Dominic Sandbrook has taken upon himself to do a complete history of mid-century Britain, dealing with everything from grand politics to football to TDominic Sandbrook has taken upon himself to do a complete history of mid-century Britain, dealing with everything from grand politics to football to TV series. The scope and the fact that each book deals with a set chronological period, or, as Sandbrook admits, a few topics that center but are by no means contained exactly in that period, means that the reader of this book is not going to come away from this book with any new theories or theses about Britain in the era. Instead, the book comes across as the retellings of a talented if somewhat garrulous raconteur, one who wants to bring both long forgotten events and long forgotten feelings back to mind.
Unlike some "social histories," the book is not shy centering the story around politics, so it begins with the surprise June 1970 election of the Conservatives and Prime Minister Edward Heath and their defeat of Labour and Harold Wilson, and it ends, in a perfect mirrored bookend, with the surprise defeat of the Conservatives and Edward Heath by Labour and Harold Wilson in February 1974. As Sandbrook points out, one can hardly deny that Heath's premiership had been a disaster. Heath had been elected into office to unite the nation and restore its economic dynamism, especially its deteriorating terms of trade. He left after the balance of payments deficit had ballooned 10 times, after inflation hit double digits, after Northern Ireland had exploded and a year after the Provo IRA bombing campaign hit the mainland, after numerous battles with the NUM coal miners union and the electrical power union and others had led to blackouts and even a three-day week. Crime was up, violence was up, disorder was up, and people were much less happy in 1974 than they were four years earlier.
Although when elected many had either hailed or derided the "Selsdon" manifesto which had seemed to offer Tories a proto-Thatcherite vision for renewal, in reality Heath was always a cautious One Nation conservative who looked for the middle and was unlikely to cause trouble (as was, at the time, his Education Minister, Margaret Thatcher). Yet the fact that he soon imposed national "income" and price controls, with his Pay Board and Price Commission, used Anthony Barber's 1972 budget to explode spending and ignite an inflationary spiral, created a national industries act and bailed out and semi-nationalized Ross Royce and the Clydes Shipyards, and generally caved to union efforts outraged many of his supporters even as these swerves didn't change this "reactionary" image among the left. Heath himself was a mystery, a "grammar school boy" who showed the Tories were moving away from their upper-class background, and who, in one of the strangest events in modern politics, captained the winning sailing team in the Admiral's Cup when he was still prime minister, all while he was a more than passable classical pianist who also occasionally conducted. Rather than a kind of superman, however, he came across as dull, self-interested, and supremely rude. This made it impossible for him to assemble the teams he needed to run the nation and make the negotiations, above with the Northern Irish and especially the unions, that were so essential to his premiership.
Of course the book goes into far more than politics, talking about how Reuters journalist Vladimir Raitz who flew 32 students and teachers to Corsica in 1950 and set up what became by 1970 the "holidays" package industry," the rise of "Til Death do us Part" (the British "All in the Family"), the first mention of "mugging" in a British newspaper (in 1972) as a "foreign" import, the early 1970s rise of and panic about pornography, and so forth. Although lacking a strong center, it's a look at a distinct and seemingly forgotten world. I'm looking forward to reading the next one....more
Some (such as Henry Steel Commanger) have declared Frank Algernon Cowperwood to be one of the most intriguing characters in American literature. I hadSome (such as Henry Steel Commanger) have declared Frank Algernon Cowperwood to be one of the most intriguing characters in American literature. I had already read of his exploits in Dreiser's "The Financier," and this, the second volume in his trilogy, did not add much to the roundness of that character, who too me seemed, and still seems, flat. Instead, Cowperwood is presented as pure "life force," drive, and cunning. Clearly intended as a type of fascinating ubermensch, of which the early 20th century love of liveliness for its own sake is supposed to flow, one gets little of the depths of the man here. The only other main characters are hastily-sketched business opponents, who are just differentiated by their degree of cunning and their level of loathing for Cowperwood, and Cowperwood's several lovers.
Perhaps my greatest complaint about this book, and this is similar to the complaint against "The Financier," is that it is really two unhappily combined stories: one, of a utility magnate buying up gas and transit lines and constantly bribing state and local legislators; and second, of a pitiless lothario, endlessly chasing another girl and ever more enraging his (in this novel, second) wife, Aileen. I assume those who read it today (including myself) does so for it's intricate look of city politics at the turn of the century, and Dreiser seemingly does have a good understanding of capitalization, franchise debates, dividend returns, Chicago aldermen, and so forth, and a seeming ability to transfer that into real stories and battles between opponents. Yet the characters behind those battles are shallow, and one battle just succeeds another without any clear narrative progression. Likewise there is almost little seeming connection of the street car battles (except "life force") to Cowperwood's constant woman-chasing, and there is no connection between the chasing of one woman and the next. The reader forgets them because they had no real point to begin with. The thin attempt to philosophize or spirtualize all of this by identifying power and the life force with the universe or older conceptions of God only gives a thin gloss of cynicism to the underlying nihilism of it all.
For those who want a dramatization of street car battles in the Progressive Era, I suppose this is one of the few places you'll find it, even if it is not that scintillating. But for those who want a solid narrative and novel, look elsewhere....more
Henry Hobson Richardson deserves a much greater place in the pantheon of American architecture, and in American art more generally. Most importantly wHenry Hobson Richardson deserves a much greater place in the pantheon of American architecture, and in American art more generally. Most importantly with his Trinity Church in Boston (1874) he started the "Richardson Romanesque" trend, which featured rough-faced, often red, stone, asymmetrical massing, limited ornament, and large voussoired arches. I hadn't fully appreciated that the reason much of late 19th century buildings, from the old Dallas Courthouse (based on Richardson's Alleghany Courthouse) to the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. look like they do is almost solely because of Richardson.
Beyond his eponymous style, Richardson's focus on limited ornament and massing was a major inspiration for Louis Sullivan and Burnham & Root in Chicago (their Auditorium and Rookery building unmistakably bear his imprint, especially from his Marshall Field store design) as well as Frank Lloyd Wright, all of whom found his low-slung, large-roofed buildings with minimal ornament an obvious inspiration for much of American modernism. He had both Stanford White and Charles McKim work in his office, which thus helped birth the McKim, Mead, and White firm and much of the subsequent Beaux-Arts style. Beyond, these major styles, however, he almost single-handedly revived "gambrel" (two pitches, side-gabled) roofs from American colonial times, which can now be seen in suburbs across the nation. He created the "shingle style" with his Stoughton house that is so popular among resort homes. Somehow numerous, occasionally conflicting, trends and tendencies in American architecture all emerged out of one man with an incredibly inventive mind; a man who, despite his stutter and soon-disabling girth, was universally lauded as a boisterous, fun, and generous human being.
The author demonstrates the Richardson's collaboration with Frederick Law Olmsted was constant and real, as was their friendship, first when they lived on Staten Island together, and then when Olmsted moved to Brookline, Massachusetts to be closer to Richardson who had moved their after the Trinity Commission. They were both collaborators and best friends. As the author notes in the acknowledgments, the book started with Richardson and it's clear that Olmsted takes a back seat here, but his accomplishments are at least as great. Besides the Central Park commission that started his career (late, at age 35, after some years of toying as a writer and nurseryman), he was essential in turning both Yosemite and Niagara Falls into public parks, he created the first arboretum with Charles Sergeant of Harvard; he designed the park systems for Chicago, Buffalo, San Francisco, Brooklyn, and Boston, as well as the grounds the Capitol in DC, of all of which used his combination of rolling paths and pleasure-riding parkways, which he basically created; with Riverside outside of Chicago he created the first modern, curvilinear street suburb. As the book notes, starting with Central Park he also became a good manager of his projects, and, beyond architecture, as head of the Sanitary Commission in the Civil War which helped save thousands of lives.
One leaves this book impressed with the immense scale of these men's impact on the landscape. It is almost impossible to imagine modern American cities and parks without their imprint, and it is more amazing that they were close friends and often collaborators. The book does tend to go on tangents, and spends much time on individual projects that don't seem important to the evolution of the architects, but it tells an important and essential story about America's land, and even America's contribution to global art and design....more
This book delivers what it promises, an overview of water and wastewater treatment (and, importantly, a third distinct area, sludge or biosolid disposThis book delivers what it promises, an overview of water and wastewater treatment (and, importantly, a third distinct area, sludge or biosolid disposal).
The engineering of modern water systems is pretty straightforward, if also very detailed. Basically, drinking water has to be screened, coagulated and flocculated (bad stuff clumped together), sedimented out, filtered (usually with a rapid sand filter that can be "backwashed" and cleaned), and chlorinated. Sewage has to be screened, the big materials then shredded and the grit removed, primary settled, aerated, secondary settled, and then chemically administered (also usually with chlorine). Waste solids that emerge from the drinking water processes are still only about 1% solid and 99% water, so they have to be coagulated again (usually with alum), thickened, usually with gravity, conditioned with heat or chemicals, and dewatered. Wastewater solids, or biosolids, are sent into another process of thickening, and stabilized, usually by anaerobic digestion, and then delivered to places to be cured like lagoons and composted or applied to agriculture. These processes remind one how much work goes into keeping our water clean and available.
If there is a surprise here it is that there are so many ways to do the same things. For instance, primary sedimentation for wastewater can use septic tanks, two-story tanks, or plain settling tanks, while secondary sedimentation can involve trickling filters, rotating biological contractors, different types of treatment ponds, or, most common, activated sludge systems, the last of which is the most modern and most common, but all of which involve using bacteria to eat through the wastewaters problems. This book explains to the reader the benefits and costs of each of these methods, and tries to point out how they can all deal with federal water regulations, which determine much of this activity. The book is only for people directly interested in water systems, but who do not directly engineer them, but it should be useful for them. ...more
This is a valuable although at times confused look at water supply, which is used as part of a general examination of special district governance in AThis is a valuable although at times confused look at water supply, which is used as part of a general examination of special district governance in America. The book notes that special districts occupy an increasingly large space in American local government. They went from 6% of local spending in 1952 to 11% by 2002, and went from about 12,000 separate districts to over 35,000. Admittedly, water is just one, rather smallish, part of special districts, and special districts only constitute about 22% of average local water spending, but that can go up to 40% or above in places like California, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, to 0% in North Dakota (which, actually has the most total special districts per capita, for other issues.)
The fundamental question asked here is, "Do special districts act differently than other governments?" The author investigates this empirically in the areas of adoption of "increasing block rates" (or progressive water rates), water impact fee imposition, and interlocal agreements. The answer in each area is "it depends." For block rates, water districts are more likely to adopt in general, but are much more so at low temperatures (supposedly an indication of high supply of water) and are slightly less so at very high temperatures (where "saliency" makes even cities more responsive to majority demands for block rates.) Water impact fees, at least in the studied California example, are much higher in general for special districts, but with very high growth, cities increase water impact fees even more, again supposedly because of high saliency. The research also shows that many rules on extending/shifting boundaries makes districts more likely to make revenue-gaining contracts with other govs, but less likely to make expenditure increasing contracts, which argues that boundary flexibility and cooperation are substitute strategies.
In the end, much of the book argues that things like block rates are good which shows that special districts are welfare enhancing, but on the whole the best part of the book, like many political science books, is the examples, in this case, of five water and growth debates (in both CA and PA). It shows that water is an essential part of growth control or expansion, and that opponents of growth could use special districts elections to oppose growth when they couldn't get their way at county or municipal elections, and sometimes retail or wholesale districts had different strategies that opponents or advocates of growth could exploit (such as making contracts with different utilities or directly with wholesale water groups). This book showed me that water politics are much more important than I thought, but I left with more questions than answers. ...more
This is a wonderful look at an underappreciated part of Washington D.C. life and of American politics generally. As the author points out, Washington This is a wonderful look at an underappreciated part of Washington D.C. life and of American politics generally. As the author points out, Washington high society was long distinct from others. For one, it was the newest of the big East Coast cities, founded in 1800 (Baltimore, the next closest, was 1729). Many of the highest ranked people who lived in the city tended to be there for only a short-time (in the early 19th century, fewer than half of Congressmen returned after each term) leading to a "congregation of strangers" as one commentator said. There was no large commercial class that dominated the city. And, in a factor that later became very important for those with young daughters looking for husbands, the international legations and embassies (self-styled "ambassadors" from other countries started after 1893) gave this rather small city a rather cosmopolitan feel. The political center of social life also made society more important for advancement in the city relative to elsewhere.
As the author points out, in the antebellum years social life was rather undefined but also very Southern, based on families like the Van Nesses and the Carrolls and the Tayloes who had lived in the area even before it became a city. Thomas Jefferson, the first president to set the tone in the city, established a famously loose social scene (of "pele mele" one said), but Dolley and James Madison from 1809 restored the Wednesday "drawingrooms" that Jefferson had dropped and expanded the social calendar, starting in December when new Congresses usually came in, from six weeks to ten. Monroe and then Jackson (especially over the Peggy Eaton affair) and the 1824 election, the first to truly divide Washington society, all threw the social orders into turmoil, but Dolley continued to dominate through it all, even befriending and guiding Mrs. Presidents Tyler and Polk through society (and wives were frequently identified by both the title and name of their husband). Harriet Lane later helped her uncle President Buchanan through the ropes too.
The Civil War upturned everything. Beside a few "Antiques" (as Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner called them in the "Gilded Age") such as William Corcoran, who left to Europe to the war and then came back to endow Louisa House for Southern genteel women on Massachusetts Avenue, the city quickly changed from Democratic and Southern to Republican and Northern. War heroes took new social precedence and stuck around and formed a new part of "official" society, and new wealth, what Twain in the "Gilded Age" called the "Parvenus," mingled with both. Washington became famous for it's relatively open social pecking order, so many noveau riche descended, before or after they bought senatorships, to come for the winter social season or simply to put down roots. Although it was famously bad luck to buy a house in Washington with all of the turnover (demonstrated by James Blaine finishing his house on DuPont just as he was removed from the Secretary of State position by President Chester Arthur), a few did, such as the "bonanza kings" Senator William Stewart of Nevada and Senator Tom Walsh of Colorado. Some officials intertwined with local residential builders, such as "Boss" Alexander Shephard and Amzi Barber, the latter of whom worked with Senator John Sherman to build LeDroit Park and helped build up Columbia Heights (as well as helping create some of the earliest asphalt in the nation.) Other official members at least removed from the "messes" and, as the Congressional Directory, showed, the city went from just a quarter of Congressmen with family in 1845 when first counted, to a third in 1860 to more than half in 1871 (when it stopped including its "Members in Messes" but by which time the Directory had a bewildering array of typographic symbols for the type of "ladies" brought with them). Meanwhile the Antiques, known from 1900 on, the same year as the first Social Register (and a dozen years after NYC got the first one) as "Cave Dwellers," held on, mainly around Lafayette Square, while the Parvenus moved to Pacific, later DuPont, Circle. Old society Madeline Vinton Dahlgren, wife of the admiral, wrote "Etiquette of Social Life in Washington" in 1873 and was sustained by it, while the paid "social secretary" first embodied by Nellie Hunt, daughter of William Henry Hunt, Navy Secretary under Garfield, became established and blossomed in 1901 when Mrs. Roosevelt established the first White House social secretary. As one commentator said it was "as though a beneficent Providence" had created the social secretary role for impecunious blue bloods.
The book is filled with forgotten social scandals and battles, such as those of Kate Salmon Sprague, daughter of the Chief Justice and wife to Senator Sprague, who dominated society in the 1860s but was rumored to have had an affair with Roscoe Conkling, or Victoria Sackville-West, the illegitimate daughter of the British minister who official society had meetings on and decided to accept as a hostess, or the late marriage of the once celebrated Admiral Dewey to Mildred Mclean Hazen, the daughter of the much questioned Ohio Democratic mogul and powerbroker Washington McLean and sister of John McLean, who married into the wealthy but locally based Beale family, and who bought the Decatur House on Lafayette. Overall, it's a surprising and important look at the life of America's capital....more
This is a near perfect encapsulation of the years and personalities that created the modern urban planning movement. As Peterson shows, although thereThis is a near perfect encapsulation of the years and personalities that created the modern urban planning movement. As Peterson shows, although there were "townsite plans" going back millennia, where streets for new cities were laid out, the modern idea of planning for existing cities really emerged in the late 19th century. There were a few distinct strands that went into this idea. Some engineers had already thought of "comprehensive" plans for water and sewer systems, often in a metropolitan fashion, as part of sanitary reforms such as those of Edwin Chadwick in London and of new Boards of Health that sprouted beginning in the 1860s in the U.S. Landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmsted created systematic plans for urban parks, such as San Francisco, Brooklyn and Buffalo, all in the 1860s (only Buffalo's was finished in this mold, in the next decade) using systematic parkways connecting them and creating new residential streets. These parkways intersected with town extension planning, such in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, which hoped to form the layout of new residential districts.
Another strand was the goal of civil beautification, such as that encouraged by the American Institute of Architects after its formation in 1857. This culminated in the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where the "White City," everyone from D.H. Burnham to Olmsted agreed, was a spectacular triumph in imaging what city spaces could be, especially its main "Court of Honor." In that decade new plans for "civic centers" arose in places such as Chicago and Cleveland. But, as Peterson shows, the real birth of the "City Beautiful" method was the 1902 McMillan Plan (after DC Senate Committee Chair James McMillan of Michigan) for Washington, D.C. Originally a way for McMillan to eliminate grade crossing and update the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad depot at the mall, it intersected with a Centennial Commission plan to bring a new bridge across the Potomac and the recently moved-to-Washington AIA's endorsement under Glenn Brown of a comprehensive park system. It led to a $10,000 appropriation to consider a general plan of parks and public buildings, but the commission soon more than doubled that amounted and created a full architectural plan and model that inspired the nation, with the help of Burnham. A new Union Station (not the one McMillan wanted on the Mall), a park system including a road to Mount Vernon designed by Olmsted, and other additions aggregated many different strands together in one "plan."
The City Beautiful took from the DC plan and a few blossoming reform movements, such as the Municipal Art Society of New York, formed in 1893, the National League of Improvement Associations formed in 1900 (led by sociologist Charles Zueblin and organizer Jesse Good, growing out of village improvement societies dating back to Stockbridge, Massachusetts in 1852) and the American Park and Outdoor Art Association of 1897, with people like HOrace William Shaler Cleveland and George Kessler to lobby for things like limiting public advertising. When these merged under J. Horace McFarland in 1904 in the American Civic Association, they created a real aesthetic-focused planning ethos. Lots of towns and cities in the next five years drew up big "city plans" that promised urban revivals but had little bearing on reality. It was the effort by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. in 1909 to begin turning the new Committee on the Congestion of Population into the Committee on City Planning that combined the various threads of the movement into a conservative yet fragmented discipline that was aesthetic but also practical, although, still, distinct from the housing reform movement of Lawrence Veiller, who jealously guarded his domination of that.
As the author shows, there were numerous triumphs of city planning, from smoke and billboard abatement, to park systems, to traffic and street reorganizations, to street extension rules (often the only power given to new city planning "commissions," which emerged despite Olmsted's goal of a professional "office"), to civic centers, that are still visible today. But the main goal, of comprehensive "planning," never solidified. The biggest change in urban planning, zoning, starting in 1908 in Los Angeles and in 1916 in New York, took the planners by surprise, and although they appreciated it, it evolved alongside urban plans that had little effect on them. As the author shows, the urban planning ideal expressed a moment in Progressive reform, one that largely failed, but which left remnants all around....more
This is a near-perfect biography. It encapsulates the personality of a man and his time, explains the peculiar nature of his work and his genius, and This is a near-perfect biography. It encapsulates the personality of a man and his time, explains the peculiar nature of his work and his genius, and explores his effect on history. Even somebody mildly familiar with Benjamin Henry Latrobe might be shocked to read in this book at how broad his impacts were.
Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born to be a minister in the strict confines of the Moravian Church in England, where communal child-rearing and intense education, including a spell in the seminary in church's homeland in Germany, were supposed to turn Latrobe into an ideal preacher. He, however, rebelled against the church, and in 1796, after the death of his first wife and his looming insolvency (the first of three), he took his budding talents from a spell at an architectural firm, and a time working with pioneering engineer Sir John Smeaton, to America, and, to be precise, to Norfolk and then Richmond, Virginia. His intelligence and education, and his Freemasonry, meant he was meeting with President George Washington within weeks of arriving and he soon began designing buildings.
As Latrobe constantly complained, his insulated upbringing made him incapable of financial stability. Yet he constantly insisted on his status as a gentleman supervising architect and his 5% commission (he also consistently disdained the American practice of soliciting architectural competitions, with unpaid submissions, judged by lay juries, but he kept participating in them). Yet he designed several new buildings, including the first Virginia State Penitentiary, which incorporated the new reform ideas of John Howard about solitary confinement. He moved to Philadelphia and completed the Bank of Pennsylvania in 1798, which single-handedly ignited the Greek Revival style in America (the more famous Second Bank of the US, from his student William Strickland, in the 1820s, explicitly stole not just from this, but from Latrobe's own submission for the contest.) He also created the design of the first municipal waterworks, with steam-powered pressure, and surrounding Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. His friend Thomas Jefferson called Latrobe to the new city Washington D.C. when Jefferson became president and appointed him surveyor of building, from which he fixed and rearranged amateur architect William Thornton's Capitol building. He redesigned it again after the British burned it in the War of 1812. Later he designed the first neoclassical Catholic cathedral in the country in Baltimore. In the meantime he supervised a launch of Robert Fulton's steamship in Pittsburgh, and with his son helped construct the New Orleans waterworks, although both he and his son succumbed to yellow fever there.
So from one of the first US prisons, to the first Greek Revival building, the first municipal waterworks, the US Capitol, innovative residential design (he moved the kitchen to the first floor and combined tub and toilet in one room to centralize plumbing), many famous descriptions and sketches (some of which still populate US history textbooks), and relations with everyone who mattered, Latrobe had an eventful life. This book shows him warts and all. He was haughty, with a a false and imagined aristocratic lineage he touted, and constantly struggling with friends and supposed allies, but it also shows why he still matters today. It's a great read. ...more
This is a somewhat disappointing read in that the author either spends significant amounts of time on national subjects not directly related to VirginThis is a somewhat disappointing read in that the author either spends significant amounts of time on national subjects not directly related to Virginia (explaining the American Revolution, the Civil War, and so forth) or, in later chapters, on "firsts" (the first woman or minority at this or that college or hospital). When the author focuses on major changes to Virginia's society and government the story can be fascinating.
One of the most surprising events to me was the 1799 repeal of the "glebes," or landed supports for Episcopal clergy in Virginia, and the 1802 law for the sale of them. In a 1815 US Supreme Court case, Terrett v. Taylor, from Alexandria County and thus from what was then DC, the sale was declared invalid, based on no specific provision of the Constitution, but Virginia ignored and thus nulified the case. This was a disestablishment similar to the 1530s in England. Also, Henry Ruffner became famous in 1847 for his "Address to the People of West Virginia" where he condemned slavery for its bad economic effects and proposed both black education and black colonization. In the 1870s his son, William Henry Ruffner, became the first superintendent of Virginia's new public school system and an important proponent of what became Virginia Tech, founded in 1872 as the land-grant school for the state, which was matched by designation of the Hampton Institute for African-Americans. The adoption of the "Gray Plan" for massive resistance in 1955, which allowed a local option for or against segregation, won in a referendum to the people 2-1, but the Byrd Organization took that as a mandate to forbid any local options at all the next year (the "Stanley Plan"), which led to closing of schools until it was struck down by courts in 1959 (Governor Lindsay Almond won state-wide elections the same year to help keep the schools open too).
The history of Virginia is indeed fascinating and distinct. I wish it had a more focused telling....more
This is a workmanlike biography that does much to illuminate its subject, although I wish it had focused a little more on the part of Alexander ShepheThis is a workmanlike biography that does much to illuminate its subject, although I wish it had focused a little more on the part of Alexander Shepherd's career that made him famous.
Admittedly, Alexander Shepherd, sometimes, falsely as this book shows, known as "Boss" Shepherd, is famous for his work during just a short period as the effective head of Washington D.C. from 1871 to 1874. He started as the son of a middling farmer in Charles County, MD, made his way to DC and worked his way up a pipe-laying and plumbing business to become head, and eventually established a small fortune through is business and DC real estate ventures. He became involved in Republican politics, and advocated for the end of DC's independent government in exchange for direct congressional oversight, since partially he thought it would cause DC to get more federal funds and partially because he worried that the newly enfranchised African Americans would not vote in the way he wanted. Due to his wealth and his intense friendship with President Ulysses Grant (and despite the opposition of old DC power brokers W.W. Corcoran and George Washington Riggs) he got his wish and was appointed executive head of the Board of Public Works and, right before the end, eventually, governor.
The book only spends about 50 pages on Shepherd's time running the DC government. It does absolve him (as did the two congressional investigations in 1872 and 1874) of any personal corruption, but does note his use of what he called "the law of necessity" to push projects through, set-price, instead of bid, contracts, that increased prices, and road grading projects that often devastated nearby homeowners. In the end, he argues that Shephard assured that DC remained the capital and substantially improved the public areas, although he did put the city into deep debt and caused the city to lose all voting rights, in 1874, for the next 100 years. On the other plus side however, Congress at the same time guaranteed the 50-50 spending match which helped ensure the success of the city.
The book spends entirely too long on Shepherd's unfortunate 22 year sojurn with his seven member family in a small silver mining town in Mexico. The attempt demonstrated Shepherd's drive, but had little effect on the rest of the world. On the whole though, this book is a worthwhile contribution to American urban history and DC history by a dedicated researcher....more
Although a little dated, and with a little too much generalized theorizing, this is an important and original look at federal civil service reform in Although a little dated, and with a little too much generalized theorizing, this is an important and original look at federal civil service reform in America. The authors puncture a few myths, and add a few important new perspectives as well.
The book considers the rise of the autonomous and putatively merit-based civil service as the result of interest group politics. First, they show that the usual story of civil service reformers triumphing over political bosses is false, because the growth of the federal bureaucracy from 37,000 in 1861 to 51,000 in 1871 to 100,000 in 1881 made it harder for both the Congress and President to manage patronage demands. They themselves wanted to escape it but neither could withdraw from the demands on their own, so the Pendleton Act, passed with large bipartisan majorities in 1883, did so. The act also helped federal politicians escape patronage demands that mainly benefited the local and state party organizations that made them. Businesses also wanted the government to operate more efficiently and thus one of the strongest determinants of voting for the bill was large post offices and custom houses, both of which businesses interacted frequently with, in a congressional district, and these were usually in the largest cities (the original act put post and customs houses under the merit system if they had more than 50 members but that had been reduced to 5 by 1896). This was not all just "blanketing in" previous patronage appointments. As the books shows, only about 40% of all executive order classifications were in the famous "lame duck" periods to protect their own appointees and only 20% of the growth of the merit system overall was during lame-ducks. The proportion of merit employees kept going up until it approached 90% in the 1920s.
The books notes that there are several issues beyond merit hiring that are important to consider for the civil service. There are pay equalization provisions, where unions played big. The postal unions (the first federal ones to form, in 1890, and for years by far the largest) helped create the first pay classification bill for their service in 1907. The inflation after the 1890s caused government wages to decline relative to the private sector (even though they were still higher) but the unions allowed postal workers catch up and exceed regular federal pay by 1919. The 1923 Classification Act aimed to raise all federal salaries and created a Personnel Classification Board made up of the Bureau of the Budget, the Bureau of Efficiency and the Civil Service Commission, at least for DC based employees, which was much demanded by all the unions. This also created general salary schedules that Congress could control while before lump-sum appropriations allowed executive officials to hire and control the size of staffs. The 1949 Classification Act extended the classification system nationwide. The 1962, 1970 and 1990 salary adjustment acts all tried to boost salaries and accommodate divergent costs across the nation and were much lobbied by the unions.
There were also fights over blue-collar wages and hours, such as the eight-hour work law of 868 and then two in 1888 for printers and letter carriers, and the 1912 the Reilly Act, which extended the eight-hour law to all postal clerks and carriers. All this is long-before state or private sector eigh hour laws. The 1908 and 1916 federal workers compensation laws also proceeded and exceeded the state laws, which only started in 1911. The 1920 retirement act was considerably more generous than anywhere else. Only Massachusetts, from 1911, had a civil service retirement proposal, but that promised only 50% of the pension costs while the Feds paid 2/3s. There were other political battles, such as restrictions on political advocacy, from Teddy Roosevelt's gag order of 1902 for merit employees to restrictions on political activity in a 1907 act and the Hatch Acts of 1939 and 1940. There is also of course tenure provisions, put in place by McKinley by executive order in 1897, withdrawn by Teddy Roosevelt, and then formalized in the 1912 Lloyd-LaFollette Act and the 1920 Civil Service Retirement Act.
Time and again the authors show the growing power of federal employees and how they became more autonomous, but they also show many explanations for this power are not true. Fed employee power is not from votes, since federal employees are pretty diffuse and don't tend to vote much more than private-sector workers (unlike state and local employees which vote by 30% more). Representatives with higher proportions of fed workers don't tend to vote much more for fed employee interests. Their power seems to come from lobbying with, at least in the 1980s, three big postal unions especially donating multiples of what the other federal employee unions donated. Fed employees are also not "empire-builders" because as the book shows there is little relationship between the growth in bureaucracies and employee pay, which is capped and controlled anyway. Yet federal workers do get more pay overall, about 30% more than either private or state or local workers (which, due to the possibilities of taxpayer exit and direct oversight do not differ significantly from the private sector.)
I wish the authors had gone more into the big changes in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, and I wish that they had cut some of the verbiage, but overall this is a great look at an underappreciated topic. ...more
This is one of the more beautiful and heartrending looks at American poverty I've ever read. Although the book focuses on about half a dozen people inThis is one of the more beautiful and heartrending looks at American poverty I've ever read. Although the book focuses on about half a dozen people in Milwaukee, by examining them and their milieux the author more than makes his case that the American poor are beset by housing instability and high housing costs (many of these families survive off welfare or SSI and rent takes up about 70% of their cash income). Yet by the author's unstinting and honest look at these individuals, the reader might takeaway a different explanation for poverty than the author, namely, that pervasive crime, dysfunction, and drug addiction, not the laws around eviction, are at the root of much of the housing instability.
The book focuses on two areas, the black North Side and mainly white College Mobile Home Park in the South Side. Both share many of the same issues. One individual, Crystal, was born prematurely when her mother was stabbed. Her father smoked crack and so did her mother and so did her mother's mother. She went to foster care and eventually got a subsidized apartment, but to keep the apartment she would have to get a job. She submitted a single application but believed her SSI check was better and thus was removed from the house and became homelessness. For awhile she lived with a friend Vanetta, but Vanetta helped her boyfriend rob purses from two ladies at gunpoint and was sentenced to prison.
Doreen Hinkston is the single mother (all mothers in this book are single mothers) of Patrice, Natasha, C.J. and Ruby, ages 24 to 13,from different fathers. Patrice herself is already a mother of three children, the first conceived when she was 14, and Natasha soon becomes unwittingly pregnant (at one point one person in the book looks at a heavy new baby boy and says it proves cigarettes don't lower birth weights.) Doreen is physically fine but gets SSI for depression and thus doesn't work. Most of the fathers don't even pretend to be involved.
Its hard to blame the individuals themselves because they are clearly immersed in a world that is so dysfunctional they don't know much else. If one's father and mother and grandmother smoked crack, it's not surprising that someone doesn't grow up to be successful. Many try to take the meager resources they are given to stay above water, but the usual problem here isn't some temporary shortage of rental money; it's perpetual problems with unstable families and drugs, from which even temporary boosts don't seem to help them escape.
None of this detracts from the book itself, which makes one feel for everyone in it. The author is willing to go into all sides of the story, from Sherrena and Quentin, the black landlords in the North Side, to Tobin, the owner of the mobile home park, and shows some of their struggles and successes. The author chronicles the moving company that clears people out of their evicted apartments, and goes to the housing court to deal with all the evictions, settlements and "stipulations" that landlords get with their tenants if they promise to withdraw the eviction notice. It's a comprehensive and honest look at a world that most Americans can barely imagine and I can't recommend it enough....more
This is one of the best books on the history of Washington, which also gives a whole new view of 20th century politics. At first I thought the timing This is one of the best books on the history of Washington, which also gives a whole new view of 20th century politics. At first I thought the timing of the book, taking it from the 1930s to the 1990s, was somewhat arbitrary, but as the author shows this was the one period where homosexuality was considered decidedly dangerous, and thus where it became both more secretive and more openly discussed, albeit usually as a threat. Yes, there were famous gays in Washington and in politics beforehand, although much is just speculation. Baron Frederich von Steuben ironically fled the court of the almost openly homosexual King Frederick the Great due to being too "familiar" with younger soldiers, and thus became one of the most important tacticians in US history (ironically too, his statute graced Lafeyette Park, where, before DuPont Circle became famous, was the main gay cruising ground in the city.) One could go on. President James Buchanan did seem very close to Senator William Rufus King. Rose Cleveland, President Grover Cleveland's sister, spent most of her life with a close "friend." Archie Butt, Taft's doctor, went down on the Titanic with his likely lover. Jesse "Jess" Smith, who lead President Harding's "Ohio Gang" and was uncommonly close to Attorney General Harry Daugherty.
But it is interesting that basically none of these gays were persecuted, and its not just because they were more discreet. At least among the upper classes, such "perversions" brought few consequences. It was the New York Post's attack on isolationist Massachusetts Senator David Walsh for supposedly visiting a gay brothel (the charges were shown to be false, but he was likely gay), an attack that FDR who was otherwise extremely understanding of homosexuality, cheered along, that opened a new front. As even papers at the time noted, such subjects had never been used for political warfare. Charges of homosexuality soon pushed Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles out, largely due to the attacks of Ambassador William Bullitt, who, in one of the endless ironies here, was almost certainly gay and living with Carmel Offie, a noted Washington socialite.
As the author shows, homosexuality was the subtext of much of postwar political debates. The McCarthyite scare actually led to fewer communists being fired from the government than the Lavender Scare led to homosexuals being fired, where first Truman banned homosexuals from secret positions and then Eisenhower banned them from all (the Eisenhower position was revoked by Ford in 1975 and the secret one later in the decade). The fear of homosexuals in the Cold War emerged out of the false claim Alfred Redl, a gay Austro-Hungarian spy, was blackmailed by the Russians before World War I, at a time when future CIA director Allen Dulles was serving in Vienna. The suspicion of the CIA and the State Department (the latter due to the false idea that Alger Hiss (straight) and Whittaker Chambers (gay) were lovers) gave more power to the FBI whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, was famously, well, different, although the author doesn't come down hard on one side or the other. Homosexuality was the subtext behind the opposition to Eisenhower pushing the liberalish Chip Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union. (As the author shows, the US never found one example of gays being blackmailed into being spied. Ironically, again, the one attempt, where columnist Joe Alsop was entrapped by a gay agent in Moscow, led Joe to become just more anti-Communist.)
For years homosexuality was a useful charge in internecine power struggles. It helped Lyn Nofziger get rid of Governor Ronald Reagan's deputy chief-of-staff Phil Battaglia in California. Ray Price, Nixon's speechwriter, was subject to constant insinuations. Many were just forced out of top positions either before they would be screened by the government. Arthur Vandenberg Jr. dropped out from being Eisenhower's top aide. Lem Billings, JFK's "first friend," stayed out of formal government. Others became national scandals. Walter Jenkins became a threat to LBJ's reelection campaign when caught in a YMCA bathroom.
The culmination of the book is the Reagan presidency, which as the author shows, was both in many ways the gayest presidency in history, due to the couple's Hollywood background and especially Nancy's many, many close gay friends, and the one beset of course with the AIDs crisis, where Reagan was slow to act but moved after his close friend Rock Hudson died of it.
The author is always sympathetic, always thoughtful, and, surprisingly for such a politically charged book, very equanimous towards the parties (he shows liberals were no less likely to use the charge than conservatives, that many gays were attracted to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, and that many steps towards gay rights were taken by conservatives, although the political divide became stronger in the 1980s.) It's a wonderful and revealing look at American history with no close parallel that I can think of....more
Voltaire war gewisser Spotter der Religion und die Sitte Europas. In diesem Buch verspotte Voltaire jedoch arabeschenin Sitte um sich uber Europas lusVoltaire war gewisser Spotter der Religion und die Sitte Europas. In diesem Buch verspotte Voltaire jedoch arabeschenin Sitte um sich uber Europas lustig zu machen. Er feirt gleichzeitig die Tugenden eines Mann namens Zadig. Zadig ist ein Philosophe, das immer die Richtig tut. Aber fur jede richtig Tat litt Zadig. Er verliert sein Madchen und sein Geld, wenn er seine Gelhrsamkeit bewist oder Grosszugig ist. Es scheint, als wurde Zadigs Schicksal leiden. In dieses Hinsicht ahnelt Zadig Voltaires beruhmteem Roman, Candide. Und ahnlich wie bein Candide ist ubberraschendweise am Ende auch fur Zadig alles gut.
Ich habe diese Buch auf Deutsch gelesen weil meine Franzosisch nicht so gut ist und weil meine Frau dieses Buch gekauft hat. Es mag fur Deutschlerner schwierig sein, aber es ist eine wunderbaren Geschichte....more
As a slice of Chicago trading life in the early 2000s this is interesting, but mainly it is an overlong tale of every jot and tittle that ever went doAs a slice of Chicago trading life in the early 2000s this is interesting, but mainly it is an overlong tale of every jot and tittle that ever went down during the merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (the "Merc" or CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) in mid-2007. As the author relates, through most of their history they were bitter rivals and it was hard for employees at either to ever imagine them coming together. But Terry Duffy of the Merc and Charles Carey of the CBOT both were Irish-American South Side Chicagoans who made an effort to try it out. The Merc had gone from playing second-fiddle to the larger exchange and it had IPOed first. The CBOT had fallen behind on things like electronic trading and it IPOed just in 2005 and had long resisted their essential ag contracts to go "side-by-side" with both pit and electronic trading. Thus the merger was effectively a purchase of CBOT by CME.
The merger was complicated however, because Jeff Sprecher, who had turned an incohoate California energy producer into the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in Atlanta made an even juicier offer for CBOT, valuing it at well over $10 billion. A bidding war started, often involving the tightly held B-shares still owned by the CBOT members and their claim to have open seats on the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE) which had spun off back in 1973. It was a tight-knit group both sides had to convince, as well as the DOJ, but in the end the Merc, with a technically smaller deal, but more experience and tradition, won out, and the merger went off smoothly, soon leading to the total purchase of NYMEX.
The bare bones of the story are interesting, as well as insight into how traders worked and how the economics team designed new "products" for the exchanges and encouraged them with sweet market-maker deals, but this is just too long with too many characters (all called by their first name, since this is an insider account, which can get confusing.) It would have been better if it was 1/3 the length and more focused. ...more
Half of this book is a masterclass on both think tanks and politics that should be read by anyone interested in either topic. The story of how FacebooHalf of this book is a masterclass on both think tanks and politics that should be read by anyone interested in either topic. The story of how Facebook founder Sean Parker founded a new think tank, the Economic Innovation Group, with Steve Glickman and John Lettieri, DC Democratic and Republican workers, rolled out a proposal for "Opportunity Zones," or capital gains tax-breaks for investments in certain lower income census-tracts, and got it hitched as a "stowaway," as Glickman said, on President Trump's 2017 tax bill is well-told and insightful. EIG got top tier thinkers and politicians involved, did appropriate outreach to the press (cemented by their "Distressed Communities Index") and got bipartisan buy-in by people in both chambers of Congress (especially Senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott in the Senate). They then leveraged that support, and Tim Scott's personal conversation with President Trump after the Charlottesville tragedy, into a bill provision that managed to survive in the Senate with nary a public peep and into the conference committee act (the House, where Speaker Paul Ryan and Ways and Means Chair Kevin Brady remained suspicious, had kept it out.) It's all well-told and well down.
About half of the book, however, is taken up with tales of individual real-estate investors in individual OZ tracts and funds. As the author admits, the Treasury is not required to issue reports on the zones and there is basically no systematic data on them. He probably proves his point that much of the big investment went into high-end hotels in already wealthy areas, but much of this part reads as tendentious. It's simply not particularly interesting how some investor scrounged up funding for a development in Portland or in Charleston or in Baltimore, and doesn't say too much about the overall program.
But for a good tale of how some people can get things done in Washington, this is tough to beat....more
This is something of a missed opportunity in that commodities and futures markets have not received a tenth of the interest of stock markets, and therThis is something of a missed opportunity in that commodities and futures markets have not received a tenth of the interest of stock markets, and there are few if any public accounts of them, and none of their whole history that I am aware of. This book takes a bold look at the history of futures and options in America, focusing on Chicago since the formation of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1848 and its wheat trading market, which graduated in 1870 to the later famous octagonal trading pits. The problem is that story is filled with one-off names and characters that don't seem to have much purpose except to add color and there is basically no attempt to explain the reasons for these markets evolution.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Merc, started in 1874 as the Chicago Produce Exchange, and for awhile a version became the Chicago Butter and Egg Board after 1898, but they remerged in 1919. While the CBOT was mainly Irish, the Merc was a little more down-market and mainly Jewish. In 1842 it introduced trading in potatoes and onions, and acquired a bad rep after Vincent Kosuga corned the onion market and then crashed it, leading to a ban on onions futures by Congress in 1958. That caused the Merc to move into pork bellies in 1961 to make up for the post-January months when egg trading was light. Leo Melamed, the son of Bundist Chicagoans, set up a futures currency trading market on the Merc after a New York one went under. In 1972 the CBOT set up an options exchange attached to the main trading floor for ag commodities and built out clearing firms and brokers with special enticements, just in time for the "Black-Scholes" option model to be built out and it traded bond options. When Berkeley economist Richard Sandor created the first interest rate options to help Ginnie Mae futures contracts for mortgages, he spawned a new industry, as well as, according to his own lights, the term "derivatives" (in 2003 he would form the Chicago Climate Exchange.) The only real trip outside of Chicago for this book is when the New York Commodities Exchange got the oil market over their rivals, but then began to grow.
One of the bigger absences here is the policy side. In the early 20th century speculative futures trading was one of the biggest issues in America, and it was even banned for awhile, as well as being heavily regulated by the Commodity Exchange Commission after 1935, but all of that receives barely a mention. There is some discussion of the 1974 creation of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which CBOT outside lawyer Philip Johnson intentionally wrote to include both commodities and futures, and to define commodities as widely as possible, hypothetically even securities, and all futures, even if they were not based on commodities. Johnson became head of the CFTC and made a special deal with S.R. Shad, former EF Hutton chair and then SEC chair, to allow the CFTC to regulate securities futures, and to have them based on cash instead of actual delivery, and to keep the SEC with stock options, what became known as the Shad-Johnson Accord of 1981. (A 1988 Georgetown Law Journal by Mark Young claimed that the swaps business was an unregulated futures market, which since 1985 had operated under the ISDA, yet a 1989 CFTC decision said they would not be regulated as such.)
The above is most of the worthwhile information one could glean from the book. If it focused on these big changes, instead of a bunch of side stories, it would have been much more worthwhile. ...more
In some senses this book is a testimony to how much more aware and sophisticated Americans are about politics since this was written in 1989. It aims In some senses this book is a testimony to how much more aware and sophisticated Americans are about politics since this was written in 1989. It aims at savvy readers but feels the need to tell them what "inside the Beltway" means, and that "in the loop" means to be aware.
At it's best the books offers insightful looks by a long-time Washington correspondent on Washington power-players that have since been forgotten, such as the Democratic millionaire Ohio Senator Howard Metzenbaum, who was said to embody "porcupine politics" who used his generally ornery behavior to win fights on special giveaways (Senator Ed Muskie was said to be a master of this too, never leaving negotiating rooms, smoking terrible cigars in small rooms, and thus winning conference committees). One could add some of the anonymous staffers who shaped history, sch as Stephen Bell, the budget committee chief of staff who revived the idea of "reconciliation" to push Reagan's budget plan. Or it describes dramas that have faded with time, such as Rockwell International's attempt to override Carter's decision in 1977 against B-1 production, which nearly won in Congress (it won over such doves as California Senator Alan Cranston since the prime contractor was based in his state and got revived by Reagan). Or issues that have faded with time, such as the power of the franking privilege, which hit almost 1 billion pieces of mail and $100 million in costs in 1984, more than double what it was in 1980. Some subjects have increased in interest with time. In 1981 when Strom Thurmond became head of the Senate Judiciary, Joe Biden went to him with a draft crime bill and asked him to become its main sponsor and then hammered out final details until late one night before the final Senate vote. It mentions that Thurmond speaks with Biden with the affection of a father for his son. Chris Matthews, then just a Tip O'Neil staffer, is a prominent and often funny explainer ("The problem with Washington is it's all an input town... You can't measure outputs." He was not talking about government programs but about the need to appear busy.)
At it's most tedious it either rehashes political bromides (explaining how power depends on access to the powerful) or recounts the innumerable power plays inside the Reagan administration, that are often discussed elsewhere chronologically, but here are discussed as examples of such bromides (SecDef Caspar Weinberger had long been under SecState George Schultz, during the Nixon's OMB and later at Betchel, and they both worked for access to the President, surprisingly often for the diplomatic Schultz to push for force as a means of diplomacy.) It's overlong, but will remain an important look at the Reagan years, if not an impressive work of political theorizing or investigation....more
This is the sort of book that couldn't be written today, in ways both good and bad. It's too panoptic and sprawling, attempting to cover six decades oThis is the sort of book that couldn't be written today, in ways both good and bad. It's too panoptic and sprawling, attempting to cover six decades of thought in America after 1880 in everything from philosophy and economics to literature. It has pages of just vague pontificating, with barely a proper noun or number to be found, and just a handful of vague book citations as the support for whole chapters. But there's also something of the eager and personal engagement with a vast body of work that one can't find much of these days.
As a student and in some ways successor to Vernon Parrington's American Studies dream, he takes up Parrington's "Main Currents in American Thought" were they were left them at Parrington's death. Literature remains the touchstone of this work, and it focuses heavily on the great late 19th century writers, such as Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Henry James, and William Dean Howells (the last he rescues from charges of drawing room pleasantries and shows his social conscience). Later, he goes into F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis and others. (He is far too biting about the former, but Commager comes out of a post-1930s social realist milieux. He is appropriately biting about the latter.) There is much about the philosophy of pragmatism from William James and John Dewey, and about economics and sociology, with a special focus on the peripatetic Lester Ward, who created an early version of social liberalism.
How much of this analysis was original, besides putting all of these diverse strands together, even in 1950, is up for debate. The book is far too verbose for it's own good, and a book one-half the length would have done much better. But it is not only a window into the mind of late 19th and early 20th century America, it is a window into the post-World War II intellectual mind, where triumphant democracy was leavened with post-Depression social concerns and pragmatist and realist instincts. It's fascinating for that as well....more
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