Author Interview: Ronald D. Lankford on 'Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells, and Silent Nights'

The idea for Virginia author Ronald D. Lankford's 2013 book, Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells, and Silent Nights: A Cultural History of American Christmas Songs, was sparked by his childhood memories.

“I grew up listening to Christmas songs in the 1960s – 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' Gene Autry, the Lennon Sisters,” he told me during an interview at this year's Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville. “Christmas music was always there, so it was an important family ritual.”

The book looks mostly at holiday songs written since the 1930s, when the first secular, commercial Christmas tunes appeared, written by Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists and distributed through the still new medium of phonograph recordings. Citing music industry historians, the author places 1934 as the year that saw the launch of the first modern Christmas standards, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Winter Wonderland” (the latter of which never mentions Christmas).

Referencing Irving Berlin's “White Christmas,” recorded by Bing Crosby, and Mel Tormé and Robert Wells' “The Christmas Song,” recorded by Nat “King” Cole, Lankford writes that this kind of holiday song, “performed by a well-known singer, pressed on a 78rpm record, and sold on the mass market, would create a new category of popular music.”

Although Americans celebrate several holidays every year, from New Year's Day to Independence Day to Thanksgiving, only Christmas has a wide range of music associated with it.

One reason for that, Lankford surmises, “is that Christmas seems to last longer than most holidays. Every year we have four or five weeks after Thanksgiving” when Christmas is celebrated, not just one day on December 25.

Another reason, he added, is “that it probably just holds a bigger place in our hearts than other holidays. A lot of people that are religious love it for religious reasons and a lot of [people who] aren't involved in religious aspects of Christmas also love it.”

For his research, Lankford acknowledged that his sources included Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas and Jody Rosen's book-length study on the origins and influence of “White Christmas,” but he also relied on Penne Restad's 1995 book, Christmas in America: A History. These and other sources emphasized nostalgia as a theme of Christmas music and other holiday traditions.

“Mostly what I was looking at was source material in the United States. If you want to understand the songs coming out in the '40s and '50s, you need to see how Christmas was sort of invented in the 19th century by the American middle class. Over and over again we come back to family, home. Dickens was very popular in the United States in the 1840s,” he pointed out, “so I wanted to go back and be grounded in these sources.”

He writes that “the first theme to emerge in the modern Christmas song was nostalgia.” He notes that recordings like “White Christmas” and “The Christmas Song” (already mentioned), as well as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (from Meet Me in St. Louis) and “I'll Be Home for Christmas” – all from the early 1940s – were songs that “connected with listeners by offering wistful images of the American past.

Ronald D. Lankford

Starting in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1970s, however, novelty songs (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” for instance) began to push nostalgia to the side, and songs “focusing on the holiday blues and hard times” started to get radio play.

The counterintuitive holiday popularity of mournful songs like “Blue Christmas” and “Pretty Paper,” he told me, really took off in the 1960s, when “everything changes.”

John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, mere weeks before Christmas, he said.

Then, the next year, The Beatles arrived in America and “music changes quite a bit. Then we start having a variety of revolutions in the street and so the mood of the country changes.”

At the same time, he said, “what we think of as family begins to change. We tend to think of family as being a mother at home, father at work, and two children – or people used to think that [but] that started to change in the Sixties and, I think, it was a little disorienting.”

As a consequence, Lankford noted, “most of our classic songs end by 1963. [In] the Sixties and the Seventies, what we have instead are a lot of cartoons basically aimed at children,” such as Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Many popular singers, even rock stars, record at least one Christmas album during the course of their careers, yet creating a hit holiday song is elusive even for artists normally at the top of the charts.

“It's a really difficult trick to pull,” Lankford explained.

“In one way, most Christmas songs are traditional, so you're going back again to family and home, and so people don't want anything really 'out there.' Weird Al's Christmas songs,” for example, “have not become classics.”

On the other hand, he said, “if you want to be a classic, you need something that people will play year after year, so it has to have something distinctive enough that it's going to stand out from every other song.”

Those, he said, “are the two qualities they would have to have” – simultaneously conservative and distinctive – “to get played five weeks a year and not wear themselves out.”

The most unexpected thing Lankford found in his research was that Elvis Presley's first Christmas recordings met resistance and negative criticism.

“I was surprised,” he said, at “how controversial Elvis Presley's Christmas album and [his] Christmas music was in 1957.”

Today, he explained, it seems like Presley is an American icon: “baseball, apple pie, and Elvis.”

Yet in the late 1950s, “when he was touring, he was very controversial and his album was very controversial.”

Lankford recounted a “wonderful story” told to him by a dentist in his hometown of Appomattox.

The dentist's mother was an Elvis fan who "went downtown to buy the Christmas album when it came out. She brought it home, took it out of its sleeve, started to play it, and she didn't get finished with one cut when she said, 'This is the worst thing I have ever heard in my life.' She put it back in its sleeve, took it back to the drug store, and asked for her money back.”

It's easy to see why that controversy of 57 years ago seems puzzling today. This time of year, the tracks on Elvis Presley's Christmas album are played over and over on the radio. Reissued several times, that LP has sold more than 23 million copies and is now considered the best-selling Christmas album in recording industry history.

In addition to his most recent book, Ronald D. Lankford is the author of Women Singer-Songwriters in Rock: A Populist Rebellion in the 1990s (2009) and Folk Music USA: The Changing Voice of Protest (2005). He also edited Should the Voting Age Be Lowered? (2007).

Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells, and Silent Nights: A Cultural History of American Christmas Songs, by Ronald D. Lankford.  University Press of Florida, October 2013. Hardcover, 264 pp., $21.95.  Kindle edition, $10.49.

Author Interview: Jeffrey Frank discusses his 'Ike & Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage'

Perhaps the most amusing sentence in Jeffrey Frank's book about Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon comes during a discussion of whether and how Eisenhower would endorse Nixon's 1968 bid for the presidency.

Jeffrey Frank

Frank recounts that veteran White House aide Bryce Harlow, who served both presidents, wrote in a memo that "without an immediate statement that Ike, as Harlow phrased it, was 'hot for Dick,' voters might 'be pen to the snide argument that as a good Republican you are only doing what you have to do.'"

It seems to me that were Eisenhower truly "hot for Dick," snide remarks would have been the least of his worries.

Although the idea that any voter or political operative was ever "hot for Dick" is debatable -- in the sense that Dick Nixon lacked the kind of adoring fans that one associates with Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama -- the only president to resign his office continues to fascinate students of twentieth-century history.  Jeffrey Frank followed his own fascination into a book-length examination of Nixon's relationship with a man he worked for and admired, Eisenhower.

The recent paperback release of Ike & Dick: A Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage seems like an appropriate moment to revisit an interview I had with Frank almost a year ago at the Virginia Festival of the Book, which originally appeared on Examiner.com.  (Robert Mitchell reviewed the paperback edition in Sunday's Washington Post.)

President Dwight Eisenhower was “sui generis,” according to biographer Jeffrey Frank, a politician with no equivalent on the current political scene.

Frank spoke about his new dual biography at the 2013 Virginia Festival of the Book, sharing the stage with another Eisenhower biographer, Evan Thomas, to discuss the life and career of the 34th U.S. president.

Following the panel discussion, Frank told me that “we have people like Nixon” today but not like Eisenhower.

“We don't have five-star national heroes running around any more today,” he explained. “They just don't happen. I wish we did.”

Frank's interest in writing about Eisenhower and his vice president and eventual successor, Richard Nixon, was sparked by how he could use their stories to explore the whole of the 20th century.

“It was a way to look at the whole century,” he said. “It was a way to look at these two men who couldn't have been less alike, one of whom was born in 1890 who grew up in Abilene when Civil War veterans were running around town, and one of whom died in 1994 after the Cold War was over.”

Eisenhower and Nixon, he said, were “two totally different men, both of whom became president," whose lives spanned "the whole century." They each also had fascinating personalities.

As he set out on research for his book, Frank explained, “the thing that struck me from the beginning was they never lost touch. Other vice presidents and presidents go their separate ways, even more recent ones. Reagan and Bush didn't have much to do with each other, Clinton and Gore.”

Yet Eisenhower and Nixon “never really lost touch. That was a unique thing” that was partly due to their family connections – Nixon's daughter Julie married Eisenhower's grandson David shortly after Nixon was elected president in 1968, just months before Eisenhower died.

In addition to the family ties, he added, both men were “so deeply engaged in the world” and that engagement “brought them together.”

Asked about his transition from being a journalist – senior editor at the New Yorker and writer for the Washington Post – Frank said that “being a historian is simply being a journalist in long form. I take my facts very seriously.”

Consequently, he explained, “the transition happened very naturally. I was working at the New Yorker and I started doing this and the more I did it the more I realized I couldn't do it justice by having two jobs at the same time so I made a leap. That was the transition.”

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'A Century of Christmas Memories' - A Book Review

A Century of Christmas Memories, 1900-1999, by the Editors of Peter Pauper Press. White Plains, N.Y.:  Peter Pauper Press, 2009. Hardcover $12.95, 120 pages.

One hundred years ago today, President Woodrow Wilson lit the first national Christmas tree on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.  Ten years later, Calvin Coolidge presided over a tree-lighting ceremony on the Ellipse south of the White House, beginning a tradition that endures today.

These are two of the historical tidbits included in A Century of Christmas Memories, 1900-1999, a stocking stuffer book attributed to "nameless" editors working for the Peter Pauper Press.

While it contains more than 100 pages spanning ten decades, the book itself can be read cover to cover in less than an hour.  Each item consists of just one or two sentences, and the pages are dominated by photographs and other illustrations.

Designed more to entertain and to evoke nostalgia than to be a serious reference tool, A Century of Christmas Memories has the capacity to send readers scrambling to the encyclopedia or to the Internet to learn more about the events, trends, and commercial products it mentions.

To get a flavor of the book, check out some of the items reported every ten years ending in "3".

One might be surprised to learn, for instance, in one of the entries for 1903 that that was the year that Advent calendars were first introduced:

they are attributed to printer Gerhard Lang.  Legend has it that Lang's mother gave her son a piece of cake or biscuit on each day in December, giving him something to look forward to as he counted down to Christmas.  This inspired his creation of the calendars that offer children treats or favors for each day leading up to December 25.

Besides the debut of the first national Christmas tree, 1913 also saw the birth of the Kewpie doll and the Erector Set, as well as the Goo Goo Cluster candy, the crossword puzzle, and

On December 1, the first "drive-in" gas station opens in Pittsburgh, current home of the Gulf Oil Company.  The price for a gallon of gas?  Eight cents!

Ten years later, when Coolidge lit the Christmas tree outside the White House ("illuminated by 2,500 lights"), Paul Whiteman's orchestra had a hit with the holiday-themed "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" and the Hasbro company, eventually known for producing popular toys left under the Christmas tree, was founded.

In the midst of the Depression, 1933 saw the erection of the first Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and the first Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular (featuring the Rockettes).

During the Second World War, the U.S. government suggested giving war bonds as Christmas presents.  In 1943, Bing Crosby had a hit record with "I'll Be Home for Christmas" and -- despite otherwise suspending the expansion of the TV industry -- there was an experimental broadcast of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  (How many -- or how few -- viewers saw it is not noted.)  Overseas that year, American GIs decorated Christmas trees in Italy with the leftover foil from their C-rations and sailors on the U.S.S. North Carolina sent a large check to Macy's with instructions to provide gifts to their families across the country.

In the peace and prosperity of 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower produced the first White House Christmas cards, featuring his own artwork.   Classic holiday recordings introduced that year included Eartha Kitt's sultry "Santa Baby" and Louis Armstrong's novelty number, "Zat You, Santa Claus?"  That was also the year that Matchbox cars were first found under the tree on Christmas morning.

In the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Christmas 1963 was somewhat subdued, as suggested by Roy Orbison's recording of Willie Nelson's song, "Pretty Paper," but that year in England, the Beatles sent their fans the first of several special recordings of holiday greetings and Andy Williams first recorded the now-seemingly ubiquitous "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year."  Toy manufacturer Hasbro introduced the Easy-Bake Oven in 1963, selling half a million units that first year.

The OPEC oil embargo dimmed some lights for Christmas 1973, but that year saw the debut of Dungeons & Dragons and the first Hallmark collectible ornaments.  Songwriters Johnny Marks ("Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer") and Irving Berlin ("White Christmas") received the 1973 Spirit of Christmas Award from the International Society of Santa Claus.

Today we think a 24-hour cable-TV marathon of A Christmas Story is a tradition whose origins are lost in the mists of history.  It turns out that movie premiered in 1983, as did the Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd vehicle Trading Places and ABC-TV's annual Mickey Mouse Christmas parade broadcast from Disney World.

The fourth year of the last decade of the twentieth century, 1993, featured the release of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, a hybrid holiday film.  Big toys that year were action figures based on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV series and the biggest bubble commodity since tulips and before Bitcoin, the Beanie Babies:

this is the year the first Beanie Babies are unleashed on an unsuspecting public, creating a craze that would last for years.  The Original Nine?  Spot the Dog, Squealer the Pig, Patti the Platypus, Cubbie the Bear, Chocolate the Moose, Pinchers the Lobster, Splash the Orca, Legs the Frog, and Flash the Dolphin.

The twenty-first century is beyond the scope of A Century of Christmas Memories, but let's take a look back at what happened on December 25, 2003, just ten years ago, to continue the nostalgia,  The top three films that day (per box office receipts) were The Lord of the Rings:  Return of the King, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Paycheck.  Billboard's top single for that week was "Change Clothes" by Jay-Z.  The AP headlined a story: "‘Secret Santa’ spreads $40K worth of cheer" about a man in a Santa suit passing out $100 bills to strangers.

What will a future edition of A Century of Christmas Memories have to say about the holiday season of 2013? Perhaps we'll be remembering Pajama Boy, but only the editors of the Peter Pauper Press know for sure.

A Look Back at Jimmy Carter's Human Rights Speech: 'Morality and Foreign Policy'

Today is Blog Action Day, an annual participatory event for bloggers across the globe.  This year's theme is "human rights," which brought to mind another day in which that topic sparked a global conversation.

Thirty-six years ago, in a speech to college graduates, a new American president launched a worldwide discussion on the question of human rights and how best to promote them.

On May 22, 1977, President Jimmy Carter delivered an address on foreign policy at Notre Dame. Carter’s speech was widely seen and read and was the subject of much commentary.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Shortly after Carter’s speech was delivered, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) published a book entitled Morality and Foreign Policy: A Symposium on President Carter’s Stance.

That slim volume -- the first book under the imprint of the EPPC, which was then affiliated with Georgetown University -- included nine original essays that reacted directly to Carter’s address and three previously published articles on the general topic of ethics and international relations and, more specifically, the role that the promotion of human rights should play in foreign policy. Contributors included future U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, and New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

It has become something of a commonplace, and a jocular one at that, to make facile comparisons between the Carter and Obama administrations, especially with regard to foreign policy. (The comparisons were raised even before the 2008 election as a warning to voters about Candidate Obama and were accelerated by Obama's premature receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.)

Thus it was somewhat jarring to read this paragraph in the essay by Charles Burton Marshall. Substitute the word “Obama” for “Carter” and this reference to political messianism could have been written yesterday – or next week – rather than in 1977:

“Sooner or later events will demonstrate even to the tight inner circle that the Carter administration no more knows the secret for walking on water around the world than it has a formula for cleansing the public service or any other manifestation of the Old Adam. The self-enthrallment then will cease.”

That oddity aside, the substance of Carter’s speech was meant to lay down a line of demarcation between his administration’s foreign policy and that of previous administrations. As the book’s editor, Ernest W. Lefever, explained in his preface, Carter, “perhaps more than any other president since Woodrow Wilson, has sought to make morality the touchstone of his foreign policy. In so doing he draws upon a persistent and fundamental strand in the American experience. He has emphasized respect for human rights throughout the world, not only as a valued goal, but also as a specific objective of U.S. statecraft.”

Blog Action Day: October 16, 2013

In Carter’s own words at Notre Dame, he stated his belief that “we can have a foreign policy that is democratic, that is based on fundamental values, and that uses power and influence which we have for humane purposes. We can also have a foreign policy that the American people both support and for a change know about and understand.”

In the single phrase that may have, more than any other, thrust Carter’s address into heightened scrutiny, he referred to the “inordinate fear of Communism.”

Given that May 1977 was in the midst of the Cold War, for those who believed the Soviet Union was an authentic threat to the West, the phrase “inordinate fear of Communism” rang untrue. As Eugene Rostow put it in his essay, “American foreign policy during the years between the Second World War and the end of the Vietnam War was not dominated by an ‘inordinate fear of Communism,’ but by a legitimate concern for policies of Soviet expansion and aggression.”

The comments of the contributors to Morality and Foreign Policy were cutting, even as they were respectful and, in some cases, shared the basic hope and optimism that Carter manifested. Re-reading them more than three decades later, it is surprising, given the different historical, diplomatic, and political contexts of the times, how relevant the remarks seem today. Listen to the words and ask yourself if you have not heard similar expressions in the months since January 20, 2009.

For instance, Robert Bartley wrote: “Almost certainly it is a mistake to look to President Carter’s professed morality to explain our concerns about his foreign policy. His version of morality is not that sharp a departure, and on experience so far not that powerful a force in shaping his policies. We would do better to worry about sheer inexperience.”

John P. Roche, then dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, tried to set Carter’s speech in a wider context:

“As a thirty-year veteran who long since reached the conviction that commencement addresses were drafted by computers, I am certain I have heard this one four times. Indeed, had I absorbed it without advance information on the source, I might have attributed it to Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Goldberg, Harold Stassen, or George McGovern. (At half an hour it was a bit brief for Hubert Humphrey, God bless him.) In short, it was standard commencement pap by an American ‘statesman’: ‘Speech 5c—American Policy, Morality, and the World (for use at a liberal religious school).’”

Roche went on to say: “Part of Mr. Carter’s problem in world politics is the lack of any ideological roots, a weakness which has been buttressed by a McGovernite ‘issues staff’ which sincerely believes that the world began in January 1977, when they took office. In this state of historical amnesia it is hard to deal with the degrees on the scale between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’”

The two contributors most sharply critical of Carter’s speech were Michael Novak and Eugene V. Rostow.

Novak, then a religion professor at Syracuse University, said in his response that it “is a profoundly embarrassing and disturbing speech…. [The] President’s vision is deficient. It is deficient both in realism and fact. It is deficient in its moral vision. The President uses the word moral and its cognates – values, principles, social justice, and the like – very heavily indeed. But he does not use them well.”

He later added: “One of the best ways to create an immoral foreign policy is to try too hard for a moral one.”

'Morality and Foreign Policy'

Rostow, who served in the Johnson Administration’s State Department, wrote that “President Carter’s Notre Dame speech is his most ambitious attempt thus far to define the American national interest in its course. The speech is deeply flawed: inconsistent; incomplete; and excessive in its claims of novelty…. The speech lacks any conception of the relationship between power and morality in international affairs.”

While generally content with the themes underlying President Carter’s remarks, Jeane Kirkpatrick raised six questions demanding clarification or explication. One was: “Why does the President think that ‘a peaceful world cannot exist one third rich and two thirds hungry’? The implication is that the frustration of poor nations causes war. In fact that the notion that poverty causes war doesn’t wash. Poverty causes hardship, suffering, and death … but there is little evidence to support the notion that it causes war… Poverty is abominable, not because it leads to war, but because it perpetuates human misery. We can approach problems of war and poverty more effectively if we are clear about the relationships between them.”

Ronald Berman, once chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, parsed the language of Carter’s speech. “Where the language of this speech is moralistic,” he said, “it tends to have an effect just about the opposite to that intended: By devaluing our past motives it makes our present ones suspicious. How reliable can policy be which is based upon the acceptance of our moral fallibility?”

In a paragraph that timelessly retains its relevance, Charles Burton Marshall, pondering whether disappointment might follow the non-fulfillment of the president’s high-flying rhetoric, noted that the “distinction [between cynicism and skepticism] is important. A cynic shrugs off differences between right and wrong as merely conventional – a sham, as it were. A skeptic acknowledges such differences as real, but regards them to be often complex and subtle, and refuses to arrive at judgments on the basis of declaratory evidence only. Cynicism goes hand in hand with ennui. Skepticism kindles the critical spirit. Every one of us should be skeptical about foreign policy, because that attitude is what helps exact proper performance from those conducting it.”

Understanding the distinction between skepticism and cynicism is important in any context, but in the field of foreign policy, it can mean the difference between success and failure, between freedom and tyranny, and between life and death.

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Author Interview: Jesse Walker on 'The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory'

Reason magazine books editor Jesse Walker is author of the recent book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (HarperCollins, $25.99), which reaches back to the earliest days of American history to examine how conspiracy theories take hold and what kind of influence they have on politics when they fail to fizzle out.

Acknowledging that his new book draws partial inspiration from and is partially a reply to Richard Hofstadter's famous monograph, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Walker explained in an interview with me last month at the Cato Institute that The United States of Paranoia “grew out of a lot of things.”

'Folklore of conspiracy thinking'
He had “been writing stories that touched on these issues for many years. At one point in the book, I quote from interviews I did way back in 1995 for a magazine article.”

In particular, Walker said, he “wanted to explore the folklore of conspiracy thinking in America and just what we can learn from these stories – even the ones that aren't true [and] hat they say about the anxieties and the experiences of the people who believe them.”

Walker acknowledged that conspiracy theories and urban legends “overlap,” but they are not the same thing.

“The two big differences are that sometimes a conspiracy theory is true and, by definition, no urban legend is true,” while “not all urban legends involve conspiracies, but many do.”

He pointed out that “one rich source of material in the book was just looking at the works by the sociologists and anthropologists who collect urban legends and that sort of folklore.”

Anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism
Similarly, while some conspiracy theories have anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic roots, not all do.

“There are a lot of anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which is not to say that anyone who believes in a conspiracy theory shares those bigotries,” Walker explained.

“Of those conspiracy theories that involve scapegoating a group, the three that seem to have the most potent influence in American history were those involving Catholics, blacks, or Indians. Obviously, there are also ones involving Jews, gays, liberals, conservatives, and others, but those were the big three.”

On the other hand, he said, “if I were writing a history of European paranoia, anti-Semitism would be much closer to the core,” adding that there are “a number of anti-Semites in the book,” which focuses on American history.

Even little-known and generally forgotten conspiracy theories can re-emerge unexpectedly, Walker said.

Some of them “will continue to be around and mutate and find new forms. I never would have guessed in the 1980s,” for instance, “that there would be all sorts of rap lyrics about the Illuminati” two decades later.

At my prompting, Walker commented on some well-known conspiracy theories involving President Barack Obama, the AIDS virus, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Birtherism
One common conspiracy theory of the past few years has been based on the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States. This has earned the sobriquet “birtherism,” and includes such elements that Obama was born in Kenya and his official birth certificate from Hawaii is a fake.

Jesse Walker

“There's a lot to unpack there,” Walker said about that theory.

In the book, he said, he gives three reasons for why “birtherism has taken hold and even has believers now, even though it's pretty hard to make the case for it being true at this point.”

The first is a “desire for a magic bullet, something that can win you a political victory without the pain of political persuasion. It's worth noting,” Walker explained, “that birtherism initially caught on among the diehard supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primaries in 2008 before it migrated to the right.”

A second reason “is the fear of the foreign.”

If someone is “afraid of foreign Muslims and [doesn't] like the president, it's easy to be attracted to the idea of the president being foreign and/or a Muslim.”

In general, he continued, “if people who are uncomfortable with the idea of America as a multicultural nation, to them, the President is metaphorically foreign for all sorts of reasons and a conspiracy theory is very good at making the metaphoric into the concrete.”

The third reason, Walker said, is that birtherism is “a way to maintain your respect for the presidency while rejecting a president. If you can say, 'he's a usurper, pretender to the throne' – you actually see these sort of royalist metaphors in a lot of birther literature” – the birther can claim respect for the office if not for the man.

Walker added that he is “not saying that every birther subscribes to all three of those. Those groups overlap.” There are people for whom none of those reasons fit, “but those are three themes that often come up in the birther literature.”

AIDS created by U.S. government?
Another conspiracy that emerged relatively recently was the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus.

There a lot of different AIDS theories, Walker said, but the one he addresses in his book “is the idea that white doctors were injecting black babies with AIDS. You might remember that rumor in the '80s.”

That story is “obviously not true,” he noted, but still “it's easy to see how it could catch on among people who have experienced a long history of high-handed or abusive treatment from the white medical establishment, including some genuine conspiracies, like the Tuskegee Experiment. That sort of lays the ground work for believing other conspiracy theories.”

9/11 truthers
Those who refuse to believe that Islamic-extremist hijackers destroyed the World Trade Center by crashing jet planes into the Twin Towers are known as “9/11 truthers.” They often say that the U.S. government engineered the collapse of the buildings in order to trigger a war and reduce Americans' civil liberties.

The question of 9/11 trutherism is “one that has people have adopted that for so many reasons, I really hate to reduce it to any one or two.”

Sometimes, Walker pointed out, “people say that trutherism is a paralyzing idea because everything is stacked against you. The flip side is that you just have to worry about what's happening in Washington not trying to disentangle what's going on in foreign lands.”

That is not, however, “the only reason that trutherism catches on,” and he addresses some of those other possibilities in his book.

As it happens, Jesse Walker was also a guest of Coy Barefoot on WCHV-FM's “Inside Charlottesville” on August 27, talking about The United States of Paranoia.

(This article is based on two previously published pieces on Examiner.com.)

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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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Author Interview: Colin Dueck on Libertarian and Conservative Approaches to U.S. Foreign Policy

Colin Dueck teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he is associate professor of public and international affairs.  He is also the author of a new book, Hard Line:  The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy Since World War II.

On October 28, on the eve of an election that brought a new Republican majority to the House of Representatives, Dueck addressed an audience at the Heritage Foundation in Washington about his book.  In his lecture, he argued that the Republican approach to foreign policy has been remarkably consistent over the past six decades.

Dueck says in his book that “despite apparent oscillations between internationalism and isolationism, there has in fact been one overarching constant in conservative and Republican foreign policies for several decades now, namely, a hawkish and intense American nationalism.”

After his lecture, Dueck spoke briefly me about his book, about libertarian influences in conservative foreign policy making, and prospects for free trade after the election.

McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft
Dueck said he was motivated to write Hard Line as he “was reflecting on some of the changes that had taken place in U.S. and, specifically, Republican foreign policy after 9/11 -- the arguments for war in Iraq, the Bush doctrine, and so on.”

His original manuscript, he said, was 600 pages long and “started with [William] McKinley," he said.  “Then I talked to my editor,” who told him, “’This is totally out of control.’”

The first version of the book had chapters on McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge, but, Dueck said, he “decided the story would hold together a little better with a start in World War II.”

He explained that the “main storyline is the decline of that anti-interventionist trend represented by Robert Taft.  That’s the big story in the Forties and Fifties.”

Anti-interventionist and Libertarian Strains
Taft represented what Dueck calls an “anti-interventionist” strain in foreign policy, with origins in libertarian thought.

Libertarian thinking, Dueck explained, “was prominent in the sense that for Taft and, actually, for most conservatives and most Republicans, the belief was that if the U.S. intervened, for example, in World War II, that you would get an expanded national security state -- big government, in a way.  So for Taft, the priority was ‘let’s avoid that at all costs.’  Therefore, that’s the argument for staying out of war.”

History, however, intervened.  As Dueck put it, “Obviously, Pearl Harbor settled the issue.”

That anti-interventionist tendency, he continued, “still persisted after the war and for somebody like William F. Buckley [it was a] major theme, but what trumped it eventually in the Fifties was a concern over Communism.”

What happened was, said Dueck, “in practical terms a lot of libertarians or libertarian-leaning conservatives [and] Republicans embraced this new consensus over the course of the Fifties, which was a more hawkish, anti-communist, cold war policy.”

Dueck did note that there were “important exceptions” to this trend, such as economist Murray Rothbard, “who was strictly libertarian.”

Rothbard, he said, “stuck to this anti-interventionist position throughout the Cold War and in that way, almost ended up having more in common with the New Left, beginning in the Sixties and Seventies.”

While Rothbard and his circle represented “an interesting strain,” Dueck said, “it was clearly not, politically [or] in practical terms in Congress, a major force in the Republican Party,” either in the Sixties and Seventies or “in the later Cold War period.”

Free Trade Policy
One foreign policy issue that generally divides Republicans and Democrats is free trade.

Asked whether a new Republican majority in Congress will affect the pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, Dueck replied:

“Well, that will really be up to President Obama.  There’s been no sign that he’s going to make that a priority.”

If Obama wanted to make free trade a priority, Dueck noted, “he might get more support from the next Congress than from the last one.”

The reason, he said, is that “at the end of the day, new Republican Members are going to be friendlier to these trade agreements than most Democrats have been.”

(This article originally appeared, in slightly different form, on Examiner.com on October 28, 2010.)

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Author Interview: Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand's Latter-Day Popularity

To many people, the unusually high level of interest in the works of Ayn Rand and her surge in popularity are puzzling.

In January 2009, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore published an article called “’Atlas Shrugged’: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years,” in which he wrote:

“Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that 'Atlas Shrugged' parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.”

Two months later, The Economist reported that according to “data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks best-seller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the book's 30-day average Amazon rank was 127 on Feb. 21, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On Jan. 13 the book's ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obama's popular tome, ‘The Audacity of Hope.’”

Earlier this year, Marsha Enright and Gen LaGreca noted in The Daily Caller that Moore’s 2009 article “seemed to ignite an explosion of interest in Ayn Rand. Sales of this prescient novel tripled; two Rand biographies have been selling like hotcakes; and references to her in the media have skyrocketed.”

What explains this phenomenon: A philosopher/novelist who died in 1982 is more popular now than when she was actively writing and promoting her books?

On April 15, 2010, after a panel discussion at the University of Virginia on whether libertarians should seek an alliance with liberals (with the resulting combination called “liberaltarian”), I put this question to one of the authors of the two Rand biographies that were published last year, UVA historian and panel moderator Jennifer Burns, who wrote Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

Burns said that Ayn Rand “has become a rallying point for the opposition to Obama. Definitely, she has become a really strong presence in the Tea Party. I think a lot of people are seeing her writing as prophetic, both predicting what’s happening now and warning about what can happen if the state gets too big.”

In Burns’ opinion, Rand’s “time has come, in many ways.” She cautioned, however, that “it’s probably a temporary boom. She may fade away and then she’ll probably come back the next time we see this kind of state expansion.”

Burns said that so far her book has received “a very enthusiastic reaction.” Rand, she said, “is a really important figure in American intellectual life [who] hasn’t been recognized as such [and who] hasn’t been treated as such. Most readers of Rand simply appreciate that I take her on her own terms and explain just why she matters.”

(This article originally appeared on April 18, 2010, in slightly different form, on Examiner.com.)

'Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech' by Paulina Borsook

This book review originally appeared in the January 2001 issue of Liberty magazine (Volume 15, Number 1, pp. 52-54).  It has not previously been published on line.


Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech, by Paulina Borsook. Public Affairs, 2000, 256 pages.

Cyberfoolish
Richard Sincere

Have you ever read a book that you simply could not set aside, so compelled were you to turn page after page after page? Perhaps it was Atlas Shrugged or Catch-22 or, in a lighter moment, a treatise on Swedish land-use planning.

Cyberselfish is not one of those books. In fact, I had to force myself to read it all the way through, much the same way one forces oneself to swallow bitter medicine, because I did not want to be accused, as a reviewer, of not fully engaging myself with the material. Of course, that would likely not be a problem for author Paulina Borsook, who goes to great lengths to avoid engaging the arguments she pretends to refute in this book.

Borsook is shocked, quite shocked, by the libertarian philosophy that infests Silicon Valley. (She limits her critique almost entirely to the high-tech world of Northern California.) Yet it is clear that her research did not include a single book by a libertarian thinker or about libertarianism. She mentions some books — such as Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies — in a feeble attempt to prove her credentials, but her lack of engagement with the arguments and her frequent errors of fact show her self- described credentials to be fraudulent.

Two examples of error leap out at the reader. In the introduction, she says the Libertarian Party “is the party that routinely nominates Harry Browne as its presidential candidate.” That’s like saying the Democratic Party “routinely nominates Bill Clinton as its presidential candidate.” It hardly takes into account the fact that in every election since 1976, the GOP ticket has included someone named Bush or Dole. And, for a book that was published on June 6, 2000 — one month before Harry Browne became the first person in the history of the Libertarian Party to be nominated twice as a presidential candidate — it demonstrates a high degree of ignorance of the Party’s performance, not to mention its core beliefs (more on this later).

Toward the end of the first chapter (titularly about “bionomics” but really about so much more), Borsook says the Cato Institute has been “hugely funded since the late 1960s and early 1970s” Borsook says the Cato Institute has been “hugely funded since the late 1960s and early 1970s” — a neat trick for an organization established in 1977! (66) — a neat trick for an organization established in 1977! Although Borsook acknowledges Cato’s pride of place in the libertarian pantheon — such as it is — she obviously knows nothing about the Institute itself, much less the philosophy that animates it. (On page 17, she says of Cato: “To them, government is fine for dealing with the anachronism of nation-states [foreign policy, defense, import-export hassles] but is irrelevant to all else and should just get out of our way.” Someone should alert Ted Galen Carpenter before he decries non-interventionism again.)

Not only does Borsook fail to engage her opponents, she often fails to sustain her own arguments long enough to bring them to a suitable conclusion. When I say she fails to engage her opponents, I do not mean she does not argue with them. She does, but more often, she merely mocks them. She does not even take the trouble to set up straw men to knock down. Instead, she avoids ideas and focuses on tone and attitude. (Borsook’s personal tone is a breathless, neo-Joycean style of stream-of-consciousness that is exasperating at best, frustrating at worst.)

In a series of anecdotes about conferences sponsored by The Bionomics Institute (TBI), later taken over by Cato, Borsook talks about the types of people there, how they dress, where they come from, their preferences of suburban locales over downtown conference sites. She never once mentions an idea the participants or the speakers address. For instance, in describing one conference speaker, Peter Huber, she cites a paper he wrote on telecommunications deregulation, asserting that it posited that “in the realm of communications, everything would interconnect and self-heal and route most efficiently if left on its own without the Great Satan of regulation and the devil would take the hindmost and, as I think it was said by a terror of the Counter Reformation, ‘God will sort them out'” (68), going on to explain this reference to the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre — but never once telling us readers what Huber himself said, in the sense of quoting his spoken words at the conference or the text of the paper Borsook so colorfully critiques.

Nowhere in the book is there a mention of the non-coercion principle. Her only substantive mention of Ayn Rand is to attack — no surprise here — not Rand’s ideas, but her attitude (“her fiction demonstrates all the humorlessness, lack of irony, 2-D heroes, and political exhortation of the collectivist world she despised” [144]). The word “objectivism” cannot be found in the book. To Borsook, libertarianism can be summed up as the belief system of people “violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation,” while libertarians themselves are the embodiment of “nastiness, narcissism, and lack of human warmth” (5). She writes of “the most virulent form of technolibertarianism [as] a kind of scary, psychologically brittle, prepolitical autism” (15). No wonder she describes her “fascination” with libertarianism as one of “mongoose-to-cobra style” (4). She doesn’t have to understand the snake in order to kill it.

At the same time Borsook makes it clear which thinkers she admires, to wit: “The ‘Communist Manifesto’ has it right... Marx and his pal Engels had other relevant things to say about the spread of global capitalism (much more accurate for the description of what is happening at the end of our own century than at the end of his)” Borsook talks about the types of people there, how they dress, where they come from, their preferences of suburban locales over downtown conference sites. She never once mentions an idea the participants or the speakers address.(44).  And: “I am a Luddite — in the true sense of the word. The followers of Ned Ludd were rightfully concerned that rapid industrialization was ruining their traditional artisanal workways and villages. . . . like the Luddites, I am not so sure most change benefits most people” (47-48). (I guess that’s why stagnant, traditional societies in the Third World have the longest life spans, the lowest rates of illness, the lowest infant-mortality rates, universal literacy, such high standards of living, and such low levels of pollution. Oh, but they don’t, you say? My bad!)

Borsook’s eschewal of intellectual engagement goes a long way toward explaining why this book lacks a bibliography or references of any kind. One cannot list the works one has used for research if one has not read any articles or books on the topic one writes about. (At least no one will ever accuse Paulina Borsook of plagiarism.)

Some other writer may come up with a convincing critique of the rampant technolibertarianism” that Borsook has discovered in Silicon Valley. In order to do so, however, that writer must first understand what libertarianism is, who its major proponents are, and what those proponents say about it and about public policy issues as well as philosophy. Borsook has failed in all three tasks, and as a result has given us a dense, unreadable book about what could be an interesting and engaging topic.

'South Africa’s War Against Capitalism'

This article originally appeared in Volume 3, Number 3, of International Freedom Review (Spring 1990).

ENDING APARTHEID, ENDING SOCIALISM
South Africa’s War Against Capitalism by Walter E. Williams
[New York: Praeger (A Cato Institute Book), 1989, 159 pp., $19.95, cloth]
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

The mythology of African liberation movements asserts that the struggle against apartheid is inherently a struggle against capitalism. The apartheid system, according to the African National Congress and its allied groups, was designed to benefit rich white capitalists at the expense of poor black workers. American economist Walter Williams demonstrates conclusively in his book, South Africa’s War Against Capitalism, that the opposite is the case: apartheid is an inherently socialist system designed to benefit (formerly) poor white workers at the expense of the entrepreneurial classes and of poor blacks. Simply, apartheid is South Africa’s war against capitalism. As Williams puts it, if capitalism can be described as the unfettered operation of the market in the allocation of society’s scarce resources, then apartheid is the antithesis of capitalism.”

South Africa’s War Against Capitalism covers much the same ground as did an earlier study by Merle Lipton, Capitalism and Apartheid, but Williams, well-known In American conservative and libertarian circles for his unabashed willingness to speak the truth as he sees it, regardless of whom might be offended, puts his own special gloss on the subject. It is this combativeness that makes his new book a lively read that will get people to think more deeply and more precisely about the complex social and economic system we call “apartheid.”

Although the term apartheid did not appear until the 1940s, it had its genesis in laws passed by the South African parliament in the 1910s and ‘20s. These were the first laws limiting the economic freedom of black South Africans by barring them from certain occupations, forcing them to carry identity documents, and forbidding them from owning farmland or business establishments. These laws were demanded by white-controlled labor unions and the South African Communist Party, as well as by white farmers, and were passed despite the protests of white manufacturers, mine owners, and other employers.

The reason for this legislation—which, in some cases, such as minimum wage laws, had the appearance of being non-racist, colorblind, and equitable—was to exclude blacks from competition for jobs in industry and agriculture. White farmers feared black farmers because the blacks were more productive and more willing to take risks than the whites. White workers in the mines disliked the fact that blacks were willing to work for lower wages than the whites, thus being more attractive to employers, especially when filling unskilled or semi-skilled positions. And because white workers disliked the blacks, the Communist Party campaigned on the slogan “Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.”

The capitalists—i.e., white entrepreneurs and business owners—opposed this legislation vehemently. Contrary to what anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and abroad have said, white businessmen and financiers are not the bulwarks of the apartheid system, because it puts them at a disadvantage. Apartheid laws interfere with their freedom to operate their businesses as they see fit. The existence of apartheid laws that restrict the rights of white employers to hire black workers is itself evidence that business interests opposed (and oppose) racial discrimination. After all, if white employers did not want to hire blacks in the first place, why should the state legislate against such activity?

In fact, in the early part of this century, white employers preferred to hire blacks not only because they worked for less money than their white counterparts, but because they worked harder and better. Williams cites a government commission report from 1908:

We have been impressed with the frequency with which it has been stated in evidence that unskilled labour was “kaffir’s work” and as such is not the kind of work which a white man should perform. [The poor white’s] inefficiency as an unskilled labourer and the higher wage he requires, have had the natural result that coloured labour, inefficient though it is, is cheaper to the employer for unskilled work than white labour... It is essential to realize the importance of the practical monopoly of the unskilled labour market possessed by the native.

Williams reports that in 1916, the South African prime minister travelled around the country “urging white farmers to fire their black workers and replace them with poor whites. This admonishment fell on deaf ears because farmers had little incentive to do so. First of all, black workers were cheaper and more reliable; and second, many poor whites were unwilling to do kaffirwerk (the American translation would be ‘nigger work’).”

Labor unions in South Africa and the United States at this time were both calling for racially-based discriminatory legislation against non-white workers. Samuel Gompers, one of the founders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), called for immigration restrictions against Asians because he thought “the maintenance of the nation depended upon the maintenance of racial purity and strength.” Labor leaders demanded equal pay for equal work, which although it sounds altruistic and virtuous, was essentially a means to price black labor—often illiterate and mostly unskilled —out of the market. When that didn’t work, they called instead for outright discrimination by law. This was opposed by employers.

For instance, the South African Chamber of Mines argued that the color bar “should be abolished because it is irrational and immoral.” It was irrational because it stifled the most effective utilization of labor by management, making allocation of resources difficult and uneconomical. That it was immoral is self-evident.

A turning point in South African history was the “Rand Rebellion” of 1922, also known as the “Red Revolt.” Twenty thousand white miners went on strike in the area around Johannesburg, in an action described by Williams as “a Marxist revolution organized by white workers to prevent the Chamber of Mines from hiring black semiskilled workers.” In the strike, more than 200 people were killed—mostly whites—and several hundred more were wounded. It precipitated a political crisis that led to the collapse of the South African Party government led by Jan Smuts and the formation of a new government by National Party leader J. B. M. Hertzog.

Another result was the passage of the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924, which because it was opposed by the Smuts government and favored by the white workers and Hertzog’s National Party, led to Hertzog’s accession to power. Smuts’ South African Party opposed this legislation, which statutorily limited the economic rights of blacks, for several reasons that still ring true today. Williams writes:

The South African party opposed statutory discrimination for several reasons: (1) It would embarrass South Africa in the eyes of the world; (2) it would earn whites the hatred of all the other communities; and (3) it was redundant since racial domination—the party felt—had already been achieved de facto. Some members of Parliament also advanced practical arguments against statutory provisions for discrimination. They said that: (1) the bill would create hate and agitation among the black population, and (2) this artificial protection to poor whites would lead to failure since the only real job protection was in efficiency and hard work.

More than twenty years passed between the introduction of this legislation and the election in 1948 of the National Party government that campaigned on a platform of apartheid. In that twenty years, South Africa suffered the effects of the worldwide Great Depression. Rural Afrikaners, like Africans throughout the continent, migrated to the cities in search of work. The Second World War precipitated political organizing for both Afrikaners and black Africans. Within both groups were supporters and opponents of the war effort, but whatever the case, political organizing skills were strengthened and the groundwork for later social and political events was laid. Because the market acted non-racially, those who wanted to uphold white privilege increasingly turned to the political arena to achieve their goals. Not only did they pass discriminatory laws, they moved to acquire more property for the state, to the extent that by the mid- 1980s, 55 per cent of South African industry was state-owned or -controlled. By this means, the government could grant patronage positions and sinecures to white workers who preferred not to compete in a market that granted the same status to black Africans as it did to white Africans.

Under Daniel F. Malan and his successors J. M. Strijdom and Hendrik Verwoerd, apartheid—or separate development—was developed to its zenith. Under their plans, blacks and whites would do everything separately: live, work, go to school, vote, travel. Separate black republics would be established to satisfy the longing of blacks for political rights. Of course, In the long run, none of these grand schemes succeeded. The events of 1989 and 1990 show that quite clearly. As Williams explains thoroughly in this book, however, the collapse of apartheid under its own weight was inevitable.

In a chapter that has lessons for all countries where the state is tempted to intervene in the economy, Williams explains how market manipulation supported apartheid and can be used to enforce malevolent ideas almost anywhere. He discusses minimum- and equal-wage legislation at length, noting that such legislation:

is an effective tool in a racist’s arsenal. Wage regulation is effective because it enjoys the benefit of at least four powerful forces: (1) It evokes voluntary cooperation with the racist goals; (2) it gives the appearance of being racially neutral; (3) it is relatively cheap to enforce; and (4) it sometimes enjoys the political support of the people whom it is intended to victimize, as well as their benefactors.

Why is such legislation so bad? Simply because it works to price out of the market the least advantaged (or most disadvantaged, depending on one’s perspective) laborers. Williams writes: "Virtually all scholarly studies conclude that minimum wage laws discriminate against employment of the less preferred worker.” Thus, if black workers face discrimination because of their race, but employers are willing to overlook their irrational dislike of blacks if blacks also work for lower wages, the discrimination is mitigated. However, if the law forces employers to pay the same wage to workers regardless of irrational prejudices, the employer is more likely to yield to his prejudice and discriminate against the black worker. “No doubt there were white supremacists in private industry,” Williams comments, “but their sense of loyalty to white workers was not sufficient enough to withstand the voluntary forces of the marketplace.”

Williams culls examples from both American and South African history to support his argument. He recalls:

In 1909, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen called a strike against the Georgia Railroad. One of their demands called for the complete elimination of blacks from the employment rolls. Instead of eliminating blacks, however, the arbitration board decided that black firemen, hostlers, and hostlers’ helpers should be paid wages equal to the wages of white men doing the same job. The white unionists were delighted with the decision; they said, “If this course of action is followed by the company and the incentive for employing the Negro thus removed, the strike will not have been in vain.”

Similar demands were made by South African unions. Williams explains that both American and South African labor leaders

recognized the power of wage regulation as a means to accomplishing racist goals. They both saw that setting a floor on wages could be more effective and politically cheaper than the Imposition of quotas and color bars, in part because a legislated minimum wage is seldom seen as racially discriminatory and is hence more politically acceptable among decent people (even those victimized by it) and less subject to constitutional challenge.

Williams believes that all South Africans have suffered because of the apartheid system, not only blacks who are its most visible victims. This is because apartheid distorts the market, its enforcement absorbs a disproportionate amount of national income, and all South African citizens have to pay. Because race rather than the market determines the allocation of scarce resources, apartheid—which Williams terms “inefficient resource allocation”— “clearly reduces South Africa’s overall material wealth from what it otherwise might be.”

The curious problem that we face today is that organized anti-apartheid groups argue—incorrectly—that apartheid and capitalism are allies and must both be opposed with equal vehemence. Bishop Desmond Tutu, for instance, wrote in the black South African magazine Frontline in 1980:

At the outset I must say that I am opposed to capitalism it is due to abhorrence at what I believe to be an essentially exploitative economic order.... What I have seen of capitalism in my 48 years, and all over the world, has convinced me that no amount of plastic surgery can alter its basically ugly face.

Archbishop Tutu has not changed his opinion in ten years. Neither, for that matter, have Nelson Mandela or the African National Congress, who continue their insistence that in the new South Africa, banks, mines, and other basic industries must be expropriated by the state. (They use the term “nationalized,” which implies giving the nation or the people some role to play, but in fact they intend to take these industries away from the people and put them in the hands of an impersonal leviathan, the State.)

Perhaps after seeing the concrete rejection of socialism by the people of Central Europe and the at least nominal rejection of it by African rulers, the ANC, Mandela, and Tutu may change their views. But so far their minds seem closed to the logical conclusion drawn by Walter Williams:

South Africa’s apartheid is not the corollary of free-market or capitalistic forces. Apartheid is the result of anticapitalistic or socialistic efforts to subvert the operation of market (capitalistic) forces. Indeed, it is the free play of market forces—with no intervention by political forces—that has always been seen as the enemy of white privilege and that apartheid ideology has always sought to defeat.

Indeed, the South African Conservative Party and other right-wing groups that seek to return to unreconstructed apartheid and racial discrimination speak bluntly of their disdain for capitalism and the entrepreneurial classes because the free-market system subverts the ethnic solidarity and Afrikaner nationalism they hold so dear.

Walter E. Williams

The bottom line is this: While the new South Africa is undergoing its long-awaited reshaping through negotiations and civic conversation, those who support the free-market must make a frontal assault on the incorrect beliefs that apartheid and capitalism are allies. The case for the free market must be made clear and accessible to all South Africans. It must be explained, as Williams explains, that “the mere existence of South Africa’s racial regulatory laws is evidence enough that racial privilege is difficult [to sustain] through free market forces.” It must be emphasized that “the business pursuit of profits—which caused employers to be less ardent supporters of the white supremacist doctrine—has always been the enemy of white privilege.”

So it shall be in a post-apartheid South Africa. If black South Africans really want to see a fairer distribution of wealth, they must insist not that property be taken over by the state, but that state-owned enterprises be turned over to the people. The current South African government has already begun an extensive program of privatization, and it is only a matter of time before the big state-owned industries—steel, electricity, communications— become the property of the people. Anti-apartheid activists should not allow their anti-capitalist ideology to scuttle that process. A complete elimination of racist laws and practices in South Africa can only be achieved under a market system that permits maximum freedom for the individual to engage in whatever economic enterprise he or she wishes.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa, published in 1990 by the International Freedom Foundation.