Transplanting a Seattleite

Probably there will be linkage.

https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2011/08/remembering-conscription-in-the-united-states/comment-page-1/

There’s a lot of detail, and the understanding of the relevant laws, procedures, etc. is exceptional. The remarks about draft numbers is interesting as is the reference to being called up for a physical even when you had a deferment. I still have questions, but this answered some of them.

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0408draft/

Really long, really detailed discussion of the interaction between the draft, recruitment, the wars in progress, resistance, compensation while in the armed forces, etc.

https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/reviews/6248057/sandy-rutenberg-rough-draft-cold-war-military-manpower-policy-and

I’m gonna buy it — this review grabbed me with the charted wives’ menstrual cycles. Holy shit.

Subtitled: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat

I made this book last as long as I could. I really did! I did lots of side research on the people he wrote about. I cooked some of the food he talked about (great to read the backstory on the Lundberg brothers, and how they came to grow the organic brown rice that is the only organic brown rice that consistently tastes good to me). I looked up various organizations he mentioned, to see which ones were still around. I savored. It was glorious.

I’ll probably reread it.

I am not vegetarian, much less vegan. I never have been. But I’ve been consuming soy milk products since I was a couple months old, because I have a long-standing cow milk allergy. It has waxed and waned over the years — my mother and pediatrician had a plan to find a threshold that if I stayed beneath it, I wouldn’t get _too_ sick (I’d just catch every cold that went around and never let it go and wind up taking antibiotics for the secondary infection that developed. Little things like that.). My teenage years, however, put me in the path of Steve’s Ice Cream when that was still an amazing thing, and my first job with FICA taken out of it involved a manager who liked to go next door to the place that sold fudge at the mall and bring some back for whoever was working that day. Bad things to do to someone who consumes some dairy, but falls off a cliff digestively speaking when consuming a little too much.

Years ago, I (tried to) read a book about private law that was just appalling. It was interesting, because Jewish dietary restrictions mean there is a lot of private law out there enforcing rules on producers of kosher food. I’m interested now because I’m Jewish, but because Kosher Parve / pareve means “I can eat that safely”. Similarly, I love vegans, because they make baked goodies and other things that I can safely eat. And while I eat meat (I had a BLT for lunch), I don’t have to eat it all the time. I’m pretty happy with a lot of different kinds of foods, as long as I don’t get sick.

Unlike the private law book, Kauffman did a fantastic job on research. And his structure is brilliant: the first few chapters develop early health food culture in the US through specific foods: a catch all chapter on fruits, seeds, nuts and early SoCal health stores, gurus, and restaurants, followed by Ohsawa, macrobiotic and brown rice, then whole grains, tofu, and finally, a chapter on the back-to-the-land and rural commune movement. The integration of international cuisines and foodways into vegetarianism in the US and finally, a chapter on food (and other) co-ops. As you can see, the structure gives focus to what might otherwise be a meandering — and entertaining, but difficult to make sense of and retain — series of chronologically ordered anecdotes about the many contributors to the dramatic change from the four food groups of my childhood, to the various plant centered diets today.

There’s a great list of sources / bibliography at the back, if you want to read more about particular trends / participants. And so, so, so many people described are connected to or their own names are brands that are familiar to anyone who has shopped at health food stores, Whole Foods, or the “natural foods” section of a supermarket. From Bragg (of cider vinegar and amino acids) to Mackey (of Whole Foods), from Ohsawa (Whole Foods still sells an Ohsawa branded variation on soy sauce), through the Lundbergs, Ed Brown of Tassajara, Katzen of Moosewood and many, many more, it’s wonderful to finally have an answer key to explain how all those shelves got populated by all that stuff that we had to figure out how to cook without any useful explanation from a family member.

Well, apparently Kauffman grew up with this stuff. I’m assuming he’s slightly younger than me.

Anyway. Read it! You’ll learn a ton, even if you already know a lot, because somewhere in there, you’re going to go, _so that’s how that feud got started_! It is truly the answer key to understanding weird minefields scattered around in land of food activism.

Also, I _loved_ learning more about biodynamics. Wow, that is just a whole lot more unusual than I had realized.

Seventh Day Adventist contributions to the cause are covered lightly. I was a little surprised at the list of restrictions attributed to Ellen White. There were more on that list than I had realized; I don’t know how accurate Kauffman was, however.

#32

ETA: The backstory on Lappe and her book! Her work with the Ballantines to expand it from a pamphlet! Her media strategy! More about the Farm. OMG if I’d know all this about the Farm, I might have been a lot less willing to read what Ina May Gaskin had to say about breastfeeding and natural childbirth. Which would have been sad, because that woman _definitely_ knew what she was writing about. I loved the idea of Shurtleff and Laurie Sythe Praskin on The Farm corresponding about soy milk and tofu and other soy foods.

Also, wow, Ehrlich was such an idiot, but he sure had an enormous impact on people. Also, I had no real understanding just how dystopic the worldview of the communards / back to the landers really was.

I loved Levinson's _The Box_, even though it took me years to get around to reading it. I had bought it in hardcover for my husband around the time it came out, and then promptly quit reading things in paper. Despite that, it took me a while -- altho only months, not years -- to convince myself to take a flyer on _An Extraordinary Time_. Levinson's book is about the immediate post war decades, but his perspective is to show how odd those decades were by comparing them to what came before and after. And since the after is my entire life, I've got some pretty strong feelings about those decades and I haven't run into a lot of economists or economic historians who agree with me much. I didn't want to find out that Levinson was just another one of Them.

Lucky me! I love this book.

Naturally, when I read something that runs along lines that I already think, I am predisposed to like it. Aren't we all. Actually, this is not entirely true. I can get hypercritical of stuff I like a little too much. But honestly, that didn't really happen here, either, because Levinson focuses on telling the story: what happened, what were the policy responses, what happened after the policy responses, how did various investigators, whether bureaucrats or academics, interpret the policy responses and the results of the policy responses.

And it is actually pretty impossible to entirely agree with the way I have thought about the world in which I grew up, because I've changed my mind far too many times. From a world in which I hated Reagan and Thatcher, to an age where I don't think what they did really worked in any larger sense but I can now really understand what they were reacting to, it's difficult to imagine how one could reconcile those very divergent opinions, each of which I have held in turn. And yet, Levinson's analysis is so measured, he can describe the outrageous demands being made and the dire economic circumstances, the bizarre and not particularly consistent ideologies subscribed to by supply siders and Conservatives in the UK, and come out the other side basically saying, well, you definitely couldn't keep doing what had been the status quo, and the new stuff didn't work either, but . . . it's not at all clear that anything was really going to make that much of a difference anyway.

If it all sounds kind of dry and non-committal, it didn't feel that way reading it. To me, it was like watching a sped up version of the background of my life, and along it unreeling the many ways I have tried to understand it. Behind it all, Levinson does really _get_ that this all went the way it did because of two underlying factors which are not handled in great detail. First, technological change and progress which initially was compatible with full employment but later was not. Second, different societal goals that arose over time that were not well captured by economic statistics (environment, especially, but others as well). Significantly lacking in the background is a sense of the massive demographic changes -- if I have a complaint, it would be that. Backgrounding the technological changes and the What Do You Measure problem does not bother me; backgrounding the demographics leaves me with a chicken and egg problem.

It's a great book. I have no idea what it would be like to read this book if you are significantly older or younger than me, nor do I have any idea what it would be like to read this if you've never explored an economics perspective on history. I can readily imagine that reading this with a different life span to measure it against, or with a different sense of economics could result in a very, very different opinion of the book.

Look, I get that Nixon was a horrible President. I understand that. However, we've had more than one horrible President, and honestly, the older I get, the more confused I am regarding precisely _why_ it was that people who were adults in the Nixon years hated him so very much.

http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/cf7c9c870b600b9585256df80075b9dd/f8723e3606cd79ec85256ff6006f82c3?OpenDocument

Okay, then. Yeah, I get it now. Wow.

Someone could have mentioned this to me _sooner_.

I went looking because the almost certain nominee for one of the parties has been quite slow to release his returns, and TRMS was contextualizing Why Candidates Release Their Returns.

Fave sentence in the above linked article: "Ironically, Nixon may have been the first AMT taxpayer."

Subtitled: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

Levinson is an economist whose ability to write history is amazing. That's not a common trait of economists (<-- weaponized understatement there) or, for that matter, anyone else. I may buy his A&P history next, just because.

I bought this book because when it came out, the reviews were uniformly positive, and it seemed like the kind of thing my husband would enjoy, and it connected peripherally to a lot of the reading I was doing at the time in rail networks and rail history, and intermodal in general. I didn't read it myself, because it was published in 2006 and my life was kind of busy. By the time things were settled down somewhat, I had a kindle and was mostly reading on that.

The central figure of the origins of container shipping and this book was Malcom (spelling explained in the book) Mclean. He started out in trucking, switched to boats and never really looked back. For all that Mclean invented the container ship and the world we live in, he did not succeed in creating the seamless intermodal world we are still building now (not knocking him for it -- no one could have surely, altho his efforts in Vietnam gave a sense of the possible future, by contracting for end to end shipping). In the hands of a lesser author, Mclean's character would have taken over the tale; Levinson ably balances the idiosyncratic and ambitious man with the physical and economic realities of the world he acted in.

Levinson starts with a compelling description of what it was like to ship cargo before containers: the timelines, pilferage, hard and dangerous labor, how factories and longshoremen both were highly motivated to live and work as close to the docs as possible, the long standing conflict between those who loaded and unloaded ships, and everyone else, the politics of the port cities, etc. He shows how the end of WW2 made available, cheap, boats that could be converted to move containers. He does not spend time on the changes in the steel industry during this time frame (and they are kind of important but _way_ out of scope), or the growth of oil. Instead, inexpensive fuel for boats and inexpensive materials for the boxes are treated as a given.

Containers do several things. Like just about everything else in the middle of the 20th century, they make it cheaper per unit as long as you are willing to run a whole lot of units. They saved money by clearing up the port bottleneck: once you can load up the container and truck it around, you no longer have to have your factory located next to the docks. You also can pay a very different rate to have that container loaded, because you can have your own people do it, rather than deal with the dock workers and their complex work rules, unions, pilfering ways, etc. They saved money by reducing the amount of time spent in port, loading and unloading the ship, so the ship could move on to the next port. They ultimately made possible Just In Time inventory systems, reducing the overhead costs of keeping inventory. As insurers recognized the reduction in damage and theft to items being shipped, there was savings all around on insurance.

Over the longer term, they compressed the world, as the subtitle notes. One of the oddest bits of the book occurs when RJ Reynolds in the late 1960s/early 1970s has a lot of cash on hand and is staring in the face of increasing domestic regulation and a shrinking market at home. They wanted to diversify, to become one of the conglomerates characteristic of the age, and Mclean sold out to them so he'd get money to build more container ships. And thus, ironically, the bad habit of the blue collar factory worker became the instrument of the end of factory jobs through outsourcing. Altho not right away.

Mclean was imperfect, and in a particular way: he tended to optimize blindly. For a guy who created massive, longstanding change based on many stages of effects, he guessed wrong big on oil prices. Twice. He got caught out building super fast ships just before the oil crisis. And then he got caught out building super slow fuel sippers just before oil got real cheap again.

His biggest successes occurred when he looked at the world around him, saw how it worked and concluded that he was needed to Fix It. The chapter on Vietnam is a real eye opener. The military invited shipping execs to Washington, "where they were shown film clips of sailors lowering cargo nets by rope and asked for advice. When Malcom McLean saw the film, a colleague recalled, "[h]e got obsessed with the idea of putting containerships into Vietnam. He was back and forth to Washington, talking to people, and they told him there isn't anything you can do in Vietnam.""

Of course, the problem of container ships is you need special port facilities to realize benefits from them: huge cranes and a lot of space, mostly, but also significant organizational capacity to manage the containers moving in and out and making sure you don't sink the boat loading in the wrong order. Container shipping got into computers early, in a big way. New ports were built, and ""The port congestion problem was solved," the army's history of 1967 declared triumphantly." And since Sea-Land was making money on one leg, the backhaul was essentially pure profit.

Levinson tells the stories of West Coast, East Coast and English unions and how they wrestled with the changes brought by containerization. It would be incredibly easy to viciously denigrate unions and unions leaders when telling these stories. Levinson does not succumb to the temptation. He remains even handed and fair minded throughout the discussion.

I grew up in Seattle. Seattle, like many port cities, converted its older docks in an effort to revitalize a derelict area that had once been packed full of people and stuff. When we went down to the piers to go look around the shops or go to the Aquarium, my father told stories about the past, and, like young people everywhere, I mostly ignored those stories, hanging onto only occasional details like the eye popping salaries he claimed the longshoremen made running the cranes further south in the container port that had utterly replaced the piers we now came to for recreation (partly from reading this book, partly from reading other things, I now know that the eye popping salaries he quoted, like nearly everything he had to say about unions, was true). Levinson's book gave me a chance to really see the change happen that my father saw happen as a young man. And it gave a vivid backdrop to efforts around the country to revive derelict waterfronts with recreation, shopping and restaurants. All those waterfronts died at basically the same time, for the same reason.

Best of all, this book explained something that I've been scratching my head about for a decade or more. Whatever the hell happened to SeaLand, anyway? Those containers were everywhere when I was a kid, and then suddenly, I was 30 and that name was vanished as if it never existed, replaced by Maersk, mostly. My first wedding was officiated by a gentlemen who worked as a VP for Sealand -- I couldn't have imagined it all, could I? Whenever an economic segment commodifies, companies -- even big ones -- come and go with great rapidity, and it can be hard to understand why if you aren't in the industry during those years. Levinson manages to make it at least as accessible as a synopsis of a relationship-heavy novel or soap opera.

I can't recommend this book enough. It is a great read, an amazing story, and it explains so much of our world and why things changed when they did and how they did.

Subtitled: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire

I keep wondering if maybe this guy is related to a good friend of mine, based purely on that last name. Not really relevant. Anyway.

This came out about a year ago; I bought it last August and then didn't read it. Not sure why I finally decided to give it a go, other than that I've had good luck with non-fiction lately which tends to give me some momentum for more. It's a long book, even when you discount the end notes, but it moves along quickly because Irwin tells the story very much as a story of People. The three central bankers of the subtitle are Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King (of the Bank of England) and Jean-Claude Trichet of the ECB. As with some other books I've been reading, I was an interested adult paying attention as the events covered in this book occurred, so some of what is contained within was already familiar to me.

But mostly, Irwin managed to get everyone but the Germans to talk to him. Extensively. I don't know if that's because the cables released by wikileaks sort of made everyone decide there wasn't much left to lose and this was a great chance to frame their legacy or what. Probably what: there are a lot of indications that Irwin is the sort of guy you want to tell your story to. He'll be accurate and sympathetic, which is an unusual combination. By sympathetic, I mean he'll explain why the person did what they did -- what the actor's value system was and how their choices fit within it. Obvs, the reader may be headdesking madly while reading about Mervyn King or Axel Weber or whatever, but it won't be because Irwin _told_ them to headdesk; it'll be because the reader is a Sensible Person. The few exceptions (the open contempt Irwin displays when describing Sarkozy and Merkel's little walk along the beach) are kind of hard to argue with.

The plot is straightforward. As a result of the full flowering of securitization, insurance and financialization of lending (notably mortgages, but in general), the most recent economic bust was more comprehensive and difficult to recover from than recent busts, comparable to events like the Great Depression, 1907 and similar. Because the dollar is the reserve currency for most of the world, it was particularly important that the US Get It Right after the crash, and we (mostly) did (eventually) (thank you, Ben). Because holding sterling denominated debt (gilts) is largely optional, Mervyn King's options were somewhat constrained, however, his theory-orientation and general pigheadedness led him into a bunch of foolishness which was probably avoidable but not necessarily catastrophic. Irwin's main contribution to the usual presentation is to argue that Jean-Claude Trichet's repeated runs right up to the brink of disaster -- which largely seemed like madness at the time -- were in fact calculated attempts to pressure European political figures into taking fiscal action. Irwin then largely undoes a lot of his success at this argument by presenting Mario Draghi as tackling the rest of the same situation and generally being much more effective at it by taking a different approach to personal interactions with political figures. This is not to suggest Irwin is wrong -- likely he is just making the same damn point over and over and over again, which is that monetary folk can and must do some things, but the politicians must do other things -- and both groups are better served by genuinely listening to stakeholders, making sure everyone is actually heard, considering what they have to say, and then presenting a plan that can be accepted by enough/all. Also, that all Germans other than Angela Merkel are Not Helpful when it comes to a Europe-wide financial crisis, and she's questionable.

It's weirdly touchy-feely good in a book that's all about international money flows.

I particularly liked that Irwin really seemed to understand why the Euro is so important to Europe. Few commentators in the US really grasp this (Paul Krugman in particular is just inadequate on the topic, which always makes me cranky and sad, because I want him to Get It).

I hesitate to suggest you run right out and read the book, because were you paying attention to what I said it was about? Central banking? Seriously? But if you think you could slog through it, give it a go. Irwin writes engagingly, and the people-focus (while it initially made me very suspicious) turns out to work both as an analysis and as a story.

Subtitled The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900

Published by Rutgers University Press

Hardcover original was Temple University in 1981; the first paperback was 1990. This has the preface for the first paperback thus some retrospective about where it fits into other women’s studies literature and also some comments about how the author would do things differently if writing it at the later date.

The author’s other books include a biography of Frances Willard.

I’ve read at least one other detailed history involving Prohibition (_Last Call_, by Daniel Okrent, which is also excellent). Immediately before this, my previous non-fiction read covering the rhetoric of the women’s movement before, during and after this time (_White Women’s Rights_, so-so).

The WCTU, the organization which is the subject of this organizational biography, continues to exist; you can visit their website here http://www.wctu.org/

Whatever you might think of alcohol (whether it is or was a problem, and if so, what if anything should be done to address it), the WCTU served a variety of purposes in its quest for Prohibition. It was an organization which respectable, middle-class women felt comfortable joining: it did not negatively affect their status as prosperous, locally influential wives and mothers nor did it threaten their religious identity or their church affiliation. Their husbands were more okay with them speaking in public in support of this cause, unlike others of the time (such as women’s suffrage, and, earlier, abolition), and were amenable to financially supporting this cause. Because the WCTU never allowed voting male members, the organization was made up of women at all levels of leadership and membership. Because Frances Willard, over time, came to believe that temperance and Prohibition would not by themselves cure all of the ills of the world, the WCTU branched out into numerous other causes (including women’s suffrage, kindergartens, the 8 hour day, Sunday off and half day Saturday, equal pay for equal work, disarmament, peace, international arbitration and numerous other causes), which by themselves had difficulty attracting the attention and participation of these women in support of them.

Willard and the WCTU made conscious choices to encourage local organization with local leadership, including Native Americans, blacks and various immigrant groups. Of course this was in service of the cause of Temperance, but it was also done in recognition that these groups (and Southern white women, for that matter) remained largely unpoliticized and Temperance could provide the same jump-start to political activism of all sorts which it had to the members of the WCTU.

Really, the WCTU is a model of how incredibly effective community organizing can be: a cause with broad, deep, non-partisan appeal combined with good works in communities, local pseudo-autonomy, national leadership, a willingness to join forces with other causes and other groups where membership overlapped in values and current priorities and above all effective legislation to impact education around the country is a pretty straightforward template for how change occurs in our country and around the world.

A good, detailed history monograph -- without even meaning to -- is deeply relevant and resonant in later eras. Ruth Bordin has produced one of the best. You might think of Prohibition with a shudder (honestly, I no longer do, altho of course I do not advocate for it, either), but the women who pushed the world in that direction (in conjunction with organizations like the Anti-Saloon League, which came into existence in part to counter the backlash to the WCTU) were politically brilliant and their example is instructive even now.

There are also some great details. Ohio law at the time of the first Crusade prohibited the sale of beer or alcohol to persons whose relatives had asked that they not be served. At times, Ruth Bordin’s perspective is too obvious, as when she criticizes Willard, describing her Crusade experience as “at best contrived and minimal”, largely because her experience was more as a teacher assigning themes in her classes on the subject, rather than direct action. And also when she describes Willard here: “Women liked Willard. Indeed she was more than liked, she was loved, she was adored. Her intense, almost sexual attractiveness to members of her own sex was a major factor in her success. Women competed for her favors and cherished some intimate moment with her as they would the attentions of a male lover.”

I’m mostly okay with the “almost sexual”; I’m _really not okay_ with the “male lover”. That male really does not need to be there; it is straight up (ahem) heterocentricity at a moment where heterocentricity is least justified.

WCTU was instrumental in getting the age of consent raised in many states, in part as a way or reducing prostitution. “In 1886 the laws of twenty states placed the age of consent at ten years, and one at seven. 86 By 1894 only four states (all in the South) still put consent at ten, and in twenty states legal consent had been raised to sixteen, an accomplishment for which the WCTU could take substantial credit.” A clearer example of good work done in the service of a cause that we may no longer approve of would be harder to imagine.

I picked my copy up at Half Price Books for $5.98, over 10 years ago, possibly closer to 20. If you would like my copy (it’s not available as an ebook, as near as I can determine), let me know and I’ll send it to you. I will hang onto it for at least a few months and will edit this review to indicate when I no longer have it.

T. likes popping bubblewrap. Who doesn't? Of course, few of us love it as much when someone else is getting the fun of doing the popping while we have to listen to it. In any event, he is having a merry old time _jumping_ on bubble wrap. I had no idea you could get that kind of volume out of those pops.

I'm reading _Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture_. It is slow going, because I'm off to YouTube every paragraph or three to listen to music, and then off to iTunes slightly less often to buy tracks/albums. Things I have learned in the last couple days:

(1) Holy crap I love Chic. Really, words fail to convey just how perfect I find this music. I find this music amazing to the extent of buying the complete studio album collection on iTunes and _not getting tired of it_. That Nile Rodgers memoir is probably coming up after this book.

(2) The Trammps album with Disco Inferno is actually a really good album. Who knew?

(3) I actually don't like much Chaka Khan, other than some of the Rufus albums (which I already knew I liked). And I'm starting to understand some of why.

(4) Sylvia Robinson. That has to be the oddest career in music I have ever encountered.

Because I am Too Youthful (*cackle*) to have really participated in The Disco Years, but old enough to remember them sliding by (sort of), I had a very limited grasp of the timeline and essentially no real understanding of the relationship of disco to the development of identity politics. While the opening to Alice Echols' book is cringe-inducingly personal, it turns out to be a really effective opener once into the book proper, because she helps the reader find the relationship between their local/personal experience of disco and its time period to the NYC-centric cultural archetype. She does a fantastic job of exploring economic, racial, gender, and obvs orientation politics in and around disco.

I'll post a complete review when I'm done, but don't bother to wait for it. Get a copy and read it. Maybe it will help you find your favorite disco music, too! Because navigating around the stuff that's just gonna piss you off is Tricky.

ETA: Also, my Grado SR 80s are so thoroughly on their last legs I've ordered replacements. I _could_ replace a whole bunch of parts, but instead, Sennheiser HR 558's are on their way.

I ran across a remark indicating that Millard Fillmore opposed Abraham Lincoln during the war, and backed Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction. This was a point where I went, yeah, never really understood any of that, either. So off to wikipedia for a refresher, to see if it made more sense now than it did the last time I saw it (possibly college, more likely high school).

Most superficial and ridiculous conversations about US politics in the middle of the 19th century sort of lose track of how, er, multi-faceted they were. During Reconstruction, the States which had Lost were not participating in national politics: they weren't represented in Congress. There was an ambiguous and contested relationship between the occupying Army and the state legislatures. There was debate about who should be allowed to vote. There were debates about who should be prosecuted and how. Etc.

You can think of roughly three interests participating in these debates: freedmen and that fraction of Republicans which thought they ought to be citizens and be allowed to vote, other Republicans who were incredibly pissed about the war and wanted to make sure Something Happened as a result, and a third group that hadn't been all that hot about abolitionism in the first place, Andrew Johnson appears to have fallen somewhere on the Democratic side of that last group. His horse in the race was the poor, white, scrappy farmer, and he was a lot more worried about freedmen voting for their former masters who they were still farming for just under a technically different arrangement, than about anything we might recognize as justice.

Andrew Johnson really got into it with his Congress. This seems sort of surprising, altho if you give any thought to how the Whigs went down, and the various assemblages that cratered until Lincoln finally got the nod (in exchange for Committing to Not Support Abolition), maybe not so surprising at all. But it's so odd: basically a completely one party setup, and Congress kept overriding his vetoes -- and then they impeached him.

Wow.

Andrew Johnson switched parties.

If you are wondering why they didn't just find a way to get rid of him, apparently the Vice President favored Women's Suffrage, which is about the only thing all these white men could agree to be in opposition to.

The wikipedia article on Andrew Johnson has (at the time I read it today) a really great section on succeeding generations of historians and what they thought of him. In many ways, I feel bad for _anyone_ who was involved in politics through the middle decades of the nineteenth century (I mean, even more so than most other times). Basically, if you could convince other people to agree with you on anything at the time, there was guaranteed to be a whole wave of people then or later that would think you were Evil Incarnate for whatever it was. Given that Johnson was from Tennessee, and assuming he wanted to actually go home again, his politics don't seem that inept to me. At all. They really quite liked him when he went home. He got to be a Senator after a bit.

But whenever I think about what he did from the perspective of liberty, justice and Righting of Wrongs, well, he still doesn't seem inept. Evil, and damn good at it.

I'm not seeing the inept theory, I guess.

I also feel like I can see the underlying theme that was appealing to Fillmore and Johnson. They were both fundamentally status quo guys, who were freaked out about immigration, and freaked out about people who had historically been at the bottom of the pile somehow being elevated. Johnson had his own group that he wanted to succeed, but his was a weak populism, at best. They were absolutely centrist beings in a hyper-partisan time: for farm, family, and a white Protestant God.

This may be the Best Argument Ever against centrism, but it sure does a great job of explaining my mid- to late- 19th century ancestors living in what is now the Midwest. For them, it wasn't about being for or against slavery. It was about being _for_ the nuclear family climbing the economic ladder by settling new land.

Yeesh.

Subtitled: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President

We had a good turnout at Mayberry (<-- not its real name) Public Library for book group: 6 people. We all finished the book (this is somewhat amazing in and of itself) AND we all really liked it. AND we had a great discussion. I don't think this trifecta has _ever_ occurred in this group before. I'll be getting Millard's earlier book, and looking forward to future ones.

If you've ever given Garfield's assassination any thought at all (I had previous to this read a multi-page description of the medical "treatment" he was subjected to, but I hadn't really thought about the assassination part at all, Garfield's politics or anything else), well, you were ahead of all of us. Millard quite capably ties together several distinct threads to the tale in ways that avoid confusion and create a degree of insight into the third quarter of the 19th century that isn't easy to achieve.

The first thread is Garfield himself: his humble beginnings, his marriage and family life (Millard's treatment of his affair is sensitive and makes the reader like and understand everyone even more), his education, participation in the Civil War, nomination and then election to the Presidency. I don't think I had any real idea that Garfield is the Origin Point for the "no, no, please, don't nominate me" meme, nor did I realize how truly he embodied the log cabin Origin Story. Best of all, however, Millard conveys an idea of how deeply divided the party was at that time between those who wanted to continue traditional machine/partisan politics and a reform wing that wanted to professionalize more elements of governmental service.

The second thread is the assassin: Charles Guiteau. His history of craziness, influenced in part by his father's religious ideas and the Oneida colony (but even _they_ thought he was nuts) and the enabling of his sister until even she felt he was a threat to her. Running out on bills for clothes, for rent and train fare and abusing his wife during their brief marriage are enough to recognize him as mentally unbalanced -- the problem was he kept running a little too fast for people to actually institutionalize him.

The third thread is technology. Medical clashes over antisepsis are obviously crucial to the story (and an echo of authority/seniority vs. professionalism arises in this thread, too), but Alexander Graham Bell is an important character as he develops a device for using induction to detect balls and bullets inside a human body. I had no idea that this device would continue to be used down through the Vietnam War, when X-ray machines were unavailable in the field or the results they were producing were not helpful.

Weaving this all together are the women. Candice Millard does a stunningly good job of showing how important women were to all of these men, and in all of these events. They are obviously not front-and-center because of societal restrictions, but, in the the most clear-cut case, women Change the Outcome. Julia Sand's letters to Chester Arthur, which he improbably read, was influenced by and preserved, were written by a woman unknown and unrelated to the Vice President. She said in strong terms that he must become a better man as he became the President and he must not allow his weak and corrupt past to determine the future of the Nation.

So Chester Arthur implemented the reform plans that Garfield supported -- and then we all forgot the whole thing.

It's a great book. I expect I'll be rereading it in the future, because there was so much in it. Lucretia Garfield created the first Presidential Library and started a grand tradition of preserving presidential papers so we could go back in time through them and better understand our national heritage. The kids turned out well. Lister was decorated and lauded and eventually, because his ideas (and those of Semmelweis) won out, we all live a lot longer after trauma (and childbirth) than we otherwise would have. Good stuff.

Also, a very enjoyable read.

ETA: Oh, after reading this, I got to thinking about the list of assassins that Guiteau was one of. It seems that people who attempt to kill heads of state are really not connecting to reality as the rest of us understand it. I think I had assumed there must have been _some_ that had a coherent political platform/ideology/wtf that they thought would be advanced by assassination, but it turns out that might not be true. Like, at all. If you are defending against assassination, there are really two things you care about: crazy people, and getting shot accidentally by the armed guards who are protecting you.

But this conclusion may be influenced the by selection of universe. I think if you are looking at assassination in the context of drug lords, or Italian city-states, you could probably find "rational" assassinations. Altho maybe not -- they might have been part of an overall plan, but the person picked to do the deed may always be Not Sane.