Richard White's "Railroaded"

Richard White, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Parkman Prize, is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s Page 99 Test pretty much nails my book Railroaded. The excerpt from page 99 concerns the “friendship” that was at the center of so much Gilded Age politics, corruption, and business. Similar networks remain central to modern politics, business, and corruption today. The excerpt below captures much of this, but page 99 breaks off a paragraph that I will complete here: “The key figures of the Gilded Age networks of finance, government, journalism, and business had stumbled like so many vampires on a cultural form (friendship), drained it of its lifeblood (affection), and left it so that it still walked, talked, and served their purposes in the world. Friendship was a code: a network of social bonds that could organize political activity. Affection was not necessary.”

Railroaded is a history the transcontinental railroads of the United States, Canada, and Mexico –all of which were enterprises dependent on government aid and subsidies --to try to get at the mystery of how some men obtained great wealth from corporations that lost money and ended up in receivership. Its thesis is that failure is as critical to understanding modernity as success. The result of these railroads was dumb growth: growth that enriched insiders but brought environmental harm, political corruption, and social disaster for Indian peoples and for many whites. Settlement in the regions west of the 100th meridian and east of the Sierras during the late nineteenth century brought environmental damage, political upheaval, and repeated economic collapse. The question is not whether transcontinental railroads were eventually necessary, but rather whether they should have been built where, when, and how they were. Friendship provides one of the keys to the processes that sustained these dubious enterprises.

Excerpt:

Often missing from Gilded Age friendship was what seems to us its defining and necessary element: affection. It is not that these men never liked each other. When Mark Hopkins died in 1878, Huntington wrote, “I liked him so much and his death has hurt me more than I can tell. If I had not so much to do for the living I would stop for a time and think only of the dead.” But Friend Huntington despised Friend Stanford. “I am disposed to think,” Huntington had written Charles Crocker in 1871, “Stanford will go to work for the railroad company as soon as the horse races are over. Of course, I do not expect anything until then.” And he once wrote Stanford himself, “I wish you would tell me whom to correspond with in Cal. When I want anything done; for I have become thoroughly convinced that there is no use in writing to you.” The other Associates shared his disdain. Their writing on Stanford is a chronicle of amazement, dismay and irritation at his greed, laziness, ignorance, and ineptitude. Mark Hopkins thought Stanford’s key quality was his intellectual torpor. “He could do it,” Hopkins told Huntington of some necessary task, “but not without more mental effort than is agreeable to him.” Men who had once been Stanford’s friends were even less generous. Ex-Senator Conness of California railed against Stanford as “this immensely stupid man,” who has forgotten he “had helped make his fortune.”

David Colton was certain that Stanford and Hopkins disliked him and would blackball him as an Associate when the special five-year agreement that made him one of them was up. It was this certainty, as well as his financial desperation, that led him to embezzle. But even as Colton embezzled, he employed the language of friendship. When friends of the Central Pacific failed to pass critical legislation in 1878, Colton was alternately lachrymose and indignant –“we have got no true friends outside of us five.”

Learn more about Railroaded at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Gardiner's "A Perfect Moral Storm"

Stephen Gardiner is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Program on Values in Society, University of Washington, Seattle.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, and reported the following:

I'd say that the Page 99 Test fails for my book.

The book is about why climate change poses a profound challenge to ethical action, because it is genuinely global, severely intergenerational, and takes place in a setting where our theories are weak. These three problems are seen as distinct "storms" that converge on humanity in a mutually reinforcing way, analogous to the way in which three real storms converged on the fishing boat the Andrea Gail, as recounted in Sebastian Junger's book 'The Perfect Storm'. One upshot is that there is a threat to our public discourse on the climate challenge: since we benefit from our escalating emissions, and since the global poor, future generations, and nonhuman nature will disproportionately bear the brunt of them, there is a strong incentive towards inaction supported by distraction, selective attention, and bad arguments. I illustrate this in the book by drawing a parallel between the current climate conversation and a classic case of moral corruption described by Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility. I also discuss how it infects how we talk about both climate economics, and the move towards direct, intentional and large-scale intervention in the climate system ('geoengineering'), such as through injecting sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere to try to cool the surface of the planet down.

Page 99 occurs in my chapter 3, which is about why climate change cannot be 'somebody else's problem' in the sense that it might be solved by a small group of countries (e.g., those who supposedly tried to reduce their emissions under the Kyoto Protocol) while the rest continue with business as usual. Page 99 concerns the narrow question of why other, noncooperating countries, would have incentives to break a ceiling on global emissions that any smaller group tried to maintain. (One sign that the Page 99 thesis fails is that at the top of my page 99 I say 'this section may be safely skipped by those uninterested in technicalities'.) The basic idea is that most countries have not yet fully realized the potential short-term gains from emitting more than they currently do, because they are constrained by their lack of resources to emit more. This will change as countries get richer. It is also likely to be affected by a smaller group emitting less, as other things being equal, this will reduce the price of fossil fuels to outsiders.

There is a footnote on page 99 which does capture something central about the book (though nothing like the whole thesis). The note says:

There is no end in sight. As we saw above, given that most countries are far from American (or even European) levels of per capita emissions, they are far from achieving even the current (perceived) gains from the cheap energy associated with high emissions. Furthermore, even those with high per capita emissions rates do not think that they have exhausted the gains from energy consumption. We might add to this that the gains from emissions are tangible, immediate, and accrue directly to those consuming, whereas the costs of extra consumption—the increased risk of negative climate impacts—are intangible, deferred, shared across all countries, and accrue disproportionately to the world’s poor and future generations. Given this, growth in emissions is a natural default position.

Learn more about A Perfect Moral Storm at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julia C. Ott's "When Wall Street Met Main Street"

Julia C. Ott is Assistant Professor of History at The New School for Social Research.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors' Democracy, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

When individuals refused to join the financial nation, swift reprisals ensued … Crowds meted out violent retribution to “dollar slackers” perceived as disloyal, subversive, and inclined towards bolshevism. These associations were strengthened by the tendency of critics of the war to refuse investment … Roused by warnings issued from the Treasury Department, stalwart citizen-investors also took action against those who attempted to induce others to part with their Liberty bonds [in exchange for merchandise or other securities]. Just as they ferreted out those who refused to subscribe, local patriotic groups – whose ranks swelled with returning servicemen after the war – identified and captured “swindlers” for similar extralegal prosecution. To be sure, strongly coercive measures of financial mobilization met criticism … Yet critics and skeptics concurred that universal investment in federal war debt – if freely chosen – would enrich citizenship, enhance civic culture, and repel bolshevism.

Page 99 of When Wall Street Met Main Street examines the War Loan campaigns of the First World War. Whereas fewer than 500,000 Americans owned any type of stock or bond before 1917, approximately one third of the population (34 million Americans) purchased some form of federal war bond during World War I. As part of its conduct of war, the federal government sought to nurture both the practice of investing and an investors’ mentality. Because the War Loan drives celebrated the benefits of investment as a general practice, they opened the door for postwar marketers of corporate securities. The Great War, therefore, marks a major turning point in the book, which considers how Americans’ relationships with financial securities markets changed dramatically – and permanently – in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

The architects of the War Loans (which included the Liberty Loan, Victory Loan, and War Savings programs) looked upon universal investment in federal war debt as a means of encouraging a widespread sense of identification with the war effort and with the nation itself. Through mass distribution of bonds, stamps, and certificates, the Wilson Administration aimed to mobilize all the inhabitants of the United States, even those opposed to the war and/or lacking full political rights. Shared investment practices would construct a sense of national community among a dispersed, heterogeneous populace, War Loan architects believed. They imagined that universal investment would foster Americanization and counter political alienation and radicalism among those denied the vote. At a historical moment marked by passionate debate over the meaning of citizenship and nationhood, the War Loan drives invited Americans to imagine the nation as a financial market, one in which investment both made and manifested citizenship. Propaganda and spectacle further defended investment as a set of attitudes and practices that would yield a better economic future for individuals and for the nation as a whole.

The Treasury Department determined the goals, terms, quotas, and key themes for the War Loan drives. But on the ground, Americans mobilized themselves through the broad array of private associations that organized public life. The architects of the War Loans could not control the manner in which citizen-investors policed the boundaries of their financial nation. To secure subscriptions, grassroots rituals of financial nationalism mixed celebration and exhortation with emotional manipulation, social ostracism, even physical coercion.

Page 99 reveals a crucial paradox at the heart of the War Loan campaigns. Even as publicity and pageantry cast investment as an instrument of freedom and democracy, Americans employed force to induce individuals to enlist their dollars.

Learn more about When Wall Street Met Main Street at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew J. Nelson's "In the Shadow of Shari‘ah"

Matthew J. Nelson teaches in the Department of Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, In the Shadow of Shari’ah: Islam, Islamic Law, and Democracy in Pakistan, and reported the following:

On page 99, readers with an interest in Pakistan encounter a familiar figure, namely, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah, the ‘founding father’ of Pakistan, is widely known for his efforts to establish a Muslim-majority state in South Asia following the independence of British India in 1947.

On page 99, the year is 1937, and Jinnah can be found struggling to convince the Muslim majority of what would become the most powerful province of Pakistan—namely, the Punjab—to accept a new ‘Shariat Act’ ensuring that Islamic law, rather than ‘tribal customs,’ would govern South Asia’s Muslims. Unfortunately for Jinnah, the Muslims of the Punjab were not on board. In particular, they knew that the enforcement of shari‘ah would guarantee inheritance rights for all Muslim women and, thus, break up the patrilineal (all-male) landed estates that dominated the politics of the Punjab. As Muslims, many local landowners did not want to be seen ‘opposing the terms of shari‘ah.’ But, in practice, they were clearly very nervous. To make a long story short, their ‘economic interests’ did not coincide with the terms of their ‘religious identity.’

In the Shadow of Shari‘ah discusses the political implications of this challenging bind. It asks a simple, common, and increasingly important question: what happens, politically, when, following the formation of an ‘Islamic’ state, patriarchal Muslim property owners find themselves faced with the promulgation of statutes stressing the enforcement of Islamic law? How do local ideas about Islamic law affect local prospects for democracy?

Many readers will be surprised to find that the terms of Islamic law (shari‘ah) occupy two very different positions with reference to the issue of ‘politics’ and, especially, the crucial issue of ‘democracy’ in this book. First, the terms of Islamic law are contrasted with those of ‘tribal custom.’ The former embrace inheritance rights for women; the latter do not. In fact, somewhat counter-intuitively, the terms of Islamic law are shown to provide substantially greater inheritance rights for women. Second, however, the terms of Islamic law are also shown to conjure up specific notions of legal fixity. In fact most of the landowners who appear in this book are shown to regard the terms of Islamic law as completely inflexible, meaning that, although they are deeply apprehensive about the enforcement of (female-friendly) Islamic laws, they also tend to believe that they are not in a position to engage or amend those laws politically. Even as the terms of Islamic law are shown to support the rights of women, then, they are also seen as politically intractable in ways that complicate the relationship between politically negotiated laws and the basic underpinnings of ‘democracy.’

Broadly speaking, In the Shadow of Shari‘ah concerns the ways in which landowning Muslims, concerned about the enforcement of Islamic law, attempt to circumvent the terms of shari‘ah without actually trying to amend or repeal those terms. It concludes with an argument regarding the ways in which the ‘negotiated’ features of Islamic law deserve more attention than they have received so far—not only among legal experts, but also among the public and their local elected representatives. This alternative is not inconsistent with the history of Islamic law in many parts of the Muslim world. It is simply inconsistent with the practice of Islamic law as this relates to the politics of Pakistan today.

Read more about In the Shadow of Shari‘ah at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids"

Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and blogger at EconLog, one of the Wall Street Journal's Top 25 Economics Blogs. He lives in Oakton, Virginia, with his wife and their three children.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids begins with a comparison of war deaths in 1950 versus 2005:

In 1950, American families were losing their sons to the Korean War. In 2005, American families were losing their sons—and occasionally daughters—to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A cynic might say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” At least from the American point of view, however, he’d be wrong. Since 1950, war has radically changed: It isn’t that dangerous anymore. The 1950’s fatality rate was more than fifty times as high as the fatality rate of 2005. In 1950, parents really had to worry that the government would force their sons to join the army and send them overseas to die. Now the soldiers are volunteers, and they almost always come home alive.

I then turn to risk of murder and suicide, and end with a table comparing child safety in 1900 versus 1950. The topics are grim, but my message is upbeat: 2005 is a much safer time for kids than 1950, but 1950 was much better than 1900.

My Page 99 hardly reveals “the whole” of my book. It doesn’t even mention my main thesis: That parents endure a lot of needless unhappiness because they greatly overestimate their long-run effect on the kind of adults their children become. It doesn’t mention my main evidence: adoption and twin studies. Nevertheless, Page 99 is supporting evidence for one of the “selfish reasons to have more kids” I advertise in the title: Parents are needlessly anxious because kids today are safer than ever. If daily life looked like the evening news and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, being a parent would be terrifying. Fortunately, the numbers tell a far more optimistic story. So relax, lighten up, and remember that there’s never been a better time to bring a child into the world.

Learn more about Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dorothee Schneider's "Crossing Borders"

Dorothee Schneider teaches in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century United States, and reported the following:

On page 99 readers find themselves at the Laredo border station with Carmen Moctezuma and her little nephew Alfonso. It is the winter of 1918 and Carmen is pleading her case for admission with the immigration inspectors. We have already read about immigrant departures from Europe and Asia in the previous chapter and have visited the U.S. ports of entry on the Atlantic Coast and the Canada. The encounter in Laredo is part of the readers’ journey westwards along the US border.

The encounter on page 99 takes place far away from Washington D.C. where immigration law is forged. Though the law is uniform everywhere, the realities of the Mexican border differ from Ellis Island. Inspectors are scarce and crossing the border away from inspection points is easy. Only a few thousand Mexicans choose to enter as registered immigrants every year, Carmen Moctezuma among them.

Perhaps Moctezuma has chosen this route because she is confident that as a woman of some means who has crossed the border regularly before, she has nothing to fear from the inspectors. She owns a home in Laredo, and has enough money saved for her nephew’s private school tuition. Perhaps she plans to become a U.S. citizen in the future and therefore had to document her legal entry.

The immigration inspectors note the facts and after extensive interviews they let Moctezuma and her nephew into the United States. But unlike European immigrants, Carmen Moctezuma is not admitted because of her apparent commitment to a stable life in the United States, but because she promises to return to Mexico once the boy’s education is completed.

For immigrants at the Eastern border stations the intention of a future life in the United States had always been a crucial part of their plea for admission. Mexicans on the other hand, were more easily admitted if they showed little intention of staying permanently in the United States.

The condition of impermanence would have important and problematic consequences for Mexican (and Asian) immigrants for the rest of the twentieth century. As Europeans crossed the borders into American culture and society and into U.S. citizenship, Mexicans’ admission would remain tentative. The pages and chapters which follow Carmen Moctezuma’s story show the divergent experiences of immigrants from Europe Asia and Mexico as they confront what it meant to become “American” in the eyes of the U.S. government and for themselves during the rest of the twentieth century.

Learn more about Crossing Borders at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Utpal Sandesara & Tom Wooten's "No One Had a Tongue to Speak"

Utpal Sandesara, the son of a Machhu flood survivor, is pursuing doctoral degrees in medicine and social anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Tom Wooten lives in New Orleans, where he teaches writing and researches the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. They graduated from Harvard University in 2008 with degrees in social studies.

Sandesara and Wooten applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, No One Had a Tongue to Speak: The Untold Story of One of History's Deadliest Floods, and reported the following:

The crisis on the Machhu River had already far exceeded the bounds anticipated by the radio message.

So begins page 99 of No One Had a Tongue to Speak, our narrative nonfiction account of a long-forgotten disaster that offers profound lessons for the twenty-first century world.

Thirty years ago, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, a two-mile long earthen irrigation dam collapsed under torrential monsoon rains. Up to 25,000 people perished in the resulting flood, as a thirty-foot tall wall of muddy water wiped out dozens of villages and the industrial city of Morbi. Subsequently, the government quashed a commission set up to investigate the disaster and rebuilt the dam without acknowledging the failings that led to its collapse. Though recognized by experts as one of history’s deadliest flash floods, the disaster was quickly forgotten by all but its survivors.

In 2006, we traveled to India as wide-eyed Harvard undergraduates, having resolved to investigate the tragedy that Utpal’s mother had survived in her youth. After digging through thousands of archival documents and interviewing 148 people, we realized that we had happened upon a story of tremendous intrigue and profound humanity. We had not expected to learn, for example, that a centuries-old curse had presaged the flood, or that a convicted murderer had won a pardon after plucking more than seventy people from the floodwaters (only to stand accused of another murder), or that cover-ups and conspiracy theories had obscured the disaster’s true causes from survivors for decades. We could not have imagined the emotion the disaster still conjured; residents recounted their terrifying stories so vividly that it seemed as if the flood had happened only yesterday.

Page 99 encapsulates the tension that pervades early chapters of No One Had a Tongue to Speak. It straddles two of the numerous vignettes through which we present our multivocal narrative. The page begins with communication failures leaving downstream residents unaware of the emergency brewing behind the dam. In the next vignette, the reader meets Dhirubhai Mehta, a quiet, meticulous shopkeeper whose life will soon be thrown into turmoil. Though the monsoon rains are whipping the dam’s crew into a panicked frenzy, they merely leave Dhirubhai with a dearth of customers on a dreary afternoon…

A beaded curtain of runoff veiled the entrance to the Mehta Machinery shop. From his seat behind the counter, Dhirubhai Mehta glanced out at the Mahendra Quarter, the middle-class neighborhood northwest of Morbi’s main market. A gushing stream filled the street, and a damp coolness hung in the air. Although large-scale evacuations were underway in the city’s low-lying neighborhoods, life in the Mahendra Quarter continued to follow the routine of a mundane rainy day. Dhirubhai Mehta pored over his business ledgers.

For the most part, Mehta was an unremarkable man. His bland shirts and pants covered a body that stood average in both height and build. He tended to remain silent, holding his gravelly voice in reserve except when compelled. His dark face rarely betrayed emotion.

Like Mayor Ratilal Desai and the woman who had cursed the city centuries earlier, Mehta belonged to the Vaniya merchant jati. Unlike Desai, he had not achieved widespread distinction. He had spent his life in the Mahendra Quarter, quietly tending his agricultural machinery business and bringing up three daughters. He passed his days haggling with farmers, praying at the local temple, and socializing with fellow members of the Rotary Club.

Recently, however, he had found a new passion in life, something that filled him with satisfaction and a small degree of self-importance. Over the last five years, Mehta’s son Vimal – the only boy after a string of three girls – had become the greatest joy in his life.

Mehta’s harrowing account of attempts to save his son amid the floodwaters appears verbatim in the subsequent narration of the disaster’s chaos. By combining the words of survivors like Mehta with insights gleaned from previously classified documents, No One Had a Tongue to Speak finally bears witness to a landmark tragedy.

Learn more about No One Had a Tongue to Speak at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Byman's "A High Price"

Daniel Byman is Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has served on the 9/11 Commission staff and as an analyst with the U.S. government.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism, and reported the following:

In 2002, I was in the Middle East while investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Just before I entered Israel, its military killed Saleh Shehada – the founder of Hamas’ military wing whom Israel blamed for the deaths of more than 200 Israelis. The same strike, however, also killed 14 others, including 10 children. Hamas declared that it would not rest until “Jews see their own body parts in every restaurant and park,” and less than 10 days later it retaliated, bombing Hebrew University in Jerusalem and killing seven people, including five American students. An ostensible counterterrorism success was fraught with complications on every level.

Since Israel was founded in 1948, it has fought Palestinian terrorists, Jewish extremists, and the Lebanese Hizballah. I set out to write A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism because I believe that Israel’s experiences, both for better and for worse, offer many lessons to other countries in their own struggles against terrorism.

One lesson highlighted on page 99 of my book is how aggressive counterterrorism measures, in this case arrests of Hamas operatives in the late 1980s, can devastate a group. This simple fact is underappreciated – although many of terrorism’s roots are political, if a group’s leaders are hit hard, the group as a whole becomes dysfunctional. Hamas’ ability to strike plummeted, even though it could draw on deep wellsprings of anger within Palestinian society.

Second, p. 99 reveals how terrorist groups adapt. Rather than collapse after its operatives when to jail, Hamas exploited prisons, using them as a place to indoctrinate other prisoners and organize its members, emerging stronger in the end. Hamas also learned how to organize itself into secretive cells and otherwise become a far harder nut for Israeli intelligence to crack.

A final lesson that appears on p. 99 is how the Oslo peace process, which in 1993 seemed close to fruition, undermined terrorism. When hopes for peace were high, many Palestinians saw violence against Israel as counterproductive, as it made a Palestinian state that much less likely. Sadly, as peace talks stagnated, support for violence grew, leading to more attacks and creating a cycle whereby violence set back negotiations, which in turn begat more violence.

Learn more about A High Price at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven A. Barnes's "Death and Redemption"

Steven A. Barnes is associate professor of history and director of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Mason University.  He is part of the group behind the Russian History Blog.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Death and Redemption is part of a discussion of identities in the 1930s Gulag, the Soviet Union’s forced labor system. Once formerly secret Soviet archives opened, we learned that at least 20 percent of the Gulag population was released every year. At the same time, as we have long known, millions died in the Gulag. The book attempts to explore if and how Soviet authorities determined who would be released from and who would die in the Gulag. An important factor in answering that question is the differential treatment of Gulag prisoners according to their identity as understood by Gulag officials. In the Gulag, an informal yet powerful categorization matrix operated based on who a prisoner had been prior to their arrival in camps (that is, their gender, the crime they had allegedly committed, their ethnicity, etc.) and whom they had become after arrival (that is, according to their labor productivity, their behavior in the camps, the state of their health, etc.). One’s position in that categorization matrix was strongly correlated with survival until release from the Gulag. Different axes in the matrix determined everything from the length of the prisoners’ terms of detention, the remoteness and climatic extremes of their place of detention, the amount food they would receive to whether a prisoner would be released early, on-time, or would be charged for a new crime to continue their detention.

Page 99 considers just one aspect of that categorization matrix, looking at the role that gender identity played in the fates of women prisoners. As I write on that page, “Women had their own special place in the Gulag’s identity universe. They were treated as remedial subjects, officially required to work on par with men, but nonetheless subjected to cruelty specifically due to their gender. In the early 1930s, women appeared in a position similar to the national minorities. That is, they were considered to be a group in need of remedial instruction, although their cultural level was generally low due to their oppression in the tsarist era; special attention was generally low due to their oppression in the tsarist era; special attention was required to raise the cultural level of women so they could take their rightful place in Soviet society.” So, women were by definition unfit for Soviet society until they could shake off the deleterious impacts of pre-revolutionary patriarchal oppression. Labor in the Gulag was supposedly the way to enable that transition. Obviously, reality was quite different.

Finally, the page shows how women creatively struggled to maintain their social lives in the conditions of gender separation (even if that separation was never as complete as Gulag authorities wished it to be. “Consider, for example, Catholics in the camps. Since the church only allowed men to serve in the priesthood, the separation of Catholic women from Catholic men denied these women access to the sacraments. While men could find many corners in the camps invisible to the prying eyes of the state to practice their beliefs, women could not. Mass was celebrated in the barracks, mine shafts, and forests whenever the guards had been drawn away. But women did find their own methods to practice their religion. In some camps, where men were nearby, 'Catholic women would write down their sins on a piece of paper or tree bark with a number, which would be smuggled to their priests on the men’s side. The priests would go along the fence and silently dispense absolution to the women, who held up their fingers to identify themselves, and smuggle penances back to them.'” [The quotation comes from Christopher Lawrence Zugger, The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001) 202.]

Learn more about Death and Redemption at the Princeton University Press website, and visit the Russian History Blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian D. Behnken's "Fighting Their Own Battles"

Brian D. Behnken is assistant professor in the department of history and the U.S. Latino/a studies program at Iowa State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Fighting Their Own Battles is part of the concluding section of the third chapter. It comes after a discussion of the Mexican American and African American civil rights struggles of the early 1960s and offers analysis on black-brown relations at that time. My page 99 largely confirms the Ford Madox Ford thesis.

Throughout the book I not only detail the key events of both civil rights movements, but also explain why these two communities failed to unite their respective freedom struggles. The key reasons why both groups fought their own battles include a perception that they were culturally dissimilar, class tensions, organizational differences, and geographical distance. Most importantly, racial prejudices hampered attempts to build a united movement. In particular, Mexican Americans attempted to position themselves as white people to avoid segregation, which frustrated unity with blacks.

Here is what Page 99 and a small portion of Page 100 have to say:

….This case confirms that white racial positioning still served as a tool in the Mexican American quest for rights. It further shows one reason why blacks and Mexican Americans did not unite.

Like PASO [the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations], LULAC [the League of United Latin American Citizens] continued to promote the whiteness strategy. In a letter of May 1963 to the TGNC [Texas Good Neighbor Commission], Texas regional governor William Bonilla complained about segregation at a Texas resort. In a pamphlet, the resort made clear, "No Latin Americans or Colored People [Are] Accepted." Bonilla protested the "attitude" of people who would explicitly state that "no Latin Americans are allowed." As in the 1950s, Bonilla indicated that use of the words "colored" and "Latin American" in the same sentence constituted the real problem. If it could not repair this particular situation, Bonilla implied, then the TGNC had failed. The commission's Frank Kelley then wrote to remind the resort’s owners that in Texas "the Latin race is a purely white race." This example again demonstrates that Mexican Americans continued to appeal to the government for support. It also shows that LULACers still promoted whiteness as a method of fighting for Mexican American rights.

The objectives of African Americans and Mexican Americans also paradoxically contributed to disunity. The basic goals of each group appeared identical; to end discrimination, secure rights, eradicate poverty. For many blacks and Mexican Americans, pickets, sit-ins, and political activism resembled each other. In fact, the two groups used similar tactics, although the contexts differed….So each group had similar goals and tactics, but the overall emphasis of each movement differed. This contributed to the lack of African American/Mexican American unity.

Politics also created divisions between Mexican Americans and African Americans. In previous decades, Mexican American leaders had worked diligently to nurture a close working relationship with state leaders, but their endorsement of Price Daniel over John Connally soured this relationship. In the 1960s African Americans saw a much more productive future with the segregationist Daniel out of office and a governor like Connally in the State House. Because of black support, and because JFK's assassination convinced many whites to look more favorably upon black civil rights, black Texans received more state support. Thus, a transformation took place in the Texas government as African Americans became the beneficiaries of state support while Mexican Americans received more hostile treatment. The evolution of the government's role in minority communities served to once again divide the movements. Blacks and Mexican Americans ultimately found themselves in competition for state support, not in cooperation.

What Page 99 leaves out are the instances of black-brown collaboration that occurred throughout the era. For instance, only a handful of pages before Page 99 I detail the legendary filibuster of state senator Henry B. Gonzalez, who railed against anti-integration legislation proposed by the state House in 1957. He was broadly supported by the African American community. The following chapter explores the Mexican American "Minimum Wage March" of 1966, which blacks also supported. And Chapter 5 examines ecumenical activism in Texas, a movement that attempted to bring blacks, whites, and browns together to fight for voting rights, antipoverty aid, and integrated neighborhoods. Thus while Page 99 captures several of the main causes of African American and Mexican American disunity, it misses the instances of cooperation discussed elsewhere in Fighting Their Own Battles.

Learn more about Fighting Their Own Battles at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue