Robert Mason's "The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan"

Robert Mason is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan, and reported the following:

The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan investigates a period when defeat usually characterized the GOP’s electoral record, when a majority of Americans identified with the Democratic party. The book analyzes the debate among Republicans about these problems, together with their efforts to restore their party to majority status. It explains why these efforts usually ended in failure.

Page 99 is about an atypical phase of this quest. It features part of the book’s discussion of Wendell Willkie, the party’s 1940 presidential nominee and a charismatic iconoclast, and his effort to reshape the GOP approach to foreign policy. An outsider to party politics when he won the nomination, he then pursued a project to transform the party’s policy agenda and to boost its electoral appeal. Page 99 sees Willkie at his most controversial, during 1941’s “Great Debate” about World War II. Willkie argued against most fellow Republican politicians in echoing Franklin Roosevelt’s sympathetic policies toward the Allies. Willkie’s project to transform the GOP earned him widespread enmity among Republicans, ensuring both the project’s failure and the destruction of his party career.

The Willkie episode is an atypical part of the book because of the policy ideas that informed this project of party transformation. At that moment of extreme geopolitical instability, Willkie cared most of all about foreign policy. He wanted to challenge the neutrality that informed how many Republicans viewed the aggressive, expansionist threat of dictatorships in Europe and East Asia. Most of the book, however, deals with the Republican response to the Democratic party’s domestic agenda. During this era, government activism in response to the nation’s socioeconomic problems was consistently more popular than laissez-faire, fiscally conservative principles. In practice if not in theory, Americans preferred big government to small government, accounting for the Democrats’ majority status. How to respond most effectively to this New Deal liberalism is the Republican challenge that the book investigates.

This electoral challenge was never far from the center of the Republican debate during this period. The problem of minority status also informed the Willkie project; it is Willkie’s potential as a party outsider able to reach out to Americans beyond conventional Republican ranks that had helped to win him the party nomination. In this sense, the discussion of Willkie on page 99 is closely related to the analytical focus of the book as a whole. The Willkie project failed, but so did many other Republican initiatives to boost the party’s fortunes during this long period of the twentieth century.

Learn more about The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Hiott's "Thinking Small"

Andrea Hiott was born in South Carolina and graduated with a degree in philosophy from the University of Georgia in Athens. She then went to Berlin to study German and neuroscience, and ended up staying and working as a freelance journalist. In 2005, alongside a group of international artists and writers, she cofounded a cultural journal called Pulse. She now serves as editor-in-chief.

Hiott applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle, and reported the following:

When I opened Thinking Small to page 99, here’s what first caught my eye:

Though the shop had other projects in the works as well, Porsche was obsessed with getting the small car exactly right. He consumed any automotive writing he could find on new ideas of streamlining and weight, trying to rearrange all available theories into something new.

Straightforward as these sentences may be, there is indeed a lot of the Long Strange Trip in them; in fact, they hint at three ideas that bubble up again and again in the story of the Bug:

1. Thinking strange. To paraphrase NYU”s president John Sexton, thinking strange is about wakefulness, curiosity, and responsible risk. It’s about experimenting with what you’ve learned, deconstructing and recombining artifacts until you’ve discovered something new. In Ferdinand Porsche’s time, that ‘something new’ was the Bug. And thinking strange was precisely what the complicated genius and his close-knit design team did when they created the iconic car.

Something similar happened, too, in the smoky ad offices of a Times Square high-rise when a few young men and women found themselves pulled into the world of an unexpected revolutionary named Bill Bernbach. Together, with ads like Lemon and It’s Ugly But it Gets You There, they created a campaign for the Bug that exemplified thinking strange. In Bill’s own words, “Rules are what the artist breaks. The memorable never emerged from a formula.”

2. Thinking big. If there’s one thing the story of this little car demonstrates, it’s that no revolutionary idea has ever come to light without first having to fight for its life. And that’s no different for the automobile. Not too long ago, it was laughable in Europe and the States to imagine a day when so many citizens would have his or her own car. The idea of a People’s Car (“Volkswagen”) sounded like the idea of a maniac when men such as Henry Ford and Ferdinand Porsche first dared to dream of it. Still, it was those big ideas that led to the dynamic world we now know so well.

3. Thinking small. It’s essential that we dream big and reach for the stars, but it’s equally essential that we remember to evaluate what really holds meaning and worth. Thinking small, being present and clear, can require infinite patience and self-constraint (tough stuff!), but true success, as the story of this car shows, requires dreaming big and thinking small. One without the other can be dangerous, as the legacy of Adolf Hitler unfortunately proves. The bigger we dream, the more crucial it is we remain strong and sober enough to think small.

Learn more about Thinking Small at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Popp Berman's "Creating the Market University"

Elizabeth Popp Berman is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine, and reported the following:

It’s pretty common these days to call universities “economic engines.” Administrators at my own university, the State University of New York, are constantly talking about how it can drive economic development, foster entrepreneurship, and create jobs. Some of this is real, and some of it’s just rhetoric—in SUNY’s case, from a university system desperate to replace the 30% of its state appropriations that evaporated over three years.

Universities didn’t always think of themselves as economic engines, though. In the 1960s, the governor of Illinois asked the University of Illinois to consider how it could encourage regional economic growth. A committee that included some very smart physicists, engineers, economists and urban planners met for two years and reported, basically, that they had no idea. The difference between then and now is remarkable.

Creating the Market University is my attempt to answer the question, What changed? Why did universities start to see their research not just as new knowledge or the solution to practical problems, but as a first step in the creation of new products? In a nutshell, I argue that there were two reasons. One is the rise of an idea: that technological innovation drives economic growth. The second is its result: right around 1980, policymakers became enamored with this idea and made a bunch of policy decisions that started treating science more like something you could buy and sell in the marketplace. Together, these changes led to the takeoff of all sorts of entrepreneurial practices in universities, like industry partnerships and biotech startups.

Chapter Four looks at one of these practices, the patenting and licensing of university inventions. Before 1980, a lot of government-funded research—that is, most of the research done in academia—couldn’t be patented. After 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act passed, it could be patented, and was. But the debate about whether such research should be patented goes back much further. Page 99 gives some of this history. After World War II, Vannevar Bush, who ran the U.S. science effort during the war, and Senator Harley Kilgore argued about whether or not to allow the patenting of government-funded research:

Bush, who was politically conservative and had close ties to industry, argued that patents were an absolutely necessary incentive to encourage private-sector investment in technology. He supported a government-license policy. [That would have meant industry or universities could patent government-funded research.] Kilgore, on the other hand, was a “true New Dealer with a distrust of monopolies that dated from the days when his father was driven out of business by Standard Oil.” He thought that giving contractors patent rights would hinder the free flow of scientific information, especially since industry had a motive to restrict, rather than spread, the dissemination of research. Kilgore’s initial proposal gave all patent rights to the government, though a later revision would have allowed the sponsoring agency to assign rights to the inventor under certain conditions.

What’s interesting is that despite everything that’s changed, the arguments Bush and Kilgore made are remarkably similar to the ones we hear today. For the record, neither of them won the debate, and government patent policy was a complicated mess for the next 35 years.

Learn more about Creating the Market University at the Princeton University Press website and Elizabeth Popp Berman’s website.

Writers Read: Elizabeth Popp Berman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Peel's "Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse"

Mark Peel is professor of modern cultural and social history and head of the School of History at the University of Liverpool. A former professor of history at Monash University, his books include The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain, and reported the following: 

If it is difficult for any single page to encapsulate a book describing hundreds of encounters in five different cities and three continents, I am confident that page 99 of Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse gives its readers a reliable sense of the book’s themes and style. This is a history of what the social workers and charity investigators who encountered the poor during the 1920s and 1930s heard them saying and then formed what they heard—and misheard—into dramatized explanations of poverty. What we understand about poverty powerfully shapes what we think we should do about it, and this account of Melbourne, London, Boston, Minneapolis and Oregon shows that Australians, Americans and Britons agreed on some ideas and disagreed on others.

On page 99, readers find themselves in London, at the end of a chapter called ‘The Man With the Repulsive Face’. It features an impoverished young husband and father, William Rowthorn, who came to symbolize for a group of London social workers, employed by the Charity Organisation Society, the strange, hapless ways of the poor. In London, more than in the United States or Australia, the poor were seen at a distance and with a more or less dismissive disdain, ‘when they come close, or when they are tracked to where they live: behind things, under things, down the stairs, or surrounded by the debris of their hopeless lives. They “shamble” and “shuffle” on and off the stage, largely untouched by any attempt to help them, and probably cheerful, apart from the odd teary moment. They are disfigured and disarrayed, too fat or too thin, and distant and different enough to warrant such terms as “repulsive.” William Rowthorn’s rash might have been worse than many, but he was not alone in attracting a rather offhand entitlement. As the COS faced its own crisis in the 1920s and 1930s, that version of the poor would hardly waver’.

Miss Cutler’s raw material are thousands of case files, written by social workers who were normally trying very hard to understand and help the poor. They tell stories in these files, and it is from those stories that I show how ideas about the poor and their poverty differed and did not differ, changed and did not change, across place and time. I have turned some of those stories into scripts, dramatizing encounters in which there was always misapprehension, and often clumsiness and denial. But they also dramatize the difficulty—and the great significance—of listening to the poor and accepting that they might understanding something about poverty, its origins and especially its remedies.

Learn more about Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fritz Allhoff's "Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture"

Fritz Allhoff is associate professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University and a senior research fellow at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University. He is coauthor of What Is Nanotechnology and Why Does It Matter? and the editor or coeditor of numerous volumes, including Wine & Philosophy, Physicians at War, and The Philosophy of Science.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture: A Philosophical Analysis, and reported the following:

Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture explores the conceptual and moral underpinnings of terrorism, then asks, when terrorism is wrong, what we may do to prevent it. In particular, the central question of the book is whether torture can be justified in ticking time-bomb cases, as well as how those cases gain traction in the real world.

Page 99 falls within a critical chapter in the book, the fifth. In this chapter, the discussion is not about whether it is morally permissible to torture in ticking time-bomb cases, but rather is about what ticking time-bomb cases are and what role they are supposed to play in our moral methodology. These cases ask us to countenance torture as the lesser of two evils: with torture, many lives will certainly be saved and, without it, many will be lost. The moral calculus is supposed to be configured such that the harm of torturing the terrorist is outweighed by the value of the lives saved, though, again, this chapter is methodological; the normative issues are deferred to the following chapter.

Setting aside whether ticking time-bomb cases are ever actualized—for more on this, see chapter 7—a standard assumption is that we intuit the permissibility of interrogational torture in these cases. But do we? Or, even if we do, what, precisely, is it that we are intuiting? That the torture is, all things considered, permissible? That it is morally wrong but that we may do it nevertheless, perhaps with moral residue (cf., dirty hands)? These are very different answers. Page 99 falls in the midst of this discussion, and within a chapter more generally that marshals empirical data on intuitions to make arguments as to what ticking time-bomb cases are doing and the role they play in our thinking. To be sure, the goal here is to vindicate ticking time-bomb thinking; in other words, contra critics, the author wants to make a legitimate role for ticking time-bomb cases in our moral discourse. This methodological project is important given the normative discussion that follows, as well as for later chapters in the book where the discussion shifts to torture in the real world.

Learn more about the book and author at Fritz Allhoff's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meredith H. Lair's "Armed with Abundance"

Meredith H. Lair is assistant professor of history at George Mason University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War, and reported the following:

American soldiers had a lot of complaints in the Vietnam War: hard work, heavy loads, oppressive weather, loneliness, boredom, bugs, military regulations, and of course the threat--and often vicious reality--of enemy attack. Page 99 of Armed with Abundance is part of a discussion of complaints that U.S. soldiers made to their families, elected officials, and the Army itself about daily life in the war zone.

Complaints are dual articulations of experience, expressing both the way things were and the way they ought to be, according to the author of the complaint. Some soldier complaints were perfectly legitimate, but others were problematic, because they exaggerated the depths of their misery in order to extract sympathy from the folks at home. On Page 99, I describe two such cases: a mother's letter to the secretary of the army alleging that her son was not getting enough to eat; and a wife's missive to her senator alleging that her husband had to trade liquor purchased in Saigon for rations at his base up-country. In the first case, military investigators determined that the soldier's letter to mom included "that little hardship touch to let the folks back home know that he's fighting a war." In the second case, the soldier quietly disavowed the complaints he had made to his spouse. "My dear wife's intentions are indeed good and honest," he wrote, "but everything over here is relative, and she doesn't understand this."

Armed with Abundance examines the daily lives of soldiers in Vietnam, most of whom did not serve in combat. Because the war was unpopular, military authorities struggled to maintain troop morale. To do so, they provided soldiers with material abundance—comfortable living conditions, frequent entertainments, and easy access to consumer goods—that minimized the gap between stateside and war zone standards of living. But no matter how much soldiers had, they always wanted more; there was no fixed point at which satisfaction was achieved. Complaints discussed on subsequent pages reflect this phenomenon: soldiers who slept in beds wanted maids to make them; soldiers who worked in offices wanted fans or central air; and soldiers who worked nine-hour shifts wanted entertainment for the rest of the evening. These complaints only begin to suggest the world the U.S. military made for its soldiers in Vietnam, an alternative warscape that has been all but forgotten in public memory, because it fails to conform to popular ideas of what a war should be.

Learn more about Armed with Abundance at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William J. Cook's "In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman"

William Cook is a professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation, and reported the following:

Any mathematician will tell you that coincidences are not as rare as we might think. So maybe you should not be surprised to learn that this is the second 99 test I've faced this week. The first is playing out on the roads of Iowa.

In mid-December, together with two Princeton professors, I computed the shortest route to visit all 99 county seats in the state. This was the basis of an op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times political pages. The tie-in was the mad scrambles taken by presidential hopefuls in front of the January caucuses.

Des Moines columnist Kyle Munson is now putting our optimal route to the test. Munson is driving his Ford Focus from county to county in an attempt to complete the state tour, known as a Full Grassley, in a single week.

Finding the shortest route to visit a list of cities, such as the 99 in Iowa, is known in mathematical circles as the traveling salesman problem. It is not only known, it is despised. Or loved, depending on your point of view. The emotions come from the fact that, despite its simple description, no one knows a method that can solve quickly every example of the problem. There is even a $1,000,000 prize offered to the first person to succeed, or to prove that it is impossible.

For now, if you want to get a shortest route for a specific example of the traveling salesman problem, you need to employ a tool called linear programming. This is the topic of the paragraph in the middle of page 99.

The scope of the use of linear programming in industry is breathtaking, covering pretty much any sector you can name. Although it is difficult to quantify, it is clear that planning via linear programming saves enormous amounts of the world's natural resources every day. In terms of money, a New York Times article by Gina Kolata states, "Solving linear programming problems for industry is a multibillion dollar-a-year business.'' Take that, Professor Hotelling.

The short book is devoted to the history, mathematics, and aesthetics of the salesman problem. If you like math, or you are just curious to learn how mathematicians are trying to understand the world around us, I hope you will have a look!

Learn more about the book and author at William Cook's webpage and the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eben Miller's "Born along the Color Line"

Eben Miller teaches at Southern Maine Community College and lives in Lewiston, Maine.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Born along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

Recently plagued by symptoms of fatigue, [Abram] Harris had received a medical checkup that revealed startling but thankfully small "cloudy areas" on his lungs. Naturally he feared tuberculosis—a blight in urban black communities across the nation, another morbid consequence of segregation—but was told the spots would "disappear very shortly," he wrote, "if I get plenty of sleep, drink milk regularly, take the prescribed doses of cod-liver oil and cut down on my work." Between cod-liver oil and rest, the latter was the less palatable prescription....

All the while, the economics of the race problem beckoned. He did not "deny that you can still fight for Negro rights," he wrote his friend and Howard colleague Ralph Bunche during these weeks of convalescence, yet gaining citizenship rights would be "only half of the job." Just as the New Deal was remaking the national economy, it remained necessary for black leaders to develop a comprehensive program for the civil rights movement.

Two features in this excerpt from page 99 most struck me as supportive of Ford Madox Ford's memorable maxim—its biographical focus and its suggestion that African Americans' economic rights were as important as civil rights.

The biographical nature of this excerpt is apt; my book is a collective biography. Page 99 falls at the very end of the second chapter, which follows the early career of Abram Harris, an economist and professor at Howard University. Here details from Harris's life, such as his illness during the spring and summer of 1933 and his frustration with being so unproductive, afford an everyday perspective. But they appear without the intent of overshadowing the broader argument and momentum of the narrative. For instance, I deployed these details to underscore how committed Harris was to his scholarship. They also help to establish how anxious he would be to participate in the singular civil rigths gathering described in the following chapter. In this respect—the attempt to balance biographical details within a generation-long story about the struggle for African American freedom—this excerpt certainly reveals something of "the quality of the whole."

As does its emphasis on economic rights. A main argument appearing throughout the book is that between the 1920s and early 1950s, African Americans strived to secure equal economic opportunities along with Constitutionally-protected political and civic freedoms. Abram Harris was a key figure in this regard. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Harris sought to use his scholarship and stature as an intellectual to promote an interracial movement for economic rights, mainly among industrial laborers. Much of the rest of my book examines the influence of this outlook on the civil rights movement, especially during the Great Depression and World War II.

In each of these ways, then—illustrating the narrative strategy and highlighting a critical argument—the Ford test works with my book.

Learn more about Born along the Color Line at the Oxford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Born along the Color Line.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hendrik Hartog's "Someday All This Will Be Yours"

Hendrik Hartog is Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age, and reported the following:

Someday All This Will Be Yours explores how family members solicited and produced old age care in the generations before World War II. It is a study both of how older people convinced younger ones to stay and work and about the arguments mobilized by younger people who fought to be compensated for the care they had provided. It offers a weird and different picture of nineteenth and early twentieth century family life than do most family histories. It focuses on negotiations and bargaining between family members around questions of care. The world it brings out is not one where family members worked together and shared an unconflicted “haven in a heartless world.” To the contrary, it is filled with dark stories about unsatisfied expectations and discomfort. It lends no comfort to those who might wish to return the care of dependent people to the private family.

The first half of Someday All This Will Be Yours is framed by what I call the “King Lear” dilemma. Older (or soon-to-be older) people struggled to secure care from mobile and free adult children and other younger people, without actually giving up power or control. A successful resolution of that dilemma depended on careful and constant mobilization of the language of “promise.” Older people promised, repeatedly and in many contexts and situations, to compensate those younger people who stayed to care. But the promise would be fulfilled only after death, through inheritance.

That language of promise was consciously ambiguous. Promises had to appear strong and unqualified, if younger people were to stay to work at home (and to give up economic prospects elsewhere). But, in order not to become like King Lear, the promisemaker could not offer an executed contract, an actual conveyance of property. Until death, the older person would, in theory, retain control. (In actual fact, of course, many older people would become actually dependent, might succumb to dementia or other disabling conditions, would lose control.)

Around page 99 I bring out the ways that language of promise often became something different when mobilized to keep a daughter at home, as opposed to a son. A daughter who stayed at home to do housekeeping, which might include intimate bodily caregiving to an elderly person, was often construed as doing what daughters did, as opposed to sons, who were understood as “naturally” moving away to seek trades and careers. As with everything in this difficult book, I move in two directions on page 99. On the one hand, I recount a modal case where a daughter lost in court because she was doing just what daughters did, because she conformed to gender stereotypes. The promises made by father to daughter would be reconstructed after her father's death as empty talk. On the other hand, I then qualify that overly simple picture by insisting on the ways needs sometimes overwhelmed conventional gendered categories and by reminding readers that parents often may have compensated daughters in other ways not revealed in the case transcripts.

Learn more about Someday All This Will Be Yours at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

A. W. Moore's "The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics"

A. W. Moore is Professor of Philosophy and Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things, and reported the following:

The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics is concerned with the history of metaphysics since Descartes. Its subtitle, Making Sense of Things, reflects the definition of metaphysics—“the most general attempt to make sense of things”—on which the book is based. The book charts the evolution of this enterprise through various competing conceptions of its possibility, scope, and limits. It runs to a little over six hundred pages and it is divided into three parts. Part One deals with the early modern period. Part Two deals with the late modern period in the analytic tradition. Part Three deals with the late modern period in various non-analytic traditions. Each of these three parts is divided into seven chapters, and each of the twenty-one chapters looks in depth at the work of one particular philosopher. The chapters are of roughly equal length. Page 99 thus occurs mid way through the fourth and central chapter of Part One, which is a chapter on David Hume (1711 – 1776).

I would be very disappointed to learn that this page reveals the quality of the whole book. This is not because I take it to be unrepresentative, still less because I take it to be unrepresentatively bad. It is simply because I like to think that my book has, in the words of one of my reviewers, “a strong narrative thread” which prevents its quality from being revealed by anything significantly less than the whole. Typical authorial hubris? You will need to judge for yourself. But be fair: you cannot do so unless you read a good deal more than page 99. (Oh, and for the record, page 99 tries to rebut the suggestion that there is material in Hume that makes a mockery of my definition of metaphysics.)

Learn more about The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue