My Amazon Review of Bridgett M. Davis' "The World According to Fanny Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers"

 

Love and Capital in Motown

Baruch College creative writing professor Bridgett M. Davis has written a loving biography of her mother Fanny and along the way a partial autobiography of herself and the Black experience in declining Detroit through the prism of the subculture around the numbers game. (Note: I received this book as a gift and although I have an association with Baruch College, I have not met the author.) Fanny Davis moves her family from Jim Crow Nashville to Detroit in the mid-fifties and the author, the last of five children is born there in 1960. It is through her eyes and the research that she had undertaken we see the larger-than-life Fanny Davis.

After winning a big 500-1 payout to the tune of $25,000 Fanny has the cash to “buy” (actually a land contract of sale because the neighborhood was redlined.) a house and is also taken with the idea of at first being a numbers bookie and then a numbers banker. All of this is illegal. For the uninitiated, the numbers game involves betting on three-digit number that is derived from the last digits of a parimutuel pool in a given race. The odds of winning are, of course, 1,000-1 while the payoff varies between 500-1 and 600-1 making the expected value of a $1 bet 50 or 60 cents. Thus, there is huge “vigorish” for the house. However, the house faces the risk of ruin if too much is bet on the winning number. It is the success of this business that enables the family to grow up with a middle-class lifestyle.

The author was born in 1960, the youngest of five children and she is treated like a princess. She wears fancy clothes, has lots of shoes and most importantly many books to read. There is an early incident where her first-grade teacher questions the number pairs of shoes she has and further questions how her family makes its money. Fanny soon puts her into her place. We see similar incidents in high end department stores where store clerks question Fanny’s ability to pay. She then either roles out $100 bills or a stack of credit cards.

Fanny and other members of the numbers reinvest their profits back into their businesses and into the community at large by founding legitimate businesses and funding the local NAACP and Urban League chapters. Capital accumulation occurs at different levels.

In 1972 new competition enters in the form of a legal state lottery. Fanny had to adjust her whole business strategy. In the parlance of today’s Wall Street, she creates a derivative bet on the state lottery. She allows people to bet with her on the same numbers, but she pays out 600-1 instead of 500-1 and because the activity is illegal the winning better avoids the income taxes associated with winning in the formal state lottery. Further the risk of ruin is gone, because if there were excessive betting on a given number, she laid off the bet with the official lottery. Again, using Wall Street terminology this is called delta hedging. In a different era, Fanny could very well have run a casino or worked as a trader on Wall Street. To highlight her acumen in that regard, she bought Chrysler stock when it was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1980.

We also see her family in turmoil as three of her children die young, her divorce from her first husband who moved with her from Nashville, and her dying of cancer. The author brought tears to my eyes as she recounted her Mom’s death.

All the events in the book are going on amidst Detroit’s long wave decline. The auto industry is collapsing, whites are fleeing the city and the crime rate skyrockets. Indeed, the house that the author grew up in was later vandalized and ultimately bulldozed. The triggering event was the 1967 riot where the Army was called in. I would disagree with the author that the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act was the trigger for the white flight. In my opinion the white flight was already underway and that the Fair Housing Act did not have the perverse effect of advancing racial segregation.

Although I largely focused on the business side of things, Bridgett Davis’ endearing story of her Mom is an American story of success and capital accumulation against the backdrop of a major American city in decline. I would end by noting that this story will soon(?) be a major motion picture. I can’t wait.

For the complete Amazon URL see:  Love and Capital in Motown (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Colson Whitehead's "The Nickel Boys"

Path Dependence

As I write this there are 1607 reviews on Amazon for Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys.” As a result I will not have much to add, but I would still add my voice to recommending it. The book is based on the sordid history of Florida’s Dozier School for Boys where for over 100 years torture, beatings and rape were commonplace and it was only uncovered accidentally by archaeology students in 2014. As one reviewer called it, it was truly a “house of horrors.”

Whitehead’s protagonist is Elwood Curtis, a bright, idealistic and somewhat naïve Florida teenager who in 1959 Florida worshiped Martin Luther King. His life is upended when he ends up hitch hiking in a stolen car where the driver is caught and Elwood ends getting sentenced to The Nickel Academy, the fictional version of Dozier. There with one random event his life is permanently upended for the worse.

At Nickel he witnesses and is victim of the day to day brutality of the place that is symbolic of the Jim Crow South and has the strength to persevere. He also witnesses the ongoing corruption of the place where supplies are sold or given to nearby businesses and inmates perform work on the houses of the nearby town’s well-to-do. Whitehead tells story by looking back from 2014 and the late 20^th century to life in the “school” and in doing so he keeps the story moving. Although there are many redemptive qualities I must warn the reader that good does not necessarily triumph.

Although Whitehead’s story is that of the Jim Crow south it has resonance for today. Instead of naked brutality all too many African-American teenagers suffer from poor schools and inadequate opportunity thus setting themselves up for path dependent events that have negative consequences. Thus in a sense it was far easier to close a Nickel Academy than fix the urban schools of America. 

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3B2M3ZY6NX8TS/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Steven Luxenberg's "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation"

Betrayal

Washington Post journalist Steve Luxenberg has written an important book as to how the “separate but equal” doctrine was codified by the Supreme Court in 1896 that for all practical purposes legalized the Jim Crow laws of the South thereby betraying the promise of the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution. He tells this story through the biographies of the dissenting Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, the majority opinion writer Henry Billings Brown, the lead plaintiff attorney Albion Tourgee and the history of the free mixed-race community that grew up in pre-Civil War New Orleans, of which Homer Plessy was a member.

The two heroes of the book are Harlan and Tourgee. Harlan was the slaveholding son of Kentucky’s Whig aristocracy who while supporting slavery opposed the dissolution of the Union and fought on the Union side during the Civil War. Tourgee was an Ohio lawyer who fought for the Union and later became a judge in the Reconstruction South.  Massachusetts born Brown, on the other hand, bought his way out of Civil War service and became a judge in Michigan. Of special interest is the milieu of the mixed race New Orleans community who fought with Andrew Jackson in famous battle of New Orleans and how it evolved over the 19^th century.

Plessy v. Ferguson was a set-up case orchestrated by Tourgee to overturn Louisiana’s separate car rule which kept black people out of the white’s only cars at the sole discretion of the conductor. How was a conductor to tell whether a light-skinned Negro was black or white? Nevertheless that was part of his job. Also of interest is the fact that the railroads did not like the separate car rule either. It cost them money. As a result both the Louisville & Nashville RR earlier and later the Eastern Louisiana RR fully cooperated with Tourgee in causing Plessy’s removal from the whites’ only car to set-up the case. Clearly the railroads, at least in the 1890s, were not the handmaidens of segregation.

What is remembered today is Justice Harlan’s famous quote that came out of his ringing dissent: “Our Constitution is color-blind.” Would that be true today? Luxenberg has written an important history. To me it was way too detailed and way too long, but at many points he reveals himself to be a very fine writer.

The Full amazon URL is: https://www.amazon.com/review/RAIR48142PPMZ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Richard White's "The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896"

History with a 21^st Century Liberal Bias

Stanford professor Richard White is a distinguished historian; I only have amateur status. While reading White’s encyclopedic history of post-civil war America you get the impression that he is looking to shock the sensibilities of 21^st Century liberals by highlighting racism, the plight of laborers and farmers, the corruption of government and the greed of the emerging capitalist class.

To be sure the post-civil war era was no bed of roses, but if Lincoln came back from the dead and looked upon the America of 1896 he would have been largely pleased. The Whig in Lincoln, after all he was an admirer of Henry Clay’s American  System,  would have been pleased to see the success of the Pacific Railway Act, the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act (land grant colleges). America truly became a country from sea to shining sea, surpassed Britain as an industrial power and was about to take its place on the world stage. Of course as White rightfully notes the Native Americans were far from being partners in this process. Nation building is messy.

The free labor Lincoln might have been a bit disappointed in that industrial workers instead of being free were in fact “slaves” to the industrialists. This last point White makes over and over. However industrial workers were far from being slaves and far from being a majority of the workforce and even with the urbanization that took place in the 30 years after the civil war, America was still an agricultural country with a small town economy. And as bad as factory conditions were, immigrants from Europe continued to pile in. Simply put higher real wages and freedom remained a big draw.  Moreover, White ignores the rise of the middle class who would read the muckraking journals that were just beginning to make their appearance in the 1890s.  

The idea that White doesn’t seem to get is that the America of the 1870s was an “emerging market.” Where he is shocked about the governmental corruption that took place, I view it as a stage in the growth of the economy. Industrialization is messy and that is why crony capitalism and emerging markets go hand in hand. He also makes a side comment that American growth was slow compared to some of the faster growing economies of the 20^th century. Of course it was because America was inventing the stuff that the 20^th century economies had the benefit of copying.

Although White cites the excellent work in Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” he doesn’t take it to heart. (See https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-amazon-review-of-robert-j-gordons.html )   Productivity growth was strong and real wages were rising. The U.S. was experiencing a “good” deflation, not a bad one as gains in productivity were translated into lower prices. Indeed the return to the gold standard, which White is critical of and it had a lot to do with the deflation, but it laid the basis of America becoming a global economic power at the dawn of the next century. The late 1800s truly were truly an age on invention and the locus of invention was largely in America.

All of the class issues that White discusses were fought out in the election of 1896. William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan was a resounding vote for the gold standard and against the class-based reforms proposed by Bryan. Highlighting the rise of the new middle class is the fact that 750,000 people visited McKinley’s home to hear him give campaign speeches. These folks weren’t the tribunes of capitalism or White’s downtrodden workers and farmers, but rather they were of the rising middle class.

The one area where I know Lincoln would have been disappointed is the failure of reconstruction. Here the Republicans punted and turned the south over to the Ku Klux Klan, the armed wing of the Democratic Party. As White notes, the Republican traded the south for the west. I wish he would have spent more time on President James Garfield, whose was shot at the beginning of his term. If there was anyone who could have halted Jim Crow, it would have been him. We will never know.

I am sure White’s book will win its share of awards, but for me it was a disappointment. He should take off his liberal blinders and look at the world as it was.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1TWNN5VYQ0HO0/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv