and the United States bore sole responsibility for the burgeoning Cold War. Wallace believed the only way to secure world peace was to appease the Soviets by offering a series of concessions to their strategic goals. But as events like the Czech coup and the Soviet blockade of Berlin would demonstrate, Wallace’s belief in the essential goodness of the Soviet leadership was shockingly naïve and out of touch with the vast majority of international public opinion. Because his campaign was launched on the basis of a critique of Truman’s foreign policy, Wallace’s ignorance of foreign affairs and his rose-tinted view of life in the Soviet bloc was his biggest liability. Though Wallace ultimately proved to be an ineffective and unpopular politician, as Oliver Stone’s documentary series makes clear, the radical leftist narrative Wallace championed has endured. This is perhaps in part due to the fact that subsequent U.S. military interventions seemed to prove Wallace’s warnings about the dangers of U.S. Cold War imperialism particularly prescient.

Billboard promoting the 1948 Wallace campaign for President (Image courtesy of the University of Iowa Special Collections)

Devine’s exploration of Wallace’s campaign and the dynamics of the communist-progressive alliance is political history at its finest. Chockablock with colorful quotes, wry asides, and deft understatement, the book is not just a timely and persuasive rejoinder to the popular – though fundamentally misleading – narrative of American postwar liberalism, but is also a genuine pleasure to read.

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Michelle Reeves’s review of Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945-1965

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Stephen F. Austin’s bookstore receipt

This is the first in an occasional series of articles highlighting the fascinating collection of historical documents in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin.

by Brenda Gunn

In July 1835, after two years in Mexico, part of that time confined to a jail cell, Stephen F. Austin received a passport issued by the Mexican government. Austin had gone to Mexico on a diplomatic mission, when Texas was still under Mexican rule, but set off to return home to Texas, where the political climate had shifted and tolerance for Mexican rule had deteriorated. On his way back, he spent time in New Orleans, purchasing several books that might provide clues to his state of mind.

Austin’s passport and the receipt for his book purchases are part of a collection held at The Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin. The passport confirms that Austin boarded the Wanderer and set sail from Veracruz bound for the United States. The exact date of Austin’s landing in New Orleans is unclear, but the New Orleans Bee mentions Austin’s stay on Aug. 12, 1835.

Stephen F. Austin’s 1835 receipt for Hotchkiss & Co. Booksellers and Stationers in New Orleans (Image courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History)

While in New Orleans, Austin visited Hotchkiss & Co. Booksellers and Stationers on Chartres Street, where he spent $27 on books. It is clear that Austin was interested in conflicts. Listed on the receipt were two recent publications: A History of the Fall of the Roman Empire by J-C-L Sismondi and History of the Revolution in England 1688 by Sir James Mackintosh (both published in 1834). Austin also purchased Washington Irving’s military history, Spanish Conquest of Granada.

These choices suggest a shift from Austin’s long-held moderate outlook regarding Texas’ relationship with Mexico toward resignation that conflict was inevitable.

Other purchases listed on the receipt, however, reflect very different preoccupations.

19th century depiction of Stephen F. Austin (Image courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History)

An issue of the monthly literary magazine, Atkinson’s Casket: or Gems of Literature, Wit, and Sentiment and a copy of Penny Magazine, which focused on British culture, exhibit the cultural interests of the future revolutionary. Since Austin wrote often and at length, it also seems fitting that the receipt includes a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.

Austin also bought the Young Man’s Own Book: A Manual of Politeness, Intellectual Improvement, and Moral Deportment and Sacred Classics, or Cabinet Library of Divinity, featuring sermons on a variety of topics. Most of the books Austin bought that day are works of nonfiction and convey a serious frame of mind in August 1835.

He did leave room for a novel: Pelham: Or the Adventures of a Gentleman, a tale of a young man with political aspirations — a topic that may not have been far from Austin’s heart.

***

Check out more DISCOVER pieces:

Ann Twinam explains how a 19th century Peruvian “bought” his whiteness

And Danielle Sanchez discusses her family’s confusing, and often painful, history of immigration, race and prejudice.

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War, by James Mann (2010)

by Joseph Parrott

Ronald Reagan’s presidential policies have irrevocably shaped the political debate over the last two decades. He effectively reversed the momentum of the New Deal expansion of the federal government while leading the largest growth in peacetime military spending in national history, making him a polarizing figure for commentators and historians alike. Contrasting visions of Reagan have been especially stark in the realm of foreign affairs. Advocates often argue that he launched a new arms race that undermined the Soviet Union. Critics remember a detached leader presiding over the shameful Iran-Contra scandal. Both depictions are problematic, as they accentuate different aspects of a complex, often inscrutable man. Therefore, James Mann’s examination of the president’s personal diplomacy with the Soviet Union is especially welcome. The journalist has written critically of conservative foreign policies in the past, but he finds much to admire in Reagan. No, the president did not single-handedly end the Cold War, nor was he the primary factor influencing its peaceful resolution. According to Mann, he was, however, optimistic and adaptable, relying on a set of Cold War values that emphasized the human character that existed under the communist system he so vehemently despised. These values ran counter to entrenched ideologies on both right and left, but they allowed him to see the promise of working with honestly reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev.

Mann finds the key to Reagan’s rebellion in his particular moralistic perspective on the Cold War conflict. The president believed that the United States was a country of right, where democracy and capitalism best served the needs of the people. In contrast, Reagan viewed communism as a devious ideology imposed on an unwilling nation by disingenuous leaders. This Manichean approach to the political systems often made him aggressive and overbearing, inspiring his rhetoric of the “evil empire” and his unbending attachment to the “Star Wars” missile defense system. However, Mann argues that this separation of the people from the system also allowed for a certain flexibility. Reagan saw a real possibility for systemic reform if only a Soviet leader would abandon dictatorial control of the people. Mann contrasts this ideological worldview with the seemingly more moderate one held by the realist architects of détente, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The duo embraced a rigid model of geopolitical competition where the existence of two superpowers with contrasting ideologies made some conflict inevitable. Power relationships, and not specific leaders, fueled the feud. Managing the conflict through persistent pressure offered the only solution. Due to his faith in a laudable human side to the Soviet state, Reagan broke with his own party’s thinking. He embraced Gorbachev when he came to trust the man, moderating his suspicion of the Soviet actions in a way critics like Nixon could not understand.

This interpersonal relationship is Reagan’s lasting contribution to decreasing tensions. Mann makes this argument by examining a series of key moments in Reagan’s presidency. When Gorbachev first came to power, Reagan remained hawkish and distrustful of the new leader. The arch-Cold Warrior eventually warmed to the Soviet premier thanks partly to the intervention of popular author and Russophile Suzanne Massie and to the face-to-face meetings at Reykjavik and Geneva. Certainly, Reagan never fully abandoned his confrontational tone, perhaps best exemplified in his direct challenge to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Still, Mann considers even this a positive quality, as Reagan continued to push Gorbachev to make good on his opening of the Russian political system and the liberalization of its foreign policy.

President Reagan meeting with Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev for the first time during the Geneva Summit in Switzerland, 1985 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

There is room for debate in some of these conclusions, but Mann shows clearly the key role of Reagan in keeping dialogue going after the initial summit meetings. Nixon, Kissinger, and even advisers like Frank Carlucci rightly believed that Soviet reforms were meant primarily to strengthen the country, yet in their support for more confrontational policies they missed the real potential of cooperation. The president was almost alone in his belief in the sincerity of Gorbachev’s calls for reduced tensions and the decisive role collaboration could play in positively shaping global politics. The president could not have predicted the rapid dissolution of the communist bloc or the Soviet Union, but he “grasped the possibility that the Cold War could end” and he sold this hope to a wary country over the objections of his own political party.

Ronald and Nancy Reagan greeting Moscow citizens during the Moscow Summit (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Mann’s eminently readable book demythologizes Reagan, but it also celebrates his lasting if perhaps unpredictable contribution to ending the world’s most dangerous international conflict. Mann agrees with recent authors like historian Melvyn Leffler that Gorbachev’s actions lead to the peaceful resolution of the Cold War, though the Soviet premier does not take center stage. Reagan’s role was as the willing dance partner. Reagan was a hawk, but he was far less hidebound in his beliefs than many of his contemporaries. The president pursued the opportunity to reduce tensions when it presented itself. In a time when politicians from across the political spectrum are retreating into bunkers of partisanship, Mann is right to celebrate Ronald Reagan’s decision to ignore the party line.

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