Category Archives: History

Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History

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Scarlet SistersThe Scarlet Sisters, by Myra MacPherson, is subtitled Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age.  It is the story of “two improper Victorians” who were famous in their day for championing women’s rights and infamous for scandals.  Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin “rose from poverty, a trashy family, and a childhood of scam fortune-telling,” (including murderously sham cancer ‘treatments,’) “to become rich, powerful, and infamous.”  MacPherson notes that the sisters as well as their rivals and supporters wrote various lies and inconsistencies which make a biography difficult to assemble.

While I had not heard of the sisters before reading this book, they gained supporters and enemies whose names I recognize: the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and radical socialist Karl Marx.  This is only a sample of their associates; the “Cast of Characters” lists fifty-two people.

Spiritualism was their usual entry into famous social circles, and the rags-to-riches backgrounds of many Gilded Age tycoons offered an accepting attitude towards their origins.  These connections supported them when they opened the first woman-owned brokerage house on Wall Street, where they made and lost a fortune. Continue reading →

Russians, The People Behind the Power

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Russians I found Gregory Feifer’s book depressing. “The vast majority of Russians will continue to endure the grinding bureaucracy… [G]overnment repression, waste, shoddiness and corruption remain prominent.” Between the oligarchs and the vast majority there is a “jarring contrast between extravagance and the heart-wrenching shabbiness of the great unwashed.” Westerners who try to do business through the visible government structure are disappointed because the real power is hidden in traditional cronyism, corruption, and bribery.
Feifer says he is pessimistic that Russia will “Westernize”. He asks: “Have they learned nothing from their painful past?” They don’t seem to; Russia has a “political culture that has shaped the country’s history for centuries.”
Feifer covers tsarist, Soviet, and recent history, including the history of St. Petersburg and Moscow. (Being a Russian peasant has always been a misery.) World War II is still prominent in Russian thinking: while seventy years of Soviet rule killed as many as 20 million people directly through execution and imprisonment, or through state-orchestrated famines; WWII killed 30 million in a few years, including 40% of men aged twenty to forty-nine. Continue reading →

Supreme Court Criminal Trial after a Lynching

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I’m often given a stack of legal magazines while visiting our son and his family, and one article that I’ve saved is titled, “A Supreme Case of Contempt” by Mark Curriden published in the June 2009 ABA Journal. You can tell by the date that it took a considerable time before I could post something about this incredibly sad and disturbing story. The article tells the remarkable story of United States v. Shipp. It was the first and only criminal trial in the history of the Supreme Court. There were nine defendants, and all were charged with contempt of the Supreme Court. The U.S. Attorney had filed the charges directly with the court, which gave it “…original jurisdiction in the matter.” The charges alleged that the defendants engaged in action “…with the intent to show their contempt and disregard for the orders of this honorable court…and for the purpose of preventing Ed Johnson from exercising and enjoying a right secured to him by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Ed Johnson was a young black man convicted of raping a white woman despite ample evidence he was innocent. He was lynched after police officials stood aside to allow him to be taken by a mob.

The story begins with a 21 year old white woman named Nevada Taylor who was on her way to work in Chattanooga, TN on January 23, 1906. An assailant approached her from behind, put a leather strap around her neck, threatened to kill her if she screamed, and raped her. She ran home and her father called Hamilton County Sherriff Joseph F. Shipp to report the crime. The newspaper report of the “fiendish crime” said that Taylor had not seen the assailant. The report described the assailant as a “Negro brute.” There was a $375 reward announced for anyone who could identify the attacker. A white man named Will Hixxon read about the reward and said he had seen Ed Johnson, a young black man, carrying a leather strap near the scene of the crime about the time it had occurred. Shipp arrested Johnson, who maintained his innocence during a three hour interrogation. Johnson said he had been in a saloon and gave names of a dozen men who could vouch for his story. Continue reading →

Paradox of Iran

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Ayatollah Begs to DifferThe Ayatollah Begs to Differ
By Hooman Majd

On this blog, we have been making an effort to understand the Islamic world.  Majd says “my hope is that this book, through a combination of stories, history, and personal reflection, will provide the reader a glimpse of Iran and Iranians” and reveal paradoxes of the Iranian character that baffle Americans.  He succeeds.

Majd is the son of an Iranian diplomat raised in the West, and seems well situated to bridge the gap between the two peoples.

Iranians are Persians, not Arabs, and are 90% Shia, not Sunni, Muslim.  Shia believe in the twelfth Imam, who is not dead but hidden, and who will return as the Messiah in a way that reminds me of Christians’ faith in the return of Jesus Christ.  I’m not sure if this similarity will make the two peoples more or less sympathetic to each other, since discussing religion is dangerous outside of trusting relationships.

“Persia” had been “Iran” to Iranians since 226 CE; “Persia” came from the French.  In 1935 a Shah who embraced the Third Reich and fascism decreed that the nation should be called “Iran” which means “land of the Aryans”.  I found it alarming that today Farsi translations of Hitler’s Mein Kampf are prominent in book stores, though some Americans may appreciate that Marx and Communist are loathed by the theocracy.

Many Iranians (especially expats) view the word “Persian” as connoting their glorious past and they are annoyed that Westerners are ignorant of Iran’s history.  Iran was the equal of ancient Egypt, Rome, or Athens.  Westerners admire Alexander the Great, while Iranians view him as a barbarian for burning magnificent Iranian libraries.

“The Shia sense of the world [is] a dark and oppressive place” of “estrangement and woe”, “under a perpetual dark cloud” where “death and martyrdom are pillars of Shia Islam.”  The nation’s recent history reinforces this gloomy outlook: Muslims have suffered “five hundred years of Western hegemony,” and “for two or three hundred years Iran had been [under] Western powers – specifically Britain and then the United States when it took over the mantle of empire after World War II.” Continue reading →

Tyranny of the Status Quo

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bookcvr_status_quoI was looking for a different book by Milton Friedman, but this was the only one available at the library. This book lists both Milton & Rose Friedman as the authors, and I initially thought it would probably be too out of date to be of much interest since it was written in the latter part of Ronald Reagan’s first term as President. I plunged ahead and was rewarded. The book is perhaps even more appropriate to discussing government-caused problems than when first published. The message I want to emphasize is that the Friedman’s warn that politicians often campaign against raising taxes but then engage in deficit spending. They explain that a deficit is a “…hidden tax whether it is financed by pieces  of paper or bookkeeping entries called money or…notes or bills or bonds.” We are liable for the deficit, although it might be our children or grandchildren who will eventually have to actually pay the bill. That is a thought that should be frightening to anyone watching what has happened to the federal deficit in the last decade.

I had never read a Friedman book, although I’ve always admired his many Libertarian-based quotes. My favorite, and I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, is “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in six years we would have a shortage of sand.” I was disappointed that I found only one such pithy quote in the book, but more about that later in the review. Continue reading →

David and Goliath

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Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
By Malcolm Gladwell

david and goliathThis book uses David and Goliath as a metaphor, but it’s not the metaphor you might expect.  Gladwell spends some time explaining the story and its setting in the ancient world, with notes on the surprising amount of scholarly research devoted to it. We modern Americans misunderstand the story’s intent and have the original message wrong.

 

David_and_Goliath public domain

Public Domain in the US: copyright expired

We think of David as a hopeless underdog facing an unbeatable foe, saved only by divine intervention.  “No one in ancient times would have doubted David’s tactical advantage once it was known he was an expert in slinging.”  Gladwell writes that soldiers trained to use sling shots were as formidable as archers.  Goliath was a heavily armored infantry warrior and there was no way he could chase down and engage David; he was a sitting duck. (He may have also had acromegaly: speculation on the diseases of historical figures is always intriguing, even if they are seldom provable.)  I found this part of the book surprisingly interesting and fun; much better than the “favorite Bible stories for children” sort of idea I had before. Continue reading →