Containing College Costs (without MOOCing Things Up)

The rapidly rising cost of American college education – tuition jumped 500% over the past 28 years, according to MSN Money – became a matter of national concern last year, when President Obama announced several mild proposals addressing the problem.  Other stakeholders in the debate, mainly state legislators, college administrators, and well-intentioned but clueless gadflies like Tom Friedman have advocated more radical reforms, like increasing faculty teaching loads or relying on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).  I have not given the matter much thought here, except to note in passing that Americans have collectively decided A) to make college education almost universally necessary for employment, and B) to force students to pay for it themselves, with loans now collectively valued at 1 trillion dollars

Rather than curse the darkness and the many predators who lurk in it, some thoughtful faculty members have offered intelligent and nuanced suggestions about how to get college costs under control.  One, I am proud to say, is my colleague Anne Foster, who kindly took time off from her busy schedule as a professor and co-editor of Diplomatic History to share her thoughts on the subject. Her suggestions will appear here in two parts, one today and the other this Friday. Comments are welcome, either here or by direct communication with Prof. Foster (Anne.Foster@indstate.edu).

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On college affordability, view from the trenches

Anne Foster

            President Barack Obama has weighed in on the college affordability conversation, touting a program to incentivize colleges and universities to keep their costs down. He wants to make college more affordable, student loans less onerous, and higher education more accessible. All worthy goals, none likely to be achieved by President Obama’s plans. From my vantage point as a faculty member with six years of teaching experience in a small, private liberal arts college and ten in a public university, I offer the view from the trenches, and some advice to those whose choices make a difference in the cost of college.

Federal government:  I start with the feds only because President Obama has suggested the federal government will use its power to enforce a particular vision of how to make college affordable. His vision is based on the notion that knowledge will lead to more rational choices. Students and parents already have access to a lot of information about which colleges are more affordable and graduate their students, at the College Navigator website run by the U.S. Department of Education. Some other federal government efforts would be more helpful.

            First, make it easier for students attending college part time to access federal financial aid.  Too many students with modest economic resources or demanding personal situations attempt to attend college full time while working full time or caring for family members. Why do they take on this heavy burden? Because only full time students are eligible for most forms of financial aid. And because financial aid is not tied to number of credit hours attempted, but to number of semesters attended. This one-size-fits-all approach ill serves the students who most need and deserve assistance with attending college.

            Second, make sure Pell Grant amounts keep up with inflation. Self-explanatory. The grant for those students whose families have the fewest financial resources need to hold their value.

            Third, make student loans able to be discharged in the bankruptcy process, and lower the interest rate. Student loans should be harder to get and cheaper to have.

State governments:  State universities have seen their net cost rise more quickly than private in most cases, in large measure because most state governments have cut appropriations. Many state colleges and universities have also been asked to teach more students with these fewer resources, and to meet an increasing number of mandates from the state government.

            First, decide whether you want to keep cutting taxes or have inexpensive higher education.  You can’t do both.

            Second, don’t micromanage state colleges and universities. Legislate educational goals; let universities figure out how to implement them. The faculty, administration and students know how to manage their own institutions far better than you do.

            Third, do cultivate better relationships with faculty and students at the state universities. Most state legislators speak only to lobbyists and high level administration officials. Important though they are, they are the least important people in the educational process. If you want to know what is happening, work to get to know those who are teaching and those who are learning.

            Fourth, education is difficult, for learners and teachers. The path is not always smooth and swift, and people will make mistakes along the way and then learn from them. Focusing solely on the goal of graduation may miss the broader goal of education.

            Fifth, education is expensive and state budgets are limited. If state appropriations to colleges and universities must be cut, don’t be surprised if those schools go after other revenue sources (tuition hikes and out of state students). Don’t be surprised when the schools think that if the state provides less money it should have less control as well.

(To be continued.)

The Most Important Battle Ever Fought on Lake Erie

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Lake Erie, a short but intense* shoot-out between American and British naval squadrons that killed or wounded 260 people and resulted in the disabling or capture of six British ships.  The battle made American commandant Oliver Hazard Perry a war hero - one of the few that the inglorious War of 1812 produced - with a popular tagline, "We have met the enemy and they are ours."

It was also, however, an important episode in Native American history, even though no Indians fought in the naval engagement.  Prior to the battle of September 10th, British ships controlled most of the Great Lakes and used this control to seize American forts in the region and to supply His Majesty's Native allies. After the Battle of Lake Erie, the Americans were able to ship 5,000 men across the west end of Lake Erie to Detroit, which they retook from British forces before marching into southwestern Ontario. It was there that the Indian confederation of Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa made their wartime headquarters, and there that American forces smashed the confederacy on October 5th, at the Battle of Moraviantown. Native American casualties in the battle were light, but they included Tecumseh, whose death fatally demoralized his already exhausted confederates. 

In this case, it wasn't just superior American numbers that mattered, but also superior American mobility, without which the United States would not have been able to move so many men so far away from their supply base.  The fall of Tecumseh's confederacy thus resulted, part, from a fateful imbalance between U.S. and Northwest Indian forces: one side had a navy, and the other did not. (H/t to Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance [1992], 184-185.)


* British sailors who'd fought in both the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Lake Erie said that the 1813 engagement was more vicious and violent.

World War BLEAAARRRGGGHHH

Winston Churchill, author of the Gallipoli fiasco of 1915-16 and the disastrous deflation of the British pound in 1925, finally redeemed his reputation in his sixties as the head of Britain's wartime coalition government. In your humble narrator's youth, most Americans who knew of Winston Churchill considered him one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century, the man inspired a besieged island nation to fight the Nazis wholly through the power of oratory. Winston Churchill's wartime speeches are certainly masterpieces of rhetoric, but careful research by Professor Richard Toye of the University of Exeter has revealed that most Britons found the prime minister's addresses less than inspiring at the time of delivery. Polls from the early 1940s indicate that listeners had measured responses to Churchill's broadcasts, found some of them gloomy or depressing, never actually heard one of the most famous speeches ("We shall fight them on the beaches...") on the radio, and in some cases considered the prime minister guilty of a "f[arging] cover-up." Listeners also thought the PM was drunk during his "finest hour" speech of August 1940, and lest some of my readers think this improbable, let me add the following recollection by Churchill's secretary, who left no indication that he considered the PM's drinking habits excessive:

"At work or on holiday, Churchill drinks a glass of dry sherry at mid morning and a small bottle of claret or burgundy at lunch.  To Mr. Churchill a meal without wine is not a meal at all.  When he is in England he sometimes takes port after lunch, and always after dinner.  It is at this time that his conversation is most brilliant.  In the late afternoon he calls for his first whiskey and soda of the day...He likes a bottle of champagne at dinner.  After the ritual of port, he sips the very finest Napoleon brandy.  He may have a highball in the course of the evening." (Paul Fussell, Wartime [1989], 98.)

Small wonder that Dave Barry renders Churchill's most famous dinnertime quote as "Madam, I may be drunk, but BLEAAARRRGGGHHH." Apparently the prime minister thought he had better treat World War Two less as a great national trial and more as a drinking game.

Remembering Mike Green

I met Michael Green (1941-2013) for the first time in August 1994, when I enrolled as a student in his graduate seminar in Native American history. I had just started school at the University of Kentucky, and Mike initially struck me as kind of a forbidding person, but his pleasant, gravelly voice and stock of amusing anecdotes and homey locutions (e.g. "rich as Croesus," "if the good lord is willin' and the creeks don't rise," "you pays your money and you takes your choice") soon set me at my ease. Indeed, when I began teaching a few years later I tried to adopt Mike's demeanor and mannerisms in class, which proved impossible for a beaky easterner like myself. Professor Green's seminar also helped set me on the path that led to my dissertation and first book: at the end of the term I wrote a review essay on Iroquois historiography, which nicely dovetailed with a discovery I had just made in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick's Age of Federalism (1993), namely that the paranoid and vindictive Federalist Timothy Pickering had in his early career been a respected commissioner to the Six Nations. This led me to a seminar paper on Pickering's relationship with the Iroquois, and ultimately to a dissertation on the cultural background of Federalist Indian policy.

A couple of years later Mike agreed to join my graduate committee, and when in January 1997 we met to discuss my qualifying exams he decided the time had come to turn this somewhat limited early-republic scholar into an ethnohistorian.  "Which of the books on my seminar's reading list have you read?" Mike asked.  I admitted I had read about a dozen of them. "Okay, read the rest," he replied, "and write a one or two-page summary of each one of them for me."  That meant reading and summarizing about fifty books in ten weeks. If I neglected to protest, it was probably due to the overconfidence of youth. Mike, I suspect, thought I would find the next ten weeks intellectually exhilarating rather than exhausting, and so they were. I have since taught several independent graduate readings courses in this manner, and a least a few of the students I've put through the ordeal, such as Craig Hammond and C.J. Lepley, thrived on it.

Mike had already provided me with the germ of my second book, an analytical history of the U.S. government's Indian factory system, which I learned about while writing a research essay for Prof. Green on Thomas McKenney and the 1819 Civilization Act. The paper did not itself lead to an independent publication, but it did make me realize that the factory system had generated a large quantity of records and very little scholarship. When I completed the first draft of my first book in 2004, Mike encouraged me to undertake a book-length study of the factories, and when we subsequently met at conferences he asked me for updates and helped me through a difficult impasse I reached in one chapter. When I finally finished the manuscript of the factories book in September 2011 Mike was generous enough to read the whole thing - all 450 pages or so - and write a couple of pages of comments and advice. All of this ensured I would not only finish the book but make it presentable for publication. "The Engines of Diplomacy," which is currently under contract with a university press, is in many ways Mike's book.

It was a long-standing joke among Mike's students that when someone asked him what subject they should research, he always replied "the Chickasaws." I must have heard this joke at some point during graduate school, for when I was finishing "Engines of Diplomacy" and considering topics for my next monograph, I felt drawn to the economic and cultural history of the Chickasaws, on whom I wished to write a book similar to James Carson's Searching for the Bright Path (1999). Again, Mike played a big role in shaping this book project because he was one of the informal leaders of an NEH Summer Seminar I was privileged to attend in 2011. Directed by Theda Perdue and Malinda Maynor Lowery, the seminar was one of the high points of my intellectual life: a month of readings, seminar meetings, lunchtime discussions, field trips to Native American communities in the Carolinas, and research in UNC / Chapel Hill's outstanding libraries. Mike and Theda both provided direction to our discussions, offered advice on seminar participants' research, and hosted weekly pool parties that helped us get through a hot summer. I had the pleasure, too, of accompanying Mike on a day-long book-buying expedition to several used bookstores in Chapel Hill and Raleigh; we got a chance to chat about our days at Kentucky and about reading recommendations.  (One of these days I'll need to sit down and read the Master and Commander series by Patrick O'Brien.)

Mike attended the first paper I presented on my Chickasaw research, at the 2011 Ethnohistory conference in Pasadena, and encouraged me to follow up my investigation of the Chickasaws' so-called "military economy," which became the subject of a paper I presented in Helsinki and of a chapter I wrote for a festschrift in Mike and Theda's honor. By then Mike's health was failing, but we corresponded as late as last summer, exchanging our impressions of Finland. I had a chance to tell Mike that I had recently traveled to Spain with my petite amie Susan, and that I had found his and Theda's North American Indians book very useful in class.

I suppose it is natural for graduate students to look for intellectual parents among teir professors, and I was fortunate enough to find two intellectual father figures in my formative years, namely Lance Banning (my dissertation director) and Mike Green. Now both of them are gone, and it remains for me and other survivors to figure out how to deal with the loss.  Probably the best thing to do is to follow a modified version of the Marques de Pombal's famous advice: "Honor the dead and feed the living."

Mike was not a religious man and I doubt he believed in a future state of rewards and punishments, but it is incontrovertibly true that everyone gets at least one real afterlife, living on in the memories and dreams of those who knew them in life. Mike was a scholar and a university professor, which means that he will live on in the memories and minds and research of his hundreds of students, and in the narrative voice of the seven books he authored. If my own case is any indication, Mike supplied the living, in his own lifetime, with an intellectual and personal feast. Those of us who knew him will surely honor his memory and carry on his legacy.

The Bird Is Dead but the Plumage Remains

Your humble narrator must confess that on his recent trip to Europe, he found Paris rather unimpressive* – muggy, full of surly tourists, and comprised mainly of “drearily monotonous” Haussman tenements and overpriced shops. (Quote by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, from David McCullough, The Greater Journey [Simon and Schuster, 2011], p. 209.) To the traveler visiting central France, however, he can without hesitation recommend a visit to the Palace of Versailles, home to three successive French monarchs and symbol of absolute royal authority in the early modern era. The courtly ritual which framed the king's authority ended in 1789, when crowds invaded the palace and drove the royal family to Paris, but the baroque furnishings of the royal apartments remain. The curlicued woodwork, richly canopied beds, extravagant crystal chandeliers, and ceilings lavishly painted with rococo scenes still retain their ability to impress. Our guide explained that it was common for Louis XIV to receive high-ranking visitors in his outer bedchamber while he reposed in bed, and I wondered if this was a common practice in 17th-century Europe. If so, it might explain why the Virginia Company presented Powhatan with a bed when they crowned him “king” of his people (and vassal of James I) in 1608.

The most famous room in the palace, the Hall of Mirrors, extends for 240 feet between the king's and queen's suites, and its immense Venetian mirrors represented, for their time, an extraordinary (and expensive) demonstration of the glazier's art. Today they look a bit dark and faded, but considering their great age they have held up well. The chandeliered hall must have glowed quite brightly at night during its heyday, and I am not surprised that the Bourbon monarchs used it for public celebrations and social events, most famously the 1745 ball where Louis XV met Madame de Pompadour. When the Prussian army occupied Versailles during its siege of Paris, Bismarck chose the Hall as the site for the declaration of the German Empire (1871). In symbolic retaliation, the victorious Allies met there half a century later to impose their punitive peace treaty on the successors to that Empire.

The gardens of Versailles, a huge expanse of meticulously pruned hedges, white statues, flower beds, and fountains, are even more impressive than the Hall of Mirrors, but they cover nearly three square miles and my petite amie and I only saw a tiny sliver of them. I understand one can rent a golf cart to tour the gardens today, which is probably the best way to see them if one lacks a horse. Incidentally, the pumps driving the Versailles fountains originally drew their power from twelve large waterwheels that could collectively generate up to 124 horsepower, or about twenty-five times as much power of one of the aforementioned golf carts (Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun [Norton, 2006], 72.)

* Your narrator will of course make an exception for the Louvre, perhaps the only place in the world where one can, while looking for the stele containing Hammurabi's Code, stumble upon an entire gallery full of Peter Rubens paintings.

Dutch Fungus Gun

Friends and relatives told me before I visited it last month that I would surely find Amsterdam and the Netherlands very agreeable, and I must report that I agree with them. The Dutch are (generally)
friendly to tourists, speak passable to good English, and have a sensible attitude toward matters such as gay marriage and soft drugs. Amsterdam, or the parts of it I visited, was a jewel: clean and charming, with beautiful houses and churches, ample flowers and public parks, and so many canals (a relic of seventeenth century town planning) that it is easier to move around the city by boat than by car. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. allegedly said that Paris was the city where good Americans went when they died, but I am persuaded that, in the twenty-first century at least, Amsterdam has taken Paris's place in that sentiment.

Of the city's cultural sites, the most popular with foreign tourists, judging from the length of the lines, are the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank House. My petite amie and I found ourselves more enthralled with the Rijksmuseum, which contains several galleries of seventeenth and eighteenth Dutch art - including masterpieces such as Rembrandt's Night Watch and Vermeer's Milkmaid - and displays of historical artifacts from other eras. Fond as I am of Baroque-era Dutch art, which focuses more on secular themes (children at play, tavern carousers, landscapes*) than the religious themes typical of contemporary Italian art, the one room in the Rijksmuseum that really caught my eye was a massive display of firearms from the seventeenth century.  The collection included a large number of wheellock pistols and muskets - wheellocks being a fussy and expensive, but useful, form of handgun which one could use from a prone position, unlike the more common matchlock gun ** - and an example of something I'd never heard of, a tinderlock gun, which used smoldering dried fungus as the firing element.  An appropriate weapon, I suppose, for people who once used peat moss as a primary source of heat.

One might think that a display of firearms, or of model ships (which one could find in the next gallery over), had little place in a museum of art and culture, but of course both things had much to do with the efflorescence of Dutch art in the seventeenth century.  Between their war for independence against the Spanish in the 1500s and their decline in the 1700s (when the English knocked them down and took their lunch money), the merchant-adventurers of the Netherlands enjoyed a century of global economic predominance. This rested on their maritime skills, their well-armed merchant fleet, and their merchants' investment in the sort of disreputable commodities mentioned by David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years: slaves, soft drugs like coffee and sugar and tobacco (the Dutch didn't grow much themselves but shipped a lot from the English colonies), and firearms.  According to David Silverman, the Netherlands were the center of the European arms export industry in the seventeenth century, and Dutch wheellocks and flintlocks were in demand throughout the Atlantic world. The guns displayed in the Rijksmuseum were thus a sample of the sort of wares that enriched the Dutch merchant class, and they in turn financed the paintings and objets d'art that beautified the Netherlands' "Golden Age."

(The photos above, taken by the author, show a) the placard for the aforementioned tinderlock gun, b) a sample wheellock musket, and c) a very heavy musket, approximately 1.5 meters in length, that the Dutch probably used to shoot through schools.***)

* This is actually the English spelling of a Dutch word; the Dutch largely invented the landscape painting and were the first to create a market for them.
** Matchlocks used a smoldering length of cord, or "match," to light their powder charges. One can see an example of one in the 1991 film Black Robe.
*** H/t Johnny Dangerously.

Worse than the Wars of the Roses

While my petite amie Susan and I were in London last month, the top three news stories were 1) the heat wave gripping England (anything over 30C qualifies as extreme heat), 2) the imminent birth of the Dutchess of Cornwall's baby, and 3) the Globe Theater's staging of Henry VI, Shakespeare's three-part play about the Wars of the Roses, at the sites of four of those wars' principal battles.

The Wars of the Roses proved more important, I think, as a romantic literary reference point than an actual historical event. Though the civil war lasted, off and on, for nearly thirty years, it chiefly took the form of a series of grudge matches between various nobles and their armed retainers; the combatants generally avoided ravaging the countryside, whose resources they hoped to win in the war. The most enduring political result of the wars was the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, whose founder, Henry Tudor (subsequently Henry VII), was the last man standing after all the Plantagenet claimants to the throne were killed. It was to curry favor with Henry's grand-daughter, Elizabeth I, that William Shakespeare memorialized the Wars of the Roses in two plays. One of these, Henry VI, was the Bard's first and, arguably, worst play, a point memorably made by Christopher Marlowe in Neil Gaiman's story "Men of Good Fortune" (Sandman, No. 13):

Marlowe: At least it scans. But "bad, revolting stars"?

Shakespeare: It's my first play.

Marlowe: And it should be your last.

Bearing this in mind, I do not regret missing the chance to sit through an outdoor performance of the play, even if it is staged on Tewkesbury battlefield. The other Shakespeare play on the Wars of the Roses, Richard III, was far better; it helped establish Richard's reputation (perhaps undeserved) as a Machiavellian villain, and became the basis for an excellent 1995 film version – a version populated with 1930s technology, in which Richard, ably played by Ian McKellan, emerged from the civil war as a fascist dictator.

Shakespeare probably helped English schoolteachers decide that the wars were, as a whole, a worthy subject of study, and thereby to plague several generations of students with their vagaries. George Orwell recounted in "Such, Such Were the Joys" that he had to memorize the principal battles in school, and did so with the aid of the mnemonic "A black Negress was my aunt; there's her house behind the barn." C.S. Lewis apparently had to learn about the wars in the same way, and his character Lucy would later characterize part of Telmarine history (in Prince Caspian) as “worse than the Wars of the Roses.” Favorable modern references to the conflict come mostly from those who approach the war as an abstraction, like designers of Kingmaker, a 1974 boardgame in which the players assemble armies of nobles, tromp around England collecting heirs to the throne, and then crown or behead the heirs as strategy dictates. More recently, George R.R. Martin allegedly modeled his Song of Ice and Fire series on the Wars of the Roses, but it was apparently rather a loose adaptation, involving mass killings of peasants, quasi-Viking raiders, weird religious cults, and the occasional zombie. None of which found their way into the historical chronicles or Shakespeare's plays, and more's the pity.

The Violence Inherent in the System

Defenders of free-market capitalism, such as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, have argued that capitalism is both an economic and a moral system, whose moral superiority to other forms of economic organization comes from its strictly voluntary nature. Coercion and violence, they assert, have no place in economies based on the voluntary exchange of goods and the solemnity of freely-negotiated contracts. In my recent entry on Corey Robin's “Nietzche's Marginal Children,” however, I noted that it is very easy to challenge this rose-tinted view. Capitalism, as I've observed before, is an economic system in which capitalists can commodify economic inputs, such as labor and land, and mobilize them through markets to generate profitable returns. Contracts and voluntary exchanges are important to capitalists, providing them with security and flexibility, but they are only means to the ultimate end, which is the maximization of profits. If coercion and force will serve the same end, capitalists are willing to employ them, and as both Prof. Robin and David Graeber have observed, they have in the past proven happy to do so. Indeed, military and legal violence have proven essential to capitalists because some of their economic inputs, notably workers, tend to resist being turned into commodities, and because the most efficient way to mobilize inputs was often through violence. More recently, capitalist states have found violence a useful way to neutralize the “counter-measures,” like labor unions and social-insurance laws, that workers and political reformers created in the nineteenth century to mitigate some of the worst effects of capitalism.

One can easily appreciate the important role that violence played in early capitalism when one realizes that Atlantic slavery, arguably the most important economic institution of the early-modern era, was actually a capitalist form of labor mobilization. Modern historians like Stephanie Smallwood and Walter Johnson have made this point quite eloquently, noting that commodification was key to the success of capitalism and that African-American slavery, unlike many Old World variants of slavery, involved converting people and their labor into wholly fungible commodities. This was a necessarily violent process, in which African and European slavers ripped people from their communities and families and converted them into disposable units of labor. Slavery might appear to be an inflexible labor system, insofar as slave owners had to buy an entire person rather than merely hiring their labor, but in practice masters found ways to maximize the flexibility and profitability of the system: they minimized their labor costs (the average American master spent $2.50 a month on the upkeep of each bondsman), hired out slaves to other masters when the owner had less use for their labor, and sold them when this proved more profitable than continuing to employ them.

Early modern slavery was both capitalistic itself and essential to capitalists in other sectors of the world economy. Native American slaves produced the silver that supplied merchants with much of their actual circulating capital. Indian and African slaves produced the sugar, coffee, and tobacco that built some of the great European mercantile fortunes, as well as the cheap cotton that was the feedstock for the British industrial revolution. Slavery also indirectly justified the harsh treatment of wage laborers, on the grounds that no matter how bad wage labor became, it could never become as bad as slavery. Early wage labor was in fact much harsher than celebrants of nineteenth-century liberalism would have us believe: collective bargaining was difficult in some industrial countries and illegal in others, workplace safety was non-existent, and the ability of workers to quit one job for a better one was impeded by employers' practice (backed by law) of requiring “testimonial letters” from workers' previous bosses, who could thereby deny their employees the right to quit.

I've spent a lot of time here on slavery, but there were other ways in which early modern capitalism depended on violence, notably during the creation of a global free market in land. English and Scottish landlords drove their peasants off the land with enclosure laws, high rents, and anti-poaching statutes, replacing them with more profitable herds of sheep and with recreational hunting preserves. British and European colonists elsewhere in the world seized indigenous lands by force, claiming them by right of discovery, or took them with treaties when they could not immediately overwhelm indigenes' resistance, as in New Zealand and North America. (These treaties were technically voluntary, but usually rested on fraud, bribery, and the threat of force.)

Those who believe the Violent Era of primitive capitalism ended in the nineteenth century need to think again, according to Corey Robin and Naomi Klein. The threat of revolutionary violence in the 1800s and the apparent success of communism in the early twentieth century forced capitalist governments to enact reform measures, such as legalizing labor unions or partially nationalizing some industries, in order to take the edge off capitalism. However, many capitalists bitterly opposed these reforms – witness, for example, the long-smoldering anger of American conservatives toward the otherwise popular New Deal – and when they had the chance they gladly aligned themselves with repressive governments in order to bring back the Golden Age of violent capitalism. American and British corporations gladly aided Francisco Franco in the hopes that he would crush Spain's labor unions and make the country safe for foreign investment; he cheerfully did the former (killing several hundred thousand people in the process) though he held off on the latter until the 1960s. In Spanish America, free-market reactionaries found a better ally in Chile's Augusto Pinochet: after Pinochet seized power in 1973, his army surgically excised the supporters of the previous socialist administration, killing 3,000, torturing tens of thousands more, and terrorizing the rest of the population into passivity. Pinochet then brought in economic advisers from the University of Chicago to create a new capitalist regime, free of unions, social subsidies, and other impediments to exploitation of the nation's resources. Similar “shock-therapy” measures, including the end of food and energy subsidies, were imposed on Iraq by President George W. Bush's viceroys, leading to the displacement of much of the country's farming population and to increased chaos in the cities.

In the cases of Chile and Iraq, free-market reformers had the opportunity to treat ordinary citizens as conquered peoples. When Chicago-school economists tried “shock therapy” in Poland (1989) and Russia (1992), they enjoyed the sponsorship of popularly elected governments, but the circumstances were unusual: in both countries communist regimes had just collapsed, leaving behind huge debts, and the new democracies could not secure the IMF loans they needed to function without embracing austerity and privatization. In both cases the governments in question became deeply unpopular, and Poland's Solidarity Party lost free elections to the communists in 1994, while Boris Yeltsin suspended the constitution and bombarded the Russian Parliament building in order to remain in power. Indonesia, which had opened up its economy to foreign business after Suharto's initial coup, adopted a new round of free-market reforms in 1997 under pressure from the IMF. The IMF did what dictator Suharto's own brutality and corruption could not accomplish: they provoked an internal rebellion which ousted Suharto and instituted a democratic government. Policies that promote free-market capitalism are no more popular today than they were in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and democratic governments that pursue them are likely to find themselves voted or thrown out of office. This may help explain why the most devout American defenders of capitalism aren't very big supporters of voting, or of democracy. More important to them is the right of a few people to become very rich and of everyone else to go hungry or go to prison.

Capitalism Defined: The Index

For those few of my readers wishing to revisit my entire series on capitalism, including my recent entry on the Marginalists, Mises, and Hayek, I present here a short entry index:

Capitalism: A Short Definition
Everything and everyone can be turned into money, and money makes money.

Adam Smith
In which we learn that capitalists are heroic job creators!  And also greedy arseholes.

Karl Marx
Capital is both accumulated labor and accumulated misery.

Max Weber
Men accumulate capital because they are worried that God doesn't love them.

Karl Polanyi
For ordinary people, reciprocity and redistribution are much more important than accumulation and commodification.

Joseph Schumpeter
Capitalism is a form of permanent economic revolution, but at the end of the road lies socialism.

Ayn Rand
Capitalism is the only valid moral system, and those who disagree aren't fit to live.

The Marginalists, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek
Labor is not the source of value - scarcity, aristocratic virtues, and irreproducable native genius are.

**

There will doubtless be more to come on this subject, but this will serve for now.

Two Friedrichs and a Ludwig: Nietzsche and the Austrians

A couple of years ago I posted here a series of entries on the origins of capitalism, or more precisely on the evolution of Western thought regarding capitalism, from Adam Smith through Ayn Rand. Looking back, I see that that series excluded some important contributors to this intellectual current, in particular the authors of the “marginal revolution” in late nineteenth-century economics and the creators of the “Austrian school” of the twentieth century. I neglected the former group because I didn't know anything about them at the time, and the latter because I assumed their importance had declined relative to the Nietzschian novelist and cult leader Ayn Rand, about whom I wrote at length. In May 2013, however, political scientist Cory Robin published in The Nation a provocative essay joining all of these men and women – the marginalists, the Austrians, Nietzsche, Rand – into a single school of reactionary thought. “Nietzsche's Marginal Children” became the subject of a forum on Crooked Timber, and generated such hostile commentary there that the author published another long essay in Jacobin magazine defending his conclusions. All deserve some commentary here, if only as a coda to my earlier series and a reflection on the illiberal nature of capitalism.

The marginalists, more specifically William Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras, introduced to economics the concept of marginal utility, which tied the price of a good or service to the usefulness of one additional unit of that commodity to the consumer. Marginal analysis stipulated that the price of a good depends both on its importance and its scarcity, which is why water is cheaper than diamonds, even though the former is more universally useful. Marginal analysis suggested that labor, being more abundant than land and capital – or, rather, owned by more people than land or capital – should command a lower-unit market price than those latter commodities. It was thus a useful concept for elitists who feared that the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 had destroyed the values of the ancien regime and substituted only Marx's labor theory of value, which gave entirely too much power to the working class – to the mob. Marginalism promoted instead the idea that scarcity and the making of difficult choices determined value.

The same fear the mob lay behind the elitism of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophical works argued that the masses, obsessed with their “finite” lives, could not create anything of enduring value. Value, Nietzsche admitted, was a human invention, but it came only from the works and the esteem of “exalted men of culture,” a tiny minority of warriors, statesmen and artists whose thoughts and struggles were the only sources of beauty and dignity. The purpose of a society, he insisted, was to serve as the support structure for this aristocracy. To borrow a phrase from Theodosius Dobzhansky, Nietzsche believed that common people were “a manured soil in which to grow a few graceful flowers of refined culture” (quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life [U. of California Press, 1992], 186.) A democrat he was not.

Nietzsche had a considerable influence on early twentieth-century European fascists, and on several important American philosophers, notably Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand. His impact on the Austrian economists, particularly the ur-libertarians Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, is harder to prove, and Robin argues that Nietzsche did not directly influence them. The three men instead came of age in the same problematized intellectual environment, that of late nineteenth-century middle-European gentry struggling to defend their position and their culture against the working class. The Austrian economists took their initial cues from the marginalists, who argued that landowners and capitalists were more economically valuable (because scarcer) than an equal number of laborers. The marginalists also imparted a certain romance to the marketplace, insofar as “economic man” had to make sacrifices in order to determine what was economically valuable to him.

What Mises and Hayek added to these assumptions was the belief, alien to Nietzsche and unnecessary to the marginalists, that the capitalist market economy was a moral system. Morality, Hayek argued, concerned the ordering of ends, or goals, and because scarcity determines marginal utility, a free market forces individuals to prioritize and rank their goals. “The economy,” Robin observes, thus “becomes a theater of self-disclosure...It is not in the casual chatter of a seminar or the cloistered pews of a church that we determine our values; it is in the duress—the ordeal—of our lived lives, those moments when we are not only free to choose but forced to choose.” Economic man became through his choices a moralist and (because the market was actually a moral theater) an artist.

Thus far the Austrians' view could theoretically support social democracy, insofar as it makes ordinary workers' and consumers' economic lives morally significant. Mises and Hayek, of course, were not social democrats. Instead, they viewed the market as “the proving ground of aristocratic action.” In his 1960 work The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek argued that consumers were never free to make all of their own economic choices; instead, the inventors and entrepreneurs who develop complex technologies and the wealthy capitalists who are the leading arbiters of taste shape the choices of the consuming multitudes.* Economic freedom was not an end in itself but a means to an end: the creation of an economic sphere in which an entrepreneurial and cultural elite could flourish. To give Hayek his due, one should note that he was a trickle-down elitist: a flourishing entrepreneurial class and aristocracy would, he believed, create benefits for society as a whole, providing ordinary schmoes with jobs, security, and access to mass-produced consumer goods. Contrast him with Nietzsche, who argued that the highest purpose for hoi polloi was to support the elite, and Ayn Rand, who described the 99% as “moochers and looters” for whom the great-souled elite should feel nothing but contempt.

Since a society could not flourish without nurturing a free-market elite, however, Hayek viewed any government which threatened capital and markets as a menace, and considered its overthrow, even by a dictatorship, as a positive good. He reserved particular contempt for totalitarian systems like Nazi Germany's, but he believed social democracy was also dangerous, insofar as it replaced a rule-based economy favorable to capital with a discretionary political economy controlled by the mob. A temporary dictatorship, Hayek believed, might occasionally become necessary to purge a nation-state of its constitutional “impurities” and restore a free-market economy. In the early 1960s he sent a copy of The Constitution of Liberty to Antonio Salazar of Portugal, hoping to persuade him to become that nation's law-giver, and later Hayek became an influential cheerleader for Augusto Pinochet of Chile. That Pinochet violently deposed his predecessor, Salvador Allende, and then tortured and murdered his political opponents does not appear to have bothered Professor Hayek. A “liberal” dictator, Hayek argued, was preferable in the long run to an illiberal social democracy. Jeanne Kirkpatrick would certainly have approved.

Robin's essay has its shortcomings. His writing style is diffuse, digressive, and occasionally difficult to follow, and I find his connection of the Austrians with Nietzsche both strained and unnecessary. One may successfully argue that Mises and Hayek were elitists without invoking Thus Spake Zarathustra. I think “Nietzsche's Marginal Children” and the sequel that Robin published in Jacobin, "Nietzsche, Hayek, and the Meaning of Conservatism," are noteworthy for other reasons. Fans of the Austrian school of economics generally characterize Mises and Hayek as the intellectual heirs of nineteenth-century liberalism, and Robin persuasively argues that they were not. They were instead reactionaries, for whom a free market was not an instrument for egalitarian social progress but the crucible of aristocracy. Robin also usefully summarizes the work of another, equally influential Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, whom Mises and Hayek found inspiring but with whose historical conclusions they disagreed. Schumpeter attributed technological progress to a small elite of entrepreneurs and inventors, whom he characterized as eccentric, romantic geniuses willing to flout social norms and destroy older industries. Schumpeter argued that a mature capitalist economy had little place for the entrepreneur, but the other Austrians disagreed, asserting that the entire purpose of a free-market society was to nurture such capitalist heroes.

Perhaps Robin's most controversial contribution is his linkage of Hayek with modern dictators, a liaison which actual classical liberals, like John Stuart Mill, would have found appalling. In noting Hayek's fondness for Salazar and Pinochet, Prof. Robin observes that we do not often appreciate the role of violence in creating capitalist societies, or in transforming socialist countries into free-market ones. This is a point addressed by David Graeber and Naomi Klein, and one upon which I would like to expand in a forthcoming blog entry.

**

(The above image, of octogenarian Friedrich Hayek enjoying a sherry and a scowl, is from Wikimedia Commons.)

*  Hayek made analogous observations about free-market price systems: prices are extremely useful for consumers and investors, but they the product of complex socio-economic interactions that most people don't fully understand; one can "use" prices just as one uses advanced technology, without fully understanding the intellectual and social labor that went into them.

Over-Rated, but Inspiring Nonetheless

Today (with tomorrow and Wednesday) marks the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which, in addition to producing enough casualties to fill a cemetery, came to inspire an iconic political address, a memorable William Faulkner quote, an excellent historical novel, a mediocre movie, and an array of board and computer games. In his 1990 Civil War series Ken Burns called the three-day battle “the most important...fought in the Western Hemisphere,” which strikes me as exaggerated to the point of inaccuracy. I can think of at least two other battles, namely the 1521 siege of Tenochtitlan and the 1759 Battle of Quebec, which proved more important than any American Civil War engagement, insofar as they determined which European cultures would come to dominate the New World. Moreover, I don't think Gettysburg was nearly as decisive a battle as many Civil War buffs assume. William Fortschen, in the conclusion to the anthology Alternate Gettysburgs (2002), makes a persuasive case for the battle's strategic irrelevance: even if Robert Lee had defeated George Meade at Gettysburg, he would not have been able to go on and take Washington, as that would have required him to slog through several days of hard rain (which began the evening of July 3-4) and attack a well-fortified city defended by 40,000 federal troops. Perhaps a federal defeat at Gettysburg would have fatally undermined Union morale, but I doubt it, given that the Union would shortly learn of the surrender of Vicksburg (July 4), a far more important event. Today I think the Battle of Gettysburg remains important more for the political speech it inspired than the strategic reverse it inflicted on the Confederacy. If one were so inclined one could add a comparative remark about pens and swords, and which was stronger than the other.

In Defense of French Scholarship in a State That Apparently Forgot Its Origins

Herewith, the short entry on Louisiana and the French that I mentioned in an earlier post.  It relates to current academic events, rather than historical scholarship, and so I hope non-academic readers will accept a digression that may not be of interest to them.

While initially settled by Native Americans, Louisiana, as most Americans know, was colonized by the French, who named the province for King Louis XIV.  At the time of the Louisiana Purchase the region that would become the state of Louisiana had 40,000 non-Indian inhabitants, the majority of whom were Francophones.  The state remains officially bilingual today, and its largest city still celebrates its French Quarter and French heritage.  There is considerable demand for French language classes in Louisiana's high schools, and thus for university-trained French teachers.  This heritage and these demands, however, are currently far less important to the bean-counters that run Louisiana's universities than cutting costs and casualizing the academic workforce.

In 2010 administrators at Southeastern Louisiana University unilaterally announced the termination of the university's French major and the firing of its three tenured French professors. Administrators declared that the program and the classes it offered were underutilized, but 1) in the wake of the firings SLU is still offering French classes, taught (of course) by contingent instructors, and 2) SLU is a public institution in a state which needs college-trained teachers of French.  The move appears to have been primarily a demonstration of administrative power over the faculty, and SLU administrators have subsequently ignored a faculty senate recommendation that the professors be reinstated and a censure vote from the American Association of University Professors.

Faced with a choice between surrendering to arbitrary power and resisting, the three fired professors have chosen to fight, in the courts. The national AAUP and its Louisiana chapter have begun to organize a legal defense fund for the three plaintiffs, to which your humble narrator, who takes both tenure and the French language rather seriously, has decided to contribute.

What Civilization Means to Me

“I found myself in the visitors' bar at Granada jail – a shiny, modern building sticking up, incongruously, out of fields of olive trees twenty miles from the city...A British photographer had asked to come along. 'Wherever I go [in Spain] they have a bar,' he said. And he was right. That morning we had had breakfast – freshly squeezed orange juice and thick, toasted rolls drowned in a garlic-flavoured olive oil and tomato pulp – at the bar in the Renault dealership in Seville. There are said to be more than 138,000 bars in Spain. This is as many as the rest of Western Europe put together. The prison was doing its bit to keep the numbers up.” - Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain (Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 160.

If, as Dostoyevsky once wrote, one may judge a civilization by its prisons – and by its pubs – then modern Spain is many centuries ahead of the United States.

The Great Lakes Country in 1718: An Index

For the convenience of readers who might like a brief summary of and TOC for my blog series on Jacques-Charles Sabrevois's Memoir on the Savages of Canada:

Part One (23 November 2012): Niagara Falls, Seneca porters, the rivers and hunting prospects of the Ohio country.

Part Two (12 December 2012): The Odawas, Potawatomis, and Hurons of Detroit – dwellings, clothing, dances, games; fortunately, Yahtzee is not among the latter.

Part Three (23 Jan. 2013): The Odawas of Michigan's lower peninsula; the Indians of Green Bay (Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sauk, Mesquakie); Mesquakie dress and lifeways.

Part Four (22 April 2013): The Illiniwek and their Frenchified customs.

Part Five (1 May 2013): The Maumee and Wabash Rivers, the Miamis, and the similarities between their forts and the Tuileries; conclusions.

A little more to come in the near future on matters French and Louisianan.

Niall Ferguson is still a bigoted, pseudo-intellectual windbag

Those of us who hoped my intense scolding of Niall Ferguson last year had a suitably improving and chastening effect were no doubt disappointed this past weekend by the news that the Not-So-Good Professor has made some homophobic remarks about John Maynard Keynes. At the annual Altegris Conference, a forum with several hundred financiers and financial counselors – presumably well-to-do, presumably not terribly liberal – Niall-o took Keynes's famous remark “In the long run we are all dead” to mean that the economist was uninterested in the fate of posterity, and made the off-the-cuff remark that of course one would not have expected a gay man without children to be concerned with the long term. In the same talk, Ferguson further intimated that Keynes was a swishy girly-man by remarking that Keynes and his wife preferred discussing poetry to having sex. Several people at the forum took sufficient offense with Ferg's remarks to leak them to the press, and Senor Bonehead, realizing that there might be wealthy and powerful people in the world who were also gay, quickly apologized.

This doesn't sound like the kind of episode on which one ought to dwell, except that the Sexiest Scotsman's remarks are typical of the kind of carelessness and general intellectual slovenliness that characterizes his recent articles and his recent book, Civilization (which, my readers will recall, I reviewed at some length). Ferguson deliberately took Keynes's famous quote out of context to imply that Keynes was uninterested in the long-term impact of his fiscal policies (e.g. running a deficit to fight unemployment). As Paul Krugman, one of the leading neo-Keynesians, recently observed, what Keynes actually said was: “This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” Keynes's point, or one of his points, was that simply waiting for a depressed economy to regain its pre-depression equilibrium was a rotten policy for the immediate term, and that economists needed also to focus on relief in the short term if they wanted to have any useful impact on government policy. To put it another way: it may be irresponsible for governments to saddle young people with heavy long-term public debts, but it is even more irresponsible to saddle them with years of unemployment – and unpayable student-loan debts – that permanently depress their earnings (and the government's future income-tax revenues) in the same term. In his apology, Ferguson did not suggest that he understood what Keynes was actually trying to say.

 

Niall-o also acknowledged in his apology that Keynes, despite his homosexuality, was also married and may have been trying to have children (his wife had a miscarriage), so his observations about Keynes's childlessness were somewhat inaccurate. I think this is rather beside the point, as sexual orientation, child-rearing, and other aspects of one's personal life have little impact on the quality of one's ideas, unless one's ideas primarily relate to sexual orientation. Karl Marx had a fairly untidy personal life, but this by itself did not affect his ideas about economics and history. Hannah Arendt's youthful affair de coeur with Martin Heidegger may be interesting of itself, but I haven't seen a convincing explanation of how it shaped her powerful (if rather turgidly expressed) liberal ideology. Ferg, however, finds it difficult to acknowledge this, because like many other modern conservatives he follows Paul Johnson's assumption that an intellectual's personal life necessarily shapes his or her ideas.  (Johnson himself was, as Christopher Hitchens discovered in the 1990s, a philanderer and afficionado of spanking, but this is only relevant when one is considering that he criticized Rousseau for having the same fetish, and presented himself to both British and American conservatives as a firm opponent of adultery.)

Probably Ferg would have been better off if he had stuck to the mild defense of Keynes he made in Chapter 5 of Civilization, but I suspect he felt this would not have made him popular with a fiscally conservative audience, and so decided to take a few cheap (and dimwitted) shots in order to earn a few cheap laughs. This is one other besetting sin of the Sexiest Scotsman: a pathological need for public approval, even if one can only extract it from a particular source by lawsuit.  One might almost feel sorry for Ferguson, except that there are other people - several billion of them, in fact - far more worthy of our concern and consideration.

Through the Eighteenth-Century Midwest with This Guy Named Sabrevois, Part Five

(For the previous entry in this series, see here.)

Sabrevois concludes his jaunt around the Great Lakes with a description of the Maumee River, which he follows to its headwaters at Kekionga and then across that portage to the Wabash. The Maumee was quite shallow, which may explain why it was an expensive water transport route in the early modern era, and it presented “continuous marshes” for the first 20 or 30 miles upstream from Lake Erie. It was, however, richly populated with waterfowl, so much so that in the spring “one cannot sleep on account of the noise made by their cries” (p. 375). Halfway up the river, 60 or 70 miles from its mouth, Sabrevois points out The Glaize, “the place of clay,” where bison used the clay banks as a wallow. 75 years later the Northwest Indian confederacy would build its settlements, plant its crops, and hold its meetings at this site; its occupation by Anthony Wayne (1794) dealt that confederation a heavy blow.

At the head of the Maumee River, 60 leagues (approximately 120 miles) from Lake Erie, was the town of the Miamis, the principal members of the Miami confederacy. Sabrevois puts their population at “400 men,” which, assuming he means “fighting men,” translates to a total population of 1,600 – 2,000. Across a three-league portage from the Maumee flowed the headwaters of the Wabash River, which Sabrevois here confuses with the Ohio. This is understandable if one knows that colonial French cartographers referred to the lower Ohio River as the Wabash. On the actual Wabash River resided the Weas, who by Sabrevois's reckoning were the larger part of the Miami confederacy: 1,000 – 1,200 men, or 4,000 – 6,000 people overall, residing in five towns (Ouiatenon, Peticotia, Les Gros, Peangnichia, and one other). He does not mention that the Weas and Miamis may have been offshoots of the neighboring Illini, or that by 1718 they outnumbered their “elder” brethren to the west.

Sabrevois was perhaps tiring by this point in his memoir, because his descriptions of the Miamis' and Weas' lifeways are repetitive and reminiscent of his descriptions of other Lakes Indians. Both peoples raised corn and other crops, both adorned themselves with vermilion, both preoccupied themselves with “gaming and dancing” (375). In both nations women wore ample clothing and men very little - presumably Sabrevois refers to summer attire. Regarding the Miamis, Sabrevois adds that the men wore many tattoos, that men's and women's garments were principally of deerskins rather than cloth, and that men punished adultery by cutting off their wives' noses. The author notes that only the Miamis had this punishment for adultery, and only applied it to women, though we may note that the Chickasaws had a similar practice by the 1760s – perhaps Chickasaw men borrowed it from their Miami allies? Sabrevois, who is uninterested in gendered violence, presumably includes this detail to let travelers know when they are in Miami communities rather than Illini or Wea ones. Of the Weas, the lieutenant says that their fields were very extensive and that one of their towns had a fortified enclosure with a very clean interior, covered in a layer of sand “like the Tuileries” (376).

Sabrevois's choice of ethnological details helps explain the purposes this memoir was to serve. The lieutenant was writing not as an ethnographer but as an imperial functionary, and he intended, I think, for his document to be used by other French colonists, especially traders and officials. In discussing various Indian nations he provides details of clothing, tattoos, and games not to provide local color, but to help French travelers distinguish between Indian nations whose people physically resembled one another and often spoke similar languages. Such distinctions were important for Europeans who needed to know whether the people they visited were French allies. Sabrevois counts the male population of each Indian nation as a kind of military inventory, to let French officials know how many gunmen they could potentially raise from each of those nations in wartime. Sabrevois's interest in Indian subsistence and food supplies, finally, was not intended as a reflection on Native Americans' civility, but rather an indication of how easily various communities could feed French travelers. In sum, his memoir is an instrument of empire: a device allowing officials and traders to operate more freely in territory claimed by the French monarchy, describing waterways and available food supplies (both domesticated and wild), identifying distinctions between different Indian nations with whom one might wish to trade (or whom one should avoid), and counting Native American men who might rally to the French colors in wartime.

Such is the case with nearly all historical documents; the purpose for which they were written is vastly different from the purposes to which the historian wishes to put them. Such is arguably the case with all writing: the author cannot know or control his or her readers' interaction with their finished work. Would Jacques-Charles Sabrevois have been amused, puzzled, or horrified by the uses to which later ethnohistorians have put his memoir? And does that really matter?