Recommend Books on This Thread

Cornelio Friday 12 Jun 2020

Irkutyanin said: ↑

Truman: Part 2 Review

When David McCullough set out to write this biography on the president who became the progenitor of every foreign and domestic policy position for the remainder of the century, one wonders if he had this stylistic choice in mind from the beginning, or if it was a presentation morphed by series of committees of PR people at Yale, the Truman Library, and the National Security Council. Having reserved my full opinion on the book until I could conclude McCullough’s intent in his portrayal of Truman. I left time for him to reprimand his subject until the very end, and as a result I can thoroughly conclude that McCullough had zero intention outside of rehabilitating America’s least popular president without any qualifications. McCullough invites the reader to indulge in the George W Bush image of the serene decision maker, as austere and regal as his other subject, John Adams, while presenting Harry S Truman as quaint and down to earth as the litany of “middle American” candidates that have aped Truman’s Sam Waltonesque image to the present day.

McCullough had dedicated the entirety of his presidential writings to nourishing the current cult of the presidency, mixing the folkish “common wisdom” tropes of American politics with the aloof image of Cincinnatus Americana that has been a cornerstone of Masonic adulation of Washington since the beginning of the republic. McCullough grafts the image of John Adams’ principled and “intentional” unpopularity onto Truman, assigning principles of high office to his most controversial issues, and higher loyalty to abstract constitutionalism that has been the bane of conservative writing since the implosion of the Dixiecrats and Taftites that Truman played a vital role in. McCullough hides Truman’s hypocrisies as best he can under a veneer of higher loyalties never fully articulated but asserted to be higher civic principles. This is at its most jarring in his description of the conflict with MacArthur, where the Yale man assures us that the man whose presidency solidified the present role of the National Security state institutions asserted the “principle of civil control over the military.”

The result is a 1000+ page biography with many glaring holes, with every controversy being adeptly sidestepped and avoided in exchange for describing Truman’s private life, personal quirks, and “good ole fashioned” mindset in the midst of events and figures that dwarf him in every way. By depriving Truman of any real personal agency or affiliation after the death of FDR, we are left with a bumbling boy scout caricature of the man who nuked Japan, murdered his first Secretary of Defense over his opposition to Zionism, launched the first forever war in modern American history, solidified the Pentagons’ role in peace time, founded the CIA, and allowed Hoover to turn the FBI into the most sophisticated domestic surveillance force before beginning a social revolution from above. Maybe Truman was a dope that understood nothing of what he did, and blundered his way into his place as the most disliked president in US history after being the tool of more powerful people his entire life, but in my estimation the biography does him more disservice than even his harshest Republican or nationalist critics by reducing him to this role for the consumption of Clinton and Bush voters. Is it useless? Not quite, I think this book reveals quite a bit about American political realities and the condescending mentality of our literary class since they have branded the triple A label of the Pulitzer Prize on this interpretation of Truman. However, McCullough’s biography it is far from definitive on the era, the man, the decisions, or their consequences, which makes me question if it’s worth the time of anyone trying to come to grips with the early Post War genesis of America the global empire.

As we turn away from the managed career of Judge and Senator Truman, we arrive at the most critical moment of his entire life, the 1944 Democratic VP nomination. In this, Truman too was a pawn of the remaining political bosses and FDR, who was at a difficult political juncture managing his political patronage empire. Bob Hannegan, the St Louis politico who saved Truman’s run in 1940 against Stark by defecting to Tom Pendergast’s organization, had advanced in the national DNC political hierarchy by the Chicago convention in 1944.

FDR was in a difficult position. He had mostly eliminated the populist nationalists from a position to challenge him. Huey Long was dead, Charles Coughlin silenced, Charles Lindbergh thoroughly discredited, Pelley and Smith hounded to obscurity, there was no one left to contest the crown directly. But, FDR’s coalition of Catholic immigrants, Jews, Debsian Socialists, and Southerners was always unstable, and many felt this convention would select two presidents despite Roosevelt’s failing health being largely a secret. The conservative Bourbon Democrats had attempted their own coup 4 years prior when Roosevelt’s VP, former Texas Senator John “Cactus Jack” Garner attempted to primary Roosevelt in 1940 only to be humiliated and the Pro Soviet Henry Wallace replacing him. Wallace was devoutly from the Progressive wing of the party, for a national healthcare and desegregation, but was deeply unpopular politically and dangerous for the stability of the FDR coalition. FDR also had decided he was not going to let Wallace succeed him.

McCullough’s best chapters are on the maneuvering of FDR’s men in 1944 convention, because they are the last important ones that are wholly real. FDR himself falsely declared that he expected South Carolina Senator James F Byrnes to receive the nomination, but privately he was attempting to take focus off of Wallace until he could find a person he could put in place. Byrnes was a New Dealer, but also a staunch segregationist, and in FDR’s calculations Harlem was more important for electoral victory than the entirety of the US South, which was assumed would “vote Democrat regardless.” This marks a substantial departure from a critical Democratic Party policy from maintaining the Southern vote to securing the urban minority and labor vote, which crystallized and intensified as time went on. Truman was put forward as a unassuming compromise candidate from the MidWest, chosen by higher calculation in creating the least offensive ticket and nothing more. The DNC delegates, who put Wallace in the lead after Byrnes dropped out in disgust, had their votes artificially manipulated in the 2nd and 3rd ballots to exclude Wallace voters to the benefit of the political bosses and FDR who put their party machinery behind Truman. It was the most supreme triumph and comeback for the Bourbon Democrats, the disgraced ex Vice President Garner was elated at the choice, as was another junior member from Texas and lifelong Truman man, Congressman Lyndon Johnson.

McCullough’s narrative enters a turning point from this point onwards, before this point, McCullough had tried to rose tint the image of Truman as “the one straight man” in a corrupt political machine in Missouri, but had been essentially honest that he was not an autonomous figure. From the 44 conference, that aspect of the narrative disappears despite the clear reasons FDR had selected Truman. Truman was a man who would be quiet, he would do as he was told and not cause controversy, and he was a man who could be inert for years in a useless office without a fuss. He was not briefed on the War, the secret projects, diplomatic affairs, or even domestic concerns of maintaining the coalition party. Roosevelt treated him as a secondary figure, and he was, much to his resentment.

As McCullough shifts to President Truman, we are increasingly subject to a flight of developments and people who are described, then discarded. This is most glaring in the treatments of James Forrestal’s “suicide” in 4 paragraphs and his reduction of MacArthur to a petulant and dangerous “Custer like” showboater. As I’ve shown above, an entire 400 page book was written on the specifics of Forrestal, which is brushed off almost absurdly by McCullough here. Even Joseph Schechtman, revisionist Zionist and Jabotinsky’s secretary has more to say in “ The United States and the Jewish State Movement 1939-1949” on the flaws of the treatment of both Marshall and Forrestal as a strategy that nearly catastrophically backfired had someone with less of a tolerance threshold than Truman been in place. The attacks on both McArthur and McCarthy are almost what you would expect from a Hollywood film; shallow, partisan, and bitter over the remote survival of their memory. Meanwhile Truman’s “Civil Rights” readjustment of US policy is uncritically asserted as a moral given of a man with selfless determination to achieve Black equality. To McCullough, he was throwing the southern party into chaos out of purely altruistic motives, and the voter fraud that won Truman’s Senate seat suddenly doesn’t exist in states like Texas in 1948. The whole of the Presidential narrative, some 400 pages, falls unforgivably flat by repeating this presentation, issue after issue.

This is the longest and most thorough of the Truman biographies, finished in the 90’s as the definitive touch up job. And yet it can’t hide uncomfortable realities of the administration in its own footnotes. George C Marshall, his second Secretary of State and third of Defense got a four volume biography 30 years sooner. His other Secretaries of State, Defense, even his particular ambassadors and lesser nominal subordinates have all gotten more extensive treatment than himself, and it isn’t hard to see why. They made most of the important decisions of the state in that critical era. Truman was handed the most powerful executive and centralized rule in American history since Abraham Lincoln, it was a true “Imperial Presidency” with a unitary command bureaucracy and security apparatus. If FDR is responsible for the creation of the National Security State as we have come to understand it, Truman is the man most responsible for losing control. McCullough doesn’t know what to do with this aspect of Truman’s lack of ambition and understanding that cost an additional 44,499 dead Americans and the revival of a unified China. So he makes it the cornerstone of Truman’s “Americanism” and high dignity of office and character. He is not wrong. The endemic problems of American statecraft since Truman have all been characteristics he has fashioned into national tropes.

Truman was the first modern weak executive enfeebling his own office’s ability to enact policy in real terms. Truman presided over the onset of the ever expanding scope of agencies essentially leaderless and uncommunicative with any central apparatus. Truman was ruled by political bosses McCullough assures the reader “are a thing of the past” selecting him as a candidate long in advance based off of marketing data and donor money. But most of all Truman embodied the sheer lack of understanding or feeling plastered over with contradictory usage of faux folksy attempts at mass appeals and regal touting of the dignified high office’s separation from the public attitude.

These are the traits McCullough gives Truman in his “friendly” biography, and like the Hillary Clinton memoirs: What Happened? with its 2 chapters dedicated to banal food reviews, it paints a harsher portrait of its subject than a dedicated opponent who would write that these actions were undertaken only for reasons of cynical self interest.

The funniest thing about this hagiography is that the only time McCullough says something negative of Truman is in his harsh rebuke of him in the early chapters for thinking of joining the KKK.

Irkutyanin Sunday 19 Jul 2020

Russian Revolutions: Historiographical Review Part 1:

As the early 20th century conclusively disappears from the living memory, so to can the centuries of revisionism and platitudes for partisans that no longer exist.

Ernst Nolte and the Historians’ Question has been discussed a few times on the forum, and for the most part, it is not difficult to understand why the chaos and continuing war in North Asia should occupy a position of greater significance than the challenge to the dysfunctional Interwar European order. Nolte, of course, is staring down the main guilt historiography that was foundational to the post 1945 Western order, proceeding with the utmost caution lest he be thrown to Irving’s wolves.

For us, however, it is easier to say that 1919-45 Germany could not have existed or acted in the way that it did without the frame of 1917-1927 Russia. This is self evident even without books like Jonathan Smele’s The Russian Revolution and Civil War: an Annotated Bibliography , but it certainly helps illustrate how much more enlarged the academic efforts were for the Revolution. Smele’s bibliography is 20 years old, is limited to mostly English and a few French and German books and selected articles, excludes doctorate and MA theses, (catalogues of which are published separately in yearly installments by Indiana University), and yet still offers a list that dwarfs most major university holdings of books on Germany of every historical period combined. While it is true that a well made bibliography of books and articles on military operations of the Second World War in English likely approach the same size as Smele’s work, the reviews of front operations likely do not readily translate into successive political historiographical schools anywhere near as much. As you read down the list, the 20th century rolls down the pages, Early Soviet Press propaganda, American journalists who worked with the Wilson delegation, defeated liberal emigres, White Russian aristocratic authors in exile, successive leftist heresies turned into janitors abroad or chairing university departments in Brooklyn, bitter Baltic German shame molding into National Socialist tracts on Judeo-Bolshevism, the first American anti communists mixed in with apologists and gathering Trotskyite organizations, from the Socialist Workers Party to the North American Man/Boy Love Association. Smele leads us through all of these evolving hagiographies and demonologies before concluding with the last large generation of Sovietologists digging through archives and the “Revisionists” take up a variety of post hoc justifications while appropriating the mantle of historiographical revision from the scholars actually doing the revising work.

Smele has continued his work in reference material building by writing the Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil War, but his bibliography shows the work of decades he’s put into the period while writing other monographs on Kolchak or the ethnic conflicts within the Russian Civil War. The result is the best serious overview you can get on the many, many controversies and revisionisms you would likely regret learning about by digging through texts yourself. But a bibliography that is a series of annotated paragraph long reviews is only as good as the reviewer, so what are Smele’s qualities? He is generally hostile to the “Revisionists” of modern leftist hagiographies or platitude derived histories, so British Trotskyite Tony Cliff or AnCom Neil Faulkner are fairly easily trashed, and older works of propaganda like Reed, Gorky, or Carr are labeled as such. However, he is, as a general rule positive on at least one aspect of each book so long as he feels it didn’t waste his time. Thus Trotsky and Deutscher both get a generally favorable review for their literary style and depth they have in constructing a self contained historiographical viewpoint despite the objective obliteration of these older works by the opening of archives. He has little patience for shallow Bircher or later day 4th internationalist works that add only polemics, and barely comments on these. However, the memoirist literature, whatever the bias, often gets the benefit of a total review. If nothing else, Smele’s bibliography is worth reading for realizing the sheer immensity of the topic and material, from 600 page monographs on Latvian Riflemen, to four separate two/three volume series of the diplomatic and financial history of the Arkhangelsk intervention, every pre Revolutionary , Revolutionary, and Civil War front is thrown open. If not illuminating in itself to the depth or minutia of history, (though it could serve in itself as one if all the annotated reviews are read) then it certainly gives you a cartographic layout of the published historiography. Every chapter focusing on a major topic that fractures into subtopics filled with books, and obscure controversies represented sometimes only in a dozen pages of a single article. Smele continues to write, and with this and his two volume historical encyclopedia, he is the most adept person to have ever compiled the material into a useable and approachable reference.

Smele’s bibliography was the first of his reference works, having been finished in the early 2000’s and able to look at the twilight of the Sovietologists’ half century of work. While most “Revisionists” as they attempted to call themselves get the rightful scorn they deserve, but the actual work in revisionism gets high praise in the book. Among these are Volkoganov, Service, and Richard Pipes, whose massive 1000 page history bookended the Soviet Union itself.

Pipes’ Russian Revolution is the second of a three book series on the period between 1861-1925, but it is the largest of the the three and the most contained in chronology, attempting to show the years 1917 and 1918 in their full international context. Pipes was, of course, a Polish Jew who missed the catastrophe by moving to America early. After his flight he became a distinguished leading Sovietologist for Harvard from the late fifties to the late nineties. As such one can’t expect him to be without biases or motives for writing his history, and you should be quick to note his unremitting hostility to most things Russian even before we get to the liberals or Bolsheviks. Indeed, his 1974 book Russia Under the Old Regime, which was the first book of the series, was so unflinchingly negative that it caused a rupture with Solzhenitsyn, and the beginnings of the allegations of anti-semitism against him. But over the course of this book, the Court, Stavka, the Bureaucracy, and the Tsar himself become the pillars of stability and order in comparison with the duplicity and political cowardice of the liberals and the cynical cruelty of the Bolsheviks. This fruit of Glastnost, arriving the year of the Soviet Collapse, had the benefit of standing over the men it condemned triumphantly, had they been alive, this book would have been a masterpiece of polemic justifying a Nuremberg trial of all the Bolshevik leaders. Such is the power of the work, that I do not think American politics will escape it until a more traumatic event comes along. Though infinitely cruder, much of what has been made into popular boomer platitudes about Bolshevism can be said to come from this book, just without its substance of depth.

But to say this without calling attention to its many strengths is unfair, and its depth was itself revolutionary for a history of Russia. Besides a few PhD theses, including one by the murdered journalist Pavel Khlebnikov, no other book so thoroughly examined the Tsarist era peasant question and Stolypin land reform without accepting truisms of the Bolshevik line or the many leftist heresies. In essence, the later half of the Russian 19th century, from Tolstoyan Anarcho-Christian millenarianism, to the narodniki and Socialist Revolutionaries, was predicated on the strengthening of the rural communes on overcrowded productive areas starting to lose poorer peasants to the industrializing new cities. Stolypin’s land reform would have eventually given the edge to freeholders, and destroyed the communes, but this was uncompleted by 1914. The consequences were to be a peasant commune surliness at the remnants of manorial and private (pre emancipation) freed serf land that would make the “land question” an easy one for the Bolsheviks to pander to against both the Provisional Government and the Whites. As agrarian history, Pipes comes the closest in revolutionary books that I’ve read thus far of giving the Russian peasant a similar place to the Mexican peasant in the Fehrenbach history of Mexico, or the poor tenant farmer in a hypothetical good history of the American Populist Party. As it stood, Pipes was the first English language historian that accurately demonstrated that the Bolsheviks effectively taxed the peasantry more than the land was worth for the land collectivization utilizing the new price controls even before the grain requisition demands of War Communism. After doing so, he expertly ties the Leninist hostility to rural Russia as a breeding ground for the petty bourgeoisie, to the grain requisitions and the immense tragedies of the wartime famines as the attempt to break agrarian Russia as a population block succeeded politically but reached a stalemate economically. While Lenin had to back down, Pipes adeptly shows us that the Central Committee would remember the underperformance and “betrayal” of the peasantry.

The other aspect Pipes’ covers very well without skimping on any detail is the diplomatic angles of the Bolshevik era, and the fragility of Bolshevik power in the first year of their government. Pipes’ is fairly open in stating that the Bolsheviks only survived in power because of the Germans, and survived against the explicit opposition of the German High Command and even the ill fated official diplomatic mission to Moscow. Pipes’ is strait forward in describing interests within the German Foreign Ministry as well as finance interests that stressed the benefits of keeping the Bolsheviks in power despite the protests of Ludendorff and the assassination of Ambassador Mirbach. There was at least some non nefarious logic to this, the Germans did not want to fight the Entente naval invasions already underway in the North, nor a reactivated front constituted out of Whites, POW units like the Czechs, and whatever the reds might do after they were deposed. The Brest Lotovsk treaty had already made economic puppets of “Mittleuropa” and the much less known about Supplementary Treaty, signed just days before the black day of the German Army on the Western Front, would have reserved for Bolshevik Russia the status of extractive economic puppet even below those of Skoropadsky’s Ukraine.

Pipes’ narrative shines best as history when it is revealing the failed state of post revolutionary Russia, from the July Coup in Moscow by the left SRs, to the complete reliance of the Bolsheviks on the Latvian Rifles. Wildman may have the definitive narrative of how the Russian Imperial Army collapsed in The End of the Russian Imperial Army but Pipes does an excellent job in demonstrating the aftermath. In August of 1918, Russia is reduced to two large blocks of prisoner non-Russian ethnic unites fighting for the total control of the empire’s husk, while the Entente and Alliance unenthusiastically occupy rail junctions on the periphery. Had the Czechs been victorious over the Latvians on the Volga, it’s likely an SR government would have been the result. To that end, Pipes demonstrates a crucial fact of the earliest stage of the “Russian” Civil War. Neither titular side had a “Russian Army” worth much mention until 1919, after the critical implosion of German power. On that subject, Pipes notes that from the establishment of diplomatic relationships, the Bolsheviks used consulates merely as fronts for revolutionary agitation and coordination inside of Germany, building the Spartacists up for the 1918 revolution. Count Mirbach and the German embassy staff was aware of this, and tried repeatedly to convince the Imperial government to overthrow the Bolsheviks with the willing military, but Foreign Minister Kuhlmann was adamant in his protection of the hostile and subversive government of Russia. While this can be partially explained by the strategic reasons above, individuals like Parvus Helphand and Olof Aschberg, and the increasingly desperate situation in the West, a recent history of the revolution by Sean McMeekin point to perhaps a sunken cost fallacy in the German foreign affairs offices.

Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Revolution; A New History is perhaps the single best centenary overview put out, and though it is significantly more brief than both the older Pipes, Figes, Rabinowitch, Carr, or Trotsky or even some of the newer competing accounts like Engelstein and Zygar, the quality of information presented per page surpasses most of its rivals. There are a number of reasons for this. For one, the opening of the Soviet archives have allowed multiple internal documents the appropriate time to be adequately rediscovered, while the more personal works of the Provisional Government Emigres are worked over with less sympathetic eyes. The Academic International Press publication of Milyukov’s personal history, combined with the work of Simeon Lyanders on Russian liberal secret societies and private political and financial pacts in the lead up to February have allowed for the near total revision of events and their significance that was impossible for historians to broach for 90 years. McMeekin himself was the student of Norman Stone, and a colleague of David Stone both of whose works on the Russian Army in the First World War are extensively referenced and quoted in New History. The use of these monographs and McMeekins earlier revisionist work on Russian Imperial diplomacy and war goals paint a much different picture than the under equipped, untrained, under supplied army lead by lethargic incompetents to strategically unimportant objectives for the Empire. Such a vision of the First World War was the dominating interpretation for the Bolsheviks from Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism , to the very last Soviet accounts of the revolution. The Bolsheviks were not singular culprits, however. This historiography of the Russian War was completely unchallenged by “right” historians in the West. The hostility toward all things Russia by Richard Pipes comes forward here, in his vision of a muzhik army without weapons, whose greatest accomplishment was “not being totally overwhelmed in 1915, during the retreat from Poland.” Similarly, Figes, Chamberlain, Reed, and Churchill all take this jaundiced view of a pathetic Russia, barely holding on as the walls close in from the relentless Teutonic pursuit and Slavic unruliness.

With McMeekin’s earlier work, The Russian Origins of the First World War , this image of a increasingly helpless stavka was systematically assaulted at the expense of potential claims Russian morality and liberal/socialist legacy, which is targeted for total destruction in New History . The Russian Army had completed supply rails from Murmansk and Tehran in 1916, after its most successful military year in the War thus far. The naval supremacy of the Turks had been broken in the Black Sea, the straits were guarded by two divisions as the Ottoman armies stood poised for their final collapse on the approach to Ankara, shell production, which had made Russia the laughingstock of world history in 1914, surpassed the Germans in 1916, and matched the Soviet Union of 1942. Admiral Kolchak, with his new dreadnaught protected fleet of landing craft was poised to make the largest naval landing of history in June 1917. And here is where McMeekin is most useful. While specialist books by Gregory Katkov or Tsuyoshi Hasegawa revealed the importance of the February Revolution beforehand, McMeekin is the first historian to put its significance and catastrophe of the February Revolution, before the October Revolution’s importance. The hysteria of the Petrograd political scene and opportunism of the Kadets and Octoberists of the progressive Duma are given their due place. For one, their connections with the Paris Grand Orient, Finance Ministry, foreign capital, and hostile minority groups is unhidden when describing the motivations of the men who destroyed Tsardom, and forced the abdication weeks before the American entry into the war. Their prize of government overthrow during wartime accomplished, their first action was to immediately lose unilateral control by allying with the Petrograd Soviet and mass enforced soldier mutinies against their aristocratic and frequently German officers. The dangerous “dual sovereignty” of the Tsarist era after 1905, was thus repeated and made all the more dangerous by “democratizing” the entire military. Of the successive factions to control the nominal government, the liberals proved themselves to be the least capable of operating under crisis. While pro Entente and pro War patriotic socialists would continue to lead the now critically weakened army into pointless disasters, they forfeited everything that had been negotiated by 1916, while allowing Bolshevik subversion to occur as a weapon against the “right.”

When Lenin returned to Petrograd, after being escorted through German and Swedish territory to Finland, he was able with newfound influxes of foreign cash to set up the Bolsheviks as a centralized delegitimization and demoralization media empire, as their now overhauled press and pamphleteering operation showed. While they nearly were all arrested for the July Days putsch, the failure of the Kerensky offensive, and the supreme tragedy of the Kornilov affair relegitimized the party, and amnesties were given to all of its leaders just as the disgusted remaining military leaders now refused to aid Kerensky if another attempt at insurrection was taken. In this drama of the Provisional Government, victory went to the faction willing to use force and the assets it had, while not pissing crucial men away. While the Bolsheviks are far from redeemed in McMeekin’s narrative, the callous opportunism and incompetence cuts the liberals and non-Bolshevik socialists as pathetic characters, fundamentally unserious about power. This, combined with their willful distortion of the historical record, has fundamentally soured my not to great view of the Russian intelligentsia as a class, helped along by my follow up reading of Mikhail Zygar.

Another Centennial work, Mikhail Zygar’s The Empire Must Die is also not found In Smele’s 2003 bibliography, and it is the most surprising book I have read on the Revolution. For those unfamiliar, Zygar was the man behind the neoliberal news channel Dozhd and maintains a business relationship with the Pussy Riot girls. Gearing myself up for an absolute travesty of a book (like Trotskyite Neil Faulkner’s People’s History of the Russian Revolution ) I was ready for a book full of bougie sexual morality and millionaire minority heroes in the face of the autocratic Proto-Hitler Tsar. What I got, while still a little gay, was a mostly unsympathetic treatment of Russian Civil Society, the intelligentsia in particular, as they lead the country to ruin. Indeed, if there is any spirit of a previous work in Zygar’s appraisal it is the 1906 collection of anti intellectual essays by prominent Orthodox theologians Vekhi which condemned much of the higher destructive culture of the intelligentsia in severe terms. This is interesting, because Zygar himself has little respect for the Church as an institution, and takes petty jabs at it in the text, but the bulk of his serious criticism falls to the Russian Elites in a way much closer to our cultural understanding of that term. Zygar’s work is a journalistic web narrative, more akin to a Paul Khlebnikov or Ben Mezrich’s treatment of oligarch era Russia than a traditional history of the buildup to the revolution. This approach reminds me of some of my favorite Joseph Conrad novels, specifically his underread and less remembered Russian espionage stories, Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent. Like those novels, Zygar’s portrait is the dysfunctional side of a Russian society and revolutionary assassination and counter assassination framed by a decadent and self indulgent moral elite that encourages this cycle. His targets are not the Autocracy, bureaucracy, the nobility, or the Church but rather the professors, writers, new money, and radical intelligentsia.

His book actually opens and has a significant focus on the literary world of Russia, starting with the excommunication of Tolstoy for his Christian Anarchist Millenarianism and his over support for the Socialist Revolutionaries’ peasant platform. From there we get into his late friendship of Gorky, who donates most of his book money and family fortune to the Russian Social Democratic Party while cucking the theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky of theatre kid fame. Gorky and his new girlfriend, Maria Andreyevna make acquaintances with the millionaire actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya and one of the richest industrialists in Russia, Savva Morozov and his nephew Nikolai Schmidt. These last three were the largest domestic contributors specifically to the Bolshevik party in the underground phase, and they all have connection to one another in a very specific minority religious sect that were renowned for being niggardly merchants. That’s right, the Old Believers. Now, the Old Believer Question had been in the back of my mind as a lost factor in the Russian Revolution, especially since when I started to dig, I found quite a bit of crossover in the “disaffected sub elite” strata of Moscovite and Petersburg society. But no historian names the Raskol quite as explicitly as Zygar has done in his map of money and connections specifically to the underground Bolsheviks. While there were self financing activities in the Caucasus on the Party’s part, and still other contributors, Zygar makes the case that the unimportant lesser branch of social democracy got its greates pre March 1917 mindfalls from profligate Old Believers who had made up the “native” merchant burger artificially maintained ethno-religious group, which was so novel a take I found it worth writing these series of reviews to get to it.

Of course, Zygar also has the distinction of being the most specific general account I have seen with Jewish finance and its branches inside 1917 Russia too, but these lead less to the Bolsheviks and more to their alternatives. For one, Zygar makes much of Gregory Gershuni, Mikhail Gotz, and Abram Gotz, who he credits exclusively with supplying the bulk of finances to the People’s Will and maintaining the Narodniki as a cohesive movement until the SR party was founded. With the death of Mikhail Gotz and Gershuni, the party was in the woods without much identifiable leadership at the most critical stage. Many Orthodox Marxist “assimilationist” Jews were behind the Menshevik leadership, morphed into radical from the rapidly disintegrating non Hasidic “official” Jewish life in the late Pale of Settlement. There was, of course, the separate Jewish Labor Bund, but many of its most faithful adherents became demoralized by the 1903 RSDP conference, followed immediately by the Kinshinyov Pogrom and 1905, when the Russian government set up state controlled proxy parties for “Jewish self defense” and many Jews either split into Zionist or Marxist camps. There was, of course, a final option, one embraced by Simon Dubnow, the Yiddish Folkspartei, and the bulk of international finance; Jewish autonomism within Eastern Europe. This was never a viewpoint with a cohesive goal, which made it attractive to Anglophiles and Francophilic Republican Masons in the Octoberist and Kadet parties. These men could promise basically anything the diaspora wanted to hear about the Jewish Question, because of their grudges with the Tsar. In most cases this manifested in talking about ending the Pale of Settlement, though as Zygar noted, there were ways of buying out already, this was not the international perception, especially in New York. The liberals held a sword of Damocles over the Tsar, since most had come from the Finance ministry and were directly in control of negotiating Russian credit and servicing of debts to foreign bankers. Their most spectacular accomplishment was negotiating the French “loan that saved Russia” in 1906 in exchange for certain promises of foreign alignment and redrawing domestic political arrangements. This loan was to secure Russia on the irreversible path to hostility to Germany on behalf of this clique and more general alignment with the democracies. All of this is mapped by Zygar, as well as most of the Union of Russian People’s response in specifically targeting the liberals for assassination and not the much less contemporarily important Bolsheviks or even Mensheviks. You can hopefully see, then, why I was so surprised by the forthwith of this information’s presentation. Most of this I knew from Dubnow, or Sylvia Klinberg’s Revolutionary Yiddishland , but I did not think the finer points would come out of a Dozhd man.

I will return to this series, to add additional titles and viewpoints, but these I would consider the best overviews I have yet read, and a great start.

Razumov Wednesday 12 Aug 2020

The Power of Life Or Death: A Critique of Medical Tyranny

https://books.google.com/books?id=g_6IDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Irkutyanin Saturday 29 Aug 2020

This book will probably be the only thing by Masha Gessen I ever complete, and at 98 pages it is mercifully short but still manages to be the most self revealing work of secular refusenik Jews I have read. Gessen’s type are those who refuse to turn to either Hasidism or return to Israel on the grounds they will be near other Jews that have an idea of who they are without negative self image. The children or grandchildren of those Jews who were stilted Evsektsia (Gessen’s own grandmother was a NKVD camp gaurd) have emigrated en masse to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and those too decadent and neurotic to return to yeshivot have made careers for themselves talking about what it really means to be Jewish. Lev Golinkin was one of these, but at least his memoirs of emigration confine themselves largely to his own lived experience. Gessen here tries to fit her own conception of Jewishness with all of its liberality and homosexual updates over the skin of the Shtetlach, JAO, and Israel. The result is perhaps the most self condemnatory tract she could author, resplendent with outrage of the loss of Jewish separateness even as she confines her own heritage to the void for lib points by posturing against modern Russia. For Example:

“The questions of the generations of Jews before me, including my parents, came back to haunt me. When should the Jews stay put and when should the Jews run? How do we know where we will be safe? Does departure ever signal cowardice? Can the failure to leave be a betrayal of life itself? There is only one right answer to any given question at any given time, and how can I tell when the time has come to know the difference?
At twelve, I longed desperately to know where my true home might be. Thirty years later, I was apparently free to choose my own destination, and far better versed in the physical ways of the world. Yet I remained suspended in mistrust, hedging my geographical bets like so many generations of Jews before me. In part in an attempt to understand or at least describe this state, I set out to write a book about Birobidzhan.

In December 2013, I found myself sitting on the floor in the study of my Moscow apartment. The room was nearly empty, the bookshelves were barren, and the last of the guests at our going-away party were still drinking in the kitchen, even after my partner and two of our three kids had gone to sleep on the one remaining mattress on the floor in our bedroom. Our plane to New York would leave in a few hours. Just months earlier, we had decided that it was time to run; waiting any longer would put our family in danger. This time, the choice did not have to do with being Jewish: the Kremlin had unleashed a campaign against gays, and my partner and I happened to be that, too. The parliament was discussing ways to remove children from LGBT families. The threat seemed alternately far-fetched and immediate, but the risk, we decided, was unacceptable in either case.

I sat on the floor, hoping that my absence from the living room would compel the stragglers to leave. I looked down at the molding, where the wall met the floor—it was painted light blue, and the radiator was dark blue, and this had been done in accordance with my sketches. The tears came then, and this was the first time in my life’s many moves—from the Soviet Union to the United States, then back to Russia, now back to America—that I cried for what had been my home.

A few months later, in New York, I returned to working on this book, which is about Birobidzhan, the concept of home, and knowing when to leave.”

Hopefully this sets the tone. This book is for no one except a small circle of post reform, post Judaism Jews, and is full of the sincerity of the Author, who embraces nothing except oblivion and atheism, the grand cup of victimhood as the ultimate prize of the Soviet Jews who reject spiritual meaning and Israel both. She puts these words in a Birobidzhan survivor who stayed in JAO:

“The morning I met Bekerman at the synagogue, he had just attended services for Simchat Torah—the highest holiday of the year for Soviet Jews of my generation. On that day, hundreds of people would dance in the street in front of the central Moscow synagogue; we would shield our faces ineffectually from the secret police and Komsomol informers, out in force with their cameras, but still put our arms around one another and dance in circles to old Yiddish tunes, which we belted out ourselves. The Birobidzhan synagogue, however, is essentially an American import, with a young Lubavitcher rabbi who probably knows nothing of the peculiar traditions of secular Soviet Jews.

“He wanted us to cover our heads,” Bekerman grumbled as we walked the fifteen yards to Freud. “What does he think? He thinks I believe in God?”

“I go to synagogue,” he explained to me, apparently angry at how little I seemed to understand, “because I like to read and I like to study. But God? I cannot believe in God. Where was your God when the Jewish people were killed? When my parents and my five brothers and sisters were buried alive? You say he chose the Jewish people? He forsook the Jewish people!”

The difference between me and ninety-year-old Bekerman was that I had heard this before. He had not. He might have said it a few times, but the opportunities would have been few. There might be a synagogue and a community center in Birobidzhan, but there was still no place in the Jewish Autonomous Region to talk about the Jewish people and what had happened to them.”

Yes Masha, I’m sure the 90 year old Communist Evsektsia JAO veteran who survived the purges has never heard about atheism before. I’m sure he’s never applied YOUR worldview to being a Jew because he didn’t watch Schindler’s list or have gay sex or something. I swear this book is amazing just for the parts of the book where Masha bloviates around Birobidzhan, making everyone uncomfortable with her dyke haircut and questions to library curators and museum attendants about the purges and Jewish demographics figures. It’s the exact same as reading a autistic 4chan green text where Gessen edits down her awkwardness and makes her characters say what she thinks.

She is all over the place about the Soviet Union and the shtetlach, should the Jews have had Yiddish Israel? Her treatment of one of the central figures of JAO’s founding, David Bergelson is completely split between scathing detached irony and Applebaumesque shock porn. This book serves as a brief biography of Bergelson, who oscillates between Soviet shill and sell out, hapless founder of a swamp colony, heroic survivor against anti-Semitic persecution and tragic victim of the Stalinist purges and this schizophrenia of tone is a result not of his life, but Gessen’s complete lack of base. She cannot condemn Bergelson on religious grounds, she can not express nostalgia for the shtetlach and condemns earlier emigrant Jews for the ignorance of nostalgia, she cannot remove the ambiguity about secular definitions of Jews and simply proclaim she wants a Yiddish speaking ethnic Ashkenazi Israel, or else wants total assimilation and annihilation but just guided by Jews like her grandmother instead of idk Lavrenty Beria and so she shifts around in the plausible deniability of all positions at various points of her polemic. Perhaps this is to define her subject in her own Jewish terms laid out in the first passage above. The only core message and point, is that JAO was “sad and absurd” but why, exactly? How was it absurd Masha? The best we can get is that it was sad and absurd because the Jews suffered in the 20th century and the project failed, and that as it was failing its designers were shot.

I think I had my biggest revelation as to why I can’t stand these people with a related passage to this thought:

“I liked the museum. I have been to dozens of these small regional museums in the former Soviet Union, and I fancy myself something of a specialist in their many ways of misapprehending history. All local Russian museums begin with rocks. They are the ideal museum exhibit: rocks do not need to be rearranged in case of a regime shift. In the Birobidzhan museum, rocks take up the entire first floor. Upstairs, I found three rooms devoted to the history of the Jewish Autonomous Region—one each for the prewar, war, and postwar years.
The prewar room begins with an exhibit whose own history I was able gradually to reconstruct. In the late 1980s, the staff of the museum apparently wanted to put the Jewish back into the museum of the autonomous region, but all evidence of Jewishness had been destroyed. So they organized an expedition to what had been a shtetl in what had been the Pale of Settlement. As a result, a visitor to the second floor of the Birobidzhan Regional Museum is greeted by the picture of an old, bent Jew with tefillin and a prayer shawl, captioned, “There is only one person left in this old shtetl who remembers how to put on traditional clothing”; a picture of the old shtetl synagogue, now a canning factory; and a glass display case with the “everyday objects of Jewish life,” which include a stringless fiddle. The rest of the room covers the earliest stage of Birobidzhan history, from the arrival of the first settlers and the establishment of the autonomous region to a detailed account of the purges of the late 1930s.

The next room, like most war rooms in most Russian museums, has no identity of its own; it is the canned canon of the Great Patriotic War, reproduced faithfully in every regional, school, and workplace museum all over the country. The room is draped in red flags, and it drips Soviet patriotism. Many such war rooms in other museums are dedicated to the heroism of Alexander Matrosov, a nineteen-year-old soldier who threw himself on the opening of a German bunker, thus shielding his comrades from fire. This feat of turning oneself literally into cannon fodder has long been the Soviet definition of heroism.”

“Birobidzhan, as it happened, had its own hero of similar standing, Iosif Bumagin. Born in Vitebsk in 1907, he joined the Red Army in 1929 and served for four years. He moved to Birobidzhan in 1937 and worked at the one big industrial plant in town. He was drafted again in May 1941, before the German invasion. Purges had decimated the Red Army, and Bumagin was among those chosen for officer training; his credentials were seven years of formal schooling, four years of military service, and years of working as a Communist organizer. He managed to stay at military school virtually until the end of the war, joining the front in April 1945, in Germany. It was during the storming of Breslau, just two weeks before the war in Europe ended, that Bumagin used his own body to silence a German machine gun.1 The Birobidzhan Museum did not tell me any of this; rather, the exhibit informs the visitor that “Iosif Bumagin repeated the feat of Alexander Matrosov,” and for this an entire neighborhood of Birobidzhan is named after him. That is the only local color in the war room, which, oddly, does not even make any mention of the Japanese front, which was virtually a stone’s throw from here.

The third and final room has the most difficult job. Whoever put together the first display cases clearly could not make up his mind whether they were devoted to the Yiddish literature and culture of Birobidzhan or to the purges of the late 1940s. As a result, both stories are mangled, a collection of stand-alone pictures—David Bergelson, Lyubov Vasserman, the Jewish theater, a copy of another local writer’s book—with brief captions that do not add up to stories:

“D. R. Bergelson. The first leader of a writing group in Birobidzhan in the 1930s. Arrested, executed in 1952.”
“Poet I. B. Keller. Arrested in 1948. While incarcerated, wrote and concealed 80 poems. Released in 1956.”

“I visited the museum on a day in early October, when the sun outside was still bright enough to let me walk around wearing a light coat but it was already brutally cold in this unheated building, where I made a detailed inventory of the displays. I left the building with an uneasy feeling, the sense of something missing. Something big. Something essential. Something catastrophic.

It took me another few hours to realize that I had just spent an entire day at a Jewish museum that made no mention of the Holocaust. It was as if the Jews of the shtetlach from that first display case had just vanished, disappeared into history for no apparent reason. It was as though there had been no reason for the new influx of Jews after the war. It was as though history, and Birobidzhan itself, had just happened.”

I think that’s the choicest passage of the book that explains why Masha ended up this way, turning tricks for Uncle Sam while ensuring her genetic lineage ends. Who knows if she inherited it from her parents before she left the USSR or if this is only the after effects of a journalist career at Vanity Fair. There cannot be a Jewish legacy to Gessen without having the Holocaust as its central defining characteristic, that which has existed before is mockable, beneath contempt even, it has nothing to do with being Jewish, but the liquidation of the Shtetlach in the global upheaval defines what it means to be Jewish because you get to be a Survivor , you get to be a living testament to how you, personally, triumphed over fascism, and as a 3rd generation victim you are dead set against a new Holocaust of gays by Putler.

Lastly, I wanted to point this out.

“Dubnow and Ahad Ha-Am conducted their argument in Russian, through published essays they called letters. Dubnow considered the Jews to be a nation. (My Soviet documents specified that, regardless of my citizenship, my “nationality” was Jewish.) In fact, he wrote that the Jews were, from an evolutionary perspective, the most advanced of nations. They had no trappings of a nation—only the essence of one.
When a people loses not only its political independence but also its land, when the storm of history uproots it and removes it far from its natural homeland and it becomes dispersed and scattered in alien lands, and in addition loses its unifying language; if, despite the fact that the external national bonds have been destroyed, such a nation still maintains itself for many years, creates an independent existence, reveals a stubborn determination to carry on its autonomous development—such a people has reached the highest stage of cultural-historical individuality and may be said to be indestructible, if only it cling forcefully to its national will. We have many examples in history of nations that have become dispersed among other nations. We find only one instance, however, of a people that has survived for thousands of years despite dispersion and loss of homeland. This unique people is the people of Israel.1

If Jewishness was a nationality, then one did not have to be religiously Jewish to remain a Jew. Converting to another religion, however, would be going a step too far because it would tear the person from the cultural fabric of his nation. “We aim only to negate the supremacy of religion, but not to eliminate it from the storehouse of national cultural treasures,” wrote Dubnow. He called Jews a “cultural-historical” kind of nation, and he stressed that “the religion of Judaism is one of the integral foundations of national culture.”

This is actually a very self serving interpretation of Dubnow, one that which, by no coincidence, she gets to remain a Jew despite being a atheist faggot so repulsive she probably would have inspired Dubnow to do terrorist work for the Black Hundreds. Dubnow wrote his history and political polemics in a age when people not quite as far gone as Gessen were unmaking the Shtetlach and the yeshivot system of education. Dubnow saw thousands of young Jews abandoning first the traditional ways of life in the Pale and joining the Bund, renouncing being Jewish altogether, or setting off to Zion, an endeavor he associated with Frankists and other heretics like the Hasidim. In sort Dubnow’s life is a series of desperately escalating cope posts as the traditional life of Eastern European Jewery, was collapsing around him. He did not like this, and frankly saw what a disaster this was going to be decades before Germans had even considered building tanks. He couldn’t embrace Zionism for a number of personal prejudices, and so his only other option for his preservation of pre Hasidic Ashkenaz rites and Shtetl culture sans Tsarist or Polish Pale laws was to recruit Bundists who failed, for one reason or another, to align themselves with the 3rd International.

This didn’t work for him, just like Bolshevism didn’t work for Evsektsia in the end, both left only a very small legacy of their decades of work. And yet, when you contrast this to the Gessen brand of Jewish “future” and what its likely “legacy” will be, those Synagogue museums and Holocaust free Kraevedcheskies will be beyond compare as achievements.

graveler Saturday 12 Sep 2020

Swastika Night

A 1937 dystopian novel about the world centuries after an Axis victory in WW2. Written by upper-crust English divorcee lesbian feminist Katherine Burdekin, under the pen name "Murray Constantine".

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My expectations going in were low. My primary interest was historiographic, as this novel is a clear antecedent to modern feminist science fiction (e.g. The Handmaid's Tale ). I've read quite a bit of old SF; what it usually lacks in literary quality it makes up in revealing the imagination of a mind from the past. In this case, before The War Against Hitler. Can I recommend it? Not unless you share my interest and have run out of other things to read, and I'll give a summary so you don't have to read it. But I don't regret it.

Swastika Night takes place 720 years After Hitler. The world is evenly divided between the empires of Germany and Japan, although the story takes place entirely in first Germany and later England. Women are reduced to barely-sentient reproduction devices at the bottom of a rigid caste system dominated by the uber-Nazi Teutonic Knights. Burdekin lays out the scenery memorably in the opening chapter:

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There are basically three characters, two of whom are mentioned in the above scene: the secretly enlightened Knight, von Hess; the dull Nazi/German (the terms are used interchangeably) farmboy Hermann; and the English transfer student pilgrim to Holy Germany, Alfred. The basic plot of the story is that the secretly enlightened Alfred travels to Germany and meets his old friend/lover Hermann. Then, the local ruling Knight von Hess -- in possession of perhaps the only pre-Hitler history in existence -- recognizes Alfred as a fellow nonbeliever in Hitlerism behind his eccentric-within-the-limits-of-a-Nazi-dystopia-Englishness and hands Alfred the book for safekeeping in occupied England, as von Hess himself lost all of his sons in an accident and is getting old.

The secret book reveals that while Hitler Himself presided over the establishment of the German Empire, it was actually only several generation later, under another guy whom I guess Hitler's victory laid the groundwork for, that the Reich decided to destroy all records of the past whatsoever, shave all womens' heads, and lock them into giant (village-sized) cages together where they could continue to produce sons to mass public acclaim. Now, however, the clock has wound down on both the Germans and the Japanese: women are too subconsciously demoralized to have daughters, and Burdekin hints that homosexuality is increasingly preferred anyway. As a result the population is starting to shrink, although this is a state secret. Alfred's task, by the end of the novel, is to nonviolently spread the word of the non-eternality of Hitlerdom. It's implied that this will ultimately be successful. The title itself is a reference to a conversation where Alfred speculates that the current regime is simply a night in between the previous day and a new, better tomorrow where women can be completely equal (I'm getting there).

Burdekin actually is quite good at implication and internal allusion, very useful when constructing a speculative future (for another example, the book seems to imply that Hitler is as good as his word and the Reich actually will last a thousand years...but no longer). My only formal objection to the book is that most of its actual content consists of dialogues conducted in the manner of an afternoon tea setting: the Knight invites Alfred to his office, or Alfred and his son sit in their secret hideout, and the characters engage in lengthy disquisitions and internal monologues about how Hitler wasn't really a seven-foot-tall ripped Nordic breatharian with blond hair flowing down over his huge shoulders as he personally destroyed the archfiends Lenin and Stalin from his Holy Aeroplane and never even saw a woman in his life, but a normal looking guy with a toothbrush moustache. It' s more than a little tedious. Fortunately, the author is quite economical; the book comes in at under 200 pages, generously spaced and margined.

It's always difficult to suss out how far something as hysterical, in every sense of the word, as Swastika Night 's uber-Nazi homodystopia (or its Reagan-era successor, Handmaiden's Tale) is "satire". As far as I can judge, Burdekin might have been exaggerating a bit for effect, but the novel is perfectly sincere. Swastika Night has been kept in print by a feminist press, even though women and feminism are only a background element -- even if a significant one -- in the novel itself. It's pointless to talk about this without at least giving the Wikipedia breakdown of Burdekin's biography : a bookish gentrywoman who married an Oxford man -- an Olympian back when that just meant a good collegiate athlete instead of some off-the-books human medical experiment -- had two children, and then got a divorce in the 1920s before living out her days in Cornwall with "a woman with whom she formed a lifelong relationship".

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The bizarre treatment of women in the novel's future, in which women clad in tight rags have their heads shaved under male supervision before being kept in gigantic caste-segregated cage-villages to be bred as the men see fit, resembling nothing so much as a certain BAP poast , certainly demands some explanation. It clearly shares a common origin with Atwood's later vision. My take: impotent fear of the apparently/comparatively limitless physical power of men, along with anxiety about being "reduced" to a machine for making babies, something that does appear to induce a sort of Cronenbergian body horror in a certain type of women. Again, see her biography. Sure, this hasn't actually happened yet, but it could happen any day! (It won't, because men like looking at attractive women; Burdekin tries to address this but can't come up with a convincing explanation beyond something like "men are jealous of the power womens' beauty gives them".)

Speaking of bizarre linear extrapolations, how about that Global One Thousand Year Reich? This is something that's interesting to me, that this high-strung Englishwoman got the impression that Hitler Will Take Over The World in the 1930s. In a moment of unintentional humor, von Hess reveals that there have been other empires before the eternal German Reich -- and the British were among them. But, he assures Alfred, while Empire is always bad the British were not themselves in the same league as Germany; you see, the British built a maritime empire while the Germans were a continental power. So while maybe the British empire wasn't so great it wasn't like they were Nazis . (Burdekin does not use this exact terminology but that is what gets said.)

The novel is pacifist before it is feminist: the Thousand Year Reich is presented as the natural result of German martial superiority, ipso facto the end state of martial prowess is women kept in caged villages for breeding while men chant nonsensical oaths to the manly creed of " pride, courage, violence, brutality, bloodshed, ruthlessness, and all other soldierly and heroic virtues " in giant swastika-shaped chapels. Violent resistance is impossible.

There is not even a hint of homosexual behavior beyond certain male characters sort of hanging out with each other a lot. I don't know whether this is Burdekin's Edwardian personal sensibility, contemporary publishing standards, or a projection of lesbian relationships.

Again: this is all of some interest. It's an interesting sample of pre-WW2 SF and of no small importance to feminist SF literature, for whatever that's worth.

I want to end with something else. There's actually another well-known science fiction portrayal of the Thousand Year German Reich, senescent in the eighth century After Hitler: Legend of the Galactic Heroes . And despite being an animu space opera, it's much more even-handed and believable in what such an organization would actually be like than the bluestocking fantasia presented in Swastika Night. And it's almost as meme-worthy.

RedHand Sunday 13 Sep 2020

Prudish frumps and saturnine intellectuals dream up these sexual nightmare realms because they've quite literally forgotten that sex exists as part of a recurring, ultimately cosmic, process of regeneration. Presumably they feel detached from the body or frightened in such a way that they view physical nature, the world, the ordered universe itself as some kind of imposition on the pure and sensual world of the mind. This actually reminds me of certain types of non-binary people, I don't understand how it is possible for an organism to be something other than what it is. If a woman, that is an adult with female sex organs, "identifies" as non-binary she is likely telling you some interesting things, namely that she wishes to remain a child and that she's fundamentally sort of detached from nature in various ways. The same goes for genteel prudes like Burdekin who seems to think the human inherent-purpose is a sort of pre-adult satiety and things like childbirth, sex, politics, war etc are employed on them, through conspiracy or other means, by men like HITLER.

Speaking of which, Beyond Evil and Tyranny by R.H.S Stolfi is a book Thomas was promoting here earlier. I would like to second that, it's a great vaccine for the aforementioned strain of mind-virus.

humanaffairs Friday 2 Oct 2020

I recently read, and highly recommend, the book Trade Wars are Class Wars by Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis. The book's theoretical framework does not pretend to be original, the authors are openly indebted to turn-of-the-century economist J.A. Hobson. Unfortunately, Hobson has mostly been forgotten, probably due to his anti-Semitic proclivities. Klein and Pettis believe the same phenomenon Hobson saw behind the British empire lies behind modern trade wars and the broader crisis of the global economy. Hobson believed the British colonies were in essence shopping malls in which British industrialists could sell their goods and services, which could not possibly all be consumed by the poor British working class.

Sensibly, after an opening assault on Ricardo-ian (mainstream) trade theory, Klein and Pettis build their analysis upon a balance sheet/accounting foundation rather than standard economic theory. A few main points come together to build the main thesis:

Give a rich man a dollar and he will probably save it. Give a poor man a dollar and he will probably spend it. Perhaps the latter man must spend what he earns to eat because he is poor, or perhaps he is poor because he chooses to spend and not save. The causality doesn't matter; income inequality and the savings rate are directly correlated.
Savings equals investment; this is a matter of accounting identity. However, on the global level greater savings do not equal greater investment. If everyone saves, nobody is consuming and the sum of all economic activity is 0.
A high savings rate creates an export driven economy. Every dollar saved is a dollar not spent on domestic consumption, and thus domestic production exceeds domestic demand, sending goods and services overseas.
A country can pursue growth by two basic means. The first, mentioned above, is to increase savings and thus domestic production, which generally leads to a trade surplus. The second is to increase wages and thus domestic consumption, which generally leads to a trade deficit.
Large real good and service outflows lead to large financial inflows, and vice versa.
Capital movement is driven as much by risk avoidance, reserve accumulation, liquidity preference, and tax sheltering as by seeking the highest return.

Thus the picture begins to fall into place. In Europe, particularly Germany, increased inequality has led to higher savings, creating trade surpluses. In China, policy targeted toward achieving incredible savings rates and keeping the Yuan low vs the dollar has produced enormous surpluses. The United States, with its incredibly open economy, soaks up these exports. Chinese and European elites use America (and the UK) as a shopping mall, and American elites are happy to watch the money flow into safe American financial assets. The dollar goes up and reinforces the model. Meanwhile, the regular people of China and Europe suffer under vastly inequitable savings oriented policy, and the American people, under the dollar system, see the same wage suppression without reaping the benefits of savings-led growth. There has been a global savings glut for the last few decades; too much money sloshing around chasing too few good investments. This had had mildly annoying results, like investment from Europe flooding into an American housing bubble.

Ultimately this model is unsustainable, as the low wage-high savings model ultimately constrains consumption and racks up debt. What should America do? Tariffs and subsides will do little to impede the global capital flows and corresponding trade imbalances. Ultimately the authors believe that in the long run America cannot solve the issues without China and Europe to changing their parasitical ways/ a change in the dollar system, but that CTRL-P'ing industrial capacity and infrastructure rebuilding can help. Of course, the elites of all countries oppose all these measures.

If one were too nitpick, the absence of a discussion of immigration is a glaring hole and the overall view is possibly a bit too demand-focused. Despite that, all in all this was a very good read.

RedHand Friday 2 Oct 2020

HITLER'S GENERALS - Corelli Barnett

LOST VICTORIES - Erich von Manstein

Jargon Monday 4 Jan 2021 at 5:42 PM

Nancy Beck Young's Wright Patman: Populism, Liberalism and the American Dream

humanaffairs Irkutyanin
deagull Dogeinist
chairman

Note: This book is now extremely rare and goes on Amazon for around $900. A good Samaritan put it up on LibGen where it's free to read.

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=505F144B4900D9AA76A44C1DEB301858

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Reading the Acknowledgements section of Nancy Beck Young's biography of Wright Patman, I felt a knot form in my stomach. As Young lists through the people and institutions that gave her financial and archival support for this work, she lists also the intellectual support, particularly in the areas of editing and criticism, from the professional historians: Kathryn Lang, Keith Gregory, Teddy Diggs, Freddie Goff, Bonny McLaughlin, Rich Hendel, Bruce Schulman, Jeff Broadwater, and so on and so forth - the professional Southern History Contextualizers. I understand full well that most intellectual works dealing with recorded history, especially ones such as these, are collaborative efforts, but even so I felt a sense of looming dread at what the Professionals were going to do with the legacy of Wright Patman. To those for whom this dread seems a bit confusing - there is a tendency among professional historians, particularly when dealing with the South, to treat certain types of figures with a Yankee-ish condescension, to conscript them into their own causes when it is expedient, and to relegate them to obsolescence, or apologize for their lack of good sense, when those figures become inconvenient.

Wright Patman was a Texarkana native who served as Texas Congressman, as a Democrat, from 1929-1976. That's 47 years of service, in which time he also served as Chairman of the Small Business Committee from 1949-1953 and Chairman of the Currency and Banking Committee from 1963-1975. Patman was raised in the thick of Texas agrarian populism, and lived and died as a warrior for that general social cause, which is known today as Producerism. To briefly summarize what that means, producerism means supporting those that produce against those that distribute, i.e. farmers against middlemen and bankers, it means supporting places deprived of capital versus those places swimming in capital, i.e. rural areas versus urban areas, and it means supporting little enterprise (even banks!) against bigger ones, i.e. big versus small. In short, Producerism means trying to reverse the flow of what Market Forces invariably want to do when left to their own devices: commodify, liquidate, rationalize, consolidate. It seeks to create a society in which the number of people living as self-sufficient master craftsmen and proprietors is the greatest, in which the personal autonomy of the worker and small-holder is secured against the forces of bigness. To onlooking critics then, Wright Patman's political decisions may sometimes have seemed at odds with his populist bona fides but it would only appear that way to someone who didn't understand economics and the American peoples' interests as perfectly as he did. This issue becomes more and more a point of contention as the biography proceeds into the future, where, it is claimed, personal autonomy in economies dominated by big business is a non-issue.

Nancy Young lays out her retelling of Patman's life in accordance with his great political battles in Washington, listed sequentially thus: (1) his come-up from Texarkana and his leading advocacy on the issue of the Bonus Army and Depression-era Monetary Reform, (2) his fight against the Chain Stores and his advocacy for Small Business Interests in the Defense Planning of WWII, (3) the fight against the Banks and Tight-Money Policy under Eisenhower, (4) his appointment to Chairman of the Currency and Banking Committee and his confrontation with the Tax-Exempt Foundations, and lastly (5) Patman in the Era of Nixon Politics. We start from the beginning.

Patman came up out of Texas Democratic politics in somewhat anomalous fashion. Although he remained committed to segregation politics - he was, first and foremost, a representative of his constituency's interests - his first real fight in politics was against the Ku Klux Klan. The reason for his opposition to the KKK was that he believed a secret reactionary core of political power, somewhat akin to Freemasonry or, for a more relevant example, the Elk's Club. As a true Jeffersonian Democrat, Patman abhorred the idea of secret political power, especially that which was generally opposed to development. His fights earned him enemies with the KKK but they earned him the respect of his district of Texarkana and the friendship of influential Texas democrat Sam Rayburn, who would be a lifelong ally of his. Patman beat Eugene Black in the 1928 race for his Texarkana district for Congressman and in his victory he conscripted some of the old Populist people I mentioned in the review of Goodwyn's Democratic Promise . Jim "Cyclone" Davis was one such Texas democrat and old veteran of the Farmer's Alliance - the farmer's cooperative union that launched the Populist movement of the 1890s based on the critique of the country's money system - who helped Patman steady his wings for this race and helped him get enmeshed in the networks that had still been maintained from the crest of the Populist wave. His opponent, Eugene Black, had made the mistake of down-talking farmer's concerns and, in doing so, essentially gave over the race to him.

When Patman first arrived in Washington, he did not get the tap to sit on the committee he most wanted, the Currency and Banking committee, but he did get the tap for the War Claims committee, which would ultimately serve as a springboard for his highest priority anyways: monetary reform. In 1929, but long before the Stock Market Crash which brought in the Great Depression, a group of disgruntled WWI veterans began to coalesce around the issue of the payments they were owed for their wartime service. When they returned from Europe, they received only a $60 severance "bonus", and in 1924, Congress passed a bill providing for an adjusted compensation that would be payable in 1945. This was an insult to the soldiers who felt they had fought a nonsense-war and come back home only to be rewarded with a pittance and a promise of something (maybe) two decades in the future. Patman took charge of this issue and sought to reform the Compensation Act of 1924 for an immediate payment for veterans. Critics of the soldiers demands started to call the early compensation a "bonus payment" and from then on, the name of the "Bonus Army" stuck.

One of Patman's many virtues was his work ethic and, in his advocacy and organization for the legislative package he intended to put through, he put together his own leaflets and mailed them out to veterans via the American Legions and lobbied the National American Legion Convention. When this strategy started falter due to string-pulling from then-Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon, he reached out to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the Disabled American Veterans for further support. Andrew Mellon was a Pittsburgh steel-baron and stalwart reactionary; he wouldn't tolerate the idea of a new Bonus Army package which, he rightly suspected, would be the narrow end of the wedge for subsequent attempts at reforming the country's money system. Mellon and Patman would become nemeses around this issue, Mellon representing the banker's orthodox view and Patman the populist heterodox view. Patman would be distracted by a number of other issues after kicking the Bonus Army issue into gear and his efforts, alongside the efforts of the disgruntled veterans and other currency-activists, would not come to fruition until 1936, when Congress passed an Adjusted Compensation Payment Act in 1936, overriding Roosevelt's veto, and affording an immediate payout for veterans. The Bonus Army issue would become a national drama in the meantime. The Bonus Army soldiers marched on Washington D.C. in 1932 and President Hoover called in the Army to disperse the veteran army with lethal force. The affair was seen as a national disgrace and is thought by many to have significantly contributed to Hoover's loss to Roosevelt in the same year.

The march was occurring at the same time as a vote on the bill that Patman had helped to draft. The bill had been significantly watered down since the time that Patman had started to help draft it and then left to go back to Texarkana and work on local issues. He wanted it to provide for an issue of debt-free currency directly from the Treasury, but this was seen as inflationary by new-comers. The bill had been accumulating popularity and attracted both Democrats and Republicans as a vehicle for their own electoral popularity but they did not share Patman's understanding of the country's monetary ills (read: general lack of currency). In this section of the book, Young is more sympathetic to Patman's greenbacker politics and refrains from using critical language, for the most part, when discussing his monetary proposals. One might speculate that this is because it is now acknowledged by even the staunchest free-marketeers that the cause of the Great Depression was a lack of money. That is to say, there is little social or intellectual cost in supposing that Wright Patman may have been right in 1932 to support an injection of money, even if it was debt-free (this is considered bad because it bypasses the democratic and multilateral process of money creation which is made more transparent and stable by the inclusion of the primary dealer banks).

In the meantime, Patman used the Bonus Bill as a platform from which to attack Andrew Mellon. He made a motion to impeach the Secretary of Treasury on the basis of high crimes and misdemeanors, identifying the Secretary as overseeing tax refunds of companies he owned or controlled, owning bank stock while serving as an ex oficio chair of the Federal Reserve, and illegally trading with the Soviet Union in his capacity as board-member of the Aluminum Company of America. Patman had his eye on Mellon and had not forgotten his statement regarding what ought to be done in response to the crash:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

At the same time he advocated market discipline for Americans, this arch-reactionary baron of America's financial machinery was illegally shipping aluminum to the Red Russia. Though the impeachment proceedings were laughed down, Mellon resigned from his position in their wake, whereafter he was reappointed as Ambassador to the United Kingdom. This is an all-too-easily glossed-over segment of American history: the fact that so many dogmatically free-market American industry-captains were, simultaneous to their denunciations of the moral rot of socialism in the US, actively themselves building Communism in the East.

Following the Hoover's defeat and Roosevelt's victory, whereby Mellon stepped down and Henry Morgenthau stepped up to the Treasury position, Patman started building coalitions. He gained the support of various money-populists throughout the country: James Curley the Irish Boston mayor, who threatened to rip up the plumbing in front of the banks' downtown offices if they didn't help to circulate credit in the city, Jacob Coxey the veteran populist who led a mass march on D.C. in 1894 to protest the currency shortage, and Father Coughlin the anti-bank radio-priest of Detroit. In 1934, Patman published his Bankerteering, Bonuseering, and Melloneering as an attempt to explain the way the money-system worked and its myriad abuses. The refined version of Patman's Bonus Army bill, with all his new populist friends who had sprung up out of the Depression's discontent, made it to Congress in May of 1935 and even passed a vote in the Senate, but was vetoed by President Roosevelt. In early May, Roosevelt confided to his right-hand man Morgenthau, regarding the bill: "It is going to be vetoed. That is number one. It is going to be vetoed as strongly as I can veto it. And number three, I hope with all my heart that the veto will be sustained." Morgenthau would shortly afterwards comment in a correspondence: "The president's gone right out on the end of the limb on this bonus... And I'm going with him... And as far as I can find, I'm the only member of the Cabinet that gives a God damn what he's doing." The two were dead-set against the Bonus Bill which would provide for the injection of debt-free currency into the economy as a payout to the veterans. Kentucky Democrat Vinson organized a redrafting of the bill such that the provisions which were seen by many as 'radical' and 'inflationary' were taken out and it would simply be a payment to the veterans from the government's budget as it was. The now-bowdlerized Bonus Bill passed through a second time with enough votes to beat the veto. Strangely, Patman's takeaway from this episode was optimistic, both in his perspective on Roosevelt and on the co-authors of the bill who defanged it post-veto. It was part of Patman's unflappably optimistic character to see every political episode, whether victory, minor victory or defeat, as a learning opportunity for the American people in their struggle against the banks. He would even turn down further collaboration with Father Coughlin due to the latter's denunciation of Roosevelt as a 'liar' and 'betrayer'. Coughlin was right, but despite Roosevelt's betrayal of Patman's bill, Patman remained a loyal support of the President and the New Deal. Perhaps he thought he could one day influence the President to a greater understanding of the issue one day or, perhaps more realistically, he knew that his only chance for pushing through producerist reform was within the broad New Deal coalition under Roosevelt's aegis. Patman, despite the betrayal, remained a New Dealer and supporter of Roosevelt, and would even ape Rooseveltian political language later on, giving speeches warning about the imminent danger of a Fascist takeover in America. Young concludes this section by noting that his struggles in the 1930s, which included the Bonus Bill but also a subsequent piece of legislation aiming to increase governmental control over the Federal Reserve System, gained him a reputation as a fighter and a hard-worker, but also as a loner who was incapable of passing his own legislation and accuses him of being unable to make compromises with others.

The next segment of Patman's career is concerned with his defense and advocacy of small business, particularly against the rise of chain stores and in the national defense planning budgets. This was, much like the previous one, a difficult time in his story; it gave him legitimacy in the New Deal coalition as a dogged warrior for the interests of the small against the big, but it also further alienated him as the passion and aggression of his writings, orations, and maneuvers discomforted neutral observers ("Dude stop fighting the banks, you're scaring the hoes...") and irritated those whose interests he threatened.

During this period (roughly the second half of the 1930s until the end of the Second World War), Patman's legislative activities included lobbying on behalf of Texas banks' rights to the deposits and credit-markets of Texas business, fighting the approach of the Chain Store system which he correctly anticipated would ruin the social fabric of rural and suburban America, and securing Defense Funds for the development of industry and small business in Texas. One of his victories in this period, while it did not stem the tide of the Chain Store, was the Robinson-Patman Act, which prevented price discrimination among retailers. This was meant to give small retailers a chance against larger ones which were vertically integrated into a corporate structure of importing, warehousing, refining, etc. These vertically integrated corporate structures could deal to themselves on a preferential basis and thus create private markets-within-markets, which local retailers had no access to. The Robinson-Patman Act was an attempt to get the retail market to behave in the way that economic theory tells us it does: with a normal market price for every good.

To his credit, Wright Patman also broadcasted a radio show criticizing the prospect of American entry into the War in Europe. Although, when Pearl Harbor did happen, and America did enter, he supported the enterprise like a good New Dealer. This flip to supporting the war gives insight on Patman's character and priorities: he was first-and-foremost a representative of his constituency's interests, meaning the interests of the working people of Texarkana, and if sticking his neck out for the Germans meant losing clout within the New Deal coalition, then he would not do it. Patman's objection to American overseas-adventurism was, in the first place, based on the populist understanding that America's foreign policy establishment and its economic royalty were one in the same. It was not based, as can be speculated in other cases, on Teutonophile tendencies. Thus, when the War began on the Commander-in-Chief's say-so, the pragmatic choice was obvious, if painful. Patman thought that the war and its mobilization of national resources could represent an opportunity for development in rural areas. He fought to create a Smaller War Plants Corporation (SWPC), which was meant to allocate credit to small industrial enterprises in underdeveloped areas. And then when it was created, he had to fight to get it to do its job because it had been staffed with banker's trying to scuttle its mission. The SWPC's role was to allocate credit to fledgling industrial enterprise that it wouldn't otherwise get in normal credit conditions; this would help both small business (for obvious reasons) and the state in its wartime effort (for the reason that it could build more nimble, more robust supply chains for things that could be supplied by small-scale producers). The losers in this case would have been the banks because the SWPC-allocated credit would wreck the bargaining power in the loan-capital markets. The thirst for capital would be slaked and banks would no longer have industry over a barrel.

In addition to his work for the SWPC, which was only semi-successful due to the power struggle that ensued over credit allocation, he successfully lobbied for the direct allocation of capital from the federal government to a small steel concern in Texarkana called Lone Star Steel. The infusion and following contracts were small but big enough to get the thing up and running. Patman's lobbying on behalf of Lone Star Steel were not accompanied by pro-labor or pro-farmer provisions; instead, it was simply a mission to get the capital to develop the Texarkana and raise the general level of demand for labor and inputs, thus lifting all tides. Evidently this was confusing for Nancy Young, who commented on Patman's lobbying efforts to the effect that this was somehow complicating or even contradictory to his record and integrity as a populist or even as a liberal. She commented that Patman's program was somewhat confused, but really it's probably closer to the truth that Young is herself confused. Patman did not hate private enterprise, he simply loved fruitful, working people and hated whatever he saw to be an agent of exploitation or deprivation over their heads. Lobbying for investment and contracts for a steel mill with no unionized labor was in no way contradictory to Patman's philosophy as a populist because to him it was obvious that economic development was a net positive for the region, and would tilt the labor market in the region in favor of labor - which it did, as Young's record of complaining Northeast Texan businessmen can attest to.

We come to some of my complaints with Nancy Young. In terms of her retelling of Wright Patman's career I have no complaints, though this might be simply because there's no other Patman biography with which to compare it, as far as I know. In terms of her commentary on Patman's ideology, she is often chiseling at him with backhanded compliments, apologies for his ignorance on racial questions, and a mixture of condescension and motherly, loving pity for his anachronistic Producerist stance. For one example, she says that Patman's record as a liberal is flawed because his perfectly economically progressive (her words) record is marred by his relatively racially reactionary record. She says on more than one occasion that his complacency with the mores of his place and time did not allow him to see how his economic views were contradicted by his racial views, but then stops without further explanation. It does not appear to enter into her consideration that maybe Wright Patman was a self-possessed intelligent person who did not agree with the politics of integration and civil rights. That would be impossible because someone as principled and intelligent as Wright Patman could not possibly in his good mind be of that opinion. Rather than keeping him as a pure Populist, Nancy Young claims him as a Liberal but then chides him as a reactionary imperfect one.

For another example, to return to the previous topic, she notes the case of the Lone Star Steel Mill. It should be easily comprehensible to anyone with a full understanding of Patman's economic perspective as to why he would lobby for the federal government's capital to be invested in developing the local Texarkana economy, and yet Young sees some mystifying contradiction here between Patman's supposed hatred of big business and his lobbying for petty steel bosses. But there is quite obviously no contradiction whatsoever. Patman is for the Texarkana farmer against the Texarkana bank, for the Texarkana steel mill against the Texarkana bank, but for the Texarkana bank against the Texas bank, and even for the Texas bank against the New York City bank. Get it? A consistent application of principles along multiple axes: the worker/boss axis, the producer/distributor axis, the local/national axis, and the small/big axis, supporting the former of these pairings in every case. Always against the big New York City banks, no matter what.

Nancy Young's attempt to shove him awkwardly into her own basket, which would grant her (and Liberalism) both the power to take credit for his great successes and chastise him for his transgressions, rather than letting him slip flush into the Populist-shaped slot, shows that something here is at work underneath the hood. Liberalism is working quietly but diligently to fold the Populist legacy under the aegis of the New Deal and then, when it's newly situated, deal with it once and for all. This is how history gets erased in Open Societies: by using word tricks and the pitying downward-facing love of the executioner.

This review is mostly going to skip over the Eisenhower Era of Patman's career because, to be frank, it's not as exciting as the other parts, but for a quick recap: Patman used his position on the Currency and Banking committee to criticize the Federal Reserve and the concerned banks for collectively keeping interest rates too high, unsuccessfully proposed legislation that would support local banks against State and National banks, and further polarized the Democratic party around him. Some people grew to such a state of irritation with his constant meddling that they would vote 'No' as soon as they heard the name 'Patman', Democrats included.

The next section, which deals with Patman's fights against the Tax-Exempt Foundations opens with perhaps the only substantive criticism of Patman's Populism as something 'anachronistic'. It is cogent so I'll just post it in full:

"The events of the 1960s helped reshape the concept of liberalism in thought, in social exchange, and in practical political application. The result in the United States was a mixture of New Deal economic liberalism, postwar anticommunism, and the newest component of the American liberal tradition: a consciousness of race and gender discrimination. Wright Patman's career provides an interesting lens for examining the internal stresses at work in this decade. Although he occasionally recognized the civil rights demands of minorities and women, he never re-created the parameters of his economic liberalism and his populism to account for these constituencies. His vociferous rhetoric of protest made Patman a foil for the other important ideological development of the decade: the reemergence of conservatism as a political and social force. Social conservatives, however, co-opted Patman's emphasis on the primacy of local control. Whereas Patman had stressed the need for local economic control in order to ensure expanded opportunities for the disadvantaged, conservatives used arguments for local control to fend off nationally mandated civil rights reforms. These dual pressures - an expansive liberalism on one side and a developing conservatism on the other - made Patman appear even more anachronistic to his contemporaries and to media observers"

In case that isn't entirely clear, let me translate: the 1960s were a decade in which the Rockefeller-Banker-CIA spooks were trying to subject the population to their program of internal social engineering, which required that the federal government be able to stick its fingers into the workings of state politics (for non-Americans, 'State' here means the sub-state like 'Michigan' or 'Louisiana'). Wright Patman's political program also sought for the federal government to stick its fingers into state politics but for entirely different purposes. Patman found himself at odds with his traditionally-minded working-class constituency, who were now starting to seek protection from the social engineering program in the arms of the States' Rights conservatives. Thus he was placed by default in an awkward position, where his historically bread-and-butter people were (figuratively speaking) afraid to reach out for his powerful, tender, Populist mitts and risk getting their arms bitten by the venomous snake of federally-encroaching social engineering. It is ironic then that, after so succinctly grasping the nasty contradictory situation into which Patman was placed by circumstance, and after assembling some great information in this section, that Nancy Young cannot quite piece together why the 1960s were the decade in which Patman decided to wheel his guns toward the Foundations.

To give some context for this period, Patman was finally given the position of Chairman of the Currency and Banking Committee in 1963, which was his great ambition when he entered into politics. He had been serving on this crucial committee for some time already. In fact he authored a report on the country's monetary and financial situation under the Eisenhower administration which was so well-researched that it gained him the admiration and lifelong friendship of John K. Galbraith. But now he was to sit at the top of the pyramid of this committee and finally have the kind of power, or so he believed, to push for serious monetary reform.

Furthermore, his good friend Lyndon B. Johnson became vice-president in the Kennedy administration and then, rather infamously, became POTUS after his untimely death. As this section of the book reveals, Johnson and Patman, both being two Texas democrats were on good terms with each other and even had very similar sympathies. This friendship with Johnson allowed Patman to push and poke around in areas which he otherwise might not have been allowed to, so irritating was it to the powers that be. On the other hand, Johnson's worldview was so different to Patman's, that their friendship was not nearly as politically expedient as Patman expected it to be. Patman thought in terms of popular power vs. bank power, he thought in terms of fighting for principle and building the power to fight for principle. Johnson thought in terms of what the greatest short-term good he could accomplish with the political capital that was currently available. Patman was a principled warrior and Johnson, on the other hand, while still a peoples' democrat like Patman, was a pragmatist and a spender, rather than accumulator, of political power. This fundamental difference between them did not sour their friendship, but it did place pressures on Johnson as POTUS that made him a friend to Patman in an increasingly personal sense, to the detriment of political friendship. One might say that it is a tragic irony that Johnson's politics, which we might call Demand-Side Socialism (welfare payments, education spending, healthcare spending, etc.), would ultimately dwarf and erase Patman's politics, which we might call Supply-Side Socialism (monetary reform, credit allocation and stimulus to production, excision of economic rents, etc.) -- politically speaking, it is much much easier to put legislation through that taxes business, but lets them be, and then does something with that revenue, than it is to try and reverse the sway of market forces by excising rents, diffusing ownership, etc. -- , while Patman's personal friendship and tutelage were so helpful in building Johnson's career. Of course, to the professional historians like Young, the victory of Demand-Side Socialism (or 'Leftism') over Supply-Side Socialism (or 'Populism', 'Producerism', etc.), is not indicative of political battles won and lost so much as it is of the smoothly neutral unfolding of the Liberal process known as 'History', and Patman's stubborn refusal to lay down his banners indicates a quaint country-stubbornness rather than a heroic integrity. That being said, as lifelong friends, Patman and Johnson always kept on good terms and exchanged letters often. Patman had a wonderful personal quality of being able to sustain differences with others while keeping the friendship in full life.

From the beginning of the 1960s, and from his positions on the Small Business Committee and Ways and Means Committee, Patman launched an attack on the Tax-Exempt Foundations, which he saw as inimical to the American way of life, a way for a circle of oligarchical families to put themselves above the law and pave the way for the consolidation of industrial and financial control within the domain of these foundations. The thing that first aroused Patman's ire was John D. Rockefeller III's statement to the Ways and Means Committee to the effect that "since I am not required to pay any income tax, I will do so anyways at a rate between 5 and 10 percent." This statement galled Patman, although it apparently hardly galled anyone else, as it indicated that J.D. Rockefeller III thought that his tax payments were a matter of noblesse oblige and a ceremonial formality, rather than the legal duty of any citizen of the United States. Of course, Rockefeller was justified in thinking so, but Patman's point had merit in that he wished to make the United States a genuinely democratic country, not one in which the authority of the State is merely a layer separating the populace from the oligarchy. Patman's objection to the Tax-Exempt Foundations was categorical, which confused his peers who evidently could not find the moral problem with creating a caste of wealthy large-holders above the law.

Patman's inquiries, launched from the Small Business committee, charged with moral fervor, started to approach the Third Rail of politics, after which point his tack was forced to change. Young is oddly silent in this, perhaps the most significant passage of the entire work, which we quote directly below:

"Pleased that his inquiries had caused trouble for some of what he believed were the more egregious foundation offenders, Patman kept his eye on the main goal - a legislative reform package. Yet during the Johnson presidency, Patman had great difficulty getting his foundation message out to the public. After Johnson left office, reports surfaced that the president had pressured his Texas ally to tone down his foundation rhetoric. In early hearings, Patman publicized that connections among certain foundations, the IRS, and the CIA . On August 31, 1964, Patman told the few individuals assembled at the subcommittee hearing that the J.M. Kaplan Fund distributed money to CIA operatives throughout the world. Although the upper echelons of the foundation community and government officials already knew of the relationship, Patman made his disclosure because neither the IRS nor the CIA would answer his questions about foundations. "I feel I have been trifled with," he complained to the press. Patman and Olsher unearthed a scheme in which the CIA and the IRS used foundations to fund overseas exercises that usually involved student organizations . The problem with the arrangement ensued because the IRS broke the laws pertaining to tax exemption when it cleared foundations for partisan activity, an endeavor that legally mandated the revocation of tax exemption. When the hearing adjourned, reporters greeted the assemblage, but no further mention of the CIA connection occurred for three years. Patman's disclosure led to several meetings with CIA and IRS officials, who cautioned silence on the matter. "

Recalling the earlier statement on the irony of Young's introduction regarding Patman, 1960s conservatism, social issues, and the foundations - here is the irony: she has not put together that Patman was indeed trying to confront those issues that were frightening his constituency. They were afraid of the social engineering programs that came from the federal government and associated channels and thus cleaved themselves to the States' Rights conservatives, but Patman was addressing the problem in the most direct way possible . Instead of the conservatives' tactical retreat from the Spook Leviathan, Patman was jabbing his finger right into the material heart of the issue, the Psyop State's warchest - the wealthy families' foundation-money that was the material base for the social engineering that went on in the post-War Liberal Era. Young can't pursue this angle because, as a professional historian, she is not permitted to get to the bottom of things, but to the discerning reader Patman's anti-Foundation crusade should be taken as a strong point in favor of the argument that not only was he not autistically and exclusively concerned with economic issues, but that he had a full understanding of the situation and was attempting to fight back against it in the most straightforward manner possible: by fucking with the money that was feeding the psyops. If one would rather contend that Patman just stumbled onto this issue coincidentally, at the same time that molested voters were fleeing New Deal liberalism to conservatism, he is welcome to do so. Patman commented to the left-leaning Ramparts magazine in March of 1967: "Disclosure of CIA activities on U.S. campuses threatens to cloud an even more invidious activity by some tax-exempt foundations. Although tax-exempt foundations appear to have been used as spy money conduits for a number of years, they have been used for a much longer time as tax-dodging conduits." The result of Patman's inquiries was a tax reform package that went through successfully, but which also contained such broad legal conditions that many of the foundations were ultimately able to escape from its stipulations, which Patman became completely aware of, saying "The laws of the past are no longer effective." His colleagues, however, only saw reason to celebrate; after all, they had successfully passed a tax reform bill. What was the problem?

Moving onto the last section of this review/summary, we find the Patman in the Era of Nixon Politics episode. Much of this section of the book is dedicated unpleasant topics, such as Patman's personal losses of loved ones, the accelerating effect they had on his aging (he was by now a grizzled old man), the backstabbings he suffered at the hands of junior congressmen on the Currency and Banking committee, more fights with the Federal Reserve on interest rates, and the fight he picked with Richard Nixon after the Watergate thing appeared.

This review is getting too long - in the late 1960s and early '70s Patman was outflanked on the Currency and Banking committee by young liberal democrats from the North who neither understood his gripe with the banks nor cared to learn about it. He had to step down as chairman in 1975 and died one year later. In his last years as chairman, however, he carried on his perennial fight on interest rates. In fact, Patman might well be understood as a structural ceiling on interest rates in mid-century American politics. So doggedly and unconditionally persistent was his fight for lower rates, regardless of the monetary or fiscal situation of the country at any given moment, that Patman acted like a structural barrier to policy, somewhat in the same way that economists often think of wages as sticky on the way downwards. When it came to interest rates, he had only one consideration: how it would affect his constituency, the small-holders and independent producers, who were separated from the unmolestedly low Discount Rate at the Fed by an ocean of middlemanning financial institutions. Whether you think Patman's constituency getting the rates he wanted for them would have been inflationary or not is up for debate, but his loyalty to his people and principles was impregnable.

That Patman and Nixon were, for a time, mortal enemies is just one of the sad facts of history. Lots of guys on our side of things have now learned to see the name 'Nixon' and read 'Betrayed Hero', and I can't disagree - I feel the same way. The facts however, are that Nixon ran a dirty campaign against Wright Patman's friend, democrat Jerry Voorhis, in California. Voorhis and Patman worked on legislation that successfully passed which would force Federal Reserve banks to pay back money to the treasury, money they accrued from the interest on holding bonds, and which they had been keeping in their own accounts as emergency reserves, representing a drain on the currency. Voorhis, like Patman, was a money-populist even if he didn't share the same Texan cultural mores. Patman fingered Nixon for a lover of dirty tricks and a spaniel to the bankers. And who could honestly blame him for that assessment? Nixon did receive campaign funds from Rockefeller people for his race against Voorhis, even if he never felt comfortable with them, and he was practically attached-by-the-hip with David Rockefeller's personal protege Henry Kissinger while in office, so it's hard to fault Patman for making the assessment he did. It wouldn't become clear until years of hindsight yielded sufficient insight to show that Nixon had been the victim of a CIA-DOD plot, his crime being that he was trying to wrest the levers of foreign policy away from oligarchy and restore them to the office of the executive.

Patman, on the other hand, did not see the Nixon presidency in terms of a lower-middle-class Californian trying to run a country with his hands on only roughly a quarter of the political machinery necessary to do so. The Watergate revelation, in conjunction with the Nixon-Voorhis race, suggested to him something else: rule by secrecy, something he abhorred. Patman was not naive, he knew that whatever system-papers and system-media were talking about was probably bunk, but he also saw opportunities for his brand of populist politics in the Nixon scandal. He thought he could turn the narrative into one about democratic control of the country versus secret power. Resultantly, he dove headfirst into the Watergate hearings. The fact that Patman had arrived at a politics so far-removed from the actual material stakes in order to try to build up power is indicative of where he was in his career: he had burned a lot of goodwill with his constant pushing and needed to do something rekindle the romance between himself and the DNC. But he was also an old man, who, along with his politics, had been fairly well left behind. In his stead he left Henry Gonzalez, another Texas democrat and money-populist, who would continue to grill Federal Reserve governors and push for audits. He also left Jim Wright, who would become embroiled in the S&L Scandal, although accounts of his culpability in this differ.

Young winds down her biography with a tone that is increasingly critical of Patman, and it proceeds along a few different lines. The first line of criticism is that Patman was somewhat racist and that he should have supported more civil rights and ethnic integration to get a better grade as a New Deal liberal. The second line is that his politics of localism and populism were contradictory because, as a New Deal liberal, he should never have advocated for any large business interests in Texas. The third line is that his legacy is largely one of obstinacy and divisiveness; that his failures were proof of his unwillingness to compromise (a bad thing). The fourth is that his politics were anachronistic and somewhat futile. There is an ambience running throughout this biography, a mixture of admiration for his big heart and optimism and condescension for his political struggles. All of this criticism is based on the author's understanding of (or maybe it's better to say "efforts to make") Patman as a New Deal liberal. If the author sought out to, instead of pardoning his legacy in the Liberal Historiography, but understand it on its own terms, then there would be no basis for these criticisms. The obstinate pushing on anachronistic issues, when relieved from the lens of Liberal ideology, becomes what it really is: a refusal to let the sacrifices of older Populists go in vain, a refusal to accept the final result of the banks' victory and their right to decide how capital is allocated. 'Divisiveness' is only a negative in the Liberal historical worldview, in which politics is one big kitchen where each faction can come to throw their own offerings into the stew which, when mixed gently together, becomes "Society". The Populists saw clearly that politics is always a fight, that the compromise of the weak with the powerful is the defeat of the former, and that the 'divisive', i.e. those that refuse to abandon their principles, are just the demonstrably trustworthy. Young would have preferred that Patman compromised on his principles, and then had a more successful political career. But that is only success in that it would have resulted in the passage of more legislation, with no regard for its content. So what exactly is the success there? What is success in general? The aggrandizement of the self in political history? Or the accomplishment of The Thing. For Patman it is obviously the latter. For that, he has earned my unconditional admiration and if he doesn't get full marks from the Historians as a liberal, I humbly give him A+ as Populist Statesman , for five decades of struggle with pinpoint accuracy and acuity against the money power. Going over financial data and writing reports, quibbling over interest rate differentials between the Northeast and the Southwest, and so on and so forth, may seem tedious but it really is just a fight for freedom.

What lessons can we learn from the incorruptible Wright Patman? We can learn both from his successes and his failures. From his successes? His life is one big proof that hard work, high character and optimism can bring success, even with the most controversial, unpalatable program. He showed that freedom is always a fight, that it takes constant vigilance and effort. The kind of political career that Patman had might not be possible any longer but then again maybe it is. After all, Ron Paul's district is geographically very close to Patman's and he had a long career too. But that's neither here nor there. Patman's life is a testament to the efficacy of virtue and struggle: always keeping your eye on the ball, fighting hard, staying optimistic. For us it is no different, we have to fight hard and work hard if we want to be free.

From his failures? Here I will join in with Young and make an accusation of anachronism: his aversion to secrecy. Patman came up in an era when the illusion of a public square still existed, when the Spectacle had not yet completely enveloped the masses, and when censorship and counter-intelligence mechanisms had not diffused down to the finest granularity in the midst of mass society, i.e. on each of our computers, phones, social media accounts, etc.. We don't have the advantage of those conditions and thus we can't adhere to his ideals of honorable struggle out in the open, with everything crystal clear. We have to be more like Nixon and maintain a higher degree of opacity and mediacy in how we act. Patman was a one-man show and rarely had allies around him, even if he had a lot of sympathizers. He was working politically in a time when political power was power. When you could write a report on interest rates and it might have the effect of pushing legislation in favor of small farmers. That is not the situation now. The power to pass legislation is downstream of higher powers. Patman tried to nationalize money in 1936 and got kind of close to winning. Try to nationalize money in 2021. It's a non-starter. The question for us then today is: from what position can we come to agree on ultimate goals and project influence and accumulate power in service of them, without inviting others to target us?

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