Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Rosalind Franklin and Her Contributions to the Discovery of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid

by Danielle Maldonado

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was an English biophysicist who made critical scientific contributions to our knowledge of DNA. Her data enabled crucial breakthroughs in the field of biochemistry, notably the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure. For Texas History Day, Danielle Maldonado produced a video performance of Franklin’s life and work, outlining her achievements and explaining what life would have been like for the iconic scientist. You can watch her dramatic and historical performance here. Danielle argues that Fanklin’s work represented a major turning point in history:

“Everyone knows who Dr. James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins are. If you don’t, they are credited with the discovery of the structure of DNA. They won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Without the help of Rosalind Franklin, this great turning pointing in history wouldn’t have been possible. The base of genetic biochemistry was stabilized by Rosalind Franklin’s contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA….This knowledge has helped scientists discover other biological breakthroughs that would’ve otherwise been impossible. Told from the viewpoint of Rosalind Franklin, she expresses the struggles of completing all the main research on her own and explains how many genetic advancements have been made since then. Rosalind Franklin’s work helped pave a new road for biochemistry to travel.”

“The base of genetic biochemistry was stabilized by Rosalind Franklin’s contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA. This is a turning point in history, and is thus significant in history, because there is so little that we understand about human life. In the 21st century, being able to recognize and treat genetically inherited diseases and disorders impacts our lives greatly. The structure of DNA is one more puzzle we were able to solve, though not all puzzles are solvable. We may never be able to see the whole picture that lies at the end, but we will continue to piece it together, one strand of DNA at a time.”

Danielle Maldonado
Division II
Individual Performance

Photo Credits:

Rosalind Franklin performing an experiment (Image courtesy of Science Blogs)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Fire and Ice: How a Handshake in Space Turned Cold War Agendas from Competition to Cooperation

By Kacey Manlove

Read the full paper here
See more images here
Annotated bibliography, including author interviews with former NASA officials

What role did space exploration assume in the history of Soviet-American relations? For her Texas History Day research paper, Kacey Manlove argues that it represented the “fire” of mutual distrust and fear, but also the “ice” of cooperation and détente:

Time Magazine Cover "Space Spectacular: Science, Politics, & Show Biz" over two hands shaking, each is painted to represent a different flag (the U.S. and U.S.S.R)

“Between 1945 and 1991, Robert Frost’s ‘Fire and Ice’ presented sobering possibilities as Cold War confrontations dominated world politics. Both America and the Soviet Union postured for superiority in nuclear strength, building armories with potential to annihilate the world in fiery holocaust. October 4, 1957, marked the first major turning point when Sputnik’s launch catapulted the possibility of destruction into space. Their tense competition for nuclear dominance on earth and control of activities in space appeared unsolvable until 1975, when their Cold War space agencies initiated the next major turning point, symbolically transforming American-Soviet relations from conflict to détente as the commanders of their joint Apollo-Soyuz mission reached across space to shake hands. That handshake planted the seed for other cooperative events, first Shuttle-Mir and later the International Space Station, today’s symbol of international cooperation.”

You can follow the links above to read all of Kacey’s fascinating paper, see more images and read her first person interviews with former NASA officials.

Kacey Manlove
Rockport-Fulton High School
Senior Division
Individual Paper

Photo Credits:

1975 issue of Time examining American-Soviet cooperation in space (Image courtesy of “Fire and Ice: How a Handshake in Space Turned Cold War Agendas from Competition to Cooperation”)

Student Showcase – A Turning Point in the Communication Age: The ARPANET, The Ancestor of the Modern Internet

by Matthew Baker, Christopher Calandria and Jake Leland

In their group website, “A Turning Point in the Communication Age: The ARPANET, The Ancestor of the Modern Internet,” Matthew Baker, Christopher Calandria, Jake Leland of James Martin High School argue that the “ARPANET” system was the precursor to the modern Internet. The group site examines how it functioned, why it was created, and explain how a modest government program expanded into a globally dominant technology.

Baker, Calandria and Leland contend that that ARPANET was initially developed to facilitate greater communication between government researchers. They quote Leonard Kleinrock, one of the primary engineers of the program, recalls that what “initiated [the ARPANET] was the need to share resources among fellow researchers.” But by the late 1980’s and early 1990’s the ARPANET technology steadily entered the public as the Internet, irrevocably changing our economy and society.

However, the group argues that ARAPNET’s historical role was not uniformly positive and had a “dark side” of unforeseen consequences, including a rise in hacking, fraud and theft. They conclude by stating that the “Internet had considerable repercussions, both positive and negative” and that the “creation of The ARPANET was the significant turning point that resulted in these impacts.”

Photo Credits:

An interface message processor, or IMP, a network of small processors which allowed for the interconnection of different computers (Image courtesy of “A Turning Point in the Communication Age: The ARPANET”)

War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and the Tejano Communities edited by Arnoldo De León (2012)

By Lizeth Elizondo

The Mexican Revolution knew no borders. Mexicans migrated north seeking refuge from its tumult, Tejanos, (Mexican-American Texans) assisted the fight by supplying weapons and incorporating these new immigrants into their communities. Other Tejanos and African Americans from Texas even joined the Mexican revolutionary forces. Texans were then, both directly and indirectly, by choice or by circumstance, part of this historic period.

Prior to the publishing of War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and the Tejano Communities, the lived experiences on the Texas side of the border had never been told in a transnational historical perspective. Raul Ramos sums up the importance of this approach in writing that “people, families, ideas, capital, goods, and violence crossed back and forth across the border to the point that self-contained national narratives lose their power to explain and make sense of the past.”

Book cover of War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities edited by Arnoldo De León

The porousness of the boundary between the United States and Mexico during the Mexican Revolution is eloquently captured in this edited volume. The histories told illuminate the lived realities of communities on both the Mexican and the U.S. side during this tumultuous period. One need not be an expert on the variety of revolutionary factions, alliances, and motivations. The opening essay by Paul Hart offers readers a concise historical background that contextualizes the larger ideals of the Mexican Revolution. From this point forward, the reader is guided through more intimate scenes of the period.

The emphasis on the lived experiences of Tejanos makes this a path-breaking endeavor. Rodolfo Treviño tells the intimate family history of his grandfather’s immigration. In sharing one family’s struggle to survive after migrating, Treviño elucidates the possible similarities between his family’s history and the history of many others, who like his grandfather, emigrated from Mexico into Texas during this period. As a cotton picker, Geronimo Treviño – and other Mexican immigrants both male and female—helped propel the agricultural industry in Texas. As Treviño explains, these are the forgotten histories of “ordinary people doing extraordinary things in American history.” The exceptional story of Felix Tijerina, proclaimed to have been the first Mexican-American millionaire in Houston, also serves as an example of an overlooked history of a remarkable American. The chapter details Thomas Kreneck’s quest for unearthing the truthful birthplace of Tijerina, a self-proclaimed American citizen. Kreneck’s pursuit takes him across the border, where he discovers the small villa where Tijerina so adamantly denied having been born. American citizenship during a period filled with racism and opposition to the influx of immigrants from Mexico, explains Kreneck, helps to contextualize Tijerina’s obstinate desire to be recognized as an American at all costs. In fact, Kreneck discovered Tijerina’s birthplace only after Tijerina’s death. Felix Tijerina died as a proud American.

Black and white photograph of Mexican rebels camped outside Juárex, Mexico, 1911

Mexican rebels camped outside Juárez, Mexico, 1911 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Not all stories left untold revolve around successful rags-to-riches sagas. Violence, racism and death were also consequences of the Revolution on the American side of the border. Two chapters describe in detail the triangle of violence that resulted from the Plan de San Diego, the Revolución de Texas, and the Texas Rangers. Richard Ribb outlines the violent repercussions lived by Tejanos and Mexicans, after discovering that social revolutionaries called for the Mexican and Mexican-American community to join forces in an armed uprising against the United States, scheduled for February 20, 1915, that would seek to kill all Anglo Americans. The discovery of this plot initiated a period of Anglo violence toward the Mexican-American population regardless of their involvement or support of the plan. La Revolución de Texas as Trinidad Gonzales details, was different than the Plan de San Diego in ideology; however, the lived experiences of Tejanos at the wrath of the Texas Rangers and Anglo vigilantes, was the same. Supporters of La Revolución de Texas, clearly outlined their motives for their uprising as a response to the continual racism experienced in Texas. Ironically, this forthright challenge to prejudice served as a catalyst to massacre hundreds of Tejanos and Mexicanos. A year later, in 1916, El Paso experienced its own form of Revolutionary violence. Miguel Levario evaluates the influence of the El Paso Race Riot fueled by the slaughter of American engineers at Santa Ysabel, Chihuahua, in categorizing Tejanos as “un-American.” The race war and race-related violence in Texas during the period of the Mexican Revolution claimed the lives of Anglo Americans, Tejanos, and Mexicans.

The violence and death experienced on both the Mexican and the American sides of the U.S.-Mexico border also ironically created niches of opportunities for some women. The essays by Juanita Luna Lawhn and Sonia Hernández convey the ways in which women sought safe-haven in the United States from this revolutionary violence. Lawhn unearths the experiences of elite women in exile. She utilizes newspaper records to trace the lives of the wives of famous revolutionaries with surnames like Madero, Villa, and Carranza. Hernández on the other hand, relies on bi-national archival research to excavate the experiences of women in the labor industry, as well as their social and political activism during the revolutionary period.

Black and white photograph of members of the U.S. Army's Pancho Villa Expedition camped in San Jerónimo, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1916

Members of the U.S. Army’s Pancho Villa Expedition camped in San Jerónimo, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1916 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Federal Government)

The contributors to War Along the Border entangle the Mexican Revolution with transnational history and American history. By focusing on the experiences of Tejanos, by disregarding the political boundaries of the international border in their research, and by choosing to present this period as one of multinational influences, these scholars sketch a rich historical account of the Mexican Revolution as it affected Americans. War Along the Border is an invaluable contribution to the histories of Texas, the Mexican Revolution, Tejanos, Mexican-Americans, Mexicans, and the history of the United States in the early twentieth century.

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.

Mark Metzler on Post-War Japan

By Mark Metzler

In the fifteen years after World War II, Japan made an astounding transition from wartime devastation to the boom known as the “Era of High-Speed Growth.” Japan’s High-Speed Growth system was an epoch-making innovation that opened the current Asian age of world industrialization. The inflationary creation of credit by banks funded this industrial transformation, set its directions, and forced its pace. In fact, Japan’s style of hypercapitalist growth illustrates basic principles of capitalist development in an exceptionally clear way. Credit-leveraged growth also has built-in insustainabilities—we see them reflected today in the building up of international debt bubbles on an unprecedented scale. Here too, Japanese experience has lessons to offer.

In trying to grasp this process, I found that the name of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter entered the story in an unexpected way. Not only does Schumpeter’s century-old book, The Theory of Economic Development, help us see this industrial revolution in a clearer light. More surprisingly, Schumpeter’s Japanese students chaired some of the country’s most influential policy councils during this crucial period. They took Schumpeter’s ideas and put them to work in entirely new ways.

Schumpeter’s basic realization was that the inflationary creation of new credit-capital—new purchasing power— mainly by banks, is the basic mechanism of capital creation under modern capitalism. On one hand, this is a form of monetary expropriation: high inflation, by its nature, robs the purchasing power of existing monetary wealth. But in appropriate developmental circumstances, when properly modulated, inflationary credit creation can also generate rapid industrial growth. No past economic system has approached what industrial capitalism has achieved in this respect. In Japan’s case, a highly rationalized system of credit-capital provision funded a kind of growth that seemed miraculous. We might also call it Faustian, for a classic literary work points to some of its sources.

Faustian Capital

In Part Two of Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe presents an allegory of paper money and capitalist development. The scene opens at the court of the emperor at a time when the empire is overburdened with debt. Faust and the devil Mephistopheles, appear at court. Mephistopheles, in the guise of court jester, tells the emperor that he need not wait for treasure to be dug out of the ground before spending it. Mephistopheles understands that a credible, negotiable claim to money is money. He explains that the vast unknown treasures underground can be represented by paper notes. The emperor’s paper money represents nothing more than potential wealth, yet the creation of believable claims written on slips of paper is enough to enroll legions of followers and set them to work creating new productive resources. The emperor’s debts are erased at a stroke and Mephistopheles and Faust earn a place at the emperor’s side. Faust goes on to become an entrepreneur, which of course is when the devil comes to collect his debt.

Faust’s venture into capital creation recalls an episode in history that Goethe knew well: the story of the financier John Law, who after the great war of 1701–14 proposed to the French regent that the kingdom’s land could be a basis for creating paper money. The French regent hired the Scottish bankerand fired his alchemists, who were now redundant. Then he set up a state bank that paid off the kingdom’s immense war debts.

Joseph Schumpeter considered John Law’s scheme an epoch-making capitalist innovation, despite the notorious Mississippi bubble of 1719–20 it produced. He credited Law with the discovery that banking operations could “manufacture” money—“and hence capital in the monetary sense of the term.” The problem with Law’s plan, Schumpeter said, was that the newly created credits were not directed to a commercial or industrial enterprise that would have repaid the social investment. As it happened, Law’s banknotes lost their purchasing power, Law’s bank collapsed, and Law fled the scene.

Schumpeter originally described the mechanism at work here as “forced savings.” New credits created for new investment reduce the purchasing power of already existing money—it is a privately imposed “inflation tax” and, in effect, a fractional expropriation of purchasing power from others. In this way, capital formation could be forced upon the community “through monetary witchcraft,” as Schumpeter’s friend Fritz Machlup put it.

Schumpeter’s idea of forced savings appeared in Japan’s first and most influential textbook of neoclassical economics, written by Schumpeter’s student Nakayama Ichiro. And hence the explanation given by Okita Saburo, the Japanese government’s top economic planner, in 1957: if a country were to restrict its new investment to the amount of monetary savings already collected, “not much could be done.” But by investing in excess of savings, great deeds could be accomplished.

Mirrors and Miracles

It is in the nature of credit-money that it can somehow be “in” two places at once, without really being “anywhere” at all. Schumpeter joked that you can’t ride on a claim to a horse, but you may be able to create new claims on the basis of that claim. This is what economist Hans Christoph Binswanger, returning to Goethe for inspiration, described as “the modern economy’s alchemical core.”

Schumpeter developed a sophisticated justification for the extraordinary money-creation license given to banks, arguing that new purchasing power created by banks, although inflationary in the short run, would not be inflationary in the long run, if it were directed to the expansion of production. The new production would balance, or over-balance, the new means of payment. Cycles of price inflation and deflation are not incidental to the capitalist developmental process but rather are the very mechanism through which it operates.

Schumpeter’s idea is a credible description of the main direction of capital investment during Japan’s Era of High-Speed Growth. This was also a time when Japanese governmental and central bank authorities actively restricted the use of capital for nonproductive purposes.

But what of capital created by banks for speculation in land, or in already existing commodities? And what of capital created for the even more reflexive, recursive business of purely financial speculation, capital scarcely or not at all mediated by investment into the world of material commodities? This brings us to the economic bubbles of recent decades.

The first great economic bubble appeared in Japan; the appearance of the same phenomenon in the United States, Britain, and Europe suggests a further idea: that Schumpeterian finance, on the scale of the credit creation that funded the first great age of industrial capitalism, has outlived its usefulness in the already industrialized world. More than that, it appears radically incompatible with the emerging circumstances of countries that are experiencing zero population growth and need now to embark on a course of qualitative development rather than rapid, extensive industrial growth. Massively leveraged finance, created in ever greater volume, cannot continue to correspond to an ever greater torrent of production. In these new circumstances, the type of banking system that funded the first great age of capitalism works as a bubble machine, casually throwing up immense debts that act as a dead weight on everything else.

In considering our twenty-first-century world, the Japanese experience may have a more universal significance than has hitherto been recognized. Japan’s High-Speed Growth, the culmination of an eighty-year process, was itself a historic super-compression of capitalist development. And now, it seems that Japan is the country that completed the modern inflationary process first. Simultaneously the country is making a highly compressed transit from the “first” demographic transition to the “second”—meaning that population decline is already under way. Underlying forces tend now in the direction of deflation rather than inflation. The present slowdown may thus signify a turning point on a very long timescale: the culmination of Japan’s modern era of inflationary industrial-capitalist development. This question will be answered by a history that remains to be seen. It is also a question in the spirit of Schumpeter’s own approach and vision of economic life as a rhythmic, dynamic developmental process.

Mark Metzler, Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle, (2013).

Further Reading

Hans Christoph Binswanger, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust. A senior professor of finance, Binswanger makes an important contribution to economic philosophy in this brilliant and popular interpretation of Goethe’s life’s work.

Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. This is Volume III of Braudel’s magnificent trilogy, Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th–18^th Century. Markets and market economy were something very different from modern capitalism, as Braudel explores with a combination of marvelous detail and panoramic sweep. Many would vote Braudel the twentieth century’s greatest historian and Schumpeter the century’s greatest economist.

At first approach, Joseph Schumpeter’s own prose style is meandering and overfull with illustrations, asides, and historical qualifications. He is also sensitive to the aliveness of economic life and his new insights often emerge from the detail. His big three books are The Theory of Economic Development (1912; English edition, 1934), with its theory of innovation, capital creation, and development through cycles; Business Cycles (1939), with its historical vision of economic long waves; and his wartime essay Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Each book alludes only lightly to the theories developed in the others; when they are read together the whole vista of modern economic history opens up.

Schumpeter’s work inspires many others. One recent and important work is Chris Freeman and Francisco Louça, As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution, which focuses on waves of technological innovation, boom, and bust. Another, also highly readable, is Erik Reinert’s book, How Rich Countries Got Rich, And Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, which revisits the question of economic development by reference to an alternative canon of continental European thought, exemplified by Schumpeter. Schumpeter’s inspiration crops up also in some less expected places, including the cyclic vision developed by the ecologist C. S. Holling in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems.

Photo Credits:
Hiroshi Okura, “Satoyama to konbinato” (Village landscape and Kombinat)
Joseph Schumpeter in Japan in 1931 via Wikipedia Commons

A Ferro e Fuoco: La Guerra Civile Europea, 1914-1945 by Enzo Traverso (2008)

by Alexander Lang

The period from 1914-1945 has sometimes been called a “European Civil War,” but that concept has rarely been put to a systematic examination. Fortunately, Italian historian Enzo Traverso’s recent work A Ferro e Fuoco, which can be loosely translated as Put to the Sword, offers some intriguing proposals for understanding the period as a continental civil war. For Traverso, this larger perspective is important as Europe continues to struggle with the memory of the violence unleashed by two world wars. Only by entering the moral and psychological world of the actors of the time, he claims, can we comprehend the ever increasing systems of violence that culminated in the Holocaust.

One of the focal points of the book is how conceptions of legality changed during the period. Traverso employs the ideas of the German legal scholar (and Nazi supporter) Carl Schmitt to explain how the pre-1914 liberal order fell to the harsh legality of civil war. According to Schmitt, in a civil war, the two opposing sides each represent a different legal order, which requires that each place its enemy in a state of illegality. Before 1914 this ability of a sovereign to declare enemies illegitimate had been reserved to domestic civil wars and to the colonies. But when the Bolshevik Revolution challenged the legal structure of nation-states by representing an idea rather than a political entity, many Europeans sought to not only crack down on domestic supporters of communism, but to help overthrow, and then quarantine, the Bolshevik “virus.”

From the beginning of the Russian Civil War (1918) until the end of the Second World War, both fascists and communists, and sometimes liberal-democrats, denied the legal legitimacy of certain groups and individuals (such as political opponents, immigrants, ethnic minorities, and others) in order to either protect the sovereignty of the state or to provide the state with tools to construct a new legal order based not on the past, but on ideological imperatives. This culminated in Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941, a war conceived by the Nazis as an existential struggle of annihilation. It is therefore not surprising that the Allies demanded that Germany surrender unconditionally, and later executed Wilhelm Keitel, who had represented the German armed forces at the surrender. Such actions would have been inconceivable in earlier wars between nations, but the European Civil War could only be resolved through the elimination of an opponent deemed illegitimate by the victors.

Traverso suggests that our modern liberal-democratic sensibilities are offended by the ease with which many leftists and rightists turned to the legal exclusion and violent targeting of groups seen as a threat. He fears that the consequent valorization of those who stayed neutral and “above” the fray will lead us to forget how discredited the liberal order was, and how the often violent means of revolutionaries and resistance fighters were the only realistic response to the threat of Nazism and Fascism. Furthermore, Traverso argues that while not all of these leftists were communists, only the strength and conviction of communists could have spearheaded the anti-fascist movement that would grant the opportunity for aimless socialists and liberals to regain their sense of strength.

Russian POWs being marched to a German prison camp, 1941 (Image courtesy of The People’s Republic of Poland)

Traverso’s argument is not only legal, as he describes the evolution of violence during the period, as well as the psychological phenomena of fear and hysteria. Within each he shows how the catastrophe of World War I and its aftermath laid the foundations for the greater tragedy that would follow, though he does not go so far as to say that the Second World War was a necessary conclusion to the first. More work will have to be done to demonstrate the continuum of violence and instability linked to the fear and competing legitimacies unleashed in 1914. With that said, Traverso’s work pushes us to place local violence in the broader context of an international struggle, and to place the critical moments of that struggle (the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, World War II and all of its small civil wars) in a single period marked by constant structural and psychological crisis.

A destroyed farmhouse in Belarus or Ukraine after the German invasion of 1941 (Image courtesy of The People’s Republic of Poland)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

42 (2013)

By Dolph Briscoe IV

The new film 42 tells the story of Jackie Robinson’s heroic effort to integrate Major League Baseball. Signed by Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) endures resistance from teammates, taunting from opposing players and fans, and terrifying threats of violence against his family and himself by breaking baseball’s color line. His loving wife Rachel Robinson (Nicole Beharie), herself a determined warrior in the struggle for racial equality, serves as his anchor during this time of trial. Jackie Robinson’s courage inspires Americans, both white and black, and helps to ignite the emerging civil rights movement. 42 is a stirring film that illustrates the brutality of racism and the heroism of those individuals who sought to overcome the most troubling characteristic of American society in the twentieth century.

Set in the immediate post-World War II years, 42 focuses primarily on Jackie Robinson’s first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. A key theme in this movie is the significance of relationships between people, with Jackie Robinson as the ideal candidate for integrating baseball. Branch Rickey immediately recognizes that Robinson possesses the strength of character as well as the athletic gifts necessary to undertake this daunting task. As the film begins, Robinson tells teammates and the press that he is “just a ballplayer,” and Rickey stresses that his job as a baseball executive is solely to win games and make money for the club. But the two men forge a close relationship through their shared experience and, by the movie’s end, recognize that Robinson’s integration of baseball means much more to themselves and to the nation at large. Rickey, portrayed by Ford as deeply philosophical and troubled by a failure earlier in his career to take a stand for integration, finds redemption and a renewed love for the game through Robinson’s bravery. Robinson realizes that he is much more than only a baseball player—he has become an inspiration and a hero for Americans of all races, particularly children, and has touched the conscience of the United States.

The strong marriage of Jackie and Rachel Robinson further illustrates the key role played by personal relationships in the quest to integrate baseball. 42 presents the Robinsons’ marriage as a true love story. Jackie calls Rachel his “heart,” not only the love of his life, but also his source of strength during his times of trouble. Rachel Robinson is as much a civil rights activist as her husband, confidently entering a whites-only bathroom in a southern airport and continuously displaying a calm resolve in the presence of hostile fans in baseball parks.

42 also examines Jackie Robinson’s relationships with the press and his teammates. Besides Rachel, Jackie’s key confidant becomes Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), an African American sports reporter covering these historic events. Robinson initially is reluctant to become too close with Smith for fear of relying on other people for support. Eventually however, Robinson develops a strong friendship with the journalist, who records his accomplishments on the diamond with beautiful prose. Furthermore, Smith helps Robinson realize that he represents more than “just a ballplayer” by confiding his own hardships with racism as a black reporter. Many Brooklyn Dodgers players are wary about having Robinson on their team, pictured most dramatically when several sign a petition against his joining the club. Yet Robinson’s determination and dedicated play win over most of his fellow ballplayers, and by the film’s ending those few remaining doubters find themselves ostracized by the team. In a poignant moment, while playing in Cincinnati, a city bordering the South, Kentucky native Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black) puts his arm around Robinson on the field, a powerful gesture for all fans to see.

The film depicts the cruelty of racial segregation and the valor of civil rights activists in twentieth-century America. Fans and players yell at Robinson hatefully and, in an upsetting scene, an opposing team’s manager viciously taunts him with a barrage of racist insults. Base runners spike Robinson with their sharp cleats and pitchers purposefully try to bean him; by season’s end Robinson leads the majors in hits by pitch. Perhaps most frightening, Robinson receives hundreds of letters with death threats against him and his family. Yet Jackie and Rachel Robinson, like later civil rights activists, handle this trauma with quiet persistence and sheer bravery. Branch Rickey encourages Robinson by invoking their shared Methodist faith, which Jackie emulates through “turning the other cheek” in the face of his oppressors. 42 also soberly illustrates how children imitate their elders, for both good and evil. In a disturbing sequence, a seemingly kind young boy heckles Robinson after watching his white father do the same. However, young black children see Robinson as a role model to imitate in both words and deeds. Rickey further tells Robinson that he has even noticed some white children pretending to be him on playgrounds, a hopeful sign for the future of race relations in the United States.

By expanding its story beyond the 1947 season, 42 could have illustrated better Jackie Robinson’s complexity. Following his first year in the majors, Robinson, with Rickey’s approval, resolved to fight back when persecuted on and off the field. He believed that he had proved he belonged in the Major Leagues and now had to protest against his tormentors to further the larger civil rights movement. To do otherwise would be to acquiesce to the unjust status quo. Indeed, for the rest of his life, Robinson continued to push for greater progress in racial equality. He viewed his post-baseball career in several successful commercial ventures as similarly important in opening doors to African Americans in the business world. He urged ball clubs to hire black managers and front office administrators. Major League Baseball’s failure in this area, coupled with a growing national backlash against the civil rights movement by the early 1970s, left Robinson disillusioned. Yet despite these disappointments, serious health problems, and personal tragedy with the death of his oldest son, Robinson remained dedicated to the struggle for racial equality until his death in 1972.

In 1997, Major League Baseball retired Jackie Robinson’s number 42 for every team. Over the last few years, players of all races have worn the number 42 on Jackie Robinson Day in April. Although additional detail about his entire life could have provided a more nuanced picture of Robinson, 42 is a magnificent film that shows audiences a critical time in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. Brilliant actors give unforgettable performances in a movie that should stand the test of time not only as a sports classic, but indeed a masterful drama of American history.

Photo Credits:

Promotional poster for 42 (Image courtesy of Legendary Pictures)

Jackie Robinson signing autographs in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ dugout, Ebbets Field, April 11, 1947 (Image courtesy of Corbis Images)

Robinson playing against the Boston Braves (Image courtesy of The Full Count)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

In the months following his resounding electoral triumph over Barry Goldwater in November 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson made momentous decisions to escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Most consequentially, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam: first retaliatory strikes following a National Liberation Front attack on the U.S. base at Pleiku and then a sustained bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder. Critics of the administration’s decision-making feared that these steps would commit the United States to a difficult and unnecessary war and appealed urgently for a change of course. One such appeal came from Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who focused not just on geostrategic dangers but also, more unusually, on the domestic political risks. In a memorandum to the president ten days after the Pleiku attack, Humphrey warned that the American public had little enthusiasm for a major war and that escalation might damage the administration and the Democratic Party more generally. Although there is no definitive evidence that Johnson read the memo, one of Johnson’s aides, Bill Moyers, later stated that he had given it to the president.

I would like to share with you my views on the political consequences of certain courses of action that have been proposed in regard to U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. I refer both to the domestic political consequences here in the United States and to the international political consequences.

A. Domestic Political Consequences.

1. 1964 Campaign.

Although the question of U.S. involvement in Vietnam is and should be a non-partisan question, there have always been significant differences in approach to the Asian question between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. These came out in the 1964 campaign. The Republicans represented both by Goldwater, and the top Republican leaders in Congress, favored a quick, total military solution in Vietnam, to be achieved through military escalation of the war.

The Democratic position emphasized the complexity of a Vietnam situation involving both political, social and military factors; the necessity of staying in Vietnam as long as necessary; recognition that the war will be won or lost chiefly in South Vietnam.

In Vietnam, as in Korea, the Republicans have attacked the Democrats either for failure to use our military power to “win” a total victory, or alternatively for losing the country to the Communists. The Democratic position has always been one of firmness in the face of Communist pressure but restraint in the use of military force; it has sought to obtain the best possible settlement without provoking a nuclear World War III; it has sought to leave open face-saving options to an opponent when necessary to avoid a nuclear show-down. When grave risks have been necessary, as in the case of Cuba, they have been taken. But here again a face-saving option was permitted the opponent. In all instances the Democratic position has included a balancing of both political and military factors.

Today the Administration is being charged by some of its critics with adopting the Goldwater position on Vietnam. While this is not true of the Administration’s position as defined by the President, it is true that many key advisors in the Government are advocating a policy markedly similar to the Republican policy as defined by Goldwater.

2. Consequences for other policies advocated by a Democratic Administration.

The Johnson Administration is associated both at home and abroad with a policy of progress toward detente with the Soviet bloc, a policy of limited arms control, and a policy of new initiatives for peace. A full-scale military attack on North Vietnam – with the attendant risk of an open military clash with Communist China – would risk gravely undermining other U.S. policies. It would eliminate for the time being any possible exchange between the President and Soviet leaders; it would postpone any progress on arms control; it would encourage the Soviet Union and China to end their rift; it would seriously hamper our efforts to strengthen relations with our European allies; it would weaken our position in the United Nations; it might require a call-up of reservists if we were to get involved in a large-scale land war–and a consequent increase in defense expenditures; it would tend to shift the Administration’s emphasis from its Great Society oriented programs to further military outlays; finally and most important it would damage the image of the President of the United States – and that of the United States itself.

3. Involvement in a full scale war with North Vietnam would not make sense to the majority of the American people.

American wars have to be politically understandable by the American public. There has to be a cogent, convincing case if we are to have sustained public support. In World Wars I and II we had this. In Korea we were moving under UN auspices to defend South Korea against dramatic, across-the-border conventional aggression. Yet even with those advantages, we could not sustain American political support for fighting the Chinese in Korea in 1952.

Today in Vietnam we lack the very advantages we had in Korea. The public is worried and confused. Our rationale for action has shifted away now even from the notion that we are there as advisors on request of a free government – to the simple argument of our “national interest.” We have not succeeded in making this “national interest” interesting enough at home or abroad to generate support.

4. From a political viewpoint, the American people find it hard to understand why we risk World War III by enlarging a war under terms we found unacceptable 12 years ago in Korea, particularly since the chances of success are slimmer….

5. Absence of confidence in the Government of South Vietnam.

Politically, people can’t understand why we would run grave risks to support a country which is totally unable to put its own house in order. The chronic instability in Saigon directly undermines American political support for our policy.

6. Politically, it is hard to justify over a long period of time sustained, large-scale U.S. air bombardments across a border as a response to camouflaged, often non-sensational, elusive, small-scale terror which has been going on for 10 years in what looks like a civil war in the South.

7. Politically, in Washington and across the country, the opposition is more Democratic than Republican.

8. Politically, it is always hard to cut losses. But the Johnson Administration is in a stronger position to do so than any Administration in this century. 1965 is the year of minimum political risk for the Johnson Administration. Indeed it is the first year when we can face the Vietnam problem without being preoccupied with the political repercussions from the Republican right. As indicated earlier, the political problems are likely to come from new and different sources if we pursue an enlarged military policy very long (Democratic liberals, Independents, Labor, Church groups).

9. Politically, we now risk creating the impression that we are the prisoner of events in Vietnam. This blurs the Administration’s leadership role and has spill-over effects across the board. It also helps erode confidence and credibility in our policies.

10. The President is personally identified with, and admired for, political ingenuity. He will be expected to put all his great political sense to work now for international political solutions. People will be counting upon him to use on the world scene his unrivalled talents as a political leader.

They will be watching to see how he makes this transition. The best possible outcome a year from now would be a Vietnam settlement which turns out to be better than was in the cards because the President’s political talents for the first time came to grips with a fateful world crisis and so successfully. It goes without saying that the subsequent domestic political benefits of such an outcome, and such a new dimension for the President, would be enormous.

11. If on the other hand, we find ourselves leading from frustration to escalation, and end up short of a war with China but embroiled deeper in fighting with Vietnam over the next few months, political opposition will steadily mount. It will underwrite all the negativism and disillusionment which we already have about foreign involvement generally – with direct spill-over effects politically for all the Democratic internationalist programs to which we are committed – AID, UN, disarmament, and activist world policies generally.

B. International Political Implications of Vietnam.

1. What is our goal, our ultimate objective in Vietnam? Is our goal to restore a military balance between North and South Vietnam so as to go to the conference table later to negotiate a settlement? I believe it is the latter. If so, what is the optimum time for achieving the most favorable combination of factors to achieve this goal?

If ultimately a negotiated settlement is our aim, when do we start developing a political track, in addition to the military one, that might lead us to the conference table? I believe we should develop the political track earlier rather than later. We should take the initiative on the political side and not end up being dragged to a conference as an unwilling participant. This does not mean we should cease all programs of military pressure. But we should distinguish carefully between those military actions necessary to reach our political goal of a negotiated settlement, and those likely to provoke open Chinese military intervention.

We should not underestimate the likelihood of Chinese intervention and repeat the mistake of the Korean War. If we begin to bomb further north in Vietnam, the likelihood is great of an encounter with the Chinese Air Force operating from sanctuary bases across the border. Once the Chinese Air Force is involved, Peking’s full prestige will be involved as she cannot afford to permit her Air Force to be destroyed. To do so would undermine, if not end, her role as a great power in Asia.

Confrontation with the Chinese Air Force can easily lead to massive retaliation by the Chinese in South Vietnam. What is our response to this? Do we bomb Chinese air bases and nuclear installations? If so, will not the Soviet Union honor its treaty of friendship and come to China’s assistance? I believe there is a good chance that it would–thereby involving us in a war with both China and the Soviet Union. Here again, we must remember the consequences for the Soviet Union of not intervening if China’s military power is destroyed by the U.S.

Photo Credits:

Lyndon Johnson examining a model of the Khe Sanh region of Vietnam in the White House Situation Room, 1968 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Federal Government)

President Johnson meets U.S. troops in Vietnam, 1966 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Department of State)

Man surveying the damage from a Viet Cong bomb attack against a multi-story U.S. officers billet in Saigon, 1966 (Image courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration)

Members of the 101st Airborn Division aboard a USAF C-130 at Pham Thiet Air Base, Republic of Vietnam, for airlift to Phi Troung Air Base (Image courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration)

U.S. pilots bomb a military target over North Vietnam, 1966 (Image courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration)

Counterfactual History in a New Video Game

By Robert Whitaker

BioShock Infinite
Irrational Games

I have spent most of the last year applying for jobs, which means that I have spent most of the last year analyzing, constructing, rewriting, and generally just staring at my résumé. Writing a résumé is similar to creating a historical narrative – there is a protagonist (you), a cast of characters (employers and recommenders), a beginning, an end, a series of events in the middle, and a whole set of details that can be added or removed to suit particular audiences. Given the economy right now, there is pressure to make this narrative as broadly appealing as possible. Some career advisors have even encouraged me to engage in “creative truth-telling” to help me land a position. This practice, they tell me, isn’t lying, per se, but rather a gentle embellishment of the facts.

As an historian, however, this practice gives me the heebie jeebies. It reminds me too much of the push by some to make a selective reading of American history the standard for teaching the subject. American History, in many ways, represents the nation’s résumé. It is a catalog of achievements and events – some good, some regrettable – that are used to encourage citizens and outsiders to buy into the nation. As with my own personal narrative, the stakes for this résumé are high. There is the same pressure to embellish this history – both through addition and omission. But we must ask if it is really beneficial to avoid all the nasty bits when studying the past? When we consider our own personal failures, we often say that we learn from our mistakes. How can we learn from the nation’s mistakes if we remove them from our history?

BioShock Infinite is a game that uses a counterfactual history of the United States to force players to consider some of these mistakes. Set in 1912, the game takes place in Columbia, a floating city hovering over the United States. You play as Booker DeWitt, a veteran of the 7th Cavalry Regiment and a former member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who is sent to Columbia to retrieve a girl named Elizabeth in order to absolve his debt. Booker is racked by guilt for his participation in the Wounded Knee Massacre and for his role in putting down worker strikes as a Pinkerton agent. His personal remorse has driven him to drinking and gambling. Booker embodies several Progressive Era sensibilities, including the awareness of past wrongs, and the desire for redemption and reform.

In Columbia, however, Booker faces an unrepentant Gilded Age society led by firebrand preacher Zachary Comstock – a man who shares much of Booker’s personal history, but none of his remorse. Styling himself as a modern day Noah, Comstock sees Columbia as “another ark, for another time,” a place where he can preserve his vision of America while planning the destruction of “the Sodom below.” Comstock’s America is built upon a perverse worship of the Founding Fathers and rejection of the political and social developments in American society since the Civil War. Columbian society is committed to racial purity, religious zealotry, and unfettered capitalism, and promotes these philosophies through a set of distorted Sears Roebuck advertisements plastered around the city. Museums in the city present John Wilkes Booth as a hero and the Wounded Knee Massacre as a national triumph. The personal histories of DeWitt and Comstock reminds players not only of particular historical events, but also how the memories of those events can be perverted to attain political goals.

This sort of stylistic use of history is familiar territory for Irrational Games and its creative director, Ken Levine. The original BioShock, published in 2007, used Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy as the basis for a story set in the underwater city of Rapture. Levine’s BioShock games share many similarities in terms of plot and theme. Both games feature an antagonist bent on creating a utopian society based on warped notions of exceptionalism and capitalism. These antagonists are opposed in both instances by a group made up of dissatisfied, working class civilians, led by Frank Fontaine in BioShock and Daisy Fitzroy in Infinite. Thematically, the BioShock series grapples with the age old question of free will versus destiny, and stresses the potential role of the state in determining the answer.

Both BioShock games offer easy parallels with the present division between neoliberal capitalists and the Occupy Movement, yet these parallels become murky as both games progress. While the capitalist appears as the initial antagonist in both games, the player comes to learn that the opposition is capable of just as much destruction and violence. Levine’s message, then, is not a simple liberal critique of current politics, but rather a general warning about extremism in politics, whether that extremism comes from the left or the right. Writing as an historian of the 20th century, this is a warning that cannot be repeated too many times.

In addition to the plot and themes, BioShock Infinite encourages historicism through its music and gameplay. For reasons that become clear through the story, Infinite contains a jukebox musical score that features ragtime versions of popular twentieth-century hits, including songs by the Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cyndi Lauper, Lead Belly, Soft Cell, and Tears for Fears. Additionally, Infinite’s gameplay often encourages the player to take on the role of historian. Major elements of the game’s narrative are left unexplained in cut scenes, but can be found by the player in voice recordings and kinetoscopes scattered throughout the city. These recordings and logs are not always easy to find, meaning that each player can come away with a different sense of the storyline depending on which, or how many, recordings they discovered. One of the game’s major side quests, then, is an oral history scavenger hunt.

This sort of detailed work would be lost on most players without exciting gameplay to draw them in. Infinite, however, builds upon traditional first-person action in interesting ways. In particular, it takes advantage of the game’s setting in the clouds, allowing players to move around the environment using skylines and zeppelins. This freedom of movement gives the combat sequences a frenetic feel and prevents them from becoming predictable. Unfortunately, this novelty is diminished by the rote nature of the game’s violence. The current debate on graphic content in video games is all too applicable here. Infinite’s storyline, including the player’s interactions with their companion Elizabeth, are best experienced by the reader themselves. The plot is a bit more precocious than profound, but it is well paced, matching the action of the game.

The BioShock series has become something of a bellwether for the video game industry and the release of Infinite has led to several “state of the medium” pieces online (listed below). What, then, does BioShock Infinite indicate about the future course of video games? On the one hand, we see a familiar reliance on violence and the first-person perspective, but on the other hand, we see a game that engages with complex, historically laced themes. Certainly, Infinite presents these themes in an exaggerated manner, but the fact that the game deals with them at all is encouraging. This further maturation of video games can only be seen as a good thing, for historians and players alike.

Photo Credits:

Promotional Photos of Bioshock Infinite (Images courtesy of Irrational Games and 2K Games)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

If you’d like to read more about Bioshock Infinite:

Leigh Alexander writes that Infinite represents “a crucial moment in

canon,” but not one without flaws.

Giantbomb.com editor Alex Navarro collects and discusses the major threads of criticism that Infinite has encouraged in the gaming press.

Gamespot.com interview with Ken Levine on the development of Infinite and the current state of the video game industry.

CIA Study: “Consequences to the US of Communist Domination of Mainland Southeast Asia,” October 13, 1950

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Before 1948, the Cold War was largely confined to Europe and the Middle East, areas that both U.S. and Soviet leaders considered vital to their nations’ core foreign policy objectives after the Second World War. By 1950, however, the Cold War had spread to Asia. First, Mao Zedong’s communist armies prevailed in the long-running Chinese civil war in October 1949, making the world’s most populous country part of the communist bloc. Then, on July 25, 1950, communist North Korea invaded Western-oriented South Korea, igniting a bloody war and intensifying the mood of global crisis. U.S. officials assumed that Stalin and Mao were behind the North Korean attack and feared that the assault marked the start of a broader offensive in other parts of the continent. Even as they sent troops to defend South Korea, U.S. leaders pumped money and weapons into the region to help bolster friendly forces. Underlying such behavior was a strong sense, illustrated in the following analysis by the Central Intelligence Agency, that losing the region to the communist bloc would have an array of devastating strategic, economic, military, and psychological repercussions extending far beyond Southeast Asia.

Communist domination of mainland Southeast Asia would not be critical to US security interests but would have serious immediate and direct consequences. The gravest of such consequences would be a spreading of doubt and fear among other threatened non-Communist countries as to the ability of the US to back up its proclaimed intention to halt Communist expansion everywhere. Unless offset by positive additions to the security of non-Communist countries in other sensitive areas of the world, the psychological effect of the loss of mainland Southeast Asia would not only strengthen Communist propaganda that the advance of Communism is inexorable but would encourage countries vulnerable to Soviet pressure to adopt “neutral” attitudes in the cold war, or possibly even lead them to an accommodation with Communism.

Domination of the Southeast Asian mainland would increase the threat to such Western outposts in the Pacific as the island chain extending from Japan to Australia and New Zealand. The extension of Communist control, via Burma, to the borders of India and Pakistan would augment the slowly developing Communist threat to the Indian subcontinent. The fall of the Southeast Asian mainland would increase the feeling of insecurity already present in Japan as a result of Communist successes in China and would further underline the apparent economic advantages to the Japanese of association with a communist-dominated Asian sphere.

The countries of mainland Southeast Asia produce such materials on the US strategic list as rubber, tin, shellac, kapok, and teak in substantial volume. Although access to these countries is not considered to be “absolutely essential in an emergency” by the National Security Resources Board, US access to this area is considered “desirable.” Unlimited Soviet access to the strategic materials of Southeast Asia would probably be “desirable” for the USSR but would not be “absolutely essential in an emergency” and therefore denial of the resources of the area to the Soviet Union would not be essential to the US strategic position. Communist control over the rice surpluses of the Southeast Asian mainland would, however, provide the USSR with considerable bargaining power in its relations with other countries of the Far East.

Loss of the area would indirectly affect US security interests through its important economic consequences for countries aligned with the US. Loss of Malaya would deprive the UK of its greatest net dollar earner. An immediate consequence of the loss of Indochina might be a strengthening of the defense of Western Europe since French expenditures for men and materiel in Indochina would be available to fulfill other commitments. Exclusion of Japan from trade with Southeast Asia would seriously frustrate Japanese prospects for economic recovery.

Communist domination of mainland Southeast Asia would place unfriendly forces astride the most direct and best-developed sea and air routes between the Western Pacific and India and the Near East. The denial to the US of intermediate routes in mainland Southeast Asia would be significant because communications between the US and India and the Near East would be essential in a global war. In the event of such a war, the development of Soviet submarine and air bases in mainland Southeast Asia probably would compel the detour of US and allied shipping and air transportation in the Southeast Asia region via considerably longer alternate routes to the south. This extension of friendly lines of communication would hamper US strategic movements in this region and tend to isolate the major non-Communist bases In the Far East – the offshore island chain and Australia – from existing bases in East Africa and the Near and Middle East, as well as from potential bases on the Indian sub-continent.

Besides disrupting established lines of communication in the area, the denial of actual military facilities in mainland Southeast Asia – in particular, the loss of the major naval operating bases at Singapore – would compel the utilization of less desirable peripheral bases. Soviet exploitation of the naval and air bases in mainland Southeast Asia probably would be limited by the difficulties of logistic support but would, nevertheless, increase the threat to existing lines of communication.The loss of any portion of mainland Southeast Asia would increase possibilities for the extension of Communist control over the remainder. The fall of Indochina would provide the Communists with a staging area in addition to China for military operations against the rest of mainland Southeast Asia, and this threat might well inspire accommodation in both Thailand and Burma. Assuming Thailand’s loss, the already considerable difficulty faced by the British in maintaining security in Malaya would be greatly aggravated. Assuming Burma’s internal collapse, unfavorable trends in India would be accelerated. If Burma were overcome by external aggression, however, a stiffening of the attitude of the Government of India toward International Communism could be anticipated.

Source: http://www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000258837/DOC_0000258837.pdf

Photo Credits:

Mao Zedong proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, October 1, 1949 (Image courtesy of the People’s Republic of China)

South Korean refugees flee south to escape the North Korean army, 1950 (Image courtesy of the United States Government)

U.S. air and ground Marines fighting Chinese forces in Korea, 1950 (Image courtesy of the United States Federal Government)

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