Bookmarks Festival

Last Saturday (11/7) my wife, Noell, our son Simon, and I went to this year's Bookmarks Festival in Winston-Salem. It's really a wonderful event that brings authors from around the country together to interact with readers. Simon is at the age (just over 3 months) were he is unfortunately too young to enjoy the made-for-kids events like story time but, fortunately, also too young (and immobile) to get overly bored with the adult presentations.

I wanted to go because the eminent Civil War historian James McPherson was talking about his new book War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865, which examines an under-appreciated aspect of the conflict. Actually, Professor McPherson gave a talk at UNCG the day before, but I was unable to attend.

McPherson framed his discussion around the issue of foreign intervention: the American Civil War was, he pointed out, a rare example of an internal conflict that did not require official intervention by foreign powers (the recent hostilities in Syria, on the other hand, reflect the more common pattern). The Union and Confederate navies played key roles in determining how nations such as France and Britain decided to deal with the belligerents. Three events were particularly important:

• The Trent Affair. In November of 1861 the Union navy intercepted the British mail ship Trent and, with it, two Confederate envoys whose aim was to secure British and French recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. Without permission from Washington, the Trent was boarded and the two envoys arrested. Although the ship was allowed to continue on its journey, Britain protested that the boarding violated her neutrality and demanded a formal apology and the release of the prisoners. Wanting to avoid an armed conflict, the Lincoln Administration eventually freed the captives. While Britain was focused on maintaining her neutrality throughout the affair, a Union bungling of the situation could certainly have significantly worsened its relationship with Britain (the latter, in fact, had ordered additional troops to Canada and ships to the Atlantic).
• The Union blockade. Almost as soon as hostilities broke out, Lincoln ordered a naval blockade of the entire Confederate coast. This was, of course, a nearly impossible task given that the cordon would need to extend from the Texas border with Mexico all the way to northern Virginia−a distance of around 2,500 miles. According to international law, the legitimacy of a blockade rested partly on its successful implementation; that is, a legitimate blockade is one that can successfully prevent outgoing ships from leaving and in-going ships from entering. The Confederacy pointed to the numerous ships that were able to run the blockade, while the Union maintained its legitimacy. Eventually, foreign powers recognized the blockade. Professor McPherson pointed out that Britain likely took this stance in part because blockading was an important tool for the Royal Navy itself and a failure to acknowledge the Union blockade would have set a potentially damaging precedent.   
• Construction of Confederate ships in foreign ports. Several ships, disguised as merchant vessels, were built in British yards and eventually served as Confederate commerce raiders. Protests from the American government convinced both Britain and France to seize other ships intended for Confederate service.     

My wife and I took a couple of photos during the talk, and you can see Professor McPherson's BookTV on War on the Waters here.

Professor McPherson giving his book talk. Photo by Noell Egeland.

My wife also pointed out that Adrian Miller would be speaking at the festival, reminding me that we had heard him on NPR a while ago discussing his research on Soul Food. So, we decided to stick around and listen to him, and I'm glad we did. Most importantly, he's a fellow Denverite, something I learned when he came around before his talk and introduced himself to the audience to thank them for coming. He spoke about his book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. The most fascinating point that Miller made was that "Soul" or "Southern" food, while partly a modification of African cuisines brought to the New World by slaves, actually partitioned itself by socio-economic status, and not race. That is, both whites and blacks used the same ingredients to make very similar dishes. His point was borne out by how the audience−black and white−nodded in agreement when he would list off classic southern ingredients.

References:

McPherson, J (2012). War on the waters: the Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

Miller, A (2013). Soul Food: the surprising story of an American cuisine, one plate at a time. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

In the Garden of Beasts

The other night my wife, Noell, and I attended a book discussion hosted by the UNCG libraries of Erik Larsen's In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. The book was an excellent read, and follows the exploits of William E. Dodd, the first American ambassador to a Germany ruled by Adolf Hitler, and his family. From Amazon.com:

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the "New Germany," she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance-and ultimately, horror when a climatic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition

We were lucky enough to have Dr. Karl Schleunes, a professor emeritus of history at UNCG and an expert on early 20th century Germany, lead the discussion. As Dr. Schleunes summarized it, Dodd (who was FDR's third or fourth choice) was sent to do two things: (1) to negotiate the payment of U.S. loans to Germany (American banks had made huge loans to help bail out the German economy in the aftermath of World War I), and (2) to steer Hitler along a more moderate path. He then summarized the historical context that preceded Dodd's appointment.

Perhaps the two most important events were the German experience in World War I and the onset of depression in 1929. Germany ended the war having defeated one enemy in the East (Tsarist Russia) and, in the west, with her armies situated on foreign soil. The German people had to reconcile this with the fact that their government signed an armistice and then negotiated a treaty in 1919 that laid much of the blame for the war on Germany (a not unrealistic interpretation of events) and forced it to concede complete defeat. Germany was thus on the lookout for scapegoats. Dr. Schleunes also pointed out that in 1928, when the German economy was relatively strong, the Nazi party received a paltry 2.7% of the vote. However, in the years after 1929 (the onset of the depression in the U.S. and elsewhere), the Nazis secured ever larger percentages, eventually capturing 40% by the 1930s. Germans appeared, in other words, to be looking for a political party that could restore Germany to her rightful (as many saw it) place among the world powers while, at the same time, providing an explanation for the humiliating defeat in World War I.

This is the situation that Dodd, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, stepped into when he arrived as ambassador in 1933. The consensus among the discussion group was that, despite his best intentions and efforts, Dodd was mostly a failure as ambassador. Hitler obviously did not steer a moderate course, and Dodd resigned his post in 1934. There was quite a bit of discussion on why exactly he was unsuccessful. I think Noell has it mostly right when she argued that Dodd simply was not interested playing political games: in order for an ambassador to succeed, they need people to like them, they need to compromise, and they need to tell people what they want to hear. Dodd really didn't have any of these qualities (depending on how you feel, this could be to his credit or discredit). During his BookTV talk, Larsen was asked his thoughts on Dodd's performance. He gave Dodd a B+ grade, stating further that no one was likely to have succeeded in such a position (a point that the discussion group touched on as well).

One of the more eye-opening things about the book (at least for me) was the level of anti-Semitism within the U.S. State Department. Everyone talked about the so-called "Jewish Problem." One of the audience members, when referring to a particular individual in the book that committed suicide because of her Jewish ancestry, asked how one could tell whether or not someone was actually Jewish. This question became particularly important after the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which encroached on, or even eliminated in many cases, the rights of Jews in Germany. Apparently, one had to track down, and keep, the baptismal certificates of your grandparents (there is no equivalent in Judaism) to demonstrate that they were not Jewish. If one had two, three, or four Jewish grandparents, was part of a religious community (i.e., they went to Synagogue), or married to someone of Jewish ancestry, then they were considered Jewish. If one only had a single Jewish grandparent (and in possession of baptismal certificates for the other three), then they were not considered Jewish. (All of this, of course, rested on false assumption that there was some fixed, identifiable thing called the "Jewish race.") 

A couple of interesting tidbits that I learned during the discussion, thanks largely to Dr. Schleunes :

• Hitler did not actually become a German citizen until 1932, the year before he was named chancellor (he was Austrian)
• The Nazi government defended laws that outlawed marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans by citing American miscegenation legislation, which prohibited breeding between whites and blacks

Anyway, I highly recommend the book...

Social darwinism in the gilded and progressive ages

I just finished reading (or, more correctly, listening to, as my commute provides ample time for audio books) an interesting book by Evan Thomas, "The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898". There is a lot of intriguing stuff in here, and the gilded and progressive ages in America were fascinating times for a number of reasons, but what struck me, as an anthropologist, was the  pervasive role that social Darwinism played in American foreign and domestic policy (as exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt, senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst). The idea that superior groups (however that is defined) were meant to out-compete inferior groups in the "struggle for existence" served to justify much of America's expansionist and imperialist policies towards Spain and the populations then under their rule (Black Cubans and Filipinos).

CNN has a wonderful service called BookTV, where you can watch authors give talks on their books. I haven't seen Thomas's clip yet, but you can find his talk here, a book discussion here, and a nice review of the book here.

UPDATE 3.23.13

I just watched Thomas's BookTV segment. He summed up the book (as they always do...this is actually a good way to figure out if the book will interest you), and then took some questions from the audience. The most interesting question probably dealt with parallels between the war fever of 1898 and that of 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq. Thomas himself was a Hawk in 2003, and he discussed how attitudes have changed, just as they have for the 1898 conflicts.