Sixty-five: Got to love him

Here's Richard Hofstadter from the Paranoid Style in American Politics.  The full piece from the November 1964 issue of Harpers can be found here.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed, he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often, the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is, on many counts, the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations, set up to combat secret organizations, give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

Here is Ahab creating his Moby Dick out of his own paranoia and determining that the whale needs to be destroyed, even if he takes the Pequod down with him.

Sixty-four: Resist and Survive

Patrick Henry, the 2013-14 Ida E. King Distinguished Fellow, gave a very interesting presentation for the 10^th Annual Kristallnacht Lecture yesterday (October 29th). Dr. Henry is the author of We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (Catholic University of America Press, 2007), and he gave his reflections on the occasion of the 75^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when the Nazis engineered a pogrom in which 1500 synagogues and thousands of Jewish business were destroyed and scores of Jews were killed throughout Germany. Sponsored as it was by the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center, the Sam Azeez Museum of Woodbine Heritage, the Holocaust and Genocide undergraduate minor (director, Carol Rittner, below) the Masters Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (director, Michael Hayse, below), along with the Student Senate, the turnout for the lecture was excellent and the Campus Center was filled with a fittingly solemn audience. All present would agree, I think, that the lecture was terrific, both informative and nicely argued. It will make a fine addition to our published collection of Kristallnacht lectures given by the Ida E. King Fellows.

Dr. Henry’s lecture was entitled, “Jewish Resistance against the Nazis,” and in it he endeavored to lay to rest that old canard about Jewish passivity during the Holocaust. Pat provided the audience with a brief historiography on the notion of Jewish passivity, asserting that the Nazis themselves had recorded the events in such a way as to build an archive that would suggest that there was little Jewish resistance. This was a simple case of blaming the victim, either suggesting to the rest of the Europe and the world that there was no problem and that the Jews were going along with many of the things being done to them (e.g., being moved to ghettos), or asserting that the Jews were less than men and deserved this fate. Other nations also bought into this notion of passivity as it calmed their consciences regarding their failure to act in opposition to the crimes. Perhaps surprisingly, the idea remained uncontested after the war; Jewish intellectuals themselves frequently suggested that Jews had been passive during the Holocaust, in part to promote the notion that in future any such intimation of a threat to the Jewish people would be met with a strong and immediate response.

History, truth, and our understanding of what Jews were doing throughout Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s clearly suffered in the construction of this unflattering archive. While other historians have now done much to refute most of the claims of this school of thinking about the Holocaust, Pat was pleased to inform us, the key elements of the critique have yet to gain wide currency, and the myth of Jewish passivity still has many adherents. So Pat set about dismantling the myth at all levels.

Pat took us through the elements of violent resistance occurring in many of the ghettos, like the one in Warsaw where Jews managing to hold off the Nazis for several months, in spite of being armed with very primitive weapons compared to the might of Nazi Germany. He informed us of other violent resistance occurring in several of the death camps, and the many partisan units throughout eastern Europe, and he then provided information about the participation of Jewish soldiers in the various armies opposing Hitler (including half a million in the US army). Clearly violent resistance was formidable.

Where I was most intrigued, though, was in the detailing of all the forms of non-violent resistance. These were many and varied, covering all kinds of activity from helping Jews to escape and survive, to vigorously resisting the attempt to annihilate the humanity of Jews, which was so clearly a part of the Nazi approach to setting the stage for their liquidation as a European people. In many situations violent resistance was futile and so Jews maneuvered through a lot of different approaches to promote or secure their survival, which in the end was the ultimate form of resistance, as Primo Levi frequently asserted.

I was struck by the similarity in the discussion of the Holocaust victims’ passivity to that of the slaves of the Old South. Slavery propagandists had claimed that slaves were happy under slavery and it was their natural condition, and in most instances Northerners and those from other nations who benefitted from the slave-produced commodities were happy to agree. Even after the Civil War (which it has to be noted was largely won by the actions of the slaves themselves, carrying out what W.E.B. Du Bois described as a General Strike, and bolstering the Union army at a time when it was facing huge difficulties in securing willing recruits from the white population, who had no interest in fighting a war to eradicate slavery), the myth survived and became the basis for specious claims that African Americans weren’t "ready" for equality and citizenship.

But, the scholarship about resistance has also shifted. There used to be an assumption that only “manly” and violent resistance should count, as in the movie “Glory,” where one is led to believe that the soldiers earned their right to freedom by proving that they were real men, when the right was theirs even without these actions. There is now more of an understanding of the gendered nature of resistance, and the fact that survival itself can be a form of resistance – though in a system of labor extraction, where the slave is considered property – suicide might be a form of resistance also.

Anyway, as with all good lectures, Pat’s got the gray matter churning. As he spoke, one immediately wanted to make connections, to look for similar themes elsewhere, and connect up the dots in this tragic tapestry of death and destruction, speckled though it is with serious endeavors to promote happiness and the well-being of others, that we call human history.

Rob

Sixty-three: Muffin Wrong With It -- except...

I had been transcribing my father’s letters, which he had written home from India during the Second World War. He had been sent out to Bombay in 1943 and had, almost as soon as he arrived, been struck with a very bad bout of dysentery. He recovered after quite a bit of time in hospital only to be struck down again with it and to be laid up once again. As a result of this, he missed two opportunities to be commissioned and sent out to fight against the Japanese. In effect, therefore, getting dysentery probably saved his life and allowed me and my siblings, and all our sons, daughters, and now grandchildren, to grace this earth.

The letter that struck me was one in which he mentioned the fact that the doctors were telling him that he had fallen foul of this disease and suffered more than the other soldiers, owing to the fact that he had low amounts of acid in his stomach. All the junk that was getting in there, the doctors were telling him, wasn’t being broken down, and was sitting around in there able to do all its mischief.

This struck me as very intriguing, as I had frequently wondered whether my father had had an allergy to bread, which he consumed in large quantities. I had been thinking this ever since I had known two twins on my son's soccer team, both of whom had been excellent players when they were 11, but one had grown to around 5-10 in his early teens, while the other remained around 5-2, or something like that. As a result of this the one had stayed playing very competitive soccer, while the other had been dropped down to B teams. At some point, however, it was realized that the shorter boy had celiac disease, and once this was known, and he was given a gluten-free diet, he shot up to the same height as his brother – and, not coincidentally, started playing on the same level teams.

Why this had occurred to me as intriguing was that my father was around 5-4, but almost everyone else in his family was around 5-10. And going back to look at some pictures of the Thomson family (his mother was Winifred Thomson) it is evident that in the 1890s, there were two heights for the five or six male siblings – about 5-4 and about 5-10. Interestingly, the shorter ones seem to have succumbed to consumption in their youth, though that is probably not linked to this little saga.

Furthermore, the story of the short twin was somewhat similar to what I had experienced. While my brothers had grown very quickly to the height they are now (they were well on the way to that height by the time they were 13), I had remained at about 5-2 until around the age of 15, and suddenly shot up to be the height I am now (the same as them). As I recall, this coincided roughly with the time when I moved from a diet of large quantities of bread, though I may be reading this back into it.

But my father complained bitterly of some food ailments. He hated garlic with a passion and thought this caused him all kinds of issues. Garlic bread or pasta would be very problematic for him. My siblings and I had somewhat scoffed at this, but when I started having the same issues, I began to think there was something to it. But, on reducing the garlic from pasta, I noticed this didn’t make much difference, and so I began to conclude that it wasn’t the garlic, but it was the gluten that was the issue.

But my father had died before any of these hypotheses could be tested, and I was now reading these letters and discovering that there had been an issue earlier in his life. But this got me thinking that perhaps the low stomach acid was something that I shared; and, moreover, perhaps low stomach acid is often connected to gluten intolerance. A quick tour around the web confirmed that this was so, or at least true enough from my perspective, and I thought that I should try going gluten free immediately. So I believe it is fair to say that from the moment that I read that letter I began a gluten-free diet, which I have kept to to this day.

The impact on me was so stunning – remarkable even – that I would never even consider going back to eating gluten again. Here is a list of the different things that improved once I gave up gluten:

1) Sensitive Skin. My skin was no longer sensitive. Prior to giving up gluten my skin was extremely sensitive to such an extent that I could not wear any deodorant or antiperspirant, because I would be itching and in absolute agony all day. Furthermore, I developed a skin abnormality where I used to wear a watch with a metal strap. It looked like I had some cancerous growth, but this had been confirmed as not being one, and it was the only mark on my body of this nature. It was a definite allergic response to the metal, but had my skin not been so sensitive from eating gluten, I don't think I would have it -- certainly wearing a watch doesn't irritate the way it used to.

2) Cold sores. In a related vein, I haven’t had a single cold sore since I gave up gluten. This related to my sensitive skin. I had been having cold sores since I was around eleven, as my father had had, and my other siblings had never suffered through the pleasure of one of these. They are incredibly traumatic for any child, and to have finally seen the end of them, or to hope that I have done, really is quite profound for me. Every time I had been in a situation of stress, I had had them. A change of temperature, or a time of sudden exertion; whatever it was, it led to a cold sore. If you have ever turned up at Harvard for an interview and arrived with a major cold sore on your lip, you know exactly what this feeling is like. Any interview might do it, but the Harvard one was a doozy.

3) Nose Bleeds. One of the impacts of ingesting gluten was congestion. As a result of this I would always be trying to clear my nose, and the sensitivity of my skin resulted in nosebleeds – all the time. Again this would relate to nervousness, and when I was about to be interviewed, for example, I would invariably experience a nosebleed, which wasn’t the most pleasurable experience. Since giving up gluten, I have not had a single nosebleed.

4) Eyes watering. Related to the congestion, my eyes now no longer constantly water, in a way that makes it look like I am crying. This, though, remains a good sign for evidence of gluten in the food. If I start sniffling and my eyes begin to water, I know it is time to take a Gluteneze pill, which limits the effects by helping me digest the gluten.

5) Snoring.  My snoring, I am led to believe, owing to the transformation that has occurred, was caused by inflammation in the throat, as a result of eating gluten. I can only assume this because I was incredibly loud by any reports prior to giving up gluten, while afterwards, the only problems have occurred when I have unknowingly eaten some gluten – an Indonesian meal, for example, or drinking beer. Now, provided I don’t consume the gluten, I don’t snore.

6) Knees.  I was on the verge of getting an ACL taken care of by an operation, but when I gave up gluten, miraculously all my knee problems evaporated. Gluten appears to inflame and make joints work less well. Perhaps my father might not have needed the hip replacement that led to his death, if he had been avoiding gluten. But that is just speculation. I thought I would have to give up squash and any major exercise, but once I gave up gluten, my mobility was markedly improved, and I have no need for an operation.

7) Brain.  The swelling that results from gluten seemed to put the brain in a fog. One seemed to become drowsy and even depressed as a result. Attention deficit has sometimes been linked to gluten intolerance, and I can certainly see why. While I am still not always as clear thinking as I would like to be, I am certainly appreciably better than before.

8) Sensitive stomach. Obviously.  For years, I had believed that eating a fried breakfast was a major problem, or at least a problem if bathrooms were not easily accessible. But once I gave up on the sausage and the toast, I found that the rest was not a problem. I have always enjoyed an English breakfast, so now I do so without any concerns.

9) Dandruff.  This is obviously related to the first item, sensitive skin. Before giving up gluten it was necessary every day to use Head & Shoulders, or some such product. If I used a regular shampoo, I would be itching and dandruff would appear. Now, I sometimes use H&S out of habit, but if I find myself without it for several weeks, it makes no difference; I am fine – so long as I am not consuming any gluten.

10) Weight.  Eating muffins and bagels regularly it was hard work keeping the weight down. Almost immediately, giving up the gluten I lost about 15 pounds, and this has largely stayed off. When I haven’t exercised for a while I am now always surprised that my weight hasn’t gone up much, and it certainly never climbs back to where I was on a gluten diet (even while exercising).

11) Gums of Navarone. Related to sensitive skin, a trip to the dentist would feel like the reenactment of the Battle of the Somme, accompanied by complaints by the dental hygienist that my gums were extremely sensitive and I needed to take better care of them. It did not matter how frequently I went and how much care I took, it was always the same. But those were the old days. I just returned from the dentist having neglected to go for two years -- who wants to reenact the Somme? -- and it was a pain-free and bloodless experience. And the hygienist said nothing about the condition of my gums. Coincidence that this was the first time I had been since I had become gluten free? I don't think so.

That’s all I can think of for the moment; there may be other things to add that I am just not able to recollect at the moment, but they are probably just small things. Obviously, it sounds like I was a complete wreck beforehand, and that you would have seen me hobbling and smelling down the corridors or along the street. Well, no, for many of these things there were products created that helped one deal with the item of concern. But it’s great not to have to get these products anymore, and the extra cost of the gluten-free food, is basically covered by the fact that I don’t need to purchase chondroitin or B-vitamin, or Ginko, or products for hyper-sensitivity (that cost more than the regular ones), to take care of each of the issues.

And the availability of the gluten-free products just continues to increase. Every supermarket now has a gluten-free section, so pasta (which was my favorite food) can be consumed again. Cereals are also available, particularly with Chex endeavoring to make most of its line gluten free. Nuts and raisins become a snack substitute for muffins, and there’s muffin wrong with that!

The only way to end is with a ditty, written specially for the occasion:

I used to go a-swimmin'

And the wheat would way me down,

I used to go a-swimmin' 

And I would feel like I would drown.

Walkin' on water

The gluten-free way,

Walkin' on water,

It's better that way.

Cos there's muffin wrong

with being gluten free

So create your own song,

and you'll end up on Glee.

Sixty-two: Mario and the Magicians

I had been asked to write a paper for an edited volume called After the Imperial Turn. My intention had been to write a piece that linked Progressive social reform back to Emancipation predicaments, beginning with Daniel T. Rodgers’ Atlantic Crossings and winding its way back to Eric Foner’s Nothing But Freedom. A car accident intervened, however, and I was laid up during the Spring of 2001 recovering from a broken neck. The deadline was approaching fast and I could not imagine how I was going to finish the essay I had promised to write. Fortunately, two things came together to help me produce a paper, albeit a rather different one from the one I had initially conceived of writing. First, the report from the OAH-NYU "Internationalizing American History" project arrived on my doorstep, and secondly, some rather effective psychedelic painkillers allowed me to cut through all my inhibitions and write down what I really thought of this mailing. Within a couple of days I had written "Making the World Safe for American History," a rather biting response to the OAH-NYU pamphlet, and an essay that possibly fit the projected volume better than my original idea would have done. Here’s a taster.

Like myself he was half American, and here I must resist the temptation to digress on a fascinating topic: England’s intellectual debt to America.  Nearly all the remarkable Englishmen of the last fifty years have a strong seasoning of Yankee blood.  Great is the temptation to dwell on Winston Churchill and develop a theme which has not yet received proper attention.  Where would the modern poetaster be without T.S. Eliot?  But I shall forbear: perhaps we have suffered too much from racial theorists.

            Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete[1]

Never judging a book by its cover is not always to be trusted as a sound rule. For the Report La Pietra, judging by the cover seems only fair, and for most people it may be a time-saving device. It is fair since the lavishness of the pamphlet’s presentation is intended to make an impression, albeit a positive one. What follows is the impression it made on me:

The pamphlet’s cover presents us with the title of the pamphlet, an interesting photograph of Villa La Pietra (with Greco-Roman statues on the imposing gate), and mention of sponsorship by the OAH. Right from the get-go, this identification between a project on internationalizing the study of American history and an Italian villa seems rather an unfortunate lapse. When we learn, by turning to the Preface, that this connection is by design not misfortune, we certainly have to wonder whether we need to read further. This is from the preface:

The title [of the report] is taken from the Villa La Pietra, where the international body of historians who participated in the project met. It was thought appropriate, given the theme of the project, to meet abroad, and the availability of meeting facilities at Villa La Pietra, New York University’s magnificent center in Florence, Italy, made that possible.[2]

On the surface, convening a meeting overseas for a conference on internationalizing of American History seems like a sensible plan. In fact, though, internationalizing American History might be more effectively demonstrated by endeavoring to bring out the global buried within the local. Of course, attempting this, perhaps by holding the conference in one of the less attractive locations in the United States that may be thirsting for our international band’s dollars, might not be quite so appealing to a group of professionals used to meeting only in Sheratons and Hiltons, not to mention Adams Marks. 

But even if we accept the need for a foreign venue, we need to ask ourselves whether this was indeed either the most convenient or the cheapest one? It was certainly one that most Americanists would find attractive and to which they would wish to travel. It was also readily available through the auspices of NYU, which had been given the building for the purpose of holding international conferences. But, even if it were truly the most convenient (which I doubt), is convenience always to override the importance of avoiding a symbolic Euro-American bias that such a venue might signify?

More than convenience, however, the preface continues by letting us know of the villa’s own symbolic credentials:

In fact, the recent history of the villa illustrates in its own way the transnational theme of the conferences. The villa was given to NYU by Sir Harold Acton, whose father had purchased it after marrying an American woman from Cleveland who brought to the marriage the resources that made the purchase possible. And it was this American connection that prompted Sir Harold Acton to offer the villa to an American university, which dedicated it in part to be a center for international academic conferences.[3]

So, dare we suggest a subconscious desire to revive the great Anglo-American marriage lurking beneath this enterprise? If this is the extent of our internationalization –- an Italian villa, purchased by what appears to be an Englishman, with American money –- then we haven’t advanced very far from the beginning of this century, when such arrangements fed the dreams of many an Anglo-American racial supremacist: a Theodore Roosevelt, a Winston Churchill, or a W.T. Stead (all of whom were chart busters in the globalization business).[4]

But, if we listen closely, we may hear rumblings of a text lying dormant beneath the weight of this preface. First, we may learn from Sir Harold’s memoirs that, in fact, the Mitchell money that bought La Pietra was from Chicago rather than Cleveland, which, as the “capital of the West” back then, may perhaps do more for our globalizing sensibilities than Cleveland.[5]  As Sir Harold might have said, it is so much more delicious an idea to conjure with. And, when we add to this the strong probability that some of the Hawaiian money flowing into the family was coming (directly or indirectly) from sugar plantations, then our taste buds really just tingle with excitement. And, in the wake of this foppery, for which Sir Harold was renowned, we are not surprised to learn that our host was the model for Anthony Blanch, that “prancing faun” Evelyn Waugh’s character in Brideshead Revisited. When we factor into our consideration Waugh’s provision of a South American mother for Blanch, racializing Sir Harold’s aesthetic, as well as all the imperial imaginings that wandered through the minds of Sebastian Flight and Charles Rider, then we do have a delightful feast, the smells of which may indeed emanate from within the walls of villa La Pietra.[6]

But the magic of the transnational embodied in Sir Harold’s aesthetics is present neither in the cover of this report, which gives no signal beyond the Euro-American, nor in the material that lies within. For, this conference was constructed on a foundation made up of that steely alliance of Academy and Foundation – what we will for convenience dub the Foundation-Academy-Complex (FAC). Scholars of un-American history will remember that it was the FAC which brought us (with heavy State Department and CIA backing) Area Studies. Indeed, the FAC was able to establish conformity over intellectual endeavors in quite formidable ways, as witnessed in the emergence of the Chicago (St. Valentine’s Day) School with its distinctive and largely hegemonic approaches to urbanization, immigration, ghettoization and development, among other things. One can see this beginning to be replicated in the case of internationalizing history. Those organizing the La Pietra conference are donning the mantle of “godfather,” so that as new global and international history centers are established in universities around the United States their positions will be filled either by those scholars who were participants in the La Pietra meetings, or by people recommended from within this family of scholars. New publications in this area will also seek the imprimatur of the family’s inner circle, and we can predict that Rethinking American History in a Global Age will receive sufficiently heavy marketing to give it iconic status.[7] The Foundations, meanwhile, are busily looking for the alternative to their earlier, now-failed ventures in area studies, and are ready to fund anything coming downstream that appears programmatic.[8]  

Let’s be honest now. My real beef with the OAH’s conference on internationalizing the study of American history at La Pietra was that I wasn’t a participant. Had I been invited, let’s face it, I would be endorsing the La Pietra report in a snap, like all the other worthies on the participant list.  Maybe – maybe not!

Notes

[1] Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 79.

[2] La Pietra Report, p. 3

[3]Ibid.

[4] See, for example, W.T. Stead, The Americanization of the World (NY: Garland, 1972 [1902]). 

[5] Acton writes: “My grandfather, William Mitchell, had taken an active part in Chicago’s growth, having founded the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank and a large family, ramifications of which spread to Hawaii, Spain, and, in our case Italy.’ He was however, “remote from the vulgar conception of a Chicagoan;” Memoirs, p. 18.

[6] Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993.).

[7] Now available from the University of California Press.

[8] The report’s author acknowledges the Ford Foundation’s efforts to “rethink area studies;” p. 24.