“‘In 1906, San Francisco was the largest city west of the Rockies. We had 400,000 people in the city,’ Eisner said. ‘Today we have 7 million in the Bay Area. And the consequences of a disaster of this magnitude in an urban area are significant.’” On the eve of tomorrow’s centennial of the great San Francisco earthquake, a new study suggests another Big One would mean a Katrina-level disaster for the Bay Area. “Seismologists generally agree that a repeat of a 1906-size earthquake is inevitable, though when and where along the fault are unknown. In 2002, the U.S. Geological Survey reported a 62 percent chance of a magnitude-6.7 earthquake or greater hitting the Bay Area within 30 years.” And, in a related story, historians look for lessons for post-Katrina New Orleans amid the rubble of 1906.
Tag: History
The End of History.
And hundreds of fifth-graders in day-glo hats lamented…The Smithsonian American History Museum will be closed for two years as of Labor Day, to allow for interior renovations and a new display for the Star Spangled Banner. And in vaguely related news (and as noted previously here), the Post looks into the plan by the CIA, Air Force and others to file away some records…forever. (2nd link via Cliopatria.)
In the dime stores and bus stations.
“In his conversation with Robert Kennedy, King refused to heed an appeal for moderation: ‘I am different from my father. I feel the need of being free now.’ This impatience for freedom, acted out by the courageous young Freedom Riders, helped propel a reluctant America at least part of the way down the road to racial justice.” In the same NYT Book Review as the Brinkley piece posted on Monday, Columbia’s Eric Foner favorably reviews Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. And, also in history news, the AP profiles historian, Dylanologist, and recent Bancroft winner Sean Wilentz. “There isn’t much that’s gone wrong with the country’s institutions that a good election can’t cure. Or a few good elections. So I have a kind of willful optimism.“
Cubism.
“The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. The year was 1968. Nixon won the presidency. The Beatles released The White Album. And home-furnishings company Herman Miller (Research) in Zeeland, Mich., launched the Action Office. It was the brainchild of Bob Propst, a Coloradan who had joined the company as director of research.” (Propst would later deem his invention “monolithic insanity.”) Fortune‘s Julie Schlosser recounts the ignominious rise of the cubicle as the bane of the American workplace. “The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.”
Prospect Pop Quiz.
“For $800: DAILY DOUBLE!!!!: Thomas Edison is more famous, but this man’s alternating-current system actually won out over Edison’s direct-current variation.” [Think The Prestige…Nicola Tesla.] The American Prospect‘s Michael Tomasky offers up a Jeopardy-style cultural literacy test in American history and political philosophy. (Via The Late Adopter.)
Nessie, meet Dumbo.
A new theory by Glasgow paleontologist Neil Clark suggests the Loch Ness Monster was more circus elephant than pink elephant. “‘It is quite possible that people not used to seeing a swimming elephant — the vast bulk of the animal is submerged, with only a thick trunk and a couple of humps visible,’ thought they saw a monster, Clark said in an interview Tuesday.” Adding fuel to the fire is the 20,000 pound reward for Nessie’s capture put forward by circus impresario Bertram Mills, who may well have rested his traveling circus animals along the banks of Loch Ness, in 1933.
Bryan’s Song.
“Bryan inaugurated an era in which style and sentiment would trump substance, personal charisma would trump intellect or ideas, and pious moralizing would trump social consciousness. Politicians of the Gilded Age had remained aloof from the public, relying on printed broadsides, entrenched partisan loyalties and local organization. Bryan invented the glad-handing, ‘happy warrior’ style of the modern political campaign, crisscrossing the country tirelessly by rail and delivering countless speeches to crowds large and small. (It has often been observed that if radio or television had existed in Bryan’s day, he would have beaten the drab McKinley or pretty much anyone else.)” Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir reviews Michael Kazin’s A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, and argues that the legacy of the Great Commoner’s brand of populism is less sanguine than Kazin makes it out to be. Still, I’m looking forward to checking out Kazin’s book.
Secret Garden.
“It is also worth noting that much of this reclassification is being conducted by junior officers, or in many cases private contractors who know nothing about the historical context of these documents and nothing about whether the contents are sensitive or innocuous. One military historian told me that some of these junior contractors have been instructed simply to reclassify anything bearing the words ‘atomic’ or ‘restricted data,’ regardless of what else the documents might or might not contain.” Fred Kaplan offers up more info on the highly suspect re-classifying program currently underway at the National Archives.
Whitewash at the Archives.
“The stuff they pulled should never have been removed…Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous.” As recently uncovered by intelligence historian Matthew Aid, the National Archives has been re-classifying thousands of once publicly available documents at the behest of unknown (re: still-classified) government agencies since 1999. “While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago. One reclassified document in Mr. Aid’s files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.’s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was ‘not probable in 1950.’ Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.” Aid posted his account of the sordid tale today at the National Security Archive.
Plot Foiled.
A quick book bash: I wasn’t going to write about Philip Roth’s The Plot against America, which I read a few weeks ago, until seeing C.S.A tonight crystallized my problems with it. I should say up front that I run hot and cold on Roth — I quite liked Portnoy and American Pastoral, but kinda loathed Goodbye, Columbus. And, while The Plot Against America is getting good reviews all around, I had a strongly adverse reaction to it. For those of you who haven’t heard anything about it, Plot describes an alternate USA in which famed aviator and rabid isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940, makes peace with Hitler, and begins a pogrom of sorts against Jewish-Americans, forcibly enrolling Jewish children (including the narrator’s brother) in Americanization programs and, eventually, attempting to relocate Jewish families to the Midwest. As per Roth’s usual m.o., the tale is told from the perspective of a Newark family trying to find their way — not very successfully — amid the deteriorating events.
As alternate histories go, it’s a great idea for a book, and I was really looking forward to seeing what Roth did with it. But, unlike CSA, which clearly showed an attentiveness to both what happened and what might have happened, Roth here has written an alternate history without seeming to give a whit about the history. In short, I found the book stunningly, almost narcissisticly, myopic. One gets the sense from reading Plot that the rift beween Jews and Gentiles in America was not only the most significant but the only ethnic or cultural schism in FDR’s America. This is not to say anti-semitism wasn’t rampant and widespread at the time — Of course it was, as attested by Father Coughlin, Breckinridge Long, and Lindbergh himself, who — in a speech that tarnished his reputation much more than Roth lets on — blamed support for the war on the “large ownership and influence [of Jews] in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.” But, in The Plot Against America, no one else seems to even exist besides Jews and (White) Gentiles — To take the two most notable examples, there’s no mention of the fact that Africans-Americans were being lynched in staggering numbers in this period (the only lynching mentioned is that of Leo Frank), or that we actually did intern Japanese-Americans during the war. (As a point of contrast, C.S.A.‘s central thesis is about slavery, but it moves beyond white-black relations to explore, or at least reference, the place of Asians, Latinos, and gay Americans in the new Confederate system.)
This isn’t about tokenism — it’s about doing justice to the people and the history of the period you’re writing about. And, frankly, the history in The Plot Against America strains credulity time and time again. I’ll skip over the final twist so as not to give it away, and because it’s so ridiculously implausible that Roth couldn’t have intended for us to take it seriously. But, even despite that, Lindbergh’s popularity — and the public’s taste for isolationism — by 1940 seem significantly overstated throughout. (To take one example, there is no way that the Solid Democratic South would up and vote GOP that year — With the Civil War only recently out of living memory, the Dems could’ve run a wet paper bag in the South, so long as it wasn’t of the party of Lincoln and didn’t threaten to upset the Jim Crow racial order. That didn’t even begin to change until Strom in ’48.) And, while Walter Winchell plays a large role here in calling out the Nazi-American pact and resulting Jewish pogrom, he seems to be the only public figure in America doing so. Where’s everyone else? It doesn’t make sense.
Finally (and I’ll admit, this really ticked me off), Plot basically commits a character assassination of progressive/isolationist Burton Wheeler of Montana, who here appears as Lindbergh’s Vice-President (or, more to the point, his Cheney — I’m assuming that’s what Roth was getting at.) At a certain point in Plot, we’re supposed to believe that Wheeler — a guy who refused to prosecute alleged dissenters as Montana Attorney General during the hysteria of WWI, helped lead the investigation into the government corruption of Teapot Dome, and turned on FDR because he thought court-packing was an unconstitutional powergrab — is going to, out-of-the-blue, declare martial law and start rounding people up? That makes zero sense, and is, in effect, a slander on a real historical figure. Roth is obviously one of America’s most gifted writers — but, lordy, I thought The Plot Against America needed more research, more attention to historical nuance, and more sense that injustice and suffering in this country has often run along more than one axis of discrimination.