Double Eye

God Shot

Bonanza Coffee Heroes

Toytown speaks…

Other diamonds? Felix? Tommy? What say you?

Blue: please ask your Mom

Thus, the objective of this lesson is to explore how different people from different walks of life experienced TGD. This era was complex, dynamic, and curious; it was not just Depressing.

To this end, each of you will read 1 of these 4 documents and respond to the questions given

Print your reading responses, bring them to class, and be prepared to discuss the articles.

Group #1: Wall Street Stock Broker
Group #2: American Women
Group #3: White Americans
Group #4: African Americans

If stories of life during the Depression peaks your curiosity, here are some video documentaries that explore themes of life in the TGD:

The Civilian Conservation Corps

The Crash of 1929

Hoover Dam

Hurricane of ’38

Riding the Rails

Seabiscuit

Surviving the Dust Bowl

If you are really interested in life during TGD, my favorite book on the era, and one of my favorite oral histories, is Hard Times by my hometown hero Studs Terkel

The rise and fall of Bo is part of a much larger and potentially disruptive trend in China — the return of politics to the Chinese Communist Party.

We don’t much think of the party as a political organization these days. It is dominated by technocrats obsessed with economic and engineering challenges. These men — and they are almost all men — are comfortable talking about detailed economic and technical data, but they are not skilled politicians, adept at handling large crowds or palace intrigue. This apolitical system is a recent phenomenon and the outcome of a conscious decision by the founder of modern China, Deng Xiaoping.

When the Chinese communists took power in 1949, the party was dominated by charismatic revolutionaries and military leaders. Court politics, intrigue, ideological posturing and mass politics were pervasive in the new regime, and its leader, Mao Zedong, was a master politician. In 1957 he launched the “antirightist campaign,” which was followed by the Great Leap Forward, which was followed by the Cultural Revolution, all designed to divide and destroy his opponents and consolidate his power.

Deng was determined to end the high drama of Chinese political life and focus on economic development. He wanted to turn the party into a professional organization run by technocrats, mostly engineers. He required them to have been top students who subsequently showed skill in practical problem solving. He even changed the tone of party meetings, which had been devoted to long-winded ideological speeches, saying in 1980, “If you don’t have anything to say, save your breath … The only reason to hold meetings and to speak at them is to solve problems.”

The party was soon transformed. By 1985, the Central Committee was dominated by younger college graduates and the Politburo’s Standing Committee, the country’s ruling elite, were all engineers. That tradition of technocracy has persisted. A party whose history is tied to peasants, workers and soldiers is now the most elitist operation in the world. Its system of promotion favors engineers, economists and management experts over anyone with grassroots political skills. For two decades, China has been run like a company, not a country.

Eventually, politics had to re-emerge. China has reached a level of growth and development at which the big questions it faces are not technical engineering puzzles but deep political, philosophical ones.

Bo represented the revival of politics in at least two ways. In a system of colorless men, he was charismatic, conniving and political. He was comfortable in front of crowds, eager to push himself forward, and he rubbed against the grain of consensus decisionmaking. Money was, as in U.S. politics, the grease that smoothed Bo’s rise. But he also represented the “new left,” an ideological movement that emphasized social and cultural solidarity, the power of the state and other populist issues.

Bo’s ouster is the most significant purge in the party’s top ranks since Tiananmen Square. The party may hope that the People’s Republic, as it did after that earlier upheaval, can return to its efficient and steady technocratic path. But China has changed too much. And politics in China is xenophobic, populist, nationalist, messy and certainly unpredictable — like politics everywhere.

Mao’s China, 1949-1976

18 minutes

A refresher: After Communists took control of mainland China in 1949, Beijing adopted a pro-Soviet diplomacy in exchange for Soviet support, loans and technology, during which a lot of propaganda sprung out endorsing Sino-USSR friendship.

In every nation Wilson had come to see the same impulse: “the irresistible instinct of power to expand itself, of well-organized human aggregations to absorb or impose themselves on other groups.” The same “sub-rational reason” lay at the root of both the conquest “of the South by the North in the Civil War, of Germany by the allies.” With this degree of cynicism, one wonders how Wilson managed to find brilliance, humor, and even the sublime in so many Civil War writers.

As Wilson finished Patriotic Gore he was very discouraged by the Cold War, by nuclear testing, and U.S.-Soviet saber-rattling. In the summer of 1961 he unloaded on Alfred Kazin: “the U.S.A. is getting me down … I don’t see how you still manage to believe in American ideals and all that.” Wilson seems never to have gotten over his experience of 1918-19 in those French hospitals.

The alienation Wilson felt from what he called the “United States of Hiroshima” produced a belligerent, blasphemous screed against his country’s sense of history, and especially its foreign policy. Some of his historical judgments and moral equivalences can still seem disturbing today. But it is not merely a perverse diatribe full of prickly opinions; at times it is a weirdly brilliant exposition of “anti-war morality.”

But all of this was by design. John Marshall, the brilliant but unassuming chief justice, always intended to use Marbury to hand his cousin [REALLY?] and arch-foe Jefferson a narrow legal victory while dealing him a long-lasting political blow. By lecturing Jefferson about his legal duties, Marshall put the president in his place. (Ours is “a government of laws, and not of men.”) And by laying the foundation for judicial review, Marshall carved out a prominent new place for the court. Most important, Marshall did all of this without ordering Madison or Jefferson to actually do anything. No wonder historian Robert McCloskey called Marbury “a masterwork of indirection.”

Apply this approach to “Obamacare”?

This long form review offers some thoughtful nuggets. For instance:

“Wilson argued that the three great leaders of the modern “impulse to unification”— Lincoln, Bismarck, and Lenin—all became heroic but detested “dictators” for their respective causes. Each was “confident that he was acting out the purpose of a force infinitely greater than himself,” Wilson intoned. Bismarck believed in “God,” Lenin in “History,” and Lincoln in some kind of democratic combination of the two. All three, though, according to Wilson, were mere agents of the “power drive” that moved nations and history over and over into mass violence and conquest.”

“And this protection,” Lincoln declared “they shall have at once.”

This conversation seems like the stuff of legends. But I’ll probably try to keep the legend alive.
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Ulysses S. Grant’s surprising embrace of Jews during his presidency takes on new significance. Through his appointments and policies, Grant rejected calls for a “Christian nation,” and embraced Jews as insiders in America, part of “We the People.” During his administration, Jews achieved heightened status on the national scene. Judaism won recognition (at least from him) as a faith co-equal to Protestantism and Catholicism (”the [P]rotestant, the Catholic, and the Jew appointed days for universal prayer in my behalf,”

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In recent years, however, a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of Ulysses S. Grant has taken place. “Though much of the public and even some historians haven’t yet heard the news,” historian Sean Wilentz observed in the New York Times, “the vindication of Ulysses S. Grant is well under way. I expect that before too long Grant will be returned to the standing he deserves—not only as the military savior of the Union but as one of the great presidents of his era, and possibly one of the greatest in all American history.” A fresh look at Grant’s relationship with the Jewish community reinforces this view.

I really appreciate Goodheart’s analyses. For instance, he draws a parallel between slave owners who refused to give up their slaves to moderns who refuse to give up fossil fuels (abolitionists as modern day bike riders). He also unpacks the Sumter issue incisively. Really good interview performance too.

However, is Machiavelli’s lasting reputation as the philosopher-king of political manipulation really justified? This article re-examines Machiavelli’s work and legacy and comes to some surprising conclusions. It also suggests a number of different ways to interpret Machiavelli’s political ideas.

Vincent Barnett reveals that there is more to Machiavelli than his notorious reputation. (History Today)

Nicholas Vincent celebrates the founder of the Plantagenet dynasty.