2013 Virginia Festival of the Book: Christianity

Historian Robert Louis Wilken gave a presentation about his most recent book, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity, at the 2013 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville on March 22.

The book festival's web site offers this biographical note on Wilken:

Robert Wilken, author of The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity Emeritus. He taught at UVa from 1985 to 2009 and is the author of many books, including The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought, and The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. He is also the editor of The Church's Bible, a series of commentaries based on writings of the church fathers.

Speaking to a packed auditorium in the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections on the grounds of the University of Virginia, Wilken gave an engaging and entertaining lecture that spanned topics from apostolic succession to Christianity's intellectual confrontation with Islam to the necessity of bishops for the survival of the church (taking a dig at Garry Wills for asking "Why priests?" in a book of that name).

Wilken explained that he wanted the book to include a full range of the Christian communities from the first 1,000 years of the church, including the Syriac churches of the Middle East, the Greek churches that expanded into Slavic lands, and the Latin church based in Rome, with stops along the way among the Coptic churches of Egypt and Christian churches farther south in Nubia (Sudan) and Ethiopia. He said that he wanted to keep the chapters short for readability's sake and, for the same reason, decided not to include footnotes. The book, he noted, is meant for general audiences, not academic readers.

A video of Wilken's complete remarks, including a question-and-answer session with the audience, is here:

The program on "Christianity: The First Thousand Years" was hosted by the St. Anselm Institute for Catholic Thought, St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, and the Center for Christian Study.

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2013 Virginia Festival of the Book: Eisenhower

Two veteran journalists-turned-biographers spoke at the Virginia Festival of the Book on Friday to talk about their recent books about President Dwight Eisenhower and his administration.

The book festival's web site offers background notes on the speakers for the panel entitled "Eisenhower: The Presidency." First, Evan Thomas, who

was a writer and editor at Time and Newsweek magazines for 33 years. There he wrote more than 100 cover stories and won a National Magazine award. He is the author of 8 books, including 2 New York Times best sellers. He teaches writing and journalism at Princeton University.

and also Jeffrey Frank, who

was a senior editor at the New Yorker, the deputy editor of the Washington Post's Outlook section, and is the author of four novels, including the Washington Trilogy

The moderator of the panel was journalist and author Earl Swift, whom I interviewed last year at the book festival about his history of the interstate highway system, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.

Evan Thomas discussed Ike's Bluff: Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World, which focuses largely on foreign policy but also addresses Eisenhower's personality -- warm on the outside, cold as steel on the inside -- and his way of working with other government officials.

Here is video of Thomas's opening remarks:

For his part, Jeffrey Frank discussed Ike & Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage, which looks into Eisenhower's relationship with his vice-president and eventual successor, Richard Nixon.

Here is the video of Frank talking about Ike & Dick:

The near-simultaneous publication of books about Ike by Evan Thomas and Jeffrey Frank suggests that Eisenhower's presidency is undergoing a historical reassessment, just as Calvin Coolidge's administration is getting a similar treatment.

The panel on Eisenhower's presidency took place on the upper level of the University of Virginia Bookstore, overlooking the bustling commerce on the ground floor.

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2013 Virginia Festival of the Book: Locavores

Two local authors spoke on March 21 at the Jefferson Madison Regional Library on the topic "Locavore: Hunting and Eating Locally."

Their discussion was part of the 19th Virginia Festival of the Book, which started Wednesday and ends Sunday.

The speakers were, according to the book festival's web site,

Pam Dawling, author of Sustainable Market Farming: Intensive Vegetable Production on a Few Acres, [who] also writes for Growing for Market magazine. For 20 years, she has grown vegetables at Twin Oaks Community in central Virginia, feeding a hundred people.

and

Jackson Landers, author of Eating Aliens and The Beginner's Guide to Hunting Deer for Food, [who] teaches hunting workshops across the U.S., has been featured in the Huffington Post and the New York Times, and is the subject of a documentary entitled Close to the Bone. He lives in Virginia.

The entire discussion was captured on video:

Dawling spoke first about gardening and growing vegetables in an economical, efficient, and sustainable fashion.

Landers followed, explaining how the "blood footprint" of hunting deer for food is smaller than the blood footprint of tofu, which, because it involves large-scale agriculture in the growing of soybeans, necessarily results in the deaths of many small animals -- something that vegans may want to think about the next time they fry up a tofuburger.

He also provided the audience with some entertaining stories of hunting pigeons in New York's Central Park and explained that all of the odd species he has killed and eaten "taste like chicken, beef, or pork."

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Sole Booklength Biography of SecDef Nominee Chuck Hagel Leaves Much to Be Desired

Today's confirmation hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee to review President Obama's nomination of former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel as the new Secretary of Defense is drawing plenty of attention from the press and public alike.

Outside of Nebraska and rarefied policy-wonk circles, most Americans are not familiar with Hagel or his career. Consequently, they are looking for information about him so that they can make up their own minds about his qualifications to be the successor to Leon Panetta.

Some will turn to their local libraries or book shops to find a biography of Hagel. They will find there is just one available: Charlyne Berens' 2006 book, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward (University of Nebraska Press), scheduled to be published by Bison Books in paperback this year on July 1 (a publication date that may, given the current circumstances, be moved up).

Berens, described on the book's jacket flap as a professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, wrote this fawning, uncritical biography of her state's then-senior senator during a period in which Hagel was being widely discussed as a potential Republican presidential candidate for 2008. Ultimately, Hagel decided against a run – the nomination went instead to his fellow Vietnam veteran, John McCain – but Berens' book is little more than a brief for supporters of a draft-Hagel movement.


Comic relief
Sadly, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward, despite being brisk and breezy, reads like a book-length answer to a job interviewer's question: “What would you say are your shortcomings?”, with the reply being, “I work too hard and give too much money to charity.”

Relying on interviews with Hagel's family members, friends, and political colleagues, there is not an unkind word said about him – and even the few (slightly) negative comments are spun positively.

Berens is the kind of biographer who seeks out early mentors of her subject who are prone to say things like, what he lacked in raw talent he made up in scrappiness.

That is not a direct quotation, but this (p. 18) is:

Hagel played football and basketball and went out for track. He was on student council and in the honor society as well as in Sodality, a Catholic young people's organization. "He was a kid you never could keep busy because he was so busy," his football coach Dean Soulliere, now retired, said.

And this, from the next page:

Anything he lacked in athletic ability he made up in effort. For instance, [younger brother] Tom Hagel said Chuck really didn't have a lot of talent in basketball, but he wanted to play so badly that he just drove himself until he made the team. "He was kind of the comic relief in some games,' Tom recalls, 'moderately good, at best, but just entirely focused on it."

Slapdash hagiography
It is hard to begrudge Hagel's success in the armed services (a decorated infantryman, with two Purple Hearts to his credit), business (he built up a multimillion-dollar fortune by investing his life savings in the nascent cell phone industry), philanthropy (he rescued the USO from near bankruptcy in the 1980s), and politics (he defeated a popular sitting governor in the 1996 U.S. Senate race, having never run for office before). But Berens writes about Hagel as if he were an angel. This is a Hagel hagiography entirely lacking academic detachment.

The book is also a slapdash effort that should embarrass both the academic press that published it and the professor who wrote it.

For instance, in discussing Hagel's first first major assignment in the U.S. Army, Berens writes on page 28:

So he was sent to Fort Ord, California, and the White Sands Missile Range. He was nearly twenty-one years old, and it was the first time he had seen the ocean. It was only the second time he'd been out of Nebraska; the first time was for basic training at Fort Bliss.

Yet just a few pages earlier, Berens quotes Hagel as saying that, as a teenager, “I spent way too much time with my buddies, driving up to Yankton, South Dakota,” to meet coeds and drink in a state with a lower drinking age than Nebraska's (p. 23). And two paragraphs later on the same page, Berens reports that Hagel had spent a year in Minneapolis, Minnesota, attending the Brown Institute of Radio and Television, where he also worked several jobs – all this before he began his military service.

Then, much deeper into the book, in a discussion of environmental policy and legislation, Berens explains that the Kyoto Protocol (on climate change) “would have required industrial plants – but not automobile manufacturers – to cut pollution from burning fossil fuels to 2000 levels by 2010” (p. 104). Two pages later, Berens describes a bill that Hagel opposed as one that “would have required U.S. industrial plants – but not auto manufacturers – to cut pollution from burning fossil fuels to 2000 levels by 2010.” The only difference is “automobile” becomes “auto.”


Amateurish
This is amateurish stuff, but Berens worst sin, in terms of academic rigor, may be the way she sources her quotations and paraphrases. Her end notes are all in this form: “Omaha World-Herald, August 16, 1999” or “Washington Post, November 15, 2004” – no page numbers, no article titles, no author bylines. If a high-school student turned in a term paper with that kind of format, he would barely get a passing grade. For a college professor to do it in a book published by a university press is simply horrifying.

All those criticisms aside, there are some interesting tidbits found within the text.

Who knew, for instance, that in the early 1990s, before he returned to Nebraska after two decades as a Washington insider, Republican activists tried to recruit Hagel to run for governor of Virginia? He was, Berens reports, “mildly interested but never pursued the option” (p. 72).

It is also largely forgotten that Hagel was talked about as a potential vice-presidential candidate for George W. Bush as early as 1999, and also as a possible running mate (crossing party lines) for John Kerry in 2004.

With a certain prescient irony, Berens recounts that it would be “safe to say Hagel never seriously considered pursuing a spot on the ticket with Kerry. But the suggestions he might serve in a Kerry cabinet were a different matter. 'I'd see that in a different light,' Hagel said in May 2004.”

Continuing, she writes,

Of course, he added, if he, a Republican, were to serve s a member of a Democratic president's cabinet, that would eliminate any possibility he could ever run for president himself. "I'd have to think about that," Hagel said. "Would it be worth it to give up that option" to serve as secretary of state or defense in a Kerry cabinet? Only if he were convinced the position would allow him to make a real difference, he said. As things turned out, the question was moot.

As things turned out, it was only temporarily moot.

Hagel chose not to run for re-election in 2008, fulfilling a promise he had made to voters in 1996 that he would serve just two terms. He went on to become chairman of the Atlantic Council of the United States, in keeping with his lifelong interest in international affairs. And on January 7, 2013, Republican war veteran Chuck Hagel was nominated for Secretary of Defense by a Democratic president.

Will this foreclose future plans for the now-66-year-old Hagel to run for President himself? That remains to be seen but one can only hope that, if that day comes, a better, more analytical biography of him by a less sycophantic author will have been published.  For now, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward is not that book.

(This book review appeared, in slightly different form, on Examiner.com.)

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Author Interview: Arthur Herman on 'Freedom's Forge'

Charlottesville-based historian Arthur Herman is the author of six books, including the Pulitzer-Prize finalist Gandhi & Churchill and the New York Times best-seller How the Scots Invented the Modern World.

Herman’s latest book is Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

Earlier this summer, which by coincidence was on the 68th anniversary of the D-Day landings at Normandy, I met Herman at the Boar’s Head Inn to talk about the book, which he sums up as a story about “releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

Herman pointed out there were two business enterprises in Charlottesville that manufactured products that were critical to the American war effort.


Charlottesville’s war effort
One was Ix Mills, located where the Frank Ix building still stands south of downtown.

During the war, he said, Ix Mills “moved from making commercial textiles to making parachute cloth. They really became the center of the parachute cloth making for the Second World War.”

The soldiers “who jumped on D-Day” as portrayed in Stephen Spielberg’s film, Saving Private Ryan, as well as the “airmen who had to jump out over Germany and at sea during the Second World War were using Charlottesville-produced parachutes.”

Historian Arthur Herman

The other Charlottesville company that Herman discovered during his research was Southern Welding, which “made various kinds of iron piping and steel tubing. During the war, they shifted to making the steel tubing for aircraft, to contain all the electric lines and so on in B-24s and B-25s. What they also did, and their real breakthrough, is they developed the parts for arrester gear on navy aircraft carriers.”

The arrester gear allowed planes to land on the carriers without being pulled apart by a braking mechanism.

“Southern Welding, here in Charlottesville, developed the parts and manufactured the parts that went on aircraft carriers all across the Pacific. In fact, at one point, Charlottesville-made arrester gear and tailhook gear was on 43 separate aircraft carriers during the Second World War.”


Remembering D-Day
When Herman thinks about D-Day, in particular, he focuses on two things.

“First of all,” he explained, D-Day was about more than amassing military personnel “but also amassing a vast industrial effort.”

Two thirds of the landing craft and sea-going vessels used on D-Day were produced in American factories, he said, and “it’s a tribute not just to the bravery of our armed forces but also to the huge logistical possibilities that American industry could generate a landing and an enterprise of the sort that the world had never seen.”

The second thing about D-Day that comes to Herman’s mind is that “the very first Americans to get news that the landings were successful were the people working the night shifts in the factories on the East Coast.”

At the Bethlehem Shipyard in Sparrow’s Point in Baltimore, he recalled, “work stopped and everybody sank to their knees and said the Lord’s Prayer as they got the news.”

That, he said, is “really fitting, that the people who produced the tools that made that victory possible were the very first to learn that what they had done, and what they had contributed to, had been a success.”

Stated succinctly, the theme of Freedom’s Forge, is that the growth of industry during World War II was “far from being a kind of Washington, D.C.[-based], bureaucrat-driven production effort” and that, he explained, “what [it] really was about was releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

More widely, he said, the success of America’s wartime industrial production effort came “in spite of” government-imposed rationing and wage and price controls.

“The rationing that everybody remembers,” he pointed out, was the result of “government controls over the consumption of civilian goods.”


‘Minimal control’
For industrial goods needed by the military – airplanes, ships, weapons, and Jeeps – came about because, even before Pearl Harbor “the military learned it was best to let business and manufacturers handle it themselves,” and that it should be decentralized, Herman said.

“They learned that minimal control from Washington -- or even from the military services -- usually ended up getting products on time,” he explained, and “at a continually lower cost as well.”

That, he said, “was really the key ingredient in the whole wartime production effort,” the fact “that the manufacturers and producers found ways to constantly roll the costs down, so it was a huge boon not just for the American military, really giving us the tools to win World War II, but it was also a huge boon to American business and industry because they became leaner, more efficient operating organizations as a result of the wartime effort.”

The business executives and industrialists who are portrayed in Herman’s book – former General Motors president William Knudsen, road- and ship-builder (and health insurance pioneer) Henry Kaiser, Ford Motor Company’s Charles Sorensen, and others – are larger-than-life characters who seem to spring from the pages of an Ayn Rand novel, an assessment with which Herman agrees.


‘Creativity of the human mind’
“What Ayn Rand understood,” he said, “and one of the lessons that you get from her work, which is in some ways is reflected in this book, is that what the arsenal of democracy was really all about wasn’t ships and tanks and planes, any more than national wealth or an economy is about oil wells and gold mines and factories and industrial output or goods and services.”

Rather, he explained, “what it’s really about is creativity. It’s about the creativity of the human mind. It’s about vision. It’s about leadership and problem-solving.”

Throughout its history, he noted, American business has “been really at the forefront of all of those aspects. That’s what drives American business. That’s what drives American civilization.”

What Herman “wanted to chronicle is just how this episode in our history, a crucial moment in world history as well as for the United States, really reflected all of those kinds of powerful virtues that someone like Ayn Rand realized were at work in a free market economy.”

Those characteristics, he said, are “clearly on show in people like Bill Knudsen, the man [whom] Roosevelt brought to construct a system by which you could get this bottoms-up, free-market, private-sector drive to production,” as well as “the other characters [readers will] meet in the book.”

Herman’s previous books, he explained, were “on topics as various as how the Scots invented the modern world and the contribution of the Scottish enlightenment to modern civilization.”

He also wrote a book on the British navy, called To Rule the Waves. Herman explained that “Freedom’s Forge is in some ways an outgrowth” of the research on that earlier book, as he “became more and more interested in the relationship between economics and modern warfare and the links between those two things.”

‘Innate productive power’
What Freedom’s Forge does, he said, is “turn the whole story of how the United States got ready for World War II on its head.” The book argues that, “far from being a kind of Washington, D.C., [led], bureaucrat-driven production effort, what this really was about was releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

Herman’s thesis seems counterintuitive to people whose idea of economics during the Second World War is limited to rationing of sugar, butter, gasoline, and automobile tires.

The war production effort, Herman asserts, succeeded “in spite of” that kind of centralized control, noting that “the rationing that everybody who lived through that period remembers” was about “government controls over the consumption of civilian goods.”

The war production effort began even before Pearl Harbor, “starting in the summer of 1940,” Herman said, and “what the military learned was it was best to let business and manufacturers handle it themselves.”

The War Department, he explained, and President Roosevelt himself “learned that minimal control from Washington or even from the military services usually ended up getting products on time -- getting the tanks and planes and ships built -- at a continually lower cost as well”

The “key ingredient” of wartime production, Herman said, “is that the manufacturers and producers found ways to constantly roll the costs down, so it was a huge boon not just for the American military, giving us the tools to win World War II, but it was also a huge boon to American business and industry because they became leaner, more efficient operating organizations as a result of the wartime effort.”

Quirky and surprising
While doing his research, Herman came across a few quirky stories and surprising facts.

“One that will completely surprise people when they read the book,” he said, “because it’s so at variance from our usual textbook image” that the United States was caught off-guard by the Pearl Harbor attack.

In fact, “the war production effort was well underway well before Pearl Harbor,” Herman pointed out.

“As I explain in the book, it really began in the summer of 1940 when Roosevelt realized war is going to come” and that he had to get the country ready for it,” so FDR called “Bill Knudsen, president of General Motors, and says, how do I do it?”

With the system that Knudsen put in place, with Roosevelt’s blessing, Herman continued, “far from being caught off guard, we had gone from a standing start to a wartime production that was fast approaching that of Hitler’s Germany. A lot of people don’t realize that but this is in fact what American industry could do.”

There was a second surprise that Herman discovered.

“The most interesting statistic, stunning statistic that came out of my research was that in 1942, as this war production effort is going on, the number of Americans killed or injured in war-related industries surpassed the number of Americans in uniform killed and wounded in action in the war by a factor of 20 to 1,” he said.

The civilian sector of “what we call the Greatest Generation were [not] just sitting at home or just comfortably handling jobs while people in uniform were out risking their lives at sea and on land and in the air,” he said.

To the contrary, he explained, war production was “incredibly dangerous work. It involved enormous sacrifice from lots of people, including business executives. One hundred eighty-nine General Motors senior executives died on the job during the war.”

Summing up, Herman said that what is “really the thesis of the book” is that “this was a huge effort [that] was made possible by the productive forces that are part of a free-market American economy,” and not by any centralized planning devised in the Pentagon or the Washington bureaucracy.

The complete interview with Arthur Herman, author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, is available as a podcast on Bearing Drift radio’s “The Score.”

This article is based on three separately published excerpts from the interview, which appeared on Examiner.com on June 6, July 1, and September 2, 2012.

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Author Interview: Ronald Kessler on 'In the President's Secret Service'

An unexpected story from an unexpected place -- Cartageña, Colombia -- has dominated the nation's attention over the past few days.  It has been the subject of congressional hearings and newspaper headlines.  Last night, in fact, all three major broadcast networks led their evening news programs with the story.

The headlines sum up the tale:  "New Evidence Cited in Secret Service Prostitution Inquiry" (New York Times); "Secret Service prostitution scandal demands tough, complete investigation" (New York Daily News); "Secret Service scandal: An indication of broader organizational problems?" (Washington Post); "Bigger scandal in Latin America than US secret service: US drug hunger" (Christian Science Monitor); and "Report: Secret Service Bragged to Hookers About Protecting Obama" (The Atlantic Wire).

Ronald Kessler

Created by Abraham Lincoln to investigate currency counterfeiting (signing the authorizing legislation on the day of his assassination), the U.S. Secret Service remained part of the Department of the Treasury until 2003, when it became part of the new Department of Homeland Security. It became the protective security force for the President after William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.

According to Sean Hannity of Fox News, Ronald Kessler broke the Colombia prostitution story.

Kessler is the author of several best-selling books on law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service. In February 2011, I interviewed Kessler about his 2009 book, In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect, and asked him why he wrote it and what surprises he found in his research.  That book came out in paperback in 2010 and is also available in a Kindle edition.

‘Startling’ revelations
Kessler “wanted to find out what the presidents are really like and what better way [to do that] than to interview Secret Service agents,” he explained, noting that members of the Secret Service “are very secretive, even more secretive than the FBI or the CIA.”

Still, over more than forty years as a journalist, Kessler had developed sources within the agency and he was able to uncover information that was “pretty startling.”

His book goes back to the Eisenhower years but really picks up during the Johnson administration.

Lyndon Johnson, he said, “was totally out of control, a real maniac. He would sit on the toilet and defecate in front of aides.” During press conferences on his Texas ranch that included female journalists, he would “urinate in front of them.”

In addition to these intimidating actions, Kessler noted, Johnson “would have sex with his secretaries, even in the Oval Office” while “the press covered it up at the time.”

Phony and genuine

Jimmy Carter, he said, “was known as the phoniest president by the Secret Service. He would pretend to carry his own luggage in front of the cameras but actually the luggage was empty.”

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, “was genuine,” Kessler said, and he “liked to schmooze with the agents.”

Captains of Air Force One during the Reagan administration told Kessler that “every time Reagan got into the plane he would come into the cockpit and greet the captain. Jimmy Carter did that once in his whole four-year term.”

‘Bizarre tale’ of Bush 41
Among the more surprising tidbits that Kessler picked up was a “bizarre tale” from the George H.W. Bush administration.

President Bush was visiting Enid, Oklahoma, Kessler explained, and the Secret Service followed its normal protocol by checking with local law enforcement about any kind of threats that might have surfaced in the vicinity.

The local police “said there’s this psychic in town who has been incredibly reliable in the past and has actually led us to bodies of murder victims.”

This psychic, they said, had had a vision that Bush was going to be assassinated by a sniper at an overpass when he came to Enid.

Although they found it embarrassing to do so, the Secret Service followed up with the psychic and asked her if she had any other details.

To their surprise, Kessler recounted, she knew where the limousine that would transport the President was housed, even naming the precise hangar at a nearby Air Force base.

She also predicted that “when Bush gets out of the plane, he’s going to be wearing a sport jacket.”

The Secret Service agents thought “that was crazy” because the President would “be wearing a suit,” as Bush, a stickler for formality, always did.

But “sure enough,” Kessler continued, “when he got out of the plane, he was wearing a sport jacket. As a result of that, they changed the motorcade route so it would not go under any overpass and, of course, he was safe -- and he’s reading about it for the first time in this book.”

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Author Interview: Richard Epstein on his new book, ‘Design for Liberty’

Already well-known for such works as Principles For A Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty With The Common Good, How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution, and a widely used legal textbook on torts, New York University law professor Richard A. Epstein has just published Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law (Harvard University Press, 2011).

At a recent Cato Institute event, Professor Epstein spoke to me about his new book and his next project, a book about classical liberalism and constitutional law.

Design for Liberty, he said, differs from his previous books in that “it’s a little bit more philosophical. It spends much more time talking directly about public administration, which I have not talked about much in previous books.”

Moreover, Epstein added, it reflects his “newfound interest in public administrative law, which is usually missing from the earlier works, and of course, it has material which I could never have covered earlier because things like the Dodd-Frank [banking] statute and the current health-care bill are creatures of the last year or so and therefore I never spoke about them before.”

First and second order rules
Digging further beneath the surface, Epstein pointed out that his new book contains “a fairly detailed explanation of first and second order rules, a sort of technical subject,” which involves the question of “when is it that you have to have to resort to reasonableness rules?”

Richard Epstein

That happens, he said, when “it turns out that hard-line rules don’t work and what you have to do in order to make the rule of law work is to understand that the mere fact that there’s a reasonableness in some legal system doesn’t disqualify from the rule of the law.”

“On the other hand,” he argued, “you can’t let reasonableness determinations overwhelm the whole system, so I try to develop protocols to how it is that you separate those things.”

Epstein’s next project will be what he describes as “a very long book” with the working title “The Classical Liberal Constitution.”

That book, he said, is “about 90 percent done.”

Progressive vs. classical liberal
In it, Epstein “takes the fundamental insights that I’ve developed over the years and basically gives a comprehensive analysis of every major constitutional area with a hell of a lot of compression, but it starts with basic theories of constitutional interpretation. It talks about the conflict between the progressive and the classical liberal visions. Those,” he said, “are things I’ve talked about before.”

Epstein’s forthcoming book “goes through systematically the judicial, the executive, and legislative branches, and then does all the various threads of individual rights, each getting a chapter.”

Unlike Design for Liberty, “which is slim,” The Classical Liberal Constitution “will be fat,” he said, with a likely publication date in late 2012 or early 2013.

“It’s been a book that’s been in the making for many years now,” Epstein explained. “It’s an effort to give a comprehensive way in which, if you take the positions that I do, various cases and various issues have to come out.”

The Classical Liberal Constitution will have “some stuff on takings, but that’s not the main focus on it. It has things on freedom of religion and executive power and foreign affairs and so forth.”

Epstein concedes that his “knowledge base is not uniform across all these areas but what makes it possible to do this project is that the Supreme Court doctrine generally tends to be comprised in a relatively few key cases.”

Consequently, “if you have a strong theory, and you pick the right cases to read, you can write the kind of book that I’m talking about.”

Eminent domain
Epstein also spoke with me about an issue in the news – eminent domain reform.

Across the country over the past few years, state legislatures have been considering and passing laws in reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), which stated that governments could use eminent domain to take property from one private owner and give it to another private owner, if the transfer of property results in a “public purpose” such as more jobs or more tax revenues.

In a scathing dissent in that case, Justice Clarence Thomas memorably wrote:

“Allowing the government to take property solely for public purposes is bad enough, but extending the concept of public purpose to encompass any economically beneficial goal guarantees that these losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities. Those communities are not only systematically less likely to put their lands to the highest and best social use, but are also the least politically powerful.”

Fourteen years earlier, there had been a striking moment in then-Judge Thomas’s confirmation hearings when then-Senator Joseph Biden held up a book called Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, which Epstein wrote, and asked Thomas, essentially, if he believed what was in it.

That dramatic moment thrust legal scholar Richard Epstein into the public consciousness as the pre-eminent legal advocate for protecting private property against the intrusions of government. That is why asked him about the legal environment in the post-Kelo years and the affect that might have on future legislative attempts to protect against eminent domain abuse.

“No one is satisfied,” he said, with how the reactions to Kelo have played out over the past six years.

“This is the basic breakdown,” Epstein explained. “There are a few states which have fairly severe changes, some of them judicially, some otherwise. Michigan and Ohio, for example, are two.”

In addition, “many states have cosmetic changes, which require administrators to think more deeply before they do terrible things,” he pointed out, “and some states have relatively nominal requirements.”

Among these various regimes, he explained further, “the real difference turns out not to be in the law, it turns out to be in the practice.”

The reason is, he said, is that “once the Kelo situation came down, it raised the political cost to anybody who now wants to engage in taking of private property, particularly if it turns out to be a residential home.”

Epstein recalled a 1984 Supreme Court decision, Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, with a majority opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who also wrote the principal dissent in Kelo.

Midkiff, Epstein explained, “was hugely capacious, but it didn’t raise any hackles, because what was being condemned was a non-possessory interest.” It involved a “landlord’s interest in property” rented to tenants “and people, frankly, didn’t care [because] ‘these guys are landlords; they’re interested in money; we’ll give them a different stream of money.’”

Unlike Midkiff, he noted, “Kelo threw people off their property. And it threw them off their property for no reason at all.”

A person doesn’t “have to be a genius,” Professor Epstein said, “to figure out that when somebody’s thrown out of their house, which is ripped down by a pitchfork, you’d better have a very powerful justification for doing that.”

In Kelo, the justification was “real estate development, which is a sort of a bad end anyhow, but worse than that,” he continued, “there was no real estate development that required the use of that land.”

Consequently, Kelo “was an exercise in a dubious end and a crazy set of means. The two of those things together turned out to be really explosive and so now, both on the ends chosen and the means used to achieve it, there’s more scrutiny, which takes place as sort of an automatic administrative matter.”

Whether this sort of political scrutiny of local administrators is a sufficient brake on eminent domain abuse and a substitute for statutory or constitutional guarantees is a question that legislators will continue to ask.

(This article is adapted from two previous pieces that appeared on Examiner.com.)

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What Was Christmas Like in 1941? A Book Review

Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941, by Stanley Weintraub. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, November 1, 2011. 224 pp., $24.00.

“Pearl Harbor Christmas” may sound like the title of a 1960s-era TV holiday spectacular set in Hawaii, in which Bing Crosby had sung a duet of “Mele Kalikimaka” with Rosemary Clooney.

It’s not.

It is actually a tightly-packed but readable account of the “12 days of Christmas” beginning two weeks after the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor (Sunday, December 21 to Thursday, January 1). It begins with the arrival of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington for talks with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and ends with the ceremonial signing of the “Joint Declaration of War Aims” by representatives of the nations allied against the Axis Powers.

In between, author Stanley Weintraub takes his readers on a day-by-day (sometimes hour-by-hour) account of the political, diplomatic, and military events of that crucial week and a half. He circles the globe, drawing on public documents, letters, and diaries from not just the United States and Britain but also from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaya, Singapore, Australia, France, North Africa, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan.

I picked up Pearl Harbor Christmas by chance at a local bookstore and bought it on a whim, thinking that it primarily would focus on the home front in the weeks following the Pearl Harbor attack and how Americans adjusted their holiday celebrations to the new realities of having been thrust into war.

The book has some of that, and Weintraub is able to draw an adequate picture of what the Christmas season of 1941 was like.

Wartime black-out rules had not yet dimmed Christmas lights, and Christmas trees themselves, Wientraub says, “were plentiful, seldom priced at more than a dollar or two.” Rockefeller Center presented its annual Christmas show, featuring the Rockettes, and people were still reading comic strips and going to the movies.

“The hit book for Christmas giving,” he writes in a prelude, “at a hefty $2.50, was Edna Ferber’s Reconstruction-era romance Saratoga Trunk. For the same price, war turned up distantly yet bombastically in a two-disc set of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, performed by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra.”

Weintraub goes on to list the prices of crates of citrus fruits (“$2.79 at Bloomingdales”) and new cars (“soon to be unobtainable”) for $900. Silk stockings were $1.25 a pair, and nylon stockings – which would also quickly disappear as the fabric was needed for parachutes – were $1.65.

In a clever, parenthetical turn of phrase, he writes about upscale clothing shops:

“Hattie Carnegie’s designer dresses began at $15. The upscale Rogers Peet menswear store offered suits and topcoats from a steep $38. (At recruiting stations nationwide, the army was offering smart khaki garb at no cost whatever to enlistees.)”

The book, however, is mostly about politics, not domestic life.  And the politics and diplomacy that are the focus of Weintraub's research are fascinating in themselves.

Churchill’s extended visit to Washington included bibulous dinners at the White House, a joint press conference with FDR, two visits to local churches (on Christmas and New Year’s Day), a speech to a joint session of Congress, a side-trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament, and the British Prime Minister’s only shared public appearance with the American President, at the annual lighting of the White House Christmas tree.

The account of the Christmas Eve speeches is one of several sections of the book that could have used a better editor’s eye, because Weintraub’s writing is redundant on two facing pages.

On page 80, Weintraub writes that Churchill began his speech with the phrase “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” and then quotes extensively from his remarks, including a passage about “war, raging and soaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and our homes.”

Three paragraphs later, on page 81, Weintraub repeats the passage:

“It was, [Churchill] conceded, ‘a strange Christmas eve,’ with war ‘raging and roaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and homes.’”

This is not an isolated incident of sloppy editing.

In a description of how actor Robert Montgomery – by December 1941 an officer in Naval Intelligence assigned to the White House – set up a map room for the President’s use, Weintraub writes on pages 75-76:

“Space was limited; toilets and sinks were removed from a ladies’ cloakroom in the basement, as Montgomery superintended the conversion of a ladies cloakroom in the basement into a secure information center...”

Similar repetitiveness is found on page 92 (“Rarely seen at religious services at home, Churchill accompanied the President to Foundry Methodist Church…”) and 94 (“Churchill – not a churchgoer at home…”).

Still, these errors, while distracting, do not significantly mar the flow of the story that Weintraub tells, and Pearl Harbor Christmas is a real page-turner as the narration flies from place to place, sometimes describing high politics and sometimes describing the hardscrabble efforts at survival of seamen and grunts.

The book reveals how, simultaneously, the United States was caught unawares by the Japanese attacks in the Pacific, leading to the quick fall of the Philippines under what Weintraub seems to characterize as arrogant and incompetent military leadership of General Douglas MacArthur – but that it was also able to turn on a dime and, within weeks, ramp up its military and industrial operations to meet the needs of facing down hostile enemies in both Europe and the Pacific.

The 12 days of Christmas in 1941 included delicate negotiations about how the war would be pursued. As a direct result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American people were angry and eager to take the war into the Pacific and strike back at the Japanese immediately. Churchill and Roosevelt, however, recognized that the greater threat came from Hitler’s Germany and that the initial focus of the war should be in Europe. Japan would have to wait.

In the course of events, the war was fought on both fronts, but the defeat of Hitler came first, with Japan to fall several months later.

What’s remarkable to see, in that regard, is the predictions made by military and political leaders of that time about how long it would take to bring the war to an end. Not precisely correct, Churchill thought that a frontal invasion of the European continent would occur sometime in 1943, with the war to end by 1944. He was off by a year but, on the general shape the war would take, he was eerily prescient.

The intersection of wartime and Christmastime is a particular focus of Stanley Weintraub's prolific work. He is also the author of Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2002); 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (2007); and General Sherman's Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (2009); as well as General Washington's Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (2007).  Could Christmas in Kandahar be next?  (There is already a song by that name but, so far, no book.)

If one is primarily interested in social history (as I was, when I purchased this book), Pearl Harbor Christmas could turn out to disappoint, because it is primarily about political and military history. In my case, the initial disappointment ended quickly, because the story that Weintraub tells is compelling, with many revealing details about the first weeks of the Second World War that otherwise would be buried in archives and dusty memoirs.

Author Interview: GU philosophy professor Jason Brennan on 'The Ethics of Voting'

“Every day you see the same message: ‘get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote,’” says philosophy professor Jason Brennan.

Jason Brennan

“What if all the sentiments underlying that were just wrong?” he asks. What if they “could be shown to be wrong pretty easily?”

According to Brennan, his new book, The Ethics of Voting, in fact shows those underlying sentiments to be wrong.

Brennan, an assistant professor of business and philosophy at Georgetown University, recently summarized his book at a Cato Institute forum. After his presentation, he spoke with me about what motivated him to write The Ethics of Voting, how the book has been received by academics, and his new research on private behavior and the common good.

Brennan has long been interested in the topic of the ethics of voting.

“Growing up,” he said, “I kept hearing, over and over again, the American civic religion [says] that voting is special, that political participation is special, that serving in the military makes you an especially good person.”

These claims were not satisfying to Brennan, he explained.

“I never found myself gripped by that,” he said. “I always wondered: What were the grounds underlying that? Why did people believe it?”

He also discovered, he continued, that “at the same time, there’s a kind of interesting philosophical question about what you should do in situations where we as a group are doing something bad but that your individual input doesn’t make a difference. That happens a lot in politics.”

Those two different but related things brought him to this topic.

He had read some of the literature about voter behavior but George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan’s 2008 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, provided extra stimulus to write his own book.

“After reading that, I asked myself, suppose he’s right that voters are irrational. What does that mean about what they should do?”

The answer is not simple, he said. One cannot simply say, “Well, if they’re rational they shouldn’t vote, because individual votes don’t make a difference.” Instead, “it’s actually a real philosophical puzzle as to why it would even matter at all [with regard to] what an individual does and why they should vote well or not.”

Caplan’s book, Brennan said, was “like the last straw” in how it “pushed me over the edge to have to write something more about the philosophy behind” the ethics of voting.

Brennan has received feedback from other academic philosophers, as well as from political scientists. Most of it has been positive.

The reaction he has had from philosophers, he said, “has been overwhelmingly very positive. Even if they disagree with the conclusions -- and many of them do -- what they’ve tended to like about it is that it takes on common sense. What it does is start with rather simple, plausible premises and leads to counterintuitive results. Philosophers tend to like that.”

Moreover, he added, “what a lot of philosophers have recognized, too, is that there are just a lot of unfounded assumptions about how politics works and what we should do. At the very least, I’m being a devil’s advocate in challenging” those assumptions, and that challenge makes philosophers “recognize that common sense [claims] about voting need to be justified, if they are justified” at all.

The reaction of political scientists, he said, “has largely been the same,” but faculty in political science departments who do political theory, “which is sort of philosophy but done in political science,” have a tendency “to be more skeptical because they tend to have a much more strongly emotional attachment to democracy than philosophers do.”

Brennan is now conducting new research on how private behavior contributes to the public good, something “that ended up being a major premise even in this book.”

He explained that “we can express civic virtue anywhere: by running a good business that helps people [and] makes them richer, by coming up with inventions, by making art, and so on.”

All these things, he said, help “promote the common good. They’re doing as much good as politics is doing, perhaps even more.”

The practical effect of this for individuals is that, “if you’re a person who is publicly spirited and you want to promote the common good, that doesn’t mean you have to get out of the market and go to the forum,” Brennan explained. “It might instead mean you should stay in the market and work there.”

Giving two prominent examples, Professor Brennan pointed out that “Thomas Edison did a lot more for us with his inventions than he ever would have done as a voter. Michelangelo did a lot more with his art than he ever would have done as a voter.”

He concluded by noting that “private civil society is really important for promoting the common good. If civic virtue is about promoting the common good, then private civil society might be the way to do it.”

Brennan wrote The Ethics of Voting while he taught at Brown University; it was published in April by Princeton University Press.

(An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com on July 31, 2011.)

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Author Interview: Garrett Peck Writes History of Prohibition-Era Washington, D.C.

When Woodrow Wilson left the White House in 1921, he moved to a 12,000-square-foot home in Kalorama, an elevated section of Washington that provided him and his wife with an unobstructed view of the city all the way to the Potomac River.

Moving his household necessitated a special dispensation from Congress because Wilson had a large collection of fine wines and, under the terms of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, the transportation of alcoholic beverages – even within a city, even over a distance of barely a mile – was illegal.

This anecdote is one of many contained in a new book by Garrett Peck, a writer based in Arlington, Virginia, who has a keen interest in local Washington history and the history of alcoholic beverage regulation. (His previous book was called The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet.)

So it was no surprise that the book party celebrating the publication of Peck’s Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t was held at the Woodrow Wilson House, now a museum (in fact, the only presidential museum in the District of Columbia), which still holds one of the largest remaining collections of Prohibition-era wine.

Starting with the ‘Temperance Tour’
Peck explained in an interview that the Wilson house is the final stop on the “Temperance Tour” of Washington that he has led since 2006. This walking tour gave him the idea for his most recent book and also provided him with much of the material for it.

Garrett Peck at Woodrow Wilson House

Using primary source material, including newspaper databases, microfilm, diaries, memoirs, and magazine articles, Peck prepared a chapter “on spec,” which he presented to his eventual publisher, The History Press.

That chapter was called “The Man in the Green Hat,” and it was about George Cassiday, who was the personal bootlegger to Members of Congress during Prohibition.

One he sold the idea for the book, he dived deep into his source material.

“I used a lot of primary material,” he said, such as “the Washington Post online archives. I went to the D.C. Public Library and dug through microforms of different newspapers.”

He discovered that there are “actually a lot of biographies from the 1920s, so I used a lot of those. Probably 90 percent of the book is primary research,” he explained, which included interviews with descendants of some of the key players of the era.

Surprising and unexpected
Three things struck Peck as surprising as he conducted his research.

One was the “size of the brewing industry before Prohibition,” in Washington, he said, “which was huge, and then seeing it just collapse with Prohibition. That was really surprising.”

He also wrote a chapter on African-Americans in Washington during Prohibition.

Nobody, he pointed out, had previously written about that community, “because the press was segregated at the time.”

That lack of coverage had the result, Peck said, that the chapter on Washington’s African-American neighborhoods absorbed “about half of my research time, just trying to come up with an answer to, ‘What did black people think about Prohibition?’”

The difficulty of researching that topic “really surprised me,” he said.

The third surprise he found were the “back-to-back stories of Rufus Lusk and George Cassiday,” which came out in the press “within about a month of each other” in the fall of 1930. Lusk, who founded a real estate records firm that still bears his name, had published a map of Washington showing all the speakeasies in the city, meant to demonstrate how ineffective Prohibition enforcement was.

Cassiday “spilled the beans about bootlegging in Congress” in a series of articles for the Washington Post. That, together with Lusk’s map, Peck explained, “just had a huge impact for the wet cause and helped shift the country towards repeal” of Prohibition, which finally came in December 1933.

3,000 speakeasies
In remarks at his book launch party, Peck noted that prior to Prohibition – which, according to his book, actually began two years earlier in D.C. than in the rest of the country, thanks to the Shepard Act passed in 1917 – there were 300 saloons in the city of Washington. During Prohibition, there were at least 3,000 speakeasies (illegal drinking establishments), an increase by a factor of ten.

D.C. woman putting flask in her boot, 1922

The explosive growth is easy to explain, he said.

It makes sense “from an economic standpoint,” he explained.

“It was an economic opportunity for a lot of people. People still wanted to drink.”

The law of supply and demand meant that, “if there are people who want to drink, there are going to be people to meet that supply.”

According to Peck, “Plenty of people realized, ‘Hey, I can make a good living selling booze to people, whether it’s in my apartment or if I set up a club.’ Here in D.C.,” he explained, speakeasies were located in “a lot of apartments or [in] a room above a business so it looked like it was legit.” Many of these were hidden in plain sight, as shown on the widely-seen map published in 1930 by Rufus Lusk.

Local Prohibition history
While he prefers to “stick with DC” because it’s the city he knows best, Peck acknowledges that Prohibition in Washington, D.C. could be the start of a series of volumes of local history along the lines of “Prohibition in St. Louis,” “Prohibition in Milwaukee,” or “Prohibition in Buffalo.”

“I would certainly encourage historians in those other cities to explore those questions, especially where they know in fact there was a huge Prohibition culture,” he said, adding:

“I think Cleveland could write a story, Detroit could certainly write a story, Boston. Each one could definitely tell its own story about how the mayhem unfolded in their particular city. I would encourage that. I think the History Press would love to see more proposals like that.”

Garrett Peck will be speaking about his new book, Prohibition in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 9, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., at the Arlington Central Library, 1015 N. Quincy Street, in Arlington, Virginia.

Peck also noted that his book is available for purchase in the gift shop of the Woodrow Wilson House and available through on-line booksellers Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

(An earlier, slightly different version of this article originally appeared on Examiner.com in two parts on May 27, 2011.)

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Author Interview: Grove City Political Scientist Paul Kengor on His Latest Book, 'DUPES'

Research in the archives of the Soviet Comintern led Grove City College political scientist Paul Kengor to write his most recent book, DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.

At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Kengor autographed copies of DUPES and his previous book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. (See "Author Interview: Professor Paul Kengor on ‘The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,'" published March 3.)  He also took a few minutes to talk to me about his research.

Collusion
Looking at the Communist International’s files on the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Kengor said, “I got to the very first reel of microfiche and it was obvious” that “there was a very close collusion between the American Communist Party and the Soviet Communist Party,” corroborating the views held by anti-Communists throughout the twentieth century.

“In fact,” Kengor pointed out, “the very first document you get in the microfiche are the comrades in Chicago in September 1919 sending a letter to the comrades in Moscow at the Comintern, saying, basically, ‘We did it, we did it!’”

The document he cites is included in his book, and it celebrates the founding of the Soviet Union by the Communist Party and predicts that “America will be communist soon.” Those who wrote that letter, Kengor said, were “thrilled about this.”

As he continued in his research, he explained, he discovered “an eye opener.”

Cynical, shrewd, conniving
It showed that the Communist Party USA “very carefully, cynically, shrewdly, in a very conniving way, targeted American liberals and progressives for manipulation.”

Kengor was careful to note that “the liberals and progressives weren’t communists.”

They were, however, “also on the Left” and were therefore targeted in “a very deliberate campaign that went on for a long, long time and, I would argue, even to some extent takes place today, where the communists would lie to the liberals and progressives.”

The communists “wouldn’t tell them that they were communists. They very intentionally tried to mislead and manipulate them and with tremendous success, especially among academics (Columbia University, in particular), and also sadly among the religious left, the social-justice religious left,” Kengor said.


‘Biggest suckers of them all’
He added that, “as one veteran investigator of the American communist movement told me for this book, the religious left were the biggest suckers of them all, especially the mainline Protestant denominations.”

Groups like the National Council of Churches, he said, “fell over and over and over again for the wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

Kengor plans to do more research on the churches during the Cold War, and his next project will “probably be a follow up to DUPES -- but I need to people need to buy DUPES for me to have the incentive to follow it up.”

‘Sad state’ of reading
The author then took an opportunity to lament the current state of publishing and reading.

“It’s a very frustrating thing right now,” he said. “People are not buying books, so you’ll spend years researching all this information” but even enormous publicity for the book “doesn’t always translate into sales.”

The problem is, Kengor said, “if people aren’t going to read these things, you wonder if you should even bother writing them.”

Consequently, he is evaluating his next project based on how well DUPES does.

“I’m finding that to get the word out there,” he said, “to spread the word on what’s in the book, you have to do countless op-ed pieces, countless media interviews, countless radio interviews, [and] do Q&As because people aren’t buying books.”

Instead of buying books, he said, people are “watching TV and reading things off the internet.”

That, he concluded, is “a very sad state.”

(This article appeared in a slightly different form on Examiner.com on February 27, 2011.)

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