Despite the tremendous costs in life, limb, and treasure can it rationally be claimed that wars are sometimes worth it? Some would answer with a resounding no. Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) R-MT who was the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives voted against United States participation in WWI and for good measure was the only member of congress to vote against the USA entering WWII. Would you believe it – she was a pacifist. Her modern day equivalents are not so much true pacifists as they are simply philosophically opposed to whatever actions are taken by Republican administrations, especially if headed by G.W. Bush.
What are the attitudes of people, in particular voters, concerning going to war and once at war, staying the course until the war is either won or lost? I would maintain that putatively everybody loves a winner and conversely loathes a loser. In August 1864 just three months before the presidential election, Lincoln said that unless something changed he was not only going to be beaten, but beaten badly. After more than three years of war and with horrendous casualties the people of the North were war weary with no end of the war in sight. Small wonder that Lincoln was so pessimistic about his reelection chances. In fact Lincoln wrote out a plan to attempt to save the Union to be implemented between the time of the election (1st Tuesday of November) and the inauguration of the new president (then the 4th of March 1865). As Lincoln said, the new president (former Union Armies commander, George McClellan) would have secured the election on conditions such that he could not possibly save the Union after the election. It is instructive that Lincoln sealed his plan in an envelope and had all of his cabinet sign the envelope without reading it. The men in Lincoln’s cabinet, Sec. of State, Wm. Seward (later, in 1867, he was stupidly derided with the appellation of “Seward’s Folly” for being instrumental in the purchase of Alaska from Russia. We need more such ‘foolish’ people in government); Sec. of Treas., Salmon Chase; Sec. of War, Edwin Stanton; Sec. of the Navy, Gideon Wells; Attn. Gen., Edward Bates; Postmaster Gen., Montgomery Blair; Sec. of Interior, John Usher initially all thought they would do better as president than Lincoln, but by 1864 realized how mistaken they were and by this time had so much confidence in Lincoln that they would sign off on an important presidential document without reading it.
Things changed, of course, with the taking of Atlanta by Gen. Sherman, the destruction of the Confederate breadbasket, the Shenandoah Valley by Gen. Sheridan, and the conquest of Mobile Bay by Adm. Farragut. With the fortunes of war now firmly on the side of the North, Lincoln swept to an electoral landslide winning 212 out of 233 electoral votes and a 400,000 popular vote margin (equivalent to 4,000,000 today). As I said, everybody loves a winner. N’est-ce pas?
Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” With Wilson reelected the United States did enter the war in 1917, but American troops fought for only about 15 months and suffered 116,500 deaths vs. 405,000 in WWII and 620,000 in the Civil War so there was not sufficient time for the general public to recoil from the slaughter of this most unnecessary and bloody war. Of all the wars in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, certainly the ones the USA fought in, the First World War was the one which had the least excuse to have been undertaken not only by the United States, but especially by the European nations. It is not just the carnage the war wrought, but it was a major causative factor of WWII.
Once Germany, Italy, and Japan launched their military expansionism, the Allied countries led by Great Britain and the United States had no other option than responding with their own military might. From the Allied nations standpoint the Second World War was a necessity. The alternative was to have been conquered and subjugated.
While there was some opposition in this country to the Spanish-American War (April – August 1898) it was minor at most. Why? We won. And the war was of a very short duration. Nevertheless, consider the ethical and moral factors. The United States committed unjustified military aggression against Spain forcing them out of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. One can make a case that Spain was a colonial power who had no moral imperative to occupy those lands, yet who appointed the USA as the international sheriff?
The casus belli for the conflict was flawed – either deliberately wrong or mistakenly wrong. The battleship USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor and the cause was attributed to sabotage by the Spanish. In fact it was poor ship design. Owing to heightened tension between Spain and the United States the fires for the ship’s boilers while the ship was waiting in the harbor were never banked so as to be ready to get underway in a minimum of time. This resulted in the single bulkhead separating the boilers from the powder compartment where the powder for the ship’s guns was stored (the poor design) overheating, thereby setting off the powder.
Initially President Wm. McKinley resisted a military solution, choosing diplomacy to try to force concessions from Spain towards Cuba. After the Maine blew up killing 260 seamen, McKinley capitulated to public pressure by endorsing a declaration of war against Spain by congress on April 25, 1898.
The Mexican-American War of 1846-48 generally had high approval in the United States. Not only did American generals Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor (he was elected president in 1848) win all of their important battles, but there was a mood in the country at that time of ‘Manifest Destiny’ – the belief in the inevitable territorial expansion of the United States in North America. The USA gained over ½ million square miles as a result of the war. One can argue whether this war and the resulting acquisition of territory were just. One might also hold that given the millions of Mexicans who have illegally enter this country to find jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities, perhaps the USA should have taken over all of Mexico at that time.
Not everyone agreed back then that the war was necessary and proper. A first term Whig congressman from Illinois made a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives strongly condemning not only the war, but Democrat president James Polk as well. He was Abraham Lincoln. One and a half decades later Lincoln would receive his own harsh criticism for leading the country into war. Isn’t there a cliché about “what goes around…….?”
Can the Korean War be defended without paralogistic argument? How about the Vietnam War? The First Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the Second Iraq War? I can absolutely guarantee there is wide disagreement by the public as to how these questions would be answered even if some respond in the negative, ispe dixit. The war against the Taliban & al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11 clearly has the highest approval rating and the fewest number of dissenters with perhaps the Vietnam War the least popular. There is a commonality among these conflicts. The ones which were won or appear to be going well are the most popular. The United States lost the Vietnam War – not on the battlefield, but we lost. The Korean War was stalemated. Neither was popular. The popularity of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be determined by their final resolution. If the results ending up being beneficial for the United States then their approval is assured and naturally if their outcomes are detrimental to the interests of the USA, unpopular. Yes, I am saying the moral aspects of these wars are not the determinate of their acceptance by the general population of our country. That is my claim even if I can not assert it apodictically.
I am reminded of the dialogue in the movie Unforgiven between the characters of the old gunfighter played by Clint Eastwood and the sadistic sheriff played by Gene Hackman. Eastwood is about to dispatch Hackman to the ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns’ with a bullet from a Spenser carbine (invented during the Civil War). Hackman says “I don’t deserve this.” Eastwood responds, “Deservin’ got nuthin’ to do with it.” Similarly the popularity of war is largely independent of moral concerns, but rests on the outcome. It is not just from the likes of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, or even Eric Hoffer where insightful apothegmatic philosophy can be found.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
THE MYTH OF SOCIAL INSECURITY 26
With the Social Security debate now coming to the foreground in the New Year (it has not been particularly deep in the background for some years now) it is time for me to weigh in on this issue in my perhaps mistaken, but certainly non conventional style. One person who will not be discussing SS as an elected member of congress is the former Congressional House Speaker, former House Minority Leader, 2004 Democratic primary presidential candidate, and now private citizen as the 109th congress convened in January 2005, namely Little Dickey Gephardt of Missouri. He had an inexplicable, even strange way of calling it, “Soc Security.” Why did he call it that? Was it a way to economize his words? Being a Democrat, economy of any thing associated with the government is unlikely. I just observed it - I can’t explain it. As a private citizen perhaps Gephardt should try to cajole Linda Daschle, the 2nd wife of Tom Daschle and Miss Kansas of 1978, to leave her highly paid job as a lobbyist in the US House of Representatives for the law firm of Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Coldwell and replace her. Ex-Senator Tom (Puff) Daschle, praise Allah, was ousted from the senate by John Thune R-SD. Linda Daschle’s influence must be greatly diminished given that her nexus to congress has now been severed. Alternately, Gephardt may want to join Fannie Mae now that both former Clinton administration members Franklin Raines resigned under pressure as chairman & CEO and former Attorney General Janet Reno’s ex-henchwoman and 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick quietly slipped out as vice-chairman in the face of a $9 billion restatement of earnings. Lower earnings of course, but then what are a few billions among friends?
The orthodox arguments concerning whether to implement major changes in Social Security and if so what kinds of changes generally go something like this: (1) there is no need to do anything now because it will be solvent until circa 2042 or until 2018 if one counts when it is estimated that outflows will first exceed inflows. (2) The system will eventually go broke so the sooner changes are made to lengthen the solvency period, the less painful the fix will be. (3) What ever is done to change the system, privatizing any part of it should not be considered as that will cost X trillion of dollars over Y number of years (some say $2 trillion over 10 years, but then there are people who believe the earth is flat and even deny that men have walked on the moon, so there you are). In addition to some others, National Public Radio’s moderate liberal Mara Liasson allowed as how anyone who would invest any part of their SS in a private account would be gambling because there is no guarantee their investment would not go south. Of course there is no certainty that the earth will not be hit by another comet or asteroid tomorrow as that which may have extinguished the dinosaurs 65 million years ago or the entire world will be not be enveloped in a giant tsunami the day after tomorrow. I would not bet a large amount of money on these scenarios and so would recommend that Ms. Liasson stick to politics and not make irrational statements on a subject she clearly knows little about. Given the long term performance of the equity markets and the proposed built-in safeguards and restraints of the investment vehicles the returns for private SS investors are about as sure a bet as the sun rising in the east each morning. Would you or Mara like to bet me against that? (4) The best way to restore confidence that younger SS contributors will be permitted to collect benefits upon their retirement is to privatize a significant part of the program on a voluntary basis. (5) In the long term the only way to keep the system solvent is a combination of increasing the ages of eligibility, decreasing the payments to retirees, and increasing the contributions by working people given that the ratio of worker to recipient will changed from 16 to 1 in the past to, oh say, 1 to 16 respectively in the future. Can everyone say, spell, and cogitate the word bleak?
One myth which needs to pass from the scene in order to raise the level of rational discourse is to forget about the “Lock Box” concept concerning Social Security or other government receipts. Even the term seems to have disappeared from the political lexicon in recent years. The last time I heard it was in the 2000 presidential campaign where the angry Algore went down to defeat still insisting that under his administration there would be a “Lock Box” for SS monies that would be inviolable from siphoning off for other government programs. Poor Al was always easily confused. Remember when he couldn’t decide whether to take the advice of one Ms. Naomi Wolff and assume the guise of an Alpha Male dressed in earth tones or stick to his boring nature dressed in conventional dark business suits? He ended up fatally combining his drab demeanor with a harsh and accusatory stump speech delivery which as an incumbent Vice-President against all odds of a still thriving economy and non-militarily active milieu managed to lose a close election which he should have won going away. The Fates were kind to the American people that time.
I do not get all exercised because money is not set aside in what is called a “Social Security Trust Fund” the way many commentators do for reasons discussed below. That does not mean I do not favor privatizing at least part if not all of Social Security savings, on a voluntary basis of course, because I do. Not only will this be income retirees can count on receiving, but it will almost certainly be more than that paid out from the “public” sector funds. Thomas Sowell concluded a January 20, 2005 article by stating, “No matter how much money you have paid into Social Security over the years, and no matter what you were promised when you paid it, the government always has the option to pay you back only what future politicians decide they can afford, given all the other things they might prefer to spend the money on.”
“Owning your own private pension plan means that those who owe you have to pay you what they promised. It also means that if you die without ever using it, you can leave it to your family, instead of having the government keep the money.”
Forget all of the above Social Security folderol (excepting the wise counsel of Thomas Sowell) which I am sure y’all have heard from various and diverse pundits in the past few years. Mostly these opinions are recycled over and over apparently without any original positions to input into the cauldron of bold new ideas.
Social Security is a program of the federal government which makes it different from state, municipal, corporate, or private financing. Only the federal government can legally create money and one of the major functions of the federal government is to regulate the money supply. In addition to manipulating several interest rates, the federal government is so dominant in this country’s overall financial and social structure that the welfare of its people is intimately tied to government policies. Therein lays the regulating mechanism for the purchasing power of our money and by extension to Social Security. What does that mean? Allow me to explain.
As a practical matter the federal government does not have a fixed and limited amount of money to spend on individual programs such as Social Security, Medicare, etc. As a consequence there will not come a time when no more money is available to distribute to SS recipients as calculated by how much in receipts are coming in from current SS contributors. This is an important point which should be differentiated from the orthodox acceptance of the balance of SS receipts and payouts, but one which must not be over interpreted. Clearly the economy is not immunized from suffering dire consequences caused by the federal government dispensing vast and uncompensated quantities of money.
In additional to redistributing wealth, another important purpose of federal taxes, with individual income taxes being a prime source, is to remove monies from the economy so as to alleviate the problem of having too much money chasing too few goods and services, i.e. inflation. It therefore follows that payouts in SS will have to be compensated by a diminution in the supply of money. But it does not matter whether this money comes from SS receipts or other forms of taxes. This is not some fanciful hypothesis I originated but rather is the theory of the 1930’s to 1970’s economist, Dr. Abba Lerner, who in 1959 - 1965 taught economics at Michigan State University and at that time was as respected and almost as well known as economist and later Nobel Prize winner Dr. Milton Friedman. According to Prof. Lerner, except for relatively minor taxes e.g., the so called ‘sin’ taxes - tax on alcohol and tobacco to discourage consumption, there are two reasons for federal taxes: (1) To redistribute income and (2) take money out of circulation to keep too many dollars from chasing too few goods and services - in other words to keep inflation under control (see Everybody’s Business: A Re-examination of Current Assumptions in Economics and Public Policy by Abba P. Lerner).
The other side of this federal equation is expenditures. Compensating for SS payouts could also be accomplished, in part or in whole, by decreasing other federal spending such as for social programs, the military, corporate welfare, or even, God forbid, by genuinely decreasing the size of the federal government which both Democrat and Republican politicians are not wont to do. However, like the animals of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, all expenditures are equal - except some are more equal than others. There is the question of efficiency of money spent as well as perceived need and political expediency. These are issues which would have to be balanced by the reality, need, and political clout of retirees.
At this time congressional Democrats and even a few Republicans seem intent on obstructing any and every change to Social Security being contemplated by the Bush administration for what appear to be impurely political reasons. I predict they will either come to an acceptable, to most Republicans, compromise or they will be estopped in their obstructionist tactics considering their previously declared claim for SS reform.
There are those who say that Medicare is a bigger unfunded government liability than Social Security and therefore a larger looming problem. I am reminded that during the American Civil War when the “Trent Affair” threatened to engulf the country in a war with Great Britain, Abraham Lincoln tamping down the fires of conflict told his cabinet, “Gentlemen, one war at a time.”
The orthodox arguments concerning whether to implement major changes in Social Security and if so what kinds of changes generally go something like this: (1) there is no need to do anything now because it will be solvent until circa 2042 or until 2018 if one counts when it is estimated that outflows will first exceed inflows. (2) The system will eventually go broke so the sooner changes are made to lengthen the solvency period, the less painful the fix will be. (3) What ever is done to change the system, privatizing any part of it should not be considered as that will cost X trillion of dollars over Y number of years (some say $2 trillion over 10 years, but then there are people who believe the earth is flat and even deny that men have walked on the moon, so there you are). In addition to some others, National Public Radio’s moderate liberal Mara Liasson allowed as how anyone who would invest any part of their SS in a private account would be gambling because there is no guarantee their investment would not go south. Of course there is no certainty that the earth will not be hit by another comet or asteroid tomorrow as that which may have extinguished the dinosaurs 65 million years ago or the entire world will be not be enveloped in a giant tsunami the day after tomorrow. I would not bet a large amount of money on these scenarios and so would recommend that Ms. Liasson stick to politics and not make irrational statements on a subject she clearly knows little about. Given the long term performance of the equity markets and the proposed built-in safeguards and restraints of the investment vehicles the returns for private SS investors are about as sure a bet as the sun rising in the east each morning. Would you or Mara like to bet me against that? (4) The best way to restore confidence that younger SS contributors will be permitted to collect benefits upon their retirement is to privatize a significant part of the program on a voluntary basis. (5) In the long term the only way to keep the system solvent is a combination of increasing the ages of eligibility, decreasing the payments to retirees, and increasing the contributions by working people given that the ratio of worker to recipient will changed from 16 to 1 in the past to, oh say, 1 to 16 respectively in the future. Can everyone say, spell, and cogitate the word bleak?
One myth which needs to pass from the scene in order to raise the level of rational discourse is to forget about the “Lock Box” concept concerning Social Security or other government receipts. Even the term seems to have disappeared from the political lexicon in recent years. The last time I heard it was in the 2000 presidential campaign where the angry Algore went down to defeat still insisting that under his administration there would be a “Lock Box” for SS monies that would be inviolable from siphoning off for other government programs. Poor Al was always easily confused. Remember when he couldn’t decide whether to take the advice of one Ms. Naomi Wolff and assume the guise of an Alpha Male dressed in earth tones or stick to his boring nature dressed in conventional dark business suits? He ended up fatally combining his drab demeanor with a harsh and accusatory stump speech delivery which as an incumbent Vice-President against all odds of a still thriving economy and non-militarily active milieu managed to lose a close election which he should have won going away. The Fates were kind to the American people that time.
I do not get all exercised because money is not set aside in what is called a “Social Security Trust Fund” the way many commentators do for reasons discussed below. That does not mean I do not favor privatizing at least part if not all of Social Security savings, on a voluntary basis of course, because I do. Not only will this be income retirees can count on receiving, but it will almost certainly be more than that paid out from the “public” sector funds. Thomas Sowell concluded a January 20, 2005 article by stating, “No matter how much money you have paid into Social Security over the years, and no matter what you were promised when you paid it, the government always has the option to pay you back only what future politicians decide they can afford, given all the other things they might prefer to spend the money on.”
“Owning your own private pension plan means that those who owe you have to pay you what they promised. It also means that if you die without ever using it, you can leave it to your family, instead of having the government keep the money.”
Forget all of the above Social Security folderol (excepting the wise counsel of Thomas Sowell) which I am sure y’all have heard from various and diverse pundits in the past few years. Mostly these opinions are recycled over and over apparently without any original positions to input into the cauldron of bold new ideas.
Social Security is a program of the federal government which makes it different from state, municipal, corporate, or private financing. Only the federal government can legally create money and one of the major functions of the federal government is to regulate the money supply. In addition to manipulating several interest rates, the federal government is so dominant in this country’s overall financial and social structure that the welfare of its people is intimately tied to government policies. Therein lays the regulating mechanism for the purchasing power of our money and by extension to Social Security. What does that mean? Allow me to explain.
As a practical matter the federal government does not have a fixed and limited amount of money to spend on individual programs such as Social Security, Medicare, etc. As a consequence there will not come a time when no more money is available to distribute to SS recipients as calculated by how much in receipts are coming in from current SS contributors. This is an important point which should be differentiated from the orthodox acceptance of the balance of SS receipts and payouts, but one which must not be over interpreted. Clearly the economy is not immunized from suffering dire consequences caused by the federal government dispensing vast and uncompensated quantities of money.
In additional to redistributing wealth, another important purpose of federal taxes, with individual income taxes being a prime source, is to remove monies from the economy so as to alleviate the problem of having too much money chasing too few goods and services, i.e. inflation. It therefore follows that payouts in SS will have to be compensated by a diminution in the supply of money. But it does not matter whether this money comes from SS receipts or other forms of taxes. This is not some fanciful hypothesis I originated but rather is the theory of the 1930’s to 1970’s economist, Dr. Abba Lerner, who in 1959 - 1965 taught economics at Michigan State University and at that time was as respected and almost as well known as economist and later Nobel Prize winner Dr. Milton Friedman. According to Prof. Lerner, except for relatively minor taxes e.g., the so called ‘sin’ taxes - tax on alcohol and tobacco to discourage consumption, there are two reasons for federal taxes: (1) To redistribute income and (2) take money out of circulation to keep too many dollars from chasing too few goods and services - in other words to keep inflation under control (see Everybody’s Business: A Re-examination of Current Assumptions in Economics and Public Policy by Abba P. Lerner).
The other side of this federal equation is expenditures. Compensating for SS payouts could also be accomplished, in part or in whole, by decreasing other federal spending such as for social programs, the military, corporate welfare, or even, God forbid, by genuinely decreasing the size of the federal government which both Democrat and Republican politicians are not wont to do. However, like the animals of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, all expenditures are equal - except some are more equal than others. There is the question of efficiency of money spent as well as perceived need and political expediency. These are issues which would have to be balanced by the reality, need, and political clout of retirees.
At this time congressional Democrats and even a few Republicans seem intent on obstructing any and every change to Social Security being contemplated by the Bush administration for what appear to be impurely political reasons. I predict they will either come to an acceptable, to most Republicans, compromise or they will be estopped in their obstructionist tactics considering their previously declared claim for SS reform.
There are those who say that Medicare is a bigger unfunded government liability than Social Security and therefore a larger looming problem. I am reminded that during the American Civil War when the “Trent Affair” threatened to engulf the country in a war with Great Britain, Abraham Lincoln tamping down the fires of conflict told his cabinet, “Gentlemen, one war at a time.”
Friday, July 13, 2007
CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS 25
There was a lawsuit in a London, England court room concerning plagiarism and copyright infringement. Was that an interesting story? Not particularly, but what is worth writing about is the content of the suit. You see, this was about two books – The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigert and Richard Leigh and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Additionally there was a movie which was in theaters in May 2006 based on The Da Vinci Code book which has sold 40,000,000 worldwide to date.
The central theme of both books and the movie is that Jesus, yes Jesus, the son of God, fathered a child with Mary Magdalene and an ultra secret organization called the Priory of Sion has concealed and protected the bloodline of Him which exists even today. I do not classify myself an especially ardent Christian, yet I find this postulation extremely offensive. How much more must the millions of highly devout and fervent Christians around the world feel the obloquy caused by the lese majesty and calumny heaped upon their religion?
There has been some criticism and complains about The Da Vinci Code book and was more when the movie came out, yet there has not been worldwide rioting, murder, and mayhem (don’t get ahead of me here – wait for the following paragraph). I understand why not in secular Europe where fewer than 10% of the people find themselves in church on Sundays. It seems only the young unhinged anarchists and Luddites in Europe feel passionate about anything. Perhaps that explains why most European countries have a less than replacement fertility rate. Yet how about the Christians in the Americas, Africa, and Asia?
In my mind and I believe in many others, the cartoons which ridiculed and imprecated the prophet Mohammed were no difference in substance as applied to Islam from the aforementioned books and movie as referenced to Christianity. What then accounts for the difference in reactions of Christians and Muslims? A Muslim might say that if Christians do not defend their religion then that is their problem not ours. I suppose, for Muslims, issuing fatwas (fatwi plural?) willy-nilly, calling for the deaths of every Tom, Dick, and Harry even remotely connected to the cartoons, once again calling for the death of Salmon Rushdie now that he is being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, and the now ever so tiresome mob marches through the streets burning flags and shouting death to Israel, America, Denmark, etc. qualify as normal defenses of their faith. Rational people would disagree. Does it mean then that Muslims are irrational fanatics? Christians are flaccid and craven? Or Christians are tolerant and kindly? And Muslims are simply mawkish and emotionally immature? One thing can be stated with reasonable certainty: There is and has long been, as written about by octogenarian Islamic specialist, the British Bernard Lewis (he reads the Koran in the original Arabic), a continent wide chasm in the general philosophy, religious, social, governmental, and world outlook of Muslims and Christians.
The central theme of both books and the movie is that Jesus, yes Jesus, the son of God, fathered a child with Mary Magdalene and an ultra secret organization called the Priory of Sion has concealed and protected the bloodline of Him which exists even today. I do not classify myself an especially ardent Christian, yet I find this postulation extremely offensive. How much more must the millions of highly devout and fervent Christians around the world feel the obloquy caused by the lese majesty and calumny heaped upon their religion?
There has been some criticism and complains about The Da Vinci Code book and was more when the movie came out, yet there has not been worldwide rioting, murder, and mayhem (don’t get ahead of me here – wait for the following paragraph). I understand why not in secular Europe where fewer than 10% of the people find themselves in church on Sundays. It seems only the young unhinged anarchists and Luddites in Europe feel passionate about anything. Perhaps that explains why most European countries have a less than replacement fertility rate. Yet how about the Christians in the Americas, Africa, and Asia?
In my mind and I believe in many others, the cartoons which ridiculed and imprecated the prophet Mohammed were no difference in substance as applied to Islam from the aforementioned books and movie as referenced to Christianity. What then accounts for the difference in reactions of Christians and Muslims? A Muslim might say that if Christians do not defend their religion then that is their problem not ours. I suppose, for Muslims, issuing fatwas (fatwi plural?) willy-nilly, calling for the deaths of every Tom, Dick, and Harry even remotely connected to the cartoons, once again calling for the death of Salmon Rushdie now that he is being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, and the now ever so tiresome mob marches through the streets burning flags and shouting death to Israel, America, Denmark, etc. qualify as normal defenses of their faith. Rational people would disagree. Does it mean then that Muslims are irrational fanatics? Christians are flaccid and craven? Or Christians are tolerant and kindly? And Muslims are simply mawkish and emotionally immature? One thing can be stated with reasonable certainty: There is and has long been, as written about by octogenarian Islamic specialist, the British Bernard Lewis (he reads the Koran in the original Arabic), a continent wide chasm in the general philosophy, religious, social, governmental, and world outlook of Muslims and Christians.
Friday, July 6, 2007
THE MISUNDERSTOOD AMERICAN ECONOMY 24
All of the meaningful jobs in this country are being outsourced to places such as India, mainland China, Taiwan, etc. Our manufacturing sector is diminishing faster than our waistlines are expanding. We will soon be left with only service jobs – hamburger flipping and the like. Real wages for the average family are going down, not up. Our economy is stagnating and the American Dream has become a nightmare for most folks.
If people believe the above dreck (What a wonderfully appropriate slang word which means worthless, junk, trash - and it is derived from the Yiddish word threkkr meaning excrement.) then they have been getting too much of their ‘information’ from such sources as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and, as it turns out, the Sunday supplement, PARADE magazine. The Washington D.C. presidential press corps would be proud of them for believing such nonsense.
I apologize up front for the length of this article, but there is simply too much information to cover by using fewer words while trying to be both informative and entertaining. Many of the data are derived from the book MYTHS OF RICH AND POOR: Why We are Better off than We Think by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm. Michael Cox was the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas and Richard Alm was business reporter for the Dallas Morning News so both are well credentialed.
Hourly wages rose an average annual 2%, adjusted for inflation, between 1953 and 1973. For the next 5 years wages were flat, and then fell by an average 0.7% per year through 1996. Case closed right? Living standards have been declining since 1973, apodictically. Well, not so fast. There is more to the story – much more.
A better indicator of how well Americans are doing is consumption, not a proxy such as wages or salaries. The statistics on consumption clearly reveal that Americans are better off now than at any time in history. No one doubts that Americans are better off materially, perhaps not spiritually, today than 100 years ago when people lived without electricity, telephones, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, automobiles, and disease fighting antibiotics among other things. How much better off are we than people were 30 years ago in the 1970’s? Consider this partial list from the Cox & Alm book:
ITEM 1970 Mid - 1990’s
Avg. size of new home (sq. ft.) 1500 2150
New homes w/central heat and A/C 34.0% 81.0%
Homes lacking a telephone 13.0% 6.3%
Households with computer 0.0% 41.0%
Households with no vehicle 20.4% 7.9%
Households with two or more vehicles 29.3% 61.9%
Households with color TV 34.0% 97.9%
Households with two or more TV’s 30.7% 72.8%
Households with cable TV 6.3% 63.4%
Households with answering machine 0.0% 6.5%
Households with cordless telephone 0.0% 66.0%
Households with computer printer 0.0% 38.0%
Households with CD player 0.0% 49.0%
Households with cellular telephone 0.0% 34.0%
Households with clothes washer 62.1% 83.2%
Households with clothes dryer 44.6% 75.0%
Households with a microwave <1% 89.5%
Households with outdoors gas grill <5% 28.5%
Households with frost-free refrigerator <25% 86.8%
Mean household net worth $86,095 $216,843
Median household net worth $27,938 $59,398
Additionally fewer than ½ the homes built in 1970 had two or more bathrooms; by 1997 nine out of ten did. In 1970 58% of new homes included garages – by 1997 87% of new homes had them. The garages like the homes have gotten bigger. In 1997 ¾ of the garages had space for two or more automobiles compared with a little more than 1/3 in the early 1970’s.
More up-to-date data on housing (the Cox and Alm book was published in 1999) are that in 1973 the median home had 1660 sq. ft. while in 2005 it was 2412 sq. ft. In 1973 23% of homes had 4+ bedrooms, in 2005 it was 37%; in 1973 12% had 3+ bathrooms, in 2005 24% did; in 1973 44% had fireplaces, in 2005 there were 55% of homes with fireplaces.
Americans are enjoying more luxuries than ever too. Adjusted for inflation, the average spent on jewelry and watches more than doubled from 1970 to 1996. On average 11 gallons of bottled water were consumed per person per year in 1996, up from one gallon in 1970. American spending on services has risen 83 % since the early 1970’s. Included are health clubs, financial advisors, landscapers, caterers, pest-control companies, dry cleaners, car detailing shops, and hundreds of other businesses that entertain, pamper, and save us time. Per capita donations to charities, adjusted for inflation, rose from $402 a year in 1970 to $569 a year in 1996. We eat out more often too. Adjusted for inflation and a growing population, spending on restaurant meals is up 45% from the early 1970’s to the middle 1990’s. We travel more often and to more exotic places. On a per capita basis, average annual miles on commercial flights have more than tripled in the past 25 years and we take nine times as many cruises. Per capita spending on overseas travel and tourism is nearly three times what it was in the 1970’s. In terms of consumption Americans are much better off now than in the 1970’s.
As queried ironically by Cox and Alm, Americans could be paying for a fin-de-siécle spending spree by depleting their assets. Yet this is not borne out by the data. The above list shows that U.S.A. households had inflation adjusted average net worth of $216,843 in 1995 compared to $86,095 in 1970 and half of American families had a net worth of at least $59,398 in 1995, more than double the median net worth in 1970. As a proportion of net financial assets, average consumer debt in 1997 was approximately what it was in 1970 at roughly 5%.
How then to explain the seeming antilogy, without falling into a paralogistic trap, that while real wages declined by nearly 15% from the 1970’s to the 1990’s the living standards for Americans increased significantly by all measurements? A straightforward alternative to real wages is inflation adjusted per capita personal income. Its virtue is that it captures all sources of income – not just wages but interest, dividends, rent, and profits. The statistics on real wages suffer a glaring omission: fringe benefits. Over the past quarter of a century, as tax rates grew steeper and incomes rose, the country witnessed a surge in non-wage benefits. Another factor in increased prosperity not measured by wages is that there are many more small entrepreneurs now than three decades ago or so. In fact much of the hiring is now done by small businesses with work forces of fewer than a dozen to a few hundred employees. Not all of the small enterprises are successful of course, but many are and people with an entrepreneurial spirit are not easily dissuaded, trying again in the same business or a different one after initially failing.
In the view of most people on the political left, the rich get all of the breaks, take advantage of, or otherwise benefit at the expense of the poor. I would like to offer a contrary interpretation. In nurturing infant industries and product lines, the rich pay most of the new industries’ early fixed costs – including research, plant and equipment, and market development. According to Cox and Alm, a three minute telephone call from New York to San Francisco cost $20.70 when first available in 1915. A three minute coast-to-coast call cost less than 50 cents in 1997.
Without the rich, fewer new goods and services would find their way to the rest of us. Over the years wealthy Americans financed the emergence of the automobile, airplane travel, color television sets, computers, and many other products now readily available to the masses in America. As goods and services filter down to the less affluent, prices more nearly reflect companies’ variable cost, including labor and raw materials. The ratio of fixed to variable costs differs from one product to another. That dichotomy helps to explain why some goods and services show quick, steep price reductions, while others go through the process more gradually. Big declines usually occur when fixed costs are high – computers, electronics, pharmaceuticals, for example. Where fixed costs are not overwhelming, companies start out charging prices closer to variable cost. The low-fixed-cost pattern fits food and personal services.
The critics of capitalism fret that the economy works to the benefit of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Nothing could be more wrong. Economic progress actually emerges from a system of price discrimination – against the wealthy not the masses. Still not empathetic toward the rich – neither am I, yet I am biased towards the truth, wherever it leads.
Remember when……when the economy of the Land of the Rising Sun (Japan) rising from the ashes of WWII like the proverbial Phoenix was considered by the middle of the 1980’s to be an unstoppable juggernaut? The Japanese were going to own the entire world according to some alarmists at that time. They even bought Rockefeller Center in New York City for heaven sake. That’s sake (sāk) not sake (säkē), although I’m sure they had a large amount of that too. Something seemed to go a bit wrong before total ownership eventuated. The vaunted co-operation and putative synergy between corporations and the Japanese government, so trumpeted by the West’s socialist leaning economists and journalists, lost its economic magic. The Japanese economy went into a funk for the next 15 years or so, only recovering a bit in the 21st century. And they ended up selling Rockefeller Center along with other properties.
The tocsins of today tout the quondam Red Menace, mainland China, as the next industrial giant that will dominate the world economically. These people seem unfamiliar with the philosopher, George Santayana: “People who do not know history are deemed to repeat its mistakes.” Not withstanding the extremely low probability that China will be the lone superpower in the next half century, the forecast of Ben J. Wattenberg in his 2004 book Fewer, does not sound irrational when he claims that by 2050 there may be three economic super powers in the world: The United States, China, and India. China, however, is facing major problems in the next several decades, not the least will be a growing demand from the increasingly prosperous middle and upper classes for more social and political freedom. There is also the looming quandary from the current ratio of 150/100 boys to girls being allowed to be born. One can imagine the social turmoil and dissatisfaction which will result in a generation from now. The nimiety of young Chinese men can not be rectified by all becoming interior decorators or hairdressers.
An example given by Cox and Alm of the static nature of jobs and professions in the past are the surnames of families: Farmer, Hunter, Fisher, Fowler, Archer, Wheeler, Dyer, Gardner, Glover, Carter, Hooper, Shoemaker, Taylor, Carter, Crocker, Cook, Carpenter, Baker, Weaver, Miner, Mason, Miller, Sawyer, Collier, Chandler, Porter, Planter, Potter, Shepherd, Shearer, Spinner, Fuller, Wright, and Smith. Nobody today is named Charley Computer, Tammy Telephone, or Harold Harddrive except in a failed attempt at levity. Some of the professions were unknown when people now were born and new professions will arise when the next generation comes of age. All of which is a way of saying that with our modern rapidly evolving economy there are bound to be dislocations in the labor market effecting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people with layoffs each year and the necessity of retraining. It is temporarily tough on the people being laid off, or downsized if you will, but would it be preferable if the job market and therefore the economy were as static as it was in the past? A good example of an economic success and dynamic job market is Wal-Mart. In his 2006 book, The Wal-Mart Effect, Charles Fishman details how 90% of Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart and over 50% are within 5 miles. Wal-Mart which was founded in 1962 by Sam Walton, the same year as Kmart and Target, now sells approximately ¼ of all the groceries, apparel, and pharmaceuticals in the United States. There are more than 4000 Wal-Mart stores in the USA (almost 5000 worldwide) with 1.3 million employees. Astonishingly about 650,000 or ½ of the employees quit each year thereby causing Wal-Mart to have to hire 12,500 new employees each week just to stay even. One would think that it would be a sound financial decision for Wal-Mart to reduce the expense of hiring and training by attempting to retain more of its employees with more generous salaries and benefits. Wal-Mart may very well double in size in the next ten years, but the growth will have to come from overseas because how many more stores would be economically profitable for Wal-Mart to build here? Mainland China has about 45 Wal-Mart stores and India zero. As you can well imagine Wal-Mart is lobbying these countries heavily to increase market share in China and get established in India. Incidentally although Fishman declares that it is a morally neutral position for corporations, unknown to most people Wal-Mart is the largest contributor to charity in gross amount of all businesses in this country.
In a capitalistic economy, people, whether individually or in groups called companies or corporations, act on the powerful motive of making oneself better off economically. Call it the profit motive, self-interest, or pejoratively, greed; it is what make the economy tick. Through relentless turmoil, the economy re-creates itself, shifting labor resources to where they are needed, replacing old jobs with new ones. A descriptive shorthand term for this process used by Cox and Alm is “the churn.” Whereas the expression “downsizing” focuses solely on the discomfiture side of economic change, the image of the churn captures the whole process – the jobs that are created as well as the ones lost. The churn isn’t new. Through out history each generation of jobs has given way to the next although at a slower pace in the past than now. And there has always been resistance to this change because of the jobs lost. There is a letter reproduced in the Cox and Alm book which illustrates this point. The complainant, the governor of New York, was beseeching the president of the United States to protect the canal system from the newfangled mode of conveyance, the railroads. He claimed captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen, and tenders would be left without a means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers employed in growing hay for the horses; additionally boat builders would suffer and tow-line, whip and harness makers would be left destitute. Another point he made, apparently seriously, was that canal boats were absolutely essential to the “defence” [sic] of the United States. Further he wrote that “railroad carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ‘engines’ which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children.” This letter was written to President Andrew Jackson by Governor Martin Van Buren in 1829. No, I did not make this up or exaggerate it – it is on page 134 of the Cox and Alm book. The problems envisioned by Van Buren seem comical now, but the joke is on us – these are the same types of concerns in modern dress that people come up with now. Not in this book but in a 2006 book titled Martin Van Buren by Edward L. Widmer and as a matter of interest, Martin Van Buren of Kinderhook in upstate New York went on to become the 8th president of the United States from 1836-40. He was the vice-president in the second term of Andrew Jackson from 1832-36 and was the last vice-president to become president, without having filled the job before being elected to it before George H.W. Bush did so in 1988-92 (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson were vice-presidents who were elected president, but were sitting presidents when elected, having assumed the office after the elected presidents died or were assassinated – McKinley [Roosevelt]; Warren Harding [Calvin Coolidge]; Franklin Roosevelt [Harry Truman]; John Kennedy [Lyndon Johnson]). Van Buren was the only president of the United States who’s first learned language was not English (it was Dutch). Having been defeated for reelection by William Henry Harrison, Van Buren toured the country in 1842 becoming the first politician to do so, in an unsuccessful bid to win the next election. After leaving Chicago (he was the first president or ex-president to visit that city) his carriage broke down so he was put up overnight with a family near Springfield, Illinois. In order to entertain a former president of the United States the family summoned a young lawyer who lived near by. Van Buren and the young man stayed up until the early hours telling each other stories. Van Buren later wrote that he laughed until his sides hurt at the stories of his companion. That young lawyer was Abraham Lincoln. Much later a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle wanted to write an advice column, but was told by the editor that her name was ‘too ethnic’ – meaning too Jewish. She took the surname of a former president and titled her byline: Abigail Van Buren. The irony is that Van Buren was considered an ethnic name in his time.
The United States has not run a foreign trade surplus since the Nixon administration which has caused much hand wringing among people who are prone to that sort of thing. Over the years we have had large trade deficits with Japan and now even larger ones with China. Do we have cause for concern? The short answer is no. Here’s why: (1.) The deficit reflects only merchandise trade, not services. In 1997 the nation’s positive balance in services was almost $88 billion and has been positive ever year since. (2.) According to Cox and Alm the trade deficit is a red herring (I would not have used a cliché that goes back to the Truman administration). The trade deficit and capital surplus are two sides of the same coin. Other countries’ surpluses earn them dollars to purchase more of our services and invest in America. If we don’t buy from foreigners, they can’t buy from us and invest with us. The long-running furor of the merchandise-trade deficit can be turned on its head. What it really signifies is that the United States remains the best place to invest – by a large margin. Again according to Cox and Alm, in the mid 1990’s direct investment from overseas in the United States was more than double that in any other country. Japan’s trade surpluses reflect the opposite. The Japanese economy, where profits and interest rates are low and prices are high, hasn’t been a good place to invest. (3.) When corporations set up manufacturing plants and service and distribution centers outside their original countries, as many do - the so-called multi-nationals, then how can imports and exports be meaningfully differentiated?
The Sunday supplement PARADE magazine ran a front page story on April 23, 2006 questioning whether the American Dream was still possible. The first clue that the story was a politically correct bit of propaganda was the three families shown on the cover. There was an Anglo childless couple, another Anglo family sans father, and a black family with father intact. If a black family had been shown without a father present you know that, to use a synecdoche, the magazine would have been accused of perpetrating racial stereotypes, yet the probability of a black family missing a father is much greater than a white family. Some of the claims in the article bear scrutiny: (1.) “The real median [the number above and below this figure being equal] household income declined 3% from 2000 to 2004.” (2.) “The percentage of households earning $25,000 to $99,999 shrank 1.5% from 2000 to 2004.” (3.) “Credit –card debt is at an all-time high, averaging $9,312 per household.” (4.) “The average cost per year of a public school college (in state) is $12,127, a 25% increase since 2001.”
(1.) & (2.) Three years of the five chosen years (2000-20004) were severe corrections in the equity markets after the “irrational” share price appreciations in the 1990’s as expressed by Federal Reserve Chairman, Allen Greenspan at that time. In fact, the tech heavy NASDAQ declined from over 5000 to under 2000 from 2000 to 2002. (3.) The credit-card debt amount although high is not corrected for inflation so the comparison is meaningless. (4.) Costs for education are certainly going up faster than inflation, still people are not helpless in dealing with it as is implied by the article. Every state has a program where parents can pay into it either as a lump sum or over a number of years in advance to cover future college costs for their children thereby locking in inflation protected prices. Many states even have reciprocal agreements with other states that cover costs for out-of-state students.
Three of the four families quoted in the article believe the American Dream is out of reach for them, yet in a survey of “more than 2200 Americans” 80% say that the American Dream is still possible. The families profiled are not representative of the broader sampling and do you think that was inadvertent?
Cox and Alm quote Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim: “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door” and point out the fallacy in it, mistaking what customers want. “People don’t want better mousetraps, they want dead mice. People don’t want cars, trains, airplanes, boats, or bicycles – they want transportation from one place to another; they don’t want daily newspapers, magazines, TV news channels, or the internet – they want information; they don’t want records, tapes, or CD’s – they want music. Our needs and wants are insatiable, but the ways of realizing them are limited only by our ingenuity and imagination. In a dynamic economy there’s a relentless quest for new, better, or cheaper ways to give people what they want.” The reason free enterprise economies outperform command economies such as socialistic or communistic ones is that consumers determine what will be produced or supplied for the market not bureaucrats. Yet there are unceasing calls for government to intercede in the supply and demand marketplace to the detriment of both consumers and producers. The battle continues.
If people believe the above dreck (What a wonderfully appropriate slang word which means worthless, junk, trash - and it is derived from the Yiddish word threkkr meaning excrement.) then they have been getting too much of their ‘information’ from such sources as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and, as it turns out, the Sunday supplement, PARADE magazine. The Washington D.C. presidential press corps would be proud of them for believing such nonsense.
I apologize up front for the length of this article, but there is simply too much information to cover by using fewer words while trying to be both informative and entertaining. Many of the data are derived from the book MYTHS OF RICH AND POOR: Why We are Better off than We Think by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm. Michael Cox was the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas and Richard Alm was business reporter for the Dallas Morning News so both are well credentialed.
Hourly wages rose an average annual 2%, adjusted for inflation, between 1953 and 1973. For the next 5 years wages were flat, and then fell by an average 0.7% per year through 1996. Case closed right? Living standards have been declining since 1973, apodictically. Well, not so fast. There is more to the story – much more.
A better indicator of how well Americans are doing is consumption, not a proxy such as wages or salaries. The statistics on consumption clearly reveal that Americans are better off now than at any time in history. No one doubts that Americans are better off materially, perhaps not spiritually, today than 100 years ago when people lived without electricity, telephones, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, automobiles, and disease fighting antibiotics among other things. How much better off are we than people were 30 years ago in the 1970’s? Consider this partial list from the Cox & Alm book:
ITEM 1970 Mid - 1990’s
Avg. size of new home (sq. ft.) 1500 2150
New homes w/central heat and A/C 34.0% 81.0%
Homes lacking a telephone 13.0% 6.3%
Households with computer 0.0% 41.0%
Households with no vehicle 20.4% 7.9%
Households with two or more vehicles 29.3% 61.9%
Households with color TV 34.0% 97.9%
Households with two or more TV’s 30.7% 72.8%
Households with cable TV 6.3% 63.4%
Households with answering machine 0.0% 6.5%
Households with cordless telephone 0.0% 66.0%
Households with computer printer 0.0% 38.0%
Households with CD player 0.0% 49.0%
Households with cellular telephone 0.0% 34.0%
Households with clothes washer 62.1% 83.2%
Households with clothes dryer 44.6% 75.0%
Households with a microwave <1% 89.5%
Households with outdoors gas grill <5% 28.5%
Households with frost-free refrigerator <25% 86.8%
Mean household net worth $86,095 $216,843
Median household net worth $27,938 $59,398
Additionally fewer than ½ the homes built in 1970 had two or more bathrooms; by 1997 nine out of ten did. In 1970 58% of new homes included garages – by 1997 87% of new homes had them. The garages like the homes have gotten bigger. In 1997 ¾ of the garages had space for two or more automobiles compared with a little more than 1/3 in the early 1970’s.
More up-to-date data on housing (the Cox and Alm book was published in 1999) are that in 1973 the median home had 1660 sq. ft. while in 2005 it was 2412 sq. ft. In 1973 23% of homes had 4+ bedrooms, in 2005 it was 37%; in 1973 12% had 3+ bathrooms, in 2005 24% did; in 1973 44% had fireplaces, in 2005 there were 55% of homes with fireplaces.
Americans are enjoying more luxuries than ever too. Adjusted for inflation, the average spent on jewelry and watches more than doubled from 1970 to 1996. On average 11 gallons of bottled water were consumed per person per year in 1996, up from one gallon in 1970. American spending on services has risen 83 % since the early 1970’s. Included are health clubs, financial advisors, landscapers, caterers, pest-control companies, dry cleaners, car detailing shops, and hundreds of other businesses that entertain, pamper, and save us time. Per capita donations to charities, adjusted for inflation, rose from $402 a year in 1970 to $569 a year in 1996. We eat out more often too. Adjusted for inflation and a growing population, spending on restaurant meals is up 45% from the early 1970’s to the middle 1990’s. We travel more often and to more exotic places. On a per capita basis, average annual miles on commercial flights have more than tripled in the past 25 years and we take nine times as many cruises. Per capita spending on overseas travel and tourism is nearly three times what it was in the 1970’s. In terms of consumption Americans are much better off now than in the 1970’s.
As queried ironically by Cox and Alm, Americans could be paying for a fin-de-siécle spending spree by depleting their assets. Yet this is not borne out by the data. The above list shows that U.S.A. households had inflation adjusted average net worth of $216,843 in 1995 compared to $86,095 in 1970 and half of American families had a net worth of at least $59,398 in 1995, more than double the median net worth in 1970. As a proportion of net financial assets, average consumer debt in 1997 was approximately what it was in 1970 at roughly 5%.
How then to explain the seeming antilogy, without falling into a paralogistic trap, that while real wages declined by nearly 15% from the 1970’s to the 1990’s the living standards for Americans increased significantly by all measurements? A straightforward alternative to real wages is inflation adjusted per capita personal income. Its virtue is that it captures all sources of income – not just wages but interest, dividends, rent, and profits. The statistics on real wages suffer a glaring omission: fringe benefits. Over the past quarter of a century, as tax rates grew steeper and incomes rose, the country witnessed a surge in non-wage benefits. Another factor in increased prosperity not measured by wages is that there are many more small entrepreneurs now than three decades ago or so. In fact much of the hiring is now done by small businesses with work forces of fewer than a dozen to a few hundred employees. Not all of the small enterprises are successful of course, but many are and people with an entrepreneurial spirit are not easily dissuaded, trying again in the same business or a different one after initially failing.
In the view of most people on the political left, the rich get all of the breaks, take advantage of, or otherwise benefit at the expense of the poor. I would like to offer a contrary interpretation. In nurturing infant industries and product lines, the rich pay most of the new industries’ early fixed costs – including research, plant and equipment, and market development. According to Cox and Alm, a three minute telephone call from New York to San Francisco cost $20.70 when first available in 1915. A three minute coast-to-coast call cost less than 50 cents in 1997.
Without the rich, fewer new goods and services would find their way to the rest of us. Over the years wealthy Americans financed the emergence of the automobile, airplane travel, color television sets, computers, and many other products now readily available to the masses in America. As goods and services filter down to the less affluent, prices more nearly reflect companies’ variable cost, including labor and raw materials. The ratio of fixed to variable costs differs from one product to another. That dichotomy helps to explain why some goods and services show quick, steep price reductions, while others go through the process more gradually. Big declines usually occur when fixed costs are high – computers, electronics, pharmaceuticals, for example. Where fixed costs are not overwhelming, companies start out charging prices closer to variable cost. The low-fixed-cost pattern fits food and personal services.
The critics of capitalism fret that the economy works to the benefit of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Nothing could be more wrong. Economic progress actually emerges from a system of price discrimination – against the wealthy not the masses. Still not empathetic toward the rich – neither am I, yet I am biased towards the truth, wherever it leads.
Remember when……when the economy of the Land of the Rising Sun (Japan) rising from the ashes of WWII like the proverbial Phoenix was considered by the middle of the 1980’s to be an unstoppable juggernaut? The Japanese were going to own the entire world according to some alarmists at that time. They even bought Rockefeller Center in New York City for heaven sake. That’s sake (sāk) not sake (säkē), although I’m sure they had a large amount of that too. Something seemed to go a bit wrong before total ownership eventuated. The vaunted co-operation and putative synergy between corporations and the Japanese government, so trumpeted by the West’s socialist leaning economists and journalists, lost its economic magic. The Japanese economy went into a funk for the next 15 years or so, only recovering a bit in the 21st century. And they ended up selling Rockefeller Center along with other properties.
The tocsins of today tout the quondam Red Menace, mainland China, as the next industrial giant that will dominate the world economically. These people seem unfamiliar with the philosopher, George Santayana: “People who do not know history are deemed to repeat its mistakes.” Not withstanding the extremely low probability that China will be the lone superpower in the next half century, the forecast of Ben J. Wattenberg in his 2004 book Fewer, does not sound irrational when he claims that by 2050 there may be three economic super powers in the world: The United States, China, and India. China, however, is facing major problems in the next several decades, not the least will be a growing demand from the increasingly prosperous middle and upper classes for more social and political freedom. There is also the looming quandary from the current ratio of 150/100 boys to girls being allowed to be born. One can imagine the social turmoil and dissatisfaction which will result in a generation from now. The nimiety of young Chinese men can not be rectified by all becoming interior decorators or hairdressers.
An example given by Cox and Alm of the static nature of jobs and professions in the past are the surnames of families: Farmer, Hunter, Fisher, Fowler, Archer, Wheeler, Dyer, Gardner, Glover, Carter, Hooper, Shoemaker, Taylor, Carter, Crocker, Cook, Carpenter, Baker, Weaver, Miner, Mason, Miller, Sawyer, Collier, Chandler, Porter, Planter, Potter, Shepherd, Shearer, Spinner, Fuller, Wright, and Smith. Nobody today is named Charley Computer, Tammy Telephone, or Harold Harddrive except in a failed attempt at levity. Some of the professions were unknown when people now were born and new professions will arise when the next generation comes of age. All of which is a way of saying that with our modern rapidly evolving economy there are bound to be dislocations in the labor market effecting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people with layoffs each year and the necessity of retraining. It is temporarily tough on the people being laid off, or downsized if you will, but would it be preferable if the job market and therefore the economy were as static as it was in the past? A good example of an economic success and dynamic job market is Wal-Mart. In his 2006 book, The Wal-Mart Effect, Charles Fishman details how 90% of Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart and over 50% are within 5 miles. Wal-Mart which was founded in 1962 by Sam Walton, the same year as Kmart and Target, now sells approximately ¼ of all the groceries, apparel, and pharmaceuticals in the United States. There are more than 4000 Wal-Mart stores in the USA (almost 5000 worldwide) with 1.3 million employees. Astonishingly about 650,000 or ½ of the employees quit each year thereby causing Wal-Mart to have to hire 12,500 new employees each week just to stay even. One would think that it would be a sound financial decision for Wal-Mart to reduce the expense of hiring and training by attempting to retain more of its employees with more generous salaries and benefits. Wal-Mart may very well double in size in the next ten years, but the growth will have to come from overseas because how many more stores would be economically profitable for Wal-Mart to build here? Mainland China has about 45 Wal-Mart stores and India zero. As you can well imagine Wal-Mart is lobbying these countries heavily to increase market share in China and get established in India. Incidentally although Fishman declares that it is a morally neutral position for corporations, unknown to most people Wal-Mart is the largest contributor to charity in gross amount of all businesses in this country.
In a capitalistic economy, people, whether individually or in groups called companies or corporations, act on the powerful motive of making oneself better off economically. Call it the profit motive, self-interest, or pejoratively, greed; it is what make the economy tick. Through relentless turmoil, the economy re-creates itself, shifting labor resources to where they are needed, replacing old jobs with new ones. A descriptive shorthand term for this process used by Cox and Alm is “the churn.” Whereas the expression “downsizing” focuses solely on the discomfiture side of economic change, the image of the churn captures the whole process – the jobs that are created as well as the ones lost. The churn isn’t new. Through out history each generation of jobs has given way to the next although at a slower pace in the past than now. And there has always been resistance to this change because of the jobs lost. There is a letter reproduced in the Cox and Alm book which illustrates this point. The complainant, the governor of New York, was beseeching the president of the United States to protect the canal system from the newfangled mode of conveyance, the railroads. He claimed captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen, and tenders would be left without a means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers employed in growing hay for the horses; additionally boat builders would suffer and tow-line, whip and harness makers would be left destitute. Another point he made, apparently seriously, was that canal boats were absolutely essential to the “defence” [sic] of the United States. Further he wrote that “railroad carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ‘engines’ which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children.” This letter was written to President Andrew Jackson by Governor Martin Van Buren in 1829. No, I did not make this up or exaggerate it – it is on page 134 of the Cox and Alm book. The problems envisioned by Van Buren seem comical now, but the joke is on us – these are the same types of concerns in modern dress that people come up with now. Not in this book but in a 2006 book titled Martin Van Buren by Edward L. Widmer and as a matter of interest, Martin Van Buren of Kinderhook in upstate New York went on to become the 8th president of the United States from 1836-40. He was the vice-president in the second term of Andrew Jackson from 1832-36 and was the last vice-president to become president, without having filled the job before being elected to it before George H.W. Bush did so in 1988-92 (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson were vice-presidents who were elected president, but were sitting presidents when elected, having assumed the office after the elected presidents died or were assassinated – McKinley [Roosevelt]; Warren Harding [Calvin Coolidge]; Franklin Roosevelt [Harry Truman]; John Kennedy [Lyndon Johnson]). Van Buren was the only president of the United States who’s first learned language was not English (it was Dutch). Having been defeated for reelection by William Henry Harrison, Van Buren toured the country in 1842 becoming the first politician to do so, in an unsuccessful bid to win the next election. After leaving Chicago (he was the first president or ex-president to visit that city) his carriage broke down so he was put up overnight with a family near Springfield, Illinois. In order to entertain a former president of the United States the family summoned a young lawyer who lived near by. Van Buren and the young man stayed up until the early hours telling each other stories. Van Buren later wrote that he laughed until his sides hurt at the stories of his companion. That young lawyer was Abraham Lincoln. Much later a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle wanted to write an advice column, but was told by the editor that her name was ‘too ethnic’ – meaning too Jewish. She took the surname of a former president and titled her byline: Abigail Van Buren. The irony is that Van Buren was considered an ethnic name in his time.
The United States has not run a foreign trade surplus since the Nixon administration which has caused much hand wringing among people who are prone to that sort of thing. Over the years we have had large trade deficits with Japan and now even larger ones with China. Do we have cause for concern? The short answer is no. Here’s why: (1.) The deficit reflects only merchandise trade, not services. In 1997 the nation’s positive balance in services was almost $88 billion and has been positive ever year since. (2.) According to Cox and Alm the trade deficit is a red herring (I would not have used a cliché that goes back to the Truman administration). The trade deficit and capital surplus are two sides of the same coin. Other countries’ surpluses earn them dollars to purchase more of our services and invest in America. If we don’t buy from foreigners, they can’t buy from us and invest with us. The long-running furor of the merchandise-trade deficit can be turned on its head. What it really signifies is that the United States remains the best place to invest – by a large margin. Again according to Cox and Alm, in the mid 1990’s direct investment from overseas in the United States was more than double that in any other country. Japan’s trade surpluses reflect the opposite. The Japanese economy, where profits and interest rates are low and prices are high, hasn’t been a good place to invest. (3.) When corporations set up manufacturing plants and service and distribution centers outside their original countries, as many do - the so-called multi-nationals, then how can imports and exports be meaningfully differentiated?
The Sunday supplement PARADE magazine ran a front page story on April 23, 2006 questioning whether the American Dream was still possible. The first clue that the story was a politically correct bit of propaganda was the three families shown on the cover. There was an Anglo childless couple, another Anglo family sans father, and a black family with father intact. If a black family had been shown without a father present you know that, to use a synecdoche, the magazine would have been accused of perpetrating racial stereotypes, yet the probability of a black family missing a father is much greater than a white family. Some of the claims in the article bear scrutiny: (1.) “The real median [the number above and below this figure being equal] household income declined 3% from 2000 to 2004.” (2.) “The percentage of households earning $25,000 to $99,999 shrank 1.5% from 2000 to 2004.” (3.) “Credit –card debt is at an all-time high, averaging $9,312 per household.” (4.) “The average cost per year of a public school college (in state) is $12,127, a 25% increase since 2001.”
(1.) & (2.) Three years of the five chosen years (2000-20004) were severe corrections in the equity markets after the “irrational” share price appreciations in the 1990’s as expressed by Federal Reserve Chairman, Allen Greenspan at that time. In fact, the tech heavy NASDAQ declined from over 5000 to under 2000 from 2000 to 2002. (3.) The credit-card debt amount although high is not corrected for inflation so the comparison is meaningless. (4.) Costs for education are certainly going up faster than inflation, still people are not helpless in dealing with it as is implied by the article. Every state has a program where parents can pay into it either as a lump sum or over a number of years in advance to cover future college costs for their children thereby locking in inflation protected prices. Many states even have reciprocal agreements with other states that cover costs for out-of-state students.
Three of the four families quoted in the article believe the American Dream is out of reach for them, yet in a survey of “more than 2200 Americans” 80% say that the American Dream is still possible. The families profiled are not representative of the broader sampling and do you think that was inadvertent?
Cox and Alm quote Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim: “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door” and point out the fallacy in it, mistaking what customers want. “People don’t want better mousetraps, they want dead mice. People don’t want cars, trains, airplanes, boats, or bicycles – they want transportation from one place to another; they don’t want daily newspapers, magazines, TV news channels, or the internet – they want information; they don’t want records, tapes, or CD’s – they want music. Our needs and wants are insatiable, but the ways of realizing them are limited only by our ingenuity and imagination. In a dynamic economy there’s a relentless quest for new, better, or cheaper ways to give people what they want.” The reason free enterprise economies outperform command economies such as socialistic or communistic ones is that consumers determine what will be produced or supplied for the market not bureaucrats. Yet there are unceasing calls for government to intercede in the supply and demand marketplace to the detriment of both consumers and producers. The battle continues.
Friday, June 29, 2007
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.”
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.”
Saturday, June 23, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, June 15, 2007
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
