Category Archives: Books

VDH on General Patton

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George C. Scott’s magnificent performance in the 1970 film “Patton” triggered a generation of interest and scholarship in this fascinating hero of the Second World War. In this Claremont Review of Books review of a new biography of Patton, Victor Davis Hanson provides an interesting and valuable overview of the previous biographies of General Patton. My brother Matt — who reads everything on General Patton — prefers Carlo D’Este’s “Patton: a Genius for War,” of which VDH writes:

In fact, we owe D’Este a great deal for his evenhandedness: although an Omar Bradley or Eisenhower might better appeal to his own sense of decorum, D’Este was too much the scholar not to see that beneath Patton’s repugnant crudity there was both talent and, in the end, humanity?and a tactical genius that simply overshadowed Eisenhower’s and Bradley’s combined.

Read the entire review for an interesting analysis of one of America’s great generals of the 20th century.

American Hustlers

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Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way university professor at Brown University and one of America’s foremost authorities on the history and philosophy of the American Revolution, reflected by his brilliant books “Radicalism of the American Revolution” and “Creation of the American Republic.” Accordingly, when Professor Wood speaks about American history, we should listen closely.
In this NY Times Review of Books review, Professor Wood opines favorably on University of Pennsylvania professor Walter A. McDougall‘s new book — ”Freedom Just Around the Corner” — that explains America’s enormous progress during the period of 1528-1828 to be attributable largely to Americans’ propensity to hustle. As Professor Wood observes:

This unusual book by Walter A. McDougall is the first of what will be a three-volume history of America. If this volume, which covers the period 1585 to 1828, is any indication of the promised whole, the trilogy may have a major impact on how we Americans understand ourselves.
”The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past 400 years.” Imagine, he says, some ghostly ship, some Flying Dutchman transported in time from the year 1600 to the present. ”The crew would be amazed by our technology and the sheer numbers of people on the globe, but the array of civilizations would be recognizable.” China, Japan, India, Russia, the vast Islamic crescent, South America and Europe are not all that different now from what they were in 1600. ”The only continent that would astound the Renaissance time-travelers would be North America, which was primitive and nearly vacant as late as 1607, but which today hosts the mightiest, richest, most dynamic civilization in history — a civilization, moreover, that perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.”

Professor Wood remarks further:

[Professor McDougall] unabashedly writes of Americans and assumes throughout that there is something called an American character. Only the character he describes may not be what many Americans would want to admit about themselves. Unlike other national narratives, which he says tend either to celebrate or to condemn America — and in righteous seriousness — his book aims to do neither. Instead, he wants to tell the truth about ”who and why we are what we are,” and to tell it entertainingly. His is thus a ”candid” history. Its major theme is ”the American people’s penchant for hustling.” We Americans, he claims, are a nation of people on the make.
. . . But we have more con men and hucksters than other nations not because we have a different nature or are worse than other peoples. It is just that ”Americans have enjoyed more opportunity to pursue their ambitions, by foul means or fair, than any other people in history.”
Of course, he admits that there are many hustlers in a ”positive sense: builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, inventors, organizers, engineers and a people supremely generous.” These qualities are what justify Americans’ faith in themselves and their destiny in the world. But the negative connotations of hustling and swindling are very strong and dominate much of our literary and popular culture, and, indeed, our entire history. ”If the United States . . . is a permanent revolution, a society in constant flux,” then, McDougall writes, we would expect all periods of American history at all levels of the society ”to be washed by turgid, overlapping waves of old and new forms” of what he calls ”creative corruption.”

Because our high and noble ideals of freedom and individual rights contrast so vividly with the often grotesque realities of American life, every period of our history, McDougall says, is marked by disharmony. He then quotes Samuel P. Huntington to clinch his point: ”America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope,” a hope expressed in Bob Dylan’s words as ”freedom just around the corner.”

The price of all this hustling was high, and McDougall does not flinch from describing the violence created by the dynamism of white Americans, including the elimination of hundreds of thousands of native people, mostly from disease, and the enslaving of hundreds of thousands of Africans. Other historians have graphically described the chicanery and greed of white Americans in their scramble for power and profit in early America. But these historians have usually written out of anger and righteous indignation. Not McDougall. He cynically, or he would say realistically (since cynicism suggests a moral judgment that human nature might be different), accepts, even celebrates, all the bribery, land-jobbing and double-dealing as the consequence of Americans’ having so much freedom.

Professor McDougall’s observations particularly resonate with me. Houston has been a wonderful and generous home for my family and me over the past 30 years, and this great city was developed largely by the unwieldly entrepreneurial spirit that Professor McDougall identifies in his book. The freedom that we Americans savor invariably involves risks, and one of those unfortunate risks is the risk of being cheated. But as Professor McDougall reminds us — just as Sir Thomas More did in this earlier post — man’s attempts to eradicate such wrongdoing often harbors the greater risk of eradicating our freedom.

The intersection of drug policy and prison policy

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This Brent Staples’ NY Times Review of Books article that reviews “Life on the Outside, The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett,” Jennifer Gonnerman’s new book about how the government’s criminalization of its drug policy has led to a large and growing portion of society that is chronically disenfranchised, at enormous societal cost. Ms. Gonnerman, who has wrote extensively about drug policy as a staff writer for the Village Voice, tells the story through the family of Elaine Bartlett, a young mother of four who received a sentence of 20 to life for her selling cocaine to an undercover cop in a motel near Albany, her first offense. As Ms. Gonnerman notes:

The United States is transforming itself into a nation of ex-convicts. This country imprisons people at 14 times the rate of Japan, eight times the rate of France and six times the rate of Canada. The American prison system disgorges 600,000 angry, unskilled people each year — more than the populations of Boston, Milwaukee or Washington . . .
Ex-cons are marooned in the poor inner-city neighborhoods where legitimate jobs do not exist and the enterprises that led them to prison in the first place are ever present. These men and women are further cut off from the mainstream by sanctions that are largely invisible to those of us who have never been to prison. They are commonly denied the right to vote, parental rights, drivers’ licenses, student loans and residency in public housing — the only housing that marginal, jobless people can afford. The most severe sanctions are reserved for former drug offenders, who have been treated worse than murderers since the start of the so-called war on drugs. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996, for example, imposed a lifetime ban on food stamp and welfare eligibility for people convicted of even a single drug felony. The states can opt out of the prohibition, but where it remains intact it cannot be lifted even for ex-prisoners who live model, crime-free lives.
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Mass imprisonment has not hindered the drug trade. Indeed, drugs are cheaper and more plentiful today than ever. In addition, many of the addicts who are held in jail for years at a cost of more than $20,000 per inmate per year could be more cheaply and effectively dealt with in treatment. What jumps out at you from ”Life on the Outside” is the extent to which imprisonment has been normalized, not just for adults from poor communities but for children who visit their parents in prison. Spending holidays and birthdays behind bars for years on end, these children come to think of prison as a natural next step in the process of growing up.

Although both major political parties share blame for failing to address America’s drug policy in a responsible manner, the Bush Administration’s failure in this area — coupled with its failure to address such major issues as health care finance reform, income tax reform, and environmental policy reform — provides a solid basis for the Democrats to attack the Bush Administration in the upcoming election. Although the Bush Administration has performed admirably under difficult circumstances in prosecuting the war against Islamic fascists, its performance on domestic issues such as those mentioned above has been abysmal. If President Bush loses the election this November, that lack of leadership on those key issues will likely be the reason why.