Category Archives: History

L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City by John Buntin

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Southern California became an interesting, fast-growing place after they started making movies in Hollywood and drilling oil wells wherever possible. The population boomed and so did crime. L.A. Noir tells the story of crime, crime-fighting and police corruption in Los Angeles between 1920 (when L.A. had become bigger than San Francisco) and 1992 (when Rodney King was beaten and 54 people died in a riot).

The book tells this story by focusing on the parallel careers of Mickey Cohen, a well-known local gangster, and William Parker, L.A.’s most famous police chief. They each had their good points, but Mickey Cohen was a thug and Chief Parker was a misguided right-winger. Los Angeles improved after they were both gone.  (2/14/13)

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

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The author Timothy Snyder calculates that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for the murder of 14 million people between 1933 and 1945, mainly in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. This didn’t include those who died from combat. The 14 million were civilians or prisoners of war intentionally killed by starvation, gunshot or gas, including the roughly 5.4 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

It is almost unbelievable that so many innocent people could have been killed. Stalin mostly killed citizens of his own country. Hitler mostly killed citizens of other countries. Stalin began by collectivizing Soviet agriculture and then tried to eliminate anyone who might conceivably pose a threat. Hitler wanted to colonize Eastern Europe and, while doing so, eliminate as many Jews and Slavs as possible. If Germany had conquered the Soviet Union, Hitler intended to kill as many as 30 million. 

I didn’t know that Stalin invaded Poland soon after Hitler in September 1939, while Stalin and Hitler were still allies. Or that relatively few German Jews were killed. The concentration camps that were liberated by the Americans and British weren’t the main site of the Holocaust, which occurred farther east and mostly targeted non-Germans. 

Snyder ends his book with a chapter that tries to explain how this all happened. Part of his explanation is that both Hitler and Stalin had utopian ideas. Stalin wanted to quickly turn the Soviet Union into a socialist paradise. Hitler wanted to quickly defeat the Soviet Union and create a vast empire that would serve Germany alone. In Snyder’s words:

“Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory”.  (1/10/13)

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

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Henry Adams was the great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams. His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom and later a congressman. Henry was brought up as a member of the political, social and intellectual elite. He served as private secretary to his father during the Civil War and later became a journalist, historian and novelist. He lived most of his life in Washington but traveled extensively throughout the world. At the age of 70, he privately circulated a book of memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams. When it was finally published after his death, it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library named it the best non-fiction book of the 20th century.

The book is offered as an account of Henry Adams’s education, but it’s really the story of his life, with some major gaps. For example, he skips forward 20 years at one point, never mentioning his marriage during those years or the fact that his wife committed suicide: “This is a story of education, not of adventure! It is meant to help young men — or such as have intelligence enough to seek help — not to amuse them. What one did — or did not do — with one’s education, after getting it, need trouble the inquirer in no way; it is a personal matter only which would confuse him”.

Adams writes of himself in the third person throughout. He is often sarcastic and cynical about himself and others. I often had trouble understanding him. He discusses various 19th century political controversies and politicians in great detail. He also expounds a view of historical progress as the accumulation of “force”, for example, the forces unleashed by the production of coal and the construction of the railroads. Many of his observations are worth reading, however, and worth reading more than once. He reminds us that human nature and politics haven’t changed much (or at all?) since the 19th century. Here is an example, from chapter 7,”Treason (1860-61)”:

“Adams found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind — fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallucination — haunted by suspicion, by idées fixes, by violent morbid excitement, but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a close [sic] society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame. They showed a young student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands”.  (12/26/12)

Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington by Daniel Mark Epstein

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Abraham Lincoln read Leaves of Grass in 1857, when he was still a lawyer in Illinois. The author of Lincoln and Whitman argues that reading Walt Whitman’s poetry made Lincoln’s speeches more poetic.

Whitman was living in New York City in 1860 when Lincoln gave his famous Cooper Union speech, but he didn’t see Lincoln in person until January 1861, when the President-elect visited New York on his way to his inauguration.

During the Civil War, Whitman spent much of his time ministering to wounded soldiers in Washington, not far from the White House. He often saw the President traveling around the city. It appears that the President noticed Whitman occasionally, since the poet had a distinctive appearance and often watched the President’s carriage drive by. On one occasion, Whitman observed Lincoln in the White House from a few feet away, but they did not meet. There is also a story, not necessarily true, that Lincoln saw Whitman walking by the White House one day and was told that this was the famous poet.

Whitman was visiting New York when Lincoln was assassinated. Lincoln’s death greatly affected Whitman. He had studied the President closely and felt a deep affection for him. His poem O Captain! My Captain! was written in response to the assassination.

Lincoln and Whitman ends in 1887 with Whitman giving a dramatic reading before a celebrity-packed audience in New York City, in commemoration of the 22nd anniversary of Lincoln’s death.

Lincoln and Whitman did lead parallel lives for a time, although Lincoln clearly affected Whitman much more than the other way around. Lincoln and Whitman mixes large-scale history and politics with these men’s daily lives and personal relationships. There is some poetry too, mostly by the poet.  (9/30/12)

The Battle of Brazil by Jack Mathews

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The Battle of Brazil tells the story of Terry Gilliam’s great movie Brazil, in particular the fight between Gilliam and Universal Pictures over the version of the movie that would be released. Executives at Universal, who hadn’t been working at Universal when the movie was in the planning stages, thought that Brazil was too dark, too confusing and too long. So they tried to re-edit it. Gilliam and his producer strongly objected and started a campaign to get the movie released in its original version. The director and producer won the battle. (Although Universal got the last word by doing a poor job marketing the movie.) 

This is an interesting story about how Hollywood worked in the 80s. Not much seems to have changed since then. Hollywood executives are still trying to maximize profits and still don’t know which movies will be successful, even though they claim to. They also probably continue to offer incredibly self-serving explanations of their behavior.

Having recently watched Brazil again, I think some of it could easily have been trimmed. Some scenes went on too long and interrupted the story. It also bothered me that the same actress was used in the initial fantasy sequences and the “real world” story. The “real world” actress could have been put in the fantasy sequences after the main character met her. I wouldn’t have given the movie the happy ending that the studio wanted, however. The bleak surprise ending is terrific.

I suppose if I ever run a movie studio, I’ll want to interfere with what gets released too. (4/6/12)