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Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Interviewed by Amber Abbas

Alig Apartments, Shamshad Market, Aligarh (June 15, 2009)

Transcript:

Context Notes: I arrived at the home of S.M. Mehdi without an appointment, having been referred to him through a chance encounter with a University official. Though he was never a student of Aligarh, he has moved to the town after his daughter did her Medical degree there and is now practicing in Aligarh. S.M. Mehdi was surprised to see me, but agreed to answer my questions though he cautioned he could not be considered an expert on Aligarh. He told me, instead, of his experiences during partition as a Communist in Bombay. He worked for thirty years in the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi and has been a lifelong Communist. He is a very friendly and engaging person. He is tragically losing his vision and was eager for conversation. Though I met him only briefly, I felt very comfortable during my few visits to his home and looked forward to them.

SMM: There is another interesting incident I will tell you about that period. That is in 1948 when Gandhi was killed. That particular day I was going to Bhopal from Bombay. Thre was a very, very good friend of mine, Munish Saxena, he said, “I will come with you to the station.” So, Sardar Jafri, the Urdu poet, was getting married that day. There was a reception and so we went to the reception and then Munish said, “Come along, let us go, because then your train will be—[going].” I said, “Alright.” So we went to take a taxi. As we went there, we saw some people engaged in rioting on the road. So I asked somebody, “What is happening?” He said, “Gandhi assassinated.”

I said, “No, this is impossible, this must be some work of RSS, this propaganda business, this is nonsense.” So we took a taxi and we went to Victoria Terminus- have you been to Bombay?

AA: No.

SMM: Victoria Terminus was the name, now it is of course, changed [to] something else. So Victoria Terminus is a huge railway station! Very old! During British time it was made. And of course it was busiest area of Bombay. So we took a taxi, I had a small suitcase with me. We went to the station. And as we reached the station it was confirmed that Gandhi was killed, assassinated that time. So Munish told me, “Mehdi, if a Muslim has killed Gandhi, then there is going to be large scale trouble and I don’t think you should go because you’ll be in danger.” I said, “Yes, you are correct. So what do we do?” He said, “Let us go back and then see what happens. Who killed Gandhi, first of all?” I said, “Alright.” So I put my suitcase in the cloakroom and said, “Alright, go.” And can you believe me? As we came out of the railway station with buses and trams and taxis and whatnot and private cars, etc. I mean, Bombay! A city like Bombay, and especially that railway station! My God, what a huge thing it used to be.

And as we came out, there was nothing! Absolutely nothing on the road! No trams. No bus. No taxi. No car. Even no person! No man! Oh God, what has happened! Within two minutes, what happened? The whole city is dead! It was eerie. Terrible. What do we do now? No taxi available and miles and miles we have to go to reach where we were staying in Walkeshwar Road near Malabar Hill. So Munish said, “Let us try the local train and let us go from here, walk down to the railway station, the local train station.” I said, “Alright.” So I and Munish walked down. My God! There was no train. There were no passengers! The whole platform was deserted.

Oh God. It was such a—what do we do now? I said, “What can we do? Let us walk.” We started walking. And, I mean, there was no alternative. There was no train, there was no taxi, there no bus, that’s why. I mean, there was no person on the road! My God. So we were walking, and by this time it was sunset and it was dark now, because we were walking and walking and walking. We saw some light coming from behind us. So I thought it might be a taxi so I flagged it. As it stopped, I came to know that it was a [private] car and it was driven by a Sardarji, Sikh. He was all alone in his car.

We said, “I’m sorry, I thought it was a taxi.” He said, “My dear, there is no taxi today. Where are you going?” I said, “Na, na, na. It is alright, we are just going.” He said, “Look, today you cannot have anything so please come and sit in my car and I will reach you there.” So I looked at Munish, and Munish looked at me. He said, “Alright, baitiye. (sit)”

AA: Did you feel a little bit—?

SMM: Dar lag rahe hain ke patha nehin, Sardarji kaun? Kya kar dein?

(It was frightening, we didn’t know who this Sardarji was. What would he do?)

AA: Aur abhi tak aapko nehin maloom tha ki Mussalman nehin tha? Jinhone mara?

(Up till now you didn’t know that it wasn’t a Muslim? Who killed him?)

SMM: Nehin, nehin. Abhi kuch nehin patha! (No, no. We didn’t know anything!) Tho Sardar asked us, “Where are you going? Which locality?” We didn’t want to give him the name of the locality that we are living in Walkeshwar Road. We said, “No, no, Sardaji, you just please drop us at Opera House.” Opera House was a place, from there we could take a bus to our house. He said, “Alright.” We asked him, “Sardarji, where are you going?” He said, “I am going to Pakistan. And come along, you also come with us!” Meaning: Muslim areas. He was going to kill. So we laughed, and said, “No, no, we have got some work to do, etc. etc. So please you drop us near the Opera House. He said, “Alright.” So he dropped us and he went away.

So we walked and reached our house where Sardar Jafri and his newlywed wife were there. They asked us, “What is this?” So we told them the whole story about it. So he said, “How do we know who has done it?” By that time, it was nine o’clock in the night. There used to be a nine o’clock new bulletin everyday. That was an important news bulletin of the radio. So he said, Sardar Jafri told me, “See, on the ground floor, there is a lady, a Muslim lady, a Khoja, who stays there. If you go to her maybe she will allow you to listen to the news on the radio.” So I went there. There was only one woman living in this huge flat, it was quite a big flat. So I told her and she said, “Hanh, hanh. Yes, please go ahead and listen.” She did not know anything in the world what is happening whether Gandhi is dead or alive. She didn’t know anything!

So I just opened her radio for the nine o’clock news and Sardar Patel came out that “A Fanatic Hindu has killed Gandhi.” Oh, God. I felt so relieved! (laughs) So it was the next day that I took the train for Bhopal. (laughs)

AA: How did it strike you, emotionally, that he had been assassinated?

SMM: Hhmm? How did I?

AA: How did you feel, emotionally?

SMM: Oh, emotionally, about Gandhi. Hanh, hanh. Emotionally, about Gandhi I thought, I mean, we thought less, I suppose, than ourselves. What is going to happen to us? Presuming some one is going to stab us, kill us. Who has killed? The whole thing was, who can it be? And it always came down, it must be a Muslim, it might be a Muslim, it must be a Muslim, it might be a Muslim, that’s all. It must be a Muslim. We thought that Muslim Leaguer must have killed Gandhi. Because at that time they were saying that partition is not in favor of Pakistan but is in favor of—the Radcliffe Award is in favor of India, not Pakistan.

So, yeh dimag me baj gaya raha tha ke “Kis ne mara hoga? Mussalman hi ho sakta jisne mara hoga.” (This was bouncing in the mind that, “Who will have killed him? It could only be a Muslim who will have killed him.”) It must be a Muslim who has killed. And we were looking bhai, ke koi aa na raha ho, koi dekh na raha ho, koi marna nehin hum logon ko. (And we were looking, man, that no one should be coming, no one should be watching, no one should kill us.) And as we heard this news that a fanatic Hindu has killed Gandhi, it was a really greatly—I mean, just imagine! We, who did not believe in this nonsense of Hindus and Muslims, when we heard that a Hindu had killed Gandhi, we felt relieved. That at least a Muslim has not killed Gandhi. That was a terrible experience of my life.

Rethinking Borders: Salman Rushdie & Sebastião Salgado on the US-Mexico Border

by Anne M. Martinez

The U.S.-Mexico border, with all its power, danger, intrigue and excitement is even more complex than most acknowledge. As Gloria Anzaldúa suggested in her seminal work, Borderlands/La Frontera:

The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture… A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A border is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.

Anzaldúa focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border, while Salman Rushdie emphasizes figurative, more than literal, borders in Step Across This Line, “there are frontiers which, being invisible, are more dangerous to cross than the physical kind.” Rushdie, an international figure who spent nearly a decade in his own “borderlands” existence, provides a unique perspective on the role of frontiers, as he calls them. Step Across This Line, his 2002 Yale University Tanner Lecture on Human Values, travels the globe and the centuries to try to make sense of lines, frontiers, and borders and the peoples who traverse them in the early twenty-first century. Consider Rushdie’s analysis of this photograph:

There is a photograph by Sebastião Salgado that shows the wall between the United States and Mexico snaking over the crests of hills, running away into the distance, as far as the eye can see, part Great Wall of China, part gulag. There is a kind of brutal beauty here, the beauty of starkness.

Give the photo a second or third or fourth glance before continuing. Which side is the United States? How do you know? What kind of activity do you see? What kind of lives do you imagine are lived on either side of the wall? Rushdie continues,

At intervals along the wall there are watchtowers, and these so-called sky-towers are manned by armed men. In the photograph we can see the tiny, silhouetted figure of a running man, an illegal immigrant, being chased by other men in cars. The strange thing about the picture is that, although the running man is clearly on the American side, he is running toward the wall, not away from it. He has been spotted, and is more afraid of the men bearing down on him in cars than of the impoverished life he thought he had left behind. He is trying to get back, to unmake his bid for freedom.

Rushdie’s turn of phrase is striking. The idea of “unmaking” one’s “bid for freedom” counters our traditional casting of the United States as the land of the free.

So freedom is now to be defined against those too poor to deserve its benefits by the edifices and procedures of totalitarianism. What kind of freedom is it, then, that we enjoy in the countries of the West – those exclusive, increasingly well-guarded enclaves of ours? That is the question the photograph asks, and before September 11, 2001, many of us – many more, I suspect, than today – would have been on the running man’s side.

This prescient vision, a decade ago, came to be: the border in the post-9/11 world has been directly tied to terrorism, despite our knowledge that none of those who struck on 9/11 entered through Mexico. In fact, the alliance between the United States and Mexico that was being strengthened by Presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox in the days immediately prior to 9/11, disintegrated. The spirit of opportunity and cooperation between these neighbors evaporated in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States.

You may also enjoy this author’s blog post: Borderlands Business

In the meantime, you may enjoy these resources:

The Borderlands Encyclopedia
Educational resource on contemporary US-Mexico border issues.

Borderlands Information Center (BIC)
Central clearinghouse and referral center for information about the Texas-Mexico border region.

Migrations.
A photo essay on world migration by Sebastião Salgado (1997)

Corruption at the Gates
Two-part series from NPR’s All Things Considered, which examines the culture of drug money and corruption along the US-Mexico border.

The Forgotten Americans
PBS documentary about the people who live in Las Colonias, shanty towns and rural communities within 150 miles of the US – Mexico Border.

Latin American Network Information Center
“LANIC’s mission is to facilitate access to Internet-based information to, from, or on Latin America. While many of our resources are designed to facilitate research and academic endeavors, our site has also become an important gateway to Latin America for primary and secondary school teachers and students, private and public sector professionals, and just about anyone looking for important information about this public region.”

Photo credit:
Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, born 1944)
U.S. – Mexico Border, desert of San Ysidro, California
negative 1997; print 2009. Gelatin silver print
34.4 x 51.4 cm (13 9/16 x 20 1/4 in.)
© Sebastião Salgado
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (1979)

by Joseph Parrott

Much like its eponymous waterway, V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River meanders steadily through the dark reality of postcolonial Africa, alternately depicting minimalist beauty and frightening tension. Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, subtle prose reveals the timelessness of the continent’s remote corners alongside human corruptibility. Yet, Naipaul moves his narrative closer in time to contemporary Africa, demonstrating that the horrifying legacies of colonialism did not end with Europe’s retreat. In A Bend in the River, the struggle to establish national identities in the wake of Western imperialism takes center stage, with “black men assuming the lies of white men” in order to govern.

The work follows Salim, an ethnically Indian trader who moves to the newly independent hinterland of an anonymous Francophone state modeled on the former Belgian Congo. The rise and fall of African modernity occurs slowly under the disembodied image of the dictatorial “Big Man” – a depiction eerily similar to Mobutu Sese Seko – who introduces relative security through the constant threat of violence. While building his mercantile business and conducting an affair with a married woman, Salim witnesses the nation devolve into a state of xenophobia, corruption, and general malaise. The character’s growing feelings of alienation and the struggle to maintain his livelihood provide the novel with narrative momentum. They also demonstrate the divisions that often emerged during the creation of postcolonial national identities and the problems common to the despotic state. Thus, Naipaul’s insular setting serves as a symbol of the transitory nature and uncertain future of the continent as a whole: “This piece of earth – how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa, and now this.”

More than just a piece of fiction, Naipaul’s work offers an introspective reflection on the practices of western modernity and the meaning of life in a period of upheaval. Essentially likeable, Salim becomes the vehicle for trenchant observations on morality, passion, and progress. A cast of supporting characters represents the failures of contemporary society: Metty, the naive servant clinging to abandoned social conventions; Mahesh, the superficial franchiser of the first western fast food chain in the bush town; Ferdinand, a malleable and ultimately disenchanted youth who becomes an African nationalist; and Raymond, the satirical former colonial who desperately seeks to portray the mercurial Big Man as the savior of Africa. Relatively uneventful and filled with intentionally unresolved subplots, the novel moves from one life experience to another as the protagonists seek only to survive under trying circumstances. Yet, the author’s eye for detail and crisp writing adeptly create a sense of tension and drama that pervades even the quietest corners of the book, culminating in an ambiguous ending reminiscent of Marlowe’s journey on an older river. Meditative, challenging, yet wholly engrossing, Naipaul’s novel deserves its fame as a monument of postcolonial literature.

The Death of Qaddafi by Historians

The death of Muammar al-Qaddafi and the end of his rule in Libya marks the end of an era. Our untiring colleague in International History, Jeremi Suri, blogs about the historical background. More historical perspective, in particular about the backseat role the US played in these events, can be found at NPR’s website. And on the photoblog of The Atlantic is a collection of photographs from the last battles.

Syria´s President Hafez al-Asad (sitting on the right side) signing the Federation of Arab Republics in Benghazi, Libya, on April 18, 1971 with President Anwar al-Sadat (stting left) of Egypt and Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya (sitting in the centre). The agreement never materialized into a federal union between the three Arab states.
Photo Credit: The Online Museum of Syrian History via Wikimedia Commons

For more on and by Jeremi Suri, see his website, which begins with another version of this article.

You may also like:
Chris Dietrich on Oil and Weapons in Libya
Lior Sternfeld on Asef Bayat’s book about Democratic Islam

Posted Saturday, October 22, 2011

Bad Blood: Newly Discovered Documents on US Funded Syphilis Experiments

by Philippa Levine

On September 13, 2011, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released its report on the syphilis experiments that were funded and conducted by the US government in Guatemala in the 1940s. Over 1300 prisoners, prostitutes, psychiatric patients, and soldiers in Guatemala were infected with sexually transmissible diseases (through supervised sexual relations among other methods), in an attempt to better understand treatments for diseases such as syphilis. The researchers also drew blood from thousands of Guatemalan children to further another aspect of the study.

The Guatemala case has close links to the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study, which withheld treatment for syphilis from some four hundred black men in Macon County, Alabama, between the 1930s and the 1970s for similar reasons. Though the Tuskegee experiment had its roots in a treatment program begun in the optimistic 1920s, the depression transformed it into a study that would end only after negative publicity in the early 1970s. In Alabama, there was no deliberate attempt to infect the subjects of the study. In Guatemala treatment was the norm, but subjects were deliberately infected. In neither case were the risks, or indeed the aim, of the studies fully explained to those who participated. Indeed, the Commission’s report explicitly notes the “deliberate efforts to deceive experimental subjects and the wider community that might have objected to the work.” In Alabama the men in the study were led to believe they were being treated for what the doctors routinely called ‘bad blood.’

Both experiments were underway before the widespread adoption of the ethics code hammered out after the Nüremberg trials, the so-called ‘doctors’ trial’ of Nazi war criminals, but the code did not put an end to the Tuskegee study. There is a long history, and not just in the US, of using people without power – those considered ‘inferior,’ those in disciplinary regimes such as prisons or the military, and those regarded as less likely to protest or even to comprehend – as human subjects in medical and scientific experiments. Indeed, experiments very similar to the Guatemalan one (without the supervised sex) were carried out in the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana in the early 1940s and again at Sing Sing in New York in the 1950s.

In Guatemala and in Alabama, the idea of racial difference played a significant role in determining the shape of the studies. Scientists debated whether there were racial differences in sexually transmissible diseases. Prejudices that saw some populations as more sexual than others fuelled such ideas. The theory that syphilis may have originated in Central America made some scientists wonder if the indigenous population had thus acquired immunity. Ideas such as these made already under-privileged populations targets for invasive research.

President Obama issued an apology to Guatemala in 2010 for the actions of government officials. President Clinton issued an apology to the subjects of the Tuskegee study in 1997.

Do studies like this go on today here or elsewhere? In theory, the answer is “no,” since there are rules in place that require scientists and doctors to explain their work to subjects and because some techniques simply aren’t allowed any longer. In practice, the situation is more complex. The Guatemala research came to light only when a researcher stumbled across evidence in the papers of the lead scientist. Tuskegee was never a secret; throughout the years of the study, leading science journals openly published its results. For the historian, all this is familiar territory: the accidental unearthing of evidence, the evidence hidden in plain sight. Students often ask me: how could this have happened? How could this have been allowed? There are good lessons to learn here, and ones in which historians can play a crucial role. While it’s too late for the Guatemalan prisoners of the 1940s and the men of Tuskegee, it has nonetheless often been the work of historians that has either uncovered or kept in the public eye actions that might otherwise go unnoticed and unremarked. Better late than never.

In Spring Semester 2012, Prof. Levine will debut a course entitled “Science, Ethics and Society.”

Government documents and Media Coverage on the experiments:
http://bioethics.gov/cms/node/306
http://www.examiningtuskegee.com/
http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm
http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/medical_history/bad_blood/report.cfm
http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=5544&blogid=140

Books on the Tuskegee Experiments:
James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
Allan M Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880

Photo Credits:

Doctor injecting subject, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, US National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons

Nuremberg Trials, Karl Brandt, Reich Commissar for Health and Sanitation, was indicted with 22 other Nazi doctors and SS officers on war crimes charges, including horrific medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. US Army. Photo No. OMT-I-D-144. Telford Taylor Papers, Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia University Law School

Lend-Lease Live: The Video

To accompany Charters Wynn’s story about US aid to the USSR during World War II, we offer this video of Lend-Lease in action.The narration is translated below.

“On the evening of June 24, 1941, Prime Minister of Great Britain Winston Churchill came on the radio. He declared: “Any person belonging to a country fighting against fascism will receive British aid.” He went on to say that he will give Russia and its people all the help that the British government can offer. On October 2, 1941, the agreement was signed. Under the terms of the agreement, Great Britain and the United States pledged to dispense aid to the Soviet Union beginning on October 1, 1941 until the end of June 1942 by providing approximately 400 airplanes, 500 tanks, rockets, tin, aluminum, lead, and other wartime materials. It was declared that Great Britain and the United States will help mobilize and deliver these materials to the Soviet Union.

Hitler spared Murmansk. He expected to capture it quickly in order to use it for its port system, repair and maintenance factories, and docks. Murmansk was the only port in Northern Russia that did not freeze in the winter. Its direct access to Moscow by rail lent it even more geostrategic value. However, Hitler’s army hit an impasse approximately 80 kilometers from Murmansk. Successful naval operations implemented by the Russian military further ruined the Fuhrer’s plans to capture the city by land, leading him to issue an order to destroy the city from above. Consequently, Murmansk endured the longest bombing campaign in the history of the Second World War.”

Samuel Pepys Tweets

by Jessica Luther

On August 29, 2011, Samuel Pepys (@samuelpepys) tweeted the following:

Took my wife, and Mercer, and Deb., to Bartholomew Fair, and there did see a ridiculous, obscene little stage-play, called “Marry Andrey.

While this may seem rather boring in content, it is extraordinary considering that Samuel Pepys originally wrote that in 1668. And now it is a tweet.

Pepys was a seventeenth-century English diarist, famous for the journal that he kept during the decade of the 1660s. He chronicled such events as the reestablishment of the monarchy under Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665 and 1666, the Great Fire of London in September 1666, the demolition of St. Paul’s cathedral in 1668, and the Second Anglo-Dutch War later in the decade. He also recorded the mundane activities of domestic life, squabbles with servants, and his extramarital affairs. Pepys was a Member of Parliament, a successful businessman, a Justice of the Peace, and a member of the Royal Society. (For more on Pepys’ biography)

The diary is an incredible resource for any historian studying early modern England but it is also an enjoyable read, especially in small 140-character bits delivered to your Twitter feed.

Since January 1, 2003, a website designer named Phil Gyford has been publishing an entry from the diary everyday, beginning with the first entry from Pepys’ diary on January 1, 1660. The main site always hosts the latest entries. Each entry is also annotated so that specific people, places, and events are easily explained by simply rolling your mouse over the highlighted term.

Pepys’ Twitter feed publishes one or two sentences from that day’s entry. It is refreshing among updates from Libya, the 2012 presidential race, and some actor’s latest scandal to see the seventeenth-century English prose of Pepys in this modern-day form of communication.

Sometimes the tweets simply serve as a reminder of the realities and lived experience of people in early modern England.

Tweeted on July 18, 2011 (which corresponds to entry for July 18, 1668):

My Lord Cornwallis did endeavour to get the King a whore, but she did get away, and killed herself, which if true is very sad.

Tweeted on July 12, 2011:

Betty Michell cries out, and my wife goes to her, and she brings forth a girl, and my wife godmother again to a Betty.

Tweeted on June 18, 2011:

I by little words find that my wife hath heard of my going to plays, and carrying people abroad every day, in her absence.

Tweeted on June 11, 2011: (Pepys’ trip to Stonehenge):

Find Stonage prodigious as any tales I ever heard of them. God knows what their use was! They are hard to tell, but yet maybe told.

Pepys’ final entry was on May 31, 1669. That means that Gyford’s online project of unveiling the diary over the course of nine years will end at the end of next May.

Image Credits:
H.B. Wheatley, ed, The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Pepysiana (London, 1899)
Anonymous, Great fire of London, 1666 (cropped and inverted)
both public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Changing Course in Vietnam — or Not

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Democratic governments often have a hard time changing their minds, as recent U.S. decision-making about Iraq and Afghanistan has made clear. Even when the United States encountered monumental frustrations and setbacks, Washington kept fighting, adjusting its strategy and tactics but not its overall goals or the assumptions that underpinned them. To withdraw from either country before achieving stated U.S. objectives would, the Bush and Obama administrations agreed, expose the United States to national-security risks. Both administrations surely also feared the domestic political consequences of failing to achieving U.S. goals after thousands of Americans had already died in the effort.

So it was more than forty years ago, when U.S. officials responded to setbacks in Vietnam not by rethinking their goals or assumptions but by affirming their commitment to the war and, for a time, increasing the number of U.S. troops. Indeed, the vast documentary record of the Vietnam War makes abundantly clear that American leaders rarely revisited the fundamental assumptions that guided their decisions to escalate U.S. involvement.

A rare exception was an extraordinary study written by the Central Intelligence Agency in September 1967. By that time, the United States had encountered virtually all of the problems that would eventually doom its war effort in Vietnam. While Lyndon Johnson and his top advisers remained adamant that the United States would suffer intolerable geostrategic reverses if it failed to press on to victory, the CIA report suggested otherwise.

Nations would not fall to communism like a row of dominos if the North Vietnamese won, it insisted. The U.S. reputation for anticommunist resolve would not be forever destroyed. And the Soviets and Chinese would not go on an anti-U.S. rampage around the globe. In short, the study insisted, “such risks are probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument has indicated.”

It is hardly surprising that President Johnson ignored the CIA’s position and continued to escalate the war. The study, while extraordinary, was just a drop in the ocean of memos and reports that passed through the Oval Office, many of them suggesting that U.S. objectives were still obtainable. And the prospect of winding down the U.S. commitment was no doubt deeply distasteful to a president who had invested a huge amount of his personal and political capital in waging war in Vietnam. Yet the document stands out nevertheless for the clarity and prescience with which it saw beyond preoccupations of the moment and questioned the conventional wisdom that had led the United States to make a gigantic commitment to a small, distant, and impoverished land. It reminds us, at a minimum, of the value of taking the long view and asking whether the expenditure of resources corresponds to U.S. interests broadly conceived.

Read the original study: “Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam,” dated September 11, 1967

Related Reading:

Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2010)

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and Escalation of War in Vietnam (2001)

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (2008)

A longer version of this essay: “The Consequences of Defeat in Vietnam”

Photo Credits:
Paddler: A US. Medic paddles a three-man assault boat down a canal during Operation Tong Thang (1968). By Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. U.S. Army Audiovisual Center. (ca. 1974 – 05/15/1984) (U.S. National Archives, ARC Identifier 530622) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
LBJ: By Yoichi R. Okamoto [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Gunner: A U.S. Navy river patrol boat crewman maintains vigilance at the .50-caliber machine gun during the boat’s day-long patrol on the Go Cong River (1967). By R.D. Moeser, JOC, U.S. Navy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Sounds of the Past #2

by Karl Hagstrom Miller

Anyone interested in early sound recordings can find a treasure trove at the Library of Congress website.

“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” is a great example of the sentimental ballads that became popular in the United States during the 1890s. The classic ballads were maudlin tearjerkers, narrative tales of lost love or dead mothers designed to pull at the heartstrings. They featured snappy melodies that lodged themselves in the heads of anyone within earshot. New York sheet music publishers churned them out by the score, hoping that a few would prove popular with theater audiences and the legions of young women who played the latest hits at the family piano. The assembly-line composition process marked the industrialization of American popular music.

Listen to “In the Baggage Coach Ahead”

“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” from 1896 hits all the requisite stops. The song takes place on the sleeping car on a train, where an inconsolable baby cries in its father’s arms. Other passengers demand silence, complaining that they cannot sleep. One woman then suggests that the father take the baby to its mother, a request that set up the song’s kicker. “I wish I could,” the father replies, “but she’s dead in the coach ahead.”

The song was the most popular composition of Gussie L. Davis, a pioneer in breaking down segregation in the music business. He was one of a very few African American songwriters who successfully published sentimental ballads during the decade. Most black writers were either barred from the industry or constrained to writing comic minstrel songs about black inferiority.

The performer, Vernon Dalhart, was a struggling opera singer who moved from Texas to New York around 1911. He eventually became a popular recording artist for the Edison phonograph company, waxing everything from light opera and minstrel songs to popular hits of the day. In 1925, he re-imagined himself as a hillbilly singer and achieved his greatest popularity with “The Prisoner’s Song,” often touted as the first country record to sell a million copies.

Sentimental ballads such as “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” were popular, in part, because they could help Americans grapple with the dramatic social changes they were experiencing. Urbanization, industrialization, immigration, the expansion of railroad travel, and the availability of thousands of new consumer goods (including phonographs and commercial theater) brought increasing contact with people, products, and ideas from elsewhere. Sentimental ballads helped negotiate the intersection of public and private spheres. Davis’ last verse finds all the mothers and wives on the train helping the lone father sooth his crying child. It concludes, “Every one had a story to tell in their home of the baggage coach ahead.” Mothers saved the day and helped transform a public tragedy into a private morality lesson when witnesses shared the story with their loved ones back home.

Embracing “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” and its kin meant not having to choose between public and private allegiances. Sentimental ballads were commercial leisure that celebrated private domesticity. Listeners could identify with both by singing along with the odes to private virtue echoing from the public stage.

Karl H. Miller’s “Sounds of the Past #1” on Not Even Past

Sheet music cover: Historic American Sheet Music collection, Duke University Libraries Digital Collections
Portraits of Davis and Dalhart via Wikimedia Commons

A Dangerous Idea

by Miriam Bodian

In 1645, a young Jew who had been captured in Portuguese Brazil was brought to Lisbon and tried by the Inquisition for heresy. He had been reluctantly baptized by his parents in France, where the practice of Judaism was forbidden. His trial, in many ways so much like other inquisitorial trials, is different from any other trial I know of in one respect: The “heretic,” Isaac de Castro Tartas, defended his right to practice Judaism on the basis of a universal natural right to freedom of conscience. This was a bold defense but it ultimately failed; he was burned at the stake in 1647, at the age of nineteen. But his long exchanges with his inquisitors on religious authority and individual conscience are preserved in a lengthy dossier housed today in the Portuguese National Archives, and tell us much about the hopes and fears around this issue.

Anonymous engraver, 17th century. The text reads “Method for burning those condemned by the Inquisition” and depicts the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon, Portugal.

Today, people who live in democratic societies take religious freedom for granted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most Europeans found the idea of “freedom of conscience” deeply threatening. How could the fabric of society withstand competing religious ideas? What would convince people to live moral lives in the absence of a single, state-supported church? The anxiety Europeans felt about religious freedom impeded the struggle to achieve that freedom. Isaac de Castro’s trial vividly reflects the great divide between the few who supported this idea and the powerful authorities who rejected it. The inquisitors’ views about religious authority is often disparaged; but even in 2011 it is just as important to understand the mentality of the inquisitors as it is to understand the arguments of Isaac de Castro.

Castro defended himself by arguing that even if the inquisitors chose to regard him as a baptized heretic, he was not guilty of heresy, “because an act that is done in accordance with one’s conscience cannot be judged culpable, and the act I have and will continue to do – the act of professing Judaism – is done according to the dictates of my conscience.” Castro supported his argument by describing his experience as a practicing Jew in Amsterdam and Dutch Brazil. These were exceptional environments in which freedom of conscience had been written into law. The inquisitors would have been well aware that Dutch society was thriving and had not been torn apart by the religious diversity of its inhabitants.

The Kahal Zur Israel synagogue in Recife, Brazil was the first Jewish congregation in the New World. It was founded in 1636 during the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco.

But the inquisitors were imbued with a medieval perspective on conscience, according to which individual conscience was “in error” if it differed from the teachings of the Catholic Church. Castro was accused of ignoring the Church’s authority and presumptuously adhering to his own personal beliefs. Confronted with this accusation, he strategically abandoned his argument as an individual and adopted an authoritarian counter-view. He argued that as a Jew by ancestry, and having been circumcised, he was bound to observe the Law of Moses – an argument invoking (Jewish) religious authority that met the inquisitors on their own ground. This concession by Castro,however, proved fatal. The inquisitors argued that baptism, regardless of ancestry, obligated Castro to observe the teachings of the Catholic Church. Having invoked religious authority, Castro had opened himself to attack. If “conscience” meant obedience to doctrines that did not come from within, as he had been pressured to admit, was he not bound to the first obligation he had incurred in his life, that is, baptism?

A great deal of pain, suffering, and experimentation have accompanied the process by which we have come to regard religious beliefs as a matter of individual conscience. But to understand events in our own time, it is important to understand that such an idea is not at all obvious – that for many centuries this was an idea that few could even imagine. An examination of the intense struggle in early modern Europe between those who defended religious authority and those who resisted it brings into focus the great difficulty involved in establishing a principle of religious freedom. It may help us to understand the frequent failure of well-intentioned efforts to impose an idea cherished in the western world, but alien to people conditioned to accept religious authority and to condone the persecution of religious nonconformists.

You may also like:

Historian Richard Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition: an Historical Revision (1999) offers a nuanced reassessment of the Spanish Inquisition’s role in history.

Yale Professor of Brazilian history Stuart Schwartz examines religious toleration in All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2009).

Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (1999).

Images via Wikimedia Commons

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