FDR 23

If Americans think they know anything about the 32nd president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and many, especially young people, do not, in addition to being elected president to three terms or was that four (it was four), it is that he brought the nation out of the Great Depression and with stellar leadership guided this country to the successful winning of WWII. There is much to be disputed about those assertions as will be made clear in this essay. Roosevelt called himself a “trickster” and said he did not allow his left hand to know what his right hand was doing.

Let’s address one oft made charge that Roosevelt ‘knew’ the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, but did not warn the military commanders there because he wanted a surprise attack to get the American people in the proper frame of mind for war. There is no credible evidence to support that claim. It is one thing to ‘know’ something and quite another to posit that something ‘might’ happen. The Roosevelt administration and the military thought it far more likely that, if the Japanese were going to attack, it would be in the Philippines which they did days after Pearl Harbor. That Roosevelt goaded the Japanese into war by embargoing gasoline, scrap metal, and rubber to attempt to discourage their imperialistic ambitions in the Pacific is also beyond dispute.

Despite manifest shortcomings and wrongheaded policies and even though it can not be asserted apodictically, I believe that Roosevelt was an effective war time leader. Few if any American political leaders realized the inevitability of war with the Axis powers and took action to prepare for it as did Roosevelt. Because of his blindness to the nefarious ambitions of the Soviet Union and perhaps also because of his fondness for socialism I think it not unreasonable to believe that Roosevelt would have been a disaster for America and the West as a leader during the Cold War. Remember, as storied and praised as Winston Churchill was as prime minister of Great Britain during the war, he and his conservative party were turned out of power little more than two months after the end of the war in Europe. Never one not to have the last word, Churchill said of his Labor Party successor as prime minister, Clement Attlee, “He is a very modest man…..and has much to be modest about.”

WWII is remembered as a ‘good’ war – the last good one fought by this country. Yet there are similarities with the current contentious War on Terrorism. Then, as now, many Americans did not want us to go to war and even after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (similar to the twin towers and pentagon attacks), they were not, to say the least, in dithyrambic agreement with our war with Germany and Italy (cf. Iraq). Many of the policies of the Roosevelt administration were repudiated by the public and congress. And especially the “New Deal” element of the Democrat party lost power and favor during the war. Having the idea that everyone was on board and enthusiastically supported Roosevelt’s efforts in conducting the war is to misread history. For a fuller analysis and more detail of the FDR administration in peace and war I would recommend the 2001 book The New Dealers’ War by Thomas Fleming.

When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936 he won by one of the greatest landslides in American history: 27,751,612 to 16,681,913 against Kansas Republican governor Alf Landon. The New Deal was in full flower – Democrats had majorities of 334 to 89 in the House and 75 to 17 in the Senate. Can anyone imagine such lopsided political power today? However, there is more to it than meets the eye and therein also lies a cautionary tale of hubris and overconfidence.

Roosevelt decided to use his newly enhanced popularity to exercise control over the judiciary with legislation to give him the opportunity to appoint 50 new federal judges including seven additional associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court - the infamous ‘court-packing’ plan. A funny thing happened on the way to fulfilling this disreputable démarche. There was immediate opposition to this legislative bill led by Southern conservative Democrats (remember this was still the time of the Democrat “Solid South”) and traditional Western Democrats. For once the senate Republicans played it smart by remaining mute while the Democrats tore themselves apart. The Gallop poll which had gain credibility by forecasting the Democrat landslide in the 1936 election showed that the American people were split on the issue 45% for, 45% against, and 10% undecided. The senate buried the plan 70-20.

There were more political embarrassments to come than just the overwhelming and humiliating court packing defeat. In fact Roosevelt’s travails were just beginning. In the 1938 mid-term elections Roosevelt revealed an all too common characteristic for him – his vindictiveness. He set out to defeat 13 of the mostly Southern and Western Democrats who had led the court bill fight. He went to their home states and spoke against them or made hostile statements about them in the newspapers. FDR was never one to shrink from traducing his political opponents. All but one of them were resoundingly reelected. As much as politics was Roosevelt’s métier he was not always successful in his machinations. In the mid-term election the Republicans went from 88 to 170 seats in the House and gained eight seats in the Senate.

Additionally there was an intensifying of the recession in 1937. The stock market went into a nosedive and by November 1937 unemployment had soared to 11 million with another 3 million working only part time. Statistics showed that the United States was lagging far behind other countries in recovering from the depression. American national income in 1937 was 86% of the 1929 high water mark while Great Britain’s was 124%. Japan’s employment figure was 75% above the 1929 number. Chile, Sweden, and Australia had economic growth rates in the range of 20% compared to the United States’ dismal -7%. At a cabinet meeting a seemingly traumatized and possibly paranoid Roosevelt complained that the new economic collapse was the result of “a concerted effort by big business and concentrated wealth to drive the market down just to create a situation unfavorable to me.”

There was some doubt that Roosevelt would be nominated as the Democrat candidate for president in 1940. The country was not doing particularly well economically and there was resistance to breaking the maximum two term rule initiated by George Washington. When Roosevelt made it known that he wanted Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace to replace John Nance Garner of Texas on the ticket as vice-president he almost had a revolt on his hands. Wallace was far too liberal, not to say outright socialistic, for most Democrat politicians and operatives at that time. His nomination was saves by Eleanor Roosevelt who had a reservoir of good will not only with Democrats, but with most people in the country. She flew to Chicago to plead with the delegates to give her husband the man he wanted to help him bear the immense burden they were placing on his shoulders. Wallace received 627 votes out of 1,100 delegates present. That meant that 43% of these official spokesmen for the Democrat Party went home in an ill tempered frame of mind.

Harry Truman was up for reelection in 1940 to the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt and the people in his administration did not support him in the Democrat primary which was tantamount to the election in Missouri. Truman still won by a slim 8000 vote margin and his victory meant that he was not beholden to Roosevelt in his term in the senate. This political independence for the man from Independence, MO may be what allowed him to gain the recognition in his senate activities that propelled him to the vice-presidency and as a consequence the presidency.

In 1941 after being reelected to the Senate, Harry Truman was appointed to head a committee to investigate military preparation and contracts. What was called the Truman Committee reported that in 1942 German submarines sank 12 million tons of Allied shipping. The U.S. Navy, having stonewalled about the U-boat offensive along the East Coast, which accounted for a heavy percentage of these staggering losses, issued a furious denial. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox sneered that the report was based on “common gossip.” The perspicacious politician Truman asked one of the Republican members of the committee to warn Knox that he would be called before the committee to settle the argument. Knox hastily issued a statement saying the figures were correct. Early in 1943 an investigation by the Truman Committee revealed almost incredible carelessness and corruption in the manufacture of aircraft engines by the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical Corporation. In secret committee hearings the army sent an array of generals and colonels who told lie after lie claiming they never saw or heard of a defective engine by Curtiss-Wright. Truman published a scathing report on the company’s defective inspection procedures and malfunctioning engines. The company launched an intense attack on the Truman Committee and for a time even the New York Times was convinced that Truman was wrong. Instead of going public with the dispute, Truman sent the committee’s chief counsel to the Times to tell them the truth and invited Under Secretary of War Robertson, who had declared that the Army Air Force had never received a single defective engine from Curtiss-Wright, to his office for a chat. The Under Secretary soon admitted he was wrong and the newspaper attacks on the committee stopped. If you now begin to understand why, seemingly against the odds, Harry Truman would be chosen or at least not opposed by Roosevelt to be his Vice-Presidential candidate in 1944, these examples of competency and honesty should be instructive.

The election on November 5, 1940 was a record 49+ million votes cast. Roosevelt/Wallace received 27,244,160 versus 22,305,198 for the Republican ticket headed by the liberal Wendell Willkie who had been a Democrat until 1938. This was a comfortable margin for Roosevelt, but less than half of the 11,000,000 vote difference in 1936.

In late 1940 Admiral James O. Richardson strongly recommended to President Roosevelt that the U.S. fleet be stationed at San Diego instead of Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt demurred stating the fleet in Hawaii would have a “restraining influence” on Japan. This made no sense whatsoever because 1.) the fleet would still be 5600 miles away from the Philippines and even farther away from other vulnerable places such as The Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Malaya; 2.) the fleet was not ready for war because it lacked enough tankers, supply ships, and training to operate at sea for long periods of time; 3.) the fleet was diminished by the reassignment of many ships to the Atlantic. When Admiral Richardson told Roosevelt that the navy did not have trust and confidence in the administration over this policy the president was offended and replaced Richardson after the 1940 presidential election. The good admiral could have counted himself lucky because his replacement was Admiral Husband Kimmel who became the scapegoat of the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In August 1941 Roosevelt met with British Prime Minster Winston Churchill in Placentia Bay, New Foundland for the Atlantic Charter conference. With Britain at war with Germany, Churchill urged Roosevelt to bring America into the war on the side of Britain. Roosevelt responded that he “planned to wage war, but not declare it” and would become more and more “provocative.” The U.S. House of Representatives just had extended the 1940 Selective Service Act by a single vote thereby keeping a million men in the army’s ranks for another 6 months. Roosevelt had reason to be cautious and devious about his intent to get the United States into the war against Germany and so he was. It came natural for Roosevelt to scheme, mislead, and to downright prevaricate.

In the opening months of 1942 the United States was being humiliated on both oceans. While the Japanese army and navy rampaged through the Far East, Germans submarines wrecked havoc along the U.S. east coast. By June 1942 German subs had sunk 397 oil tankers, cargo ships, and assorted other types. The Roosevelt administration stonewalled on this catastrophe and the American public had no idea of the magnitude of what happened even though a few swimmers occasionally saw a ship being sunk. Secretary of the Navy Knox declared that the number of German U-boats being sunk was classified for “security” reasons. In fact none was sunk. Have you heard about this before?

In a fireside chat on February 23, 1942 Roosevelt solemnly assured the American people that “your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching or losing heart.” He then proceeded to minimize American losses at Pearl Harbor. Instead of admitting the Japanese had sunk six battleships, damaged two others plus three cruisers and two destroyers, he claimed only “three ships” had been permanently put out of commission. Roosevelt then proceeded to tell an even bigger whopper. He said that “to date, including Pearl Harbor we have destroyed considerably
more Japanese planes than they have destroyed ours.” At Pearl Harbor 180 American planes were completely destroyed and 128 damaged. Japanese losses were 29 planes. In the Philippines, within two weeks, General MacArthur’s 277 plane air force had been reduced to a handful of fighters and a few bombers. By the time FDR spoke these too were gone. If you are going to tell lies in war time to attempt to boost morale that is one thing (although the Bush haters would not concede that), but don’t insult the character of the American people by first saying you know they can handle the truth then not telling them the unpleasant facts.

Knowing that Democrats would have a fight on their hands in the 1942 mid-term elections, Roosevelt wanted to change the odds by launching an invasion of North Africa before the vote. To minimize causalities the military wanted a moonless night, but the next one on October 8th was too soon for proper preparation. The one after that was on November 8th, five days after the election. The GOP gained 44 seats in the House, leaving the Democrats with a slim 8 vote majority. In the Senate the Republicans gained 9 seats. Without the largely conservative Solid South, the Democrats would have been in the minority. Thomas Dewey won the governorship in New York which was the first time since 1920 for a Republican and in California Republican Earl Warren handily beat incumbent liberal Democrat governor Culbert Olson. Two even more personal bitter pills for FDR were the reelections of Congressman Clare Hoffman of Michigan who once called Roosevelt a “crazy conceited megalomaniac” and right-wing Republican Hamilton Fish who represented the district including Hyde Park. Roosevelt spent considerable time campaigning in his own district against Fish – all to no avail.

On January 9, (for me personally a most auspicious day) 1943 Roosevelt began a top secret train trip to Florida. There he and his entourage boarded planes for North Africa to meet Winston Churchill for the 10 day Casablanca (Morocco) Conference. At its conclusion Roosevelt declared that the two allies had reached complete agreement on the future conduct of the war. FDR was being his usual disingenuous self. The precise opposite was closer to the truth. General George Marshall was so infuriated that the British refused to agree to a cross-channel invasion in 1943 that he threatened to shift American troops and resources to an all-out effort in the Pacific. At the concluding remarks before reporters Roosevelt invoked the name of American Civil War general U.S. Grant who early in that war was known as (U)nconditional (S)urrender Grant. Likewise Roosevelt said the Allies should pursue a policy of unconditional surrender against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Churchill did not publicly disagree, but privately was dumbfounded and dismayed by a stated policy that he thought could negatively impact the war. As Roosevelt continued pursuing this policy Churchill’s worst fears would be realized.

One of the New Deal’s alphabet agencies was the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) run by Roosevelt’s uncle, Frederick Delano. In March 1943 FRD sent congress two hefty reports, the first was titled After the War – Full Employment and the second After the War – Toward Security. These reports called for creation of a nation transportation agency, the consolidation of the nation’s railroads, a government role in developing air transportation, permanent public works program, a big expansion in social security benefits, and federally funded medical care for the poor. There was no better proof of the New Dealers’ fondness for a government controlled economy. The Wall Street Journal called the package a “totalitarian plan” and denounced it as an enemy of liberty and prosperity. The Senate cut the requested funding for the NRPB from a modest $1,000,000 (think $10,000,000 in today’s dollars) to a pathetic $200,000. In conference the House insisted that the program be entirely eliminated. The Senate went alone. The president had previously issued an executive order imposing a salary cap on the rich. A majority of House Democrats joined Republicans to repeal the order by a huge veto-proof margin. The Senate piled on with a 74-3 vote to kill it. For better or worst the country would face the post-war era relying on the free enterprise system.

On July 25, 1943 the Italian Fascist General Council deposed Benito Mussolini and appointed retired 72 year old Field Marshall Pietro Badoglio as prime minister. Two days later before the House of Commons Churchill said, “It would be a grave mistake…to break down the whole structure and expression of the Italian state.” - another signal of his readiness to negotiate with Badoglio. That same day General Eisenhower broadcast a statement offering the Italians a chance to surrender “immediately.” If the Italians stopped supporting the Germans and returned all allied prisoners in their hands, “the ancient liberties and traditions of your country will be restored.” There was no mention of unconditional surrender. The next day FDR went on the radio and unilaterally declared that “our terms to Italy are still the same as our terms to Germany and Japan – unconditional surrender. We will have no truck with Fascism in any shape or manner. We will permit no vestige of Fascism to remain.” The prospect of a relatively bloodless surrender of Italy went down the drain. A dismayed Eisenhower could only obey.

When FDR took office in 1933 he had already decided to recognize the Soviet Union. He moved cautiously toward this goal as the administration argued that trade with the USSR would be large and profitable and would help revive the American economy. There was a serious economic, not to say moral, impediment to these plans. Stalin instigated famine and terror in the Ukraine that had killed an estimated 10 million farmers in 1932-33 as he tried to impose a forced collectivization on those kulaks. So intense was this pogrom that at its peak 25,000 people were dying per day (As I have mention in a previous essay read Robert Conquest’s book Harvest of Sorrow for the full story of this horrendous barbarity). Rather than trying to ascertain the truth of this horror the Roosevelt administration relied on the reporting of the New York Times’ agitprop Walter Duranty who grandly assured his readers that the famine was “mostly bunk.” Incredibly Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Soviet Union in 1932. There was no excuse for the American government or the New York Times for accepting the Duranty account of what was happening in the Ukraine as there were many other reports of the induced famine. Writers such as Frederick Burchall of the New York Times and Brits Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones told what was really going on and were unmercifully attacked by Communists and liberals in the West.

At the Tehran conference in late November 1943 between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin the Soviets agreed, in principle, to give the American Air Force landing rights to six airfields in Western Russia so that the American pilots would not have to make the long dangerous flight back to England after bombing runs in Eastern Germany. The Soviets effectively reneged on that agreement despite, at the expressed command of President Roosevelt, the Soviets being given a copy of the famed Norden bombsight, as part of the agreement, even though this bombsight had not been shared with the British.

In the spring of 1944 Roosevelt’s old friend, Commander George Earle went to the Oval Office to show Roosevelt irrefutable evidence that the Soviets, not the Germans were the perpetrators of the Katyn Massacre in Poland where 10,000 Polish military officers were murdered. FDR dismissed it with a wave of his hand saying “George, this is entirely German propaganda and a German plot. I am absolutely convinced the Russians did not do this.” This was just one of many times that Roosevelt, despite the evidence, did not want to believe the worst about the Soviets. One is led to think there was much about the Soviets and their communistic system that Roosevelt admired.

At the Democrat convention in the summer of 1944 the incumbent vice-president Henry Wallace received 429 votes for the vice-presidency on the first ballot of the 589 needed to win. Harry Truman was second with 319 and the rest scattered among the favorite sons (I suppose today one would say favorite sons & daughters or perhaps favorite children). Even though the convention had been in session for 6 hours and it was nearly dinner time the Truman supporters decided to gamble and call for an immediate second ballot, risking Wallace getting enough votes to win. The gamble paid off because first Oklahoma switched from their favorite son candidate to Truman then Maryland and several other states also switched. The tally stayed close at 477 for Truman and 473 for Wallace until Senators Bankhead of Alabama, Lucas of Illinois, and Barkley of Kentucky changed their votes to Truman. As is the usual course of action at political conventions, there was a stampede towards Truman with the final vote of 1,051 for Truman and 105 for Wallace. It is interesting to speculate how much the course of history not only for the United States, but for the world would be different negatively had Wallace remained the vice-president in 1944.

Goaded by Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, in the summer and fall of 1944 Roosevelt pushed on with his “unconditional surrender” policy towards Germany, ranting “Too many people here and in England hold to the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place – that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.” This wrongheaded policy which rejected the many overtures from Germans in the military and diplomatic corps prolonged the war in Europe and caused unnecessary death and suffering. In December 1944 the Wehrmacht surprised the Americans and the British by assembling a quarter of a million men and 1000 tanks and smashed out of the perimeter of the Ardennes in a desperate attempt to recapture the port of Antwerp, Belgium and strand the Allied forces on the battlefield without food or gasoline. The fierce fighting at Bastogne in the snow and mud and at other more obscure crossroads in the ensuing Battle of the Bulge cost the Americans 80,000 casualties. Overall the Americans suffered 418,800 casualties after the breakout from Normandy and the capture of Paris. The British and Canadians had 107,000 casualties. Including German and Soviet military and German civilians from Allied bombing the total number of post D-Day casualties approaches 2,000,000. Adding in the Jews killed in the last year of the war could double the 2,000,000 figure.

How much if any of this carnage can be laid at the doorstep of the White House owing to Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender” policy? Quantifying the numbers is impossible, but certainly there is amply evidence that the efforts to overthrow the Nazi regime were greatly discouraged if not actually impeded by what the Roosevelt administration promulgated. Given the information that was known about the even then millions of Holocaust victims the personal animus of Henry Morgenthau is explainable by his religion, but what about FDR? Perhaps it was his vindictiveness which was previously displayed when, by executive order, he sent an estimated 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans to internment camps in the United States at the start of the war.

In the 1944 presidential campaign, Republican candidate and New York governor Thomas Dewey accused the Roosevelt administration of being heavily influenced by the communist head of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organization) union Sidney Hillman and Communist Party boss Earl Browder. Roosevelt sarcastically fired back by stating that “Never before in my lifetime has a campaign been filled with such misrepresentation, distortion, and falsehood.” Any candidate for high office who claimed the American government was infiltrated by communists was revealing ”a shocking lack of trust in America.” According to the Venona decrypts which were made public in the 1990’s Roosevelt has no less than 329 communists in his administration including several at the highest levels of the White House, among them Lauchlin Currie; Alger Hiss and Lawrence Duggan (he was a close friend of Edward R. Morrow – see my essay on Joseph McCarthy) in the State Department; and Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department. Although FDR likely did not know there were actual Soviet spies in the government, if he did not know these people were so overly friendly with the Soviet Union that they posed a security risk, then it was, like the Katyn Massacre, because he did not want to believe it.

On March 9, 1945 a squadron of American B-29’s totaling 172 aircraft took of from Guam and dropped 1165 tons of incendiary bombs from an altitude 4,900 feet on Tokyo a city of then 5,000,000 people. It was estimated that almost 88,000 Japanese died and 1,000,000 homes damaged or destroyed. There were more causalities than in any military action in the history of the world up to that time. No public protests were forthcoming in the U.S. or Britain because the War Department had released the details of the atrocities of the early 1942 Bataan Death March.

On February 3, 1945 in a joint military operation between the United States and Great Britain call Thunderclap, the city of Berlin was fire bombed resulting in an estimated 25,000 civilian deaths; in the following few days Munich and Leipzig were hit; it was Dresden’s turn next with about 60,000 deaths and much of the historic city destroyed.

On August 6, 1945 the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima with 90,000 people dead that day and perhaps as many as 200,000 dead as a result of radiation poisoning and burns within five years. On August 9th the B-29 Bock’s Car (Did you know that was the name of the second bomber or care and who comes up with those names?) dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki killing approx. 40,000 people immediately and circa 140,000 within five years. These initial killings were of the same magnitude as the conventional bombing of Tokyo were they not? Why then the subsequent hand wringing over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not Tokyo, Berlin, and Dresden?

Shortly after Harry Truman was sworn in as president he had a meeting in the Oval Office with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov who was on his was to a conference in San Francisco on the formation of the United Nations. Molotov wanted to know if Truman would honor the commitments of Roosevelt regarding the Soviet Union. Truman assured him he would, but then said the United States was “getting tired” of waiting for the USSR to implement the principles of the Declaration on Liberated Europe in Poland and other countries occupied by the Red Army. Molotov blusteringly started to interrupt him when Truman said “I’m not interested in propaganda” and ordered Molotov to tell Stalin that he was concerned about the situation in Eastern Europe, reminding Molotov that friendship required both countries to live up to their obligations. It could not be maintained on the basis of a “one way street.” The translator, career diplomat Charles Bohlen, reported that Molotov turned “a little ashen” and huffed: “I have never been talked to that way in my life.” Truman responded: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.” When Molotov tried to get the conversation back on the American commitments Truman said, “That will be all Mr. Molotov.” Bohlen never forgot how much he enjoyed translating Truman’s words. “They were probably the first sharp words uttered by an American president to a high ranking Soviet official during the war.”

Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails 22

The title of this essay was unashamedly taken from the 2006 book MR. LINCOLN’S T-MAILS: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War by Tom Wheeler. Even though a book title can not be copyrighted and therefore I may use any title I choose with impunity, I did not plagiarize this one because, quod erat demonstrandum, I have just given credit for the title to the author of the book.

A sometimes heard apothegm is: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Despite that statement being a cliché, it often contains an element of truth. Practically instant communication with the modern technologies of e-mails and cellular voice and text messaging seems completely new to young moderns, yet is it? No, it isn’t. Two inventors named Cooke and Wheatstone patented a telegraph that worked by electromagnetism in 1837. Later that year Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872) developed the first successful electromagnetic telegraph in the United States and made a singular contribution with his invention of a series of dots and dashes called Morse Code to send messages.

Abraham Lincoln was the first American president to have almost instant communication with his military field commanders in time of war by his use of the then new technology of the telegraph. It is altogether fitting and proper that this was so. Lincoln is still the only U.S. president to hold a patent. As young man, Lincoln invented a devise to re-ballast a boat stuck on a sandbar by use of adjustable buoyant chambers. Although the devise was never built, this does show that Lincoln was attuned to new technology to solve old problems.

As would be natural, even for someone as open and receptive to new ideas as Lincoln, the concept of a president communicating with electronic speed with his officers in the field was not speedily embraced. With the American Civil War starting in April 1861, Lincoln sent few telegraphs to his generals in 1861. This quickly changed as 1861 passed into 1862. Once Lincoln realized the great advantage of this new communication tool he utilized it more and more. Strangely, or perhaps not, Lincoln did not have a telegraph link tied into the White House. Instead he would walk across the street from the White House to the telegraph office. This may have provided him with a diversion from his other duties and allowed him to get away from the office seekers and other visitors to the White House who devoured his precious time.

Another example of there being “nothing new under the sun” concerning Lincoln is his address at the Cooper Institute in New York City on February 27, 1860. In this major political speech Lincoln used the expression “that is cool.” Of course the meaning was different from what that expression means now. Lincoln was referring to threat by the Southern states to secede from the Union, then blaming their decision on the North. Or as Lincoln put it: “A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’”

Tom Wheeler tells the story that when Lincoln would go to the telegraph office he would start reading all of the incoming telegraph messages whether they were intended for him, his Secretary of War, or the Commanding General in Washington. When he came to the last one he had read in his previous visit he would say, “Well boys, I am down to the raisins.” After this occurred a few times the curiosity one of the telegraph operators got the better of him and he asked, “Mr. President, what do you mean when you say ‘I am down to the raisins?’” Lincoln told the story (as is well known, he had a million of them) of the girl back in Springfield, Illinois who, at her birthday party, over indulged in food, got sick, and started throwing up. The last thing she had eaten were raisins for dessert. A doctor was called and in examining the basin where she had “cast up her accounts” saw the small black objects, the raisins, in the basin and told the anxious parents that the danger had passed as the child was “down to the raisins.” So said Lincoln, when I see the last message I had read on my previous visit, I know I need go no further. Whether it was something trivial or important, Lincoln had a talent for illustrating the point with a simple but appropriate story (see my essay: Lincoln Stories).

As anyone who has ever seen people try to ‘micro-manage’ every job, business deal, political problem, or any situation, knows, instant communication can be more of a bane than a blessing. Lincoln did not fall into that trap. He did get involved in the details of earlier, to varying degrees incompetent generals, but once he had the winning team of Ulysses Grant and William Sherman in place he mostly deferred to their judgments. When he appointed Grant to the rank of Lieutenant General and overall army commander he told him, “I do not know, nor do I want to know the details of your military plans for defeating the Confederate armies.”

Lincoln was what would be known today as a hands-on, walking-around executive. He realized the importance of personal contact with his administrative assistants, politicians, and military commanders. When personal contact was not possible, Lincoln also was aware that written communications in the form of letters were sometimes necessary and more appropriate than the more limited telegraph messages. Few people, including U.S. presidents, were better at communicating than Lincoln. There are several examples where Lincoln would write letters to his military commanders when they missed an opportunity to deliver decisive blows to their Confederate foes. When he was finished writing the letter Lincoln would quietly file it away because he instinctively knew the general would resign if he received it. It was a cathartic exercise for Lincoln to write his criticism thereby relieving some of the stress he was under without causing an action he might regret.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the communication power of the telegraph contributed materially to the preservation of the United States as one indivisible nation. Without President Lincoln having the means to interject himself into the important daily actions and decisions of his field commanders, the outcome of the war might well have not been decisive for the North. Of course it is one thing to have the technology to do this and quite another to possess the wisdom and skill to make these interventions useful. Whether it was fate or luck that the country had Lincoln as its president at that time, the nation then, and in the future, profited from it.

AN OFFAL TALE – 1854 LONDON 21

Even if this is not an awful story it certainly is offal. American author Steven Johnson states in his 2006 book The Ghost Map, London, England in 1854 was a city of circa 2,500,000 inhabitants. There were no sewers, no municipal garbage pickup, and no reliable clean water supply. How on earth did the people in the city get by? They did manage after a fashion with human ingenuity and coping mechanisms, but not quite up to our standards - this being written as an understatement. This next part gets a bit dicey (again an understatement) so if you have a queasy stomach you may want to skip past it, but if you persist definitely make sure there is a decent interval between reading it and your next meal. On the other hand it may have a desired purgatorial weight loss effect.

Quite simply as the city grew, entrepreneurial opportunities developed. They were filled by lower echelon types and were not desirable jobs, but voluntary and necessary ones. According to Steven Johnson there were bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredger men, mud-larks, dustmen, bunters, toshers, shore men, and especially night-soil men to the tune collectively of 100,000 strong. Those people were the ultimate recyclers who would make modern day environmentalists green with both envy and revulsion. The toshers walked along the muddy banks of the Thames starting at daybreak looking for bits of scrape metal, especially copper. Along side were the mud-larks, often children (child labor laws were a little lax, not to say nonexistent at that time), scavenging for what the toshers deign to harvest: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope, etc. The pure-finders name, as you might have surmised, is purely a euphemism. Those people collected dog manure from the streets to be used in leather tanning.

There was a niche for all of the recyclers and at the top of the heap, so to speak, were the night-soil men. Just so there is no misunderstanding I am referring to the products of not only the human alimentary system, but also that of cattle some people kept in the city. In describing those people’s work I will not be any more scatological than necessary, but we are talking about human waste from 2,500,000 people and cow dung are we not?

As I have already stated there was not a sewer system in London at that time. So what happened to the human refuse? Oddly the water closet (flush toilet) had been invented in the 16th century, but didn’t become popular until the late 18th century when a watchmaker, Alexander Cummings, and a cabinetmaker, Joseph Braham, came out with an improved version. Water closet installation increased 10 fold from 1824 to 1844. Popularity really increased when a further improved version was displayed in the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. According to one survey the average London household consumption of water increased from 160 gallons per day in 1850 to 244 gallons per day by 1856 due to the increased use of the WC. Yes, as you have foreseen, there was an ever increasing problem. Where did all this flushed egesta go? The same place it did when collected in slop jars and bed pans, but with increased volume, directly into the existing cesspools which were even more likely to overflow.

The night-soil men did their best trying to keep up. Theirs was a high paying job relative to the other recyclers, but hardly necessary to say, disgusting. Aggravating the health conditions was the expansion of the city which meant increased distances the night-soil men had to haul their loads to the outlying farms, thereby increasing the price they charged. Some people and especially landlords resisted paying these prices so they just let the waste material accumulate in the cesspits causing overflow into the basements of houses and flats.

Today there are in excess of 50 cities in the world with populations of 3,000,000 or more (the cities proper not the adjacent metropolitan areas). Mumbai (Bombay) is the largest with 13+ million and London has 7 ½ million. Try to imagine what conditions would be like with the same lack of refuse relieving infrastructure as London in 1854. You can try to imagine it if you wish. I will pass.

I believe this is enough detail of the underlying causes of the cholera outbreak in London in 1854. Around 10,700 people died of cholera which is a mere fraction of the deaths caused by the Black Death which scourged Europe in 1347-52. The real story here is that this was the first time a true scientific examination and solution were realized in a bacterial epidemic.

Cholera which is frequently called Asiatic cholera or epidemic cholera is a severe diarrheal disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Transmission to humans is usually by water and occasionally by food. Some evidence suggests that the natural environment of V. cholerae is aquatic. This characteristic makes it authochthonous to humans. We are aquatic creatures in our origin. Our blood is 84% water and contains some of the same minerals as seawater although not in the same amounts and embryos float in watery fluid in the womb. No wonder those little Vibrio cholerae like us.

V. cholerae produces cholera toxin whose action on the mucosal epithelium is responsible for the characteristic diarrhea of the disease. In its extreme manifestation, cholera is one of the most rapidly fatal illnesses known. It is possible, although not usual, that a healthy person would die within 2-3 hours of the onset of symptoms if no treatment is provided. More commonly death will occur in 18 hours to several days. Recent epidemiologic research suggests that an individual’s susceptibility to cholera and other diarrheal infections is affected by their blood type. Those with type O are the most susceptible; those with type AB are the most resistant.

In order for enough V. cholerae to survive the hostile acidic conditions of the human stomach something like 1,000,000 or more of these bacteria must be ingested to cause cholera in normal healthy adults. Cholera kills by causing rapid dehydration. As the volume of blood is reduced and becomes more concentrated, the heart beats faster to maintain normal blood pressure to keep the vital organs, the kidneys and brain, functional. Non vital organs such as the gallbladder and spleen begin to shut down. Eventually, as water is continuously expelled, the heart fails to maintain adequate blood pressure as hypotension sets in; within hours vital organs shut down resulting in death. The cure is mostly low-tech. Treatment consists of aggressive rehydration and replacement of electrolytes either intravenously or with commercial or hand mixed sugar-salt solutions. Tetracycline, ciprofloxacin, and azithromycin antibiotics are also given to reduce the duration and severity of cholera. Without treatment the death rate is as high as 50%; with treatment the death rate is below 1%.

Dr. John Snow was the single most important person in solving the cause of the 1854 cholera outbreak in the Soho district of London. A young Dr. Snow had previously established his reputation by deducing the proper amount of ether or chloroform to give surgical patients having figuring out the relationship of the concentration of gas and temperature. He then engineered a state-of-the-art medical devise to deliver it. Dr Snow became the most sought after anesthesiologist in the city.

The long prevailing contagion theory of getting cholera, as with almost all diseases, was miasma - that is breathing in foul air. The word miasma comes from the Greek word miasma meaning pollution. If the environment smelled bad it seemed natural to conclude that breathing in foul odors would give one disease. The name malaria is derived from the Italian word malaria (mala, bad and aria, air). In other words it was once thought that malaria was caused by breathing bad air rather than being caused by microscopic parasites introduced into the human bloodstream by the bite of female anopheles mosquitoes. It is interesting that in spite of evidence to the contrary there were and still are concepts and beliefs that are so strongly held that any attempt to challenge these ideas and beliefs are unfailingly repelled.

As I have previously written, in the 1920’s & 30’s German and other European chemists could not get past the firm belief that molecules from chemical dyes were the active ingredients in anti-bacterial drugs until a French lab, quite by chance, experimented with sulfanilamide alone and proved conclusively it was the anti-bacterial agent. In my opinion the modern miasma theorists are the people who insist that global warming is caused only by human pollution. This crowd will simply not entertain any suggestion that other mechanisms might be responsible for temperature variation on earth and they traduce anyone who questions their belief. As near as I can tell these people never address the incontrovertible fact that the earth has undergone even more temperature and weather extremes over millions of years as what might be happening now. If the earth’s temperature has been both hotter and colder, and wetter and dryer, and it has, when primitive humans were incapable of causing pollution, than anything experienced currently, then it is surely a paralogism to dismiss, without comprehensive investigation, those same causative factors now as occurred in the past. According to author Steven Johnson it is interesting that in the days before the cholera outbreak in Soho in August 1854, London was sweltering from a heat wave with the temperatures in the upper 80’s to lower 90’s degrees Fahrenheit for several days. Do you suppose that could have been due to Global Warming?

Even though Anton Van Leeuwenhoek of the Netherlands developed high resolution microscopes in the 4th quarter of the 18th century, microscopes were still not powerful enough for Dr. John Snow to see the V. cholerae in the Soho water supply in 1854. What was it then that alerted Dr. Snow to the cause of the cholera outbreak being contaminated drinking water? First Snow as a medical doctor was trained to observe physical symptoms and he understood that bodily effects of a disease were likely to offer important clues about the disease’s original cause. In the case of cholera, far and away the most pronounced change in the body lay in the small intestine. The disease invariably began with that terrible expulsion of fluids and fecal matter. Snow couldn’t say what kind of element was behind cholera’s catastrophic attack on the human body, but he knew from observation that it launched the attack from the gut. The respiratory system, on the other hand, was largely unaffected by cholera’s ravages. For Snow that suggested an obvious etiology: cholera was ingested not inhaled. Also he was a polymath scientist who spotted certain patterns and he was not constrained by orthodox medical beliefs. He noticed that the cases of cholera were not randomly distributed, but occurred in clusters and quickly realized that the area around one certain water pump (on Broad Street) had a higher density of cholera sickness and death than other municipal water pumps in Soho. There could have been other causes for this distribution, but after questioning the residents of Soho about where they and the ones who died got their drinking water, using statistical methods, Dr. Snow constricted a map of the area with the locations of people who died of cholera. For those cases which did not fit the pattern, the fact that Dr. Snow was a ten year resident of Soho and lived six blocks from the Broad Street pump gave him the opportunity to question people about their drinking water habits. It turned out that the people who lived close to the Broad Street pump and did not get sick, for various reasons got their water from other Soho pumps and most of those who lived farther away and got sick used the Broad Street pump water.

Another resident of Soho, Rev. Henry Whitehead, at first did not believe John Snow’s theory that water from the Broad Street pump was the source of the cholera epidemic. He was an intelligent and open minded man, who after examining all of the evidence, became a firm supporter of Dr. Snow. If you think the London city and Soho district officials and other medical men rejected miasma as the infecting agent and accepted Dr. Snow’s water bourn theory of cholera, then you have underestimated the tenacity which many beliefs are held. It was not until 1866 during another London cholera epidemic, eight tears after Dr. John Snow died, that there was wide acceptance that contaminated water was the source of cholera infections. I believe it would also be a mistake to condemn the narrow mindedness of many people of that time when there is ample evidence of people today clinging to beliefs which are unsupported by facts and could not stand up to careful exegesis.

Think of the millions of folks in this country and multiple that by an order of magnitude or two in the rest of the world for those who believe John F. Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy by: (they can pick one or a combination that suits them) the anti-Castro Cubans, the pro-Castro Cubans, the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, Lyndon Johnson, the mob, or the big, bad wolf in the Little Red Riding Hood yarn. Then there are those who are firmly convinced that FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor and when. How about the chimerical people who just know aliens from outer space are living among us and their proof is given by the Roswell, New Mexico incident (you know, the remains of a crashed high altitude weather balloon which was hysterically interpreted by the logic challenged to be the remnants of an alien space ship)? Further there are the bedlamites who insist that strange and inexplicable disappearances have repeatedly occurred in the Bermuda Triangle caused by extra-terrestrial mischief. I don’t agree with some of what the late astronomer Carl Sagan has said, but when he stated that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence to be believed he was right on.

The latest loonies are the corybantic true believers, headed by the sophist Al Gore, who are trying to convince us that man made Global Warming will wreak havoc on the entire world before this decade or the next expire. Reminds me of the 1960’s to 1980’s energumen and popular propagandist, Paul Ehrlich (see my essay Fools, Frauds, & Fakes), who predicted that “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion [there are currently about 6.5 billion].” He also wrote that by 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years because of the use of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million. There is nothing substantially different about the myrmidons of Paul Ehrlich then and Al Gore now. Spare me the doomsday scenarios be they caused by pesticides, pollution, or miasma. If you deduce that I am more than adumbrating the use of reason and rationality in examining current and historical phenomena you are correct.

THOMAS SOWELL 20

This essay will be just a synopsis, with an occasional comment by me, of a 2006 book by Thomas Sowell titled Ever Wonder Why? which in turn is a collections of articles he wrote in the past three or four years. Dr. Sowell is a septuagenarian national treasure. He is arguably the foremost living economist and social commentator in the country since Nobel laureate Milton Friedman died last year. If you had any doubt on that score it should be dispelled after you read this essay, but if you still are not sure then I suggest you read some of the many books he has written in the past 30 years.

A current mantra is that we “need” immigrants, legal or illegal, to do the work Americans will not do. What we “need” depends on what it costs and what we are willing to pay. A billionaire might “need” a private jet, but families once did not “need” electricity.

Leaving price out of the considerations is probably the source of more fallacies in economics than any other misconception. At current wages for low-level jobs and current levels of welfare, there are indeed many jobs that Americans will not take. The fact that immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, take those jobs is the very reason that wage levels will not rise enough to attract American workers.

This is elementary supply and demand. Yet we continue to hear about the “need” for immigrants to do jobs that Americans will not do – even though these are all jobs that generations of Americans have done before mass illegal immigration became a way of life in this country.

Economists tend to be unpopular because they remind people that everything has a cost – there is no free lunch. People know this, it just that they do not like to be reminded of it. Britain’s skyrocketing medical costs of taking care of things that people would never spend their own money on forces cutbacks and delays in more urgently needed medical treatments. One woman’s cancer operation was postponed so many times by the British health service that by the time the system could take her the cancer was inoperable and she died.

Economists could have told anyone in advance that making things “free” causes excessive use by some, leaving others with more urgent needs unsatisfied. Rent control, for example, has led to more housing being occupied by some, who would not have paid the market price for as large an apartment as they live in, while others can not find any housing in the city they can afford and have to live far away and commute to work.

There is no such thing as clean air; there is only air with varying degrees of impurities, varying amounts which can be removed at varying costs. Removing the kinds of particulates and gases that choke our lungs or otherwise threaten our health is usually not that expensive. However science is increasingly becoming capable of detecting and removing even more impurities with ever more insignificant consequences. Who is going to resist calls to “save the environment”? Only an economist is likely to ask, “Save it from what or from whom and at what cost?” Lunches don’t get free just because you do not see the price on the menu and economists don’t get popular by reminding people of that.

If you ask most people about the cost of medical care they will tell you how much they have to pay for a visit to their doctor’s office or their prescription drugs. These are not the cost of medical care – these are the prices paid. The difference between prices and costs is not just a fine distinction made by economists. Prices are what pay for costs and if they do not pay enough to cover the costs then supply will decline in quantity or quality or both. The average medical student graduates with a dept of about $100,000. The cost per doctor of running an office is more than $100 per hour. The average cost of developing a new pharmaceutical drug is circa $800,000,000. These are among the costs of medical care. All of the existing efforts to control the rising expense of medical care whether by government, insurance companies, or HMO’s are about holding down the amount of money they have to pay but, not about reducing the real costs.

Many of the politicians, as well as their constituents, who are in favor of imposing price controls on prescription drugs or importing Canadian price controls by importing American medicines from Canada, have not the slightest interest in curtailing frivolous lawsuits against doctors, hospitals, or drug companies which are enormous costs. If the bureaucratic hassles that doctors have to go through make their huge investment in time and money going to medical school not worthwhile then a shortage of qualified doctors will eventuate. Britain, which has had government medical care for more than ½ a century, has to import doctors from Third World countries where medical school standards are lower. As long as the numbers of medical doctors does not decline, politicians think the important thing is there is no diminution in supply. Patients will find out to their detriment what a decline in quality means.

For years we have been hearing about a water shortage in the western United States. To most people that might suggest there is just not enough water for all of the people in those states. To an economist this word has an entirely different meaning. They ask if there is a shortage then why doesn’t the price rise? If it did, some people would demand less and others would supply more until supply and demand balanced. Put differently, a shortage is a sign that the price is being kept artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely. That is precisely why there is a water shortage in the western states.

When media or political liberals express alarm about the national debt they reflectively call for increased taxation. They do not even think about, never mind call for, a reduction in government spending. We are endlessly reminded that the national debt has reached record levels during the Bush administration. That enables the liberal media to advocate raising taxes. Since we have a larger population and larger income than ever before, it should come as no surprise that we have a larger national debt. But what does it mean? If a billionaire has a larger personal debt than someone with a net worth of a few thousands of dollars is that cause for concern? Debt means nothing unless you compare it to your income or wealth. How does our current national debt compare with to our national income? As a percentage of national income our privately held national debt is lower than it was a decade ago during the Clinton administration when liberals did not seem at all panicked as they are today. What “tax cuts” cut is the tax rate. Tax revenues can rise, fall, or stay the same. Everything depends on what happens to income.

Tax revenues rose after the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960’s and the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980’s because incomes rose. Likewise incomes are rising during the Bush administration today.

India is now exporting wheat while malnutrition is a growing problem within India. This condition is both paradoxical and tragic, yet there was no mention of one key word in the Wall Street Journal where this story was written. That word is price. There can be a surplus of anything at any given time, but a chronic surplus of the same thing year after year means that the price is being artificially prevented from falling. Otherwise the excessive supply would drive the price down leading producers to produce less and consumers to consume more until the surplus is gone. What is happening is that the government of India is keeping the price of wheat and some other agriculture produce from falling. That is exactly what the American government has been doing for more than half of a century, leading to chronic agriculture surpluses here as well. Although Americans are suffering from obesity and India from malnutrition, the principle is the same.

Controls that keep prices from falling to the levels they would reach in response to supply and demand are not limited to agriculture price supports like those in India, but also minimum wage laws, which are equally common in countries around the world. Just as artificially high price for wheat set by government leads to a chronic surplus of wheat, so an artificially high price set by government for labor leads to a surplus of labor – better known as unemployment. Since all workers are not the same this unemployment is concentrated among the less skilled and less experienced workers. Many of them are simply priced out of a job.

In the United States, for example, the highest unemployment rates are almost invariably among black teenagers, but this was not always the case. Although the federal minimum law was passed in 1938, wartime inflation during the 2nd WW meant that the minimum wage law had no major effect until a new round of minimum wage increases in 1950. Unemployment rates among black teenagers before then were similar to white teenagers and a fraction of what they are today.

A caveat in Thomas Sowell’s philosophy is that he presupposes competitive markets are allowed to work. If monopoly, oligopoly, or oligopsony conditions exist then free and competitive markets can not function. Fortunately in a democratic and capitalistic society like ours, with only a few exceptions, we do have competitive markets. Some of the exceptions such as the cheaters at Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, and Arkadelphia were dealt with by government prosecution. More difficult to deal with is government interference with free markets such as by minimum wage laws and stringent and unnecessary controls on business.

At one time it was, and in many quarters still is, assumed that the 1929 stock market crash led to the Great Depression that lasted through the 1930’s. Now economists and other informed people have concluded that what the government did both deepened and extended the economic depression. Neither Republican President Herbert Hoover nor his Democratic successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had a clue about economics or a policy that made any sense. Both sought to keep prices, including wages, up, despite the fact that the money supply had declined by 1/3. How was the country supposed to buy all of the output at existing prices and employ all of the workers at existing wages when there was so much less money?

In reality it was Hoover, not Roosevelt, who first threw the power of the federal government into the effort to get the country out of the depression. In recent years it has become more widely acknowledged that Roosevelt’s New Deal was essentially Hoover’s policies raised to the next exponent. The fact that the first government effort to get the country out of the depression, by both Hoover and FDR, was followed by the longest depression in our history has not been lost on some economists. Quite apart from specific harm done by specific government programs, the general uncertainty generated by unpredictable government interventions made investors reluctant to make the long term commitments needed to generate more jobs, more output, and more purchasing power.

Not only did the Federal Reserve with its tight money policy and two presidents manage to make the Great Depression worst, but Congress did as well. When Congress passed the Hawley-Smoot tariff in 1930 (it could more accurately be called the Hoover-Hawley-Smoot bill) it contributed to a worldwide contraction in international trade as country after country tried to “save jobs” by protectionism. Professor Peter Temin of MIT has pointed out that in 1987 the “stock market fell almost exactly the same amount on almost exactly the same days of the year as 1929 and there was no depression. The Reagan administration was not the New Deal.

Charges of “price gouging” as occurred during hurricanes in Florida usually arise when prices are significantly higher than what people are used to. Florida’s laws in fact make it illegal to charge more in emergencies than the average price during the previous 30 day period. This raises questions that go to the heart of economics: What are prices for? What role do they play in the economy? Prices are not just arbitrary numbers plucked out of the air. Nor are the price levels you are used to any more special or “fair” than other prices that are higher or lower. What do prices do? They not only allow sellers to recover their costs, they force buyers to restrict how much they demand. More generally, prices cause goods and the resources that produce goods to flow in one direction through the economy rather than in a different direction.

How do “price gouging” and laws against it fit into this? When either supply or demand changes, prices change. When the law prevents this, as with Florida’s anti-price gouging laws, that reduces the flow of resources where they would be the most in demand. At the same time price controls reduces the need for the consumer to limit his demand for existing goods and resources. Rent control has consistently led to housing shortages and price controls on food have led to hunger and even starvation.

Among the complaints in Florida is that hotels raised their prices. One hotel whose rooms normally cost $40 per night now charges $109 a night and another hotel whose rooms likewise normally cost $40 per night now charge $160 per night. Those who are long on indignation and short on economics may say that those hotels were now “charging all that the traffic would bear.” But they were probably charging all the traffic would bear when such hotels were charging $40 a night. The real question is: why will the traffic bear more now? Obviously because supply and demand have both changed. Since both homes and hotels have been damaged or destroyed by the hurricanes, there are now more people seeking more rooms from fewer hotels. In short, the new prices make as much sense under the new conditions as the old prices did under the old conditions.

It is essentially the same story when stores in Florida are selling ice, plywood, gasoline, or other things that reflect today’s supply and demand rather than yesterday’s supply and demand. Price controls will not cause new supplies to be rushed in nearly as fast as higher prices will. None of this is rocket science. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.”

Some people work themselves into a depression by thinking about all of the “manufacturing jobs” being exported from the United States to low wage countries overseas. However, manufacturing jobs are less of a problem than manufacturing confusion. Much of what is being said confuses what is true in one sector of the economy with what is true of the economy as a whole.

At the beginning of the 20th century 10,000,000 American farmers and farm labors produced the food to feed 76,000,000 people. By the end of the century fewer than 2,000,000 people on the farms fed more than 250,000,000 people. Therefore more than 8,000,000 agricultural jobs were “lost.”

Between 1990 and 1995 more than 17,000,000 American workers throughout the economy lost their jobs. But there were never 17 million people unemployed during this period any more than there were 8 million agricultural workers unemployed before. People moved on to other jobs. Unemployment rates in fact hit new lows in the 1990’s. This is not rocket science either. When the same thing happens in the international economy it is much easier to manufacture confusion. There is no question that many computer programmer jobs have moved from the United States to India. But this is just a half-truth which can be worse than a lie. Peter Drucker in a Fortune magazine article points out that “Nobody seems to realize that we import two or three times as many jobs as we export.” Included are jobs in Japanese automobile plants making Toyotas and Hondas on American soil. The Swiss company Siemens alone has 60,000 employees in the United States. Drucker says “We are exporting low paying jobs, but are importing high skill, high paying jobs.”

None of this is much consolation if you are one of the people being displaced from a job that you thought would last indefinitely. Few jobs last indefinitely though. You cannot advance the standard of living by continuing to do the same things in the same ways. Progress means change whether those changes originate domestically or internationally. The grand fallacy of those who oppose free trade is that low wage countries take jobs away from high wage countries. Even though it is true for some particular jobs in some particular cases, it is another half-truth that is more misleading than an outright lie. While American companies can hire computer programmers in India to replace higher paid American programmers, that is because of India’s outstanding education in computer engineering. By and large, however, the average productivity of Indian workers is about 15% of American workers. In other words if you hired Indian workers and paid them 1/5 of what you paid American workers, it would cost you more to get a job done in India. That is the rule and computer programming is the exception.

Facts are blithely ignored by those who simply assume that low wage countries have an advantage in international trade, but high wage countries have been exporting to low wage countries for centuries. The vast majority of foreign investments by American companies are in high wage countries, despite great outcries about how multinational corporations are “exploiting” Third World workers. Apparently facts do not matter to those who are manufacturing confusion about manufacturing jobs.

A simple phrase can define a complete mindset. Tax cuts are characterized by liberals as “showering benefits on the wealthiest taxpayers.” Imagine, keeping money that you have earned is called having benefits “showered” on you! By this reasoning someone who has the power to take something from you, but does not take it all is “showering” benefits on you. Big government spenders and taxers never want to admit that wealth is not created by government, but rather by the people who are taxed. Moreover, these are not, for the most part, people who “happen to have money” as the phrase goes. Most people who have money got it by providing other people with something they wanted enough to pay for it. This is never called “public service” by the left. Selling people what they want, in order to get what you want, is called “greed.” Given this mindset you can see why letting people keep more of the money they earn is considered indulging them with benefits that the government “showers” on them. To those types it is like subsidizing sin.

GLOBAL WARMING 19

The greatest problem with Global Warming is not ignorance – it is the presumption of knowledge. Mark Twain put it this way: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The chimerical Global Warming enthusiasts insist there is no more rational debate on the subject. The earth is warming rapidly and is human caused. Period; end of discussion. I am afraid I have to dissent from what I consider is such a self-serving and unsupportable position. What follows is a précis rather than a megillah of the historical and current evidence of global climate change. To write more might bore you and would certainly exhaust me.

Everyone and I mean everyone, who has looked at the data and the many who have not, agree that the earth is experiencing global warming and for those who have examined the historical record this warming has been going on since the end of the Little Ice Age circa 1850. There the agreement ends. I believe human and animal generated gases such as CO², SO², NO², methane, and other atmospheric contaminants have had, at most, only a minor effect on our climate. And by far the most abundant “greenhouse” gas is water vapor which is hardly a human caused pollutant. Over millions of years the earth has gone through myriad natural climate cycles. That is what we are going through now.

What is the scientific method for identifying, gathering, processing, and comparing current and historical climate data? In the last few decades global temperatures have been measured over enough of the land, sea, and atmosphere in order to have a high confidence level that they are representative. However, correlating these data with many fewer measurements made in the early and middle parts of the 20th century requires statistical adjustments. Now think about how these actual temperature measurements can be compared with proxy data such as ice cores, seabed sediments, boreholes, stalagmites, pollen, and tree rings covering the time periods hundreds and thousands of years ago before actual temperature measurements were available and you begin to appreciate the difficulty of establishing valid comparative temperatures.

As you know or could surmise, there has been a great deal of scientific effort, both valid and bogus, in processing and correlating these disparate data. The mathematical tools of probability and statistics are primarily used to fit these various actual and proxy data into a coherent picture of present and historical global weather. As an attachment to this essay there are three examples of the simplest types of probability and statistical problems which you might want to attempt to solve (answers and explanations will be provided upon request). The mathematical manipulations used to calculate and compare current and historical climate data are far more complicated and requires a more sophisticated understanding of probability and statistical methods to fully appreciate. The point is that not only is our weather highly complex, but the process of trying to quantify it and make sense out of historical comparisons is also complicated and sometimes inchoate and controversial. It is not straightforward and settled as the Global Warming fanatics would have it.

There is other than quantifiable evidence for historical climate change. Going back in time from approximately 12,000 years to more than a million years there is geological evident of glacial and interglacial cycles, especially in North America and Europe which implies large swings in temperature. During at least one of those interglacial times the ice may have almost wholly disappeared, under a climate somewhat warmer than the present one, as indicated by fossils contained in the deposits. No informed person that I am aware of disputes this. The apodictic conclusion which can be drawn is that humans can not be tagged with causing these climate changes.

Written evidence also exists for climate cycles over the past several hundred years encompassing the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, the Dark Ages, and the Roman Warming. While what has been written during these periods of climate changes can not be translated into definitive temperature numbers, it does strongly indicate these changes did take place. This indirect evidence is that summers were rainy, winters cold, and in many places temperatures too low for grain crops to mature. Famines and epidemics raged, and average life expectancy dropped 10 years (The Little Ice Age). The Vikings raised livestock on Greenland and sailed to North America. New cities were built all across Europe, and the continent’s population grew from 30 million to 80 million (The Medieval Warm Period). Food and population decreased and diseases increased due to cold and inclement weather (the Dark Ages). Their empire greatly expanded and there was general prosperity and a classical building boom (the Roman Warming).

In their 2007 book Unstoppable Global Warming authors S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery point out that between the roughly 100,000 year major ice age cycles the earth’s climate had been dominated by natural, shorter, irregular cycles. The most recent are the afore mentioned Roman Warming which started about 200 B.C., ending about A.D. 600 and paired with its other half, the Dark Ages, which ended in A.D. 900; the Medieval Warming ending in A.D. 1400, paired with the Little Ice Age which ended around 1850. These alternating periods of warmer and colder weather lasted from 300 to 800 years so the present warming trend may be with us for a few hundred years more. We had better learn to adjust to it without the histrionics and destructive economic policies advocated by Global Warming energumen. Mind you, according to the available information these cycles were not just monotonic periods of warm and cold, but simply warmer or colder than average with years where the weather went counter to the general trend.

Is there a correlation between warmer global temperatures and increases in the magnitude and/or frequency of hurricanes (called typhoons in the South Pacific), tornadoes, or thunderstorms? It would seem that given warmer global temperatures and hence warmer gulf waters, hurricanes might be more severe since the energy of hurricanes is increased by warmer waters. In fact there has been no measurable increase in the strength or frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, or thunderstorms in the last 50 years. The reporting of U.S. tornadoes has increased by a factor of ten in the past 50 years, but the number of severe tornadoes has not increased, therefore it appears that only the detection and reporting of tornadoes has increased. There has, on average, been more rain. Many researches have found that the amount of rainfall from thunderstorms has increased over most of the United States over the past century. This fits with the increased evaporation occurring as the rising 20th century temperatures have produced an “invigorating hydrological cycle.”

Global Circulation Models (GCMs) are the mega-stars of today’s climate and environmental research. The GCMs are three-dimensional computer models that attempt to pull together, and project into the future, all the major causes of climate change. These include jet streams in the upper atmosphere; deep ocean currents; solar radiation reflected back in space by ice sheets and glaciers; changes in vegetation; naturally changing greenhouse gas levels; eddies in the oceans that transfer heat laterally; number, type, and altitude of clouds in the skies; variations in radiant energy coming from the sun; plus dozens of other factors.

The models work from “first principles” such as the laws of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, the carbon cycle, the water cycle, statistical and probability theory, and so forth. The models are so complex that they can only be run on supercomputers. Notable GCMs are located at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and Britain’s Hadley Centre.

One of the modelers’ key problems is that real-world long term climate changes are sensitive to small changes in surface conditions or solar radiation – so small that humans doing the computer input may not pick them up. And, if they do, they don’t know how to interpret the cumulative future changes the models will forecast over decades or centuries. Another major problem is that the GCMs provide smoothly varying results, but the records we have from ice cores, geology, and paleontology say past climate changes have often been major and abrupt.

The Earth’s surface thermometers are so heavily skewed by urban heat and land use changes that they may overstate U.S. surface warming by as much as 40%. The models have erroneously predicted a 20th century surge in Earth’s temperatures to match surging CO² concentrations in the atmosphere. It hasn’t happened. The degree of climate forcing assumed in the still unverified models is apparently far too high. The Greenhouse Theory also seems to be failing at the poles, where the warming was supposed to be earliest and strongest. The models say we should have seen warming several ºC at the poles since 1940 to reflect the major increases in atmospheric CO². Instead polar temperatures have been falling. However the biggest failing of the Greenhouse Theory may be in the troposphere, which seemingly should warm faster than the Earth’s surface. The opposite has happened; the troposphere has warmed much less than the earth’s surface. What explanation does the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) offer for these major departures from its basic man-made warming contention? None.

There is a correlation of the sun’s energy output, the solar wind, and cosmic rays from outer space. Cosmic rays are thought to collude with particles or molecules in the atmosphere, leaving them electrically charged or ionized. These ionized particles then seed the growth of water droplets clouds. The clouds that form low in the sky are relatively warm and cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. The sun continuously releases a stream of charged particles, the solar wind, which partially shields the earth from cosmic rays.

When the sun’s energy output is stronger and the solar wind blows more forcefully, as it has been in the past few decades, the earth is shielded more effectively from cosmic rays, therefore generating fewer low clouds and causing more warming. Conversely when the sun’s energy is lower and the solar wind weaker, more cosmic rays streak through our atmosphere causing more low clouds to form thereby cooling the planet.

In addition to the GCM computer models which, although complex, still demonstrably can not adequately account for our far more complex weather, is the famous or now infamous long term “Hockey Stick” global temperature chart. The climate study containing this temperature chart was first published in Nature magazine in 1998 by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes and is commonly called MBH98. This study calculated global temperatures back to A.D. 1400. A follow up paper called MBH99 added temperatures back to A.D. 1000 without recalculating post-1400 values; it simply extended the previous results to an earlier period.

As the name “Hockey Stick” implies the chart shows fairly uniform temperatures with a slight drop from 1400 until the start of the 20th century and then a sharp rise from 1900 until the present. Not only did the IPCC, but the mainstream news media, all of the environmental groups, the Hollywood elites, and the other human caused Global Warming advocates, including Al Gore, began using this study as prima-facie evidence that global temperatures have accelerated in the past few decades and are caused by greenhouse gases generated by industrialization. In late 2002 in trying to sell the Kyoto Protocol, the Canadian government repeatedly cited the Mann “Hockey Stick” temperature chart. In 2003 Stephen McIntyre began investigating the MBH papers, later joined by Patrick J. Michaels editor of the 2005 book Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming. Prior to this investigation absolutely nobody including the editors of Nature magazine had done any checking on either the original paper or the 1999 follow up. Do you still wonder why I am skeptical of the human caused Global Warming crowd?

McIntyre and Michaels contacted Michael Mann with questions about his methodology and source data. At first Mann co-operated, but he quickly changed his attitude as McIntyre and Michaels begin making slow albeit steady progress in deciphering what Mann, et.al. had done. Mann would say that the requested data were contained in previously cited sources (it never was), then he cut them off completely and would not answer their inquiries thereafter. When McIntyre and Michaels had complied the entire data set they believed was used in MBH98 they sent it all to Mann asking him for confirmation that these were the data actually used in MBH98. Mann replied that he was too busy to answer this or any other inquiries. Ironically one of the subsequent complains lodged against McIntyre and Michaels was that they did not consult Mann before publishing their critique. Of course Dr. Michaels had a ready answer: it was Mann who had cut the communications, not him.

In essence what McIntyre and Michaels had discovered (a much more complete explanation is contained in the book Shattered Consensus) was there were errors in the manipulation of the data; gross data collation errors; unexplained selection of some data sets and exclusion of others; unconventional extrapolation of data; and for all the subsequent usage of the results of the MBH98 paper it is conspicuous that the methodology used in that study has not been widely applied. Even Mann did not use it in subsequent papers. The data corrected and plotted by McIntyre and Michaels from 1400 A.D. to present do not show the “Hockey Stick” abrupt temperature rise in the 20th century. One can question whether the results of Mann, et. al. or McIntyre and Michaels are closer to the truth. What is not in question is that both the methodology and complete data set used by Mann, et. al. is not transparent while what McIntyre and Michaels did is.

As summarized by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery in their book Unstoppable Global Warming the weaknesses of the Greenhouse Theory of recent global warming are as follows:

First, CO² changes do not account for the highly variable climate we know the Earth has had in the past couple of millennia, including the Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming, and the Little Ice Age.

Second, the Greenhouse Theory does not explain temperature changes in the 20th century. Most of the current warming occurred prior to 1940, before there was much human generated CO² in the air. After 1940, temperatures declined until 1975 or so, despite a large increase in industrial CO², during that period.

Third, the early and supposedly most powerful increases in atmospheric CO² have not produced the frightening planetary overheating that the theory and climate models told us to expect.

Fourth, we must discount the official temperature record to reflect the increased size and intensity of today’s urban heat islands, where most of the official thermometers are located. We must take into account the changes of rural land use (forests cleared for farming and pastures, more intensive row-crop irrigated farming) that affect soil moisture and temperatures. When meteorological experts reconstructed U.S. official temperatures “without cities and crops”, using more accurate data from satellites and high-altitude weather balloons, about one-half the recent “official” warming disappeared.

Fifth, the Earth’s surface thermometers have recently warmed faster than the temperature readings in the lower atmosphere up to 30,000 ft. Yet the Greenhouse Theory says that CO² will warm the lower atmosphere first and then atmospheric heat will radiate to the Earth’s surface. This is not happening.

Sixth, CO² for at least 240,000 years has been a lagging indicator of global warming, not a causal factor. Studies within the last 15 years have revealed from ice cores that temperatures and CO² levels have tracked closely during the warmings after each of Earth’s last three ice age glaciations. However, the CO² changes have lagged about 800 years behind the temperature changes. Global warming has produced more CO² rather than CO² producing more warming. This accords with the physical reality that the oceans hold the vast majority of the planet’s carbon and the laws of physics let cold oceans hold more CO² gas than warm oceans.

Seventh, the Greenhouse Theory predicts that CO² driven warming of the Earth’s surface will start, and be strongest, at the North and South Polar regions. This is not happening either. A broadly scattered set of meteorological stations and ocean buoys show that temperature readings in the Arctic, Greenland, and the seas around them are colder today than in the 1930’s. Alaska has been warming, but researchers say this is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), not a broader Arctic warming pattern. The 20 to 30 year cycle of the PDO seems to have reversed again recently so Alaska may start cooling again.

In the Antarctic only the thin finger of the Antarctic Peninsula has been warming. Temperatures over the other 98% of the Antarctic continent have been declining slowing since the 1960’s, according to a broad array of Antarctic surface stations and satellite measurements.

Eighth, the scary predictions of planetary overheating require that the warming effect of additional CO² be amplified by increased water vapor in the atmosphere. Warming will indeed lift more moisture from the oceans into the air. But what if the moister, warmer air increases the efficiency of rainfall, and leaves the upper atmosphere as dry, or even drier, than it was before? We have absolutely no evidence to demonstrate that the upper atmosphere is retaining more water vapor to amplify CO².

Pollutants in the atmosphere can cause global weather changes depending on the type and quantity of the pollutants. When the Krakatoa volcano in the Sunda Strait half way between Sumatra and Java erupted in 1883 an estimated 25 km³ of rock, ash, pumice, and gases were injected into the atmosphere and caused a worldwide average drop in temperature of 1.2 Cº. Ash reached a height of 25 km. with the energy of the eruption estimated to be 200 megatons of TNT or 13,000 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Global weather did not return to normal until 1888.

The Tambora volcano on Sumbawa Island, Indonesia erupted in 1815 causing a real catastrophic global weather change. It had four times the energy of Krakatoa with 100 km³ of rock, ash, pumice, and gases injected to a height of 43 km. This occurrence, near the end of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1400-1850), added to the misery of the general cold weather so that 1816 was called the year without a summer. New England experienced snow in July and August and in winter there were reports of birds falling out of the sky – dead from the cold. In Europe reddish colored snow (from the ash and pumice) fell in several places.

It would be a paralogistic stretch to infer from the above that greenhouse gases would have the same magnitude of influence on global weather and besides in these two cases the shielding of the sun’s energy had the effect of lowering global temperatures for several years.

Apparently the mainstream news media has infected much of the other media with their GW folderol. An article in the April 23rd 2007 issue of Business Week was a paean to the coming human caused GW disaster. It started out with this tendentious dreck: “Remember the arguments for not taking action against global warming? Just a few years ago the claim was: ‘There is no evidence the climate is changing.’ Then it became: ‘Well maybe it is, but humans aren’t to blame.’ That morphed into: ‘Warmer could be better, and we can easily adapt.’ And all along we heard that cutting emissions would cripple the economy – and wouldn’t make much difference because China and India weren’t on board.”

Such mendacious propaganda is topped by a statement from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) headquartered in Switzerland (you know, the organization with a cuddly little panda as it symbol). These Cassandras stated this week that we have just five more years, by 2012, before climate catastrophe overtakes us if we don’t end our environment polluting ways now. Sorry, they also state, no more building of nuclear power plants allowed. I find their claims rather droll even though these whackos are serious.

On the other side, at a meeting this past week, meteorologist Augie Auer said this: “Man’s contribution to greenhouse gases is so small we couldn’t change the climate if we tried. We’re all going to survive this. It’s going to be a joke in five years [a rather different take from the WWF’s five year catastrophic climate scenario]. A combination of misinterpreted and misguided science, media hype, and political spin has created the current hysteria and it is time to put a stop to it. It is time to attack the myth of global warming. Water vapour is responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect, an effect which is vital to keep the earth warm. If we didn’t have the greenhouse effect the planet would be at -18 ºC, but because we do have the greenhouse effect it is +15 ºC. The other greenhouse gases: CO², methane, NO², and various others including CFC’s contribute only 5% of effect, CO² being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6%.

However, CO² as a result of man’s activities is only 3.2% of that, hence only 0.12% of the greenhouse gases in total. Human related methane, NO², and CFC’s make minuscule contributions of 0.066%, 0.047%, and 0.046%, respectively. That aught to be the end of the argument, then and there. We couldn’t do it [change the climate] even if we wanted to because water vapour dominates.”

The global warming crowd accuses the skeptics of being in the pocket of big oil and the auto industry by accepting money from them for their research. The GW skeptics respond, tu quoque, that far more money is sought and paid to the human caused global warming advocates through governmental, institutional, and private grants. A researcher from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland explained it this way: He said, “For example, if I apply for a grant to study the habits of ground squirrels in Northern Scotland my chances of receiving it are slim. If I simply add, ‘as it relates to global warming’ I would likely succeed.”

By all means read and listen to the people who believe current global warming is human caused, especially the ones who are climatologists or otherwise have specialized knowledge on the subject (not the Hollywood elites who are complete idiots). And even for laughs or for critical analysis, watch the Al Gore DVD, A convenient Falsehood (Do I have that title right?). Leaven this with a generous diet of what the scientific skeptics of human caused GW have to say – there are many of them and they have written a great deal on the subject despite the claims to the opposite by the agitprop myrmidons of Global Warming Doom. Then make your own informed opinion, even if tentatively, on this important issue.


QUESTIONS



1.) On day 1 the probability of rain is 50%; day 2 the probability is 20%; and day 3 the probability is 30%. What is the probability there will be rain on at least one of those days? No, the answer is not 100%.



2.) The probability of a rosebush not being watered is 2/3. Even if it is watered the probability that it withers is 1/2; if it not watered the probability that it withers is 3/4. The rosebush withers. What is the probability that the rosebush was not watered?



3.) What is the standard deviation of the following series of numbers:
9, 14, 33, -11, 27, 0, 55, -5, 6, 89 and what does it mean?