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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Author Interview: Kristin Swenson on ‘Bible Babel’ and Her New Research Project

Kristin M. Swenson has been teaching in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where she specializes in the history and literature of ancient Israel. On May 16, she takes up an appointment as visiting professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Kristin Swenson

Dr. Swenson is the author of Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked about Book of All Time, which was first published by HarperCollins in 2010 and came out as a Harper Perennial paperback in March of this year. She is also the author of Living through Pain: Psalms and the Search for Wholeness and co-author with Esther Nelson of What is Religious Studies?:  A Journey of Inquiry. Bible Babel is also scheduled to be published in translation in Brazil and South Korea in 2012.

I spoke to Swenson last month at the 2011 Virginia Festival of the Book, where she moderated a panel discussion entitled “Speaking of God” with authors David Baggett (Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality), Winn Collier (Let God: The Transforming Wisdom of Fenelon), Alex Joyner (Hard Times Come Again No More:  Suffering and Hope), and Clare Aukofer and J. Anderson "Andy" Thomson, Jr. (Why We Believe in God[s]: A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith).

She was pleased with the way the discussion turned out, she said.

“It was a terrific discussion in that it was civil. We had folks who believe that the Bible is the word of God and God is very much a living part of the world,” she explained, “and we had people who believe that religion is a completely human construct and brain moderated beliefs of god are nothing more than biology. So it was a lively group.”

The conversation among the authors and the audience was so lively, she said, that not only could it have continued an hour beyond the allotted time, but “we could have gone on 24 hours.”

In an earlier interview (at the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book), Swenson described Bible Babel like this:

“The book is for general readers. It does not take a particular religious perspective. It’s also not dismissive of persons of faith but provides background information about the Bible: what is the Bible, where does it come from, [and] what’s in it, so that folks can make sense of the way the Bible shows up in contemporary culture.”

She said that the book has been well-received by reviewers and by readers.

“It’s gotten a nice reception so far, I’m happy to say. People both of faith perspectives and secular folks who feel they need to know more about the Bible are finding it very useful and fun reading, so I’m getting some nice responses.”

One such response was in a review by Michael Dirda in The Washington Post (February 18, 2010). Dirda wrote that “despite its sometimes overbright prose, this is a solid, readable work that doesn't shy away from the tough issues. For instance, Swenson lists and interprets the Bible texts that seem to comment on evolution and creation, homosexuality, abortion, whether God wants you to be rich, environmentalism and the care of the Earth, anti-Semitism, and the position of women.”

Similarly, Martin Sieff started off his review in The Washington Times (March 9, 2010) enthusiastically:

“Hats off to Kristin Swenson: She has done what I really thought was impossible. She has produced an accessible, freewheeling newcomers’ guide to the Bible aimed at attention-deficit-disordered teens, twenty-somethings and soccer moms that manages to avoid being lame.”

Swenson’s latest research project focuses on a more narrow, but no less interesting, topic.

She is looking into “a very fascinating man who is forgotten in history. I think of him as the “forgotten Messiah”: Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire.”

Cyrus, she said, was “instrumental in the development of the Bible and in the development of civilization, [yet] we know very little about him, especially in the West, though he is lionized in Iran today.”

In the Bible are “references to Cyrus as the anointed one that God chose to save the ancient Israelite people. He’s mentioned by name in the Book of Isaiah,” and those passages are often cited in the New Testament as references to Jesus as the Messiah (a word that means “anointed one.”)

Cyrus, Swenson noted is, “also sometimes referred to as the author of the first declaration of human rights,” based on “an inscription called the Cyrus Cylinder, in which he articulates some of what we think of as basic human rights.”

Asked if the admiration for Cyrus in modern-day Iran causes a conflict with that country’s Muslim theocracy, Swenson replied:

“That’s an interesting question. There does seem to be a distinction that some of the population make between Arab Islam and Iranian Persia.”

Many Muslim Iranians, she explained, “identify with Cyrus as a great leader who pre-dates Islam, someone [whom] they can all share and admire.”

She then added that “it’s interesting that we can admire Cyrus as well, so in Cyrus there is room for Americans to agree with Iranians.”

Swenson is unsure when her book on Cyrus of Persia will be published, since she is still in the research stage. Her agent, however, has a proposal in hand and the book will develop over “the next couple of years.”

Book Review Blog Carnival #66: Doris Day Edition

Welcome to the April 3, 2011, edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival -- number 66 in the series! The 65th edition can still be viewed at I'll Never Forget the Day I Read a Book! Two weeks from today, look for the next edition at Izgad.

Today is the 88th birthday of actress, singer, animal-rights activist, and America's sweetheart, Doris Day, who herself has been the subject of several books in recent years, including Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door, by David Kaufman (2009); Doris Day: The Illustrated Biography, by Michael Freedland (2009); Doris Day: Sentimental Journey, by Garry McGee (2010); Doris Day: Reluctant Star, by David Bret (2009); and Considering Doris Day, by Tom Santopietro (2008). All in all, that's a lot of attention paid to a film star who hasn't made a movie since 1968.

And now, on to the carnival ...

children's and young adult books

Alexia presents Book Review: Darkness Becomes Her posted at Alexia's Books and Such..., saying, "A fun new entry into the Young Adult market!"

Jim Murdoch presents Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli posted at The Truth About Lies, saying, "Beginning as the Germans invade the city we follow an innocent and ignorant young boy who only knows himself as Stopthief because he survives by stealing. He is given the name Misha by another boy who befriends and protects him and his family becomes a group of homeless orphan boys scratching out a life on the streets and eventually get rounded up and locked inside the Warsaw Ghetto where they provide an essential service as smugglers."

Read Aloud ... Dad presents Incredible Illustrated Editions: Jonathan Swift`s Gulliver posted at Read Aloud Dad, saying, "I felt it would be a shame if I could not find a way to get my young twins acquainted with Swift's masterpiece and its principal motifs. So I found the best illustrated edition!"

fiction and literature

Alexia presents Book Review: Pale Demon posted at Alexia's Books and Such..., saying, "A 5/5 amazing read! Best Rachel Morgan story in the whole series!"

Angela England, Feature Writer presents Classic Tales by Irish Authors posted at Blissfully Domestic, saying, ""In fact, some of literary circles most poignant novels have been penned by Irish authors. ""

Marisa Wikramanayake presents Dead Man’s Chest (2010) posted at Jacket & Spine.

Mark Baker presents What's On My Nightstand March 2011 Edition posted at Random Ramblings from Sunny Southern CA, saying, "Here's a review of The Baker Street Letters by Michael Robertson. I enjoyed this debut mystery."

Mon presents Love, Again posted at ink + chai.

Thomas Burchfield presents Nabokov's Gift to a Midnight Reader posted at A Curious Man, saying, "My delightful experience reading The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov."

At Man of la Book, Zohar presents Book Review: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford, as well as Book Review: The Stairway to Heaven by Therese Zrihen-Dvir, Book Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett, and Book Review: 31 Bond Street by Ellen Horan.

history

Marisa Wikramanayake presents Spinner (2010) posted at Jacket & Spine.

Scott presents Review: Gay New York posted at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land, saying, "A book review of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940."

Clark Bjorke presents The World That Made New Orleans posted at I'll Never Forget the Day I Read a Book!, saying, "World history from the point of view of the Big Easy."  Ned Sublette's book's subtitle is the intriguing "From Spanish Silver to Congo Square."

The Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner presents a two-part interview with political scientist Paul Kengor, who teaches at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.  Kengor talks about his book, The Crusader:  Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, a historical analysis of the final years of the Cold War.

non fiction

D. J. McGuire reviews James A. Bacon's Boomergeddon: How Runaway Deficits and the Age Wave Will Bankrupt the Federal Government and Devastate Retirement for Baby Boomers Unless We Act Now in "Why the sky won't necessarily fall" at The Right-Wing Liberal.

Jim Murdoch presents Minding my Peas and Cucumbers by Kay Sexton posted at The Truth About Lies, saying, "If you’ve ever thought it might be nice to have an allotment then this is the book you should read first. It traces author Kay Sexton’s experiences from novice to finally getting her own allotment; it takes a looooong time to get an allotment. So while you’re waiting it might be a good idea to read this mix of memoir, mystery novel, gardening book, etiquette guide, cookbook and science textbook."

Marisa Wikramanayake presents Wardrobe 101: Creating your perfect core wardrobe posted at Jacket & Spine.

Mike Sprouse presents Second Review of The Greatness Gap posted at Open Mike.

Trevor Schmidt presents Book Review: Lone Survivor posted at Bookophile Reviews, saying, "Check out the rest of my book reviews @ Bookophile Reviews!" Written by Marcus Luttrell, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 is "the story of four Navy SEALs who fought against a force of as many as 150 Taliban and the one SEAL who made it out alive."

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writing

Melissa Batai presents Bookin’ It: Working Writer, Happy Writer posted at Mom's Plans, saying, "If you are looking to make money from home and would like to work as a writer, I highly recommend Working Writer, Happy Writer."

Penny Zang presents Best Book on Writing. Ever. posted at Miss Good on Paper. She writes: "There is one book I return to again and again, though. It is the book I recommend to all aspiring writers and the book from which I make copies for my students: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott."

shameless self-promotion

Last month was the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, and I had an opportunity to interview some of the participants, including the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach, and the president of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Robert Vaughan.

As I noted in the interview with Vaughan,

... the annual Virginia Festival of the Book brings about 25,000 visitors to the city to hear and engage with authors, publishers, book reviewers, and bibliophiles.

The 2010 festival hosted 160 events featuring 307 authors, drawing visitors from 35 states and at least six foreign countries.

For his part, NEH Chairman Leach (a former Republican congressman from Iowa), gave several illustrations to explain why it is important to study and support the humanities:

“If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. You learn from great figures in literature. You can learn lessons not to repeat from [those who] might be considered characters that you don’t identify with.

“History provides a sense of where we’ve been and lessons that can be taken forward.

“Philosophy gives one a barometer [of] ethics of how we could and should lead our life,” he continued, “so I think the humanities have never been more important, particularly as the world becomes so change-intensive.”

I also recently had the opportunity to interview (by telephone) playwright, screenwriter, and novelist Michael Slade about his new musical play, And the Curtain Rises, which had its world premiere at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, on March 27. Slade has written children's theatre, scripts for several daytime soap operas, and a young adult novel, The Horses of Central Park.

In explaining how he wrote And the Curtain Rises, which tells the story of The Black Crook, arguably the first musical comedy produced on Broadway, Slade told me:

“I love the process of researching,” Slade said.

“I was not the best student in school, but afterwards I discovered how much fun research was. One can do almost everything on line these days but there’s something about going places and handling real books and articles.”

"Real books and articles" -- that's what we readers are all about, no?

With that, we close the 66th edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival. Submit your blog article to the next edition using the carnival submission form.  Past posts and future hosts can be found at the blog carnival index page.

Author Interview: Professor Paul Kengor on ‘The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism’

Paul Kengor teaches foreign policy and twentieth century history in the department of political science at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, a history of the relationship between the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) from World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Paul Kengor at CPAC, February 2011

Kengor also wrote The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, which examines how Ronald Reagan planned for and stimulated that collapse.

At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Kengor spoke to me about The Crusader and how he came to write that book.

The process of researching and writing The Crusader “began when I realized that a lot of people in academia – and, really, generally -- didn’t realize, didn’t know, didn’t understand that Ronald Reagan actually intended to undermine the Soviet Empire,” Kengor said.

In a sense, he explained, “they knew from his rhetoric and his speeches,” such as the June 1982 Westminster address, the May 1981 Notre Dame speech, and the so-called “Evil Empire” speech before the religious broadcasters in March 1983 that “he thought that Soviet Communism was evil. They knew that he predicted it would end up on the ash heap of history.”

At the same time, however, these observers “thought that might have been rhetoric” rather than an expression of intention.

“What they didn’t realize,” Kengor went on, “is that behind all of that was a very specific campaign on multiple fronts, probably about a dozen to maybe two dozen different things, where Reagan actually intended to peacefully undermine the USSR.”

To back up his thesis, Kengor looked directly at recently declassified government documents, particularly NSDDs, or national security decision directives.

He contrasted his research with that of other academics who have not availed themselves of these documents.

“If academics are going to be scholars,” he complained, “they need to read primary sources, like they tell their students to do. But they don’t. They read each other and they cite each other. They don’t learn anything.”

The proof of Reagan’s intentions is in these documents, Kengor said.

“All this information has been declassified. You look at NSDD 32, NSDD 66, NSDD 75, and you see here a clear intent to roll back, undermine, and as one of the documents says, bring political pluralism – [it] actually uses that word, pluralism – to the Soviet Union.”

The collapse of the Soviet empire, Kengor asserts, “was intended and there’s a paper trail to prove it.”

His research did not end with the documents, however.

“Beyond the paper trail,” he explained, “all the people who were involved in this are either still alive or died in the last 10 years” and were available to tell the story.

“I’ve interviewed all of those people,” he said. “I mean everybody that I could find: Bill Clark, Cap Weinberger, George Shultz, Richard V. Allen,” naming, respectively, the director of the CIA, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Advisor of the Reagan administration.

Those people, he noted, “will tell you this, that [undermining the Soviet system] was the intention.”

The title of the book, The Crusader, emerged from research Kengor did in the Soviet archives.

As Kengor was reading the Soviet documents, he explained, such as Pravda, Izvestia, and transcripts of a TV program called Studio 9 (“the Moscow version of 60 Minutes”), and memoirs of Soviet officials like Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, he discovered “they called Reagan ‘the crusader.’”

The Soviets, he said, “understood better than American liberal academics that Reagan, beginning in the 1950s, had signed up for groups like General Lucius Clay’s Crusade for Freedom [and] Dr. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.”

Reagan himself, Kengor noted, “had been using that word. He didn’t mean it in a religious sense, although Reagan was religiously inspired to undermine this viciously atheistic empire. (As Gorbachev said, the Soviets pursued a war on religion.) But Reagan meant the word crusade in the sense of crusade for freedom, a crusade to undermine” the USSR.

The now-declassified documents that Kengor used in his research were not kept hidden from the Soviets during the 1980s.

“They were classified at the time,” he explained, “but there was some leaking. I think it might have been intentional leaks, to get out some of the NSDDs” into the Soviets’ conversation.

According to interviews released a few years ago, NSDD 75, which was written by Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes while he served on the staff of the National Security Council in the White House, was intentionally but only partially leaked.

“When the Soviets heard that that was out, they were apoplectic. They wanted to find out, what’s in that document? They badly wanted to know what was in that document because the Soviets knew that Reagan had drawn crosshairs on their empire. They were in the crosshairs of the crusader,” Kengor said.

The Soviets, he continued, “were hungry to find out what specifically the Reagan administration was doing and they knew that Reagan was coming at them from multiple angles,” something that became clear to Kengor through interviews with former Soviet officials.

Beyond the history analyzed in his book, Kengor said, he wanted to express a criticism about scholarship.

“I would tell young people, in particular,” he said, that “if you run into a liberal professor who denies that Reagan had anything to do with the Soviet Union [collapse], that professor needs to know that the Soviets disagree with him, that the Poles disagree with him, that the people behind the former Iron Curtain disagree with him.”

That professor, he pointed out, “needs to know he is in a very tiny minority and doesn’t have evidence for his assertions.”

Kengor offered the theory that “maybe that’s why they avoid the primary source documents. They’re afraid that it will dispel a lot of their sacred cows about how Reagan allegedly had nothing to do with” the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

(This blog post has been adapted from two articles previously published on Examiner.com on February 23, 2011.)

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Author Interview: Christopher Horner on 'Power Grab'

Author Christopher Horner's most recent book is called Power Grab: How Obama's Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, published last year by Regnery Press.

Horner lives near Charlottesville but works for the Washington-based public-interest group, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where he is a senior fellow at CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment. A lawyer by training, his previous books include Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism.

In an interview in Richmond on January 11, Horner said Power Grab is “about the latest excuse to impose the statist agenda on the American economy, the latest vehicle to make people live the way that a certain class demands we live, the class says there are too many people – sorry, too many other people – taking up too much space using too much stuff with too much liberty because they might use it.”

In the book, Horner cites quotations by key policymakers in the Obama administration – including environmental policy advisor Carol Browner, former “green jobs czar” Van Jones, and even the President himself – and explores what they meant when they said those things “and how they plan to go about that agenda.”

Horner’s intended readers include “all of those who are wavering, those who nod at the cocktail party level,” and say, “Oh, sure, we have to do something and after all, this is something, therefore we must do this.”

Christopher Horner

He wants those people to start asking questions.

“I want people to start thinking this through,” he said.

“Do they really want people to have the option to reject certain lifestyle choices, or do they want those choices to be moved from the individual to the state? That, frankly, is what this is about.”

During the interview, Horner repeated several times something that then-candidate Barack Obama said during the 2008 presidential campaign: “We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times.”

Horner’s reaction to that? “I don’t know how much plainer it could have been expressed by somebody pushing this organization of society.”

In researching and writing his book, Horner tried to go back to original source material.

“I started by trying to figure out what are they doing that requires further explanation, because when the president says things like that and they sort of fall on dead ears, they get around the blogosphere then they move on.”

Horner wanted to bring these quotations out of a musty archive and make them part of the current debate over energy and environmental questions.

“How do we put the meat on the bones of what this means to you, as a matter of policy? How does the state decide whether or not you can drive what you want? How do these folks see the state deciding where you keep your thermostat?”

Horner pointed out that “these are senior elected and appointed officials who really believe it is their business, not yours, what you drive, how much you eat, what you eat, and where you keep your thermostat.”

Once he decided what he was looking for, he then “went about getting quotes to say, who are you going to believe? Which time are they lying, essentially? When they say this is really their objective or when they airbrush it away?”

To find the truth, Horner said, he “went through the proposals. I went through the admissions of the greens, the assertions of the greens, the records before they were in office of what they said, the statements of their allies, the people who say, ‘Oh, no, no, no, the green jobs agenda is just our way to make sure we have those resources to provide the energy we need.’”

The green activists, he said, “might actually believe that, but it depends on what the meaning of the term ‘need’ is. They think you need much, much less than you think you need.”

He dug up statements from people who said things like “providing people the energy they need would be like giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

Some of his sources “were videotaped discussions at rallies. Some were statements made in long-ago speeches. Some were in outlets that most of the public would never consider reading because it was intended for a particular audience.” His book, he says, now gives “a broader audience the opportunity to hear what Van Jones was saying back before he was Van Jones.”

For the green activists, he discovered in his research, including activists who now serve in the Obama administration, “it always comes back to transforming this country, [which] they see as so deeply flawed. [It] comes down to there are just enough of them, way too many of you and me, we use too much stuff, take up too much space, we have too many freedoms, and darn it, we want to use [them], and they don’t think that’s right.”

The book, he noted, comes with dust-jacket recommendations from talk show host Mark Levin, Spanish environmental economist Gabriel Calzada, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, and both Stephen Moore and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.

“Even before it came out,” Horner said, Power Grab “got its best reviews. I have to say that there were so many of us writing so much about ‘you have to pay attention to this statement and this evidence.’ There were a lot of us. We may have gotten lost in each others’ arguments.” This book, he says, helps cut through the clutter.

(A substantially shorter version of this article appeared on Examiner.com as "Charlottesville writer Christopher Horner examines environmental ‘Power Grab'.")

The Power of Words: A Review of Mark Oppenheimer's 'Wisenheimer'

My only disappointment with Mark Oppenheimer’s recently published memoir, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate, came about a third of the way through the book.

That is when Oppenheimer, who now writes about religious topics for the New York Times, reveals that the debate world he inhabited in junior high and high school was not that of policy debate – the sort familiar to the vast majority of high school debaters who compete under the auspices of the National Forensic League and the National Catholic Forensic League – but rather a more rarefied style of parliamentary debate, more familiar in Britain and Commonwealth countries and, apparently, in New England prep schools like the one Oppenheimer attended.

If one needs further proof that Oppenheimer's debate experience was different from that of debaters on the NFL circuits, one need only note the utter absence of any reference in his book to the R.E.M. song, "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," widely rumored to be about the habit of policy debaters to "pile bodies on the podium" as they try to inundate their opponents with disadvantages.  That the song was popular during Oppenheimer's high school years, yet he fails to mention it, shows the distance he and his teammates kept between themselves and policy debaters.

This break in our parallel lives did not deter me from reading the rest of this memoir of life as a debater because, despite its idiosyncratic foundations, Wisenheimer is perhaps the most accurate literary portrayal of the debate world in a genre that is strewn with misleading examples, not the least of which are the earnest-though-off-the-mark screenplays for the 1989 Kirk Cameron vehicle Listen to Me and for the later (2005) and better film, Thumbsucker.

Perhaps I am alone among debaters (among those who competed seriously, there really is no such thing as an “ex-debater” or “former debater,” any more than there is an “ex-Marine” or “former Eagle Scout”) who scour the entertainment media for realistic representations of our lives, only to be met with disappointment at every turn. (This is what it was like to be a gay teenager watching TV in the 1970s, hoping that someone like you would show up on the screen. It didn’t happen or, if it did, it was wildly wrong.)

The closest thing in recent years to accomplish what Oppenheimer has done is, perhaps, Gary Alan Fine’s Gifted Tongues: High School Debate and Adolescent Culture, but that is a densely argued, deeply researched sociological study, with the appropriate detachment that such a book requires.

Wisenheimer, on the other hand, is a breezy, deeply personal reflection about one person’s life and the characters he encounters. It is also a story of how a preternaturally loquacious boy channels his love of language – and, more important, his compulsion to argue – into a suitable, productive direction.

That is another parallel between Oppenheimer’s life and mine. Although he was born the same year that my high school debate career was just taking off, the personalities we displayed in our early childhoods were much the same.

He explains:

From the time I learned my first words, my parents were worried. For one thing, I never stopped talking. Some children never stop moving, other children never go to sleep, but I never stopped talking. All young children go through their inquisitive stages – ‘Why is the water blue, Mommy?’ … ‘But why does it reflect the sky?’ – but mine was extreme. What my parents remember about me as a two-year-old accords perfectly with my own faint memories of that age: the unquenchable desire to say more, to be understood better, and, above all, to have conversations with adults. I found children my age maddeningly slow. I’d ask them a question, and they didn’t know what I meant, or they would take forever to answer. Grownups, by contrast, talked smoothly, without hesitation, and their conversations went on and on.

Yes, yes, yes.

Oppenheimer and I shared an early love of books and, although his parliamentary-style debate in the Connecticut Valley League differed in kind from the Oregon-style policy debate that engaged my classmates and me in the 1970s, we both shared a pre-Internet-age approach to research that required long hours in the library, pawing through card catalogs until eyes bleared and wandering the stacks looking for that perfect quotation. (I don’t recall the last time I saw a reference to the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature in any book -- or anywhere, for that matter. Oppenheimer fondly remembers using it.)

As an example of what a typically competitive high-school debater in the days before the World Wide Web would do to obtain research materials, Oppenheimer recalls preparing for a series of debates on a still-current topic, drug law reform. In this passage, he’s remembering an event in 1988 or so:

After three extemporaneous tournaments in the fall, I was excited to be able to prepare again, as I had for the Star Wars debates in junior high. I began to research drug legalization with a particularly freshman zeal. To gather information on the more relaxed drug laws of Western European countries, I embarked on a project of writing letters to various foreign embassies in Washington. I mailed my requests for information in early December… and by Christmas break I had received generously sized pamphlets describing the Dutch, Swedish, and German legal regimes regarding narcotics. When I presented my haul at the last debate team meeting before break, [the] team co-president, an earthy, hippieish senior girl named B.J. Chisholm, looked at me and said, ‘You wrote letters?’ I detected both admiration and an equal measure of annoyance, as if I were trying too hard.

He wasn’t trying too hard, however.  He was doing what had to be done to succeed.

I have written previously how it was estimated in the 1970s that, each year, a high-school debater competing on the national circuit did the equivalent amount of research to that of a master’s degree student writing a thesis. I suspect that at Marquette High in Milwaukee, where I was a fourth-string player, the top debaters were writing the equivalent of a doctoral dissertation. How else could they routinely win national championships year after year after year?

I remember that, as low on the totem pole as I was, I wrote a new affirmative case each week throughout the season my junior year, in an attempt to throw rival teams off the scent of what our best teams were doing. The topic was environmental policy, so one week my partner, sophomore John Pilarski, and I would present a case about mercury pollution. The next week we’d argue endangered species. The following week it would be nuclear energy, ad-nearly-infinitum.

The middle two-thirds of Oppenheimer’s book is a blow-by-blow account of his career as a high school debater, which included several tournaments overseas. (There’s something NFL debaters can seldom add to their lists of accomplishments; score one for the parliamentary competitors.) This is framed by a long prologue about his alienation as a child and a short epilogue about college.

Oppenheimer applied to two universities, Harvard and Yale, and – for him – chose correctly to attend Yale.  Yale’s debate team, like those of most other Ivy League schools, is firmly in the parliamentary model. The Yale Political Union is a manifestation of that.

At Harvard, had he chosen to continue to debate, he would have found himself among the fast-talking, hypothesis-testing, Kritik-embracing geeks whom he rues in comparison to his own milieu of persuasive, oratorical perorators within the parliamentary tradition.

As he puts it,

… beginning in the 1970s debaters – as they call themselves in the large national leagues – changed [the style] to something hardly recognizable as debate: in order to cram in as many different arguments as possible, policy debaters now talk superfast, pausing every few sentences for a deep breath and then starting again at top speed. What’s more, they use jargon, like DA or disad for disadvantage, that makes their debates indecipherable to the nondebater, and even to someone like me, a debater not used to their style.

If you don’t believe this characterization, check out the 2007 documentary film, Resolved.  You’ll find yourself gasping for breath just by listening to its real-life high school debaters.

And if you think Oppenheimer’s complaint is new, check out Michael McGough’s October 10, 1988, article from The New Republic, “Pull It Across Your Flow,” in which he notes that a then “current debate textbook notes that ‘accomplished intercollegiate debaters’—the role models for high school contestants—‘speak at an average rate of nearly 270 words a minute.’”

It may be a matter of taste, this divide between policy debate and the more oratorical parliamentary style, but I’m sorry, in all my years as a competitive debater, coach, and judge, I never heard any First Affirmative begin a speech with “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, honorable judge.” Honorable judge? That just strikes me as pretentious.

I don’t want to leave the reader with a misperception of how much I enjoyed Oppenheimer’s memoir.  Despite the divergences in our debate experiences, I found Wisenheimer to be a tremendously entertaining book, tender in its recollection of adolescent misery, salutary in its tribute to intellectual pursuits, encouraging in its demonstration of triumph over adversity.

Like James Magruder’s novel, Sugarless, which similarly portrays the individual speaking events side of high school forensics with uncanny accuracy, Mark Oppenheimer’s Wisenheimer is a worthy, if rare, addition to a growing literature about competitive speech.  I’m glad I chanced upon it.

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Book Event: Neal Boortz Visits Charlottesville with 'Somebody's Gotta Say It'

On March 21, 2007, at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, syndicated radio talk-show host Neal Boortz spoke to about 200 fans and signed copies of his then-new book, Somebody's Gotta Say It. Boortz was on the fifth week of a six-week book promotion tour.

Boortz – co-author of the earlier New York Times best-seller The Fair Tax Book -- drew an overflow crowd that night at an event cosponsored by the Virginia Festival of the Book and WINA-AM radio.

Joined on the dais by WINA radio show hosts Jane Foy and Rob Schilling, Boortz entertained the crowd for about 30 minutes with anecdotes and quips before autographing copies of his latest book, Somebody’s Gotta Say It, which is based on the program notes from his daily radio show and addresses a wider range of issues than his earlier book, which dealt only with tax reform.

“Charlottesville,” Boortz began, “is one of the radio markets I’m in that I get unbelievable support, which is amazing because it has to be the bedwetting capital of Virginia.” (The home of the University of Virginia is widely known for its liberal/progressive/socialist populace.)

Joking with former City Councilor Schilling, Boortz said, “All men are born with the same number of hormones; Rob has been using his to grow hair.” Retorted Schilling: “I am a hair libertarian.”

Replying to that in words that would be echoed at the Cato Institute the next day, Boortz suggested that “most people are [libertarian] but they don’t recognize it.”

Moving on to the topics of the day, Boortz proclaimed: “I am a global warming denier. When somebody explains to me how our carbon emissions are causing the ice caps on Mars to melt, I’ll start listening to Al Gore.”

Boortz explained that his new book was started over three years ago, even before The Fair Tax Book (which he wrote with Georgia Congressman John Linder, who has introduced the Fair Tax legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives). As published, he said, “the book is 100,000 words long – pared down from 250,000.” The original manuscript, if it hadn’t been edited, “was going to take 800 pages” (about the same as Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism, as it happens).

On another issue – his opposition to the war on drugs – Boortz said that “this is one of the good things about the Libertarian Party and one of the worst things.” It’s one of the good things, he said, because the LP recognizes that “we would save tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars by treating drugs as a public health problem rather than as a law enforcement problem.” It is one of the worst things because, when the average American is confronted with the Libertarian platform, his first response is, “You’re the guys who want to legalize drugs” – as though that was the only principle on the LP’s agenda.

If we ended the war on drugs, Boortz explained, “you wouldn’t have the criminal element. We arrest 800,000 people a year for using or possessing marijuana,” which is safer than cigarettes or alcohol. “There is not one known case,” he continued, “of a death from an overdose of marijuana.”

In addition to these costs, he added, there is the “misery we force on people by denying them access to medicinal marijuana” to reduce the pain and suffering from terminal cancer, for instance.

Commenting on life in Charlottesville, Boortz joked that there should be a sign at the city limits that says: “Entering Charlottesville: Suspend Reality.”

Reality, he said, “doesn’t exist in a university town,” because when school is in session, the town is comprised of “people at the age who know everything and have all the answers.”

Asked how we can get Congress to pass the Fair Tax, Boortz related a story he heard from former Majority Leader John Boehner, who had told John Linder that at 27 townhall meetings in 17 states in the run-up to last year’s election, either the first or second question asked at each meeting was about the Fair Tax. “Across the country,” Boortz said, “we have to get people to hammer the subject” to their legislators, who do not like the Fair Tax because it takes power away from them and returns it to the individual.

Boortz asserted that the Fair Tax is the “most researched piece of legislation ever put before Congress,” and noted that “in order to criticize it, people have to change its terms” by, for instance, saying there should be exemptions or the percentage of the tax should be higher or lower.

The Fair Tax, Boortz said, “is a tax plan not devised by politicians. They’ve had their chance, and they screwed it up.”

Relating a story about a Brazilian politician who wanted to talk to him about the Fair Tax, Boortz warned that some other country “is going to do this [adopt the Fair Tax] and become the world’s number one tax haven, and the United States will have to play catch-up.”

Jane Foy asked Boortz what the most controversial chapter of his book has been, and he answered that it was his complaint that “teachers’ unions are a greater threat to the United States than Islamic terrorists,” which attracted quite a bit of media attention about a month ago.

Boortz went on, however, to talk about his view that “there is no right to vote in this country” – at least no constitutional right to vote in federal elections. There might be a right to vote in state constitutions, but not in the federal constitution, he said. Referring to the members of the Electoral College, Boortz suggested that “the state of Virginia could decide that the 13 best-looking Hooters waitresses in Virginia could be [our presidential] Electors.”

The question, Boortz said, is “who are we going to keep away from the polls.” The answer, he said, is to “limit the vote to people who know what the hell is going on.”

(This article is excerpted and adapted from an earlier blog post published on March 22, 2007, on Rick Sincere News & Thoughts.)

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Book Event: Brian Doherty Discusses 'Radicals for Capitalism'

At the Cato Institute in Washington on March 22, 2007, author Brian Doherty summarized, in about ten minutes, his 800-page retrospective, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

Introduced by executive vice president David Boaz as a former Cato intern, Doherty explained that the genesis of his book came more than ten years ago when he was working at Cato, the result of water-cooler conversations with other interns and with staff members. He noted that “a great sign of how much the libertarian movement has grown,” is that, in the early 1990s, “I was the PR department of the Cato Institute.”

Getting to the substance of his remarks, Doherty explained that “one of the great things about” the story he tells in the book is that it “has a great feminist hook,” in that three of the major intellectual figures of the movement were women: Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand. “We would not have the libertarian movement today,” he said, “without these three women.”

Paterson, Lane, and Rand all inspired Leonard Read, who established the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the first libertarian think tank.

Doherty explained that he “grew up in a world where there was a Libertarian Party and a Cato Institute, but that libertarian world did not exist” for people like Leonard Read. For them, living in the 1930s and 1940s, the libertarian world remained to be created. “The fact is,” Doherty said, “ these people had to forge something new for themselves – and that explains a lot.” Among other things, it explains why so many of the characters described in his book appear to be eccentric, or at least “strong-willed.”

In the early years of the libertarian movement, the movement was mostly about education, teaching people about individual liberty and personal responsibility. It was not until the 1970s, Doherty explained, that “organizations arose that saw the intersection of ideas and politics.” Among these were the Libertarian Party (LP), Cato, the Reason Foundation (which grew out of Reason magazine, then as now a major journal for the movement).

These organizations brought into public view ideas about limited government that included Social Security reform, school choice, privatization of municipal services, the end to the military draft, and the relegalization of narcotics.

“While we absolutely do not live in a libertarian dream world,” Doherty said, “the world is much improved since the 1940s,” the era explored at the start of his book.

Today we live in a world that his been influenced by such people as Ronald Reagan – who said libertarianism is the heart of conservatism – and Milton Friedman. Still, Doherty admitted, “there is no direct, 100% link between the success of libertarian ideas and the efforts of individual libertarians.” Nonetheless, “even the craziest and most adorable people have had their effects” in creating a world that libertarians aim for, one in which people can do “anything that’s peaceful.”

Responding to Doherty’s remarks was Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, author of Why Americans Hate Politics and other books. Dionne admitted that “it is indeed true that I once went through what a Catholic would call the ‘libertarian temptation,’ but I turned it back.”

Complimenting Doherty, Dionne said, “This is a really good book, a really important book, a fascinating book.” (This was a sentiment shared by several audience members, who expressed it during the question-and-answer period later in the afternoon.)

“One of the great values of this book,” Dionne said, despite libertarians oft-expressed disdain for tradition, “is that libertarians need to be aware of the rich tradition from which they came.”

Libertarianism, said Dionne, “is the latent and unconscious ideology of millions of Americans,” a position borne out by various public opinion surveys over the years.

Looking back at the high-water mark of the Libertarian Party’s presidential ambitions – the election of 1980, in which LP candidate Ed Clark won nearly one million votes across the country – Dionne offered this analogy: “Ed Clark was to Ronald Reagan what Norman Thomas was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

Reagan, he said, “was free-market enough to undercut the momentum of the Libertarian Party.”

Coming back to the present, Dionne suggested that there is now a “crack-up” between libertarians and conservatives because “six years of George W. Bush makes liberals and liberalism look very good” to libertarians.

During the Q&A, economist Arnold Kling asked why libertarian ideas have not “infected” academia, leading to two widely different responses from Doherty and Dionne.

Doherty answered Kling by saying that, thanks to the efforts of the Institute for Humane Studies, resistance to libertarian ideas in the academy is diminishing. Still, he cautioned, “most people, even when exposed to libertarian ideas, do not embrace them.” The bottom line is that “you have to have a revulsion about solving social problems at the point of a gun” in order to be a strong libertarian.

For his part, Dionne said, somewhat ruefully (by his own admission) that “libertarianism has made enormous strides in academia.” He pointed to how the law and economics movement, which did not even exist 30 years ago, has established itself in law schools across the country. He added that, again to his regret, “public choice theory is increasingly powerful in political science.”

Asked why libertarians are still marginalized in the political sphere, Doherty replied by saying that this is not the case, at least not compared to the situation of the 1940s. He mentioned having a recent conversation with a George Mason University student who pointed out to him that “in the world of Facebook, there are hundreds of thousands of young libertarians.” Consequently, Doherty concluded, “I am extremely optimistic about the libertarian future.”

The book forum at the Cato Institute was perhaps unusual in that so many people who are featured in Radicals for Capitalism were present. Obviously some of the influential characters in the book – Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek – are no longer with us.

But there in the Hayek Auditorium, listening to this brief history lesson, were people like Lee Edwards, who worked on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign; Don Ernsberger, one of the early Libertarian Party activists; Cato chairman William Niskanen, president Ed Crane, and executive vice president David Boaz; constitutional scholar Randy Barnett; draft-registration resister and citizen-empowerment activist Paul Jacob; and many others among the standing-room-only crowd. How rare it is to be able to have lunch with a book’s index.

(This is excerpted and adapted from an earlier blog post published on March 22, 2007, on Rick Sincere News & Thoughts.)

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