US History Archives - Page 23 of 24

Borderlands Business: Conflict and Cooperation on the US-Mexico Border

The economic ties between the United States and Mexico are well over a century old, but the coverage of the border rarely contextualizes it in these terms. In order to understand the violence we see today, we must consider the violence that erupted there in the early 1990s. The film Señorita Etraviada/Missing Young Woman (2001) chronicles the mysterious deaths of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez starting two decades ago. Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo challenges us to look beyond our assumptions about Mexican culture and biases about working-class women to recognize an epidemic of violence costing Mexico a generation. Portillo finds the maquiladoras, the factories on the border that manufacture products largely for American consumption and largely profiting American corporations, at the middle of the chaos that allowed the murders of these women.

Alejandro Lugo’s book, Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism and Conquest at the U.S. Mexico Border, considers the historical legacy of the twin cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas. Lugo suggests that the placement of Juárez, at the intersection of the Iberian Century and the American Century, brings together global capitalism and imperial conquest in a way that reduces the human element – the maquiladora workers – to a cog in a global machine. To explore the historical legacy of the borderlands even futher, consider Intepreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations and Legends, edited by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara and John M. Nieto-Phillips. This collection of essays examines nation-building and historiographies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, centering on the narratives of Spain and its colonies as backward in comparison to the narratives of progress associated with Great Britain and its colonies. These historical legacies have stuck, in great measure, and they intersect in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre present a different view of the maquiladoras in their documentary, Maquilapolis (2007). In a colonia on the edge of Tijuana, women maquiladora workers organize to fight for severance pay, safe working conditions, and to clean up of the toxic waste polluting their community. American business interests and Mexican government officials insist their workers have good lives, but we see otherwise in the tours the women give us of their communities. (Watch the trailer here.)

There are examples of productive cross-border alliances as well. The photographer David Bacon documents many of the efforts to build solidarity across the border, including the deep roots of many non-governmental organizations. There are also corporate projects that change the relationship between U.S. and Mexican partners. For example, PepsiCo has undertaken a new initiative that saves the corporation money, but also benefits small corn and sunflower farmers in Mexico. The elimination of middlemen and strategic use of regional production facilities, helps both the corporation and the farmers. Such projects, while still profit-oriented, can enhance communities in Mexico and reduce migration to the United States.

For more reading and viewing, take a look at Anne Martínez’s “Rethinking Borders” in DISCOVER.

Photo Credit:
Guldhammer, A Maquiladora factory in Mexico, via Wikimedia Commons

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

The Strangest Dream – Reykjavik 1986

by Jonathan Hunt

College freshmen have no personal knowledge of the Cold War. Born after the Berlin Wall’s fall and the Soviet Union’s collapse, the threat of nuclear Armageddon seems far removed from their experiences, a relic of a bygone age. Yet, today, more countries than ever hold weapons whose scale of destruction can dwarf that of every bomb used in World War II. As the Cold War nuclear arms race recedes from collective memory, it is important to remember why the world remains beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

This October 11th and 12th, the world observed the 25th anniversary of the summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986, where the leaders of the world’s superpowers contemplated the abolition of nuclear weapons. The talks remain the closest humanity has come to stopping the accumulation and proliferation of nuclear arms. Twenty-five years later, historians still debate the summit’s legacy. Even if the nuclear colossi had adopted Gorbachev’s plan to disarm in three stages by 2000, only their fine example would have persuaded Great Britain, France, China, India, and Israel to join them. Reading the minutes of the four meetings at Reykjavik, it is also unclear if gravity bombs like the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been eliminated. Nevertheless, during those two autumn days, Reagan and Gorbachev neared the brink of a nuclear-free world, only to turn back in defeat.

It seems, ironically, that Reagan’s abhorrence of nuclear weapons scuttled the talks. As president, Reagan made research and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an anti-missile shield derisively known as “Star Wars,” a centerpiece of his strategic policy. Nuclear abolitionists condemned the project as a multi-billion dollar boondoggle and a slippery slope toward normalizing the military use of nuclear weapons. Strategists weaned on the Cold War doctrine of mutual assured destruction warned that its construction could prompt the Soviet Union to launch a preemptive first strike. For Reagan, SDI represented a means by which to make nuclear weapons obsolete and an insurance policy if a “madman” ever got his hands on them. Gorbachev disagreed, and saw limits on SDI as indispensible if the USSR was to trust its rival to disarm.

At Reykjavik, Soviet and American negotiators smoothed over rough spot after rough spot, agreeing to limits and sub-limits on an array of nuclear delivery systems—bombs, cruise missiles, sub-launched, medium-range, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. More progress was made in 36 hours than the previous 15 years combined. Paul Nitze, the president’s special adviser on arms control and a fixture in U.S. foreign policymaking throughout the Cold War, remarked Soviet concessions were “the best we have received in 25 years.” When Reagan and Gorbachev began their fourth and final meeting, they knew the stakes: an historic agreement for deep arms cuts and eventual disarmament. They also knew the final and toughest challenge; how to finesse Reagan’s steely support for SDI and Gorbachev’s stand that the U.S. confine R&D to the labs.

Initial expectations for Reykjavik had been modest. Recurrent crises had beset U.S.-Soviet relations since Reagan took office. The White House’s more confrontational tone, the shooting down of a wayward Korean airliner over Soviet territory, the deployment of quick-strike missiles in Europe, and an alarming NATO nuclear exercise codenamed Able Archer, compounded an already fraught relationship. However, conditions eventually improved. Reagan assumed a more conciliatory line so as to facilitate arms control initiatives and lessen the chances of an accidental nuclear exchange. It was Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, however, that transformed the tenor of the Cold War by infusing new life into a listless Soviet system. Following a series of three elderly statesmen whose best days were behind them, he was confronted by an economic system with chronic shortages and, in April 1986, a catastrophic meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Gorbachev insisted that “new thinking” be applied to the USSR’s manifold problems, and espoused the policies of perestroika, restructuring the Soviet economy, and glasnost, making the government more open and responsive. A major element of perestroika was redirecting the river of resources flowing into the state’s military-industrial complex, especially the secret agencies managing the USSR’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, to more productive ends. Unable and unwilling to keep pace with U.S. military spending, Gorbachev instead offered a three-step plan to liquidate the superpowers’ nuclear weapons.

It was a bold initiative, but Gorbachev’s labors were close to bearing fruit when he and Reagan sat down for their last tête-à-tête. Reagan promised to share advances in missile defense with the Soviets. Gorbachev fired back that the U.S. had thus far been unwilling to share even industrial and agricultural technology with his country. Just when the statesmen seemed to have exhausted their cases, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, urged them to cross the finish line, declaring they had “come very close to accomplishing this historic task … [a]nd when future generations read the record … they will not forgive us if we let this opportunity slip by.” Despite Shevardnadze’s appeal, however, Reagan and Gorbachev failed to agree on the wording of the final text. The two negotiating parties left Reykjavik without an agreement.

Sadly, subsequent generations have more often forgotten than condemned the talks. The calamity of climate change is more familiar to our undergraduates than the firestorm of nuclear war and the long night of the ensuing nuclear winter. In the 1980s, scientists theorized that only 200 thermonuclear explosions would kick up a planetary shroud of radioactive dust, lowering temperatures enough to recreate the climactic conditions in which the dinosaurs died off. Five countries—the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, France, and China—have more than 200 warheads. The U.S. and Russia are currently reducing their arsenals to 1,550 deliverable warheads. A conflict between India and Pakistan, who fought four wars since 1947, where nuclear weapons were used would jeopardize the continuation of life, as we know it.

Current global affairs hardly resemble the global situation in 1986 when two nuclear-armed superpowers testily eyed one another. Yet some themes have reoccurred. Just as the Soviet Union fiscal emergency forced Gorbachev to offer a plan to nuclear disarmament, today’s financial crisis could pave the way for deep multilateral arms cuts. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan augurs lessons similar to those of Chernobyl regarding the uncontrollable nature of nuclear power. It remains for the leaders of today to take advantage of their window of opportunity.

For two days on a remote archipelago in the North Atlantic, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed the entwined destinies of the Cold War and nuclear arms. As educators, we must remind our students of such moments, when history conspires to grant individuals the occasion to re-route its course. Reykjavik’s great tragedy is not its failure; after all, the negotiations paved the way for two momentous treaties—the 1987 Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile Treaty and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Its tragedy resides in its potential disappearance from our collective memory. For our students’ generation will have to address this dangerous legacy of the Cold War—even if they don’t remember it.

You may also like:

Reuters, Mikhail Gorbachev, “A Farewell to Nuclear Arms,” October 11, 2011

“The Reykjavik File: Previously Secret Documents from U.S. and Soviet Archives on the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev Summit, from the collections of The National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington DC.

Jonathan Hunt and Paul Walker, “The Legacy of Reykjavik and the Future of Nuclear Disarmament,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec 2011.

Photo Credits:
Federal Government via Wikimedia Commons

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.”

The “Einstein Letter” — A Tipping Point in History

by Michael B. Stoff

On a mid-July day in 1939, Albert Einstein, still in his slippers, opened the door of his summer cottage in Peconic on the fishtail end of Long Island. There stood his former student and onetime partner in an electromagnetic refrigerator pump, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, and next to him a fellow Hungarian (and fellow physicist), Eugene Wigner. The two had not come to Long Island for a day at the beach with the most famous scientist in the world but on an urgent mission. Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from mines in Czechoslovakia it now controlled. To Szilard, this could mean only one thing: Germany was developing an atomic bomb.

Szilard wanted Einstein to write a letter to his friend, Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium. The Belgian Congo was rich in uranium, and Szilard worried that if the Germans got their hands on the ore, they might have all the material they needed to make a weapon of unprecedented power. First, however, he had to explain to Einstein the theory upon which the weapon rested, a chain reaction. “I never thought of that,” an astonished Einstein said. Nor was he willing to write the Queen Mother. Instead, Wigner convinced him to write a note to one of the Belgian cabinet ministers.

Pen in hand, Wigner recorded what Einstein dictated in German while Szilard listened. The Hungarians returned to New York with the draft, but within days, Szilard received a striking proposal from Alexander Sachs, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. Might Szilard transmit such a letter to Roosevelt? A series of drafts followed, one composed by Szilard as he sat soaking in his bathtub, another after a second visit to Einstein, and two more following discussions with Sachs. Einstein approved the longer version of the last two, dated “August 2, 1939,” and signed it as “A. Einstein” in his tiny scrawl.

The result was the “Einstein Letter,” which historians know as the product not of a single hand but of many hands. Regardless of how it was concocted, the letter remains among the most famous documents in the history of atomic weaponry. It is a model of compression, barely two typewritten, double-spaced pages in length. Its language is so simple even a president could understand it. Its tone is deferential, its assertions authoritative but tentative in the manner of scientists who have yet to prove their hypotheses. Its effect was persuasive enough to initiate the steps that led finally to the Manhattan Project and the development of atomic bombs.

Stripped of all jargon, the letter cited the work of an international array of scientists (“Fermi,” “Joliot,” “Szilard” himself), pointed to a novel generator of power (“the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy”), urged vigilance and more (“aspects of the situation call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action”), sounded a warning (“extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”), made a prediction (“a single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with the surrounding territory”), and mapped out a plan (“permanent contact between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America . . . and perhaps obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories”). A simple conclusion, no less ominous for its understatement, noted what worried the Hungarians in the first place: “Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.”

Looking back at the letter, aware of how things actually turned out, we can appreciate its richness. For one thing, it shows us a world about to pass from existence. Where once scientific information flowed freely across national borders through professional journals, personal letters, and the “manuscripts” to which the letter refers in its first sentence, national governments would now impose a clamp of secrecy on any research that might advance weapons technology. The letter also tells us how little even the most renowned scientists knew at the time. No “chain reaction” had yet been achieved and no reaction-sustaining isotope of uranium had been identified. Thus the assumption was that “a large mass of uranium” would be required to set one in motion. No aircraft had been built that could carry what these scientists expected to be a ponderous nuclear core necessary to make up a bomb, so the letter predicts that a “boat” would be needed to transport it.

More than the past, the letter points to the shape of things to come. Most immediately, it shows us that the race for atomic arms would be conducted in competition with Germany, soon to become a hostile foreign power. And in the longer term, of course, the postwar arms race would duplicate that deadly competition as hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union led them to amass more and more nuclear weapons. The letter also presents us with nothing less than a master plan for what became the Manhattan Project, the first “crash program” in the history of science. After the war, other crash programs in science—to develop the hydrogen bomb; to conquer polio; to reach the moon; to cure cancer—would follow. Finally, by stressing the entwining of government, science, and industry in service of the state, the letter foreshadows what Dwight Eisenhower later called “the military-industrial complex.”

In the end, the “Einstein Letter” is a document deservedly famous, but not merely for launching the new atomic age. If we read it closely enough, it gives us a fascinating, Janus-faced look at a tipping point in history, a window on a world just passing and one yet to come, all in two pages.

You can read the letter in its entirety here.

Photo Credits:
Albert Einstein, 1947, by Oren Jack Turner, The Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Norman Hilberry and Dr. Leo Szilard (right) stand beside the site where the world’s first nuclear reactor was built during World War II. Both worked with the late Dr. Enrico Fermi in achieving the first self-sustaining chain reaction in nuclear energy on December 2, 1942, at Stagg Field, University of Chicago. U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons

Re-Reading John Winthrop’s “City upon the Hill”

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

I recently came across John Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered in 1630 on a boat to those about to establish a “New England” across the ocean from the old. Winthrop urged his congregation to create a “city upon the hill,” a model for others to imitate. Ever since Winthrop, the meaning of that city has been hotly debated. It is clear, however, that Winthrop’s city has come to stand for the ongoing experiment that is America: unique, exceptional, inspiring. Modern rebels, like those who have gathered on a platform of social and cultural conservatism around the Tea Party, a name full of references to Puritan Massachusetts, owe Winthrop, their alleged ideological ancestor, a careful reading.

Winthrop was a man of his age. He understood societies to be naturally divided into two camps: the “great ones” and the “inferior sort.” He thought that, for all their divisions, societies had built-in limits to social polarization so “that the riche and mighty should not eat up neither the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against and shake off their yoke.” Natural instincts pushed the rich to be merciful and the poor not to be too rebellious. A society that has lowered the taxes of the wealthy so that it could then dismantle both collective bargaining and public education would have puzzled Winthrop. He would have been surprised by last summer’s developments in Wisconsin.

Winthrop was a realist and acknowledged that there were limits to giving and forgiving. Individuals needed to put aside some of their wealth to guard against future hardship; they needed to take care of their family before they practiced charity. According to Winthrop, even the Bible found this prudence virtuous: the wise Egyptian Joseph put grain away and saved his treasonous brethren, the sons of Jacob, from famine when drought struck Israel. Winthrop, however, also thought that members of communities under siege demonstrated unusual degrees of solidarity. Natural law dictated that, under these circumstances, the wealthy would openly share their property. Winthrop would have not recognized his city upon the hill in America today: a society whose most needy voluntarily sign up to fight wars while the most powerful avoid such sacrifices and tirelessly lobby to get ever larger tax cuts.

But it is perhaps the failure of America to live up to the laws of a Christian community that would have disoriented Winthrop. Winthrop made a distinction between societies ruled solely by natural law and those ruled by the “law of Grace or of the Gospel.” Christian societies were bodies whose disparate parts were also glued by the ligaments of “love.” For all our desire to remember the Pilgrims as peaceful Christians who fled England to escape persecution, the fact is that Puritans were just as intolerant as their enemies, and Winthrop was no exception. Winthrop drew a clear line separating true Christians from the rest. He argued that the ligament of love worked best in communities that were ideologically homogenous. And yet, Winthrop did think that love caused communities to be more egalitarian. His model was the primitive Church whose members “had all things in common, neither did any man say that which he possessed was his own.”

Tea Party radicals, the alleged ideological heirs of men like Winthrop, might be surprised by Winthrop’s views on love and same-sex relationships. Winthrop’s descriptions of the love required to create his city on the hill are moving. His examples are all biblical. He explained that the love Eve felt for Adam was so carnal because her flesh literally came from Adam’s. But Winthrop also acknowledged the love Jonathan felt for David, the courageous shepherd who would soon dethrone Jonathan’s father, Saul. Winthrop was deeply aware of the force and depth of homoerotic love: “so that it is said [Jonathan] loved [David] as his own soul.” These two lovers would have their hearts broken when they were apart, “had not their affections found vent by abundance of tears.” Winthrop also considered the love of Ruth and Noemi exemplary.

The city upon the hill that Winthrop sought to create in New England is a different world from that of his alleged ideological heirs. For Winthrop, the stakes of getting the city right were high (and they continue to be). To build a lasting “city upon the hill” the Puritans needed to create a society held together by charity, mercy, and love. A danger loomed: this new experiment could be overtaken by lack of either foresight or solidarity. Puritans then would meet the fate of so many failed social experiments. So let’s take Winthrop’s parting words as a warning: “The eyes of all people are upon us. So if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”

The text of the sermon can be found here.

President John F Kennedy on the City Upon a Hill: video/audio

President Ronald Reagan on the City Upon a Hill, text

To read more of Canizares-Esguerra on Puritans in North American see our monthly feature on his work from May 2011.

Portrait of John Winthrop, author unknown.
Page from John Winthrop’s journal: Wikisource, The Founding of New England

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

David Oshinsky on Capital Punishment

By David Oshinsky

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia struck down state death penalty laws nationwide on grounds they violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against “cruel and unusual punishment.” The 5-4 decision was extremely controversial. Each justice wrote a separate opinion; not one could be persuaded to join with another. The combined verbiage filled 232 pages, making Furman the wordiest decision the Court had ever released. And the implications were stunning. Not only were 587 men and two women immediately removed from death rows across the country and re-sentenced to life in prison, but capital punishment itself now seemed a relic of the past.

The Court’s liberal wing—William Brennan, William O. Douglas, and Thurgood Marshall—portrayed the death penalty as a barbaric punishment, employed almost exclusively against poor and minority defendants, which violated the nation’s evolving standards of decency. The more conservative justices—Nixon appointees Harry Blackmun, Warren Burger, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist—strongly disagreed. Each pursued a different line of argument, noting, for example, that capital punishment had been endorsed by the Founding Fathers, that it enjoyed wide support among the American people, and that it was meant to be decided in the state legislatures, not by nine unelected men in Washington. That left the two centrist justices—Potter Stewart and Byron White—to determine the outcome.

Both men believed the death penalty to be morally and legally defensible, yet both were troubled by its use. The issue wasn’t prejudice or evolving standards or original intent, they argued; it was the arbitrary and capricious method in which the punishment had been applied. The death penalty was cruel and unusual, said Stewart, “in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. . . . The Eighth Amendment cannot tolerate the infliction of a death sentence . . . so wantonly and freakishly imposed.”

Stewart had a point. Every year, more than 20,000 Americans are murdered. Of those arrested for these crimes, about half make a plea bargain or are found guilty at trial. Only a few hundred actually receive the death penalty, many of whom are then spared upon appeal. Such a system—about 100 executions for every 20,000 murders—raises obvious doubts about the effectiveness of deterrence and retribution. More important, it leads one to ask: Who, exactly, is chosen to die? Can we honestly say that the few defendants we execute have committed more horrible crimes than the thousands of defendants who receive prison terms? And if not, is it possible to create the kind of guidelines that will sort out the truly deserving offenders?

Furman had left the door slightly ajar. By deciding that capital punishment as currently practiced was unconstitutional, the justices had implicitly invited the individual states to rewrite their death penalty statutes in a manner that did not violate the Eighth Amendment. But no one on the Court expected this to occur. As Chief Justice Burger remarked privately to friends, “There will never be another execution in this country.” So, what happened?

Quite a lot, it turned out. In Capital Punishment on Trial, I look at the social and political landscape of the 1970s—the rise in urban crime, the cries for “law and order,” popular culture’s embrace of vigilante action, from “Death Wish” to “Dirty Harry.” In short order, the removal of the death penalty by “bleeding-heart judges” became part of the angry debate over why America’s streets had become more unsafe, and what could be done to fix the problem. Politicians promised a tougher stand on crime, leading numerous state legislatures to rewrite their death penalty statutes—the key new provisions being a bifurcated trial with a separate punishment phase in which “aggravating” and mitigating” circumstances could be weighed; and a clearer definition of what constituted a capital crime.

In 1976, the Supreme Court in Gregg v. Georgia upheld the new death penalty statutes in Florida, Georgia, and Texas, ruling that they provided capital juries with sufficient guidance and discretion. Other states quickly followed suit. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court moved cautiously on the death penalty, carefully narrowing its scope while avoiding the issue of abolition—ruling, for example, that those under eighteen and the mentally retarded cannot be executed, nor can those convicted of crimes, such as rape in which a life is not taken. No issue over the years has been more difficult or contentious for the individual justices than this one. And no issue has demanded more of their time.

Today, as in the past, Americans support capital punishment in overwhelming numbers, according to public opinion polls, despite a stream of reports that portray the system as racially biased, weighted against the poor, expensive to maintain, and prone to wrongful convictions. The issue strikes so powerfully because of the combustible elements it contains—elements of morality and justice, on the one hand, punishment and vengeance, on the other. The future of capital punishment is difficult to predict, especially in the post-9/11 world. At the moment, however, one thing is clear. For a majority of Americans, some crimes are simply too heinous to be punished by anything less than death.

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

« Previous Page

Recent Posts