US History Archives - Page 13 of 24

The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

In this history of popular religion and spirituality, Matthew Hedstrom argues that books and book culture were integral for the rise of liberal religion in the twentieth century. After World War I, a modernizing book business and an emerging religious liberalism expanded the spiritual horizons of many middle-class Americans. The new spiritual forms of twentieth-century liberalism incorporated psychology, mysticism, and (to a lesser extent) positive thinking in their works. Hedstrom, like sociologist Christian Smith, believes that liberal religion achieved a stunning cultural victory after World War II.

Two key developments led to the rise of liberal religion: the embrace of the marketplace and the creation of middlebrow reading culture. In the 1920s, liberal Protestants turned to the marketplace, but on their own terms. They wanted people to read right. Middlebrow reading required that one read earnestly, intensely, and with purpose. Many liberal Protestants thought that this manner of reading would improve people. Middlebrow reading norms also required individual autonomy and expertise. Religious and cultural leaders carefully shepherded readers by offering comfortable — but limited — freedom to act as guided consumers. In other words, religious leaders still hoped to shape the purchases that laymen and laywomen made and the book industry complied.

The First World War destroyed the faith Americans had in simple notions of progress. In response to this crisis, liberal Protestant leaders, executives of the American publishing industry, and other cultural figures collaborated on a series of new initiatives to promote the buying and reading of religious books. These initiatives included the Religious Book Week, the Religious Book Club, and the Religious Books Round Table of the American Library Association. Major publishing houses, like Harper’s and Macmillan, established religious departments for the first time.

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925. Via Library of Congress.

In the interwar years, religious reading became a national concern as the United States faced the threat of fascism. Religious groups like the Council on Books in Wartime and the Religious Book Week campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) promoted reading. Hedstrom shows the widespread appeal of the Council’s slogan, “Books as Weapons in the War of Ideas.” The Second World War, for these groups, was not only an ideological battle, it was also a spiritual struggle for the soul.

US Government Poster from 1942. Via Library of Congress.

Harry Emerson Fosdick. Via Wikipedia.

After the war, Americans continued to turn to books for spiritual guidance. And the increasing belief that the United States was a Judeo-Christian nation formed the foundation of what Hedstrom calls “spiritual cosmopolitanism.” Letters to Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two of the most popular post-World War II authors of liberal religion, display Americans’ newfound eagerness to read religious and spiritual works from authors of other faiths. These letters also provide keen insight into who was reading spiritual books and why and how they were reading them. Many Americans were religious, even if they were not attending church on Sundays. Readers of middlebrow religious culture were trying to grapple with religious questions about the Second World War, morality, and spirituality. Fosdick and Liebman helped them find answers.

The Rise of Liberal Religion is revisionist history in the best possible sense. By emphasizing “lived religion,” or the spaces where religion is practiced and faith is formed, Hedstrom shows that the numerical decline of mainline Protestant churches and churchgoers matters less than previous historians insisted. In addition, Hedstrom challenges the master narrative that conservative Christianity dominated the post-World War II religious landscape. Despite this, readers might find a few shortcomings. First, Hedstrom makes too many sweeping declarations about liberal religion after the 1950s. For example, he points to Americans’ incorporation of yoga as a form of spiritual cosmopolitanism, but it is not clear that liberal religion in the U.S. made a conscious effort to incorporate yoga into its practice. More important, Hedstrom provides little evidence about the lived religious experiences of women, African Americans, and Native Americans. He asserts that middlebrow reading provided women agency, but the evidence from women themselves is somewhat thin. By emphasizing the vitality of liberal religious experience, Hedstrom has set a new agenda for the cultural history of U.S. religion, but that cultural history will have to incorporate more of the population of the faithful for it to have a real impact.

Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013)

You may also like these reviews by Christopher Babits:

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

And Robert Abzug’s discussion of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Call Pest Control: The Bug Problem at the US Embassy in Moscow

By Brian Selman

Every popular American spy novel and film of the past half-century has had to contain a Russian character, usually in the form of a femme fatale or a burly, deep-voiced brute. Is there a strong historical basis for this? Did the US and Soviet Union conduct espionage as extensively as the movies would make us believe? The short answer is “yes.” While it is true that there were far fewer explosions and self-destructing messages than portrayed in this particular sub-genre, both superpowers employed vast intelligence and espionage networks in order to gather information about each other. The 1964 bugging of the US embassy in Moscow is a good example of this, as it served as one of the most pervasive and prolonged acts of espionage discovered during the Cold War.

Image of a bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow. Courtesy of the LBJ Library

Image of a bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow in 1964. Courtesy of the LBJ Library.

On the morning of April 29, 1964, the American embassy in Moscow sent a telegram to the Department of State in Washington detailing the discovery and the beginning of the removal of microphones, eventually found to total more than forty, hidden within their walls. According to a situation brief from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to the American embassy, the U.S. had long suspected that their facilities in Moscow were bugged. Regular sweeps and frequent probing of the embassy’s walls, however, had never shown any evidence of the presence of microphones. According to Rusk, they had done everything “short of physically destroying a room.” Rusk states in this telegram that the hidden microphones were only discovered as a result of a ”decision to do some extensive physical damage to an area in Embassy.” According to this telegram and as reported in “Red ‘Bugs’ Found in U.S. Embassy,” an article in Long Island’s Star-Journal, after demolishing an inner wall, embassy staff discovered the first covert listening device located inside a wooden tube 8-10 inches behind the wall’s surface. It was only after finding this first microphone and following its wires that they realized the pervasiveness of the bugging. The foundations of every single room, including the bathrooms, were bugged, with the exception of a specially designed “room-within-a-room.” As the Star Journal report states, due to the age and obvious rusting on some of the microphones, it was clear that the embassy had been bugged since the Soviet government had leased the facility to Americans over a decade prior to their discovery.

L-R: US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1967 during the Glassboro Summit Conference. Courtesy of the LBJ Library.

In a press conference on May 19,1964, James L. Greenfield of the Public Affairs Bureau and Marvin Gentile, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Security at the time, announced that more than 130 microphones had been found in American embassies in Eastern Europe between 1949 and April 1964 when the Moscow bugs were detected. However, none of these other microphones were part of such an extensive system. After the removal of these microphones, embassy staff there evaluated the size of the security breach resulting from the unprecedented 12-year Soviet bug infestation. Many reports were sent to the White House by different members of staff at the embassy detailing the precautions they took in their correspondences and conversations. In fact, as a circular telegram sent out by Rusk to numerous embassies in Europe states, all members of staff at the Moscow embassy were instructed as a matter of procedure to always assume they were being watched and listened to by the KGB (Soviet secret police). At the press conference Gentile stated that, “We will never operate in any post behind the [Iron] Curtain except under the assumption that a place is bugged.” He then claimed, “That is the only way we can operate in Eastern European countries.” In a report to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Rusk claims that he often made statements “in the hope, if not expectation” that they would be overheard by the Soviets. All these reports stated that, to all embassy staff members’ knowledge, no ultra-sensitive information was leaked. However, according to the article in the Star Journal, a meeting of U.S. consular officials had been proposed to take place at the American embassy in Moscow. The “room-within-a-room” where most important meetings were held was not large enough to accommodate all of the meeting’s members. Therefore, if this proposal had gone through, they would have convened in a larger, and therefore bugged, room. Because the hidden microphones were discovered first, Rusk rejected the meeting’s proposal and it never took place. If it had, unbeknownst to the US, the Soviet Union would have gained profound insight in American consulate operations during the peak of Cold War tensions.

Replica of the Great Seal which contained a Soviet bugging device concealed inside a gift given by the Soviets to the US Ambassador to Moscow on August 4, 1945. The device is displayed at the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum. Via Wikipedia

Another problem at the time was how to officially declare the discovery of these bugs to the Soviet government. A memo for Bundy from Benjamin H. Read, Rusk’s Executive Secretary, states that it was likely that the Soviets already knew that the bugs at the American embassy had been discovered; it was assumed that they heard the moment of detection through the bugs themselves. However, the U.S. needed to inform the Soviet government that such blatant acts of espionage would not be taken lightly. Embassy staff drafted a formal protest intended for U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Foy D. Kohler, to present to Soviet Foreign Minister, Vasily Kuznetsov. The first draft is written in flowery complimentary language, giving Kohler the “honor” of informing Kuznetsov and the Soviet government about the discovery of the bugs. After edits, the official protest was written in much sterner and stronger language, detailing the U.S.’s serious displeasure of the USSR’s “flagrant contravention” of Article 22 of the Vienna Convention, which invested the host state with the responsibility of assuring diplomatic missions safety against intrusion. As Kohler reported to Rusk, Kuznetsov openly wondered why such a “strong” protest was issued. He recalled several prior occasions, when Soviets found similar bugs in their facilities in Washington, but Soviet government had issued no such protest. According to the memorandum to Bundy, Kohler replied to Kuznetsov that due to the extent of this particular bugging, a “strong” protest was indeed warranted. However, later, after the Soviet Union’s subsequent official rejection of the U.S. protest, Kohler privately confirmed Kuznetsov’s claim, listing multiple cases of American espionage that the Soviet Union cited in its rejection of the U.S. protest including the discovery of listening devices in a table leg in the USSR mission to UN and microphones discovered in vehicles belonging to both a military attaché in the Soviet embassy in Washington and of the Third Secretary of Soviet UN mission.

While the Moscow embassy bugging and the American bugs mentioned by Kuznetsov were by no means the only large-scale acts of espionage between the two superpowers during the Cold War, they demonstrate the lengths that both sides were willing to go to in order to gain an edge in their worldwide struggle for supremacy.

The image of the bug and all cited documents were taken from box #9 of the NSF Intelligence File at the LBJ library, file name: “USSR-Hidden Microphones in Moscow Embassy.”

50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective

By Nancy Bui

Most Americans, including policy makers, and Vietnam Veterans have expressed their lack of knowledge of Vietnam’s history and culture before US’s involvement in Vietnam to fight a war over ideology. The War cost over 58,000 American lives and claimed the lives of over a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers, over a million of North Vietnamese troops and an estimated 7 million civilians from both North and South Vietnam.

The war was over, but the misunderstandings continued. What can we learn from this war? Perhaps, we may want to look at the war from the Vietnamese perspective. After all, we carry the largest cost of the war and suffered unspeakable atrocities long before and long after America’s involvement. The outcome of the War has affected us tremendously and the ongoing process of healing will take us generations.

On May 8, 1965, 3,500 U.S Marines landed in Da Nang, a beach town North of South Vietnam. It marked the year America officially got involved in The Vietnam War by sending ground troops. However, for the Vietnamese, the war had started many years before. After World War II, Ho Chi Minh, an expat who was away from Vietnam for over 30 years, introduced communism into Vietnam. The Vietnamese have had a history of fighting for our sovereignty long before communism arrived. Our people fought the French for our independence from 1885, and we quickly had to fight another war against communists at the same time. In 1954, the Geneva Accords was signed to divide Vietnam into two parts at the 17th parallel. The North belonged to the communist party, and the South belonged to the free Vietnamese.

On May 19, 1959, Ho Chi Minh’s 69th birthday, with help from Russia and China, North Vietnam officially kicked off the invasion of South Vietnam. The South fought back in a Guerrilla War which lasted from 1959-1963. America wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and sent troops to Vietnam. President Ngo Dinh Diem on the other hand, only wanted economic aid, weapons, and training, because he believed that any foreign troops on Vietnamese soil would sooner or later offend the Vietnamese people, as fighting for their sovereignty from foreign invaders was their way of life. The conflict ended in his assassination on Nov. 2, 1963.

After sending troops to Vietnam, the conflict extended into a Total War. The battlefields became bloodier and bloodier. Over half a million U.S troops were in South Vietnam by 1968. Vietnam lost the media war, as public opinion and support for the War rapidly declined, triggering a decade of antiwar demonstrations. America started pulling troops out of Vietnam. By the end of 1972, all combat troops were completely withdrawn. In early 1973, Congress passed the resolution to prohibit any funding of The Indochina War. The US was quick to get involved in the war, but was even quicker to retreat from it.

The South Vietnamese Army fought for over two years without any outside assistance. On the other hand, Russia and China more than doubled their aids to North Vietnam. The South fought to their last bullet and finally surrendered on April 30, 1975. The following two slides offer further information what happened after the war.

You may also like:

Mark Lawrence’s article The War in Vietnam Revisted and his recommended must-read books on the war in Vietnam.

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan (2012)

By Christopher Babits

In the series finale of Mad Men, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) finds himself at a California retreat center overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of several days, Draper attends seminars where participants talk about what’s bothering them. At first, he’s skeptical of the place, reluctantly engaging with other people to support the niece who wanted to attend the retreat. When she leaves him, with no car and no escape, Draper is forced to find peace with himself. In the final scene, he participates in a morning meditation session. He sits with his legs crossed and his eyes closed. Upon uttering an “om,” a bell rings, as Draper has yet another advertising epiphany, and the show ends with the famous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. Draper finally accepted that he was an ad man, albeit one who was responding to — and incorporating elements of — changing social and cultural norms .

Don Draper in the final scene of Mad Men. Via Hollywood Reporter

In Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, Jessica Grogan examines the rise, demise, and lasting impact of humanistic psychology, a mental health movement that sometimes incorporated meditation, always emphasized self-acceptance, and that Grogan implies changed the corporate world for the better. Grogan offers detailed and illuminating portraits of the individuals most responsible for shaping humanistic psychology — Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May — while putting their movement in historical context. As Grogan demonstrates, humanistic psychology emerged in the 1950s and grew in the 1960s because Maslow, Rogers, May, and others thought psychology had lost its way. In the early Cold War, professional psychologists focused on individuals’ pathologies and academic psychologists emphasized empirical studies at the expense of theory and philosophy. Humanistic psychology, with its emphasis on personal growth and the practice of nondirective therapy, challenged the status quo. By the 1970s, Grogan believes, humanistic psychology infiltrated various segments of American intellectual, cultural, and social life, laying the foundations for today’s therapy culture.

Grogan’s well-constructed and easy-to-follow narrative highlights the discontent that existed in the 1950s and 1960s and the ways that humanistic psychologists offered Americans a new kind of therapy. The threat of nuclear war, not to mention excessive conformity, were key factors for a despondent national mood. Grogan shows that humanistic psychologists had the same critiques of American culture put forth in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956). And she traces the solution humanistic psychologists pursued: create, develop, refine, and advertise a subfield of psychology that emphasized personal growth and individualism.

Abraham Maslow. Via Wikipedia

Humanistic psychologists had a formidable challenge ahead of them. For nearly fifty years, Freudian psychoanalysts and empirical behaviorists dominated the practice of psychotherapy. Grogan describes how Maslow, Rogers, May, and others aimed to transform psychology and American culture in spite of this longstanding dominance. Maslow, a professor of psychology at Brandeis, then a fledgling and financially struggling university, wrote theoretical and philosophical texts, mixed with some small-scale empirical studies, that emphasized the healthy parts of human development and personal growth. Rogers and May pushed humanistic psychology in other directions. Rogers, who taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and left to join the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, California, in 1963, established person-centered therapy. According to Grogan, person-centered therapy allowed for a relationship to develop between psychologist and patient, thus questioning old models where a stifled psychoanalyst listened to her patient and then asked probing questions. May, on the other hand, pushed for group therapy, challenging the predominant belief that therapy had to be a one-on-one relationship between psychoanalyst and patient.

Carl Rogers. Via Wikipedia

By the end of the 1960s, humanistic psychology had gained repute in disparate areas of American intellectual, cultural, and social life. Grogan demonstrates that Maslow, Rogers, and May were able to carve out a space within the psychological discipline for humanistic psychology, organizing their own journals and conferences. Rogers’ ideas about person-centered therapy also dramatically changed the fields of social work and education, putting increasing emphasis on the lived (and subjective) experiences of clients and students. And at least initially, humanistic psychologists supported Timothy Leary’s ideas about the therapeutic uses of LSD. In addition, Grogan examines California’s Esalen Institute, the place that many commentators believe Don Draper found himself in the last episode of Mad Men. Esalen practiced encounter-group therapy and meditation and spiritual practices as paths to self-actualization. By covering such an array of people and places, Grogan underscores that humanistic psychology found a diverse group of followers in the 1960s and 1970s.

Esalen Institute, California. Via Wikipedia.

Encountering America is a fascinating work of cultural and intellectual history. It would have been easy for any historian to get bogged down in the details about the many people, ideas, and events related to humanistic psychology, but Grogan’s narrative style keeps the reader interested. Grogan’s least developed point, however, deals with humanistic psychology’s connections to corporate America. It is clear that humanistic psychology had some impact on the business world (for example, companies now offer employee retreats and sensitivity training), but at what cost? Was this a dramatic victory for humanistic psychology? Or was it selling out? Grogan implies that the changes were for the best, but she also hints that humanistic psychology could only do so much to change businesses’ adherence to the profit-motive. Importantly, Grogan has written a work that could help future historians probe these questions. Anyone interested in Sixties culture and/or the history of psychology should find themselves immersed in this work.

Jessica Grogan, Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self (Harper Perennial, 2012)

You may also like:

Christopher Babits on Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

Jing Zhai explains Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Adrian Masters recommends Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis by Rubén Gallo (2010)

Could a Supreme Court justice be president?

By Lewis L. Gould

Bill Kristol, whose major political contribution to American public life is the national career of Sarah Palin, has another bright idea to free the Republican Party from the looming prospect of a Donald Trump presidential candidacy. The GOP, he writes, should turn to a dark horse from an unlikely source. After naming several long-shot contenders such as Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan, Kristol essays the presidential equivalent of a two-handed shot from half court. Why not, he inquires, Justice Samuel Alito from the Supreme Court? Never mind that Justice Alito has never expressed interest in the White House and would have to give up his seat to make the race. A man of Alito’s intellect would save the party from the oafish Trump whose slogan on his hat embodies his program to make America great again. Has this potential departure from the Court ever happened before or is the gadfly Kristol innovating again?

The Republicans faced such a dilemma once before in American history. Against President Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for a second term in 1916, the GOP lacked a strong presidential nominee to counter the resurgence of former president Theodore Roosevelt who hated Wilson, advocated for intervention on the Allied side in World War I, and seemed an unpromising candidate against the sitting president. Several Republican hopefuls pressed to be nominated, but a motley assortment of senators, governors, and also-rans caused no excitement comparable to what the charismatic Roosevelt stirred.

Salvation seemed at hand on the Supreme Court. Justice Charles Evans Hughes, appointed to the Court by William Howard Taft in 1910, seemed the ideal solution. Formerly a reformist governor of New York (1907-1910), Hughes had no baggage from 1912, when Taft and Roosevelt fractured the party. He was a man with no personal blemishes who could lead the Republicans back to the White House against the unpopular Wilson. Republicans of the era hated Wilson with a venom reminiscent of how modern GOP members hate President Barack Obama.

How to convince Hughes to leave the Court? He disclaimed all interest in the presidency and ordered his name removed from primary ballots in the spring of 1916. However, unauthorized advocates kept his name before the party. Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s candidacy struck few sparks; his bellicose positions toward World War I attracted some but alienated many, especially in the Middle West, on which the Republicans counted for victory. When the Republican National Convention met in June 1916, the Hughes candidacy was poised for success. It came on the third ballot. Hughes was nominated and he promptly resigned from the bench. Republicans had their savior and they anticipated the ouster of Wilson and a prompt return to power. A reporter with the New York Times visited Hughes’ headquarters a week after his selection and observed, “The casual visitor would think it was all over except the inauguration.”

“Charles Evans Hughes campaigns in Winona, Minnesota on the Milwaukee Road’s Olympian”. Via Wikipedia Commons.

Hughes was a brilliant jurist, which he later proved as Chief Justice. Alas for the Republicans, he proved an inept candidate. Certain he would win the presidency, he gave dry discourses that stressed familiar GOP themes about the protective tariff and prosperity. On issues of war and peace, he indicted Wilson’s performance but said little about what he would do instead. Democrats called him Charles “E-vasion” Hughes. Audiences arrived at events enthusiastic, but left deflated and disappointed. A reporter concluded that “Hughes is dropping icicles all over the west and will return to New York clean shaven.”

Though the election was close, Democrats boasted that Wilson had “kept us out of war” and those sentiments won the president a second term. Wilson carried the crucial state of California and won 277 electoral votes to Hughes’ 254. Republican Party members disavowed “smart” candidates like Roosevelt, Taft, and Hughes, which won Warren G. Harding favor in 1920. Hughes returned to private life, but years as Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the United States lay ahead of him. No viable candidate has emerged from the Supreme Court since Hughes (unless we consider the feckless antics of William O. Douglas). Given the cavalry-charge nature of the current Republican presidential race—and the prospect of a campaign against Trump—it would not be surprising if Justice Alito, a smart man, considers Hughes as precedent and ignores the aggressive punditry of Bill Kristol for the lifetime security of a seat on the Supreme Court.

This post originally appeared on the OUPblog

You may also like:

Lewis. L. Gould, The Republicans: A History of the Grand Old Party (Oxford university Press, 2014)

J. Taylor Vurpillat recommends A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920, by Michael McGerr (2003)

A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico jointly created the Mexican Drug War, by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace (2015)

By Christina Villareal

The “war on drugs” originated in the late nineteenth century when the United States and Mexico began to combat the narcotics industry. By 1914, the Harrison Act criminalized non-medicinal use of opiates and cocaine in the United States. Likewise, with the ratification of the 1917 Constitution, Mexico tried to terminate the distribution of drugs with strict bans on the production and importation of opiates, cocaine, and marijuana. Before 1920, both countries had declared war on drugs. In A Narco History, Boullosa and Wallace explain how the battle against drugs has enriched narcos, escalated violence, and increased the demand for illegal substances.

Boullosa and Wallace begin by recounting the events of 2014 that led to the horrific murder of 43 students from Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero. Although the truth about this case remains obscure today, the authors suggest foul play rooted in collaboration between the federal government, local politicians, and drug-related gangs. The remainder of the book details the convergence of federal and local politicians with drug dealers since the late nineteenth century. Spanning from Mexico’s Porfiriato to Obama’s administration, the twelve chapters explore how the actions of one government, typically those of the United States, resulted in the expansion of the drug trade. For instance, Boullosa and Wallace argue that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which favored U.S. agribusiness, forced thousands of Mexican farmers to turn to marijuana and cocaine production. This deepened the local dependence on the drug market and provided a greater supply for the insatiable demand in the US. Similar instances of cause and effect, which typically benefited the United States to the detriment of Mexicans, occurred throughout the century.

Cempasuchil petals form human-shaped outlines on the ground beside lit candles and a placard during an event held in remembrances of the 43 missing student teachers from the Ayotzinapa. Via REUTERS/Henry Romero

A Nacro History will get any interested reader up-to-speed on the history of this oft discussed “war on drugs.” Beyond a simple timeline, Wallace and Boullosa spell out the implications of political corruption, neoliberalism, the arms trade, and American exceptionalism. U.S. drug policies and pressures on Mexico to squelch the trade ensured the proliferation of “cartels” and the movement of narcotics. The elimination of one “drug lord” inevitably led to the fissuring of cartels and the increase in “collateral criminality,” like kidnapping, rape, extortion, and murder. The authors end the history with a few suggestions for both countries on how to ameliorate the situations for the victims of the drug war violence. Considering the attention given to US-Mexico border issues in the upcoming presidential elections, readers will find their propositions useful.

Courtesy of The Denver Post

The clear writing style and the absence of intimidating footnotes makes A Narco History extremely accessible (even if it might raise questions for academic readers seeking its sources). The lively vignettes on individuals ranging from corrupt politicians and extravagant narcotraficantea to opportunistic agriculturalists and heroic victims, will prove especially interesting to undergraduates and nonacademic audiences. A Narco History will leave many readers eager to embark on research of their own, which they can begin with the book’s excellent bibliography.

You may also like:

NEP’s collection of articles on US-Mexico Interactions

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

Few topics in history have produced a larger literature than the origins of the Cold War. Since its onset, historians, rightists or leftists, have hotly debated whether the United States or the Soviet Union initiated the mutual antagonism, culminating in the Korean War. After decades of controversy, the scholarly tensions have now died down, though the issue is far from settled, as most Cold War historians moved on to a myriad of other issues. One may, therefore, well ask: Do we need yet another book about the making of the Cold War? Hajimu Masuda says yes. Contrary to the dominant notion of the Cold War as geopolitical and ideological struggle between the capitalist and communist states, Cold War Crucible depicts it as a social construct that local peoples consciously or unconsciously created from the bottom up. For Masuda, the Cold War was a popular fantasy, not an objective reality.

Masuda begins by explaining how Cold War perceptions took shape in the United States, China, and Japan before the Korean War. After WWII, American labor unions, women, and Black people openly called for more rights; Chinese students with vivid memories of WWII opposed U.S. reconstruction of Japan; Japanese workers and students demanded liberal reforms. These social movements, though not caused by communist conspiracies, met a growing backlash from conservatives in each country, who adopted Cold War language, such as “un-American,” “Commies,” and “Reds,” to denounce liberals.

Cover of Red Channels, a pamphlet-style book issued by the journal Counterattack in 1950. Via Wikipedia.

He goes on to analyze how popular discourse distinguishing “us” from “them” during the Korean War consolidated the Cold War realities in the United States and China. Despite deep uncertainty within Harry Truman’s administration about crossing the 38^th parallel on the Korean Peninsula, public enthusiasm and Republican pressure for victory against communists emboldened American policymakers. Likewise, despite ambivalence within the Communist Party toward the Korean War, Chairman Mao Zedong decided to send the People’s Volunteer Army because of popular outcry that connected the war against U.S. imperialists to the domestic struggle against landlords and bourgeoisies. Public support for the war, fueled by widespread fear of WWIII, translated local particularities into a monolithic reality of the Cold War.

Chinese Propaganda poster during the Korean War

Worldwide purges of liberals transformed such fears into political realities. In the United States, conservative offensives against African Americans, homosexuals, labor leaders, and immigrants, as well as gender struggle against working women, gave birth to McCarthyism. Similarly, Britain’s crackdown on labor unions, Japan’s Red Purge, Taiwan’s White Terror, and the Philippine’s suppression of “un-Filipino” activists, though all reflecting social divides at the local level, reinforced the Cold War illusion. Masuda concludes that, “the reality of the Cold War materialized in the crucible of the postwar era… leading to the rise of a particular mode of Cold War fantasy that ‘fit’ well with social needs of populations around the world.”

So, was the Cold War simply a fantasy? Of course not. Masuda does not intend to ignore the actual geopolitical and military conflicts in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Instead, he argues that the Cold War was a product of complex interactions between international and local leaders and the populace. Although the Korean War was no doubt a military reality for U.S. and Chinese policymakers, ordinary peoples interpreted it through local lenses, which turned the foreign war into a factor in domestic social conflicts. Readers, however, may wonder if Masuda slightly overemphasizes the local agency, as he often cites emotional letters by ordinary citizens, while paying relatively little attention to strategic concerns of top-level policymakers.

Reality of Korean War: A G.I. comforts a grieving infantryman. Via Wikipedia

Such a caveat aside, Cold War Crucible is a welcome addition to the rich historiography on the origins of the Cold War, as well as the burgeoning literature on the role of popular perception in international relations. Using primary sources from sixty-four archives in ten countries and regions, Masuda offers a truly international history. Although it is clearly too much to ask for more language sources, his research begs further study on Europe and the Soviet Union to examine whether the same reality-making mechanism was in place in the European front of the Cold War, where geopolitical and ideological confrontation was more intense than in Asia.

Hajimu Masuda, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press. 2015)

Jim Crow: A Reading List

By Jacqueline Jones and Henry Wiencek

In the late nineteenth century, white Southerners imposed a system of constraints on African Americans, denying blacks their Constitutional rights, and, indeed, their human rights. This system—often violently enforced—was called “Jim Crow,” named after a minstrel song that stereotyped blacks. It included the disfranchisement of black men, the forcible segregation of blacks from whites in public spaces, and forms of state-sanctioned terrorism such as lynching, which included hanging, mutilating, and burning victims alive.

An African-American man drinking at a “colored” drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, 1939. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

“Jim Crow” shaped the South’s judicial and public education systems, employment structure, and patterns of landownership. Black people were limited to the most menial kinds of jobs, and sharecroppers found it difficult if not impossible to escape chronic indebtedness to their landlord-employers. In effect, white Southerners were determined to replace the institution of slavery with a new set of constraints enforced by white judicial officials, politicians, religious leaders, and lynch mobs.

For their part, African American Southerners protested “Jim Crow” by forming advocacy organizations, educational and religious institutions; boycotting and protesting against segregated facilities; and moving north.

The “Jim Crow” project included the creation of a white identity based in part on the glorification of the “Lost Cause”— the myth that before the Civil War, the south was an idyllic place populated by gracious planters and contented slaves. The Lost Cause found tangible expression in the many statues and other memorials dedicated to the Confederacy and the soldiers who fought for it.

Ku Klux Klan members and a burning cross, Denver, Colorado, 1921.The KKK was founded by former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The erasure of slavery and “Jim Crow” from the historical record has distorted the teaching of U. S. history in both the South and the rest of the country. As communities finally begin to discuss and remove remnants of the Confederacy from public spaces, it is vital that all of us confront and fully understand this history.

Books:

James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Sante Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000

Douglas A.Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 2008

David Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fallof the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002

Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982

David F. Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005

Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996

Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998

Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: the Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972

Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: the Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915, Volume 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983

F. Michael Higginbotham, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America. New York: NYU Press, 2013

Albert Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1951

J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One Party South: 1880-1910. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974

Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005

J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985

Neil McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana, Ill: Illinois University Press, 1989

Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery, Disfranchisement in the South. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001

Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, edited by William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad. New York: The New Press, 2014

Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. Edited by James Oliver Horton, Lois E. Horton. New York: The New Press, 2006

LeRae Sikes Umfleet , A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot. Raleigh: Historical Publications Section, Office of State Archives and History, 2009

Articles:

Carl R. Weinberg, “The Strange Career of Confederate History Month,” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 25, No. 2, Civil War at 150: Origins (April 2011), pp. 63-64

Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” Journal of Urban History, 21, 3 (March 1995), 295-346

Fred Arthur Bailey, “Free Speech and the Lost Cause in the Old Dominion,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 103, No. 2, “Play the Bitter Loser’s Game”: Reconstruction and the Lost Cause in the Old Dominion (Apr., 1995), pp. 237-266

Grace Elizabeth Hale, “Granite Stopped Time: The Stone Mountain Memorial and the Representation of White Southern Identity,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1 (SPRING 1998), pp. 22-44

Michael Martinez, “The Georgia Confederate Flag Dispute,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 200-228

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–63.

Kenneth O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 17 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 117-121

Reiko Hillyer, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” The Public Historian, Vol. 33, No. 4 (November 2011), pp. 35-62

Stephen A. Berrey, “Resistance Begins at Home:The Black Family and Lessons in Survival and Subversion in Jim Crow Mississippi,” Black Women, Gender + Families, Vol. 3, No. 1 (SPRING 2009), pp. 65-90

Documents:

The Library of Congress has a Teacher’s Guide to American segregation, including several documentary resources

Library of Congress collection of photographs and documents specifically relating to Brown v. Board of Education and its aftermath

Blackpast.org has compiled a large trove of primary documents that tell the story of segregation from colonial Louisiana to present day America

Oral histories, videos and documents that specifically recount the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia

Interviews with several individuals who participated in the Civil Rights Movement in Danville, Virginia

A new digital history project that uses GIS mapping software to visualize housing segregation in Washington, DC

An NEH piece documenting “Massive Resistance” to school integration in small towns in the South [also includes a lot of great photographs]

A two-volume Congressional report on Mississippi’s 1875 constitutional convention. Here is volume 1 and here is volume 2.

National Humanities Center, The Making of African American Identity

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, the website of this PBS special has stories, maps, documents, and activities for teachers.

You might also like these NEP articles on Slavery and its legacy in the US and further reading on Confederate flags, monuments, and historical myths.

Featured image: Attempting to block integration at the University of Alabama, Governor George Wallace stands defiantly at the door while being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. 11 June 1963. Via Wikipedia.

Reading Every Issue of The New Yorker

By David Ochsner

In Jack Finney’s novel Time and Again, the protagonist Simon Morley is taken to a top-secret government facility where time travel is made possible through self-hypnosis. Simon views what seem to be a series of historically accurate movie sets—complete with live actors performing everyday activities—and through extreme concentration he “travels” to the era depicted in those sets.

I read the novel when I was about ten years old, and subsequently attempted the trick myself, building shoebox dioramas and concentrating on the contents in hopes that it would be a portal to some great adventure.

It didn’t work.

I’ve since found another way to access the past through the The New Yorker magazine’s digital archive. By reading every issue—every article, every advertisement starting with Issue No. 1, Feb. 21, 1925— and blogging about it, I am hoping to gain a better sense of how one slice of America was living and thinking in the interwar years and beyond.

The New Yorker, Issue No. 1, Feb. 21, 1925. Many of magazine’s elements familiar to today’s readers were in place from the beginning, including the magazine’s distinctive typography and its famous cartoons. (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

This approach is similar to one taken by writer Laura Hillenbrand when she wrote a bestseller about the racehorse Seabiscuit. In an excellent essay in the July, 7, 2003 New Yorker, she described how a chronic illness forced her to conduct much of the book’s research from home, and in a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine (Dec. 18, 2014), she further related how the research included buying old newspapers on eBay and reading them in her living room as though she were browsing the daily paper. “I wanted to start to feel like I was living in the ’30s,” she told the magazine. “That elemental sense of daily life seeps into the book in ways too subtle and myriad to count.”

The New Yorker’s digital archive doesn’t provide the same tactile experience as newsprint, but each issue is nevertheless an exact scan of the original, some even bearing a past reader’s penciled notes, dog-eared corners, or the shadow of cellophane tape hastily applied over a tear.

My blog, A New Yorker State of Mind, is by no means a comprehensive survey of The New Yorker, but I hope my selections and observations give readers a sense of what was important to the magazine’s editors and writers. In addition to citing actual articles and illustrations from each magazine, I provide some context through research and images gleaned from various sources.

Famously droll cartoons were a New Yorker staple from the very beginning, including this illustration of President and Mrs. Coolidge by Miguel Covarrubias. The president was a frequent target of the magazine for his frugality and bland demeanor. March 14, 1925 (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

The magazine archive not only offers a glimpse into the lives of upper-middle class Gotham strivers, but it is also offers a point of reference to a particular time, and to all of the historic digressions to which it is connected.

For example, the May 2, 1925 issue’s “The Talk of the Town” notes the rapidly changing face of the city—Fifth Avenue mansions are giving way to commercial interests and architectural landmarks, such as architect Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden, are falling to the wrecking ball. In “The Sky-Line” section of the magazine, architecture critic R.W. Sexton noted, in reference to the Garden’s demise, how critics, including foreign visitors, often taunted New Yorkers about their “rabid commercialism.” The following week’s issue (May 9) told of the removal of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ nude “Diana” sculpture from atop the Garden’s tower (which White fashioned after the Giralda of Seville), and an oblique reference was made to Stanford’s White’s scandalous demise, noting that although the manner of the architect’s death put him “in a poor light among his puritanical countrymen,” he was nevertheless courageously defended by the likes of Saint-Gaudens. That sent me back to 1906 (though various scans of tabloids from that time) to briefly revisit how the architect of Madison Square Garden was murdered by the husband of his lover, the actress Evelyn Nesbit, in the rooftop theatre he built in the shadow of his Giralda tower. I returned to 1925 with the understanding that the wrecking ball would be taking away far more than brick and stone.

Image of the destroyed Madison Square Gardens. Via Museum of the City of New York

Photo of the destroyed Madison Square Gardens. Via Museum of the City of New York

Photo of Evelyn Nesbit, whose affair with the architect Stanford White led to his death on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Via Wikipedia.

That is what makes this exercise so engaging: one can read the magazine as a contemporary while moving back and forth across the timeline. The blog is also informed by other contemporary readings—newspapers, other magazines, and books such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s unfinished trilogy recounting his 1933 journey on foot across Europe. Following the Rhine and the Danube on his way to Constantinople, the 19-year-old Fermor occasionally noted in his journal the rumblings of fascism in Germany and Austria, but mostly describing the faded glories of collapsed empires and the many places that retained old ways of life.

However, Fermor did not start writing his trilogy until the 1960s, and didn’t publish the first book in the series, A Time of Gifts, until 1977. It is an account of what a young man hears and sees in 1933, but the omniscient hand of his future self guides his pen. Young Fermor gives us fresh-eyed descriptions of villages and the homely charms of the people, while the older Fermor knows (and occasional notes) that much will be obliterated by the war to come.

So before one gets too carried away, one must be mindful of this “older self” that can haunt a serial reading of The New Yorker. Although I attempt to read the articles and advertisements as though I am living in that time, this is not possible since I possess the foreknowledge of an omniscient reader. When I come across a cheeky account about two buffoons named Hitler and Mussolini, I know a horrible truth awaits my fellow readers.

Foresight and hindsight: A reader of this ad in the May 8, 1937 issue of The New Yorker would be well advised not to book passage on the Hindenburg, because it will not be making the return trip to Germany. (The New Yorker Digital Archive; Wikipedia)

Then there are the advertisements, such as the series that urges indiscriminate spraying of FLIT insecticide (with whimsical drawings by Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel), or the quarter-page ad in the May 8, 1937 issue that invites readers to book a flight on the Hindenburg, which was destroyed on May 6, 1937, claiming 36 lives. The following year Germany would annex Austria, and soon after Czechoslovakia, and the rest is, um, history.

The indiscriminate spraying of FLIT insecticide was encouraged in a series of ads merrily rendered by Dr. Seuss. (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

Which begs the question I often ask myself during my readings: In the midst of the Roaring Twenties, did the New Yorker writers or readers have any idea of what was to come?

The answer so far: No more than we do today.

Conflict in the Confederacy: William Williston Heartsill’s diary

By Josh Urich

William Williston Heartsill volunteered to fight for the South before the Civil War even began. For the first two years of his service, he and his comrades from Harrison County, Texas served as a cavalryman on Texas’s western frontier. His unit, the W.P. Lane Rangers, finally saw combat at the Battle of Arkansas Post on January 11, 1863. They were captured on the second day of combat. Heartsill spent several months in Camp Douglas in Illinois and then was exchanged for Union prisoners.

Print of the bombardment and capture of Fort Hindman, Arkansas Post, January 11th 1863. Via Wikipedia. — Bombardment and capture of Fort Hindman, Arkansas Post, January 11th 1863. Via Wikipedia.

Upon their release, the Lane Rangers were separated and Heartsill was mustered into General Braxton Bragg’s infantry. Heartsill resented serving as a conscripted infantryman and longed to rejoin the rest of his volunteer unit on horseback. After the battle Chickamauga, and mere days before the battle of Chattanooga, Heartsill and one of his fellow Rangers abandoned Bragg’s army and headed back to Texas to rejoin the W.P. Lane Rangers. They succeeded after a month of dangerous travel.

Print of the Battle of Chickamauga. Via Wikipedia. — Battle of Chickamauga. Via Wikipedia.

The Lane Rangers saw little combat before they were dissolved in mid-1865. Five years after the war concluded, Heartsill printed one thousand copies of his wartime diary––although not before editing it to defend his desertion and his company’s honor. Shortly after his diary was published, he was elected mayor of Marshall, Texas, Harrison’s county seat. In the ensuing decades, Heartsill was active in the leadership of the Marshall camp of the United Confederate Veterans and was involved in both regional politics and business.

The section of the diary below is taken from the June 1, 1864 entry of Heartsill’s diary. At this point in the war, Heartsill had already abandoned Bragg’s army and rejoined the Rangers in the same place they started, Harrison County, Texas. After a number of weeks back in Harrison, Heartsill and the men began to hear “denouncements” against them. There were several reasons the townspeople turned against the Rangers. During their service, they had lost about ten percent of their company. By contrast, other units from Harrison County lost an average of fifty percent each. Many people in the county lost children or siblings from these other units. It was natural for townspeople who had lost loved ones to feel resentful towards the Rangers, considering their high survival rate. The Rangers were also an independent company and their limited combat experience, especially compared to the county’s other units, would have reflected poorly on their honor, an important southern value.

Entry from Heartsill's diary dated June 1, 1864. — Entry from Heartsill’s diary dated June 1, 1864.

Finally, the townspeople provided both emotional and material support to the Texan units. The townspeople must have wondered why the W.P. Lane Rangers accepted all of the town’s support but were not out on the frontlines. For the woman mentioned in this entry in particular, though, the root of her frustration was clearly the death of her relative. How must she have felt, seeing the Rangers still in Marshall––the Rangers who rarely saw combat, and who never, even at Arkansas Post, experienced casualty rates as high as most companies?

This document points to the internal conflicts that ate at the Confederacy from the local level up. Not only was Heartsill himself a deserter (at least briefly), but so also was this woman’s husband––if Heartsill is to be believed. Moreover, the financial burdens that companies placed upon towns put stress on loyalty to the southern cause.

Portrait of Heartsill included on the first page of diary. Via Library of Congress.

William Williston Heartsill’s papers are held at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Books:

Articles:

Documents:

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