Representative Paul Ryan’s Imprimis essay, “Health Care in a Free Society,” has been sitting on my desk since its publication in February, begging for rebuttal.
I have neither the standing of a Congressional Representative nor the political connections of a Paul Ryan. But I was a magazine editor and writer for more than 30 years (albeit in a technical and science realm), a profession that demands critical thinking and analysis, as well as clear expression. And perhaps a few years experience as an army intelligence officer compel me to think analytically and critically, as well. None of this entitles me to a podium of any note. This blog will have to do.
I should also like to offer at the outset that, like Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich, I, too, have been a late bloomer in terms of political thought and challenging conventional wisdom. Like Bacevich, I served in uniform (in the early 1970s), but unlike him, spent most of my adult life in the farm community, and even worked on a state-assembly campaign for one of the most conservative candidates in New York State political history. Even so, even with this conservative background, my thought processes have led me inexorably to reject the conservative, simplistic, dogma-driven concepts laid out in Ryan’s essay.
Simply put, Ryan’s thesis is built on fantasy, divorced from reality.
Hofstra University political scientist David Michael Green says our modern American detachment from reality can be traced back to Ronald Reagan, when [Reagan] said, in effect, “Watch this. I'm gonna slash taxes, especially for the rich, spend huge sums on ‘defense', and balance the budget at the same time".
A great many Americans—including Ryan—still love Reagan and his fiction, and they want them both back. The frightening thing is that they might get them back, with all the concomitant costs of Reagan-like denying of reality.
This is like a sunny optimist saying it's a good day to mow hay, even though every weather forecast is calling for rain and there are dark clouds on the western horizon. No philosophy can change the reality.
Here is Ryan's essence, in his own words: "Government's constitutional obligations in regard to protecting such rights [he's talking about his prior sentence, where he mentions the right to eat and the right to health care] are normally met by establishing the conditions for free markets..."
Hold it right there, Mr. Ryan. I have a question for you: When is the last time you actually saw a free market? It's such a lovely Reganesque concept. But can you find a real one?
Can't think of one? Neither can I.
Then let us try, What is the freest market you can think of?
There are lots of gas stations around. Does that mean it is a free market? Not at all. It's a market influenced by taxes to support and subsidies for highways, environmental regulations on drilling, refining, and even pumping at the gas station. The tax monies our government spends currying Saudis, killing Iraqis, cleaning up after BP, and scheming pipelines through Uzbekistan all affect the price at the pump.
How about the market for chairs like the one you are sitting on? Probably not. Not even if you made it in your basement workshop. The wood from The Home Depot was priced in a market massaged by international exchange rates, subsidies for tree planting in Georgia and Sweden, cheap saw-mill labor in Indonesia, and government-financed forestry research and extension.
Toothpaste? Nah. Lots of that is made overseas and shipped in fossil-fueled cargo ships. (See "chairs," above.)
Food? No way. Not when California produce is bred in government-financed research plots, trucked on tax-financed interstate highways, distributed in tax-abated industrial parks, and sold in grant-financed farmers' markets. Get real.
Yes, precisely, Mr. Ryan. Get real---as in reality.
Deal with the world as it really is today, not as it ought to be in your romantic vision of a few, select "Founding Fathers."
There is no free market anywhere in this world.
There are only regulated markets, influenced markets, controlled markets, and dominated markets, varying only by flavor and degree. To argue over free markets versus managed markets is a fool's errand. There are no free markets. The reality-based argument needs to be, Who are the key influencers of the market and why? Does their influence, dominance , or control render it unfair? Who gains and who loses in this real market? Is this acceptable and to whom? And ultimately, is the populace well served by the realities of this market?
The American populace recently learned that our financial markets were regulated very nicely for the banks and investment houses, but not so well for anyone else.
No clearer example of markets-dominated-by-somebody is possible or needed. Recent data and publicity about income inequality in the USA, about the richer growing vastly richer while everyone else did remarkably poorer, speak volumes about our "free market."
The rest of Ryan's essay hammers at the very notion of government exercising any role he defines as out of constitutional bounds:
* "Placing control of health care in the hands of government bureaucrats is not compassionate." Oh? And placing it in the hands of profit-driven insurance companies is compassionate?
* "The very idea of government-run health care conflicts with the American idea of a free society---the principles of individual rights and free markets."
Oh? And government-run fire departments are O.K.? We can save property but not people? Free markets? Please. The kind that gave us unregulated derivatives and credit default swaps and Halliburton-operated war? And who was it who died and left Paul Ryan in charge of defining American ideals, anyway? It was Thomas Paine who died and his ideas with him---Paine, that founding father conservatives don't like to quote because after writing The American Crisis, which Washington read to his troops at Valley Forge to inspire them, Paine went on to write The Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice, calling for democratic social programs like aid to the elderly and to the unemployed, grants akin to today's Pell Grants to college students, and guaranteed minimum wage. Oh, wait. Paine was living in France then, and we can't abide French ideas.
Ryan goes on to write, "[This] is a debate less about policy than ideology. It is a debate over whether we should reform health care in a way compatible with our Constitution and our free society , or whether we should abandon our free market economic model for a full-fledged European-syle social welfare state."
Mr. Ryan, you apparently missed the news. This country abandoned that model long ago, even as it retained the myth. We said goodbye to the free market economic model back when Hamilton, then Clay, and then Lincoln all pushed for what they called "internal improvements" like canals, roads, and railroads. Our government has been pouring tax dollars into pet projects and favored pockets ever since. The struggle is over who gets the favor.
Please forgive this insertion of reality: This is a debate over whether we should abandon our free market myth and look reality in the face and call it by its name: a struggle for market control by the common man through his elected government, a struggle to reject market domination and corruption by big corporations, big finance, and their political henchmen.
Ryan concludes, "Americans retain the Founders' view that a government that seeks to go beyond its high but limited constitutional role of securing equal rights and establishing free markets is not progressive at all in the literal sense of that word---rather it is reactionary."
Ronald Reagan must be smiling. He loved historical fiction.
# # #
-------
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Book Review
The Imperial Cruise, a Secret History of Empire and War
by James Bradley
2009, Little Brown and Company
How does one judge the accuracy or perspective of revisionist history?
That is, after all, what "The Imperial Cruise" is: revisionist history. And Howard Zinn would be proud.
In the mode of Zinn, Bradley digs up original documents and straight-from-the-horse's-mouth quotes to build this contrarian case: Theodore Roosevelt was a raving racist who openly promoted Aryan superiority, who saw nothing wrong with ethnic cleansing in the name of Teutonic superiority and inevitability, and whose arrogant diplomatic blunders set the stage for Pearl Harbor, the Korean war, and the Vietnam War.
Wow.
But how does one argue with Bradley's claim when he lays out TR's own words?
* "[Blacks are] a perfectly stupid race" and it would take "many thousand years" before the Blacks became even "as intellectual as the Athenian."
* "It is unthinkable that the United States would abandon the Philippines to their own tribes. To grant self government . . . under Aguinaldo would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief."
* "A conquest may be frought either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples . . . The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands."
To bolster his case, Bradley also shows us quote after horrific quote from other American officials of the time: William Howard Taft (governor of the Philippines before president), generals, and professors---all demonstrating with convincing clarity how widely held Roosevelt's "save the savages from themselves" (even if you kill a lot of them in the process)" philosophy was.
TR was not without his critics, even in his own age: Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, and various U.S. Senators among them.
"You have devastated provinces," said Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts. "You have slain uncounted thousands of peoples you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps . . . You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and the horror of the water torture."
The Washington Post ran a story about U.S. soldiers marching 1,300 Filipino prisoners of war to hear their last confessions from a priest, had them dig their own graves, shot them all in the head, and then hanged the priest. Shortly after, Roosevelt directed the construction of a "Philippines Reservation" at the 1904 World's Fair to show how benevolently the U.S. was administering the Pacific islands.
Bradley chronicles the conniving and deceit that gained us Hawaii. He tells us how TR pried open Japan and turned it---for a few decades---into a U.S. proxy in Asia, even secretly encouraging the Japanese to adopt its own Monroe Doctrine and occupy Korea so as to civilize it. "They are playing our game, TR crowed.
It was this encouraging of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine in relation to Asia that came back to haunt us, says Bradley. Japan thought the United States actually meant it. Thirty-six years later, even as Japanese airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor, emissaries of The Land of the Rising Sun delivered a message to The White House that said, in part, "It is a fact of history that the countries of East Asia for the past hundred years or more have been compelled to observe the status quo under Anglo-American policy of imperialist exploitation and to sacrifice themselves to the prosperity of the two nations. The Japanese Government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of such a situation."
What does Bradley care?
His father was one of the Marines in the famous photo of the raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima. "Maybe," he says, "my father didn't have to suffer through World War II in the Pacific."
Nor millions of others.
by James Bradley
2009, Little Brown and Company
How does one judge the accuracy or perspective of revisionist history?
That is, after all, what "The Imperial Cruise" is: revisionist history. And Howard Zinn would be proud.
In the mode of Zinn, Bradley digs up original documents and straight-from-the-horse's-mouth quotes to build this contrarian case: Theodore Roosevelt was a raving racist who openly promoted Aryan superiority, who saw nothing wrong with ethnic cleansing in the name of Teutonic superiority and inevitability, and whose arrogant diplomatic blunders set the stage for Pearl Harbor, the Korean war, and the Vietnam War.
Wow.
But how does one argue with Bradley's claim when he lays out TR's own words?
* "[Blacks are] a perfectly stupid race" and it would take "many thousand years" before the Blacks became even "as intellectual as the Athenian."
* "It is unthinkable that the United States would abandon the Philippines to their own tribes. To grant self government . . . under Aguinaldo would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief."
* "A conquest may be frought either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples . . . The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands."
To bolster his case, Bradley also shows us quote after horrific quote from other American officials of the time: William Howard Taft (governor of the Philippines before president), generals, and professors---all demonstrating with convincing clarity how widely held Roosevelt's "save the savages from themselves" (even if you kill a lot of them in the process)" philosophy was.
TR was not without his critics, even in his own age: Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, and various U.S. Senators among them.
"You have devastated provinces," said Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts. "You have slain uncounted thousands of peoples you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps . . . You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and the horror of the water torture."
The Washington Post ran a story about U.S. soldiers marching 1,300 Filipino prisoners of war to hear their last confessions from a priest, had them dig their own graves, shot them all in the head, and then hanged the priest. Shortly after, Roosevelt directed the construction of a "Philippines Reservation" at the 1904 World's Fair to show how benevolently the U.S. was administering the Pacific islands.
Bradley chronicles the conniving and deceit that gained us Hawaii. He tells us how TR pried open Japan and turned it---for a few decades---into a U.S. proxy in Asia, even secretly encouraging the Japanese to adopt its own Monroe Doctrine and occupy Korea so as to civilize it. "They are playing our game, TR crowed.
It was this encouraging of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine in relation to Asia that came back to haunt us, says Bradley. Japan thought the United States actually meant it. Thirty-six years later, even as Japanese airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor, emissaries of The Land of the Rising Sun delivered a message to The White House that said, in part, "It is a fact of history that the countries of East Asia for the past hundred years or more have been compelled to observe the status quo under Anglo-American policy of imperialist exploitation and to sacrifice themselves to the prosperity of the two nations. The Japanese Government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of such a situation."
What does Bradley care?
His father was one of the Marines in the famous photo of the raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima. "Maybe," he says, "my father didn't have to suffer through World War II in the Pacific."
Nor millions of others.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Book Review
The Big Sort: why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart
by Bill Bishop
2009
Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Maybe because it's part of my job to understand how people think or what drives them to make certain decisions that The Big Sort has had such a big impact on my thinking.
Its thesis, in brief, is this: Since the 1970s, tens of millions of Americans have packed up and moved, largely for jobs. And when they do, they settle in neighborhoods where pretty nearly everyone is just like them: same outlook, same political leanings, same church-going habits (or not), same education level, same political party, etc. Once settled-in, these modern day tribe members have little need to talk to or associate with people who think differently. Add to that the fact that our niche-marketed economy reinforces this behavior and serves their tribal preferences, these folks have no desire to "think outside the tribe."
In political terms we call this polarization. Author and newspaperman Bill Bishop calls it dangerous to our nation.
Bishop, assisted by statistician/demographer Robert G. Cushing, pulls his conclusions largely from Census data and voting records, and backs it up with science-based psychological and behavioral studies. He makes a compelling case.
In a Malcolm Gladwell sort of way, Bishop tells us that what we thought we knew about political polarization is wrong. It was not caused by repeal of The Fairness Doctrine by the Reagan Administration (giving birth to talk radio and Rush Limbaugh). It was not caused by Karl Rove as he taught the Bush campaign to "play to your base." According to Bishop, it happened one little decision at a time over the years, every time someone relocated. The Limbaughs and Roves of this world, as well as niche marketers, simply exploited the reality they pereceived.
One especially telling episode involves Christian celebrity pastor Rick Warren. Bishop describes the lengthy and painstaking demographic research that Warren did before establishing his wildly successful Saddleback church. In short, Warren studied the numbers to find the perfect location and then tailored the show to suit the audience.
Going even further back, Bishop describes how earlier missionaries---ones Warren leaned on---learned that the path to success lay in making the "target audience" feel welcome and comfortable, not in cramming the gospel down their throats. To extend this to contemporary migrations and affiliations: People go where they feel they fit and are welcome.
Edging close to Bowling Alone, Bishop describes the erosion of mainline churches, civic organizations, and Farm Bureau, all associations of heterogeneous groups, as their members vote with their feet and move to homogeneous (yes, polarized) organizations like evangelical Christian churches, or The Sierra Club---a church in its own right, if one listens to the words of its founder John Muir.
A couple other highlights (don't shoot me; I'm just the messenger)
* Since the 1970s, the "undecided middle" has grown smaller and smaller as one analyzes county voting patterns in presidential elections. "Landslide counties"---those where the winner wins a 20 percent or larger margin over the loser---are increasing rapidly in number.
* The single most telling indicator of all other behaviors and attitudes is church-going versus not
* Education is highly indicative and has an inverse realtionship with church habits
* Lower-educated people tend to relocate to lower-educated places and earn less
What's the future for a society that is fragmenting like this? Disagreements about everything from social services to health care to banking subsidies to war to state funding of education (and what text books to adopt) permeate our society.
Two fundamental realities are colliding head-on:
(1) as places become more densely populated, they tend to become more socialistic (to provide services and protect people from one another), hence both higher taxes and the need to tax those who disagree
(2) increasing fragmentation of society and greater resentment of being taxed to support things you disagree with
What's the solution?
Bishop gives us a lot to chew on. But not a lot of hope.
by Bill Bishop
2009
Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Maybe because it's part of my job to understand how people think or what drives them to make certain decisions that The Big Sort has had such a big impact on my thinking.
Its thesis, in brief, is this: Since the 1970s, tens of millions of Americans have packed up and moved, largely for jobs. And when they do, they settle in neighborhoods where pretty nearly everyone is just like them: same outlook, same political leanings, same church-going habits (or not), same education level, same political party, etc. Once settled-in, these modern day tribe members have little need to talk to or associate with people who think differently. Add to that the fact that our niche-marketed economy reinforces this behavior and serves their tribal preferences, these folks have no desire to "think outside the tribe."
In political terms we call this polarization. Author and newspaperman Bill Bishop calls it dangerous to our nation.
Bishop, assisted by statistician/demographer Robert G. Cushing, pulls his conclusions largely from Census data and voting records, and backs it up with science-based psychological and behavioral studies. He makes a compelling case.
In a Malcolm Gladwell sort of way, Bishop tells us that what we thought we knew about political polarization is wrong. It was not caused by repeal of The Fairness Doctrine by the Reagan Administration (giving birth to talk radio and Rush Limbaugh). It was not caused by Karl Rove as he taught the Bush campaign to "play to your base." According to Bishop, it happened one little decision at a time over the years, every time someone relocated. The Limbaughs and Roves of this world, as well as niche marketers, simply exploited the reality they pereceived.
One especially telling episode involves Christian celebrity pastor Rick Warren. Bishop describes the lengthy and painstaking demographic research that Warren did before establishing his wildly successful Saddleback church. In short, Warren studied the numbers to find the perfect location and then tailored the show to suit the audience.
Going even further back, Bishop describes how earlier missionaries---ones Warren leaned on---learned that the path to success lay in making the "target audience" feel welcome and comfortable, not in cramming the gospel down their throats. To extend this to contemporary migrations and affiliations: People go where they feel they fit and are welcome.
Edging close to Bowling Alone, Bishop describes the erosion of mainline churches, civic organizations, and Farm Bureau, all associations of heterogeneous groups, as their members vote with their feet and move to homogeneous (yes, polarized) organizations like evangelical Christian churches, or The Sierra Club---a church in its own right, if one listens to the words of its founder John Muir.
A couple other highlights (don't shoot me; I'm just the messenger)
* Since the 1970s, the "undecided middle" has grown smaller and smaller as one analyzes county voting patterns in presidential elections. "Landslide counties"---those where the winner wins a 20 percent or larger margin over the loser---are increasing rapidly in number.
* The single most telling indicator of all other behaviors and attitudes is church-going versus not
* Education is highly indicative and has an inverse realtionship with church habits
* Lower-educated people tend to relocate to lower-educated places and earn less
What's the future for a society that is fragmenting like this? Disagreements about everything from social services to health care to banking subsidies to war to state funding of education (and what text books to adopt) permeate our society.
Two fundamental realities are colliding head-on:
(1) as places become more densely populated, they tend to become more socialistic (to provide services and protect people from one another), hence both higher taxes and the need to tax those who disagree
(2) increasing fragmentation of society and greater resentment of being taxed to support things you disagree with
What's the solution?
Bishop gives us a lot to chew on. But not a lot of hope.
Book Review
The Radical Alternative
1971
by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
(titled Heaven and and Earth in its native French)
W. W. Norton and Company
It may be the best 50 cents I ever invested. That is what it cost to buy this book off the used-book shelf at the public library.
It was the author's name that caught me first: Servan-Schreiber. Could it be? I wondered. Yes, it is the father of Pittsburgh-based David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., author of The Anti-Cancer Book.
Don't let the title Radical Alternative deceive you. Its thesis is no longer radical, unless you are a political conservative who actually believes free markets can and do exist and can regulate themselves.
While I have read some history of the founding of the Common Market, I do not profess to be an expert on the history of the European Union that evolved from it. But I would say that 75% of that which Servan-Schreiber advocates in this book, written as a platform for the French Radical Party, has been adopted by The EU.
At its core is this: The industrial revolution and technological advances since then have created a world dominated by economics. Economics dominates our lives, and increasingly to the detriment of society, says Servan-Schreiber. But economics has also created a productivity that gives us the leisure, and thus the opportunity, to run the equation backwards. That is, political bodies, through true democracy, must harness the economy for the benefit of the masses.
In many respects, Servan-Schreiber's Radical Alternative is a modern-day plan to execute and expand upon Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, a powerful influence on the French Revolution. The
platform calls for---
1. Separation of political power from economic power---seemingly paradoxical, it's a fiscally conservative measure: the end of subsidies to any economic sector, with the possible exception of some start-ups---a very Alexander-Hamilton idea). Servan Schreiber writes:
2. Access to social equality---"Education must allow men, all men, to dominate change." The platform calls for a strong emphasis on education, especially ages 2 - 4 and lifelong learning
3. The end of hereditary private power---lots to say about the inheritance tax here
4. Redistribution of public power---oddly, it calls for decentralization of political power while admitting that even national governments are no match for transnational corporations.
I find myself agreeing with the nobility of Servan-Schreiber's ideas and observe that many of them seem to have been embraced by The European Union. But it would also seem that realities 40 years later show some impracticality of some of the ideas.
For example, in a global economy more highly developed now than then, these free marketers Servan-Scheiber romantically yearns-for have to compete with the socialized capitalism of China, reminiscent of amateurs competing against professionals at the Olympics. The amateurs don't win very often.
Nonetheless, the French Radical Part of 1971 has a message that resonates in the United States of 2010: We don't have to have an economy where penny-paid workers produce for mega-paid executives. It ought to be within our means to create a just society that channels more benefits to both workers and those economically displaced by the economy.
Dream on.
1971
by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
(titled Heaven and and Earth in its native French)
W. W. Norton and Company
It may be the best 50 cents I ever invested. That is what it cost to buy this book off the used-book shelf at the public library.
It was the author's name that caught me first: Servan-Schreiber. Could it be? I wondered. Yes, it is the father of Pittsburgh-based David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., author of The Anti-Cancer Book.
Don't let the title Radical Alternative deceive you. Its thesis is no longer radical, unless you are a political conservative who actually believes free markets can and do exist and can regulate themselves.
While I have read some history of the founding of the Common Market, I do not profess to be an expert on the history of the European Union that evolved from it. But I would say that 75% of that which Servan-Schreiber advocates in this book, written as a platform for the French Radical Party, has been adopted by The EU.
At its core is this: The industrial revolution and technological advances since then have created a world dominated by economics. Economics dominates our lives, and increasingly to the detriment of society, says Servan-Schreiber. But economics has also created a productivity that gives us the leisure, and thus the opportunity, to run the equation backwards. That is, political bodies, through true democracy, must harness the economy for the benefit of the masses.
In many respects, Servan-Schreiber's Radical Alternative is a modern-day plan to execute and expand upon Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, a powerful influence on the French Revolution. The
platform calls for---
1. Separation of political power from economic power---seemingly paradoxical, it's a fiscally conservative measure: the end of subsidies to any economic sector, with the possible exception of some start-ups---a very Alexander-Hamilton idea). Servan Schreiber writes:
Well founded or not [subsidies] have a tendency to be renewed each year, constituting a sort of entrenched right . . . Who pays the bill? The French people. For whose benefit? . . . The reason is clear. And for the same reason, the same confusion of roles, the same lack of common sense, the
French state is prodigally generous towards industrialists while it is extremely mean with regard to wage earners.
The Radicals will end this confusion. It is necessary in the public interest to eliminate any capitalist undertaking incapanble of developing within the most open competition. The owners of the undertaking, not the state, should bear all the risk and its consequences.
2. Access to social equality---"Education must allow men, all men, to dominate change." The platform calls for a strong emphasis on education, especially ages 2 - 4 and lifelong learning
3. The end of hereditary private power---lots to say about the inheritance tax here
4. Redistribution of public power---oddly, it calls for decentralization of political power while admitting that even national governments are no match for transnational corporations.
I find myself agreeing with the nobility of Servan-Schreiber's ideas and observe that many of them seem to have been embraced by The European Union. But it would also seem that realities 40 years later show some impracticality of some of the ideas.
For example, in a global economy more highly developed now than then, these free marketers Servan-Scheiber romantically yearns-for have to compete with the socialized capitalism of China, reminiscent of amateurs competing against professionals at the Olympics. The amateurs don't win very often.
Nonetheless, the French Radical Part of 1971 has a message that resonates in the United States of 2010: We don't have to have an economy where penny-paid workers produce for mega-paid executives. It ought to be within our means to create a just society that channels more benefits to both workers and those economically displaced by the economy.
Dream on.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Book Review: The House of Morgan: an American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
By Ron Chernow
Ron Chernow is one of the very best historians of our time. But The House of Morgan is not his finest work.
The research is there—exhaustive as it always is with Chernow’s financial histories. The problem is that he, himself, seems to run out of enthusiasm for his subject. Two-thirds the way through it, after having chronicled more than 180 years of the family and its multifarious banking manifestations, his presentation begins to show an attitude of “Geesh, let’s get this thing over with.” His paragraphs become formulaic. Every new executive is introduced with the required “physiognomy begets personality” sentences, and then it’s off to examine his damage to the corporate reputation.
Chernow is usually better than that. Certainly the first 60 percent of it was, and certainly Hamilton and Titan (a similar family biography of the Rockefellers) were-- in their entirety.
Chernow’s account peters out in 1988, just after the now-small Wall Street calamity of that day. One is left to wonder what he would add now, in 2009.
Still, all in all, it’s worth the read.
Ron Chernow is one of the very best historians of our time. But The House of Morgan is not his finest work.
The research is there—exhaustive as it always is with Chernow’s financial histories. The problem is that he, himself, seems to run out of enthusiasm for his subject. Two-thirds the way through it, after having chronicled more than 180 years of the family and its multifarious banking manifestations, his presentation begins to show an attitude of “Geesh, let’s get this thing over with.” His paragraphs become formulaic. Every new executive is introduced with the required “physiognomy begets personality” sentences, and then it’s off to examine his damage to the corporate reputation.
Chernow is usually better than that. Certainly the first 60 percent of it was, and certainly Hamilton and Titan (a similar family biography of the Rockefellers) were-- in their entirety.
Chernow’s account peters out in 1988, just after the now-small Wall Street calamity of that day. One is left to wonder what he would add now, in 2009.
Still, all in all, it’s worth the read.
Book Review: John Adams, Party of One
By James Grant
published 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
It may be a disservice to publish this review, so thoroughly has David McCullough’s slightly ealier biography of Adams dominated the popular press. They need contrasting, if only to point out the power of celebrity—McCullough’s—in marketing of books.
That will have to wait.
For now, let it be said that Grant’s book is a masterpiece of both research and style, fully on par with Ron Chernow’s Hamilton and better than Chernow’s House of Morgan.
Like Chernow, Grant hangs his hat on financial history and, like Chernow, Grant leaves no original-source detail unexamined, weaving letters, diaries, and even Adams’s own hand-written book-margin notes into a compelling and vibrant tale of the building of a nation.
Along then way, the reader is rewarded with unexpected insight into the changing of times: the evolution of Puritanism into Congregationalism into Unitarianism (and concurrently so in Adams’s mind), and the financing of the new United States of America by a reluctant junk-bond salesman by the name of John Adams.
As is so often the case with these histories of America’s founders, we are reminded that these men were in agreement barely enough to set forth The Articles of Confederation and later a Constitution. The notion of harmonious, deeply-in-agreement “founding fathers” is a fiction fostered by the unread. For that alone Grant would have done us a service. To do it as skillfully as he has is a gift.
published 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
It may be a disservice to publish this review, so thoroughly has David McCullough’s slightly ealier biography of Adams dominated the popular press. They need contrasting, if only to point out the power of celebrity—McCullough’s—in marketing of books.
That will have to wait.
For now, let it be said that Grant’s book is a masterpiece of both research and style, fully on par with Ron Chernow’s Hamilton and better than Chernow’s House of Morgan.
Like Chernow, Grant hangs his hat on financial history and, like Chernow, Grant leaves no original-source detail unexamined, weaving letters, diaries, and even Adams’s own hand-written book-margin notes into a compelling and vibrant tale of the building of a nation.
Along then way, the reader is rewarded with unexpected insight into the changing of times: the evolution of Puritanism into Congregationalism into Unitarianism (and concurrently so in Adams’s mind), and the financing of the new United States of America by a reluctant junk-bond salesman by the name of John Adams.
As is so often the case with these histories of America’s founders, we are reminded that these men were in agreement barely enough to set forth The Articles of Confederation and later a Constitution. The notion of harmonious, deeply-in-agreement “founding fathers” is a fiction fostered by the unread. For that alone Grant would have done us a service. To do it as skillfully as he has is a gift.
Book Review: Common Sense and other writings of Thomas Paine
Barnes and Noble Classics
George Stade, Consulting Editorial Director
Introduction and Notes by Joyce Appleby, Professor Emerita, UCLA
It’s hard to fault conservative politicians and pundits for invoking the founding fathers—excuse me, The Founding Fathers—as they discuss the issues of the day. It is so patriotic, so American.
The trouble is they are always wrong. The very idea is built on a wobbly foundation of fact. The writings, behavior, and biographies of the signers of The Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and The Constitution reveal an unending set of jealousies, political dirty tricks, and philosophical opposites. The miracle is that they could agree enough to produce any of these documents.
Most annoying to worshipers at The Church of the Founding Fathers—if they even know—are the 76ers whose writings and ideas don’t fit their catechism.
Case in point: Thomas Paine, Founding Father, firebrand propagandist of the American rebellion, instigator of the French Revolution, and—surprise—social democrat: the same Thomas Paine whose Common Sense was by order of General Washington read aloud to the troops at Valley Forge; the same Thomas Paine of whom John Adams said, “History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine;” the same Thomas Paine quoted lovingly in speeches by Ronald Reagan.
Thomas Paine a social democrat?
Indeed.
The Thomas Paine that Sean Hannity either does not know or willfully ignores saw beyond rejection of royalty and tyranny. His revolution would be satisfied with nothing less than social and economic justice.
Perhaps the best self-portrait of the Thomas Paine who later authored Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice is this: "When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government."
As progressive talk-show host and author Thom Hartmann writes, “It wasn't FDR who first seriously promoted the progressive income tax in the USA: it was Thomas Paine. It wasn't LBJ who invented anti-poverty programs by introducing Medicare, housing assistance, and food-stamp programs: Thomas Paine proposed versions of all of these. It wasn't Jack Kennedy who first talked seriously about international disarmament: it was Thomas Paine. And Teddy Roosevelt wasn't the first American to talk about the "living wage," or ways that corporate "maximum wage" wink-and-nod agreements could be broken up: it was Thomas Paine. Even Woodrow Wilson's inheritance tax, designed to prevent family empires from taking over our nation, was the idea of Thomas Paine, as was the suggestion for old-age pensions as part of a social safety net known today as Social Security.”
It’s all there, in this little paperback compendium of Paine’s writings, reminding us that the American Revolution and the work of at least one of our Founding Fathers is unfinished.
George Stade, Consulting Editorial Director
Introduction and Notes by Joyce Appleby, Professor Emerita, UCLA
It’s hard to fault conservative politicians and pundits for invoking the founding fathers—excuse me, The Founding Fathers—as they discuss the issues of the day. It is so patriotic, so American.
The trouble is they are always wrong. The very idea is built on a wobbly foundation of fact. The writings, behavior, and biographies of the signers of The Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and The Constitution reveal an unending set of jealousies, political dirty tricks, and philosophical opposites. The miracle is that they could agree enough to produce any of these documents.
Most annoying to worshipers at The Church of the Founding Fathers—if they even know—are the 76ers whose writings and ideas don’t fit their catechism.
Case in point: Thomas Paine, Founding Father, firebrand propagandist of the American rebellion, instigator of the French Revolution, and—surprise—social democrat: the same Thomas Paine whose Common Sense was by order of General Washington read aloud to the troops at Valley Forge; the same Thomas Paine of whom John Adams said, “History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine;” the same Thomas Paine quoted lovingly in speeches by Ronald Reagan.
Thomas Paine a social democrat?
Indeed.
The Thomas Paine that Sean Hannity either does not know or willfully ignores saw beyond rejection of royalty and tyranny. His revolution would be satisfied with nothing less than social and economic justice.
Perhaps the best self-portrait of the Thomas Paine who later authored Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice is this: "When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government."
As progressive talk-show host and author Thom Hartmann writes, “It wasn't FDR who first seriously promoted the progressive income tax in the USA: it was Thomas Paine. It wasn't LBJ who invented anti-poverty programs by introducing Medicare, housing assistance, and food-stamp programs: Thomas Paine proposed versions of all of these. It wasn't Jack Kennedy who first talked seriously about international disarmament: it was Thomas Paine. And Teddy Roosevelt wasn't the first American to talk about the "living wage," or ways that corporate "maximum wage" wink-and-nod agreements could be broken up: it was Thomas Paine. Even Woodrow Wilson's inheritance tax, designed to prevent family empires from taking over our nation, was the idea of Thomas Paine, as was the suggestion for old-age pensions as part of a social safety net known today as Social Security.”
It’s all there, in this little paperback compendium of Paine’s writings, reminding us that the American Revolution and the work of at least one of our Founding Fathers is unfinished.
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