American capitalism 6.0: The search for a new model

The form of capitalism the U.S. has pursued for three decades has been discredited. What's next?

By Michael Lind

American capitalism 6.0: The search for a new model

Topics:American History, U.S. Economy

What a difference a global economic collapse makes. Only a decade ago in the 1990s, many opinion leaders proclaimed the triumph of the American model of capitalism. The end of the Cold War replaced the battle of capitalism and communism with a battle of capitalism against capitalism. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, different schools offered different models of modern capitalist society as alternatives to the deregulated, free-market model of Reagan and Clinton, Thatcher and Blair: the universal social democratic welfare state of Scandinavia, or the “social market” of Germany, or Japanese industrial policy. But then Japan stagnated after its bubble economy popped and Germany suffered from acute indigestion after swallowing the former communist East. The winner was declared, at least by Americans, to be American-style capitalism.

That was then. Today, it is safe to say, very few people in other countries look to the U.S. for lessons in how to organize industry and finance. No country in Asia or Europe would want to emulate a bloated, out-of-control, economy-wrecking financial sector like Wall Street or a manufacturing sector as dysfunctional as Detroit. Following the poisoning of the global economy by toxic waste manufactured in the U.S. financial sector, a puzzled world watched as U.S. healthcare reform failed to provide American citizens with the universal, lower-cost healthcare that other industrial nations take for granted. Unable to find anything else to brag about, American triumphalists are reduced to boasting that the U.S. population will continue to grow rapidly, thanks to the kind of low-skilled, low-wage immigration that other industrial countries neither want nor need.

Once upon a time, the combination of U.S. venture capital and R&D were supposed to lead the human race into a new era with a dynamic new economy free from inflation and business cycles. But as the economist Michael Mandel has noted, the promise of new technological breakthroughs has not panned out. He argues that we are in an innovation drought. Meanwhile, more and more Silicon Valley firms are outsourcing R&D, when they are not claiming that they need even more underpaid, highly educated indentured servants on the grounds that, unlike the high-tech companies of China and India and Japan, they can’t be expected to hire and train their own fellow citizens. For the past decade, job growth in the U.S. has been almost entirely in the sectors of health, education and government. So much for the millions of jobs that IT was supposed to create in America for the computer-savvy “creative class” of Robert Reich and Richard Florida.

Some have suggested that the capitalism vs. capitalism debate is being revived. This time American-style liberal capitalism will be pitted against what Ian Bremmer calls “state capitalism” and Stefan Halper calls “the Beijing Consensus.” Anatole Kaletsky predicts what he calls Capitalism 4.0. But the idea that we are on the verge of a new global ideological struggle over rival forms of industrial capitalism is mistaken, for two reasons.

To begin with, there is no reason for either established economic powers like Japan and Germany or rising economies like India and Brazil to choose between Chinese Market Leninism and American Market Fundamentalism. In the last generation, the countries of Europe, Asia and Latin America and other regions have somewhat liberalized their policies in areas from trade to corporate governance. But the countries of the world were never going to converge on a single model, even before the Great Recession discredited the free-market extremism of the U.S. and Britain. In the future, as in the past, countries will adopt or reject economic ideas from other countries, without necessarily abandoning their own traditions.

The contrast between the Chinese model and the American model is mistaken for another reason. What is being described as the American model is really only the most recent model of American capitalism, dating back to the Carter and Reagan years. To be specific, today’s American model is the fifth in a series: American capitalism 5.0.

American capitalism 1.0 has been described by historians as the mixed enterprise system. Before the Civil War, most large-scale enterprises in the U.S. were chartered by state governments to provide infrastructure: first roads and canals and bridges, and later railroads. Sometimes these were mixed public-private companies in which state governments owned shares.

American capitalism 2.0 was entrepreneurial capitalism. Its heyday was from the Civil War until the end of the 19th century. The first big business in the U.S. was the railroad industry, and America’s railroads were built by the robber barons of American folklore, who were as ruthless in suppressing their workers and bribing legislatures as they were in battling one another.

The third form of American capitalism evolved around 1900, as new mass-production and electrical power industries were captured and reorganized by investment bankers like John Pierpont Morgan. Finance capitalism was American capitalism 3.0.

During the Depression, the New Deal Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act and other laws to separate investment banking from commercial banking and separate banking from industry. The result was managerial capitalism, or American capitalism 4.0. The great corporations were now governed by managers, not by finance capitalists or founding families. During and after World War II, the violent wars between capital and labor were replaced by an uneasy truce.

Managerial capitalism was the system that was in place during the Golden Age from the 1950s until the 1970s, a time of sustained growth that was free from extreme cycles of boom and bust. But American management and labor alike, having taken U.S. economic primacy for granted, struggled to compete in the 1970s when West Germany and Japan revived as industrial rivals. The truce between employers and unions broke down as American business, beset by foreign competition and stagflation (combined inflation and stagnation) tried to increase its profits by smashing organized labor and outsourcing production.

A wave of deregulation of industry and finance that began under Jimmy Carter inaugurated the most recent era. American capitalism 5.0 could be described as financial market capitalism. While multinationals outsourced first their production and then, increasingly, their R&D to Asia, Wall Street middlemen found new ways to enrich themselves without contributing to the productive economy. China’s policy of buying dollar-denominated securities to keep its currency artificially low in the interest of its export industries allowed interest rates to remain low in the U.S. That, in turn, enabled Americans to borrow to go shopping or gamble in stocks, bonds and real estates, taking part in a Ponzi scheme that crashed in the fall of 2008.

The false prosperity of the Reagan-to-George W. Bush years was rationalized by academic and pop economists who claimed that the U.S. had discovered the secret to perpetual non-inflationary growth. It was a very odd formula for national prosperity: outsource manufacturing, import unskilled, low-wage workers for the construction and menial service industries, and devote an ever-growing share of national GDP to bonuses for Wall Street traders making complex bets with the help of computer programs. But at a time when financial sector money was flowing into politics, journalism and the universities, it was the rare politician, journalist or academic who was willing to ask questions. Progressive activists who averted their eyes from what was happening in the economy and focused on non-economic issues like the environment and civil rights and foreign policy found fundraising to be much easier.

At the center of the short-lived American Capitalism 5.0 model was the notion of shareholder value. Instead of being treated as social institutions chartered by government to carry out important functions in the economy, corporations were treated as the purely private property of shareholders. And in the absence of other measures to indicate the approval or disapproval of thousands or millions of mostly anonymous shareholders, stock and bond prices were treated as the measure of success or failure. Corporate executives who were compensated with stock options had a personal incentive to do whatever it took to crank up share prices. If that meant producing a superior product at a lower price while paying good wages to American workers, fine. If it meant transferring production to a foreign police state with low-wage labor while laying off the U.S. workforce, or breaking up the company and auctioning off its assets to the highest bidder, well, that was OK, too, if share prices went up.

While the drive to maximize shareholder value was damaging to American manufacturing, it was fatal to American banking. In the New Deal era from the 1940s to the 1970s, financial crises in the U.S. were uncommon in large part because of the way that the financial industry was organized. Restraints on interstate and even intrastate banking meant that bank executives did not fear hostile takeovers if their share prices went down. And investment banks until the late 20th century were organized as partnerships, not corporations with limited liability. The fact that the partners themselves were responsible for any losses made investment bankers cautious.

Reaganites and Clintonites collaborated in dismantling the system in the 1980s and 1990s. The elimination of restraints on branch banking led to mergers and rewarded a new kind of empire-building mentality in the formerly unambitious banking profession. The investment banks mutated from partnerships into corporations, so that their staff could enjoy the benefits of limited liability if they screwed up. (This was before Goldman Sachs became a bank holding company, in order to be rescued by the federal government).

If American Capitalism 5.0 had a single fundamental flaw, it is this: it treated industries and banks as mere commodities, like apples or oranges. Outside of the English-speaking world, nobody thinks of industries and banks as commodities. In other societies, flourishing industries are considered to be essential to national military security and communal prosperity. And banks are considered to be public utilities, not gambling parlors on Mississippi riverboats tethered to a particular country by the thinnest of ropes.

From the wreckage of American Capitalism 5.0, a new 6.0 model will emerge. It will take time. Despite the best efforts of progressive reformers, to date President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress have supported Version 5.1 — a slightly modified variant of the unsustainable system that produced the present disaster. For its part, the Republican right, with its diatribes against the legacy of the New Deal, seems to want the American economy to revert to Capitalism 3.0 — the finance capitalism of J. P. Morgan — or even 2.0 — the robber-baron capitalism of Jay Gould and Leland Stanford.

In designing the next American capitalism, we should not hesitate to steal good ideas from other countries — even France. But we can also learn from our own history. The failed Reagan-Clinton version of American capitalism was just one of half a dozen models that we Americans have tried and discarded. As methods of organizing production in the real economy, there have always been alternatives in the U.S. to the shareholder-obsessed corporation, including somewhat exotic ones like producer cooperatives and public-private hybrids. The U.S. had a banking system only a few decades ago that was an appropriately dull utility. The U.S. even had a public banking system, in the form of the U.S. postal savings bank, which was abolished in the 1960s but perhaps should be revived.

Rejecting the failed model of American Capitalism 5.0 will not make us less American. Capitalism 6.0 will be just as American as its predecessors, but it will be better than what we have today. It could not possibly be worse.

Michael Lind is policy director of the economic growth program at the New America Foundation and author of “The American Way of Strategy.“

: Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com. More Michael Lind

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The hysterical American decline

As America tries to cling to world dominance, we can learn important lessons from Vietnam and Iraq

By Noam Chomsky

(Credit: The White House/AP)

Topics:American History, U.S. Military

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.

The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out — “anything that flies on anything that moves” — a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.

When the invasion was launched 50 years ago, concern was so slight that there were few efforts at justification, hardly more than the president’s impassioned plea that “we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence” and if the conspiracy achieves its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”

Elsewhere, he warned further that “the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history [and] only the strong… can possibly survive,” in this case reflecting on the failure of U.S. aggression and terror to crush Cuban independence.

By the time protest began to mount half a dozen years later, the respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall, no dove, forecast that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction…[as]…the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.” He was again referring to South Vietnam.

When the war ended eight horrendous years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who described the war as a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication, and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly. By 1977, President Carter aroused little notice when he explained that we owe Vietnam “no debt” because “the destruction was mutual.”

There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes. One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy. Another lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there is also geostrategic planning based on principles that are rational and stable over long periods because they are rooted in stable institutions and their concerns. That is true in the case of Vietnam as well. I will return to that, only stressing here that the persistent factors in state action are generally well concealed.

The Iraq war is an instructive case. It was marketed to a terrified public on the usual grounds of self-defense against an awesome threat to survival: the “single question,” George W. Bush and Tony Blair declared, was whether Saddam Hussein would end his programs of developing weapons of mass destruction. When the single question received the wrong answer, government rhetoric shifted effortlessly to our “yearning for democracy,” and educated opinion duly followed course; all routine.

Later, as the scale of the U.S. defeat in Iraq was becoming difficult to suppress, the government quietly conceded what had been clear all along. In 2007-2008, the administration officially announced that a final settlement must grant the U.S. military bases and the right of combat operations, and must privilege U.S. investors in the rich energy system — demands later reluctantly abandoned in the face of Iraqi resistance. And all well kept from the general population.

Gauging American Decline

With such lessons in mind, it is useful to look at what is highlighted in the major journals of policy and opinion today. Let us keep to the most prestigious of the establishment journals, Foreign Affairs. The headline blaring on the cover of the December 2011 issue reads in bold face: “Is America Over?”

The title article calls for “retrenchment” in the “humanitarian missions” abroad that are consuming the country’s wealth, so as to arrest the American decline that is a major theme of international affairs discourse, usually accompanied by the corollary that power is shifting to the East, to China and (maybe) India.

The lead articles are on Israel-Palestine. The first, by two high Israeli officials, is entitled “The Problem is Palestinian Rejection”: the conflict cannot be resolved because Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state — thereby conforming to standard diplomatic practice: states are recognized, but not privileged sectors within them. The demand is hardly more than a new device to deter the threat of political settlement that would undermine Israel’s expansionist goals.

The opposing position, defended by an American professor, is entitled “The Problem Is the Occupation.” The subtitle reads “How the Occupation is Destroying the Nation.” Which nation? Israel, of course. The paired articles appear under the heading “Israel under Siege.”

The January 2012 issue features yet another call to bomb Iran now, before it is too late. Warning of “the dangers of deterrence,” the author suggests that “skeptics of military action fail to appreciate the true danger that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond. And their grim forecasts assume that the cure would be worse than the disease — that is, that the consequences of a U.S. assault on Iran would be as bad as or worse than those of Iran achieving its nuclear ambitions. But that is a faulty assumption. The truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, if managed carefully, could spare the region and the world a very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national security of the United States.”

Others argue that the costs would be too high, and at the extremes some even point out that an attack would violate international law — as does the stand of the moderates, who regularly deliver threats of violence, in violation of the U.N. Charter.

Let us review these dominant concerns in turn.

American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster. Despite the piteous laments, the U.S. remains the world dominant power by a large margin, and no competitor is in sight, not only in the military dimension, in which of course the U.S. reigns supreme.

China and India have recorded rapid (though highly inegalitarian) growth, but remain very poor countries, with enormous internal problems not faced by the West. China is the world’s major manufacturing center, but largely as an assembly plant for the advanced industrial powers on its periphery and for western multinationals. That is likely to change over time. Manufacturing regularly provides the basis for innovation, often breakthroughs, as is now sometimes happening in China. One example that has impressed western specialists is China’s takeover of the growing global solar panel market, not on the basis of cheap labor but by coordinated planning and, increasingly, innovation.

But the problems China faces are serious. Some are demographic, reviewed in Science, the leading U.S. science weekly. The study shows that mortality sharply decreased in China during the Maoist years, “mainly a result of economic development and improvements in education and health services, especially the public hygiene movement that resulted in a sharp drop in mortality from infectious diseases.” This progress ended with the initiation of the capitalist reforms 30 years ago, and the death rate has since increased.

Furthermore, China’s recent economic growth has relied substantially on a “demographic bonus,” a very large working-age population. “But the window for harvesting this bonus may close soon,” with a “profound impact on development”: “Excess cheap labor supply, which is one of the major factors driving China’s economic miracle, will no longer be available.”

Demography is only one of many serious problems ahead. For India, the problems are far more severe.

Not all prominent voices foresee American decline. Among international media, there is none more serious and responsible than the London Financial Times. It recently devoted a full page to the optimistic expectation that new technology for extracting North American fossil fuels might allow the U.S. to become energy independent, hence to retain its global hegemony for a century. There is no mention of the kind of world the U.S. would rule in this happy event, but not for lack of evidence.

At about the same time, the International Energy Agency reported that, with rapidly increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel use, the limit of safety will be reached by 2017 if the world continues on its present course. “The door is closing,” the IEA chief economist said, and very soon it “will be closed forever.”

Shortly before the U.S. Department of Energy reported the most recent carbon dioxide emissions figures, which “jumped by the biggest amount on record” to a level higher than the worst-case scenario anticipated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That came as no surprise to many scientists, including the MIT program on climate change, which for years has warned that the IPCC predictions are too conservative.

Such critics of the IPCC predictions receive virtually no public attention, unlike the fringe of denialists who are supported by the corporate sector, along with huge propaganda campaigns that have driven Americans off the international spectrum in dismissal of the threats. Business support also translates directly to political power. Denialism is part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican candidates in the farcical election campaign now in progress, and in Congress they are powerful enough to abort even efforts to inquire into the effects of global warming, let alone do anything serious about it.

In brief, American decline can perhaps be stemmed if we abandon hope for decent survival, prospects that are all too real given the balance of forces in the world.

“Losing” China and Vietnam

Putting such unpleasant thoughts aside, a close look at American decline shows that China indeed plays a large role, as it has for 60 years. The decline that now elicits such concern is not a recent phenomenon. It traces back to the end of World War II, when the U.S. had half the world’s wealth and incomparable security and global reach. Planners were naturally well aware of the enormous disparity of power, and intended to keep it that way.

The basic viewpoint was outlined with admirable frankness in a major state paper of 1948 (PPS 23). The author was one of the architects of the New World Order of the day, the chair of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, the respected statesman and scholar George Kennan, a moderate dove within the planning spectrum. He observed that the central policy goal was to maintain the “position of disparity” that separated our enormous wealth from the poverty of others. To achieve that goal, he advised, “We should cease to talk about vague and… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization,” and must “deal in straight power concepts,” not “hampered by idealistic slogans” about “altruism and world-benefaction.”

Kennan was referring specifically to Asia, but the observations generalize, with exceptions, for participants in the U.S.-run global system. It was well understood that the “idealistic slogans” were to be displayed prominently when addressing others, including the intellectual classes, who were expected to promulgate them.

The plans that Kennan helped formulate and implement took for granted that the U.S. would control the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, the former British empire (including the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East), and as much of Eurasia as possible, crucially its commercial and industrial centers. These were not unrealistic objectives, given the distribution of power. But decline set in at once.

In 1949, China declared independence, an event known in Western discourse as “the loss of China” — in the U.S., with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss. The terminology is revealing. It is only possible to lose something that one owns. The tacit assumption was that the U.S. owned China, by right, along with most of the rest of the world, much as postwar planners assumed.

The “loss of China” was the first major step in “America’s decline.” It had major policy consequences. One was the immediate decision to support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony of Indochina, so that it, too, would not be “lost.”

Indochina itself was not a major concern, despite claims about its rich resources by President Eisenhower and others. Rather, the concern was the “domino theory,” which is often ridiculed when dominoes don’t fall, but remains a leading principle of policy because it is quite rational. To adopt Henry Kissinger’s version, a region that falls out of control can become a “virus” that will “spread contagion,” inducing others to follow the same path.

In the case of Vietnam, the concern was that the virus of independent development might infect Indonesia, which really does have rich resources. And that might lead Japan — the “superdomino” as it was called by the prominent Asia historian John Dower — to “accommodate” to an independent Asia as its technological and industrial center in a system that would escape the reach of U.S. power. That would mean, in effect, that the U.S. had lost the Pacific phase of World War II, fought to prevent Japan’s attempt to establish such a New Order in Asia.

The way to deal with such a problem is clear: destroy the virus and “inoculate” those who might be infected. In the Vietnam case, the rational choice was to destroy any hope of successful independent development and to impose brutal dictatorships in the surrounding regions. Those tasks were successfully carried out — though history has its own cunning, and something similar to what was feared has since been developing in East Asia, much to Washington’s dismay.

The most important victory of the Indochina wars was in 1965, when a U.S.-backed military coup in Indonesia led by General Suharto carried out massive crimes that were compared by the CIA to those of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. The “staggering mass slaughter,” as the New York Times described it, was reported accurately across the mainstream, and with unrestrained euphoria.

It was “a gleam of light in Asia,” as the noted liberal commentator James Reston wrote in the Times. The coup ended the threat of democracy by demolishing the mass-based political party of the poor, established a dictatorship that went on to compile one of the worst human rights records in the world, and threw the riches of the country open to western investors. Small wonder that, after many other horrors, including the near-genocidal invasion of East Timor, Suharto was welcomed by the Clinton administration in 1995 as “our kind of guy.”

Years after the great events of 1965, Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected that it would have been wise to end the Vietnam war at that time, with the “virus” virtually destroyed and the primary domino solidly in place, buttressed by other U.S.-backed dictatorships throughout the region.

Similar procedures have been routinely followed elsewhere. Kissinger was referring specifically to the threat of socialist democracy in Chile. That threat was ended on another forgotten date, what Latin Americans call “the first 9/11,” which in violence and bitter effects far exceeded the 9/11 commemorated in the West. A vicious dictatorship was imposed in Chile, one part of a plague of brutal repression that spread through Latin America, reaching Central America under Reagan. Viruses have aroused deep concern elsewhere as well, including the Middle East, where the threat of secular nationalism has often concerned British and U.S. planners, inducing them to support radical Islamic fundamentalism to counter it.

The Concentration of Wealth and American Decline

Despite such victories, American decline continued. By 1970, U.S. share of world wealth had dropped to about 25 percent, roughly where it remains, still colossal but far below the end of World War II. By then, the industrial world was “tripolar”: US-based North America, German-based Europe and East Asia, already the most dynamic industrial region, at the time Japan-based, but by now including the former Japanese colonies Taiwan and South Korea, and more recently China.

At about that time, American decline entered a new phase: conscious self-inflicted decline. From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing. These decisions initiated a vicious cycle in which wealth became highly concentrated (dramatically so in the top 0.1 percent of the population), yielding concentration of political power, hence legislation to carry the cycle further: taxation and other fiscal policies, deregulation, changes in the rules of corporate governance allowing huge gains for executives, and so on.

Meanwhile, for the majority, real wages largely stagnated, and people were able to get by only by sharply increased workloads (far beyond Europe), unsustainable debt, and repeated bubbles since the Reagan years, creating paper wealth that inevitably disappeared when they burst (and the perpetrators were bailed out by the taxpayer). In parallel, the political system has been increasingly shredded as both parties are driven deeper into corporate pockets with the escalating cost of elections, the Republicans to the level of farce, the Democrats (now largely the former “moderate Republicans”) not far behind.

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has been the major source of reputable data on these developments for years, is entitled “Failure by Design.” The phrase “by design” is accurate. Other choices were certainly possible. And as the study points out, the “failure” is class-based. There is no failure for the designers. Far from it. Rather, the policies are a failure for the large majority, the 99 percent in the imagery of the Occupy movements — and for the country, which has declined and will continue to do so under these policies.

One factor is the offshoring of manufacturing. As the solar panel example mentioned earlier illustrates, manufacturing capacity provides the basis and stimulus for innovation leading to higher stages of sophistication in production, design and invention. That, too, is being outsourced, not a problem for the “money mandarins” who increasingly design policy, but a serious problem for working people and the middle classes, and a real disaster for the most oppressed, African Americans, who have never escaped the legacy of slavery and its ugly aftermath, and whose meager wealth virtually disappeared after the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, setting off the most recent financial crisis, the worst so far.

[Note: Part 2 of Noam Chomsky’s discussion of American decline will be posted on Salon tomorrow.]

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

: Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements. More Noam Chomsky

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Stories don’t need morals or messages

A "stupid" test shows that the Puritan ethic lives on. Why do we insist on learning lessons from the books we read?

By Laura Miller

(Credit: iStockphoto/Yayayoyo via Shutterstock)

Topics:Readers and Reading, Education, American History, Books, Editor's Picks

What is the purpose of reading stories, especially made-up stories? That’s the question lurking behind a recent posting to the New York Times’ education blog, SchoolBook. Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols, the parents of twins, wrote about taking their kids’ third-grade English Language Arts test with some friends as a party game on New Year’s Eve. The group read an inane little story about tiger cubs learning to tear bark off logs, but, to their surprise, couldn’t agree on a single answer to the multiple choice question that followed: “What is this story mostly about?”

Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students “a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.” The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a “banal” story like this tiger-cub number admits “multiple interpretations,” and the prod to “reduce the work to a single idea” does a disservice to both reader and text.

I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her “Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,” 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference).

As the Puritans saw it, writes Avery, fiction might “deflect the reader from more profitable occupation” and was furthermore “untrue, therefore a lie.” It belonged to a category of falsehood known as the “sporting lie,” whose purpose was neither white nor black, but something too troublingly colorful: “to make one merry or to pass away Precious Time,” as one Boston schoolmaster put it.

If you think we’ve gotten past this starchy point of view, guess again. Today’s parents may anxiously urge their kids to read novels like “Charlotte’s Web” or “Fahrenheit 451,” but any desire to make their offspring merry is far overshadowed by the belief that reading is essential to getting ahead in life. You have to be a “good reader” to get good grades and you need good grades to get into Harvard (or wherever) and you need that prestigious degree to get a good job. The Protestant work ethic has not so much forgiven reading fiction for passing away Precious Time as it has swallowed it whole. Reading books has become a kind of work, at least for children.

In adults, the old Puritan attitude leads us to treat fiction as the delivery mechanism for instructional or inspirational messages. Whenever a novel’s merits are described in terms of the “life lessons” that it “teaches,” you can detect that old uneasiness over the “sporting lie” being appeased. In movies and television, literature class discussions almost always consist of students earnestly announcing that what Fitzgerald (or Hemingway or Shakespeare) is really saying is that you should follow your heart (or face your fears or be true to yourself — pick your empty nostrum). If you’ve ever turned on the option that lets you see other readers’ highlights in a Kindle book, you’ll find that they almost always underline similar mottos, such as this line from Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”: “The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.”

The weakness of this approach to fiction should be obvious: If what you really want is a set of fortifying maxims, why bother with stories about feckless romances or foolish kings? Why not just go straight to the self-help section — the secular equivalent of the sermon — as so many American readers already do?

Others (including, recently, the novelist Philip Roth) reject fiction entirely and turn to history or narrative nonfiction, explaining that, at the very least, they can be sure they’re “learning something” from what they read. Learning can certainly be fun, but the implication is that acquiring facts about, say, the life of Cleopatra, has more value than following the story of an imaginary person like Elizabeth Bennet. The Precious Time thus passed away has something to show for itself, and the American mania for self-improvement has been appeased. Never mind that most of us will find little practical use for information on quantum mechanics, the military stratagems of World War II or the private lives of British aristocrats.

Ultimately, all of these attitudes — and the standardized tests that Stone and Nichols complain about — boil down to the belief that reading can only be the means to an end, whether that end is moral betterment or worldly success (two classic Puritan preoccupations). For some of us, however, reading is an end in itself, and what fiction has to offer isn’t lessons but an experience, a revelation, a sudden expansion of the spirit. Like any art, it can teach or motivate, but it doesn’t have to, and it’s often better when it doesn’t.

Further reading

Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols on their twins’ third-grade reading test for the New York Times SchoolBook blog

Philip Roth says he’s stopped reading fiction

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

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Swallowed by a whale — a true tale?

Everyone knows the story of Jonah. But my quest was to find evidence that man, gulped whole, had really survived

By Ben Shattuck

Topics:Whales, Noble Beasts, American History

An idea’s been floating around for some time that whales more than chewed people — that they swallowed them, and people might have survived in the stomach. Jonah’s story came first, and then there were rumors from the 19th century Yankee Whale Fishery — whaling ships leaving New York and New England ports for years on the open ocean. I’d like to believe in swallowings, but it’s tough. There is no air in the stomach, for one. There are acids. And if we are talking about sperm whales, which we are most of the time, there is the deadly passage through the 30-foot jaws lined with 8-inch teeth.

Still, you’d like to think it’s possible. You want to believe in an animal that can fit you inside them — that you might be consumed not piece-by-piece, mouthful-by-mouthful as sharks and bears would eat you, but wholly; to be encased as your full self, womb-like. You want to believe in big animals like you did when you were a kid. You want to be powerless as you are leaning into hurricane winds or with your eyes closed or looking into the ocean.

- – - – - – - – - -

In 1947, Natural History magazine published a newly discovered letter from 1891 penned by a man aboard the ship Star of the East that told of a fellow crew member surviving 24 hours in a whale’s stomach. Here is the story in brief:

The Star of the East was sailing around the Falkland Islands. The crew spotted a bull sperm whale and lowered the boats to give chase. As they approached, the whale turned on the boats and attacked. It stove the boat, scattering the crew in the water. All were accounted for except for one, a young whaleman by the name of James Bartley. All assumed Bartley drowned.

The next day the crew spotted the same whale, gave chase again, and this time killed it. They dragged it back to the ship and began flensing it of its blubber. As they peeled the blubber away, someone noticed something moving under the stomach lining. They cut the stomach open, and out rolled Bartley, unconscious but breathing, his face and arms bleached entirely white by the stomach acids. After waking days later, he said he remembered nothing but sliding through the whale’s throat, and that the throat quivered when he touched it on his way down.

It didn’t take much research – follow-up articles appeared in the years following 1947 – to find that Bartley’s story was fiction, a letter written by mischievous sailors to excite landlubbers. But the letter was enough to pique my interest. Was there ever an actual swallowing, some evidence embedded deep in an antiquated logbook or diary that I might uncover?

- – - – - – - – - -

Sperm whales would rather eat squid, which require little chewing, and not the hairy, bony things we are. That’s not to say sperm whales haven’t swallowed more than squid. In the 1960s, biologist Malcolm Clarke and his colleagues examined the remains from 2,403 stomachs of sperm whales caught by whalers off the South American coast. Aside from the hundreds of squid remains, he found seabirds, lobsters, seals, driftwood, coconuts, stones, rays, swordfish and sharks. While finding a tiny coconut in a whale’s stomach is enchanting, there’s nothing so striking as the image of a sperm whale eating a shark. It disturbs me the way turducken does, like as a close cousin to cannibalism. More terrifying, with sharks in the diet, Americans who might have been swallowed by sperm whales would have had another thing to worry about: sharing the stomach of your predator with yet another predator. To be eaten after being eaten. To be the –en of the turducken.

- – - – - – - – - – -

In my initial foray into books about the dangers of the Yankee Whale Fishery, I found a pretty standard account of whalemen entering a whale’s mouth and then quickly being spit out. The whalemen either fell in the mouth from their perches in the whaleboats, or the whale, after smashing the boat with its flukes and snapping randomly at the debris floating in the water, chomped down on an unlucky swimmer. In 1771, for instance, a female sperm whale dragged Marshal Jenkins underwater when he fell from his boat, but she quickly resurfaced to spit him out. Job Sherman fell into a sperm whale’s mouth in 1860, Peleg Nye in 1863, Albert Wood in 1847. A November 1880 issue of New Bedford’s Shipping News tells of Wood, at the bow of a whaleboat floating over an angry whale, losing his balance and tumbling headfirst into the mouth. He landed straddling the lower jaw. The whale clamped down, dragged him underwater while smashing the boat with his fluke — immediately killing the boat steerer — then freed Wood, who bled heavily from his groin into the frothy water.

The famous Quaker captain Edmund Gardner’s entanglement with a whale paints the clearest picture of what might happen — he was photographed post-attack, his left hand, fingerless and gnarled, centered in the shot. Gardner and his crew were off the coast of Peru in 1839. They lowered for a sperm whale. Gardner, as captain, was the boat header. After the whale was harpooned, he switched places with the boat steerer to kill the whale with a lance. The whale turned on the boat, and bit the bow. An article in Our Flag – a mid-19th-century publication out of New Bedford — lightly describes the whale biting the bow as it might “the best part of an apple-tart in the munch of a hungry school-boy.” His crew retrieved him, put him in the bottom of the boat, and thought he was dead. But he croaked out that he wanted to go to a doctor in Peru, where he convalesced.

The secondary sources ended with Gardner’s story. If I wanted to find any evidence of full swallowings, I’d have to go to the heart of the Yankee Whale Fishery, where Ishmael goes in the second chapter of “Moby-Dick,” the once-richest city in America, the city that “lit the world” with its barrels of oil, the port from where thousands of men every year left to hunt the world’s biggest animals: New Bedford, Mass.

- – - – - – - – - -

The New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library isn’t really open to the public like a regular library. You have to set up an appointment, and when you get there, you hit the metal handicap button that is the secret buzzer for a librarian a few levels up. You wait in the street, seagulls shrieking above you, for the librarian to come to the door. He opens it a crack and asks you, “Yes?” like gatekeepers do. You explain you have an appointment. You sign the guestbook.

The inside of the library is full of polished wood. Antique oars line a wall; there’s scrimshaw in a chest, wooden boat models in display cases, books behind glass-paneled bookshelves. The spines of the books are webbed in faded gold designs looping around gothic font titles. Four paintings of moments in the whaling industry hang on the cream-colored walls: one whale ship pictured at dawn, one with a ship’s trypots burning at night, one with men stripping a whale of its blubber, and one of a French whaleboat getting smacked by a whale’s flukes.

After the librarian let me in, he pointed to the back, and called, “Michael!” I heard a disembodied voice rise from deep in the stacks, “Send him back.”

Michael Dyer is the maritime curator at the Research Library. He works at the end of a nook hidden behind bookshelves lined with whaling logbooks. He spends his days going through logbooks, the now brittle and ink-smudged paper trail that whaling captains and crew left behind centuries ago. For this I told him as I shook his hand and settled down in a chair across his desk that he had the best job in the world, and that I envied him.

I asked him if it was true, if there was a whale out there that could swallow us. He shook his head and waved dismissively. “Sperm whales’ throats are small. They can’t swallow people.”

“The Bartley story?” I said.

“Apocryphal.”

His voice was soft and low, tacked with a Southern accent. He has blue-green eyes, scraggly eyebrows bristling behind a pair of glasses. It looked as though frost had settled over his head, turning only the tips of eyebrows and hair white. He certainly fit his role. Later that day I saw him walking New Bedford’s cobblestoned streets sucking on a pale wood pipe.

“And the Gardner story?”

“That one’s very true. He was bitten, not swallowed. Edmund Gardner’s great granddaughter – she’s still alive, she’s in her late 90s – told me personally, that her mother remembered putting her hand in the dent in Edmund Gardner’s head when he was a very, very old man.”

“So no swallowings?”

“There’s a picture I want to show you,” he said, turning to his computer and opening files. “Come around here and I’ll show you. It’s an old pencil drawing of men getting chewed up.”

In his search he found a different drawing of a sperm whale with a whaleboat in its mouth. The whale had attacked the boat from the bottom instead of the more common attack called “jawing over,” where the whale torpedoed upside-down and open-jawed along the surface. I thought of looking over a gunwale to see a 15-ton animal materialize in the water beneath me. I imagined the water might be still, the boat rocking under a gray sky, my fellow crew members hunched over their heavy oars. Someone might whisper, “Where is he?” and a few moments later the water would boil and a 30-foot jaw would appear on the side of the boat. We’d be thrown upward, the sky and sea blurring in the sound of snapping wood and bones. I can’t think of anything scarier than a predator underwater. I still get scared when eelgrass brushes my toes in shallow water. A few years ago, as I paddled around a tropical beach, a curious sea turtle bumped into me and I screamed so loud through my snorkel that my mother came running down the beach, thinking shark.

Michael couldn’t find the pencil drawing he was looking for.

“Well, there are thousands of stories of men getting chewed by whales. If you want true stories, they’re here. You can ferret them out of the logbooks. It might take a while.”

He stood, and we went to front of the library, where a file cabinet full of index card references for the logbook collection. The cabinet was big as three refrigerators side-by-side, divided by tens of 6-inch-square drawers packed with hundreds of index cards, references for the mammoth collection of whaling logbooks held at the Research Library. This is where I would start my ferreting, my search for a swallowing.

- – - – - – - – - -

If, I’ll pretend for a moment, you were swallowed, it would happen like this: You would first be chewed. Sperm whales’ teeth are 8 inches long – longer than most blades in your knife drawer. Then you would be gulped to the fauces, the back of the mouth, and forced down. Here is where Bartley apparently touched the quivering sides of the throat. You would also touch the throat, perhaps claw at the sides of the throat like you would sliding down an icy slope. There would be no air, and you’d suffocate in acid and water, but, we’re saying, you somehow survive. Imagine a black and mucous-smothered tube sock slipping over you.

You would then enter the first stomach, coined by 19thcentury naturalist Thomas Beale as the holding bag. It’s lined with thick, soft and white cuticle. At 7 feet long by 3 feet wide and shaped like a big egg, the first stomach would easily fit you. If you were kept in the holding bag for over 24 hours, you would likely be joined by squid, but a coconut or shark might come, too. Most squid that sperm whales swallow are bioluminescent — the neon flying squid is a favorite. So in no time at all you’d be bathing in a pool of phosphorescence, a slew of green-yellow light winking around you like you were standing in a field in Maine come July when all the fireflies are sparking up. The rest would be black, very black.

As the stomach acids broke you down, you would continue through three smaller stomachs — a chain of membranous, acid-filled cavities. The second stomach is S-shaped, and the third is more like the first, only smaller. Then, liquidated, you would ooze into the intestine, and eventually leave the whale as excrement, floating out of the anus and into the cold deep ocean, dissolving still further until you had become so small as debris that you were indistinguishable from the ocean itself. You would lap against whaling ships looking for whales.

The only part of you that might not be digested would be your bones. Squid beaks, equally, aren’t digested — they pass through the sperm whale’s intestines wholly. Along the way, the beaks scrape the intestinal lining, creating scar tissue, which is then passed in its new form, ambergris — the intoxicating, aromatic substance used in the most potent perfumes that was worth, in 1869, $97.50 per pound. That’s $1,600 per pound today. The Egyptians burned it as incense. Your sharp fingerbones or splintery skull would rub on the whale’s intestinal lining, and your remains would scrape up the most beautiful smell on earth.

- – - – - – - – - -

Michael left me with the file cabinet. Each drawer was labeled alphabetically. In front of me was the B’s to D’s: Bone (scraping) – Deaths. Within each drawer was a line of labeled dividers. In the Bone (scraping) – Deaths were the subject Buggery and Thievery, Bounty, and Burials. I thumbed through the cards. The Bounty section included cards reading fiddle and one dollar for seeing a whale, gold watch for most whales sighted in 18 months voyage, cook cooked doughnuts for all, in the trypots, Raisins given by captain, and one very familiar one that Melville might have come across: Captain nailed one dollar to the mizzen mast for the man that raises the first whale that we get.

I went to the Illness drawer and scanned the divider labels: Asthma, Bowels. Cold virus, Colic, Consumption, Convulsions / Fits, Distemper, Dropsy, Faintings, Food Poisoning, Homesickness, Depressed, Kidney, Lips, Measles, Pleurisy, Pox, Prickly Heat, Scurvy, Seasick, Smallpox, Typhoid, Venereal.

Venereal was the thickest category. Eighty-seven notecards referencing 87 mentions in close to 87 logbooks – that’s one-third more than the Scurvy category and a magnitude thicker than the Homesickness category. I thumbed through Venereal and found, slid between endless Syphilis cards, an archaic Lady’s Fever, the whimsical Blue boar in groin, and the enigmatic doby itch. Of all the Illnesses, it appeared the stops on shore hit the whalemen the most, the damage done in the arms of a woman. One 19th-century writer calculated that during whaling season in the port of Lahaini, Hawaii, there were ”upwards of 400 instances of intercourse daily.”

Crammed between Depressed and Kidney, at only 10 notecards thick, was the file I was looking for: Injury by Whale.

- – - – - – - – - -

Other people have looked for swallowings before me. In 1903 the director of the Smithsonian sent a naturalist named F.A. Lucas up to Newfoundland to take a mold of a beached 90-foot “finback” whale with instruction that stomach and throat measurements be made. If Jonah had been swallowed by a big fish, perhaps the big fish was a whale, and that whale could have been something like a 90-foot finback. (This was probably a blue whale.) If the finback swallowed Jonah, its throat should be big enough to fit him. Lucas brought 20 barrels of plaster-of-Paris in St. John’s and got to work. The throat passage, needing only to fit mouthfuls of plankton, was measured no larger than the thickness of a man’s arm. The whale, he reported, was not the species that swallowed Jonah.

- – - – - – - – - -

Sitting in front of the file cabinet and looking at all the notecards, I thought of Russian dolls. Each step of my search for a swallowing encapsulated an equally interesting step. Inside the Research Library is a room with a giant metal file cabinet; inside the file cabinet are tens of tiny drawers; one of the drawers is labeled Illness; inside the Illness drawer are card dividers reading Blindness, Spleen. Sores. Seasick. Sick. Frostbite. Gunshot wounds. Fighting, etc; behind each card divider are dozens of cards; each card is marked with an accompanying logbook number and page number; inside that referenced logbook, which Michael would retrieve from somewhere deep in the stacks, were hundreds of entries, each one detailing the wind and storms and idle hours from a century and a half ago. I was splitting bodies to find the tiniest one, the only one not hollow, the kernel of solid truth hidden deep inside the bellies of a dozen other references.

I felt slowly dissolved, digested, in the trail of information, leading to more and more peculiar, archaic, scraps of information.

I picked out the 10 notecards from Injury by Whale, presented them to Michael, and a few minutes later the logbooks were set down on a big wooden table before me.

- – - – - – - – - -

Sperm whales’ jaws aren’t only for chewing and swallowing. In fact, with so much squid in the diet, they probably do very little chewing at all. A teacher once told me that the jaw of a sperm whale might be used as a tuning fork to aid their singing, like the metal kind you knock against your guitar and hold to its wooden body. Their mouths, when they weren’t chewing Americans’ limbs, were musical, judging pitch in the cold and dark depths from where they sang.

- – - – - – - – - -

Whaling logbooks are lovely. One from 1857 had powder-blue paper. Most are creamy brown. The writing is slanted far to the right, and difficult to read, sometimes impossible. Most of the ink is dark brown. Some is light brown. Some is black. You open them up on green foam wedges as to not over extend the binding.

The logbooks are part-business documents, part-journal, and sometime get personal. In Daniel Kimball Ritchee’s logbook from the ship Israel, there is the imprint of a pressed flower on the first page. The image is brown, but you can see the veins of the petals, and the little black dots of snuffed pistils. Behind that is a pencil drawing of a whale. And over that, a little poem:

Oh where are the Friends that to me were so dear

Long Long ago, Long Long ago

Where are the voices I delighted to hear

Long Long ago Long ago.

- – - – - – - – - -

Some single entries are stories in and of themselves. Scanning the pages of the 1860 logbook from the bark Triton, I found this: “Wednesday the 13^th of March In 1860. Light north wind. One watch on liberty. Employed getting potatoes on board. Discharged William Popess, who proved to be a hermaphrodite.”

I went through each of the 10 logbooks referenced by the notecards. None mentioned a full swallowing.

* In the Indian Ocean. The whale struck the third mate with his tail and thinks a rib broken in the right side.

* On a Saturday in May, 1848 a man was struck and killed by a whale. Struck and then killed him t…..”

* On December 8, 1836 the Larboard boat got stove and the cook’s leg was broken and another man was crippled.

* Thursday, June 23^rd 1869. Larboard boat struck and got stove. Joe Williams got hurt.

* July 23^rd, 1843 The mate got fast to a large whale – a regular hard customer – the Capt. and 2^nd Mate soon after fastened. The whale came near killing the Captain. He hit the Boatsteerer on the head with his flukes and knocked him overboard. Did not hurt him much, got the whale dead by 10 at night.

- – - – - – - – - -

Frustrated with no references to swallowings in the Injury section, I spent the rest of the afternoon looking through the file cabinet for any category that might point me in any and all entries involving whale-whalemen mishaps. I stopped when I got distracted reading references in logbooks to Unknown Islands.

- – - – - – - – - -

If I’m not sure whales ate Americans, I am certain that Americans ate whales. Some still do. I had whale meat stew above the Arctic Circle in a small, candlelit restaurant on Norway’s Lofoten Islands. It tastes, I described to my parents in an embarrassing and gushy email about “swooping fjords” and “stunning seascapes,” like beef soaked in shrimp-water.

Most would not eat whale meat. “Sailors were a persnickety bunch,” Michael told me as I chatted with him in the afternoon, “and they wanted their salt pork. They wanted their meat. And if they didn’t get their meat there would be big trouble. There were mutinies that happened because sailors didn’t get their meat.”

The best-known scene of an American eating a whale comes from “Moby Dick.” Stubb, the second mate of the Pequod, orders a harpooner to cut him tender, muscly ridgeline just before the tail, the tapering extremity of the whale. When Stubb is given his whale steak, he eats it by the light of lanterns filled sperm whale oil. This is a frightening thought, to have meat illuminated by light fed by the animal’s fat, the calm yellow flame at a dinner table flickering over the muscle.

The meat, after going down Stubb’s throat and into his stomach, would be digested by his stomach acids and pass through his villi and out to his blood, which flowed to his muscle. It would have fueled him the next day to hunt the whale, it would have been in the heat of his stiffening muscles as he tossed the lance, in his twitching leg muscles pressed against the loggerhead, and the tightening of his vocal chords as he screamed at his crew to ‘heave’ towards their prey, another sperm whale.

People don’t produce ambergris. The whale would have ended as foul-smelling excrement leaving Stubb, hunched over the precarious head at the bow of the Pequod.

- – - – - – - – - -

Having exhausted the index cards in the file cabinets, I took another approach. I went the Holy Grail of whaling logbooks, “History of the American Whale Fishery,” which the Research Library keeps handy on the tables.

The “History” includes 492 pages of tables of “Returns of Whaling Vessels, Sailing from American Ports, Since the Year 1715.” At an average of 52 entries per page, that makes for about 25,000 logbooks accounted for. The tables include name of the vessel, its class, tonnage, captain, managing owner, whaling ground, date of sailing and arrival, sperm oil / whale oil / whalebone barrels and pounds. At the end of the table is a column titled Remarks, where any odd occurrences – a particularly profitable voyage, a mutiny, or a whale killing a sailor, among others – are noted.

After compiling all references in “Remarks” to whalemen “killed by whale,” I took steps to discover if the killing was by swallowing. (I excluded “drowned by whale,” as third mate G. Thing was on Christmas day 1846 aboard the ship Florida.)

If I found in the “History of the American Whale Fishery” that the ship Milton, sailing out of New Bedford, was carrying a certain Mr. Porter, second mate who, on 5 October 1872, was “killed by a whale,” I would then go to Judith Navas Lund’s “Whaling Masters and Whaling Voyages Sailing from American Ports: A Compilation of Sources.” Lund’s book is big and maroon, longer than it is tall, and lists every logbook in the Yankee Whale Fishery and where it is located. I would then find the ship Milton listed under Vessel; I would then mark down the logbook number, ask the librarian if he had that logbook in the Library; he would say “yes,” and retrieve the 140-year old book from somewhere deep in the stacks; I would put that book on the green foam wedges, find the entry for 5 October 1872, and read the following:

Fine weather and light breeze. Mr. Porter, second officer, struck a whale he stove the boat and killed Mr. Porter. He was only seen in a seconds and appeared to be lifeless. Mr. —, 3^rd Officer is off duty from injuries received from a humpback.

If I weren’t so lucky, if the librarian didn’t have that logbook – it could be Nantucket, or Martha’s Vineyard, or Peabody or lost altogether – I would take another tack. For example, after finding that in June 1843 second mate William Lacky of the Candace was “killed by a whale,” I’d go to Lund’s book and see, sadly, that the Candace’s logbook for those years is not present in the Library’s collection; I would then go to a short maroon volume of Dennis Wood’s “Abstracts,” Volume 6, Index, which is an index of logbook summaries from each vessel. “Abstracts” is around 250 pages of tables reading Ship Name, Rig (Ship or Bark) Tonnage, Dates and Volume – Page. After finding the ship Candace, I would then go to Dennis Wood’s stack of larger, elephant folio and equally maroon “Abstracts” – listed by Volume, Part, Pages; the Candace is mentioned in Wood’s 1832 – 1847, VOL. 1 PT. 1, pp 1-300 book. At the end of this, I would read the abstract, where there would be, I found, no usable information, no mention of William Lacky, and certainly no mentioned of a swallowing.

After I would fail again and again at finding any proof of a swallowing, I would settle back into my chair, defeated. My back would burn from leaning over logbooks and indexes of logbooks and indexes of indexes of logbooks, my eyes strained from trying to read illegible photocopies of century-old chicken scratch penned out on the rolling sea; I would feel thinned, liquidated, oozing onto the desks of the Research Library, dissolving still further, lapping against whaling logbooks that had been touched whalemen from so long ago.

- – - – - – - – - -

Michael came over to my table late in the afternoon, just before closing hours, with a printout of the drawing he had been trying to find.

“Here it is,” he said, “Look here.” He pointed to the top register of the drawing. “The whale’s splitting the boat clean in half. And here,” he pointed to the bottom, “a man driving the harpoon into the whale’s mouth.”

The whale was turned upside-down, jawing over. It had two harpoons stuck in its back with thread-thin coils of lines tangled in the water. Maybe it’s because of the big forehead of a sperm whale that elicits in me some connection to a baby, or the little, teardrop flippers the artist had drawn, or just because the whale was supine under the saw-toothed lines of sea, but it looked relaxed. If it weren’t for the man driving a harpoon into its mouth, I’d say this was a whale at play.

The other end of the whale, the flukes, were drawn and redrawn, telling me the artist wanted to get this part of the whale just right. Unlike the little flipper, drawn in one hasty loop, the flukes were an important body part. This was the real danger, thin and flat, a metal-hard piece of flesh swooping around, rising from underwater and smacking you dead. This was what would break your ribs and crush your head. This is what would most likely end you. In your death you would not witness a stomach glowing with phosphorescence; your skin would not turn white; you would not find a coconut; you would not be encased and warm, womb-like. The whale didn’t care for you enough to consume you because you were not its sustenance. It didn’t need you. Death didn’t need you.

: Ben Shattuck has written for McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, HTMLGiant, ReadyMade, Once Magazine, 7x7, and The Morning News, among other publications. More Ben Shattuck

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The evolution of American debt

Over the last century, over-borrowing has gone from shameful to commonly accepted. An expert explains what changed

By Hannah Tepper

(Credit: Lightspring via Shutterstock)

Topics:Debt, Economics, American History, History

In the US today, debt is ubiquitous. Whether it’s paying back thousands of dollars in student loans, using your Visa card for a pack of gum when you’re out of cash, or taking out a mortgage on a first home, it’s been woven into our financial system so tightly, that even when we suffer the sometimes cruel and unusual detriments of borrowing, we have little to no realistic impetus to stop. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact before the 20^th century, debt was a taboo, feared, shameful, and kept in the shadows. So what events and institutions brought debt from its meager beginnings to its central role in American life?

In his new book, “Borrow: The American Way of Debt,” Cornell professor Louis Hyman writes, in essence, a biography of American debt. He traces debt through American history: from the late 19^th century, when unpaid dues meant public ignominy, to the 1920s, when the auto industry changed the face of borrowing to the mortgage fallouts that led the Great Depression to the invention of the credit card as we now know it, all the way to the current shambles of our national economic livelihood. Along the way we meet characters like the Henry Ford, the xenophobic inventor of the Model T whose scorn for the liberal age of borrowing got the best him, and Lower East Side grocery clerk Joseph Miraglia, whose miraculous $10,000 spending spree in 1965 made history as one of America’s heftiest credit cart blunders.

Salon got a chance to speak with Hyman last week about America’s long road into debt, the problem with applying morality to economics and, of course, that scene in “Pretty Woman” where Julia Roberts goes on a shopping spree.

Your background is in history and mathematics. How did you become interested in debt?

When I was in graduate school I was fishing around for a history topic that hadn’t been done or worked on before. This was in 2003, before financial history became fashionable again and before people knew there was going to be a crisis.

Little did you know… or maybe you did know, what would happen with the recession?

Unfortunately, as a historian of labor and business, I noticed that a lot of working people were struggling with debt. I thought it was a good topic to get some perspective on. As I got into the topic it was something that lent itself well to the kinds of questions I that interested me. Historians are look at how things actually are, rather than economists who are interested in how things ought to be. My work is in people’s choices, and how our choices are constrained by institutions. It lends itself to a more readable history than just a history of charts and graphs.

In the first chapter of the book you discuss how debt was extremely stigmatized in the 1920s. What was society’s moral view on borrowing then as compared to now?

People approach their checkbook not from a math point of view, but from a moral point of view. I think that’s really a key to understanding all of this. It is shocking how commonplace debt is today, but another difference between then and now is the financial infrastructure of debt. We are told that our grandparents didn’t borrow. That’s not true. People borrowed in the 19^th century, they just did it surreptitiously, illegally, or at the margins. It was always stigmatized. That stigmatization arose out of the belief that a mortgage or a debt could easily bankrupt you, or the economy would change, and you would lose everything. In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s the atmosphere around debt changed: New federal programs and financial institutions, from the FHA to department stores, enabled people to borrow more safely. So that fear that everything could be lost went away in the middle of the 20^th century. In the last 30 years that changed again. Those institutions born in this era of growth have persisted into our era of stagnation.

Is debt being re-stigmatized because of our most recent financial crisis?

Absolutely. In the 70s and 80s, it was like in the movie “Pretty Woman”; how glorious it was for Julia Roberts character to use a credit card. That was because most people in the ’80s didn’t have credit cards. In the ’90s, credit card use started to take on a different cast; it started to be seen as somewhat irresponsible. Mortgages maintained that shine of responsible adulthood until the financial crisis. Now people are questioning whether it’s good to go into debt for houses in a way that they certainly haven’t for 70 years.

In the book, you talk about the balloon mortgage and mortgage-backed securities, which had a big part in the economic collapse in the housing market during the Great Depression.

What’s shocking is that the balloon mortgage and the mortgage-backed security are things that we imagine were invented in the last ten years. At least I did before I started this research. But actually, they were commonplace in the 1920s. Banks would issue bonds to local investors who would use that money to lend interest-only mortgages (or balloon mortgages) to consumers. They were called balloon mortgages because they swelled up so that you’d only pay the interest for 3-5 years and at the end of the 3-5 year period you would just refinance it. The thought then was, you’d try to get the biggest house possible and make some money off of it a few years down the line. Banks had access to all this money to lend because they were selling “mortgage bonds” or “participation certificates.” But the bonds weren’t trade-able, they weren’t like mortgage backed securities are today. They couldn’t be resold. As the markets begin to go south after the crash people stopped buying the bonds, there were foreclosures, people started to withdraw their investments, and others were unable to refinance their mortgages.

And then Fannie Mae was created to help the government fund mortgage lending?

New Deal policy makers set up the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, which created a set of guidelines to ensure that houses would maintain value over time. They set up an insurance system so that lenders would be repaid in the case of a default, to prevent foreclosures. New Deal policy makers created Fannie Mae, originally called the Federal National Mortgage Association, to buy mortgages from local banks and mortgage companies and sell them to insurance companies and other investors. This way there was no longer a need for bonds.

In the book you give some fascinating historical information on how department stores, and later discount stores, changed the way Americans shopped and changed their intuitions about credit.

What’s interesting about department stores is that they are an amalgamation of a bunch of different kinds of stores, clothing stores, appliances, etc. Credit in the department store in the early 20^th century was a service, like delivery. The store didn’t make any money on it at all. That’s the most important thing to realize; that it was not a profit setter. It was something you did because it kept your customers happy. After the war, though, department stores begin to offer what they called “permanent budget accounts.” It allowed people to pay back purchases over many months, and the store was able to charge them interest. By the late 1950s, department stores had more money invested in consumer debt than in their own inventory, so they began to raise the interest rate on credit to 18 percent. It became profitable and they could resell that debt to finance companies. The subcontracting of debt enabled a whole system in which Americans got used to buying on credit and paying interest. Once debt could be resold, discount stores like Wal-mart and Kmart could sell for lower prices and offer the same services as department stores.

You also mention in the book that banks had an essentially trial-by-error process in learning how to profit from credit cards in the ’60s and ’70s. What were some of the regulatory and infrastructural changes that put banks at the forefront of the lending industry?

It’s important to realize that banks were not driving this shift in the ’70s. Banks didn’t come into the credit card industry until 1978 with the Marquette decision, which held that you could charge customers the legal interest rate of whichever state the bank was located in. So banks in states like South Dakota, where you could charge very high interest rates, could lend to people in Nebraska or New York City. That’s when Citibank moved its operation from Long Island to South Dakota, and charged very high interest rates across the country. This shift in the regulatory environment is key as well as the rise of interest rates more generally in the economy during the inflation of the late 1970s.

Why did consumers accept these high interest rates on credit cards?

If you are paying the customary 18 percent a year, it actually isn’t that much as long as you pay off most of your debts every month. And most of the credit cards that were lent in the ’70s and ’80s were to the well-to-do, who could handle the payments.

Nowadays almost anyone can get a credit card, not just the well off. When did that change?

It happened in the early ’90s. Banks continued to get more efficient at lending and their credit models, they believed, got better and better at differentiating between a good credit risk and a bad credit risk. It also became cheaper to borrow so that during the early ’90s from 1991 to 1996, during a five year period, nearly all the expansion in credit card debt was through securitization, when banks resell debt as credit card backed securities, just the way mortgages can be sold again as securities. Because it became cheaper to lend, banks could lend to poorer and poorer people with more vulnerable employment statuses because if these people defaulted, it wasn’t as big of a deal. Statistically, they expected default, and they just thought they could manage those defaults through clever math.

What about the mortgage market in the ’90s? In the book you talk about how an influx of securities into the mortgage market made it ridiculously easy for people to mortgage new homes. How did this lead us into a speculative bubble?

People believed that house prices would go up and that they were good investments. Friends at work, at church, at the gym were telling each other how much money they had made on their houses over the last generation. By 2005 a lot of people bought secondary houses as investments. The speculative bubble happened for many reasons. The most important reason, we think, is that most Americans weren’t making as much money. Median wages stagnated. People couldn’t borrow to invest in the stock market, but they could borrow money from a bank very easily to buy a house. People thought investing in the housing market gave them leverage to make money quickly. You see the collision of a stagnating wage market with a rising house market during a moment of low interest rates. Wages hadn’t gone up for 30 years but wealth had gone up and concentrated at the top, amongst the wealthiest. That money had to be invested somewhere and it looked like housing was a safe, easy way to invest. This money went into houses rather than into business. It went into things that produced nothing rather than things that were economically productive.

You make a really important point comparing the housing market to a Giffen good. A Giffen good is a term, in economics, that refers to something for which demand will increase as its price increases, which works against our typical understanding of the relationship between price and demand.

In economic textbooks, Giffen Goods are described as an anomaly, like a mythical beast or a unicorn that could exist intellectually but never in the real world. But it’s exactly what happened with the housing market: when the price went up, demand went up. The key is that it was not just about borrowers but about lenders. Because there was this ready supply of capital to invest and these lenders were willing to fund all of these mortgages, the housing prices went through the roof. The market wasn’t self-correcting, and there was no equilibrium until there was a crisis.

If it were left up to you, how would you change the way capital is invested in this country? What needs to change?

I think it’s important to realize that we need to use our policies for productive investments. We’ve made it too easy to invest in consumer debt. We can use the same policies to steer money into productive investments. Businesses produce value, they produce jobs, they produce growth, and in our economy, it’s very hard to do that these days. You can get venture capital for fancy high-tech companies, but you can’t get loans for mom and pop operations. I think business investment is something that’s very moderate in a lot of ways from the left and the right. From my perspective it helps us think about how we can actually intervene in the economy rather than just scold people for borrowing too much or being predatory lenders. One of the most important points of this book is to get past moral arguments. We can acknowledge the importance of culture, but I think it’s important to see ways we can actually intervene and make things better.

: More Hannah Tepper

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Embedded with the reenactors

As thousands of reenactors stage a battle from the French & Indian War, an important question comes to mind -- why?

By Nick Kowalczyk

Topics:American History

“Well, I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.” –Elwood P. Dowd, in “Harvey,” by Mary Chase

Reveille

Cannon fire woke me up.

It was sometime around seven-thirty in the morning.

For hours I had listened half-asleep through my white canvas tent to a crowd of middle-aged men confabulating about their muskets, their outfits and the costs of their campfire boilers, but it was only after that big kaboom, the great wake-the-hell-up call for war, that I began heralding the day.

Immediately a question presented itself.

Was there time for me to walk a half-mile across the park to the outdoor, cold-water only showers near the swimming pool, or would I follow the advice of my tour guide, Old Hickory, who the day before said, “We generally don’t shower at events. We tend to use baby wipes for any special-needs areas.”

I looked at my modern-day timepiece.

I had a half-hour until the festivities began.

“War really is hell,” I said, rubbing my eyes and reaching for the moist towelettes.

The Battlefield

The fake date was July 6, 1759; the real one was July 3, 2009.

I was among 2,500 otherwise normal human beings dressed as if fighting in the French and Indian War. Our raison d’être was the Siege of Fort Niagara, which this year was happening once again. Every year this fort 30 miles outside of present-day Buffalo gets “taken” by re-enactors pretending to be British and Iroquois Indian from other re-enactors pretending to be French. The whole thing conjures up Santayana’s line that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it” — which makes me wonder if historical reenacting is its own particular brand of doom. At any rate, though, I was at “the largest event of its kind in the world,” according to the French and Indian War Grand Encampment Council.

It was fun.

It’s not every 4^th of July you get to be around nearly 3,000 people inhabiting an amalgam of time, and especially in a place as lovely as Fort Niagara State Park. The water in Lake Ontario actually was blue. And the fortification, now known as Old Fort Niagara, has been well-preserved even though it was built by the French in 1726 and took a 19-day pummeling in July 1759, when a few thousand British and Indians out-maneuvered 600 Frenchman sitting pretty in a big castle protected by cannons and stone walls.

But being on the battlefield exactly 250 years later, I couldn’t help but imagine the 348 people who died and the many others who were injured or suffered. When they trembled for their lives could they ever have imagined that a bloodless, G-rated recreation of their deaths eventually would become someone’s hobby?

Public Information

The summer of 2009 was particularly ugly. President Obama had just entered office and banks too big to fail had been saved. As a country, we were debating whether health care was a basic right for everyone. A few days earlier, the government in Iraq had declared a national “Sovereignty Day” after U.S. forces handed over security responsibilities following the six-year war for oil and the American empire. In Afghanistan that day, a U.S. soldier wandered off his base without body armor or a weapon and was kidnapped and three troops died in an attack on the eastern front. And back at home, one had the feeling of even uglier times ahead, with Tea Partiers and racists chipping away at the goodwill and hope of the president’s election, his vow to end torture and close Guantanamo Bay, and it seemed certain the superhero candidate abruptly would confront the limits of his power in this age of government dysfunction and concentrated wealth. All of these things were on the minds of the re-enactors at Fort Niagara.

Without the French and Indian War, I was told in one re-enactor’s cascading cause-and-effect lecture, the British never would’ve taken hold of the American colonies, never would’ve quartered soldiers and taxed tea and killed Crispus Attucks; without the F&I there would’ve been no Washington, no Jefferson, no Lincoln, and therefore no Civil War, and so on.

Winston Churchill called the F&I the real first world war, someone added.

“It’s truly our nation’s forgotten war,” another mourned.

“Now that the Democrats are in office they’ll fund every useless social program and gut the things that really matter, like the national parks system.”

Someone else said, “This battle here is the reason today we ain’t speaking French.”

And one re-enactor offered this insight: “We’re people with an appreciation for history. We don’t just take The New York Times and go glug-glug-glug.”

Very few, if any, re-enactors recycled their bottles and cans.

Battledress

Like drag shows, re-enactments hinge on sartorial panache. If a man’s otherwise period-correct outfit includes modern-day buttons or eyeglasses, it might as well have come from K-mart.

The outfit I borrowed from Old Hickory probably cost $500. The clothes were soft and baggy like elaborate pajamas, and they consisted of one puffy striped linen shirt; a pair of navy short pants; one black vest that hung past my hips; one long mustard coat; green wool thigh-high socks; two black leather garters; one brown leather belt; one pair of uncushioned moccasins; a navy linen scarf; and one blue, puffy wool bonnet.

I also carried a haversack for journalistic supplies: a tape-recorder, a camera, several notebooks, a few Ticonderoga-brand pencils in honor of the F&I battle there, a flask of whiskey, a one-hitter, and a modest supply of marijuana. Aside from hard-tack, I couldn’t think of anything else I’d need…

“You look like a natural,” Old Hickory said that morning.

He was drinking caffeine-free diet soda from a tin coffee cup. He corrected my scarf, which I’d assumed was an ascot, and he tucked in my overlong belt. Would a real frontiersman have cared about such things? Probably not. But Old Hickory was doing me a favor.

“Now you look spit and polished.”

In disbelief, I asked if he’d photograph me. As Old Hickory took the picture, a group of re-enactors walked past us and one of them teased, “So how’s it looking out of a camera from that end?”

Old Hickory grinned, but otherwise ignored the man.

He and I examined the photograph. Round-headed and with chipmunk cheeks, I looked like a twelve year-old colonial dork.

Old Hickory, by contrast, looked pretty good.

He was dressed as a Roger’s Ranger: the great-granddaddies of the U.S. Army Rangers, who in frontier times were badass guerillas who fought for the British and were commanded by a woodsman named Robert Rogers. My tour guide’s outfit consisted of a period-correct, perfectly stitched green wool coat and thigh-high boots atop skintight khaki breeches, with extra accoutrements that included a green wool bonnet, a powder horn, a knife, and a musket. Unlike me, he seemed to disappear into his clothes, which in effect was his goal.

Real life, as we all know, can be hell, too.

The Tour Guide

Old Hickory was a handsome man of 60. Lean and high-cheeked, with strikingly blue eyes, he had sandy-brown hair that he parted in the middle and combed onto his forehead. We first met when I worked as a journalist in Kansas City, roughly in 2004. I was at work one day when an editor took a call from a man suggesting we write about his performance in an upcoming History Channel documentary called “Andrew Jackson: Conqueror of Florida.”

We first spoke in his antiquarian house in the suburbs. I remember a console television and the musty smell of a used bookstore. He came to the door wearing a white button-down shirt tucked into blue jeans and, though obviously friendly and kind, he looked uncomfortable in his own skin. Expecting to meet a thespian, I pressed him for an hour to tell me about himself. He said he lived alone, and that he wasn’t an actor, but a re-enactor, and he only appeared in historical documentaries. He said he mostly portrayed the French and Indian War time period but occasionally dabbled in the War of 1812.

“No Civil War?” I asked.

“Nope, never ever,” he replied.

He explained his career in what he called “the movies.” After auditioning for the role of a historical figure named John Stark, he received the part from a historical documentarian who told him he looked like the Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. This led to a title role as Jackson in another half-hour show, “The Decisive Battles: The Battle of New Orleans,” in 2000. By now he had played Jackson probably four times on screen, he said.

For many reasons, this surprised me.

Namely I was struck that Old Hickory seemed low-key and passionless, the antithesis of a 19^th century general, duelist, president and Indian killer.

He was a difficult interview, too. Barely answering my personal questions, he preferred to talk about historical trivia and the hobby of historical pretending. The man who plays Thomas Jefferson at colonial Williamsburg, Old Hickory said, knows his subject so well he can tell you what Jefferson ate for lunch on a given day, which I thought, or rather hoped, was an exaggeration.

I’m still not sure.

But Old Hickory captured my imagination when he said that reenacting, in various ways, had given him his “credibility.”

“What did you do before this?”

He explained that he’d quit a pretty lucrative full-time job in the insurance industry, and that his decision now allowed him to reenact up to 20 weekends a year, in places as far away from the flat Midwest as the fantastic rolling hills of upstate New York.

My story about him appeared, and yet I remained intrigued. As a lonely child and teenager, I had lived vicariously through movies and television, sometimes even to the extent that I considered many movie characters my friends and role models. So being no stranger to the modern-day ambivalence of wanting to be a fully realized person and yet wishing desperately to be someone else, I corresponded off-and-on with Old Hickory for several years. Then as luck would have it I moved to central New York and offered Old Hickory an apartment sofa to sleep on instead of his normal accommodation: a bedroll in the back of his minivan.

On the way to Niagara, Old Hickory had explained that re-enactors always drive big vehicles because the airlines won’t let them fly cross-country with their muskets and period camp gear. “That’s probably a re-enactor there,” he said many times, pointing at other overstuffed SUVs, trucks, trailers, and vans on the highway. “See the tent poles sticking out?”

The Mess (as in Messdeck)

At an outdoor commissary, a few hundred re-enactors drank coffee and ate muffins and donuts. A man in a British red coat peeled a banana. A man dressed as a French marine yelled at his wife when she took out a cell phone from her 18^th century dress. “Why can’t you understand we’re doing something important this weekend?!?” the husband snapped.

A few people talked about the night’s upcoming fireworks extravaganza.

“Bring out your dead!” crowed an old man in rags as he pulled a rickety wooden cart.

“Good morning, young scribe,” a large bearded man said when he saw me taking notes.

Luckily he didn’t see what I’d written: Why aren’t we repelled by the bloodshed that made and maintains the republic?

Staging Area

After breakfast I returned to the British Advance Camp, where the Rangers were bivouacked near a large maintenance shed. Fifty or so men and one woman dressed as a man already were marching toward the fort’s wonderfully curated museum. Their muskets were shouldered, their faces grim. Most of them were drastically overweight, and the median age for the group hovered at forty-five. (“As far as the war goes, we’re ancient!” one of them later told me). In a grassy patch they settled in three different formations and clumsily walked forward, turned right, left, wheeled around, and stood at attention. Their platoon leader sounded like a movie drill sergeant: “Poise your firelocks! Shoulder your firelocks! Rest upon your arms!” This went on for about an hour, with the soldiers showing little improvement as time passed.

As a captain lieutenant of his battalion, Old Hickory stood outside of the drill lines and chatted with the other officers. The plan for the morning was to drill like this and do safety inspections, then walk to the Battle on the Beach. As an officer his obligations were to pretend to whisper orders to the platoon leader who then relayed the messages to the men in a simulated version of chain-of-command, which made this rather tedious affair seem official.

During a pause in the action one of the privates asked who I was.

“A journalist,” I replied.

“We have an embedded reporter with us!?!” the man laughed.

“Where you from, son?” another asked.

“Ithaca, New York.”

“So you’re gonna just march around with us?”

“Yeah, Old Hickory brought me,” I said, thinking it would help me gain trust.

“Ooooooooooooohhhh,” several of them cooed, causing Old Hickory’s face to redden.

They teased him like schoolchildren ragging on the kid at the head of the class for receiving yet another award.

“Well, thanks for joining us anyway,” someone said.

“I’m happy to be here,” I replied. “I hope it’s in the script that we win.”

Domestic Intelligence

People generally assume that any reenactment is a Civil War reenactment. It’s the most popular kind, for sure, but there are other time periods and conflicts. The Vikings. Rocky Mountain Fur Traders. Revolutionary War. World Wars One and Two. Korea. War of 1812. Vietnam. One imagines there eventually will be reenactors of Afghanistan and Iraq, too.

America’s earliest reenactments were arranged by real veterans. In 1822 some Revolutionary War soldiers revisited their 1775 conflict in Lexington, presumably to recognize the “first shot” that led to independence. Then some Crow Indians from the Battle of Little Big Horn commemorated their 1876 battle against General Custer with a bloodless redux in 1902. Probably there were others, too, but those are the most well-known.

Psychologically, those reenactments must have been a way of keeping past traumas real and under control; a means of talking about tough experiences with people who’ve been through the same. But I’ve never understood why anyone would reenact a war in which they’ve never fought.

Who are these people beneath their funny clothes?

Dossier No. 1

Old Hickory grew up in white, suburban Kansas City and enjoyed his childhood with his father, the quiet son of Swedish immigrants, who became a department store window dresser; and his mother, of British ancestry, who kept a tidy house and loved Old Hickory and his older brother.

Like other boys of the 1950s, he developed fantasies of frontier heroism and respect for the American story by watching Walt Disney shows about Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. But in real life he avoided putting himself out there, as if resistant to risk and effort. Once he told me he loved the musical “South Pacific” because he’d watched his more-outgoing older brother practice the play with drama club friends in their living room, and he told this story with an undertone of self-knowing: at times his shyness can be stubborn, self-defeating.

He followed his brother to the same Kansas university and took pre-law classes but quit with just credits shy of a degree. He joined the National Guard to avoid becoming a soldier in the Vietnam War and ultimately finished college as a “C” student before returning to Kansas City. For three decades he worked in various jobs writing insurance policies. Around age 30 he tried being a marketing representative with a 10-state territory; it involved lots of travel, a company car, and an expense account — and he hated it. He also once moved to San Francisco, stayed a month, “hated every minute of that, too,” missed Kansas City and came home.

He’s never been married or had children or pets. “I don’t think I’ve ever truly been in love either,” he said on the way to Niagara. These days he’s looking for an attractive, independent, middle-aged, single woman interested in history, who reenacts the 18^th century and sews. One imagines he may be looking for a while.

Shock and Awe

Once the men finished drilling, they waited for the order to begin marching. Contrary to the stereotype that reenactors spend their time running around like 5-year-olds, not once during that weekend did I see a man move faster than 3 miles per hour. The published schedule of events had the opening Battle on the Beach set to begin at 10 a.m., once the public parked their cars, bought their tickets, and meandered to the gawker’s fence near the Lake Ontario shore. According to the program, the reenactors were tasked to play out the following scenario: “A French hunting party from Fort Niagara discover that British forces have landed east of Fort Niagara. Rangers, Native American warriors, and French troops engage in combat. Both sides are reinforced until a major battle unfolds…”

As they waited for their marching orders, the men began looking restless. “We need to eat time,” Old Hickory told them. “Our whole purpose here is to save the skin of the guys already fighting on the beach because they’re getting pretty beat up.”

Of this sort of slip into fantasy, Old Hickory explains he never loses track of himself as a 21^st century man — “I’m a little too practical, too down to earth,” he says — and so rather than succumbing to period rush he keeps in mind that he’s always being watched by the public and other reenactors, and he likes that. “I never forget that I’m a reenactor,” he once explained. “Even when I’m at a Civil War event I want to walk up to the guys and say, ‘Hey, I’m one of your brothers — I’m a reenactor, too,’ because I miss being identified the way I am when I wear my period clothes.”

Dossier No. 2

“In real life I’m just a wallflower,” he once confessed to me, before adding, on a brighter note, “but when I found reenacting everything changed.”

In 1992, at age 44, he took up black powder shooting and visited a War of 1812 site in Kansas called Fort Osage. There he met some F&I reenactors (anachronistic, yes, but who really cares), and he barraged them with questions. He bought clothes, a musket, and slept in his car at events. Some considered him “a suit” and “a mooch,” given his white-collar job and healthy diet, his constant requests for help and lack of handyman skills, but he paid those criticisms little mind. At events he was approached by the public, asked questions, even photographed. For the first time in his life he felt appreciated, like he had something to offer the world.

“Now when I’m in my street clothes I don’t feel like that’s my identity,” he said when I once asked him, Who are you outside of this?

In that conversation I drew a circle in my notebook and asked him to fill in the elements of his life — family, hobbies, friends, the job he’d quit, whatever — and to shade in the categories that involved reenacting. The exercise perplexed Old Hickory; he pushed my notebook away. “I don’t need to do that,” he said. “Reenacting is the circle. That’s it. There isn’t anything else anymore.”

Top Brass

The commanding officers were visited by the battalion’s co-founder. A circular, froggish man of 62, Tim wore a black tricorn hat and carried the title Battalion Adjutant. After Old Hickory introduced us, Tim and I spoke privately under an oak tree. For years Old Hickory had told me about the amazing history of Jaeger’s Battalion, how it’s the oldest and largest recreated Roger’s Rangers unit in the country, with members from 26 states, plus Canada and England, and more than 400 enlisted members. Old Hickory also considered Tim one of his heroes: “He’s been having fun with this all of his life, whereas I took 30 years off from ‘cowboys and Indians’ before starting again.”

When I asked how Tim got into reenacting, he said, “Back in the 1950s, the F&I was considered pretty obscure.” Immediately this made me chuckle: What does he think it is now? (There are only about 3,000 F&I reenactors compared to 40,000 in the Civil War, which itself remains a relatively fringe hobby). But Tim went on to say that in 1956, at age 9, he co-founded this battalion with his 11-year-old best friend John. They lived in the same neighborhood in Grand Rapids, Mich., and had seen a rerelease of 1940’s “Northwest Passage,” widely considered the F&I’s answer to “Gone with the Wind,” with Spencer Tracy as Robert Rogers and Walter Brennan and Robert Young as two buddies who help the famed woodsman wipe out Indian villages. Mesmerized by the movie, Tim and his buddy returned to the theater nine more times and began play-Ranging. (“I’m Robert Rogers!” “No, I am! You’re the Indian savage!” I can imagine them saying). Then as teenagers they shot muzzleloaders and began reenacting after college.

Hearing all of this I wanted to ask Tim if they’d signed their charter in a tree house, but when he said John died a few years ago, making him the commander, I didn’t have the heart to be ironic.

The author of several F&I books, as well as a memoir about Boy Scouting in western Michigan, Tim admired his fake troops: “We’re a family-friendly organization. Our members all look alike, they all get treated alike, but some of them are very interesting. That one over there is actually female; she’s a graduate of the Air Force Academy. Him over there, he’s a real Army colonel. Another is a meteorologist. Another is a schoolteacher. One’s a naturalist for the state of Ohio. And we have one young man with us on leave from Mosul in Iraq.”

“Which one is he?”

“He won’t be on the battlefield today.”

“Really?”

“Nope. He’s cooking with the women back in camp.”

Our conversation ended as all of my previous and future ones had and would: with me taking a picture of the reenactor. These people must have unwritten rules about photographs: They never smile or look at the camera, and they always try to look stern and important. As such, Tim stared off toward history and greatness, and he suggested that I capture the French fort in the background, because that’s the direction we were headed.

Flanking Maneuver

The route to the beach was a long one. Through the park, across soccer fields, past a swimming pool, and through the woods along shoreline cliffs. The reason for the distance, one reenactor said, was a “bunch of asshole French separatists.”

Earlier that year, a group of French-Canadians had threatened to ruin a reenactment near Quebec City of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, in which the French were defeated and their foremost general was killed. The battle had been canceled over the plans of angry Quebecans still pissed off about France’s defeat, to storm the battlefield with paintball guns. As a result Niagara had swelled, bringing more reenactors and in turn more spectators whom we had to journey around; we didn’t want to shatter the public’s suspended disbelief, after all.

The reenactors’ physical conditions, ranging from bad feet to morbid obesity, led them to take many breaks. Yet unlike the masses, Old Hickory was physically fit. Just a few years prior, he and a few others had dressed in Revolutionary War clothing and walked almost 700 miles recreating the Washington-Rochambeau March (sans, of course, a land war in the background). Averaging 16 miles a day, they walked up hills, through strip malls and housing developments, and across water and countryside and rain swept cities. “We’d walk seven hours a day and set up our tents immediately. We’d sleep and then start walking again. We wore modern sneakers, but still the blisters hurt so bad every step hurt,” Old Hickory told me. “But we got celebrity treatment. Every town we stopped in there were people who appreciated us, thanked us. Journalists interviewed us I don’t know how many times. The Pentagon even let us inside. It was the greatest thing I’ve ever been a part of.”

Dossier No. 3

“My dream is trying to create Andrew Jackson in a 40- or 45-minute presentation, basically a one-man performance,” Old Hickory told me more than six years ago. We were talking in the Starbucks where every day he gets his social fix talking to baristas while he reads his history and reenacting books. At that time, Old Hickory already had paid a scriptwriter $1,000 to write him a Jackson monologue. He’d purchased a few thousand dollars worth of Jackson clothing and had a website and business cards, too. He was still riding high on the fact that he made the May/June 2000 cover of a reenacting magazine called Muzzleloader, on which he appeared as a gallant General Jackson sitting atop a horse at the Battle of New Orleans.

Since that Starbucks conversation, he’d also become the main men’s model for Cobb Creek Merchants (“purveyor of 18^th Century fine clothing & accessories”); been profiled in another long Muzzleloader article about the filming of the PBS special “The War That Made America;” appeared in short films for Mount Vernon and Andrew Jackson’s hermitage in Tennessee (the latter is a low-budget movie called “An Encounter with Old Hickory,” now available on YouTube); and he modeled in a project called EPIC ART in which oil tankers outside of Houston were decorated with historical images four stories tall and 140-feet long, meaning that on a certain highway in Texas, Old Hickory can be seen as Andrew Jackson from literally a mile away.

But battle reenactments and photo shoots are one thing — real acting is another. Old Hickory doesn’t think he’s got the talent: “I’d really feel shy and self-conscious doing some kind of actor thing,” he told me. Plus, he’s too impatient for acting or public speaking classes. “I don’t want to be an actor,” he replies whenever anyone makes the suggestion. “I just want to be Jackson.”

Unanticipated Informants

The old man talking to Old Hickory called himself Captain Titus, and he was ghostly, with a turkey-like face and shoulder-length white hair. He wore a long red coat and a black tricorn hat and he carried a saber at his side and smoked a long, curvy corn pipe. (Later at this event, at the fireworks show, I would meet Captain Titus’ men. Five bearded and friendly middle-aged guys, they told me Titus often organizes multi-hour hikes during the winter, when most reenactors hang up their muskets. Apparently he leads his men through steep gorges in their period clothes and shoes, yelling at them to keep up. Another tale involved a time when Titus inspected a man’s musket and found it dirty. As punishment he pressed the man’s $2,000 gun into some mud, saying, “Don’t you just hate it when that happens?” You’ll never see a reenactor more hardcore than him, one of his men said).

Watching Titus talk to Old Hickory was like seeing a teacher and student; Titus was so lost in his character that nobody knew his real name, or if he had one.

“Did you enjoy yourself when we last engaged?”

“Yes, sir, I did,” replied Old Hickory, who told Titus he drove 30,000 miles for last year’s season of reenactments.

“My God, you go a distance for the cause, my boy!”

When they parted ways Captain Titus tipped his hat.

“Good luck killing the French!”

We crossed a four-lane divided highway to enter the woods that took us to the beach. A platoon leader yelled “Hold the road!” to some men who stood with their muskets across their chests while SUVs and sedans idled down.

At the highway, Old Hickory and I saw his pal Mike. A documentary filmmaker from Connecticut, Mike was one of the reenactors with whom Old Hickory marched the 700 miles. Claiming he was dressed as “Bobby Rogers” himself, Mike sported a long gray ponytail that swayed as he stepped through trees and brush. He bragged that the Yorktown march damaged his knees so badly he now held railings whenever he walked on steps, but still he planned to march again someday. Of his obsession he explained that his relatives have fought in every American war since the F&I and the hobby brings him closer to his roots. For 20 years he researched his genealogy, even bought a computer program to manage its 3,000 names, and he boasted to me that his relatives include Abraham Lincoln, John Hancock, Paul Revere and 21 people who survived the Mayflower voyage.

Wanting to ask how much cannon fire he’d absorbed throughout life, I instead congratulated Mike on his discoveries. He added, “And my son and daughter-in-law just had a little boy. Some years ago I asked for all of her information, and after a lot of digging I found out she’s related to the first settlers of Jamestown, which means my grandson is the byproduct of the first people to settle this country. How about that for awesome, huh?”

“I’m sure he’ll have a lot to say at show and tell,” I said.

The crack of musket fire interrupted us.

We arrived at the Battle on the Beach.

Linear Warfare

Coming out of the tree line, the Rangers saw hundreds of spectators behind the gawkers’ fence that extended all 500 yards of the battlefield. The Rangers organized themselves in a long horizontal line — which I guess is how the guerilla forest warriors actually fought? — and negotiated several picnic tables and stationary barbecue grills. As we walked forward, I saw several reenactors (as frontier medics?) pretending to carry the dead and wounded off the field, with several of those men aptly moaning.

Slowly the Rangers advanced into the battlefield, knelt, fired on the distant enemy, and advanced again. As for me, I alternated between scribbling in my notepad and lying on the ground to take battlefield photographs.

On the drive up, Old Hickory had told me that battles can be exciting, with all sorts of things happening, but really, it was just a bunch of yelling, gunfire and smoke. With everything scripted, they’re a cross between goofy and dull. I got a kick out of making chit-chat with the dead soldiers and hearing a few of the commanding officers crack jokes. One man quoted a line from “Stripes”: “If we ever find ourselves in heavy combat, just know I’ll be right behind you guys the whole time.” Others, however, were hardcore: they shouted “Huzzah!” after firing every round.

After 20 minutes the battle was scheduled to wind down. “If you’re having musket problems, start dropping out as casualties!” a commander yelled.

Added another: “But wait for the next round of enemy fire! Don’t just suddenly die!!!”

“Nicely done, boys!” said another when the men managed to fire in unison.

“Two more rounds, hold your fire, and then we’re going right after them!”

To my right I saw French navy forces on the lake shoot at us with cannons and muskets. A few men dressed in loincloths loped around the shoreline, ostensibly pretending to be warring Indians but instead looking confused as they wandered toward and away from the war. Noteworthy, though, was their body paint: Depending on the man, it was either crimson red or soot-black, and it covered them mohawk-to-toe, including all over their bare middle-aged buttocks.

At some point Captain Titus emerged from a cloud of smoke.

“You’re not afraid are you, Nick?” he asked in his thick Southern drawl.

“No, Captain Titus,” I said, lying on the ground with my notebook. “I’m just fine.”

“That’s good,” he hollered. “I didn’t think you would be!”

Then after the French fired another round of blanks he shook his head and again turned to me, totally serious: “Boy, that was a close one, Nick!”

Sortie

After the battle ended, young girls in matronly outfits walked onto the battlefield carrying canvas sacks. “Would you like some water, sir?” one of them asked in a fake British accent nobody except the two of us could hear. I drank from a plastic squeeze bottle and surveyed the field. In accordance with the script, a Tambour-Major on the French side had declared, “La Retraite” and the Frenchmen and the Indians had run into the fort. Dead soldiers rose and walked away. Old Hickory wandered off to model for sculptors and painters who’ve used his image in all sorts of artwork. But I stayed behind watching the crowd applaud us, wondering why they’ve paid $25 a ticket, for this.

Among them was an attractive young mother with two little boys. One of them sat in a stroller and the other ran around pretending to be a soldier. Despite being in uniform, so to speak, I explained to her what I was doing and asked why she brought her family to a battle reenactment given the kind of message it imparts. She answered, “It’s just something to do. And this is what boys do anyway. They’re conquerors — they think they’re born to be conquerors. I used to get tired of them playing war games, but then I got tired of trying to redirect their imagination.” And together we watched her son pretend to kill an imaginary enemy as we walked off the battlefield.

The Aftermath

Later, and mildly depressed, I went to an ice cream shop inside the fort. As luck would have it, I sat beside two other mothers and their four little boys who were arguing. Naturally I eavesdropped.

They were civilians, and I assumed the mothers also had brought their children to foster an all-American, male fascination with fighting and war. But these boys didn’t care at all about the battles, the reenactors or the fort. Like the reenactors, but also unlike them, these children were somewhere outside of real life and real time.

“I’m Mario,” one of the boys yelled.

“No, I’m Mario,” another said.

“OK, can I be Luigi,” the third asked.

The whole thing went on for five minutes, until one of the exasperated mothers put down her fudge sundae and snapped. “Half a day! Just half a day,” she pleaded. “Can you guys please go one day without arguing who’s who in the video game world.”