September 6, 2010, 2:26 pm
By Eric Rauchway
Both the American and British chief delegates to the Bretton Woods conference were tall bald men, but there the similarity between them came to an end, and even in respect of their height they stood differently. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., hung on his own frame like a picture crookedly strung on a hook, while John Maynard Keynes wore his stature as comfortably as his tailored suits. Although Keynes was the older man, his powerful new ideas made Morgenthau look ever more like a relic. As Secretary of the Treasury since 1934, Morgenthau had helped engineer the New Deal. But as Keynesianism swept the policymaking landscape, Morgenthau became more old-fashioned, insisting that whatever Keynes might claim about deficit spending, the government ought to try a balanced budget—though between the Depression and the Second World War Morgenthau never presided over one. A cruelly witty Cambridge…
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September 26, 2009, 1:21 pm
By Eric Rauchway
Sometimes as historians we have reason to sum up our careers to date and make a projection forward as to what we’re doing next. Here’s mine. I don’t think this will really interest people for discussion, so I’m putting it below the fold by backdating it 72 hours, and people who read the blog on the web probably won’t notice it. Those of you who get these posts on RSS will of course see it presented as if it were fresh and intriguing; sorry about that.
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August 28, 2009, 11:54 am
By Eric Rauchway
In the Report of the Public Lands Commission published 1905, you will find this discreet description of land fraud beginning on page v:
Under the act of June 3, 1878, generally known as the timber and stone act, there has lately been an unusual increase in the number of entries, which can not be accounted for by an increase in the demands of commerce or by any unusual settlement of the localities in which the greater part of the entries were made. … The law was enacted to meet the demands of settlers, miners, and others for timber and stone for building, mining, and other purposes. There is much evidence, however, going to show that many entries have been made for purposes not contemplated by Congress. … The Commission believes that Congress did not intend that this law should be used for the acquisition of large tracts of valuable timber land by individuals or corporations, but it…
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June 22, 2009, 4:20 pm
By Vance Maverick
I came to political awareness (well, relatively speaking) in the late 1970s, so one of the first foreign “uprisings” I can remember following was the Danzig shipyard strike, culminating Aug. 31, 1980, in the official recognition formation of the trade union Solidarity (Solidarność). It was tremendously stirring to follow from abroad, not least because of good graphic design — in the Polish tradition, starting with the beautiful, “casual” but unmistakable Solidarity logo itself, by Jerzy (Jurek) Janiszewszki. As several have lately commented, the struggle there and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc had a certain polarity with respect to the United States: the regime(s) were broadly anti-American, the popular movements were to some degree philo-American, etc. Yet even then, vicarious participation at the level possible to me in Los Angeles seemed practically pointless.
How much more so to…
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January 23, 2009, 11:45 pm
By Vance Maverick
Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem has drawn generally negative reviews (though the Facebook fan club has attracted 500-some members). My feelings about it are mixed — but reading the discussion at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ place here and here I felt torn, defensive, even protective. So many readers seem to be beating up on Alexander almost personally, rather than trying to read the poems well. (Adam Kirsch and Rudolph Delson address broader tendencies which they see or imagine in Alexander. Margaret Soltan attacks from the aesthetic right, and Ron Silliman indirectly from the left. Etc.) She hardly needs my defense (being not only a grownup but a lit professor), but I still want to try to draw out the virtues of the poem, to show it’s worth not scorning.
To begin with, I’ll acknowledge that the poem was written for the eye. The verse is syllabic, composed in lines of about 10 syllables each…
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November 9, 2008, 1:10 am
By Vance Maverick
On November 9, 1965, a crew from Bekins Moving Company arrived at 2322 Fillmore Street, San Francisco. In an apartment on the second floor, they cautiously unmounted an enormous painting — eight feet by eleven and weighing literally a ton — lowered it to the floor and packed it into a wooden crate. A carpenter cut out a window and part of the façade; the movers gently slid the painting out this slot onto the platform of a crane, then lowered it to the sidewalk and into the truck. The artist hovered, nervously smoking, clowning for a friend’s camera as her life’s work, unmanageable and well-nigh uncontainable, was shipped away.
Jay DeFeo was born in 1929, in Hanover, New Hampshire. She grew up in the Bay Area, and studied art at Berkeley, earning her MFA in 1951. After a year in Europe, she returned to Berkeley; in 1954, she married the painter Wally Hedrick, and they moved to San…
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October 23, 2008, 5:40 pm
By Eric Rauchway
If you watched the video on Understanding the Financial Crisis, you know I got asked a question something like, when did the RFC retire its bank stock. And I said, well, they’d got rid of about a quarter of it in 1935-36, but I don’t know how long it took to get rid of all of it.
I couldn’t find the answer in any obvious place, so I spent a couple hours this morning pulling it out of the Federal Reserve Bulletin 1932 onwards, and a couple of later audit reports tendered to Congress. I include it here for your interest. (Of course once I post it, I’m confident someone will point out that this is readily available in such-and-such standard reference work, but hey, such is the wages of research.) Most of the figures are as of Oct 31 of the year; the last two figures are as of June 30 and include a bit more than just the preferred stock—also notes and debentures.
Here’s what an…
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October 10, 2008, 2:39 pm
By Eric Rauchway
This is a lesson in reading the notes.
Begin with
Carter, Susan B. , “Labor force, employment, and unemployment: 1890–1990.” Table Ba470-477 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Read the footnotes! Then have a look at
Weir, David R. “A Century of U.S. Unemployment, 1890-1990: Revised Estimates and Evidence for Stabilization.” Research in Economic History 14 (1992): 301-346.
And, well, you could stop right there, but that would be missing the fun. But inasmuch as neither of these sources is easy to get hold of, let me explain why this is such a fun topic.
Used to be, the unemployment series for the 1930s looked like this:
This is from a series…
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October 8, 2008, 12:25 pm
By Eric Rauchway
Because I’ve been asked a couple times in the past few weeks, here’s a short reading list on the history of the Federal Reserve System.
Start with
Sanders, Elizabeth. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Read pp. 236-266 and also 471n125.
With this in mind one may then profitably turn to some of the following, depending on your particular interests.
Friedman, Milton and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Particularly chapters 4-8.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Particularly chapter 10.
Meltzer, Allan H. A History of the Federal Reserve, 1913-1951. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Further:
Dewey, Davis Rich. Financial History…
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September 25, 2008, 2:00 pm
By Eric Rauchway
Sometime commenter and (as Henry Farrell says) one of the Internetses’ smartest guys Cosma Shalizi has kindly listed my Blessed Among Nations on his list of “Books To Read While the Algae Grows in Your Fur” (also known, perhaps less slothishly, as “Books I’ve read in the last month or so and feel I can recommend”). So I think it’s only fair to respond to his query, which is so astute that only my colleague Kathy Olmsted has previously raised it. To wit:
Rauchway seems to find it unproblematic that a certain set of institutions should form Back In The Day, when they fit conditions … and then tend to survive later, when they did not fit so well. But I would like some explanation of why adaptive processes had an easier time working in the earlier period, as opposed to the later one.
Here is what I think I think, if I understand the question correctly:
In the earlier period the US…
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August 29, 2008, 5:06 am
By Eric Rauchway
At the American Political Science Association annual meeting, in Boston’s Hynes convention center, room 107.
7:58 All the panelists have their laptops up and open. Henry has brought donuts to entice the audience.
For an 8AM panel, there’s pretty good attendance—30-or-so people [by 8:15, more like 35; if this trickling keeps up, I'll have the biggest audience of the panelists] in a room that might hold 50—I think we call this the Krugman effect. Or else it’s the donuts.
Krugman will talk first, then Pierson, McCarty and me.
Perlstein sees my laptop screen and says, “Hi Mom!”
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June 17, 2008, 4:10 pm
By Eric Rauchway
June 17, 2008, 12:01 am
By Eric Rauchway
June 15, 2008, 7:35 pm
By Scott Kaufman
(Being the first in what I pray will not be a series, as I like my sanity and would prefer to keep it intact.)
The Real World holds the dubious honor of being first in the post-1990 tsunami of reality television. The premise was simple: seven strangers were picked to live in a house &c. &c. &c. and start being real. The show never tried to live up to its name. Canny viewers could watch the manufactured controversies being produced in the booth weeks before hostilities spontaneously erupted.
But!
The pretense of the show was that it was unscripted and unrehearsed. It was not some sitcom filmed in a West Hollywood back-lot in which a middle-class family dealt with generic adolescent, senescent, menopausal and mid-life crises to the pitch-corrected laughter of the ideal studio audience. It was real.
So you can imagine my surprise when I flipped on the latest installment of The …
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June 12, 2008, 9:34 pm
By Scott Kaufman
(Previous installments of this silliness include Disadventure, Disaddendum, Dismoralized, & Disinsomnia.)
Copyright (c) 1980, 1982, 1983, 2006 Sekocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
SPYWARE VIRUS! is a registered trademark of Sekocom, Inc.
Revision 23 / Serial number 8940726
In Apartment Complex
> go to library website
Before you is the UCI Library website. To your left are the crumbling remains of an ancient civilization.
> really?
No.
> open newspaper database asshole
Firefox will not open crap links to spoofed addresses.
> is library is safe open newspaper database
Firefox declines invitations to virus orgies on principle. Perhaps a more gullible browser would be more to your liking.
> open internet explorer
You feel more vulnerable already. Before you is the UCI Library website. To your left is the a visual representation of what is about to happen to your computer.
>…
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