My Review of Peter Cozzens' "Deadwood: Gold, Guns and Greed in the American West"

 Gold in Them There Hills

As an enthusiastic fan of the Deadwood HBO series, I was looking forward to Peter Cozzens’ book on the same subject. Except for the book being too long, I was not disappointed. Cozzens’ “Deadwood” has everything. His cast of characters include Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, Sitting Bull, President Grant, and George Hearst. We witness Indian wars, cattle rustling, horse thieves, stagecoach robberies, gun fights and water wars. As in the HBO series, the two leading protagonists are Seth Bullock and Sol Star who own a hardware store. Bullock would become sheriff and U.S. Marshall and Star would remain a pillar of the community.

 In four short years 1876-1879 Deadwood sparked the imagination of the entire country with the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The town was founded by would be miners illegally squatting on Indian land that was later legalized. The miners largely came from the vast army of the unemployed caused by the long depression of 1873-1879. Following them was a smaller army of “soiled doves,” prostitutes in the vernacular of the day, who populated the Deadwood’s notorious brothels.

 Two facets of Deadwood’s short history bring out the economist in me. First Deadwood represents a case study in spontaneous order where the town was created out of nothing. Of course, quite a bit of disorder went along with the order, but Deadwood worked more or less. Indeed, Deadwood was one of the few places in the U.S. where African Americans, Jews and Chinese got along with the majority white Christian population and were respected to varying degrees.

 Second, with the passage of Grant’s Specie Resumption Act of 1875 the United States was put on a path to the gold standard. One of the problems with the gold standard is that the growth in the money supply is contingent the success of miners in finding gold. Hence, the importance of Deadwood. In part, Deadwood helped put the U.S. back on the gold standard in 1879.

 Cozzens highlights the role George Hearst the mining magnate who struck it rich in nearby Lead City. His Homestake Mine would form the foundation of his wealth and it enabled his son William Randolf to become a press lord and leading politician in the early 20^th Century. He was far from the most scrupulous person, but his mine produced gold through 2002. It truly was the mother lode.

Deadwood’s day in the sun ended with a fire in late 1879 which wiped out the town. However, absent the fire the decline in placer mining made decline inevitable. Capital intensive hard rock mining took the place of the very labor-intensive panning for gold. Cozzens tells a great story of this small mining town that captured the attention of the nation.

 

 

My Review of Hampton Sides' "On Desperate Ground"

 The Chosin Few

Hampton Sides published his Korea War opus “On Desperate Ground” nearly seven years ago. It was highly acclaimed at that time, so don’t have much to add. All I can say his book portrays the heroism of the men of the 1st Marine Division in extraordinary personal detail. They were true heroes surrounded by Chinese and North Korean forces in the Chosin Reservoir who engaged in a spectacular breakout in the freezing cold. Through his words you can feel the snow and the winter cold at 4,000 feet in the North Korea of November 1950. 

To me the marine grunts are the true heroes of the book. However they benefitted from the great generalship of Oliver Prince Smith, who should be in the pantheon of great American generals. They also benefited from the engineering genius of Col. John Partridge who, under fire, constructed the landing field that would supply the surrounded marines and built a pontoon bridge that enabled the mass evacuation of the division. 

General Douglas Macarthur comes under withering criticism. After his very successful Inchon landing, MacArthur became blinded by his own ego. He ignored warnings of an imminent Chinese intervention and when it came, he was oblivious to its impact. It was the human wave attacks of the Chinese that made the defense of the Chosin Reservoir so perilous. Had the marines not benefitted from American air superiority, they would have been massacred. 

Although the Korean War took place 75 years ago, it still resonates today by asking the questions: Do we have soldiers of courage that would display the heroism of that time, and do we have the generalship to guide them? It goes without saying that Donald Trump couldn’t shine Harry Truman’s shoes. 

My Review of H.W. Brands' "America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War"

 The First America First

With Donald Trump’s victory America First as foreign policy is yet again being thrust into the limelight. Thus, it is important to understand its origins making University of Texas historian H.W. Brands new history of the first America First movement is especially timely. Brands views America First through the lens of the shadow war between Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh with the latter being the most prominent proponent of America First.

There is not much new in the Roosevelt side of the equation, but Brands, at least for me plows new ground on Lindbergh by carefully researching his diaries and speeches from the late 1930’s to America’s entry into the war in December 1941. What I learned was that Lindbergh was a foreign policy realist in understanding the decadence of 1930’s Britain and the weakness of France. In his view Germany was the rising power in Europe, so much so that it would overwhelm both Britain and France. 

He believed that with adequate military preparedness the United States would be able to fend off any cross Atlantic attack from a Europe under the auspices of Nazi Germany. Roosevelt, on the other hand was far more clear-eyed in understanding what a Nazi dominated Europe would mean for the security of the United States. From 1939 his globalist vision pushed the United States for war with Germany. Indeed. within the space of a few weeks between late December 1940 and early January 1941 Roosevelt called on America to become the arsenal of democracy and then articulated his Four Freedoms.

Although losing the public relations battle Lindbergh plowed ahead in attacking Roosevelt and his interventionist policies. He reached a dead-end with his infamous Des Moines speech in September 1941 when he, echoing Nazi propaganda, called out the Roosevelt, the British and the Jews for leading America into war. There was near universal condemnation of his speech and for both Lindbergh and America First it was downhill from there.

Beneath his realpolitik there was his underlying racism against Jews and the non-white races. He viewed the war as dividing the white world, when instead it should have been focusing on the dangers coming from the non-white world, no matter that Germany was allied with Japan.

Unfortunately, there are too many similarities to the world of Trump and the world of Lindbergh. America can’t stand aside today in a very dangerous world, but as Brands noted in 1941 the U.S. was the dominant economic power in the world; this is no longer the case. This makes the case that the most important task before us is to strengthen our economy.

My Amazon Review of Robert Kagan's "The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse................."

 America Comes of Age in Fits and Starts

 

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has written a sequel to his “Dangerous Nation” Japan to cover American foreign policy from 1900-1941. In 1900 fresh after defeating Spain in 1898 the U.S. had the largest economy in the world and was viewed as a non-entity as far as the great powers of Europe were concerned. Domestically there was a strong anti-imperialist lobby against the American occupation of the Philippines, but Kagan reminds us that the freeing Cuba from Spanish colonialism was highly popular across the political spectrum. Using terms of today, it was viewed as a “humanitarian intervention.” Further the takeover of the Philippines was accidental in that Admiral George Dewey was following a decade old plan to steam to Manila to engage the Spanish fleet where he won a resounding victory. Kagan argues that absent the U.S. intervention, sooner or later the Philippines would have been taken over by either Germany or Japan.

 

Kagan covers the Platt Amendment to the Monroe Doctrine which unilaterally granted the U.S. the right to intervene in Latin America which it does many times. Initially to keep the Europeans out and to maintain the peace, but later with less than benign motives. He spends less than time than he should have around the politics of building the Panama Canal and President Roosevelt’s arbitration of the Russo-Japanese War. By 1914 the U.S. has no army to speak of and has modern, but small Navy.

 

When the war in Europe broke out the U.S. position was to stay out of it, despite strong support from banking interests to weigh in on the side of the allies. There was great support for the Central Powers coming from Irish, German and Jewish Americans for their own unique reasons. Despite the sinking of the Lusitania, President Woodrow Wilson, though indirectly supporting the allies, struggles to keep the U.S. out of the war. The pressure for U.S. entry  is led by former president Theodore Roosevelt. Ultimately as Germany resorts to unrestricted submarine warfare the U.S. enters the war as an associated power with an inflated sense of morality coming from “peace without victory” and his Fourteen Points.

 

Wilson enters the Versailles negotiations as a giant. American power is supreme, yet he gets sucked into the vortex of European power politics doing whatever he can to bring forth the League of Nations. However, while in Paris, the once internationalist Republican Party, does a 180-degree shift. The party once lead by Elihu Root, Henry Stimson and Charles Evans Hughes is now lead by the anti-league Theodore Roosevelt and Senate foreign relations chair Henry Cabot Lodge. They are backed up by “the irreconcilables” led by Senator’s William Borah and Hiram Johnson. When Wilson fails to seek a compromise, the League fails and the U.S. returns to its pre-war isolation. In a footnote three young idealist, William Bullitt, John Maynard Keynes, and Walter Lippmann become disillusioned on the shoals of European reality.

 

It is here where Kagan argues that the U.S. should have stayed in the game. Without U.S. backing both France and Britain became paranoid about future German power and therefore were less willing to compromise on reparations, something that would plague the continent for a decade. In the terms of the British diplomat Harold Nicholson, the U.S. became “the ghost at the feast.” To be sure the U.S. was present financially with both the Dawes and Young Plans, it was not really in the game.

 

With the onset of the Great Depression the world order begins to collapse, first economically and the politically. Japan invades Manchuria making a mockery of the League. Further, its naval build-up threatens the American presence in the Pacific and we have the rise of Hitler.

 

What is the newly elected President Roosevelt’s response to the deteriorating international situation? More isolation. Kagan, in my opinion underplays Roosevelt’s blowing up the July 1933 World Economic Conference where it is understood in no uncertain terms the U.S. will focus on domestic recovery. This did not go unnoticed by Mussolini and Hitler. To me one failing of the book is that is lacks an economic context, particularly on the role of the gold standard and the collapse in world trade.

 

Later in the decade Roosevelt has to fight off the isolationists to deal with the growing challenges coming from Japan and Germany. He highlights the trigger for the change as the September 1938 Munich Conference and the November 1938 Kristallnacht explosion in Germany. Kagan reasons, correctly in my opinion, that the reason France and Germany caved into Hitler is that they rightfully believed that the U.S. did not have their backs. Thus had the U.S. been more involved with Europe in the 1930’s the horrors to come might just have been avoided. And if the war in Europe did not start, Japan might not have embarked on its aggression in Southeast Asia.

 

Kagan’s conclusion is that there is a straight line from America’s holiday from international affairs in the 1920’s and 1930’s to the agony of the 1940’s. It is a lesson that should be remembered by those today who see few reasons for America’s involvement on the world stage.

For the full Amazon URL see: America Comes of Age in Fits and Starts (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Colin Woodard's "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America"

 

Uneasy Alliances

 

I wish I read Colin Woodard’s book ten years ago when it came out. He hypothesizes that the United States instead of being one united nation, it is more akin to an uneasy alliance rival regional cultures. His eleven cultures formed early in the days of the republic ignore both state and national boundaries. The book is in the tradition of Kevin Phillip’s “The Emerging Republican Majority,” Joel Garreau’s “The Nine Nations of North America” and the more scholarly “Albions Seed” by David Hackett Fischer. I too used a similar approach in an article on the economic geography of the United States.

 

From the beginning the early settlements in the United States were divided on the Revolutionary War with Yankeedom leading the charge while New Netherland (New York City and environs) and the Deep South being more reluctant. He notes that the politics of today mirror those early divisions. Specifically, the Blue State alliance includes Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Left Coast and El Norte (Joel Garreau’s Mexamerica) while the Red State alliance includes the Deep South, the Far West, and Greater Appalachia. The swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Iowa are in what Woodard calls the Midlands.

 

On a minor point I would differ with Woodard when he called SDS’s 1962 Port Huron Statement the “founding document” of the youth movement. Although there were many political aspects to the youth movement at its core it was all about sex, drugs and rock and roll. This is a far cry from the original Yankee (Puritan) and Midlander (Quaker) values. To be a bit snarky what the late Tom Hayden the author of the Port Huron Statement had in common with Puritan values were rigidity in beliefs.

 

My major point of difference is that Woodard is too locked into the view that the Deep South continues to be run by a neo-colonial oligarchy. That was true prior to World War II and it far less so today. The rising cities of Atlanta, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham and the Appalachia city of Austin have more in common with Yankeedom and the Left Coast than the old agribusiness oligarchy. In fact, those cities vote Blue. Further just as Yankeedom has an innate fear of a southern theocracy, the Deep South and Appalachia fear Yankeedom’s religious-like faith in secularism. Further the hitherto reliable blue voters of El Norte are drifting away from Yankeedom as cultural values predominate over economic ones.

Close to the end of the book Woodard offers up the horrifying possibility that a pandemic might induce the suspension of civil rights, the dissolution of Congress and the incarceration of Supreme Court justices leading to a break-up of the United States. In 2011, when the book was published, that had the sound of complete fantasy; not so much today. Despite my quibbles this is a terrific book for those readers interested in the origins of our country and its politics.

For the complete Amazon URL see: Uneasy Alliances (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of John Sedgwick's "From the River to the Sea:......"

 

Railroad War in the West

 

From boardrooms to courtrooms to private armies fighting it out on the rails, John Sedgwick tells the story of the great railroad war that shaped the American Southwest. On one side there was General William Jackson Palmer of the Denver & Rio Grande and on the other side was William Barstow Strong of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. They fought it out in the mountains of Colorado and the highly critical Raton Pass that separates Colorado from New Mexico. Both wanted to reach the Pacific Ocean.  Along the way they fought over who would serve the great silver mines of Colorado. We also have an appearance on behalf of the Santa Fe, Bat Masterson of Dodge City and OK Corral fame.

 

At the outset the Denver & Rio Grande had all of the advantages. It was already present in Colorado while the Santa Fe was a pissant railroad serving Atchison and Topeka, Kansas. However Strong was by far the better railroad man first as general manager and later as president of the Santa Fe. Strong wins the Raton Pass and extends his railroad deep into New Mexico and then heads west to Los Angeles. The business side of the deal was sealed at the Santa Fe’s headquarters in Boston where Strong and Palmer were coerced into a deal by robber baron Jay Gould who controlled the mighty Union Pacific at the time. Neither party could afford to cross Gould.

 

When the Santa Fe makes it into Los Angeles, then a sleepy backwater town of 30,000 or so in 1887 he at once breaks the California monopoly of the Southern Pacific and then ends up in a price war that lowered the Chicago-Los Angeles fare to a mere $1.00. With that a surge of people flood into sunny Southern California that quintupled the population of Las Angeles to 150,000 by 1890.

 

Sedgwick tell a great story of how these two men helped shaped the West as we now know it. Sometimes he gets bogged down in too many details, but the book will make a great read for those interested in the history of the American West.

For the full Amazon URL see: Railroad War in the West (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Chris Whipple's "The Spy Masters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future"

 

Inside the CIA

 

I am an avid reader of spy fiction and nonfiction. As a result, I looked forward to reading Chris Whipple’s history of the CIA through its directors from Richard Helms in the 1960’s through Gina Haspel of today. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Simply put his words do not come off the page and at times I was reluctant to pick up the book. The drama is not there.

 

The book is an outgrowth of a Showtime documentary written by Whipple with the same title. To be sure he covers the history highlighting the CIA’s initial success in Afghanistan and its massive failure to predict the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the disclosure of the “family jewels” during the congressional hearings of the 1970s. He interviews directors George Tenet of “slam dunk” fame, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus along with numerous high-level staffers.

 

A strength of the book is that he highlights the tension between the CIA with its masters in the White House and the Congress. In my opinion the two directors that successfully navigated those shoals were George H.W. Bush and Leon Panetta, both master politicians. Thus aside from being a master spy the CIA director has to be a master politician.

 

My problem with Whipple is that I believe he does not fully understand the how difficult the job is. There is so much information, much of it bad, coming at a CIA director making it extraordinarily difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. It would have been a far better book for him to sit in the shoes of a director during a period of crisis trying to evaluate the incoming information and then to deal with the process of presenting it to the president.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R27PBIIBLHD4J8/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Fergus Bordowich's "Congress at War....."

 

The Civil War Congress

 

Instead of focusing on Lincoln, historian Fergus Bordowich turns his trained eye on the role of the Republican Congress during the Civil War. He tells his story through the eyes of Senate Finance Chairman William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME), staunch abolitionist and House Ways and Means Chairman Thaddeus Stevens (R- PA), Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War Chairman and staunch abolitionist Ben Wade (R-OH) and traitorous Democratic Congressman Clement Vallandigham (D-OH). It is Fessenden and Stevens who come up with the wartime tax and borrowing measures that kept the Union financially afloat during the darkest days of the war. Wade’s committee shines the light on General George McClellan ineptitude that leads to the appointment of General Grant. And we see Vallandigham spreading defeatist propaganda and raising every possible civil liberties argument against Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus and restrictions on antiwar speech. I wonder where today’s ACLU would be in that context?

 

Congress is way ahead of Lincoln on emancipation. Straight off it passes the confiscation act which frees the slaves captured from the Confederate army. This happens in 1861 well ahead of the draft Emancipation Proclamation that was written in mid-1862 and not formally released until January 1863. But we also learn that many abolitionists harbored deeply racist beliefs, though not true of Wade and Stevens.

 

While engaged in wartime issues the 37^th Congress, perhaps the most productive in history passes the Morrell Act (land grant colleges), the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act and the National Banking Act which created federally chartered banks. As a result, although rapidly depreciating, a national currency in the form of greenbacks was created. The next Congress passes the 13^th Amendment which abolishes slavery. Bordowich also discusses the fate of the Republican Party from its triumph in 1860 to its suffering a major defeat in the 1862 midterms to its great victory in 1864 following Sherman’s military successes in Georgia and the Carolinas.

 

Of note his discussion of Nathan Bedford Forrest who has once again become known in his role as founder of the Ku Klux Klan. What I didn’t know was that Forrest was a slave trader before the war and he conducted perhaps what was the greatest war crime of the war with his massacre of Union troops ( both black and white) Fort Pillow, Kentucky. His is one statue that should come down.

 

For those readers interested in a different take on the Civil War, Bordowich has offered up a very insightful book.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1Z7DLD4IL9YH1/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of David Paul Kuhn's "The Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution"

The Day the New Deal Coalition Died

On May 8, 1970, the 25^th anniversary of VE Day and four days after the Kent State shootings a mob of construction workers, many of whom were veterans, assaulted a large group of anti-war demonstrators in New York’s financial district. With great acuity political journalist David Paul Kuhn not only describes with fully sourced details the progression of the riot, but he also sets the stage by describing the New York City of the 1960s and the political aftershocks of the riot.

For the most part the police stood by as the construction workers assaulted the demonstrators. After all the police sympathized with them and they lived in their neighborhoods. Theirs were the neighborhoods of Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn, not the elite upper eastside of Mayor Lindsay and the suburbs of Westchester and Long Island from whence most of the students came. Simply put is was a class war. Remember the Vietnam War was fought by the children of the working class of all races, not by the children of the elite.

Interestingly the construction workers also opposed the Vietnam War, what they didn’t like is the appearance of a strain of anti-Americanism among the antiwar demonstrators. Removing American flags from flagpoles and shouting support for the Viet Cong hardly improved the situation. But perhaps far more important was the image of privileged upper-middle class college students protesting a country that had given them everything. The typical construction worker only wished that someday his children would be able to go to college.

Beneath the veneer of a construction boom in low Manhattan (i.e. the World Trade Center was under construction) New York City was falling apart. Crime was rising rapidly and the profligacy of the Lindsay Administration was undermining the fiscal health of the city. Further the workers knew that they not only would pay higher taxes to fund the fiscal profligacy of the city, they would also bear the brunt of school busing and scatter-site public housing projects.

In the White House President Nixon and his aide Pat Buchanan were watching with great interest. In the hard hat riots the saw the collapse of the New Deal coalition which at its core was the white working class. To the extent that the Republican Party could pick off these voters a political realignment of monumental proportions could take place. The fruits of which were harvested 10 years later with Reagan’s victory in 1980 and in 2016 with Trump’s surprising win. Simply put the Democratic Party became an image of Mayor John Lindsay’s coalition in New York City, upper-income liberals, minorities and young voters and that coalition haughtily looks down as white working class voters as know-nothing racists. That is certainly not the way Franklin Roosevelt viewed them.

To me Kuhn’s book was very personal. I grew up in middle-class Queens and in 1970 I was going to graduate school in Los Angeles after just getting out of the army.  While in the army I watched with my fellow soldiers the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Most of us were all for the demonstrators until they flew the Viet Cong flag and with that most of their support melted away. To me that reaction typified the hard hat reaction two years later. In 1972 I canvassed the working class neighborhoods of Los Angeles with other veterans for George McGovern and after that experience I knew McGovern was a goner.

Now 50 years later, America has changed. The white working class is a shadow of what it once was and for the most part real wages have gone nowhere so perhaps the Democrats can resurrect the Lindsay coalition in 2020. But I would warn them that with crime once again on the rise, public safety will once again become a potent political issue that will affect all races. Read this book to see how we got here.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RW7IZ05D0KKZB/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of David Rubinstein's "The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians"

History Comes Alive

Private equity mogul and patriotic philanthropist David Rubinstein truly loves the history of our country and has lovingly written up a series of interviews/conversations with America’s great historians. The interviews took place at the Library of Congress with representatives and senators present where he discussed the lives of such great Americans as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon. The historians he interviewed included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ron Chernow, Walter Isaacson and Bob Woodward among others. He also interviews Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court.

We get into the lives of the great personages who made our country. He asks the historians about their great strengths and foibles. It all comes across as a great series of conversations. There is much to learn here. The conversations really flow and the book is very hard to put down in the middle of any of the interviews.

I got sense as to how good David Rubinstein is when he interviewed Fed Chairman Jay Powell that was shown on CNBC.  Rubinstein knows his subject matter and his subjects. Given that most high school and college students don’t know history, I would highly recommend that this book be made required reading in every high school in America!

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/RAHM7T2XGLKFJ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Steve Inskeep's "Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity and Helped Cause the Civil War"

1840’s Power Couple

NPR host Steve Inskeep records the history of one of America’s first power couples. The western explorer John Fremont then 29 married Jesse Benton, then 17, the daughter of the powerful Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Jessie acts as Fremont’s promoter in the press and in the halls of Congress as John explores the west from St. Louis to California and Oregon. His description of the Great Salt Lake basin inspires Brigham Young to uproot his Mormon clan from Illinois to Utah. Why John leaves her so much is a mystery to me. My guess he had ADD and had a wanderlust for the West. Nevertheless Jessie puts up with this and faithfully publicizes his letters. Indeed she takes a hazardous trip to California with her four year old daughter, a trip that involved an overland haul across Panama. She was quite a woman.  

While in California his small band links up with a small detachment of Naval/Marine forces to seize California from Mexico not knowing that the Mexican War had already started. And remember it was the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War and the admission of California that heightens the tensions over slavery. While in California he names the entrance to San Francisco Bay the “Golden Gate.” He also has time to speculate in California real estate and gold mining. His gold mining venture makes him rich for a while.

Inskeep is very good at describing the hardships Fremont’s bands faced while traversing the West especially the snow covered Sierras. One of Fremont guides is Kit Carson, a personage whom Inskeep doesn’t take all that kindly towards as he projects his 21^st century sensibilities on to the brutal environment of the mid-19^th century west. He is also not all that kind to President James Polk, who in my opinion ranks among the great presidents of the United States as he implemented the policy of manifest destiny by making America a continent spanning nation.

In 1850s America the crisis of slavery comes to a boil. Jessie Fremont from her a youth was strongly anti-slavery and pushes John even more in that direction. In 1856 the newly formed Republican Party chose Fremont as its nominee under the banner of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Fremont.” It is an ugly campaign where the Democrats vilify his illegitimate birth to a presumably Catholic father. It is the anti-Catholicism of the time that weighs heavily on his campaign in his defeat to James Buchanan, a former neighbor of the Benton’s.

After the campaign the Fremont’s gradually disappear from history and their money runs out as they age, a real shame. Inskeep tells a great story and it is well worth the read.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R19N2QY7Y0MKFP/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Susan Schulten's "A History of America in 100 Maps"

Map Geek

I must confess that I am a map geek and there are some really terrific historical maps in Denver University Professor Susan Schulten’s book of 100 maps. I especially liked the maps portraying the slave trade, the Anglo-French rivalry over North America in the 1700s, the 1823 map that made manifest destiny so evident 20 years before the phrase was coined, Sherman’s use of census maps to plan his march through Georgia, Harlem nightlife in the 1930s, the 1961 Freedom Rides and Disneyland.

My problem with her book is what she leaves out, her negative characterizations of industry and she is way too equivalent with to the Cold War. To me any map book on the history of America would have to include three maps on the wiring of America. Specifically the electrical, telephonic and internet grids. The same holds true for the expansion of the railroads. Her comment on the railroads largely follows the populist narrative not how the strategic vision of Abraham Lincoln bound the nation with the Pacific Railway Act. It is obvious to me that she is not familiar with Robert Gordon’s now classic “The Rise and Fall of American Growth.”

With respect to the Cold War she views it more as a big power rivalry rather than in Ronald Reagan’s words a fight against “the focus of evil in the modern world.”

We were the good guys. She soft pedals the role of Soviet agents in the counsels of government by calling them “a few civil servants in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.” I don’t think Alger Hiss at State and Harry Dexter White at Treasury viewed themselves as cogs in the bureaucracy.

Those criticisms aside, there is much to be learned from Susan Schulten’s book. Look at the maps and read the commentary with a critical eye.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RYPW1A2TGM0ZS/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of H.W. Brands' "Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster"

When Giants Roamed the Halls of Congress

University of Texas history professor H.W. Brands has written a biography of the three giants who dominated Congress in the first half of the 19^th Century, namely Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster. All three were great intellects and orators who had a common dislike, for different reasons, of President Andrew Jackson.

Clay comes on the scene in 1811 where in his first term he becomes Speaker of the House. He and Calhoun would join together as the leading “war hawks” and push Madison into war against England. They would later split over the issues of tariffs, slavery and most important, the preservation of the Union. Clay would become the author of the American System based on protective tariffs, internal improvements and a national bank which made him the true heir to Alexander Hamilton. In 1820 he would put together the Missouri Compromise which delayed the ultimate reckoning of the slavery issue and thereby allowed the continued development of a growing America.

Calhoun, who served as vice-president to both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, quite a feat in its own right, became the tribune of the South. He fought tariffs, championed slavery and the ability of states to nullify federal laws they opposed which offered the theoretical basis for secession.

Webster had a brilliant career as a lawyer where he was victorious in such major Supreme Court cases as McCulloch v. Maryland, Dartmouth College and Gibbons v. Ogden. Although he is most remembered for his “Union, now and forever” speech in his Reply to Hayne, he supported New England secession during the War of 1812.

In 1850 all three of them, now all over 70, came together in the great debate over the admission of California into the Union as a free state, the treatment of fugitive slaves and the extension of slavery into the New Mexico Territory. The end result of the debate was yet another successful Clay compromise. And it was here where Webster in order to save the Union bent over backwards against his abolitionist constituency, on the issues of fugitive slaves and slavery in the New Mexico Territory, to agree with Clay. Oh to be in the Senate Gallery to hear the debate. The next best thing is reading Brands’ account. All three would be dead within two years.

Brands brings to life these three great personalities as they dominated the Congress for 40 years. It is history at its best. I only wish our current Congress had at least one Clay or a Webster and unfortunately too much of the nullification spirit of John Calhoun is alive and well in both parties today.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2JBQPK21E3ID1/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Michael Beschloss' "Presdents of War"

Making War

Historian and media personality Michael Beschloss has written an important history of how and why presidents took us to war and of their wartime decision making process from Madison to Johnson. He is at is best in discussing the role of Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. His “tick-tock” of how the Gulf of Tonkin resolution came to be is worth the price of the book. He is very clear that the Johnson administration was deceitful from Day One when they knew in their heart of hearts the war wasn’t winnable. Where I would fault him is that he does not lay enough of a predicate as to the role of John Kennedy in the lead up to the war. After all Johnson was continuing Kennedy’s very aggressive policy with respect to Vietnam.

Beschloss opens his book at the end of the Jefferson administration in 1807 and then fully discusses Madison’s role in the War of 1812. To me he is not critical enough of Madison and Jefferson. In my mind both were guilty of dereliction of duty in failing to maintain adequate naval strength while both Britain and France were raiding our ships and impressing our seaman. They both, having witnessed the Seven Years War that a generalized European conflict would sooner or later make its appearance in the Americas.  Although England was not directly threatening the U.S., Madison was egged on by the “war hawks” Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun to declare war. Be that as it may for the young trading nation that the U.S. was, the principle of freedom of the seas was worth going to war over.

He next is very critical of James K. Polk. To be sure Polk created an incident to trigger the Mexican War and lied to the American people about it, but to my mind Polk was the Bismarck of North America. Polk had the strategic vision that a war with Mexico would bring with it the entire southwest as well as California. He was fulfilling “manifest destiny,” a term that came into use during his administration. But before Polk could go to war with Mexico he had to settle up the Oregon dispute with Great Britain, which he did. Polk was smart enough to realize that U.S. could not fight a two front war against both Mexico and Britain.

Lincoln, of course, comes across as the great Civil War leader that he was. He does this not only by ultimate success on the battlefield, but by elevating the purpose of the war to give rise to “a new birth of freedom.” Unlike other presidents Lincoln was able to witness and agonize over battlefield casualties he was also able to be decisive.  Where I would be critical of Beschloss is that while the fighting was going on Lincoln pushed through Congress three great Hamiltonian projects, the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act and the Morrill Act(land grant colleges), quite a domestic program. This distinguishes Lincoln from other presidents, where domestic engagements gave way to wartime exigencies.

Beschloss is kind to McKinley. After the sinking of the Maine (an accident) in Havana Harbor, he does not rush into war. However once engaged McKinley becomes an all-in imperialist by taking the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico. Intended or not with the Spanish American War the U.S. enter the world stage.

Beschloss likes Wilsonian policies, but he doesn’t seem to like Woodrow Wilson. He comes across as an arrogant intellectual and where Wilson demonstrated great political acumen in passing his domestic program, he is a complete disaster on the world stage. Wilson’s thought process on entering the war is a “theme park” (my words) for executive indecision. In his discussion of Wilson, Beschloss leaves out a lot. He ignores the role of the March Revolution in Russia that made it easier for Wilson to argue that he was “making the world safe for democracy.” He also ignores the challenge that Lenin brings with the November Revolution. Many historians believe that his 14 Points were a response to Lenin. He also only skims through the wave of domestic repression that took place during the war and immediately thereafter. And he ignores Wilson’s hidden agenda, which he accomplished, of orchestrating the transfer of economic power from London to New York.

Roosevelt, on the other hand learns from Wilson’s mistakes. Instead of trying to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War, he molds public opinion into acceptance of the inevitability of a war against fascism. He also brings the Republicans on board, both before and after, something Wilson refused to do. Roosevelt learned what not to do when he was an assistant secretary of the navy in the Wilson Administration. He also brings in the American people, with his fireside chats, into the vast theater of the global war.

Truman does not come off well. He doesn’t bring Congress into the process and that with hostile opposition from the likes of Taft and McCarthy leads to huge problems when the Korean War stalemates on the battlefield. After he rightfully fires General MacArthur his popularity plummets. It is a sad ending for someone who so clearly understood the Soviet menace in the late 1940s to see him so pilloried.

As I said at the outset Beschloss has written an important book, but as I noted he left out quite a bit and in many cases, especially with the earlier presidents he was way too detailed and the average lay reader will likely get bogged down in the weeds. Hence four stars, not five.

The full Amazon Review appears at the following URL: https://www.amazon.com/review/R107WQR5NDUEBL/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Steven R. Weisman's "The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion"

Becoming at Home in the New Promised Land

Former New York Times journalist Steven Weisman tells the story of how Judaism became Americanized largely through the lens of the disputes between the reformers and the traditionalists coming of age in the America of the 1800s. Much of the arguments then echo true through today as to the role of women, music, choirs, English versus Hebrew in services, peoplehood versus religion, the difference between awaiting a Messiah or Messianic Age, and the relative importance of prayer and study versus social action.

Much of his history takes place in Charleston, South Carolina, which in the 1820s had the largest Jewish community in America. In fact the struggle over an organ became so heated that it had to be settled in court. What interested me the most was that much of the arguments in South Carolina preceded the arrival of the mass immigration of German Jews in the 1840s and 50s who later became the back bone of Reform Judaism. And because there were so many Jews in the South, the Jewish community split over the issue of slavery with Judah P. Benjamin becoming the Confederacy’s secretary of state. Nevertheless when Lincoln died much of American Jewry viewed him as the second Moses.

Wiesman’s book is the history of the rise of the Reform movement and the traditionalist reaction against it against the backdrop of an America that was much different from Europe. To the reformers the synagogue was the new Temple and America was the New Jerusalem. Thus there was no need to pray for a rebuilding of the ancient temple and much of the ancient rules seemed out of place in the hustle and bustle to de Tocqueville’s America, especially on the frontier.

In America there was no formal rabbinic authority. In fact there were no Rabbis until the 1830s and no American ordained rabbis until the 1880s. As a result authority was vested in the individual congregations which meant that much of the argument took place among the laity. To be sure there were leading rabbis like Isaac Wise and Jacob Leeser, but they too were responsible to their congregations.

My problems with Weisman’s book are that it over emphasizes the intellectual divisions over the role of spirituality and over emphasizes social justice politics over a connection with G-d. In many respects religion represents the triumph of faith over reason. To be sure social justice is important, but Weisman’s definition is probably far from my own because it is my belief that much of the success that Jews have enjoyed in America has come not from political action, but rather from the blessings of the market economy. Thus, unfortunately there is some truth to the old joke that Reform Judaism is the Democratic Party with holidays. To be sure Jews should be “the light among nations,” but we should walk the walk with a great deal of humility. That said Weisman has given us a well-researched book on how the Jewish religion adapted and became of age in the new Promised Land.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R16Z2C7OL6XBK3/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels"

Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty

As I write this review Jon Meacham’s  “The Soul of America” is Number One on the New York Times Bestseller List and deservedly so. This book should be required reading for every Republican member of Congress who is afraid to stand up to Donald Trump. After reading “The Soul of America” they will realize that standing up to him would put them on the side of the greats of American history. Further radical leftists who seem to hate everything about America should read “Soul…” because they will learn that America is a work in progress towards a more perfect union. They will learn that when the chips were down such dead white guys as Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and yes Ronald Reagan did a pretty good job in moving our country forward. Hopefully they will also realize that the multi-cultural America of today brought us Donald Trump.

Meacham tells great stories as to when and how America was going off track, the better angels of our nature took command. For example when slavery divided our land, Lincoln unified it. When a few year later the KKK was running wild, Grant crushed them. I wish Meacham would have done a “might have been” had James Garfield survived his assassination and reinstituted reconstruction. Segregation might have died in its crib in the 1880s instead of waiting until 1954.

Meacham gives credit to both Harding and Coolidge in their defusing the 1920s revival of the KKK. This bit of history is not generally taught. Where Meacham is most acute is his discussion of Huey Long’s challenge to Roosevelt in the 1930s. Here was a politician who understood media and would say practically anything to get attention. Sound familiar. Similarly when much of the country was terrorized by the very media savvy Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith stood up to him and his henchman, Roy Cohn. Although Eisenhower did not act quickly his wait him out strategy worked as McCarthy burned himself out. The link to today is Roy Cohn who mentored Trump in the dark arts in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Meacham also intertwines the stories of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King in their bringing on the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. He also rightly notes that much of the progress achieved by our leaders were brought about by very active citizen movements giving backbone to our better angels.

I have few criticisms of the book. He rightly notes how Truman’s victory over the segregationist Strom Thurmond in 1948 led to the desegregating of the military. However, had the Republican Tom Dewey won, it probably would have happened anyway. Dewey as governor of New York led the fight for path breaking civil rights legislation. Also although he gives some credit to Lyndon Johnson in his role in passing the 1957 civil rights act, much of the credit should go to Attorney General Herbert Brownell who authored the initial bill that was watered down by Johnson. The lesson here is that there are more than a few better angels among us and they can come from very unexpected places.

So let us hope there are angels in place to lead us away from a president who lies when he is moving his lips and divides us by appealing to our most base instincts. It’s time to get to work as we are called to defend liberty.

The complete Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1QF2ABV7S5MMU/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Brad Snyder's "The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism"

The Birth of the Administrative State

University of Wisconsin Law School professor Brad Snyder has written a very long book (824 pages in the print edition) on the origins of American liberalism. He tells his story through the collection of people who lived in and/or visited a house located at 1727 19^th Street in the DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington D.C. between 1912 -1919 and he then follows them through the early 1930’s.  Here we meet such liberal icons Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann (in his early life) and the sculptor Gertzon Borglum (think Mount Rushmore).

All of them were upset with the more conservative strain of the Taft Administration as compared to Teddy Roosevelt’s and all of them want to move  away from the laissez faire philosophy of the 19^th century and to move towards a regulated economy run by disinterested experts. Their attitudes were in response to the emergence of an industrial society that was a far cry from the Jeffersonian vision of a democracy based on yeoman farmers. Simply put they wanted to use Hamiltonian means to achieve liberal ends.

It is all so remarkable to read that the Washington D.C. of those days was a very small town and many of the residents and visitors had ready access to the leading figures of government from the president on down. And boy did they use that access, especially during the Wilson Administration. We see Frankfurter running the War Labor Board, Borglum investigating fraud in aviation procurement and Lippmann writing what was to become Wilson’s Fourteen Points and become part of the U.S. negotiation team at Versailles.

Snyder shows how Brandeis and Frankfurter influenced Holmes to become a leading civil libertarian on the Court as they applaud his pro-regulatory views. The book spends far too much time on the liberal cause celeb of the 1920s, the Sacco-Vanzetti case.  To be sure in a strict legal sense they were victims of a miscarriage of justice but as Snyder tells us in an endnote, modern scholarship suggests that Sacco was guilty. He should have been more honest in noting that upfront.

Snyder also shows us how Frankfurter sent his best students to be law clerks for the Supreme Court. One notable success was Dean Acheson Truman’s Secretary of State who clerked for Brandeis. Two others mentioned did not turn out as well. Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran clerked for Holmes was an architect of the New Deal, but later be became one of Washington’s great “fixers.” Many followed in that tradition by going to Washington to do good and ended up doing well. The other clerk he sent to Holmes was Alger Hiss, the notorious Soviet Spy.

What I liked about the denizens of 1727 19^th Street was that unlike too many of today’s progressives, they really believed in free speech and that Frankfurter and Brandeis were full-throated supporters of the Zionist project. Although Snyder carefully notes Lippmann’s move to the Right, he hardly spends time on how later in life Frankfurter became one of the leading conservatives on the Supreme Court. He stayed true to his belief that courts should give great deference to elected legislatures. Finally Snyder doesn’t deal with the dark side of the administrative state where nameless and faceless bureaucrats, many with heavy political agendas, dictate practically every nook and cranny of American life.

Nevertheless for readers who slog through the book, they will get a real sense of ferment of ideas that made liberalism a major force in our society.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1FN340T5FBJXM/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Douglas A. Irwin's "Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy"

Trading Places

Dartmouth economist Douglas Irwin has written a very long (832 pages in the print edition) and sometime tedious history of U.S. trade policy, but in many respects it is a tour de force. In a way he is writing American history through the lens of trade. His history starts with the economic impact of the French and Indian War’s (The Seven Years War globally) on Britain’s fiscal and colonial policy. The Boston Tea Party was the result. After independence and the chaos caused by the failed Articles of Confederation one of whose attributes were tariffs among the states a new constitution was written that centralized trade policy within the national government. In fact the second law enacted by the first Congress was a tariff. It was needed to fund the government. Thus Trade policy is as old as the Republic.

Irwin divides his history into three eras: tariffs for revenue (1789-1860), tariffs for restriction (1861- 1933) and tariffs for reciprocity (1934-Present?). Initially export oriented (cotton and tobacco) South favored low tariffs (for revenue only) and the North supported tariffs to restrict imports as well. Given that geography Democrats were for low tariffs and Whigs/Republicans were for high tariffs. By the late 20^th century the two parties traded places with Republicans favoring open trade while the Democrats became far more restrictionist. Irwin tells his story by going into the details of all of the major congressional debates on tariff questions. Sometimes this is very interesting and sometimes it gets a bit tedious, but it is history in the making.

The first real battle over trade took place in the 1820s where the political genius of Henry Clay pushed through a restrictive tariff which both protected northern industry and raised revenue to fund internal improvements. That was his American System. By 1832 led by John C. Calhoun the South rose up in protest against what he called the Tariff of Abominations and introduced the doctrine of nullification. Irwin notes that the fight over the tariff became a proxy war over slavery. Nevertheless, with the Southern Democrats largely in control tariffs were largely used for revenue only prior to the civil war.

With the Republicans coming to power in 1861 the tariff was first used to raise revenue to fund the civil war and afterwards to restrict the entry of foreign goods into the United States.  Irwin found no real evidence the high tariff policies of the Republicans promoted economic growth. This was due, in part, to the economy being wide open to immigration and technology transfers. It was also helpful that the U.S.’s leading trading partner was Britain which then had a zero tariff policy. It is unfortunate that Irwin did not note that the success of textile manufacturing in New England was due to stolen technology from Britain.

Although the Republicans were in the high tariff camp, both Presidents Garfield and McKinley in his second term were open to reciprocity. Unfortunately both were assassinated before they could implement their new ideas.

After growing unrest with the high tariff policies of the Republicans which were thought by the Democrats to promote monopoly and act as a tax on consumers, the new Wilson Administration moved swiftly to lower tariff. Irwin highlights how Wilson was very hands on in working with Congress to pass the Underwood Tariff which significantly lowered import duties. Something else was going on as well. The U.S. was becoming a major exporter of industrial goods. This was due to the discovery of huge iron deposits in the Mesabi Range of Minnesota which made the U.S. the world’s lowest cost producer of steel.

However after World War I and the Republicans returned to power tariffs were raised dramatically in 1923 with the Fordney-McCumber Tariff. That was followed by the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 which raised the already high tariffs by 15%. Irwin debunks the idea that the Hawley-Smoot Tariff caused the stock market crash and the depression. It did, however, exacerbate the global collapse of the early 1930s.

With the arrival of the Roosevelt Administration tariff policy takes a U-Turn. Secretary of State Cordell Hull established a policy of reciprocal trade, first with Latin America and then with the rest of the world. If anyone person is a hero in the book it is Cordell Hull. Under the leadership of state department official Will Clayton, the Truman Administration follows up deal by deal reciprocal trade agreements with broad multinational agreements(GATT now the WTO).

By the 1970s the parties traded places. The Republicans supporting trade in financial services and high technology products become free traders, while the labor oriented Democrats fearing the loss of union jobs become protectionists. Further the long free trade oriented South, switches sides as its textile manufacturing business come under stress. All of this came to a head with Democrat Bill Clinton supporting NAFTA against a majority of his party. NAFTA passed with Republican votes, but the fissures the battle engendered made Americans more suspicious of trade deals.

Those fears bore fruit with the leading Democratic candidates in 2016 opposing the Trans Pacific Partnership along with Donald Trump. Now with a protectionist in the White House and a protectionist Democratic Party it appears that the long era of reciprocal trade might be behind us. Irwin thinks there is too much momentum and it took the Civil War for policy to transition from revenue to restriction and it took the Great Depression to transition for restriction to reciprocity. My question is whether the Great Recession was another such trigger. I hope not.

In sum Irwin’s book is a long slog, but for those serious about how our trade policy came to be, it is well worth the effort.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3U5XU27SA6HNX/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Robert J. Gordon's "The Rise and Fall of American Growth"

It’s All about Growth

Northwestern economics professor Robert Gordon has a written a mostly very good and a very long book (762 pages in the print edition) on the history of economic growth in the United States from 1870 to the present. In his view it is all about the rise and fall of total factor productivity (the gains in output not due to increased labor and capital inputs, or if you will technological improvements). I know this sound very boring, but he explains the growth in output in terms of how it affected the daily home and work lives of average Americans. In other words he tells a very good story as to how the typical American moved from a completely disconnected life without indoor plumbing in 1870 to a fully connected life with water, sewerage, electricity, radio and telephones by 1940. The American of 1940 would not recognize the life of an American in 1870 while the American of today would readily recognize the life of a typical 1940 American.

To him much of this improvement is due to what he calls the second industrial revolution which was brought into being by the widespread adoption of electricity and the internal combustion engine. along with indoor plumbing remade the economy. In a way his book is a paean to industrial capitalism whose innovations brought about this revolution. Further, although it is hard to believe today, the introduction of the automobile in the early 1900s was the clean technology of its day. Simply put the major cities of the country were knee deep in horse poop and horse piss that local residents struggled to avoid. They were literally swimming in pollution.

Compare this to the third industrial revolution we are experience today involving information technology, computers and communications. Sure those technologies have improved our lives, but how do they compare to indoor plumbing and electric lights. Gordon demonstrates through a careful analysis of the data that the information revolution peaked from 1996-2004 and has since slowed down. Specifically Moore’s Law which states computer chip capacity doubles every 18-24 months which held from the late 1960s to the early 2000s broke down in the past decade to a pace of doubling every four to six years.

Going forward Gordon is a “techno-pessimist.” He views the 1870-1970 period as a one off event. The recent slowdown in productivity and economic growth certainly supports his view. Whether he is right, or not, only time will tell. Where I would disagree with Gordon is that he labels the rise of income inequality as an impediment to growth. To me that is a stretch because during his golden age of 1870-1940 there were two distinct periods of high and rising income inequality. The first was the gilded age of 1895-1910 and second was the roaring twenties. During those two time periods the standard of living for the average American grew rapidly and it is hard to see in the data that it was an impediment to growth especially when Gordon admits the official data grossly understated overall economic growth.

I know that this review has hardly done justice to Gordon’s magisterial work. I highly recommend it for those interested in how our lives came to be.

For the full Amazon URL see:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R13GCQ9VTKYY3S/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv