Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Bill Niven's "Hitler and Film"

Bill Niven is professor of contemporary German history at Nottingham Trent University and the author of many works on twentieth-century German history, including Facing the Nazi Past and The Buchenwald Child.

Niven applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion, and reported the following:
I approached page 99 of my book on Hitler and the Nazi film industry with uncertainty: would I find here a statement that encapsulates the book? The answer was positive.

My book sets out to argue that Hitler’s appreciation for film, and his influence on film during the Third Reich, were far greater than commonly assumed. He watched films night after night at his mountain residence in Bavaria – even films with Jewish actors and directors, which didn’t seem to spoil his enjoyment. From surviving archive material, I was able to work out what Hitler watched, and when.

Hitler intervened regularly in the film industry, banning films, and meddling with their production. Well known is his commissioning of films of the Nazi Party Rallies: Leni Riefenstahl obliged as his chosen director. My book explores less well-known Hitler commissions, for instance of a film about sterilising the disabled (Victims of the Past, 1937), or about the Spanish Civil War (In Battle against the World Enemy, 1938). Hitler was also involved in the gestation of the notorious anti-Semitic Nazi “documentary” The Eternal Jew (1940), and the anti-Semitic feature film Jud Süβ evolved in line with his policies.

During the war, Hitler had less time for film, but still took a keen interest in documentary film – particularly where it depicted the achievements of the German army. And, at least until 1944, he personally watched and vetted every newsreel. But as it became clear the war was likely to be lost, and as his failing health became harder and harder to conceal, he withdrew from the newsreels, much to the dismay of German cinemagoers, who complained about his absence. They had become used to their weekly visual “fix” in the form of images of the Führer, whose features they would scrutinise for indications of the way the war was going.

On page 99, I talk about another facet of Hitler’s interest in film: his attendance of film premieres:
Despite the relative failure of Nazism to produce persuasive feature films about its political struggles during the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s attendance of the premieres of Storm Trooper Brand and Hitler Youth Quex surely achieved its aim. Self-sacrifice for the cause was a quality Hitler wished to encourage through his presence; he wanted a nation, after all, that would go to the utmost for his political goals, and not question their value in the process.
This does indeed sum up the basic message of the book: Hitler’s interest in the Nazi film industry was motivated by his sense that film had a propagandistic persuasive power that would help to bring German audiences into line. He was just as aware of this as Goebbels. Goebbels may have been the “film minister”, but he was Hitler’s film minister.
Learn more about Hitler and Film at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Thomas Doherty's "Show Trial"

Thomas Doherty is professor of American studies at Brandeis University. His books include Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934; Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture; Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration; and Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939.

Doherty applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist, and reported the following:
Serendipitously enough, page 99 of Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist is not a random dip into the water but the source of a major current: the kick off to the long middle section of the book’s three act structure, the first page of the sixth chapter-- entitled “Showtime”—which chronicles the first day of the nine days of hearings staged by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in October 1947 to investigate alleged Communist subversion in the motion picture industry. The page tries to conjure the atmospherics in the hearing room and the media frenzy anent the hottest ticket in Washington, D.C., an attempt to evoke the sounds, swirls, and buzz in the white marble caucus room on the third floor of Old House Office building on Capitol Hill.

To help with the paint job, I thought it might be useful to walk around the room where it happened. I got in touch with my local congressman, Seth Moulton, Democrat from the 6th district of Massachusetts, and set up an appointment with a couple of impossibly young and perky interns (really, they looked like eighth graders) to escort me to the caucus room which, near as I could tell, was pretty much the same as it was in 1947, when what was variously called “a three ring circus,” “a honkey tonk show,” and a “Grade A production in glorious Technicolor” was staged before the newsreel cameras and radio microphones. I walked up and down the whole room, mentally positioning the placement of the congressmen on the dais, the tables for investigators, witnesses, and press, and the 300 or so seats for the public, including a contingent of Hollywood artists known as the Committee for the First Amendment, who had flown to Washington to protests HUAC’s tactics. Towards the back of the room, far left as I entered, stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Garfield, and Marsha Hunt had listened, rapt and disturbed, attracting more attention from the looky-loos than the actual witnesses. I didn’t feel déjà vu, because I knew I had been there before after a fashion, having looked so intently at the newsreel footage and photographs.

Page 99 might seem to be pretty long slog before getting to the main attraction—the hearings themselves—but the more I looked into the events of October 1947, the more I realized it was all about backstory: the 1930s, when the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League had rallied artists to the cause of anti-Nazism and pro-union activism; and World War II, when Hollywood and Washington engaged in the greatest alliance of government aims and media artistry in American history. The enduring legacy of the agitations of the 1930s and the martialing of Hollywood to military purposes during WWII was that movies—heretofore configured as pure escapism—were now seen as powerful transmission belts for cultural values and political ideology. In 1947, everyone--including the congressmen on the House Committee on Un-American Activities—knew that movies mattered.
Learn more about Show Trial at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Peter J. Woodford's "The Moral Meaning of Nature"

Peter J. Woodford is a research associate at the University of Cambridge, where he is collaborating with scientists and philosophers to study the evolution of cooperation and its potential for understanding the roots of human ethical and religious dispositions. He received his Ph.D. in Modern Western Philosophy, Religious Thought, and Ethics from Stanford University.

Woodford applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Moral Meaning of Nature: Nietzsche’s Darwinian Religion and Its Critics, and reported the following:
I do believe my book passes the page 99 test!

In The Moral Meaning of Nature, I narrate how a collection of thinkers understood the relationship between natural processes and human values, especially those values reflected in the aims of science and in the Christian religion. Page 99 occurs towards the end of chapter three, in which I discuss how Georg Simmel—a highly neglected German philosopher and founding figure of modern sociology at the turn of the 20th century—understood this relationship. My chapter on Simmel argues that he took over a core philosophical project from Friedrich Nietzsche, and this was to show that human commitments to the value of life, and even human orientations toward values that transcended life, nonetheless arose out of life. Here, “life” is understood as a natural process or phenomenon that circumscribes all of what we would call the “biological” world—namely, the world of plants and animals, insects and cells, and organisms of all kinds.

On page 99, I am in the middle of trying to explain how Simmel could conceive of religions as products of biological processes more generally. I describe Simmel’s view that religious ways of understanding and responding to reality were products of affective life that comprised emotions, drives, and instincts that preceded and indeed constituted values that emerged in rational reflection. So, page 99 describes Simmel’s view that humans emotions and drives—such as respect, love, fear, longing, admiration, and even hunger—came to “color” the world and to invest it with diverse values. However, for Simmel, these emotions and drives were not “merely subjective” in the way that we might think of them as wishes or feelings “projected” onto a neutral or indifferent world. Rather, these drives reflected something that genuinely did transcend humans and of which humans were a part, something that even pervaded the non-human world, namely, the reality of “life.” For Simmel, life itself was essentially a kind of appetite, striving, and desire, and only by recognizing this could one understand how religious aspirations toward a fulfillment or consummation of human life in response to transcendent realities could emerge from—and not in opposition to—the wider natural world in which they found themselves.

The snapshot of Simmel’s thoughts on these matters on page 99 reflects the larger project of the book, which was to interrogate how thinkers originally applied “Darwinian” notions of evolution, of life, and of human origins to a fundamental, ancient philosophical question: what place does the normative order of human values have in the wider natural world? The book focuses on what the Lebensphilosophen (“Life-philosophers”) saw as the crucial lesson of Darwinism, namely, that human values were not the products of rationality alone, but rather had a deeper past and source in natural history. However, this was not necessarily an easy idea to live with, since recognizing this appeared to challenge the authority that some of these values were thought to have, and this is why the debate about the natural origins of moral and religious values took on existential urgency. Page 99 describes some of Simmel’s views on conceiving human religious values in terms of a “life-process.” It also sets things up for the next chapter, in which I explain the reasons why a prominent Neo-Kantian philosopher, Heinrich Rickert, trenchantly rejected this picture of Darwinism and its implications for understanding guiding values of both science and the Christian religion.
Learn more about The Moral Meaning of Nature at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, May 25, 2018

Serhii Plokhy's "Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe"

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University. A three-time recipient of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies prize, he is the author of Yalta: The Price of Peace, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union, and The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.

Plokhy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, and reported the following:
Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe is the first comprehensive history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster from the explosion of the reactor no. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant on the morning of April 26, 1986 to the construction of the new shelter over the damaged reactor in 2018. The book tells the stories of the firefighters, scientists, engineers, workers, soldiers, and policemen who found themselves caught in a nuclear Armageddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: extinguishing the nuclear inferno and putting the reactor to sleep. Below is an excerpt from the story told on page 99 of the book: two firefighters meet each other on the fateful night of April 26 near the damaged reactor. One of them is Hryhorii Khmel, the driver of a firetruck, another--his son, a young lieutenant Petro Khmel.
Hryhorii Khmel spent most of the night near the walls of the turbine hall.... He had no doubt that Petro would be called as well. Around 7:00 a.m., when Hryhorii and his fellow firefighters were ordered to leave their positions and potassium iodide was administered to them, he began asking people whether they had seen Petro. The answer was no. Then someone said: “Petro Khmel was taken there as a substitute.” Hryhorii’s heart sank. “There” meant the damaged reactor. “I thought it was all over, finished,” he recalled later.

Hryhorii was told to surrender all his clothing and take a shower. Only after that did he see his son. “I went out onto the street, looked around—it was light, and everything was visible—and saw my Petro coming in uniform, with a coat on, a fire belt, a cap, and leather boots.” “Are you here, Father?” Petro asked his dad before being taken away for decontamination. Hryhorii must have felt like Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba at the execution of his son Ostap, who shouted into the crowd, “Father, where are you? Do you hear me?” before he was put to death. Hryhorii refused to leave the premises and waited until his son had taken a shower. Petro was obviously sick. As he recalled later, “I started to feel bad in the shower. I came out; my father was waiting for me. ‘How do you feel, sonny?’ Hearing almost nothing by then, I heard only ‘Hold on.’”
The Page 99 Test reveals the essence of the book better than any test I can imagine.
Learn more about Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe at the Basic Books website.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Empire.

The Page 99 Test: The Gates of Europe.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Susan Thomson's "Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace"

Susan Thomson is associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University. In 1994, she was program officer for the United Nations Development Programme and present in Rwanda during the crisis.

Thomson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace finds the reader almost a third of the way into the story. We meet Placide, Esther, and Gisele, middle-aged Tutsi siblings, all of whom returned to Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. The trio was born in eastern Rwanda to a Hutu mother and a Tutsi father. The family scattered in 1959 when political violence targeting Tutsi intensified. Ephram, their father, made life-changing calculations to find safety for his family. Placide traveled by car south to Burundi his father while his sisters fled east to Tanzania by foot with their mother, Anysie. They were reunited almost 40 years later, in 1996, having been raised in vastly differing circumstances, some of which are explained on page 99.

Their experience of returning to Rwanda and trying to settle into postgenocide society are but one of many such stories that frame my book. I situate the experience of Rwandans within the country’s centralized bureaucracy, mindful of different forms of stratification beyond ethnicity. Whether it’s age, gender and experience of exile like Placide and his sisters, or education, generation or occupation, the book pay close attention to Rwandan voices.

The goal is to explain the political, social and cultural reasons why the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front has adopted the policies it has from the perspective of the ordinary men and women subject to them. To do so, each chapter presents the stories of Rwandans like Placide, Esther and Gisele to analyze Rwanda’s prospects for lasting peace.

I find that government promise of peace and prosperity are reserved for political and military elites. This generally means RPF party officials and their kin networks. For most Rwandans, RPF policies have resulted in increased economic hardship and social shaming. Poverty, particularly for Rwanda’s rural majority, remains a pressing issue that the RPF is barely addressing. Instead, Kigali, the capital city, gleams as an ode to RPF policy while the majority of Rwandans continue to struggle, economically, politically, socially and emotionally.
Learn more about Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

James Hudnut-Beumler's "Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table"

James Hudnut-Beumler is the Anne Potter Wilson Distinguished Professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the author of several books, including In Pursuit of the Almighty's Dollar. He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table: Contemporary Christianities in the American South, and reported the following:
From page 99:
Of course, the black population of North Carolina had never been convinced that the state had rejected its Jim Crow past and turned into a smart and genteel version of the Research Triangle, Charlotte, and the Triad, writ large. This is where the Reverend Barber came in, for he was prepared with a deep analysis, a set of progressive allies, and something else rarely seen in public—a willingness to use the ordinary stuff of biblical exegesis, moral argumentation, and old-fashioned preaching in public to make a Christian case for why what the governor and legislature were doing was wrong.
Opening my book to page 99 one finds oneself in the middle of a faith and politics conflict in the state of North Carolina with Reverend William J. Barber II and Moral Monday facing off against Republican state leaders. This proves to be great place to jump right into Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table because the entire book is a testament to the vital range of Christianities underneath those red election night congressional maps that signal the dominance of the conservative white Southern evangelicals in the American South in the early 21st century. While no other non-Christian body can count more than .6% of any southern state's population, the arguments between Christians over whether and how to welcome LGBT members in their churches and schools, how to address racism, whether even to honor the voting rights secured by the civil rights movement are anything but settled.

The South is a region where many people, liberal and conservative, black and white, call themselves Matthew 25 Christians, and visit people in prison because Jesus suggested its importance. Nevertheless, the southern states persist in having the highest incarceration rates in the nation with the highest percentage of its population in prison. Ironies abound. In North Carolina after Republicans took over both houses of state government and the governorship for the first time since Reconstruction in 2012, efforts were made to turn back the clock on voting rights, and health, education and welfare policies. On page 99 we meet a coalition of faith and social justice groups organized under the banner of faith determined to resist the government. One of the members of the movement, Courtney Ritter, mother of three from Pittsboro wears pearls and a cardigan for her arrest, so as to look as conservative and respectable as possible. She reports: "I felt a moral obligation to all of those people in the civil rights movement who had put their lives and jobs on the line. I wanted them to know that what they did mattered." Courtney is white and reported that she and her husband had moved to North Carolina from Alabama thinking it was familiarly southern but more progressive. In her disappointment Courtney thought, "Wow, I could have stayed in Alabama."
Learn more about Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Michael Zakim's "Accounting for Capitalism"

Michael Zakim teaches history at Tel Aviv University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made, and reported the following:
The ninety-ninth page of Accounting for Capitalism is devoted to a pictorial parable that appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1854, depicting the “two paths in life” (earnestness versus dissipation) faced by everyone who assumes exclusive sovereignty over their fate. The Harper’s caricature is part of my book’s third chapter, which contends that the “self-made man,” a distinctly modern cultural hero born of the industrial century, constituted one of the great production projects of the new capitalist economy, namely, the production of oneself. Such “individualism” (a neologism of the times) marked a radical departure from republican tradition in America, which had rested on the moral economy of patriarchal households.

The individual’s transformation into an “ism” was closely related to another etymological event of equal revolutionary significance: capital’s transformation into “capitalism,” which was revealing of the growing relevance of truck and barter to the whole of social experience. The rise of capital to such moral and material status begat a class of “merchant clerks” assigned with administering the industrial century’s second great production project, production of the market. Indeed, the clerk personified both of these developments. Moving from farm to metropolis, from homestead to boarding house, and from growing things to selling them, he not only kept the accounts, delivered bills, distributed samples, paid import duties, figured interest charges, and copied out a constant stream of correspondence, but conceived of his own life as the subject of the same gestalt of utility, enterprise, and calculation. This turned him into an unlikely icon of the age, as well as the anti-hero of Herman Melville’s famous story of the Wall-Street scrivener, “Bartleby,” published a year before the Harper’s pictorial. Negotiable, impermanent, unhinged from the soil, and carried along by commerce’s tides of boom and bust, the clerk did not just produce the market, in other words. He was himself one of its products, the pioneer of what we so casually call today “human capital.”
Learn more about Accounting for Capitalism at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, May 18, 2018

Stephanie J. Rickard's "Spending to Win"

Stephanie J. Rickard is Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Spending to Win: Political Institutions, Economic Geography, and Government Subsidies, and reported the following:
By chance, page 99 begins with a nice summary of the argument I make in Spending to Win. Discussing two subsidies funded by governments in France and Austria in violation of European Union rules that regulate state aid, I conclude that leaders implemented these subsidies because the benefits of doing so outweighed the costs.
The domestic benefits of these subsidies were large precisely because of the constellation of economic geography and electoral institutions. Together, electoral institutions and economic geography robustly predict the likelihood that a government will violate EU state aid rules – illustrating that domestic politics shape not only national economic policy but also international economic relations.
This paragraph from page 99 nicely illustrates the main argument in Spending to Win. I argue that politicians’ willingness to selectively target economic benefits, like subsidies to businesses, depends on the way politicians are elected and the geographic distribution of economic activities. Based on interviews with government ministers and bureaucrats, as well as new quantitative data, I demonstrate that government policy-making can be explained by the combination of electoral institutions and economic geography. Political institutions interact with economic geography to influence countries’ economic policies and international economic relations. As a result, identical political institutions can have wide-ranging policy effects depending on the context in which they operate.

In the chapter that includes page 99, I explore the politics behind two subsidy programs in France and Austria. I use parliamentary records, industry publications, and local media coverage to elucidate the politics behind these two subsidy programs. Why focus on these two particular programs? As I write on page 99,
Myriad subsidy programs exist. Given the ubiquity of government subsidies, it would be far too easy to cherry pick cases that best fit my theory. To guard against this, I use a methodical, multistep selection criterion.
I go on to describe my selection criterion. I aim to convince readers that I did not cherry pick these two cases but instead investigate the universe of cases that meet the detailed selection criterion. Both subsidies provide evidence in support of my argument and illustrate the importance of electoral incentives and economic geography for economic policy-making. The two cases involve government subsidies to wine makers. Perhaps this is a chapter best enjoyed with a cold glass of Austrian Grüner Veltliner!
Learn more about Spending to Win at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Lucas A. Powe Jr.'s "America’s Lone Star Constitution"

Lucas A. Powe, Jr. is Anne Green Regents Chair in the School of Law and Professor of Government at the University of Texas.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, America's Lone Star Constitution: How Supreme Court Cases from Texas Shape the Nation, and reported the following:
Page 99 of America’s Lone Star Constitution consists of two paragraphs about the case challenging school financing via local property taxes because of wealth disparities. The first discusses choosing a Hispanic as plaintiff. The second, in detail, illustrates wealth discrepancies between two school districts within San Antonio. The latter paragraph is typical of the book in providing the necessary detail to comprehend both the litigation strategies and the decision of the Supreme Court. The former mentions the lawyer and his substitution of a Hispanic for an Anglo to highlight that the case, while about wealth discrepancies, has a minority component to it.

In discussing the plaintiff, Demetrio Rodriguez, an armed services veteran, was verbally harassed by Anglos. That represents my effort to bring as much local culture into the case discussion as well as illustrating the conservatism of the state.

What page 99 does not have is a single word about a Supreme Court justice even though every justice of the last six decades is evaluated at some point in the book where, unsurprisingly one can learn that William O. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall were the most liberal justices and William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia rank as the most conservative. It also lacks mention of any Texas politician.

Nor does page 99 discuss the outcome of the San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), the majority and the dissent’s reasoning, or the national importance of the case. A few pages later Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the majority opinion, in his private note asserts the plaintiff’s claim is both communistic and “the type of thing that emerged from the French Revolution.” Had the dissent of Thurgood Marshall, who was the last century’s most important lawyer, prevailed, federal courts would have been commandeered to supervise how fairly states and localities were funding their schools, a task far better suited to state courts and legislatures. Rodriguez was a conservative victory, but cases banning organized prayer at high school football games and protecting the burning of the American flag were liberal victories, and Texas cases have split evenly between the poles.
Learn more about America's Lone Star Constitution at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

David Charles Sloane's "Is the Cemetery Dead?"

David Charles Sloane is professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. He grew up in Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse, New York, and is the author of The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History.

Sloane applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Is the Cemetery Dead?, and reported the following:
My book is a discussion of the challenges confronting the cemetery in the 21st century. The modern cemetery was established during the antebellum period, and has throughout the remainder of American history served as the primary place for the interment of our dead.

Yet, circumstances are changing. Over the first one hundred years after the invention of the indoor mechanical crematory, the vast majority of Americans rejected the practice, even though it was cheaper. Over the last few decades the percentage of deaths that are cremated has risen to the point where in the last year or so more Americans were cremated than buried or entombed.

How does this relate to page 99? On page 99, I discuss the meaning of a visitation to the cemetery. I remind readers that even though fewer people seemed to be going, the “cemetery remains a place apart, the last stop of grief for millions of people.”

I note that the visit to the grave is a performance of grief and remembrance. “We tend the grave, replace the old flowers, and dust the top of the monument. We might leave a small memento – a photograph, stone, figurine, or stuffed animal.” These mementos don’t last long in the large cemeteries since they violate the needs for maintenance and standardized appearance, but people keep leaving them.

The restrictions are why some people are moving their mourning away from the memorial landscape of these “special sacred spaces.” As I discuss in the remainder of the book, we mourn online and in public, we place everyday memorials along the roadside, on the back car window, even on our bodies through a memorial tattoo. Many feel a diminished attachment to the place where, others still believe, mourners “can recreate a ‘home’ for the deceased.” Maybe, but many people seem to be learning less from the cemetery, and mourning in other places.
Learn more about Is the Cemetery Dead? at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Emily Ogden's "Credulity"

Emily Ogden is assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism, and reported the following:
Credulity tells how mesmerism, an early form of hypnosis, started out as a mind control technique and then became, improbably, a means of free expression. Page 99 is right where this shift occurs. Before, the book is mostly about control; after, freedom takes over.

Mesmerists claimed they had the ability to entrance people, transforming them from ordinary citizens into obedient robots with clairvoyant powers. The practice first emerged in France, then took an extraordinary journey across three continents to get to the US in 1836. From strictly run French hospitals, it migrated to Caribbean plantations and then to American factory towns. A slaveholder, Charles Poyen, brought it to America. Here's how I summarize the travels of this brainwashing method on page 99:
In Paris, the powers that magnetism had borrowed from the world's false religions made some patients compliant and helped diagnose others. In Guadeloupe, mesmerism warded off rebellion. And in the United States, it made a more tractable weaver [factory worker] out of the first American somnambulist. ("Somnambulist" is a name for the mesmeric subject.)
On page 99, things look dark. But this program of domination is about to unravel. In the chapters to come, mesmeric clairvoyants turn mind control into entertainment. They fly through the air, they do impressions of other people's personalities, and eventually they develop something similar to the stage hypnosis you can still see today, where people quack like ducks and do other outlandish things at the mesmerist’s bidding. By the end of the book (and of mesmerism’s history), brainwashing is no longer a dark art; it’s an improv technique.
Learn more about Credulity at the University of Chicago Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Credulity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Gregory Barton's "The Global History of Organic Farming"

Gregory Barton is Professor of History at Western Sydney University and the University of Johannesburg, and the author of Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism, Lord Palmerston and the Empire of Trade, and Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture. For eight years he was the Editor-in-Chief of the noted historical journal, Britain and the World.

Barton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Global History of Organic Farming and reported the following:
While Ford Madox Ford spent much of 1931 writing his autobiography, Return to Yesterday, another writer in that same year launched the organic farming movement with a book that also harkened back to the romantic world of the past.

Alas, the book was titled, unappealingly, The Waste Products of Agriculture. But despite the off-putting title, Albert Howard along with his first wife Gabrielle, and then his second wife Louise, would soon take his place as the founder of the organic farming movement and change forever how millions of consumers thought about modern industrial farming.

Page 99 of my book, The Global History of Organic Farming, captures the essence of this story that marries ancient wisdom with scientific discovery. Page 99 also captures the tragic death of his first wife and fellow scientist, Gabrielle, who worked side by side with Albert in the blinding heat and grinding poverty of India. Here they devised a new method of composting that allowed Indian peasants to fertilize their crops without artificial fertilizers and pesticides.

After Gabrielle’s tragic death Howard retired to England broken hearted and exhausted from overwork. With the help of Louise, Gabrielle’s sister, Albert began writing for a popular audience of farmers and gardeners that launched a new movement that would throw down the gauntlet and challenge the values of chemical farming and mass consumerism. This book—based on newly discovered archives— tells the untold story of how the organic farming movement attracted the support of millions of followers from Gandhi to Prince Charles, and from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

The story also highlights the forgotten role of women in the broader environmental movement. After Albert Howard’s death, Louise Howard almost single handedly carried the message of the organic farming to the world. Throughout the 1950s to the 1960s she maintained a network of amateur activists fighting against the damage of DDT on the environment and against the ill effects of industrial pollution on human health. Little could she foresee at the time, that her lonely battle for organic farming would gain widespread acceptance after 1980 and change the way hundreds of millions of consumers think about how the food they eat affected human health and the health of the entire world of nature.
Learn more about The Global History of Organic Farming at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, May 11, 2018

Tim Bartley's "Rules without Rights"

Tim Bartley is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, and studies globalization, regulation, and social movements. He applied thePage 99 Test” to his new book, Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy, and reported the following:
On page 99, you’ll read about the troubled and controversial attempts to make the Indonesian timber industry more sustainable. There has been an explosion of interest in corporate sustainability and social responsibility, and yet we know very little about what this means on the ground. Rules without Rights tries to change that by comparing land and labor standards as they are put into practice in newly democratic Indonesia and authoritarian China.

On one hand, page 99 captures only one slice of the book, which also looks at sustainability standards in China and corporate responsibility for labor conditions (especially in clothing and footwear manufacturing) in Indonesia and China.

On the other hand, page 99 captures some central themes of the book as a whole—including the risk of greenwashing/fairwashing and corporate sustainability/responsibility programs’ inability to deal with contentious land and labor rights (such as the rights of indigenous people to control rural land or the rights of workers to form independent labor unions).

The page begins with the story of how giant pulp and paper companies—Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and Asia Pacific Resources International (APRIL)—sought to use the logo of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading multi-stakeholder sustainable forestry initiative, to greenwash their image. The vast majority of their operations could not meet the FSC’s standards, but they engaged in several projects that they hoped would allow them to use the “FSC-Mixed” label on some paper products. This was an important and controversial moment for the FSC, which clamped down on some of these sorts of projects while still working to expand the market for certified paper.
In sum, the big pulp and paper companies were not prepared to abandon their harvesting practices, but they did navigate the margins of FSC certification in search of sustainability assurances. The FSC and its constituents, in turn, further policed these margins to retain their credibility, especially when prompted by external scrutiny. As theorized in the previous chapter, the rigor of transnational private regulation depends in part on scrutiny from external and internal watchdogs.
Page 99 then transitions into a focus on land rights, which turn out to be incredibly contentious in Indonesia:
FSC standards [and many other sustainability initiatives] call for stable, clear, and legitimate land use rights, but in several ways the rights to use forest land in Indonesia are unstable, overlapping, and contentious. First, because there were sizable incentives to convert forested land into oil palm plantations, forests were in a real sense fleeting—and whatever premiums might be gained by getting certified were far too low to reverse this trend. The Indonesian government began supporting fast-growing oil palm plantations in the 1980s by helping foreign investors secure land in “frontier” areas, often suppressing or displacing local smallholders.
In addition to palm oil development, forest land in Indonesia was often subject to competing claims—from different government agencies, different permit holders, and by both companies and indigenous communities who claimed customary rights to land. These customary rights were symbolically endorsed by the Indonesian constitution but practically nullified by the Forestry Law. This created a difficult situation for sustainability certification and a problem that this tool has largely failed to resolve. Here you can see one meaning of the title, Rules without Rights.
Learn more about Rules without Rights at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, May 10, 2018

David Weintraub's "Life On Mars"

David Weintraub is a Professor of Astronomy and directs the Communication of Science and Technology Program at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Is Pluto a Planet?, How Old is the Universe?, and Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It?

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book Life On Mars: What to Know Before We Go and reported the following:
I thought professors give, not take, tests, so the idea of me taking the Page 99 Test sounded like a mistake. Of course, almost everything we do in life tests us, and the Page 99 Test seemed innocuous enough. Then I worried. What if my page 99 stinks? Four years of research and writing down the drain. I should decline this offer, I thought, or let my dog eat the rough draft. But I took the test and feel good about it.

On page 99, I report that the century of planetary exploration began when “On July 23, 1896, Lowell Observatory opened for business.” Percival Lowell had used his personal wealth to build an observatory in Arizona. His goal: prove the existence of Martians whom he believed had built a planet-girdling system of canals. A decade later, he would switch his attention to a search for Planet X. That search would be completed in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto.

Lowell launched planetary astronomy as a unique astronomical sub-discipline, but his belief in intelligent Martians and his infatuation with the surface markings on Mars first identified as canali by Giovanni Schiaparelli also gave planetary astronomy a bad reputation for half a century. Lowell almost single-handedly drove astronomers away from the study of planets and toward the study of stars and galaxies. We can thank Lowell both for inventing planetary astronomy and for pushing some of the best astronomical minds of the early twentieth century away from planetary astronomy into (then) more reputable areas of study. Edwin Hubble could have pointed the great 100-inch Hooker telescope on Mt. Wilson at Mars and Saturn; instead, he discovered the expanding universe.

As a facility for studying Mars, a slew of NASA missions --- Mariner, Viking, Spirit, Opportunity, MAVEN, Curiosity, and soon InSight --- have surpassed Lowell’s observatory. All of these missions appear in Life on Mars, which tells the story of the science of searching for life on Mars over the last century.

We remain infatuated by Mars because Mars might harbor life. Lowell would be disappointed: Mars has neither engineers nor canals. Nevertheless, we know that Mars is habitable and might host microscopic Martians.

Does it? We simply don’t know, yet. The answer is worth the money and effort involved in the quest for answers, and Life on Mars takes you deep into the story of humankind’s quest for those answers.
Learn more about Life on Mars at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Spencer Piston's "Class Attitudes in America"

Spencer Piston is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Class Attitudes in America: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment of the Rich, and Political Implications, and reported the following:
Political analysts often scapegoat the public for government’s stingy orientation toward poor people in the United States. The logic is as follows: Americans must not want government to help the poor, or government would not be able to get away with passing policies that do so little to help poor people.

In Class Attitudes in America, I challenge this understanding of public opinion. Analyzing nationally representative survey data, I show that majorities of Americans are sympathetic toward the poor, and sympathy for the poor leads many Americans to support downwardly redistributive policies.

Sympathy for the poor can also cause Americans to support candidates for public office perceived to take actions that will benefit the poor. On page 99, I present the results of a survey experiment in which some subjects are randomly assigned to read about a political candidate who is described as unlikely to transfer resources to the poor if elected. Other subjects are randomly assigned to read about a candidate who is identical to the first candidate except that he is likely to transfer resources to the poor.

Contrary to some existing accounts of public opinion in the United States, I find that the candidate is actually more popular when he is likely to help the poor – and, as shown on page 99, this pattern is driven by those Americans who are most sympathetic to the poor.

Why, then, doesn’t government do more to transfer resources to poor people? The simple answer is that this is yet another case in which government does not pass policies that majorities of the public prefer. Policies that would help the poor are – with some important exceptions – generally popular in the United States. And yet government continues to do much less than it might to transfer resources to those who need them most. I argue, therefore, that political analysts should not be so quick to blame the American public for what politicians do. Just the opposite: we should ask why more politicians aren’t listening to those they are supposed to represent.
Visit Spencer Piston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, May 7, 2018

Rosina Lozano's "An American Language"

Rosina Lozano is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States, her first book, and reported the following:
Page 99 is not a winner for An American Language.

The book begins when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, extended citizenship to the former Mexican residents in the ceded territories. I unite these new citizens who almost universally spoke Spanish under a single term, treaty citizens, and the book explores the ways that these new citizens—with the help of official state, territorial, and federal language policies—used the Spanish language as U.S. citizens.

Page 99 follows an extensive look at the ways that California and Colorado used translations to reach treaty citizens in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Both included Spanish-language translation protections in their constitution. It begins a less than two-page section on how the territory of Arizona approached the politics of language very differently:
In the generation following Arizona’s establishment as a territory, treaty citizen families—and the territory’s other Mexican inhabitants who naturalized—voted with no legal restrictions, regardless of their language preference. But while the territorial government made few attempts to restrict these Spanish-speaking residents’ access to the franchise, neither did it do much to ensure their participation.
Despite Arizona’s limited language-related laws that would have addressed its Spanish-speaking citizens, the territory did extend some Spanish-language translations to help with the courts.
The legislature voted in 1875 to permit interpreters in all courts of the territory at the rate of $5 a day upon the request of the presiding judge. Relatedly, in 1887, the legislature permitted police officers to employ an interpreter for taking depositions. The use of interpreters in the courts may have worked from Spanish to English as well as from English to Spanish. At least some local justices of the peace lacked English-language skills, leading the territory to authorize the translation and printing of five hundred copies of a Spanish-language version of court laws in 1881. The proceedings unfortunately offer little commentary on why this project was undertaken so late or what the general practice was prior to the 1881 translation.
Translations of official documents and proceedings into the Spanish language was crucial if states and territories in the U.S. Southwest wished to reach all of their constituents. The section that follows this Arizona one examines New Mexico, where Spanish speakers made up the vast majority of citizens in the nineteenth century. Arizona’s neighboring territory not only required the use of Spanish, but they made it the norm in the legislature, courts, and in elections.

Page 99 not only offers a limited view of this chapter on translation, it also offers a mere sliver of the book’s larger arguments about the politics of Spanish.

Spanish was a language of politics in the nineteenth century following the U.S.-Mexican War as was described a bit here, but it was also a political language in the twentieth century that intersected with such distinct national interests as Americanization and Pan-Americanism. The United States had competing perceptions of the Spanish language—as useful for hemispheric relations, and, as foreign, radical, and expendable. These debates continued in federal agencies, schools, courts, and in territories like Puerto Rico. Part II of An American Language covers these themes.

I welcome a reader to offer an alternative page they think works better.
Learn more about An American Language at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Debra Dean's "Hidden Tapestry"

Debra Dean is the bestselling author of four critically acclaimed books that have been published in 21 languages. Her debut, The Madonnas of Leningrad, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. She teaches creative writing at Florida International University.

Dean's latest book, Hidden Tapestry: Jan Yoors, His Two Wives, and the War That Made Them One, tells the remarkable true story of Belgian-American artist Jan Yoors – childhood vagabond, wartime resistance fighter, polyamorous New York bohemian – and the two women who agreed to share his life. Best-selling author Ross King has called this “one of the most remarkable artistic stories of the twentieth century.”

Dean applied the “Page 99 Test” to Hidden Tapestry and reported the following:
From page 99:
Sheltered and naive, Annabert experienced most of the war at a muted remove, as shortages, inconveniences, and the unvoiced anxiety of grown- ups. Just a young Dutch girl, and neither Jewish or Gypsy, she was kept ignorant of the horrors so many were enduring, but as she wrote later, [it] vibrated in the atmosphere around me. This is worse because the truth concealed becomes monsters of imagination and fear. On a few occasions, she saw things that troubled her. Once, coming out of school, she saw a soldier punishing one of her schoolmates, beating him for no apparent reason. Annabert ran over to the boy, and at the sight of his bloodied face, she began to cry uncontrollably. Even when a teacher came outside and tried to shush her, she could not be soothed.
Given this one page, a reader might expect a more straightforward narrative than I’ve written. This page doesn’t really represent the whole, but I don’t think there’s another that would. An imaginary index in the back would include entries for ‘Pollack, Jackson’ next to ‘Polygamy’, and ‘Warhol, Andy’ next to ‘Weaving’ and ‘World War II.’ The very thing that drew me to this story—its epic sweep and psychological complexities—also makes it challenging to summarize. But I’ll give it a go.

Hidden Tapestry moves through the underground worlds of the Roma, the WWII Resistance, and post-war Greenwich Village. It’s a social biography following three people who eventually formed a polygamous relationship: the Belgian American artist, urban bohemian, and war hero, Jan Yoors, and the two friends, Annabert and Marianne, who agreed to share him and who wove the magnificent tapestries he designed. They knew each other as children, but World War II tore them apart, so the first part of the book shuttles between their separate wartime adventures and ordeals. Jan served in the Resistance, first as a saboteur and later setting up an escape line to ferry endangered people out of Occupied Europe to safety in Spain. He was in and out of German prisons, tortured, and sentenced to death. Marianne lost her mother and sister in the year before the war, and then her father disappeared. Unbeknownst to her, he was Jewish and had gone into hiding, so she spent the rest of the war dodging the Nazis.

Page 99 marks the beginning of a chapter titled “Annabert’s War.” Compared with the other two, Annabert’s experience of war was milder. But this is a relative term: her family was forced to move inland and then, like most Dutch citizens, she starved during the Hunger Winter in Holland.

Eventually, they found each other again and then made the decision to form a polygamous marriage (what they termed “a threefold cord”), and to dedicate their lives to art and beauty. They left Europe and moved to Greenwich Village because this is where you went if you were an artist or a bohemian or simply wanted to live without the judgment of your neighbors. Here they created the first tapestry studio of its kind in America. It’s an account of resilience, resourcefulness, and passion.
Learn more about the book and author at Debra Dean's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: The Mirrored World.

Writers Read: Debra Dean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, May 4, 2018

David Rapp's "Tinker to Evers to Chance"

David Rapp has been a political journalist and publishing executive in Washington, DC, for more than thirty years. He is the former editor of Congressional Quarterly, as well as the author of How the U.S. Got into Agriculture—and Why It Can’t Get Out.

Rapp applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Chicago Cubs and the Dawn of Modern America, and reported the following:
From page 99, a passage from Chapter 5, “Baseball Revival: 1903-1905” (I include a paragraph from the page before and one from the page after to round out the context):
Anyone who knew the recent history of the Chicago Nationals had no reason to think this season would bring any better fortune than the previous year. No new stars had been signed, no budding prospects had risen above the pack of greenhorns. “[The] club this year as compared with last season is fully 50 percent better,” allowed a Chicago Daily News correspondent, already hedging his bet. The manager “expressed great satisfaction with the looks of his men,” reported a noncommittal Chicago Record Herald. The Sporting Life weekly took note of the general drift and concluded that the Nationals “are a nice, willing set of boys, but seem rather weak with the war club.”

And yet a writer in another Chicago paper proffered a much sunnier outlook. “This has been a great day for the Colts,” beamed the anonymous dispatch in the Chicago Inter Ocean, using that paper’s preferred nickname for the team. “To begin with, the weather was just ideal for ball playing. The day was warm, with just a light breeze blowing across the park to remind them of their proximity to the coast.” The sentences were cheerful, confident, and no doubt naive, yet their forecast for Chicago and its frigid sports fans concealed an uncanny feminine intuition of better days to come.

Most Chicago baseball fans had few reasons to expect the summer to be one of joy and celebration. Their team had finished fifth in the eight- team league in 1902, another in a string of sixteen lackluster campaigns. No trophy had fallen into the team’s clutches since 1886. It was going to be a challenge to recapture the public’s interest in the bedraggled Colts or the sullied game of baseball itself. An even bigger leap was to win back the city’s faith and allegiance.

James A. Hart, the club’s owner and president, was keen to try. Hart had made the arrangements for the West Coast trip, his first spring training since taking sole financial control of the franchise the previous summer. His longtime boss and mentor, sporting goods magnate Albert G. Spalding, was now out of the picture. Hart had decided to make the expensive excursion to the far west—the longest train trip ever for a baseball team in that day—to help revive the players’ spirits and jump-start the team’s prospects. Perhaps he also wanted to show he was no longer Spalding’s lackey but finally a baseball magnate of his own accord. Either way, Hart needed to raise the city’s low expectations for this moribund franchise.

Frank G. Selee, Hart’s field manager, came aboard the year before with a stellar reputation as a talent scout and turnaround artist. Hart gave Selee complete freedom to remake the roster. They assembled seventeen players in Santa Monica, a motley crew from all corners of the nation. Among them were several holdovers—including a slick infielder named Tinker from Kansas City, and a sturdy backup catcher named Chance from California, plus a more recent pickup from upstate New York whom everyone called Little Evers.

Selee had played this rebuilding role before, a dozen years previous, when he lifted the Boston Nationals from fifth to first in just one year. And he had a brainy, methodical way of going about the task. He collected these and other prospects like marbles, tossing away the rejects and, wherever possible, buffing up the hidden jewels. “You must be on the lookout for new material all the time,” he said. At the end of the day, however, few seasoned baseball watchers expected any miracles from such a nondescript outfit. The restoration of Chicago’s baseball fortunes was going to be a long, hard slog.
I like this passage because it weaves together four of the key themes of my book:
  1. The revival of the Chicago National League franchise led by the little-known Frank Selee—this chapter includes the only extensive biographical treatment of a baseball mastermind (and ultimately tragic figure) who finally made it into the Hall of Fame in 1999.
  2. I foreshadow the introduction of his “secret weapon,” as I called her later: Selee’s wife, Bridget “May” Grant, an Irish lass of unbounded enthusiasm and remarkable brains for baseball. (It’s revealed later that she was the anonymous correspondent behind the optimistic spring training dispatch.)
  3. I touch upon baseball’s “sullied” reputation from the 1890s, hinting at the Cubs’ impending revival and their role in bringing the game back to social respectability and acceptance.
  4. Here’s the first assembly of my three protagonists, who up to this point I had written about as young boys on the rise in distinct and very different regions of 19th century America.
So, while my Page 99, in and of itself, may come across as a rather serviceable passage in the overall narrative of the book, it does provide an essential purpose in alerting the reader to several of the larger biographical and cultural topics to come.
Visit David Rapp's website.

Writers Read: David Rapp.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, May 3, 2018

Paul K. MacDonald & Joseph M. Parent's "Twilight of the Titans"

Paul K. MacDonald, an associate professor of political science at Wellesley College, is author of Networks of Domination. Joseph M. Parent, an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, is author of Uniting States and coauthor of American Conspiracy Theories. They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment, and reported the following:
Ford Madox Ford issued this advice as a quick way to cut out the middlemen and sidestep publishing houses’ public relations departments. In our case, the page 99 test is a fair representation of our style and substance, but then we also penned the material on the jacket. Yet page 99 is a fascinating Fordian prism that reveals how strong hindsight bias is, and how that might blind us to our present possibilities.

Of course, Ford was not his real surname. He changed it to Ford after the First World War because Hueffer sounded too German (his father’s family was from Westphalia; his mother’s from London). And everyone knows about the longstanding antipathy between Germany and the United Kingdom, which contributed to war’s outbreak in 1914. Yet this too is not necessarily so.

Our book is about how states deal with decline, specifically when they fall a notch in the great power pecking order. The conventional wisdom on the subject is pessimistic: either great powers fall into a hostility spiral that tends to end in war, like Athens and Sparta did in the Peloponnesian War, or domestic dysfunction hampers their ability to adjust strategically, like the brittle collapse of the Soviet Union. We argue that logic and evidence suggest the opposite: declining states tend to retrench promptly, proportionately, and peacefully. They do this to stay strategically solvent, reducing their foreign policy costs, revamping their institutions, and redistributing their resources and commitments to be more competitive in the long run.

On page 99, we’re discussing how the United Kingdom reacted to the expensive win in the South African War in a surprising manner. Rather than crow about victory or carry on with business as usual, leaders from both parties cut defense costs, closed peripheral military bases, concentrated resources at home, made new friends abroad, and put a premium on efficiency. This was not primarily aimed at Germany until much later - even after the Anglo-German naval arms race, the British were not intent on fighting Germany - but it gained the United Kingdom much needed strength at critical strongpoints, better prospects for long-term economic growth, and strategic flexibility across its empire. Had leaders not acted with such agility and alacrity then, World War I could have ended much differently, and Ford’s last name might still be Hueffer.

These debates about decline echo today as many people aspire to make America great again. Torn between earlier commitments and current challenges, the United States is ambivalent about whether to double down on the status quo or place new bets. Even if change were desirable, many doubt that the country can overcome its inertia and internal squabbles. Our book is the first to look at all states in such situations since 1870, when reliable data becomes available for the great powers, and shows what combinations of policies tend to bring about desirable outcomes in different conditions. It showcases promising paths to recovery and catastrophic courses to avoid. It offers reasons for hope and optimism. Just not all on page 99.
Learn more about Twilight of the Titans at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Daniel Bessner's "Democracy in Exile"

Daniel Bessner is the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual, and reported the following:
In Democracy in Exile, I examine the intellectual trajectory of Hans Speier, a German exile from National Socialism who in the United States became the founding chief of the RAND Corporation’s Social Science Division. In brief, the book is dedicated to explaining why Speier and other intellectuals of his generation left the groves of academe to enter the halls of power.

One of the main takeaways of the book is that processes outside of intellectuals’ control often informed their careers. Page 99 expresses this well. On this and the subsequent two pages, which comprise the end of my third chapter, I discuss the ways in which two Democratic congressmen, Martin Dies (TX) and Eugene Cox (GA), used their positions of power to demolish the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS), the government agency for which Speier worked between 1942 and 1944. (Specifically, Speier served as the head of the committee that produced analyses of Nazi propaganda.)

Dies and Cox both had personal vendettas against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the FBIS’s parent agency. The anti-New Deal Dies considered the FCC a mouthpiece of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while Cox hated the commission because it was investigating him for corruption. For these reasons, the two representatives were devoted to crushing the FCC, which they eventually did by fostering its financial evisceration. As a result of its loss of funding, the FCC was forced to reduce significantly the FBIS’s staff and operations.

The attenuation of the FBIS compelled Speier to leave the organization to accept a job as head of the Office of War Information’s (OWI) German desk. In this position, Speier was responsible for developing the propaganda directives intended to guide the materials the OWI sent to Germany. In short, Speier, a German exile, was given the opportunity to psychologically manipulate his former countrymen. This position further enabled Speier to build the contacts and reputation that helped him later join RAND. Thus, while Speier was disappointed he had to leave the FBIS, Dies’s and Cox’s crusades helped launch his career as a Cold War “defense intellectual.”

It is impossible to know for certain what would have happened if Speier had ended the war at the FBIS, but to my mind it is unlikely that he would have reached the career heights he did. In this particular instance, then, the machinations of two disgruntled congressmen created the conditions that (eventually) enabled Speier to become one of the most important defense intellectuals in the Cold War United States.
Visit Daniel Bessner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue