Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

I am Twenty (1961, released 1964)

It is Moscow in the early 1960s. In this transitional period, when Stalin’s death opened up new possibilities for private life in Soviet society, we meet three young men and a young woman who can almost bring themselves to believe that they are entitled to a life that will be individually meaningful. They search for authenticity in a city that seems both ordinary and extraordinarily vivid. We don’t just watch Sergei, Slava, Kolya, and Anya; we follow them to school and work, to a spontaneous evening of dancing and music in the courtyard of their apartment building, we are plunged into the crowd at a surprisingly joyful May Day parade and into the audience at a public poetry spectacle that feels more like a rock concert. The director, Marlen Khutsiev, gives us intimacy amid public spectacle, so we feel the characters’ self-confidence in looking forward and their increasing frustration at the limitations set before them.

The close personal point-of-view and the almost tactile realism of the individual episodes keep all this from becoming a trite coming-of-age narrative, even as the film explores what was emerging as one of the central late-soviet social issues: finding a balance between private fulfillment and public responsibility in a society where surveillance had been taken for granted.

These engaging stories of cautious, youthful self-discovery are unexpectedly interrupted about half-way through the film, when the camera zeros in on a tear-away calendar marked June 22, the date in 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. I don’t know how contemporary Soviet viewers perceived the film up until this point, but for me, its resolutely present and future orientation had obscured what now becomes obvious: that the twenty-somethings we’ve been hanging out with were members of the first generation to come of age after the war. Their search for purpose suddenly no longer seems purely ideological, materialistic, or individual. They are, in fact, each shadowed by the devastation of war-time loss even as the richness of their everyday experiences seems to have put the war behind them.

As in so many other Soviet films of this period, the older, war-scarred generation has no useful guidance for them in the new, freer, comparatively luxurious post-war world. The young adults are suspended between past and future, but in this brave new world, they are on their own. (The absence of a wise advisor, a stand-in for the Communist Party and a staple of Stalinist films and novels, infuriated censors and caused the film to be shelved for four years).

Margarita Pilikhina’s stunning cinematography brings us close to these characters and their world of youthful pleasure, anxiety, and growing disillusionment. Her camerawork is primarily responsible for the intimacy we feel and the empathy we develop. I am Twenty is a beautifully lighted film. Indoors and out, in the glare of sunlit streets and the shadows of workplaces and apartments, the black-and-white photography is a palette of luminous shades of gray. The soft lighting, however, is neither sentimental nor nostalgic; it conveys the characters’ sense of being suspended in time, between an unthinkable past and not quite imaginable future.

At the same time, the camera is exceptionally mobile: moving constantly, careening through streets and circling around, soaring above, and zooming in on people. The tension between suspension and motion embodies the young people’s inner conflicts and perfectly captures the hope and disbelief –and growing cynicism–that characterized this period in Russian history.

In my view, I am Twenty is the best Russian film of the period. Admirers of more well known directors like Andrei Tarkovsky will undoubtedly disagree, but in I am Twenty, Khutsiev succeeds in creating a fully realized world and plumbing the depths of human experience, not in some fantastical, imagined situation, but in the most ordinary everyday.

Propaganda or Progress?

by Virginia Garrard Burnett

These posters were circulated in Nicaragua in 1980 when campaigns to celebrate the end of dictatorship, to increase literacy and to improve public health were central policy concerns.

On July 19, 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN or Sandinistas), a leftist movement that drew its support from a wide sector of Nicaraguan society overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family dynasty had ruled the Central American country with ruthlessness and greed since 1936. The Sandinistas established a revolutionary government that was inspired by Karl Marx and Fidel Castro but was also deeply influenced by Catholic ideas of social justice.

The ascendency of Ronald Reagan to the US presidency in 1981, however, placed the Sandinistas squarely in the crossfire of the new Cold War. Pressure from the United States (especially the US-supported contra war) and Sandinistas’ missteps, along with growing disillusionment of Nicaraguan society, brought about the end of the regime in 1990, when the Sandinistas were voted out of power in a free democratic election.

Although the Sandinistas ultimately proved a disappointment to both the supporters and the opponents of the regime, the early days of their rule were full of optimism and hope for a new Nicaragua, where the full rights of citizenship and access to public goods would be accessible to all.

Two programs in particular, the national literacy campaign (more than half the population was illiterate in 1980) and a national campaign for basic public health (life expectancy of Nicaraguans in the 1970s was only 54 years old) formed the heart of the early Sandinista agenda. The posters here promote these Sandinista social programs, and, generally speaking, the Sandinista cause. They are part of a collection held in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Their strong graphic qualities reflect both the aesthetics of the late 1970s and the Sandinistas’ need to convey political information visually to a largely unlettered citizenry.

THE LITERACY CAMPAIGN

One of the first objectives of the revolution was to introduce basic literacy to Nicaragua’s large illiterate population, in order to both improve people’s lives and to inculcate them with the values of the Sandinista revolution. The National Literacy Crusade, headed by Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit priest, sent “brigades” of young, urban Nicaraguans to remote parts of the country to teach basic literacy to adults. Many of the early-reader materials utilized explicitly political motifs. Whether or not new readers embraced those ideas, the literacy crusade dramatically improved rates of functional literacy in adults by teaching more than 400,000 Nicaraguans to read and write. The program also introduced the young, urban teachers—brigadistas—to the realities of the poor rural countryside, many for the first time.

Poster showing a young man reading to an older man while a young woman and older woman look on. Poster reads "el deber de un hombre es estar alli, donde es mas util."

The quote printed near the top of this poster, “The duty of a man is be where he is most needed,” comes from the great Cuban nationalist of the late 19^th century, José Martí. In this drawing we can see the young brigadista—clearly identifiable not only by his red Sandinista kerchief and CNA hat, but also by the relative whiteness of his skin—sitting on the ground with a rural campesino (peasant) family and exploring a book that bears the hallmarks of the National Literacy Crusade (or CAN). We see that two of the campesinos are older adults, while a young woman also looks on. The campesinos are surrounded by the tools and implements used by ordinary workers—the man has a hoe and ax, while both women hold manos y matates—corn grinders for making tortillas—all common tools that signify the Sandinsitas’ desire to value to both literacy and labor. In the background are the humble, thatched-roof wattle-and-dab houses common in the Nicaraguan countryside, all in the shadow of a volcano, a geographic feature so characteristic of Nicaragua that it has been used as a signifier for the nation on stamps, coins, the national flag and the Nicaraguan Coat of Arms.

For more on the resources of the Nettie Lee Benson collection, see http://www.lib.utexas.edu/benson/

Further readings on Nicaragua in this period:

Michel Gobat. Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Duke, 2005)

John A. Booth, The end and the beginning: the Nicaraguan Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982)

John Donahue, The Nicaraguan revolution in health: from Somoza to the Sandinistas (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1986)

English translations of posters (by order of appearance):

“Childhood is happiness. Happiness is the revolution.” The Luis Alfonso Velazquez Association of Sandinista Children.

“The People and Army United Guarantee Victory. “(FSLN)

“The Motherland…the revolution.” Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda.

“Literacy is liberation. [To be literate] is to follow the road marked out by Carlos Fonseca (a founder of the FSLN who died in 1976) and Sandino. Free Nicaragua!” (National Literacy Crusade)

“The duty of a man is to be here, where he is most needed.” National Literacy Crusade..

“Our Land: Our Revolution.” The Nicaraguan Institute of Agrarian Reform.

George on the Lege, Part 2

Interior view of the Texas State Capital Building looking up into the building's dome.

By George Christian

The proposed appropriations bills introduced in the Texas House and Senate over the past two weeks merely confirm that Texas is in a budget crisis of historical proportions. Both bills assume there will be no additional revenue beyond what the Comptroller says is available for the next biennium (roughly $77 billion, give or take a few hundred million), and both bills cut total funding for state government by roughly 17%. The heaviest cuts are where most of the money is: in public education (15%), higher education (17%), and health and human services (22%). No part of the budget, however, has escaped unscathed. All in all, the starting point for writing the 2012-2013 state budget is more than $16 billion lower than what was budgeted for 2010-2011.

As we have seen, however, the Legislature has been here before, both in 1987 and 2003. In the first crisis, which broke during the summer of 1986, Governor Mark White called the Legislature into special session to deal with a $1 billion actual deficit, brought on by a sudden collapse of the state’s real estate and oil and gas markets. The Legislature responded by enacting a supplemental appropriations bill that cut revenue appropriations previously made by Legislature by a then-staggering $511.7 million, and further cancelled a 3% pay raise for state employees, netting an additional $70.5 million. These cuts amounted to about a 5% across-the-board cut in state spending for fiscal year 1987. To make up the rest of the deficit, the Legislature temporarily raised the sales tax rate from 4.125% to 5.25%.

Prior to the regular legislative session in the spring of 1987, Governor William P. Clements, who had previously been elected in 1978 as the first Republican Governor of Texas since Reconstruction, defeated incumbent Governor Mark White, who advocated the combination of budget cuts and temporary tax increases the Legislature adopted in the early fall of 1986. When the Legislature convened under the new governor, it soon became clear that a budget deadlock would occur. Defying the Governor’s call for $5.7 billion in further budget cuts, both the House and Senate decided that the best response to the crisis was to raise $5.7 billion in revenue to restore funding for public and higher education, health care, and other essential state services. The regular session ended without a resolution of the budget, and legislators spent most of the broiling summer of 1987 in political gridlock. Only when House Speaker Gib Lewis and Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby finally convinced the Governor to agree to another increase in the sales tax (from the temporary 5.25% to 6%), did the crisis end.

As Texas emerged from recession, the 1989 and 1991 Legislatures faced lingering budget problems, as well as a school finance crisis, but neither session had to reduce the overall level of state spending and in fact increased it. Another major reckoning didn’t occur until 2003, when the post-9/11 recession hit Texas, resulting in a $1.8 billion deficit and projected shortfall of $10 billion. This time, the Legislature made significant cuts in state spending, but it is often overlooked that in 2003 state lawmakers also adopted a number of revenue-raising measures and accounting practices that offset part of the shortfall. The bulk of these reductions were made in health and human services, both by reducing eligibility for Medicaid services and cutting back on the Children’s Health Insurance Program and other services. Most of this funding was restored in 2005, when the state returned to a positive revenue position, and in both 2007 and 2009 the Legislature got the benefit of substantial fund balances to increase overall spending.

That, of course, brings us to the present crisis. It appears that the current state of thinking is to follow the 2003 model: significant cuts with the possibility of some non-tax revenue at the end of the day. The 1987 model, however, is not being considered.

Sources:

H.B. 1, 69^th Legislature, 3^rd Called Session, 1986

Legislative Budget Board, Recommended 2002-2003 Appropriations Bill, 78^th Legislature

Comptroller of Public Accounts, Sources of Revenue Growth: A History of State Taxes and Fees in Texas, 1972-2001

Want to know more about the Texas Lege?

Texas Legislature Online
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/

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.

The Rebel’s Hour by Lieve Joris (2008)

by Charles Thomas

Lieve Joris recounts the true story of Assani, a student, rebel, soldier, and statesman, in a genre she refers to as literary reportage. Joris begins Assani’s story in Kinshasa during the fragile peace of 2003, when he is serving in the disparate forces that constitute the Congolese military. From this touchstone Joris recounts Assani’s life through a series of biographical flashbacks — from his youth as a cowherd in the turbulent Eastern Congo of the 1960s to his rise to generalship in a new Congolese state. Throughout, the reader is given a passionate and often disarming portrayal of the book’s scarred but loyal subject as he struggles with the complex ethnic and political dynamics at work in the frail but enduring Congolese state.

It would be doing this work a disservice, however, to view it simply as a biography. While Assani’s story itself is fascinating, it serves a far more vital service as a guide through the turbulent history of the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. The vast majority of Western readers are unaware that in the late 1990s two horrific wars originated in the Great Lakes region, with the Second Congo War (1998-2003) involving eight separate African nations and claiming the lives of 5.4 million people. As a descendant of the Tutsis who settled in the Eastern Congo, Assani’s story traces these wars from their earliest rumbling to their conclusion in the peace agreement of 2003. From its origins in the 1960s Tutsi resistance to the Mobutu government, to the violence between the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda that reignited the conflict; from the war waged by Laurent Kabila to seize power from Mobutu in 1996, to the horrific and confused regional struggle of 1998 to 2003, Joris uses Assani’s life to tell the history of what is now known as “Africa’s World War.” With so little otherwise written on the subject, this serves as a necessary narrative of what is certain to be a defining period in Central African history.

Overall, Joris has created a masterful work. In Assani the reader is given a sympathetic but controversial figure, through which they can absorb the history of one of the world’s most conflict-riven regions. By the end of the work even readers new to the subject will have a solid understanding of the complexity of the region, the harrowing prosecution of the region’s wars, and the fragile peace that even now appears to be unraveling. This understanding is facilitated by an excellent glossary and index of historical figures provided by Joris at the end of the book. Given the continued difficulties of the region and yet the almost complete silence of the media on the topic, The Rebel’s Hour is a necessity for any reader interested in the tides of conflict and renewal in Central Africa.

Beseiged: Voices from Delhi 1857 by Mahmood Farooqui (2010)

by Isabel Huacuja

During the summer of 1857, Indian rebel soldiers from the British Army attempted to overthrow the British hold on India and reinstall Mughal rule. For five months, rebels seized Delhi and declared the aged Mughal noble, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Emperor of India. Referred to as the 1857 Mutiny by British rulers and as the First War of Independence by enthusiastic nationalists, few events in Indian history incite more passion than the 1857 seige of Delhi. In Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857, Mahmood Farooqui draws on more than ten thousand Urdu and Persian documents processed by the rebel administration and later used by the British as evidence in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s trial. As Farooqui notes in the introduction, despite the widespread availability of histories, memoires, and essays on the 1857 uprising, we know much about the British experience and remarkably little about what went on within the walls of the seized city. The documents in this collection show how the rebel government administered the city and how the uprising affected ordinary people.

One man asks the rebel government to release his dhobie (washerman) from prison because the dhobie has all the man’s clothing and he has nothing left to wear. A widow asks for financial compensation because rebel soldiers killed her husband and stole all her belongings. Farooqui presents grievances from soldiers who had not been paid, letters from ordinary citizens complaining about harassment by rebel soldiers, documents describing elopements, evictions, burglaries, bail proceedings, gambling, and counterfeit currency. Food was scarce and looting widespread. The city’s sanitation system broke-down and corpses and animal carcasses lay on the streets untouched for months. The documents recount “the unsung, the ordinary, and the unheroic” of 1857.

A few themes run through the selected documents and cannot fail to capture the imagination. First, anti-British sentiments were widespread. Regardless of how the English may have thought of themselves, to the natives, they were “trespassers.” Second, the uprising enjoyed a wide base of support; doctors and lawyers joined the cause along with soldiers and civilians. Third, religion played a role in the uprising as anti-Christian rhetoric was widespread, but, as the translator reminds us, not everybody was affected by “religious fervor.” Fourth, while chaos certainly prevailed in Delhi in 1857, the historiography overemphasizes disorder and confusion and almost completely overlooks attempts at order and organization. In the author’s opinion, the mere existence of an archive produced by and for the rebel government shows “there was some order, organization and method to the outward chaos.”

The papers collected in that archive and presented in this book serve to record a time of turmoil and provide a bird’s eye view of everyday life during a very complicated and multifaceted event.

Latin America’s Cold War by Hal Brands (2010)

by Michelle Reeves

In this new book, covering the entire period of the Cold War in Latin America, Hal Brands restores agency and initiative to Latin American actors, in the process demolishing many of the platitudes that have governed much of the U.S. foreign policy literature. Based on prodigious research in a dizzying array of U.S., Latin American, and even East German archives, Brands’s work advances a trenchant interpretation that cannot be ignored. He argues that the origins of the chaos and instability that ravaged Latin America during the Cold War owed less to U.S. interventionism than to the prevailing confluence of local, regional, and global dynamics.

Though the burgeoning Cold War atmosphere did little to discourage the power grabs of authoritarian leaders, their actions were determined less by U.S. prodding and more by elite backlash against the extension of middle- and working-class power that had occurred earlier in the 1940s. The democratic opening of the World War II period gave way to the consolidation of dictatorship during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Cuban Revolution dramatically altered the landscape of Latin American politics, and here as well, Brands challenges the conventional wisdom concerning the Cuban-Soviet alliance. Castro’s turn toward the Soviets was driven by ideological and political considerations and occurred well before the disintegration in U.S.-Cuban relations. The real story of the 1960s is not, as most historians would have it, the extent of outside interference in Latin America, but rather the insurmountable difficulties that foreign interventionist powers confronted in attempting to expand their influence throughout the region. Brands locates the source of the intense conflicts of the 1970s in the widening ideological gulf between proponents of National Security Doctrine, who sought to eliminate all shadings of leftism, and advocates of liberation theology, which in its most extreme form embraced Marxism as a tool of social justice. The right-wing extremism of the 1970s was a backlash against the guerrilla violence and leftist radicalism of the 1960s.

The revolution in Nicaragua, far from being exemplary of hemispheric trends, in fact owed its success to four distinct though interrelated factors that combined to render the situation in that country unique. Not only was the Nicaraguan system deteriorating from the late 1960s, but the guerrillas had learned enough from the travails of their predecessors to earn substantial support from among the agrarian population. Moreover, the insurgents enjoyed significant foreign backing, not only from Moscow and Havana, but from other Latin American nations as well. Finally, the Carter administration, by means of a confused and incoherent foreign policy, effectively weakened or destroyed the traditional levers of U.S. influence in Nicaragua. The period of revolutionary ferment in 1980s Central America, when viewed through the lens of foreign intervention, reveals the meddling of several players; external intervention, writes Brands, “was not a one-sided affair.”

The wave of democratization that swept the region in the 1980s was rooted in many causes but had much to do with the relationship between dictators and the radical left. In Central America, the strength of the guerrilla insurgencies forced a measure of liberalization, while in South America the destruction of the extreme left deprived the military regimes of their legitimacy. The debt crises of the 1980s, however, were the most determinate factor in democratization, as they provided the pretext for prying open the economies of Latin America to neoliberal reforms. In the final analysis, the course of the Cold War in Latin America was shaped not only by the zero-sum struggle between Washington and Moscow for ideological and strategic dominance in the global south, but by conflicts over internal political dynamics and power structures, the extent – and more importantly, the limits – of U.S. influence, and the emergence of the Third World as both a political bloc and a rhetorical device. Brands has made an impressive and valuable contribution to our understanding of the Cold War in Latin America, and while his interpretation may spark controversy in certain academic circles, this reviewer fervently hopes that he will succeed in driving the debate forward, rather than prompting a rehash of hackneyed claims about the primary responsibility of the United States for Latin America’s problems.

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village by Eamon Duffy (2001)

by Michelle Brock

The Voices of Morebath chronicles the coming of the English Reformation to a small village in sixteenth-century Devonshire. Duffy tells the story of Morebath through the eyes of its boisterous vicar, Sir Christopher Trychay, who kept exceptionally detailed records during his fifty-four year career in the village. His churchwarden’s accounts are laden with personal commentary, providing a unique window into the lives of ordinary men and women during the years of the English Reformation, when the Church of England first broke away from the Catholic Church in Rome. Though titled the Voices of Morebath, the voice of Sir Christopher Trychay, with all his opinions and biases, dominates the work; The Voices of Morebath is ultimately his story.

The book begins with images of present-day Morebath and a fascinating account of the land, the people and the economy of the village during the sixteenth-century. Details about the collective religious life of Morebath, with deeply-rooted devotional practices centered on saints, the Parish church, and liturgy provide a broader context for the main story. When the Reformation came to Morebath in the 1540’s, the villagers reluctantly moved towards Protestantism. Through the words of Trychay, Duffy traces how the people of Morebath struggled to reconcile their commitment to traditional faith with the new religious policies under Henry VIII and his children, a struggle that, at times, resulted in dramatic rebellion. The most striking aspect of this story is the active role played by the people of Morebath, who consistently made their own choices about the religious changes occurring in their world. We also see how the Reformation brought great change to the economic and social life of Morebath, as Elizabethan taxation and military policies began to shift the villagers’ focus away from the parish church to more worldly matters.

In his earlier and larger work, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (Yale, 1992), Duffy persuasively refutes the claims that late medieval Catholicism was static and moribund and that the Protestant Reformation ushered in a welcome move towards modernity. He contends, rather, that pre-Reformation English Catholicism was a vibrant cultural staple and Protestantism arrived as an unwelcome, destabilizing, and even destructive force. In the village of Morebath, Duffy tests this thesis with convincing results. Prior to the Reformation, people in Morebath showered their parish church with gifts and bequeathed family heirlooms to a local saint, showing their devotion to a faith that informed their community identity. Duffy contends that following the Reformation, the unifying force of Catholicism was lost. While many in Morebath quietly accepted the changes wrought by Protestantism, not everyone stayed silent. In a fascinating chapter, Duffy describes a key moment of revolt, when the village sent five men to join a rebellion against the Protestant King Edward.

Not all villages in England followed the patterns found in Morebath. Nonetheless, Sir Christopher Trychay provides an authentic voice of the early modern world, providing insight into a place far removed from our own. The Voices of Morebath is a compelling and accessible microhistory with broader historical implications.

Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction by Michele Mitchell (2004)

by Ava Purkiss

Michele Mitchell’s Righteous Propagation is a fascinating study of the tactics African Americans used to bolster racial uplift after Reconstruction. Mitchell presents the book as a social history, revealing moments when African Americans shared ideas on ways to advance the race during the Progressive Era at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries. In the prologue, Mitchell explains, “No longer divided into categories of ‘free’ or ‘slave,’ people of African descent acted upon assumptions that the race was unified, that institution building was possible, that progress was imminent.” This optimism shaped ideas about collective identity, destiny, and improvement of the race.

Early in the book, Mitchell outlines the ways African Americans idealized emigration to Liberia; the working poor embraced transplantation to Africa as a way to seek economic refuge. She also asserts that African Americans linked emigration, black colonization in Africa, and the reclamation of manhood. Here, Mitchell points out an interesting contradiction, explaining that the move to Africa had imperialist overtones, yet many African Americans were united in opposing white imperialism. Mitchell also discusses sexuality in the context of racial progress: the proper “choice of sexual partner, courtship, heterosexual intercourse, reproduction…,” were all imperative to the racial destiny of African Americans and pervasive in the discourse on racial progress. Surprisingly, she discovered that within the discussion of sexual politics, African Americans championed eugenic strategies such as birth control advocacy, sexual purity crusades, and “better babies” campaigns to counter racist ideas about biological inferiority.

Focusing on everyday life, Mitchell discusses the importance of cleanliness and living conditions in the black home, and the burdens black women carried at this time: “[African American women] were simultaneously caricatured by white Americans as diseased contaminants and characterized by Afro-Americans as primary agents in regenerating the race’s home life.” In serving as both agents and targets, African American women were an essential contradiction in the circulation of ideas about racial destiny and improvement. The final chapter examines miscegenation and the ways individual choices about romantic partners affected the race as a whole. The author highlights the ways black nationalism, namely the ideologies of Marcus Garvey, stipulated ideals of sexual conduct, masculinity, racial purity, and marriage, which factored into the intimate lives of African Americans and their effort to achieve progress and solidarity.

Righteous Propagation expertly describes the various ways African Americans perceived racial destiny and progress in the post-Reconstruction era. Mitchell recognizes that African Americans sought respect, freedom, and egalitarianism by disseminating ideas that would benefit the race, but sometimes reinforced the racist tactics that were perpetrated against them. In doing so, Mitchell does not romanticize the efforts of African Americans, but complicates some of their methods for uplift.

Cynical Realism: Miller’s Crossing by Joel and Ethan Coen (1990)

By Ben Breen

The HBO series Boardwalk Empire may currently be winning laurels for its workmanlike depiction of Prohibition-era gangsters and corrupt politicos, but viewers interested in a more fully-realized work about the Golden Age of American organized crime would be wise to turn to the Coen Brother’s 1990 masterpiece Miller’s Crossing.

This film centers on the attempts of an Irish-American mob underboss in 1920s Chicago, played by Gabriel Byrne, to collect on a gambling debt from an unsavory bookie named Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro, in a riveting and unnerving performance), while he navigates a love triangle between himself, Bernbaum’s sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) and his mentor, an aging mob boss played with memorable vigor by Albert Finney. Yet the real appeal of Miller’s Crossing lies not in its convoluted plot, but in its evocative depiction of the distinctive visual style and underworld cant of 1920s Chicago. In a lesser film, the screenplay’s clutter of long-forgotten slang (“now take your flunky and dangle”) might come off as stilted or mannered, but here it seems natural: these are real characters, living real lives in a bygone urban America that is both foreign and familiar.

Miller’s Crossing was loosely based on Dashiell Hammet’s classic 1931 potboiler The Glass Key, but the Coens allow their spectacular ensemble cast to take what could have been a formulaic tale of double-crosses and gang warfare in a highly original direction

– despite nods to classic film noir like Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). Gabriel Byrne, as the brilliant but self-defeating mob lieutenant Tom Reagan, is the anchor of Miller’s Crossing, and the ethical dilemmas he faces in the film function as stand-ins for the larger moral ambiguities embedded in the ambitious and individualistic mindset of America in the twentieth (and twenty-first) centuries. Byrne’s Tom is a cynical realist who prides himself on his ability to “know the angles” and avoid allowing his conscience to get in the way of business opportunities. Yet at the same time, it is Tom’s aversion to violence — at least when he is forced to perform it himself, at close quarters — that sets in motion the film’s main events. Can criminals maintain a moral compass? And what separates a criminal from a businessman or politician, if all three place rational self-interest above personal ethics?

The Coens, who both wrote and directed the film, are wise to leave the answers to these questions up to the viewer. But Gabriel Byrne and the brilliant ensemble cast that support him are much more than gangster-movie cliches: like Tony Soprano, they are unsettling precisely because they are so familiar, such typical products of an American society that mingles cold-blooded acquisitiveness and violence with a sincere streak of idealism and a desire to do right. The French novelist Stendahl wrote that “a novel is a mirror carried along the highway.” Miller’s Crossing causes us to see criminals not as clichés or villains, but as reflections in that mirror.

The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor (2010)

by James Jenkins

The War of 1812 was not a war between two nations, but rather a civil war, in which “brother fought brother in a borderland of mixed peoples.” Alan Taylor focuses on the U.S.-Canada borderland, which stretched from Detroit to Montreal. Before the war, the distinctions between British subjects and American citizens in the region remained uncertain. The British asserted that their empire’s subjects remained subjects for life, precisely when a stream of Irish people were migrating to the United States. Moreover, immigrants from the United States made up the majority of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario). Although the War of 1812 resulted in a stalemate from a diplomatic or military perspective, it gave closure to the contested border and resulted in the emergence of the United States and Canada as modern nation-states.

Taylor identifies four components that made the War of 1812 a civil war. First, The Republican-led American government vied with Britain over who would control Upper Canada. Yet, the U.S.’s poorly trained military struggled to occupy even a sliver of Canadian territory. Taylor describes how supply lines, propaganda, and prisons all played pivotal roles in the war’s outcome. Second, American Federalists sympathized with Britain. Most Federalists opposed the war and some even contributed to Britain’s war effort by smuggling, spying and threatening secession. Moreover, the United States never waged a significant campaign on the upper St. Lawrence River because Federalists in Ogdensburg, NY used their political influence to block such a strategy. Possessing the St. Lawrence River would have weakened all of Upper Canada, which relied on the seaway for supplies. But Republican politicians from western New York and Kentucky successfully lobbied to make the Detroit and Niagara Rivers the primary American fronts. Third, Irish republicans who had immigrated to the United States renewed a failed rebellion in Ireland by enlisting in American forces. But, they also faced Irish soldiers who had joined the royal army, pitting Irishman against Irishman.

Taylor describes a fourth aspect to the civil war: the involvement of Native peoples. Many Indians joined British forces in the hopes of stopping further U.S. settlement in the Ohio Valley. However, Native peoples are curiously peripheral to Taylor’s narrative, and he instead highlights their ability to terrify untrained American soldiers and provide fodder for anti-British propaganda. Taylor’s emphasis on imagined Indians leaves some paradoxical questions unanswered. For instance, he argues that American General William Henry Harrison’s troops considered arming Indians to be racial treason. Yet Taylor has little to say about the two hundred some Native people who joined Harrison’s forces. In addition, Taylor offers almost no biographical details on Native individuals. Those wishing for the next chapter of Taylor’s The Divided Ground (2006), which places the Haudenosaunee at the center of the American Revolution, will be disappointed.

Despite this shortcoming, Taylor’s borderland approach and assiduous research make for a welcome revision to an often overlooked war. The Civil War of 1812 should appeal to a large audience thanks to Taylor’s engaging narratives and elegant writing style.

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