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This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.

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Reviews

Doug Ireland: Review of Sheila Rowbotham's Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love
Daniel W. Crofts: Review of Harold Holzer's Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008)
Murray Polner: Review of Robert Justin Goldstein's American Blacklist: The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Loren Ghiglione's CBS's Don Hollenbeck: An Honest Reporter in the Age of McCarthyism (Columbia University Press, 2008)
Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of Michael Schwartz's War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008)

Doug Ireland: Review of Sheila Rowbotham's Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love

Source: Gay City News (11-26-08)

[Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.]

When Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) broke free of the stifling world of upper-class Victorian England into which he was born, his rejection of its cosseted, impossibly mannered life was total. In his time, he became the most famous apostle of a wide-ranging revolt against sexual hypocrisy and the straightjacket of class divisions in human interpersonal relations. And Carpenter's courageous contributions over a long life made him one of the most important precursors of gay liberation, one whose influence spanned countries and continents.

Carpenter and his working-class lover of 37 years, George Merrill, became one of history's most celebrated same-sex couples, on a par with Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais or with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Yet despite his well-known defense of homosexuality, Carpenter was one of the most beloved figures of British socialism, so much so that on his 80th birthday in 1924, 43 years before same-sex relations were legalized in the United Kingdom, the entire Cabinet of the first Labour Party government, led by Carpenter's old friend Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, signed a profuse tribute to him.

A poet, essayist, and philosopher, a pioneer environmentalist and feminist, the most generous of humanitarians, an advocate of alternative democratic lifestyles who eschewed the bourgeois accumulation of possessions, and a tireless and skilled propagandist for social change, Carpenter is primarily remembered today for his writings on homosexuality.

But it is one of the great merits of Sheila Rowbotham's superb new biography, the first in-depth account of his life and work, that she restores the remarkable Carpenter to his proper place as one of the most significant figures in the rise of the British cultural left and in the creation of the shifts in attitudes that made the election of the first Labour government possible.

When Carpenter was born, "sodomy" was still a capital crime technically subject to the death penalty, a sanction that was only changed to life imprisonment in 1861 when Carpenter was 17, and although aware from an early age of his intense attraction to his own sex he did not have his first sexual experience with a man until he was 20. His first love occurred while he was an increasingly radical and egalitarian university student at Cambridge, but it was fleeting, painful, and an apparent single carnal episode with the love object - Edward Beck, a somewhat younger student who later became a conservative Cambridge dean - was not repeated, because as Rowbotham writes, "the ambiguity of strong friendships in the 1870s blurred any explicit expression of sexual passion [and] the equivocal attitudes to homosexual desire in Cambridge... created a perplexing kind of freedom which had to be intimated within bounds which could never be clearly marked out."

After Beck broke off their brief romantic friendship, leaving a lasting wound, Carpenter visited Paris in search of male prostitutes in a country in which homosex was not illegal, but his sexual experiences there left him emotionally empty, unfulfilled, and unhappy.

Carpenter's sense of alienation from his sexual self only really began to dissipate when he read Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," for "Whitman's advocacy of an 'adhesive' democratic, manly comradeship was attractive to Carpenter because it provided a new homoerotic possibility, and at the same time touched a political nerve. Whitman's 'Democratic Vistas' (1871) presented 'adhesiveness' as the complement to individualism, a brotherhood in which all races fused as comrades."

Carpenter became a confirmed Whitmanite, but it was not until 1874 as he was about to graduate from Cambridge that Carpenter worked up the courage to write "a long letter" to Whitman. "Because you have... given me a ground for the love of men, I thank you continually in my heart," Carpenter wrote the bard, "and others thank you though they do not say so. For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature. Women are beautiful, but to some there is that which surpasses the love of women."

Whitman loved the letter, and there ensued a correspondence that would only end with Whitman's death.

Using a trip to America on behalf of his wealthy family's financial entanglements there as an excuse, Carpenter - who after a brief stint as a cleric had joined the Cambridge University Extension program to teach the working classes in northern England - finally met Whitman and spent a week in his house with him. (He also sought out and met Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

One of Carpenter's young gay disciples in later years, Chester A. Arthur III (1901-1972), the grandson and namesake of the US president, recalled in his old age that Carpenter had told him he had "slept" with Whitman, and that Whitman "thought people should 'know' each other on the physical and emotional plane as well as in the mental. And that the best part of comrade love was that there was no limit to the number of comrades one could have."

Meeting Whitman, writes Rowbotham, "clarified new ways of seeing, feeling, and being for Carpenter, giving him a different means of denoting significance. It was the start of an alternative outlook on the world." Moreover, "Carpenter's visit to Whitman... made him more bold sexually: he embarked on exploratory encounters with working-class men, 'railway-men, porters, clerks, signalmen, ironworkers, coach-builders, Sheffield cutters,' discovering he could 'knit up more alliances more satisfactory to me than any I had before known... I felt I had come into, or at least in sight of, the world to which I belonged, my natural habitat.'"

His Whitman visit had also awakened a deepening love of nature, and on his return Carpenter moved first to the working-class industrial city of Sheffield, then to a farm in a nearby village where he worked at market gardening and wrote his first book, "Towards Democracy" (1883), a long prose poem greatly influenced by Whitman and the influential Christian Socialist art critic and social essayist John Ruskin.

The book "contains Carpenter's observations of the poverty he saw in the streets of the northern cities, the crushing, destructive working conditions, and the lack of human contact between people of different classes. These are mixed together with Ruskinian diatribes against commercialism... and a romantic Whitmanite embracing of all humanity, however despised or outcast." Politics was a means to an end, for the "democracy" Carpenter sought was "a new way of being human, a new manner of encountering others," flecked with homosensual accents. The book attracted a growing audience of socialists and sexual rebels over the ensuing decades and converted many to the radical cause.

By this time Carpenter had inherited considerable wealth on the death of his father, and bought three fields at Millthorpe, a "tiny, remote settlement in the Cordwell Valley" not too far from Sheffield, where he had a gray stone house built and set up to live a simpler life as a market gardener with the aid of a local farming family.

Having been converted to socialism after reading "England for All" (1881) by the pioneer of British socialism, Henry Hyndman, he began attending meetings of Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and gave ₤300 to Justice, the first and longest-surviving Marxist newspaper in England, which Hyndman started that year. And Carpenter began criss-crossing English towns and cities to lecture where "little networks of heresy," from utopians to hard-headed municipal reformers, "coalesced to become the cores of the new [Socialist] movement." He continued to keep a heavy lecture schedule until he was nearly 80.

He helped found the Sheffield Socialist Society, and in 1885 helped the Working Men's Radical Association put up one of the first independent labor candidates for Parliament.

As Rowbotham puts it, "Carpenter's unusual circumstances as a Millthorpe market gardener endowed him with a certain mystique among the newly radicalized intelligentsia earnestly debating poverty, class inequality, sexual relations, new ethical codes..." and he gained renown as a practitioner of an alternative style of living even as his lectures, constant stream of books, and never-ending series of articles in the new socialist and radical publications made him well-known.

In all his speeches and writings, he "stressed, as he had in 'Towards Democracy,' that the moral elements in historical movements were the key to change because they caused men and women to desire an alternative." Carpenter's libertarian brand of socialism had a strong anarchist tinge, but he had an entirely ecumenical view of the left that saw all its factions as working toward a common goal, and envisioned a labor "movement" that would unite them all.

For Carpenter, "Socialism was not merely a movement for industrial emancipation, it 'meant the entire regeneration of society in art, in science, in religion, and in literature, and the building up of a new life in which industrial socialism was the foundation,'" as he put it in 1887.

However, Carpenter's simple, alternative lifestyle, which included rejection of traditional bourgeois dress, a sometimes backsliding vegetarianism, and his fondness for sandals (which he eventually began to make at Millthorpe as a supplement to his income) was not to the taste of all leftists; his Socialist comrade George Bernard Shaw dryly nicknamed Carpenter "the Noble Savage."

In one of his most successful books, "Civilization: Its Cause and Cure" (1889), which went through 18 editions in English in the ensuring four decades and was widely published in translation, including Japanese, Carpenter flayed class divisions, "Panglossian Victorian complacency," and "faith in automatic progress as a result of external changes in science, technology, productivity, and material prosperity." Deploying references to Plato, Carpenter "wanted to validate physical desires denigrated by Christianity, and homosexuality peeps out gingerly from [its] pages, smuggled in under cover of the classics."

Carpenter met the man who was to become his partner for the rest of his life, 25-year-old George Merrill, in 1892 as they were descending from a train at Sheffield. They briefly and wordlessly cruised each other, and Merrill followed Carpenter at a distance as he walked off toward Millthorpe in the company of waiting friends. Eventually Carpenter stopped and turned, the two exchanged names and addresses, and a relationship that would last for the next three and a half decades was born. Their life together at Millthorpe entered into legend.

Rowbotham relates that "After meeting Merrill, Carpenter was seeking a more outright way of expressing male-male love than was possible under Whitman's cloak of comradeship." In 1893 and 1894, Carpenter set to work on four pamphlets - "Woman and Her Place in a Free Society," "Marriage in a Free Society," "Sex-love and its Place in a Free Society," and "Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society."

"The decision to write about sexuality in general," notes Rowbotham, "was consistent with Carpenter's tendency to seek out broad alliances rather than to isolate himself. Moreover the other pamphlets gave 'Homogenic Love' a degree of cover, for he could appear as a writer on sexual topics in general rather than as a homosexual pleading a case."

The first three pamphlets, which took an advanced feminist position arguing that women deserved full social and economic freedom, that marriage was a form of prostitution, and that housework was real work, were all published, and eventually collected as "Love's Coming of Age" in 1896. But the publisher refused to bring out "Homogenic Love," so Carpenter paid to have it privately printed, and "the first British statement by a homosexual man, linking emancipation to social transformation, was destined only for friends and acquaintances."

Drawing on the works in German of the pioneer German homosexual liberationist Karl Ulrichs (Carpenter was fluent in German, French, and Italian), "Homogenic Love" argued that same-sex desire was congenital and that private sexual behavior should be no concern of the law, which could not stop "natural" feelings, only persecute those individuals caught expressing them, while offering fertile terrain for blackmailers.

In the wake of the imprisonment and trial of Oscar Wilde - who had admired Carpenter's "Towards Democracy" - the following year, an event which "left a vortex of fear in its wake," Carpenter's attempts to find a publisher for "Homogenic Love" were universally rejected, and his attempts to publish articles based on his privately printed plea for homosexual liberation were repeatedly rejected, even by journals on the left which normally welcomed him. But "Homogenic Love" was published in German in 1895, in the French journal La Societé Nouvelle the next year, and copies made their way into the hands of sympathetic American sex radicals, particularly in the anarchist movement, which greatly admired Carpenter and Whitman.

In 1897 Carpenter finally managed to get his article on same-sexers, "An Unknown People," published in the freethinkers' magazine The Reformer, arguing for sexual education for lonely young "Urnings" (he'd adopted Ulrichs' term for homosexuals) and insisting that they were not the "decadents" of popular imagination but "fine, healthy specimens."

In an 1899 article in the International Journal of Ethics on "Affection in Education," Carpenter argued that "intense and romantic" friendships between pupils, and between teachers and pupils, played a vital part in education. And when the scientific study "Sexual Inversion" by the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis, a longtime friend and admirer of Carpenter who was married to a lesbian, was crucified in the press and pursued by the censors, Carpenter did not hesitate to spring publicly to its defense.

In 1902 Carpenter edited "Ioläus," an anthology celebrating same-sex love which drew its title from the name of Hercules' warrior comrade, and in which is chronicled, as Rowbotham puts it, "a great crowd of historical 'friends.' Greek and Spartan warrior lovers and shepherd boys appear in the procession along with Sir Thomas Browne, Michelangelo and the Persian poet Hafiz. From more recent times, Richard Wagner, King Ludwig II of Prussia, Walt Whitman, Byron and Shelley present themselves in its pages. Nor were the women forgotten; Carpenter included Queen Anne and Lady Churchill as well as the resolute Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby who eloped to live in Wales and became known as the 'Ladies of Llangolen' during the 18th century."

Over the years, Millthorpe and the Carpenter-Merrill ménage acted as a magnet for young men troubled about their same-sex attractions, both those from the working classes Carpenter favored - and whom he often bedded, sometimes arousing temporary fits of jealousy from the equally promiscuous Merrill that soon subsided - and a stream of younger, disconsolate would-be writers and intellectuals who were homosexual.

Among those whom the charismatic Carpenter served as sexual therapist and literary counselor were the budding poet Siegfriend Sasson, who wrote in requesting an audience that Carpenter's writings had helped him understand the antipathy he felt to young women; and the even younger Robert Graves, a schoolmaster dismissed for an affair with a schoolboy, who wrote in a thank you note that Carpenter had "absolutely taken the scales" from his eyes. Graves eventually gained worldwide fame as the author of "I, Claudius."

Even the already well-known author E.M. Forster benefited from his 1914 Millthorpe pilgrimage. "Merrill," Rowbotham relates, "who was familiar with the syndrome of nervous devotees, intuitively broke through Forster's self-conscious reticence."

As Forster later recalled, "George Merrill touched my backside - gently and just above the buttocks - I believe he touched most peoples. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-lost tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought."

On Forster's return home, he immediately sat down and wrote his novel "Maurice," a homosexual story of love across the class divide for which the Carpenter-Merrill couple was the template, and in which the character of Alec Scudder the servant gamekeeper was loosely based on Merrill. Forster regarded Carpenter as "a saviour" and noted ecstatically in his diary, "Forward rather than back, Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!"

But Carpenter's home also was a magnet for a never-ending stream of radicals - working-class trade unionists, Socialist and Labour Party leaders, rebellious aristocrats, emancipated women (who numbered among his most important friendships), environmentalists, land reformers, leaders of cooperatives, freethinking spiritual seekers, and delegations en masse from Socialist youth walking clubs all trouped to Carpenter's door and enjoyed his warm and bountiful hospitality.

Merrill died suddenly in 1928, and, shattered by the loss, Carpenter soon followed a year later. They are buried next to each other.

In Rowbotham, Carpenter has at long last found the biographer he deserves. A disciple of the great English historian E.P. Thompson and a socialist feminist historian and essayist whose writings over the last three decades have made her a revered figure in the women's movement, Rowbotham has always insisted on the importance of grassroots social movements from below.

And in her massive book on Carpenter, Rowbotham details his tireless activism and its incredible impact in fostering and nurturing the British left and the labor movement. Tens of thousands of workers who never read Carpenter had heard him lecture, or speak at open-air public meetings which attracted crowds in the thousands, whether he was appearing in support of strikers, arguing for women's suffrage, calling for the curtailment of pollution by industry, opposing the Boer War and World War I, or demanding that the privileged aristocracy's control of the land be ceded to the people who worked it.

Many more knew Carpenter, a talented musician who entertained Millthorpe visitors by playing his beloved Beethoven on the piano, as the composer and lyricist of the popular socialist hymn "England, Arise!," which was one of the frequently-sung anthems of the labor left.

Rowbotham is a felicitously vivid, witty, and evocative writer who captures Carpenter's magnetic personality and makes him come alive. But this is no undiluted hagiography, for Rowbotham neatly picks apart Carpenter's failings, foibles, and blind spots, including his unfortunate tendency to an ideological anti-Semitism (although he had close friends who were Jews) and a certain condescension, typical of Cambridge men of the era, toward Third World peoples - this despite his outspoken opposition to British colonialism and imperialism and his early and then-controversial support of the movement for independence in India, which he'd visited and written about.

Carpenter's legacy includes a direct, linear connection to the modern American homosexual rights movement, for it was when a young Harry Hay in 1925 stumbled across a restricted library copy of Carpenter's influential 1916 book "The Intermediate Sex," with its visions of same-sexers organizing to demand their rights, that Hay grasped the principals of homosexual emancipation which, two and half decades later, would lead him to found the Mattachine Society.

As brilliantly researched and told by Rowbotham, "Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love" has lessons for same-sexers, and for the left, which are invaluable in considering how we got to where we are and whither we should go. If you think you know Carpenter, this book's revelations will nonetheless surprise you, as they did me. And if you don't know him, you owe it to yourself to add this important and entertaining work, illustrated with numerous photos, to your bookshelf.

Carpenter's most important writings, including "Toward Democracy," "Ioläus," "The Intermediate Sex," and his word-portrait of his lover George Merrill are all available online at edwardcarpenter.net/. The music and lyrics to Carpenter's working-class anthem, "England, Arise!" are at strawberrythieveschoir.org.uk/music/EnglandArise!.pdf. And the Edward Carpenter Forum provides a wide range of Carpenteriana at edwardcarpenterforum.org/.

Posted on Friday, November 28, 2008 at 6:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Daniel W. Crofts: Review of Harold Holzer's Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008)

Source: Special to HNN (11-27-08)

[Mr. Crofts is Professor of History at The College of New Jersey. He is the author of Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (North Carolina, 1989) and The Diary of a Public Man: A Secession Crisis Enigma (Louisiana State, forthcoming).]

Today the United States finds itself in the midst of an interregnum between outgoing and incoming presidents. A high level of public interest attends this transfer of power because it intersects with a sharp economic reversal. But things could be much worse. In the broader sweep of world history, convulsions often accompany regime change. And the United States has not been immune.

The most dangerous transfer of power in American history occurred in the winter of 1860-61, following Abraham Lincoln’s election as president. Before he even took office, seven states in the Deep South—from South Carolina west to Texas—declared themselves out of the Union and began to organize the government for a separate nation, the Confederate States of America.

Electoral systems are supposed to assure orderly successions. In theory, those who participate in an election pledge themselves to abide by the result. Certainly Lincoln and his fellow Republicans expected the South to acquiesce. But theory and practice do not always coincide. Many white Southerners considered Lincoln’s victory an intolerable affront. Refusing to accept a “Black Republican” president, they demanded that their states secede from the Union.

During the four months following the election in early November 1860, the outgoing lame-duck president, James Buchanan, was responsible for dealing with the secession crisis (until 1936, American presidents were inaugurated on March 4, not January 20). Buchanan insisted that no state could legally secede, but he feared that any use of armed force against the secessionists would make a bad situation worse. As the Union unraveled, Lincoln could only await events. No incoming president before or since has faced such a vexing crisis.

In his inaugural address, Lincoln declared that the Union was perpetual and that it remained “unbroken.” His oath of office obligated him to take care that the laws “be faithfully executed in all the States.” But he eagerly hoped that national authority could be restored without “bloodshed or violence.” And he ended with words that President-elect Barack Obama quoted on election night earlier this month: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” (Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, IV:262-71, quotations on 264-66, 271.) Because Lincoln will always be remembered as a war president, we rarely recall that he came to power hopeful that the peace might yet be preserved.

Harold Holzer has just published a hefty new study of Lincoln’s role during the excruciating interval between his election and his inauguration. One approaches this book with high hopes. Holzer is the author or editor of thirty books on various aspects of Lincoln’s life and the Civil War. He commands a wide audience. His Lincoln at Cooper Union was awarded the Lincoln Prize. This latest venture is being vigorously marketed and carries glowing endorsements from prominent scholars.

Lincoln President-Elect provides an almost linear catalog of Lincoln’s daily routines and movements between early November 1860 and early March 1861. Two-thirds of the volume is situated in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln remained until early February. Another hundred pages detail his roundabout railroad trip to Washington, D.C. The final few chapters sketch the pressure-packed ten days between February 23 and March 4, after Lincoln reached the national capital and had to make weighty decisions about his inaugural address, about the roster of his cabinet, and about the dread matter that hung over everything—his policy toward the disaffected South.

Anything a reader might wish to know about Lincoln’s appearance, attire, and diet may be found here. The book is definitive on his post-election decision to grow whiskers. We learn about the furnishings of his Springfield home, many of which were sold as he prepared to move. We find him besieged by a growing volume of visitors. Holzer also has ransacked many odd nuggets from Lincoln’s incoming mail—counterparts to the miscellaneous avalanche of gifts and mementos that steadily accumulated in a room of the Illinois State House.

Holzer contends that Lincoln’s secession crisis role has been insufficiently appreciated. He takes exception to the idea that the president-elect picked his way tentatively through the shocks and surprises of the interregnum. He rejects David M. Potter’s tart view that Lincoln “groped and blundered” as he began to realize that the seceding states were in earnest. (Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, 315.) Holzer’s Lincoln, by contrast, navigated “brilliantly” (458) through all the snares of the secession winter and had a clear vision of the road ahead.

Part of Holzer’s case is compelling. On one key point Lincoln was adamant—he repeatedly demanded that Republicans maintain their opposition to slavery in the territories. “Hold firm, as with a chain of steel,” he insisted (159). He feared that the party would no longer stand for anything if it backed down from its core principles. He feared too that radicals would defect and cripple his new administration.

Although Lincoln consistently rejected a territorial compromise, in other ways his response to the crisis was opportunistic. New Mexico was the only territory south of the old Missouri Compromise line (36°30´). Lincoln could tolerate its admission to the Union as a slave state. He wasn’t keen to put a non-Republican Southerner into his cabinet, but he decided to offer a position to North Carolina’s John A. Gilmer, who nonetheless declined it. He rewrote his inaugural address so as to emphasize his hopes for peace. Once in office, he anguished for most of a month before deciding to risk war.

Lincoln President-Elect is an imperfect guide to the political crisis that was at the center of Lincoln’s consciousness between November and March. Part of the problem is conceptual. However much a relentless day-by-day format may inform readers about Lincoln’s activities, it is ill-suited to illuminate the various tangled strands of the story. Most historical writing examines particular topics within the broader context of chronology. Only rarely do scholars attempt a rigidly chronological approach.

By focusing so intently on Lincoln, Holzer tends to overlook important parts of the story that did not take place in Springfield. Thus, he barely touches the crisis that engulfed Buchanan’s cabinet in late December, after Major Robert Anderson boldly moved his besieged garrison of federal soldiers in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, from Fort Moultrie, a defenseless sandspit, to Fort Sumter, a mile offshore. The little that he writes about it shows that Holzer should have studied the subject more carefully. Sumter was destined to become Lincoln’s biggest headache of all.

Lincoln President-Elect has other limitations. Holzer tends to turn everything into biography or personality. For example, his account of Thurlow Weed’s visit to Springfield just before Christmas manages to misunderstand why Weed was far more alarmed than Lincoln about the situation in the South. Holzer depicts instead two veteran storytellers trading yarns with each other. A “delighted” Weed, fortified with a “hearty breakfast of sausages,” headed back east with warm feelings about his new friend (170). This glimpse conceals more than it explains.

Holzer knows a bewildering amount about Lincoln—and he cannot restrain himself from putting it all in the book. But he simply hasn’t done the research to write with full authority about the secession crisis. He has not consulted the papers of the other key players—William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, James Buchanan, Stephen A. Douglas, and Charles Francis Adams, for starters. And he knows so little about the South that he keeps making mistakes. Georgia’s Alexander Stephens had never been a U.S. Senator. James A. Bayard, identified here simply as a Philadelphian, was in fact a powerful U.S. Senator from Delaware.

For many weeks Lincoln remained confident that the South would come to its senses. He continually refused to make conciliatory statements or to offer reassurances of his good intentions. Holzer celebrates Lincoln’s stance and castigates those who saw the matter differently. Holzer cannot comprehend why any self-respecting Republican might have supported efforts to enact some kind of compromise legislation.

A recent book by a young scholar, Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (North Carolina, 2008), offers far more depth and perspective on the crisis that led to war. More succinct than Holzer’s bloated volume, McClintock’s book also covers Lincoln’s first crucial six weeks in office. McClintock understands—as Holzer does not—the complexity of what was happening in the slave states. An anti-secession insurgency in the Upper South tempted some Republicans, especially Seward, to heed warnings from Virginia about the need for compromise and about the danger of maintaining federal control over Fort Sumter, the powder keg in Charleston harbor. In the end, McClintock, like Holzer, strongly affirms Lincoln’s leadership. But McClintock’s case rests on far more persuasive foundations.

Holzer shortchanges the one previous book that covers the exact same ground as his—William E. Baringer’s A House Dividing: Lincoln as President-Elect (Abraham Lincoln Association, 1945). An accomplished Lincoln scholar, Baringer wrote more economically than Holzer and did not get bogged down in detail. So too, a wider research base enabled Baringer to grasp some aspects of the crisis that eluded Holzer. Baringer explained more clearly why pressures to enact a modified compromise intensified in January and February, once it could be depicted as a way of supporting Union-loving anti-secessionists in the Upper South.

In the end, Lincoln did prove willing to accept one key compromise—a constitutional amendment forever safeguarding slavery in the states where it already existed. He made this position explicit in his inaugural address. Holzer reprints the inaugural as an appendix, but his own narrative does not breathe a word about Lincoln’s position on the constitutional amendment. To do so would admit too much paradox. Holzer must depict Lincoln as someone who, unlike Seward, would never countenance the permanence of slavery (213-14).

Holzer refuses to see that the man we now hail as the “Great Emancipator” never expected to become a war president and never expected to preside over the forcible destruction of the slave system. Only rarely do Lincoln’s modern admirers come to grips with the “plain evidence of his earnest efforts to avoid that course altogether.” Lincoln was, in fact, “reluctant to become an Emancipator,” David Potter wrote, “and the conflict which immortalized him was a conflict which he had believed he could avert.” (Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, 315.)

Related Links

Daniel W. Crofts: Review of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005)

Posted on Thursday, November 27, 2008 at 1:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Murray Polner: Review of Robert Justin Goldstein's American Blacklist: The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Loren Ghiglione's CBS's Don Hollenbeck: An Honest Reporter in the Age of McCarthyism (Columbia University Press, 2008)

When Harry Truman issued Executive order 9835 in 1947, which in effect required all federal civil-service workers to swear they were loyal Americans, little did he realize that it would become a precursor to Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror two years later. Soon after, the government published the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) which constituted, what Robert Justin Goldstein, professor emeritus of political science at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, properly concludes “was critically important to the entire Red Scare, far more than McCarthy.”

Truman wanted to fend off rightwing attacks on his presidency and his close friend Clark Clifford’s memoir claims he never believed communism was a serious domestic threat and deeply regretted not ending “the loyalty program at its inception.” But it was too late to shut the door to a legion of inquisitors on state and federal levels eager to punish supposed malefactors and promote their own careers.

Goldstein opens by citing Alan Barth, the Washington Post editorialist, a preeminent civil libertarian and author of The Loyalty of Free Men accurately portraying the authority granted Attorney General(s) as “perhaps the most arbitrary and far-reaching power ever exercised by a single public official” in our entire history. Some 300 groups were eventually officially proclaimed to be seditious, un-American, revolutionary, and most of all, Communist (a few shuttered fascist and pro-Nazi groups plus the KKK were included as well), the overwhelming majority for their political slant and without so much as a hint of due process.

People were fired without hearings or evidence of criminal activities, while organizations were destroyed for “subversive tendencies.” The euphoria after the end of WWII was quickly drowned out by hysterical fear of Soviet Russia and news of its espionage network and, writes Goldstein in this indispensable study, “deliberate attempts by a powerful coalition of American conservatives, notably the FBI, significant elements of the business community, the Catholic Church and especially an increasingly politically desperate Republican Party, to ignite a domestic Red Scare.” Famously, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a former isolationist turned internationalist, advised Truman, then seeking congressional backing for his Truman Doctrine, to “scare the hell out of the American people.” Informed and misinformed by politicians, radio, films and the press, many Americans panicked.

Actually, the fear and intimidation created by the list and the new class of professional hunters it sired (and later, by McCarthyism) was the opening act in transforming millions of Americans into silent citizens fearful of joining any group, signing any petition, writing any article, reading or recommending any book, or in any way arousing the suspicions of professional Red hunters. With very few exceptions the major media -- no surprise here, given its role as government’s echo chambers during the early years of the Vietnam and Iraq wars—rarely challenged AGLOSO. Radio networks and public and private institutions began demanding loyalty oaths from their employees. Even the ACLU and NAACP cooperated with the FBI in eliminating its “suspicious” members. Justice, legal rights, and fairness were abandoned, a replay of Woodrow Wilson’s post-WWI Red Scare.

Remarkably, given our current two wars and “war on terror” and the Bush-Cheney administration’s dishonorable record in Guantanamo, its reliance on torture, rendition and domestic surveillance, and despite its attempts to bully domestic opponents, we haven’t had any major show trials against antiwar critics as in the Vietnam era. In fact, contemporary American dissenters have not allowed themselves to be silenced. Perhaps we’ve finally learned a lesson.

Don Hollenbeck, whose character was featured in George Clooney’s film about Joe McCarthy and the role of CBS News in “Good Night and Good Luck” killed himself after years of being falsely portrayed as a Comsymp by Jack O’Brien, a New York Journal- American entertainment columnist. Long after Hollenbeck had died O’Brien told Ghiglione that Hollenbeck, a journalist and editor, wasn’t a communist only a liberal “just sympathetic to anything on the left and very antagonistic to anything on the right,” thus presumably giving him the right to malign. When Ghiglione read Holenbeck’s FBI file (a dossier, including reports about many other Americans,that should never have been assembled) he wrote, “two detailed FBI investigation reports suggest Hollenbeck was a patriotic American.”

Loren Ghiglione’s workmanlike and sympathetic biography of a reporter, editor and radio newsman long forgotten details the life of this Nebraska-born newsman, warts and all: his alcoholism, failed marriages, mental depression and loss of a job he most cherished and his suicide in 1954. All the same, the essential theme of this compelling book by a onetime newspaper editor and currently professor of Media Ethics at Northwestern University, is the familiar but nevertheless toxic impact the post-WWII Red hunt had and still has on too many people and institutions.

In 1947 Ed Morrow chose Hollenbeck as the writer and host of “CBS Views the Press,” a weekly 15-minute examination of New York City’s daily newspapers (by my estimate and recollection, ten papers, excluding those published in the outer boroughs). Not that criticizing newspapers then or now is novel. Hollenbeck’s predecessors and contemporaries included Upton Sinclair (The Brass Check), A.J. Liebling at The New Yorker, George Seldes’ In Fact newsletter, and I.F. Stone’s weekly on the left plus several on the right. But Hollenbeck’s comments and analysis hit home and drew fire from the papers. While he sought to be even-handed – in one example, he praised the Times and Herald Tribune for “the fairest and most unbiased account” of House Un-American Activities Committee sessions while the Post and PM were too anti- HUAC and the rest of the papers too pro-HUAC. Still, his was a distinct left-liberal bias, something his rightwing critics could never forgive, especially when he went after phony headlines such as “U.S. Ship Fired on Off Siberia.”

The pressure was obviously too much for CBS and on February 4, 1950 Hollenbeck was sacked from the program accompanied by innuendos and anonymous sources detailing his alleged Communist party membership (denied by several FBI reports). Five days after his dismissal Joe McCarthy made his Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, describing the State Department as inundated with communists. The speech eventually created a new class of victims, like Robert Lewis Shayon, a onetime CBS “You Are There” writer-director-producer whose name was mentioned in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. He was accused of having been a member of an allegedly Red front group, thus losing a job he coveted. The Red Channels’ reference, Shayon said, “cost me five years of my life and career.” Added Ghiglione: “That was a price that those who supported the blacklists were willing to have others pay.”

Don Hollenbeck was a reporter and editor and this fine book does him justice.

Posted on Monday, November 24, 2008 at 4:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of Michael Schwartz's War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008)

Source: Special to HNN (11-3-08)

[Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell University.]

The Iraq War has been among the greatest disasters in modern American history. Michael Schwartz’ illuminating new book War Without End: The Iraq War in Context provides a comprehensive overview of the ideological roots of the war and its harrowing social costs for the Iraqi people. He argues quite convincingly that rather than it being purely a matter of administrative incompetence and mismanagement, the ideological zealotry of leading neo-conservatives was a principal cause of the American failure to establish political legitimacy after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He shows how neo-liberal policies and the rapid privatization of state resources backed by a doctrine of massive force helped to exacerbate the suffering of ordinary Iraqis who increasingly turned to resistance against U.S. power and rule and remain disdainful of the occupation.

According to Schwartz, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, America’s war aims were clear from the outset: to create a strategic base for the establishment of control over the Middle East’s prized energy reserves and to usher in an economic transition from the “socialist dictatorship” of Saddam Hussein to an unfettered free-market capitalist state capable of serving as a model for the region. In the aftermath of the invasion, Lieutenant L. Paul Bremer and his staff moved to rapidly privatize state resources, including the formerly state-owned oil industry and all sectors of the economy including the health and educational systems. They rewarded multinational corporations like Haliburton and Bechtel with major contracts to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure, which had been devastated during the shock and awe campaign and previous wars and economic sanctions.

The consequences of these policies were profound: They confirmed for a large number of Iraqis that America had invaded the country for self-serving reasons. Furthermore, they caused a social and economic crisis of epic proportions, which gave strength to the insurgency. The dismantling of state industries caused the loss of thousands of jobs, which were replaced by foreign contractors. Local businesses were bankrupted by the flooding of the country with cheap imports and by a lack of regular electricity. Unemployment rates in the once prosperous nation skyrocketed to over 60 percent. Massive corruption in the rewarding of contracts and the dismissal of skilled local technicians resulted in gross inefficiency. This trend was typified by a failed $70 million dollar Halliburton project to reconstruct an oil pipeline in Al Fatah, which came to resemble, as one observer put it, “some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad.”

Most disconcerting was the decline in health and educational services bred by the U.S. occupation and war. Schools damaged by the fighting were never properly repaired and lacked basic textbooks and school supplies. The U.S. military sometimes even used schools as a staging base for military incursions. By 2007, UNICEF reported that only one-sixth of Iraqi children were being educated at all. After dismantling the state health-care system, which had been among the best in the Arab world before Hussein’s ascent to power, occupation officials promised to construct dozens of private clinics across the country. Most of these never materialized, resulting in a decline in accessibility of basic medicines and equipment. In the newly “liberated” Iraq, doctors would fill out prescriptions that the pharmacies could not provide. Family members of patients even had to serve as nurses and IVs and needles had to be reused. Over time, doctor shortages and the imposition of curfews in cities made the situation grow worse. The inability of occupation officials to provide clean water throughout the country resulted in outbreaks of cholera and other diseases which the hospitals were ill-equipped to treat. The overflow of raw sewage into city streets was another factor breeding disease in the teeming urban slums of Iraqi cities which came to resemble something out of a Charles Dickens’ novel.

One of Schwartz’ important contributions is to show how the failure of America’s privatization and “nation-building” programs contributed to the rise of the insurgency in Iraq. Rather than being composed of “dead enders,” in Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous words, or foreign jihadists or ex-Bathists, he demonstrates how resistance was in fact driven by “local factors that grew strength from deep grievances and a widespread hostility to the presence of foreign troops,” as U.S. intelligence analysts concluded. In the early phases, many Iraqis staged demonstrations against the occupational authorities demanding basic social services and jobs. Rather than seeking to respond to their demands, the authorities instructed the military to greet any act of dissidence as suspicious and to shoot at any perceived threat. U.S. soldiers consequently fired upon peaceful crowds and killed and wounded civilians, thus stoking popular anger. Many more innocent civilians were killed by fearful Marines at often poorly marked checkpoints throughout the country. The routine raiding of homes designed in part to strike fear among the population helped to further stoke popular anger and resentment, as did the prevalence of deplorable prison conditions and the revelations of torture as at Abu Ghraib. The U.S. construction of a gaudy multi-billion dollar embassy made apparent America’s ambitions to remain in Iraq indefinitely.

In order to try to maintain its grip on power, and in clear violation of international law, the U.S. adopted a doctrine of collective punishment designed to annihilate not only the insurgent fighters but anyone who harbored and supported them. The consequence was the perpetration of many massacres, such as the notorious incident at Haditha where 24 civilians, including women and children were slaughtered by Marines. The doctrine of collective punishment was on display during the siege of Fallujah where the U.S. military killed thousands of people and turned the entire city into “a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted homes, weeping power lines and severed palm trees,” in the words of New York Times journalist Erik Eckholm. A marine lieutenant proclaimed afterwards: “This is what happens if you shelter terrorists.” As these comments reveal, the siege of Fallujah was intended as a warning sign to others that it would suffer the same fate if it defied U.S. power.

Much like the Vietnamese in an earlier American failed colonial intervention, the Iraqis refused to bow to U.S. pressure and thus paid a high price in fighting for their sovereignty and independence. The backbone of the resistance took root in Sunni as well as some Shia cities like Sadr city where local warlord Muqtada Sadr gained in prestige not only by defending Iraqi cities from attack but also by seeking to provide basic social services that had been abandoned under the occupation. The resistance in Iraq, however, was never unified and became factionalized and ridden by sectarian tensions which culminated in the onset of full-scale civil war. The war’s ugliness was compounded by the tactics of many insurgent fighters - particularly the small number of Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq whose agenda was to expel the U.S. from Iraq and establish a caliphate through the Arab Middle East embodying the principles of Salafi Islam. They adopted terror techniques such as suicide and car bombings directed against supposed colonial collaborators and Shia, which only intensified public suffering. Criminal gangs seized upon the violence and chaos to carry out the looting of public resources and facilities and to extort money for ransom.

According to Schwartz, the United States bears a large share of the blame for creating a climate in which these trends emerged. In his view, the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq resemble those of the U.S. in Fallujah with the aim of inducing civilians to withdraw their support for the enemy once they experienced the agony of punishment. Contrary to the false impression given by a majority of America’s mainstream media, through the extensive air campaigns and search and destroy missions, U.S. forces and their proxies bear responsibility for the majority of both civilian and combat deaths, which scientific studies have placed at well over one million. Schwartz estimates plausibly that the U.S. has been responsible for at least 57 percent of the killings, many of which he attributes to a hysterical use of firepower by American troops in urban combat zones. The much vaunted “surge” strategy of President George W. Bush only worsened the carnage and further inflamed Iraqis, which remains weary of the American presence and continues to live in conditions of utter destitution. The U.S. backed Maliki government and military, meanwhile, remain predominantly powerless outside Baghdad’s Green Zone due to the growing strength of the sectarian militias who control many neighborhoods.

On the whole, while destined to create controversy, Schwartz has written a very powerful book on the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its devastating consequences for the country. He sheds great insight into the mindset of American policy-elites and military officials and documents the stark brutality of their programs. He demonstrates furthermore that the rise of insurgency in Iraq was not irrational or driven exclusively by an Islamicist agenda or hate but was rather a product of the arrogance of American occupying officials and the failure of U.S. state-building policies and neo-liberalism, which failed to guarantee basic social services and thereby helped to facilitate Iraq’s social decay. Most of all, Schwartz reminds us who the true victims of the war are. In order to move forward the next administration needs to accept accountability and not simply withdraw troops but provide reconstruction and reparations aid so that Iraqis can rebuild their country on their own terms.