Category Archives: History

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser

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Part 1 is entitled “Class Warfare: The Long 19th Century”. In the author’s words:

We should … conceive of a long nineteenth century lasting from post-revolutionary days through to the Great Depression of the 1930s… The epoch that encompassed the transformation of a sliver of coastal villages, small farms, slave plantations and a few port cities into a transcontinental commercial, agricultural and industrial preeminnce was a wrenching one. For those generations that lived through it, it often called forth … recurring waves of resistance to the inexorable, a stubborn, multifarious insistence that the march of Progress was too spendthrift in human lives, that there were alternatives [22-23].

Fraser tells the history of those transitional years by describing political movements, the growth of organized labor and the writings of various intellectuals. It’s a very interesting story that culminates in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the coming of World War 2.

Part 2 is called “Desire and Fear in the Second Gilded Age”. Fraser tries to explain why there has been such little resistance, organized or otherwise, to increasing inequality, stagnant wages and boring, regimented work. He delves into the history again, but also tries to give psychological or sociological explanations. What I took away from this part of the book is that people are distracted by consumer products and mass entertainment; there has been a constant campaign to glorify “the successful” among us; it’s difficult for most of us to imagine an alternative (since the transition to a modern industrial nation happened so long ago); and organized labor has been beaten into submission. The powers that be are highly organized and have a lot of money to spend on maintaining the status quo. Workers aren’t organized at all and many are just trying to get by, plus nobody wants to lose their job to cheap foreign competition by making trouble.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson

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The fair in question was the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, more formally known as the World’s Columbian Exposition in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus visiting the New World. The book provides a lot of information about the fair that I found very interesting, especially the new technology that was introduced. I found the parallel stories of the fair’s chief architect and a serial killer who preyed on visitors to the fair much less interesting. So I skipped some of it, but not the story of George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., an engineer from Pittsburgh.

He conceived and then built the world’s largest, most amazing Ferris Wheel. People were worried that it would blow over in strong wind, but it remained standing and was the most popular attraction at the fair. It was 264 feet tall and was meant to rival the Eiffel Tower, which had been constructed for an earlier world’s fair in Paris. The Ferris Wheel had 36 enclosed cars that could each hold 60 people. That allowed 2,160 people to ride at the same time. That was some Ferris Wheel.

West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein

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This is an oral history of Los Angeles, especially Hollywood. It focuses on the wealthy and powerful Doheny family, Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, the troubled actress Jennifer Jones, and an unknown actress named Jane Garland. Some of it was interesting. Much of it wasn’t, which is why I didn’t read every word.

History Repeats Itself and Then Kind of Doesn’t

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In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s campaign hired an actor who was a registered Republican to do a four-minute commercial expressing his misgivings about Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for President. It was in black and white, of course, and the actor indulged in an unhealthy habit:

The ad was called “Confessions of a Republican”:

The actor, whose name is William Bogert, is still with us and has now made an ad for the Clinton campaign. It’s only a minute long, since our 2016 attention spans are 75% shorter. It’s also called “Confessions of a Republican”.

Also, here’s a related story that probably won’t appear on Fox News.That’s a pity. The ghost writer, who spent 18 months with Trump and wrote “his” popular book, The Art of the Deal, for the real estate developer, wishes it had been called The Sociopath instead:

“I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

Mr. Schwartz also says Trump has no attention span, is the most prolific liar he ever met and is running for President because he loves publicity. 

Meanwhile, the Republican National Conflagration began today in Cleveland, Ohio. The Never Trump faction tried to get Trump dumped. Yelling and confusion ensued, but the Trump Forever faction won with the help of the politician who held the gavel. A brief video records the disagreement:

God bless America.

PS — This is a longer article from The New Yorker about Trump’s ghost writer. The concluding quote:

“People are dispensable and disposable in Trump’s world.” If Trump is elected President, [Mr. Schwartz] warned, “the millions of people who voted for him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone who deals closely with him already knows—that he couldn’t care less about them.”

On Growing Up, Politically Speaking

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Kevin Baker writes for a living and voted for Bernie Sanders in the New York primary. In today’s New York Times, he calls on us liberals (aka progressives) to get serious: “Let’s Grow Up, Liberals”.

First, as preamble, he offers a critical analysis of the way Sanders endorsed Clinton this week: 

Senator Sanders’s embrace of the presumptive Democratic nominee included all the inclinations that many of us have come to find, shall we say, a tad grating about the man: his interminable, self-congratulatory stump speech, wearingly bereft of humor, argument, story or anecdote, more a listing of all bad things in the world and how they must be put right, delivered in his usual droning shout. The need to make it all about the platform concessions he had wrangled out of Mrs. Clinton, and the historical magnitude of the Senator himself: “Together we have begun a political revolution to transform America and that revolution continues.” Followed by about as short and perfunctory an actual endorsement as possible.

At least it was done. If Achilles had sulked this long in his tent we would all be speaking Trojan, but never mind. Bernie Sanders did, clearly and unequivocally, say that Hillary Clinton had won the most elected delegates, that she “will make an outstanding President and I am proud to stand with her here today” …

Mr. Kramer then diagnoses a continuing problem with left-wing politics:

Polling shows that 85 percent of Sanders supporters are willing to vote for Mrs. Clinton in November… Most of the remainder will likely come around over the next four months… yet there is a lingering problem here…

With Bernie out of the battle, what remains is the left’s odd, outmoded doctrine of purity, of revolutionary posturing. This is a philosophy alien to the long legacy of pragmatic American liberalism. Its perpetuation speaks directly to the reasons today’s liberals seem to have such difficulty holding and wielding power in this country. “The worse, the better,” went the Leninist saw. There is no reforming the rotten old system. Best to “let the empire burn,” and have the fires purify the new society….

Change — lasting, democratic change, which is the only kind worth fighting for — is hard, slow, often exasperating. And yet the theatrics of revolution seem to mesmerize the left, over and over again. The concept, all too similar to the religious fundamentalist’s obsession with the end times, is that cataclysm will bring redemption. There is inherent in this a deep indifference to the historical recognition that one thing proceeds from another … and that when we start down an unknown trail we cannot be sure where we will end up….

The corrosive effects of a political philosophy devoted to waiting for the revolution can be heard in the oddly passive demands of those speeches by Mr. Sanders that lay out always what he wants, but not how we can get it. It is reflected in the left’s distraction over presidential elections while failing to build democracy on a state or local level….

He concludes by quoting Barry Goldwater’s call to action after Goldwater lost the Republican nomination to Richard Nixon in 1960:

This country is too important for anyone’s feelings,” Goldwater thundered at his delegates. “This country, and its majesty, is too great for any man, be he conservative or liberal, to stay home and not work just because he doesn’t agree. Let’s grow up, conservatives. We want to take this party back, and I think some day we can. Let’s go to work.”

Goldwater backed up his words by campaigning hard in support of Nixon — and not incidentally, building a foundation for the right wing around the country. Four years later, he would use it to gain the nomination himself, and by 1980, Ronald Reagan had taken not only the party but the country for conservatism.