AHA Conference Review: Friday January 3, 2014, 10:30-12:00

My second panel was "The U.S. 1880-1920: Turning Point or More of the Same?" This really hit the Gilded Age and Progressive Era sweet spot.

In "The American Watershed, 1880-1920" Louis Galambos argued that the period after the Civil War was defined by a search for opportunity, not a search for order among distended units of the society, as Robert Wiebe had argued in his classic The Search for Order. Opportunity went hand-in-hand with a developing educational system. High schools came into their own during the post-Civil War period, as did professional schools catering to the law, engineering, and other valuable disciplines. The government played a productive role in this process. The land grant colleges allowed states some flexibility in meeting their own economic needs through higher education. Scientific agricultural stations and private sector research and development departments provided forums for individuals with advanced training to utilize their knowledge in a socially useful way. Galambos pointed to a re-defined the Gilded Age. In his view, intelligent, educated stivers seeking to improve their world replace Matthew Josephson's robber barons.

In "Progressivism's 'Gilded' Beginnings: The Lost Decade of the 1880s in American Politics" Rebecca Edwards took on the notion that the federal government during the Gilded Age followed a strictly Laissez-Faire policy by examining key pieces of legislation passed in the 1880s that addressed such diverse topics as the civil service, immigration, interstate commerce, labor,  marriage, Native Americans, and naval construction. She further argued that these state building seeds later blossomed more fully in the Progressive Era. This is not to say that the laws themselves were progressive, or even good policy, but the same could be said about laws passed between 1900 and 1920. The overlooked legislation of the 1880s expanded the scope of federal power and prove that there was not such a stark contrast between the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Instead, the two periods should be considered one larger era, instead of two smaller ones. The same could be said about social movements. Instead of a period of rampant individualism, there were civic-minded, issue-based social movements, such as labor unions and the Greenbacker movement, in the 1880s. Once again, the 1880s seem more like the Progressive Era than the stereotype of the Gilded Age.

In "The Search for a New Capitalist Order," Noam Maggor examined how capital from the east flowed to the west. After the Civil War, financiers had capital to invest. Traditionally, this capital had gone into the cotton economy, but after 1865 it flowed west into mines, railroads, ranches, real estate, etc. The eastern elites did not jus throw their money into these ventures, they traveled west, examined the ground, met the people, collected information, and made decisions based on the conditions they witnessed. Some westerners rebelled at the machinations of the easterners, and attempted to use the state constitution processes to limit the power of the financiers. Of course, the moneymen fought back, and used their influence to successfully temper the anti-business reaction.

AHA Conference Review: Friday, January 3, 2014, 8:30-10:00

I arrived at the Washington Hilton on Thursday, but did not get much conference stuff done. After a run on the treadmill Friday morning, I got to my first panel, State Authority and Religious Pluralism: Debating Religion and in World War II America. Not exactly Gilded Age or Progressive Era stuff, but a topic that interested me and one that I thought might help me in my upcoming US History 2 (Civil War to present) survey course. As commander-in-chief President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted a generic religion comprised of Judeo-Christian moral and ethical principles as way of drawing a distinction between the US and our enemies. He did not have a horse in the race, so to speak, when it came to backing one religion over another, which opened ground in the middle for sectarian conflict.

In "The Free Exercise of Religion: Religion and the New Deal  Liberalism at War" G. Kurt Piehler described the emergence of the USO, its mission, and the sectarian conflicts among the different groups sponsoring it. I did not know anything about the USO before attending this panel. My assumption that it was solely a military organization established to provide some sort of entertainment to military personnel was way off base. It was a private-public partnership -- with religious groups providing the private sector portion -- to supply wholesome entertainment to troops. The various groups, however, remained suspicious of each other. Piehler noted his surprise that there was so much conflict between these groups.  Depending on the sect running a particular USO there could be some variation in what fit the description of "wholesome." Dancing and entertainment on Sunday seemed to be the points of variance.

In "Religious Freedoms Behind Barbed Wire: Worship in Japanese American Incarceration Camps" Anne Blankenship  examined religious life in the internment camps. She found that there was no effort to Christianize the internees. Instead, the government promoted freedom of religion within a certain spectrum. Shintoism, for example, was deemed a cult and prohibited. All non-Catholic Christian sects were lumped together as Protestant. Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist formed the triumvirate of accepted religious options. In an effort to protect religious freedom inside the camps, administrators prevented proselytization from without. Blankenship argued that this policy, however well meaning, limited the religious diversity and hence freedom within the camp. It reduced the spectrum of choices, and hurt Catholics in particular.

In "Between Race and Religion: The Army's Approach to African American and Japanese American Chaplains in World War II" Ronit Stahl made an interesting comparison between two marginalized groups. Despite the Army's efforts, race and religion could not be seperated. The Army established a quota system to allocate chaplains among different groups. In their nomenclature "black" was a category, and the Army exerted significant energy recruiting black chaplains. To the contrary, there was only a weak effort to recruit Buddhist chaplains for Japanese units. A Lutheran chaplain served in the first Japanese regiment. When the second Japanese regiment was formed, however, a conscious effort was made to recruit a Buddhist chaplain. One candidate was identified, but he failed the medical examination. With no other candidate the unit did not get its Buddhist chaplain.

Eisenhower, MacArthur and the Fallacies of Statistical Sampling

David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies is one of my favorite books. It is insightful, witty, and humorous. In one such fallacy, one he labels "The Fallacy of Statistical Sampling" Fischer provides several examples of the error, including a 1936 Literary Digest prediction that Kansas Governor Alf Landon would defeat the incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt in the upcoming presidential election. Of course, Landon did not win. In fact, he suffered the biggest defeat in our nation's history, with FDR capturing 98.5% of the electoral college. Fischer argues that the Literary Digest poll was not an accurate barometer of the electorate at large because its sample drew disproportionately from wealthier Americans. In hindsight this seems so obvious as to be silly to miss. Far away on the other side of the globe, in the Philippines, a forty-five year old Lieutenant Colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower couldn't believe the results of the Literary Digest poll. However, his boss, General Douglas MacArthur gave great credence to the poll. Partially this resulted from wishful thinking on the general's part. He  despised the FDR and hoped to see him ousted from the White House. The other issue is that, according to Eisenhower's Diaries (edited by Robert H. Ferrell, 1981) MacArthur bet 1,000 pesos on the Kansas governor winning the election. Eisenhower tried to dissuade his chief from this delusion and showed evidence that Landon could not even carry his (both Alf's and Ike's) home state let alone carrying the country. Although Eisenhower did not pinpoint the specific flaw of the Literary Digest poll, he knew that the survey lacked a "proper index." (p 22) MacArthur would have none of it and called Ike and another staff officer who ridiculed the Literary Digest poll results as, "fearful and small-minded people who are afraid to express judgements that are obvious from the evidence at hand." (p.22) Eisenhower's reaction in his diary was to scrawl, "Oh hell." (p.22) Six weeks later, on November 15, 1936, the subject came up again. This time MacArthur felt cheated by Literary Digest. Not only was he out 1,000 pesos, but he became fearful that the administration would discover that he had bet against them, quite literally.

William Temple Hornaday and the T-Rex

In my last posting I mentioned how Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and the New York Zoological Society named tyrannosaurus rex,  perhaps the most famous dinosaur. What I neglected to mention is the role William Temple Hornaday played in this paleontological development. It was one of the little stories that never made it into The Most Defiant Devil due to word count and a desire to keep the narrative fluid and focused. Tangents about dinosaurs and other trimmings found their way to the cutting room floor. On a hunting trip along Hell Creek in Montana, Hornaday came across a field of dinosaur bones. Among other things, he recognized the distinct skull of a Triceratops. Although the skull itself was badly damaged and fractured, Hornaday brought one of its horns to New York City to demonstrated the potential of this unknown fossil cache. Henry Fairfield Osborn sent one of his men, who unearthed the remains of what Hornaday described in a magazine article reprinted in A Wild-Animal Round-Up as, "predatory, and carnivorous to the utmost." He continued the story. "A skull, four feet long, and set with frightful teeth, was unearthed and sent to New York; and in due time the world was introduced to Tyrranosaurus [sic.] Rex, the Tyrant Dinosaur, late of Hell Creek." (emphasis in the original, both quotes are on page 80).

The Earth Speaks to Bryan

During the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925 Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Zoological Society, wrote The Earth Speaks to Bryan. It was slim addition to his awe-inspiring canon of published material. Over his scholarly career, the prolific Osborn published over 1,000 items, including books, articles in both popular magazines and scholarly journals, reviews, introductions, prefaces, lectures, addresses, etc. As a professor at Columbia University, president of the American Museum of Natural History, and one of the foremost experts on evolution and paleontology Osborn possessed the scientific authority to speak definitely on the topic. He had the best education money could afford the scion of an elite New York family, and he had studied in England with the disciples of Charles Darwin. You can read his observations of these notable men of science in his memoir, Impressions of Great Naturalists (1924). After obtaining his doctorate in 1880 he taught at Princeton University before moving to Columbia. In 1906 he declined his childhood friend’s, President Theodore Roosevelt’s offer to be secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Begging Congress for money was not his style and leaving his comfortable Hudson River estate for the swampy national capital was not to his taste. Over the next twenty years Osborn ascended to the very pinnacle of scientific authority in the United States. Among other things he discovered and named a new species of dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus Rex. Attacking William Jennings Bryan came naturally to Osborn, a conservative Republican who viewed the Great Commoner’s version of populism as dangerous demagoguery and a genuine threat to the socio-economic order. Citing the book of Job, Osborn asked that the Earth be allowed to speak for itself, thus the title of his exposition. The story the Earth told went much further back than 4,000 years, and Osborn chastised Bryan for not allowing Scopes to speak this truth. Osborn provided a detailed (and very dry) discussion of geological evidence and of tooth and toe fossils over time to demonstrate that the planet had to be much older than the literal interpretation of the Bible implied and that that species evolved in form. If the Bible was not literal science, however, Osborn still maintained it was rightly the foundation of morality. Nor did he view evolution as antithetical to the existence of God. Instead, he argued that God used evolution as His mechanism to bring about change. We might call this “intelligent design” today, but it was common among the first generation of evolutionists to make this argument. They saw no contradiction between a liberal interpretation of Christianity and Darwin’s theory. Oddly, Osborn put the locus of man’s evolution in Central Asia, where he had travelled in the 1920s to collect specimens, not Africa. But this is where the ugly side of Osborn’s evolutionary theory rears its disgusting head. Like most of the men of science in his generation, he allowed evolution to underwrite a very nasty form of racism. There are more than a few specimens of this thought in his vast canon of writings, including the preface for his friend Madison Grant’s “scientific” racist diatribe, The Passing of the Great Race (1916). In addition, Osborn supported the display of an African pygmy named Ota Benga with the chimpanzees at the Bronx Zoo in 1906, and created the Hall of Man display at the American Museum of Natural History to connect his racial and scientific views of human evolution to development.

William T. Hornaday, Some Corrections

William T. Hornaday and The Most Defiant Devil got something of a nice write up here and I thank the author Forrest Whitman and the poster Aaron Storms for doing so. Still to correct two minor points. First, Hornaday could be most welcome in the halls of power, especially Congress. He testified on several occasions, and never failed to find sponsors for his bills, or powerful allies in the House or Senate.  Second, while Hornaday could be abrasive and downright rude with those whom he disagreed, he was also a very affable, charming, and gregarious person with a ready smile and great sense of humor. He formed many friendships that lasted for decades, but these were mostly with individuals outside the conservation movement. Those inside the conservation movement, on the other hand, felt the sting of his frequent loyalty tests and demands for policy purity.

Uncomfortable Wall Mates?

This building is mural is on a building across the Denver Convention center. It is an interesting grouping of cultural icons, Theodore Roosevelt and Muhammad Ali. I have no idea why these two towering men are grouped together or even if they were painted by the same artist. As a fan of manly, sporting competition, Roosevelt would have admired Ali’s amazing skill in the ring. On the other hand he would have labeled Ali a “shirker” for having avoided service in Vietnam by adopting Conscientious Objector status. Moreover, Roosevelt’s social Darwinist thinking did not predispose him to look on African-Americans favorably. While he famously dined in the White House with Booker T. Washington, he also surrendered to his prejudice by dishonorably discharging 167 black soldiers for the Brownsville “raid” in 1906. I am not the only historian who feels that this was the low point of domestic policy in Roosevelt’s presidency. On the other hand Ali would like have been uncomfortable around Roosevelt for the same reasons, seeing him as a war mongering Jingoist who did not believe non-Europeans to be his equal. The war against the Filipino insurgency would certainly have reminded Ali of the war he opposed in Vietnam.