Tag: history

I read Amity Shlaes’ book “the Forgotten Man” a couple of years when it first came out, just before the big economic downturn.  Her timing was excellent in the light of subsequent events and the insights for the Great Depression have been helping me understand the events of the great recession.
 
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain quipped, and some of the arguments of the 1930s seem very contemporary indeed.   One of the themes most pervasive in Shlaes’ book was the importance of confidence, consistency and trust. These things are the true basis of a prosperous economy, but they are impossible to measure accurately and so are often overlooked or downplayed.

Why are you willing to exchange your real labor or goods for a piece of paper with the picture of a dead president?  It is backed by nothing but trust.  I lived in Brazil during a time of hyperinflation. People didn’t trust that their money would hold its value or their government not to be capricious (and they were right) so to protect themselves they had had to devise all sorts of tricks and techniques that were often wasteful and destructive to the system as a whole. And once trust breaks down in something as important as money itself, it spreads to other areas, creating a general state of uncertainly and feelings of helplessness.
 
One of the most important functions of government is to create as much certainty and predictability in society so that people can plan for the future and feel secure in their transactions with each other.   When fails in its duty to maintain stability or, worse, when government itself comes to be viewed as unpredictable, arbitrary or capricious, the bonds of society begin to erode.
 
Some actually welcome this.  Disorder reduces the aggregate level of wealth but often has the effect or redistributing income, or at least distributing pain since people who cannot properly plan cannot do better than those who just wouldn’t. Making opportunity generally less available tends to equalize outcomes by negating the cumulative value of hard work, talent and foresight.
 
What the FDR administration did to harm economic recovery was to create uncertainty, according to Shlaes. She gives many examples.  The one I like best is the Schechter chicken case.  Part of the New Deal legislation, regulated poultry prices, making it illegal to offer discounts or allow customers to choose their own chickens. The Schechter brothers, a couple of kosher butchers, were accused of doing these things and of “destructive price cutting.” They were found guilty, given a fine of $7424 (big money in those days) and tossed in jail for a couple months. When the full weight of Federal power can come down on kosher butchers for selling a chicken and they can get jail time for doing business as they always have, you have significant uncertainty.
 
The relevant New Deal Federal laws were declared unconstitutional when the case reached the Supreme Court.  Justice Louis Brandeis took aside one of Roosevelt’s aides and told him, “This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything.”
 
Most of the New Deal programs & ideas did not survive the test of time or the courts. The reason we don’t understand that is we look back at it now with a kind of “survivor bias,” i.e. we judge it by those that did survive – a relatively small and more successful subset.  But what really saved the New Deal’s reputation was the onset of World War II. To his eternal credit, Roosevelt saw the trouble on the horizon and he understood that he would have to harness the power of the United States – all of its power – to fight the threat of totalitarianism. So the always pragmatic president chucked or let fall away many of the more radical New Deal programs and much of the anti-enterprise rhetoric into the dust bin of history, much to the chagrin of his more radical associates, such as Harry Hopkins and his wife Eleanor.  We kept the songs, murals, myths and lots of mixed feelings.

My father grew up during the Depression and always took a kind of pride in the fact that he could trump any contemporary hard times stories.  No matter what happened, he could say, “You are lucky.  When I was growing up things were a lot worse.”  And he was always right.  You just couldn’t argue with the old man when he played the “Great Depression card.”

“I need it like a hole in the head”.  I always thought it was probably a direct translation from a foreign language because of the peculiar grammar.  But I don’t really know where it came from and I figured it was just a saying. 

Alex and I went through a forensic archeology exhibit at Smithsonian. Take a look at the skull alongside and try to guess what killed this guy. I don’t suppose you would need a degree in forensic anthropology. Most of the other exhibits were less obvious. They can read various types of sickness on the bones. Evidently significant numbers of people died of toothaches in the old days, or more precisely from infections related to abscesses. What a way to go? There was a lot of misery back then from things that we just no longer think about. I stroll through this exhibit will cure even the worst case of nostalgia for the good old days.

Life in the old days was nasty, brutal & short for most people. Even the rich people lived rotten lives if you look at the things they had to put up with and suffer from. The old palace looks good, until you recall the state of plumbing, air conditioning and medicine that the fat cat had to live with. None of us would willingly trade places with Louis XIV if we had to really live his life.

Speaking of living nasty, brutal & short lives, take a look at the map below and try to find North Korea. It is truly a benighted place – literally. When you go to museums and think about how rotten life used to be in the dark old days, it is useful to recall that in some places it never got any better and I have no doubt that living in a fever ridden colony a couple of centuries was better than living in a place like North Korea today. It must be like living in a giant, endless concentration camp, where technology is used to create misery and control rather than improve lives.

BTW – the map is just supposed to show the world’s bright lights, but when you look at it you cannot help noting that North Korea doesn’t have many. 

Finally, we have something that makes life better, IMO, something even the richest king couldn’t have before the 1880s – Coca-Cola. Below are Kola nuts, used to make Cola flavored soft drinks. I recalled an old commercial for 7up talking about the un-cola nuts and with the wonders of YouTube we can see it again.

Alex and I visited the “human origins” exhibit at Smithsonian.  I have trouble keeping up with the changes.  As I recently wrote, I had to change my opinion of the Neanderthal man now that I found out he is a closer cousin and probable ancestor.   You would think that all these prehistoric things would be more or less consistent, but they are not.  Scientific perceptions change.

Anyway, the exhibit is very good.   Most of the artifacts are copies, but I wouldn’t be able to tell the real ones anyway.  The picture on the side is the “ice man” discovered frozen in the Alps. He may have been the victim of a murder more than 5000 years ago. Anyway, the exhibit is mostly set up to educate kids, but old people like me can enjoy it too.

The thing that made the biggest impression on me were the wax museum recreations of pre-humans.  If the Neanderthal man walked down the street today, you might notice that he was unusually husky and unattractive, but if we was properly groomed you might not give him too much of a second look. Of course one reason not to stare would be to avoid eye contact with a dangerous looking weirdo.  But my point is that I think you would consider him human.  We do share genes with this guy, as we have recently discovered.  Not so the others like the Homo-erectus.  It was interesting looking into their eyes, or at least the eyes that current science has provided them.

Another surprising part of the exhibit was a skull from Lapa Vermelha, Minas Gerais in Brazil.  (I will put that on my list of places to visit.)  This fossil has been carbon dated to 11,500 years ago. The interesting thing is that the ancestors of today’s Native Americans were not supposed to be there yet.  There is a lot of political argument over very old human fossils in the Americas.

Native American tribes often have creation myths that say they have always been in or near their current locations. Science and anthropology indicate that their ancestors wandered over from Asia via a land mass at what are now the Bearing Straits. The discovery of ancient skulls that do not resemble the current Native American populations upsets some people. They can go to considerable lengths to prevent the evidence from being uncovered that contracts the myths or threatens their positions as “the first Americans”, as with the Kennewick man, who looked more like Jean Luke Picard than Sitting Bull and was evidently most closely related to the Ainu people from Japan.

History is never really simple and when it gets tied in with current political sensitivities it is really hard to get things right.   It is really hard to believe that things that happened more than 10,000 years ago still make a big difference to today’s politics, but they do.

It is a little silly.  When you go far enough back, none of the current ethnic distinctions make any sense and all human history is the common heritage of mankind.  The more we learn from archeology and genetics, the clearer that becomes.

America’s largest ethnic group is German.  Nearly a quarter of the American population or 58 million Americans claim German ancestry.  It used to be a big deal; as far as I know the Germans never formed a group specifically called “the race” (as in La Raza) but some clearly had separatist notions. It is a tribute to the American assimilation machine that now it matters hardly at all. You can see some famous German-Americans on the stairs to the left.  Who knew Elvis was German?

I had been meaning to go over to the German-American cultural center since I read about it in the paper.  Yesterday I went.  It is the kind of place that is worth seeing, but not worth going to see and you could easily miss it. Look at the picture below. The signs are small. Mostly, it is a permanent poster show detailing the long and varied contributions of Germans to American culture.   Since German contributions are now as American and Americanized as hamburgers, hot dogs and potato salad, it is easy to overlook them and think that now is the first time we have really had such large influx of immigrants and foreign cultures.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it and those who remember will have to go along with them too, but it is interesting to consider the conditions that existed within living memory. So let me say a little about Germans & America.  I grew up with it in Milwaukee, so talking about German-American culture is like talking about childhood. (The picture below is the Germania building in Milwaukee. They used to joke that the towers were like the spiked Kaiser helmets.)  But I had a child’s understanding of it based on caricatures and molded by subsequent history.  It is hard to put ourselves in the mindset of a century ago but I will try. 

1910 was before the wars and before the atrocities.  Germany in those days was arguably the most advanced country in terms of science and technology.  An American who really wanted to learn science had to learn German.  It was like English is today to sciences.  This persisted.  When I was growing up, the stereotype of a scientist was a guy with a beard and a German accent.   During our space race with the Soviets, it is largely true that our German rocket scientists competed with their German rocket scientists.   We probably could not have achieved what we did in space flight w/o Germans and the Russians certainty did not have the home grown talent to compete with us.

Germans also pioneered what became the research university.   Our American universities resemble them because we specifically imported German methods, ideas and often Germans themselves to remake our system during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  If we see Germany through the prism of the Third Reich and the World Wars, we see it in entirely a different way than our grandparents would have in 1910.  Germany under Wilhelm II was not a full democracy, but it was more democratic than most of the current UN members today and it was certainly less corrupt that most of the world’s countries now. They held regular, generally free elections. There was a strong respect for the rule of law and reasonable protection of individual rights. If you can look beyond the pomp and circumstance of the aristocracy, you see that in terms of democracy, rights, rule of law & transparency, Germany of 1890-1910 would compare favorably to most of the world’s countries a hundred years later (1990-2010) and has big modern countries such as Russia & China clearly beat. 

Although emigration to the U.S. declined after German unification and subsequent massive economic growth, there still were more opportunities in the U.S. and we continued to draw German immigrants. But it was a different sort of immigration in many ways.  As I mentioned above, Germany was one of the world’s most advanced countries, with technical and scientific skills at a par or above our own. This situation just doesn’t exist anymore. Today technically savvy immigrants are still important to us, but they usually develop their skills and/or use technologies already available in America.  A century ago, we were much more the recipients of skills and technology transfer. We all know that immigrant muscle helped build America, but we may overlook that immigrant brains also had a big role in designing it, none more so than the Germans.

We made an effort to wash the German out of our national memory. During World War I, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage; dachshunds became dash hounds; frankfurters became hot dogs and hamburger was renamed Salisbury steak; many streets changed their names and so did many families. Germans assimilated much faster than they might have otherwise. Wars do things like that and we have a way of trying to fit the events of the past into our current narrative. The problem is that the German heritage just doesn’t fit well into what we think of them and ourselves today. And now we don’t think much of it at all. That is why the German American heritage museum is kind of depressing. It is now located in the middle of Washington’s Chinatown. Immigrant communities come and go. 

All this is past. History happened as it did and we cannot change it. People in the past did what they did, but we have to remember that history didn’t have to happen that way. Just as our futures are not determined, neither were theirs.  W/o that unfortunate and almost random event in Sarajevo (that pathetic little loser, Gavrilo Princip, actually got lost and the Archduke’s car passed him by chance.  Terrorists only have to get lucky once) and the incompetent reactions in 1914 how different the world could have been.

Sometimes there is nothing you can do, but everybody expects you to do something. That is the time for the rain dance. Put on a good show, create a lot of sound & fury to keep people occupied so that they will keep you around long enough for things to improve, so you get credit. Politicians are master rain dancers, butt all of us have done a few. Sometimes you just have to be seen to be doing something.

I have been reading a book about real rain dances, called Floods, Famines and Emperors:  El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations.  The author talks about the various times when climate change caused civilizations to thrive and crash.   One chapter talks about the Pueblo of the Southwest.  (I think that is where the term “rain dance” comes from, BTW.)  Their population expanded during relatively wet times and then their populations starved and dispersed during when the same Medieval warm period that brought prosperity to Western Europe brought droughts to Southwestern North America that lasted decades or centuries.  Changes always bring winners and losers.

The author Brian Fagan says that a lot of early civilizations were based in part on the implication that priests and rulers could control the weather. Their activities to do this ranged from the merely wasteful to the downright gruesome.  A lot of complicated rituals and ceremonies were designed to do things like make the Nile flow or bring on the season rains.  The ancient Maya seem to have based their belief system on the need to capture, humiliate, torture and kill people from neighboring areas in order to sacrifice them and appease bloodthirsty gods who otherwise would bring drought and destruction.  They left some nice pyramids, but living through in those times must have been like being a minor character in a endless horror movie.   Unfortunately, these kinds of superstitions were the rule and not the exception in pre-scientific societies.

At our safe distance, we sometimes think of these superstitions in the benign fairy-tale sense of an enchanted forest full of fairies, elves etc. But think of how horrible it would be if you really believed it. The pre-scientific world must have been a frightening place. Everything you did could offend some spirit or nymph, so you needed to turn to shaman, witch or priest to protect you from capricious nature, which they (and you) attributed to benign or malevolent intelligence that had to be mollified.  

Some ritual had to be performed, but nobody was ever was sure if they worked.  Of course, they didn’t work but sometimes they might look like they did. If I do ceremonies to make it rain, and it eventually rains, I take credit.  A smart shaman probably had an intuitive sense of probability, so he did his rituals at times when things were moving in the right direction. You can see how the shaman might have added some value by his experience, on balance, however not. 

I suppose superstition is a step toward science. Alchemy led to some real discoveries about chemistry and physics. Astrology gave us some of the tools later needed by astronomers. 

Superstitions are an attempt to put some planning and order into an unpredictable world.   The problem is mostly based on mistaking correlation for causality, poor record keeping and the evidently natural human propensity to see patterns that don’t exist. Superstitions are a kind of distortion of reason, but they can be ostensibly reasonable.    

Of course, we still do rain dances too. The world is still an unpredictable place.

Anyway, I recommend Floods, Famines and Emperors. A lot of his ideas seemed very familiar, but I didn’t put it together until I started writing this that I had read one of his earlier books called The Long Summer.  It is still sitting on my bookshelf. These books help put the climate change debate in its historical perspective. We have been here before and maybe some perspective on how earlier climate changes affected earlier people may help us in the future.

Today is Ronald Reagan’s birthday and I was trying to decide whether he was the greatest president of the 20th Century. I decided that FDR edged him out, but only because Roosevelt lived in more interesting times. Both presidents presided over inflection points in American history and both responded well to circumstances they faced.

After a while all presidents belong simply to the American people. That is why I can put Reagan and Roosevelt in the same category. The fact that Reagan undid many of the things Roosevelt had wrought does not affect the analysis. Roosevelt did things appropriate for the 1930s & 1940s, things that helped make American prosperous for decades. But nothing lasts forever and even the most effective solutions ossify and break apart with time. By the 1980s the appropriate thing for Reagan to do was change them. Solutions must be appropriate to the circumstances.

By the end of the 1970s, most people could see something was wrong. Stagflation was sitting on the economy like a raven. The old nostrums no longer produced desirable results. Even Jimmy Carter recognized this. It was Carter who deregulated important industries such as trucking & airlines. (Carter also did a lot to deregulate the financial industry. While we may see that as unwise now, it was appropriate for the times.)

But in 1980, Americans wanted something new and better, true change not mere adjustment. This is where Reagan came in. He was an immensely popular president, who actually won a majority in the three man race in 1980 and was reelected with nearly 59% of the popular votes when he carried every state except Minnesota. His opponents did not (and still do not) understand him. To them he was just an amiable dunce.

Recent scholarship has enhanced Reagan’s reputation as an independent thinker and debunked the disinformation of the time that Reagan was fed his lines, like the actor he had been. However, Reagan himself seemed comfortable with their assessments.

Like Roosevelt, whom Oliver Wendell Holmes described at a man with “second-class intellect” but a “first-class temperament.”, letting others underestimate him allowed Reagan to disarms, cajole and co-opt all those smart guys who would rather be correct than right. Now that we have access to Reagan’s hand written notes we can see that his ideas were based on his extensive reading and experience. He was a one man think tank, but he understood that there is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.

Ronald Reagan led a remarkable life. He was no child of privilege and his lifeguard job & diploma from Eureka College hardly impressed the elites. We can see the development of his character from his time as a New Deal Democrat, to the time when faced down communists in the Screen Actors’ Guild (Reagan was the only president who had been a union leader), to his getting to know the country as spokesman for GE, to his political career and election as president.

He was the right man for the times. Inflation raged at more than 13%. Unemployment reached more than 10% some months. The Soviet Union was on the march. Energy prices were spiking. The America we envision in our nightmares is what we actually experienced in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  (We still have not reached those levels of unemployment and we have essentially no inflation at all.)  Ronald Reagan’s presidency marked a turning point for our country. It really was morning in America. He was a great man and a great American.

The photo, BTW, is Alex in 2003 with a life-sized statue of Ronald Reagan at the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City.