August 24, 2006
Counterfactual Munichs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon wonders what the situation was regarding British radar installations in the fall of 1938, noting that they came in very handy in 1940. I am up on Cape Cod and away from my books, so what follows is off the top of my head, for which I apologize. With that caveat: I do not think that Chain Home, the radar installations that indeed came in handy in the summer of 1939, had been completed in October of 1938. Nor do I think this would have mattered too much in a war that began at that time. Among other things, Chain Home allowed the Royal Air Force to forgo scattered forward air patrols, which might have been chewed up by the (initially) numerically superior Luftwaffe fighters. Instead, radar allowed the RAF to see the big raids coming, and commit its forces accordingly. But a war that began in late 1938 would not have seen Germany in possession of those forward bases for some time (if ever). Over that time, Chain Home would presumably have been completed.
Until forward bases were conquered, though, German fighters could not have escorted bombers to southern England. They simply lacked the range. In this alternate war, by the way, German bombers could not have been based in Norway, which Germany would yet not have occupied, and this would have significantly simplified the RAF’s problems when defending Britain. But those problems would in any case have been much simpler, because unescorted daylight raids would have been suicide, as the RAF would shortly discover in the history that actually happened, and night raids might have had trouble hitting within five miles of their targets, as the historical RAF would also discover (although electronic navigation aids would be developed by both sides). German bombers were in any case not very good at strategic bombing. The early-war Luftwaffe was brilliantly effective when used for its intended purpose, which was to function as flying artillery for mechanized forces, but lacked the equipment and the doctrine for strategic bombardment.
In any case, I found a number of John Steele Gordon’s later remarks on Munich and counterfactual history quite interesting. He writes, “Had Chamberlain and Daladier made it plain (by mobilizing the Royal Navy, calling up reservists, burning embassy papers, etc., etc.) that they absolutely would go to war over Czechoslovakia, Hitler might have pulled back.” I agree. It is admittedly hard to have any confidence about the likeliest consequences, had Hitler done so; all that seems clear is that he would have been in a somewhat weaker position inside Germany and, in the near future, a much weaker military position in Europe. In our history, he used the Czech reserves of gold and foreign currency to get out of immediate economic difficulties and continue rearmament, and used the Czech weapons he seized in March of 1939 to help conquer first Poland, then the Netherlands, Belgium, and France; in this alternate history, neither the money nor the weapons (a fair number of tanks, and infantry weapons which equipped all or part of 20 divisions) would have been available.
On the other hand, Mr. Gordon says, “I think France was doomed regardless of when war broke out. The nation’s spirit was broken. Neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia would ever have invaded Germany had war come about, so Hitler could have safely moved many divisions and slammed into France with more than enough force to break that broken nation.” There I disagree. I agree that the Czechs were unlikely to invade Germany, but the war that might have broken out in October of 1938 was scheduled to begin with a German assault on Czechoslovakia. Germans who surveyed the Czech defenses in the Sudetenland, after they had been abandoned, thought an attack would have been ruinously expensive.
I don’t know what Polish war plans would have been, had they gone to war in 1938; I don’t know if anyone knows. In 1939 or later, Poland might have stood on the defensive and waited for a French attack into the Rhineland, which did not come in our 1939, other than in the most halfhearted fashion. When Germany did attack Poland in our September of 1939, with the Czech state and its formidably well-equipped army gone, the Poles inflicted 50,000 casualties. Had the Poles been fully mobilized in 1939—they went to war with only two thirds of their forces mobilized—they would have inflicted more. In 1938, against much weaker German adversaries, they would almost certainly have inflicted many more. Had war broken out later, much would depend on whether the Poles had modernized their once-formidable air force with aid from their Western allies, whether that air force had been caught on the ground, whether the Poles had modernized in other respects, what German forces would have been available to attack Poland while others screened not only France but the Czechs, etc. It is unlikely that an alliance of France, Britain, Poland, and Czechoslovakia would have operated efficiently or aggressively; the French were determined to have other people do the fighting, the Poles and Czechs mistrusted each other, and the British were also very reluctant to see any repeat of the Western Front of World War I. This suggests that Germany might have picked off first Poland, then Czechoslovakia, at significant cost, but after that the most probable Allied plan—stand on the defensive while building up military strength through mobilizing the vast resources of the British and French empires, while starving resource-poor Germany through blockade, then going over to the offensive— might well have worked. After all, something like it worked in 1918.
What about the idea that France was already broken? It was for a long time the fashion to argue that the French Third Republic was conquered because it was politically rotten. This argument was initially deployed by both the French left and the French right, for different political purposes, and picked up in the English-speaking world, where it was very widely popularized by William Shirer. There is a pretty good case that the reverse was true: The Third Republic became rotten because it was conquered, i.e., we should not reason backwards from Vichy to see a defeatist, illiberal France, thus mistaking consequences for causes. By the time war broke out, Daladier had restored French morale and to a large degree unity. After war broke out, there was something of an economic miracle, and French output was very impressive. The stories about Communist sabotage of war production seem to have been Vichy propaganda. The Air Force was finally modernizing (by May of 1940, the French had built although not yet deployed large numbers of better aircraft than the German aircraft they would have faced), and in May of 1940 the French air force inflicted significant losses on the Luftwaffe. A fascinating argument by Ernest May (Strange Victory) argues that swift and crushing defeat that concluded the historical campaign was a case of the vastly improbable happening, then being taken to have been inevitable. At least one very great historian still thinks the 1930s French were indeed politically enfeebled (Eugene Weber, in The Hollow Years), while other very good historians have over the last couple of decades made the opposite case.
The controversy is interesting for a lot of reasons. Here is one of them: People seem to cling pretty tenaciously to the idea that the Third Republic was doomed, and they generally assume that its doom was over-determined, that it had profound underlying political causes. At some level, people seem to want the French to deserve what happened to them. My belief is that France fell for almost purely military reasons: Her generals and some of her troops were out-thought and out-fought, and they were terribly unlucky. My hunch is that most of us do not like to think about how much luck matters in history, and we do not like to think about how much proficiency at war may be a relatively independent variable in determining great and tragic outcomes. Because of bad generalship and worse luck, a staggering number of people died. An earlier age might have had less trouble than we seem to have in understanding why.
August 23, 2006
Media Bias Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:30 PM EST A few thoughts on liberal media and media bias: First of all, I usually don’t watch too much TV news; I read a fair number of newspapers on-line, but TV news seems an inefficient and time-consuming way to get the news, compared to reading. Since much of what has been said here has been about TV news, my fellow bloggers have been discussing something in part outside my daily experience. On the other hand, during the second half of the 1980s and part of the 1990s I knew a fair number of news producers, and a few reporters and executive producers, in this country and in the UK, and I have known more such people since. We socialized a lot, and I informally (in one case, formally) advised people at a couple of the networks on, among other things, the background to the SALT II talks, which they had to cover. They knew very little about nuclear weapons, and rather than displaying conventionally “liberal” views on the subject, they were instead bewildered that anyone cared enough about the subject to have worked up any detailed knowledge of it. In general, their attitude about what ought to be on the news was captured by their slogan “If it bleeds, it leads.” They always insisted that a fire was the best possible subject for a news broadcast—great pictures. In some cases, politics actually bored them, although covering it was their job. I suppose most (although not all) of them were politically liberal, but that really did not seem to affect much of the way they appeared to do their jobs. They cared enormously about ratings, about the changing pay structure of their industry, and about the technical nature of their business; they were a lot less ideological, and a lot less Left, than most academics; they were alternately amused and disgusted by what was then called PC. The fact that it leads if it bleeds can have powerful but probably unintended political consequences. In Iraq, Lebanon, or the Occupied Territories, civilians killed or wounded in air strikes almost certainly intended to hit someone else bleed, and lead. This can create the impression that the Americans and Israelis are fundamentally in the business of killing civilians. It is impossible to visually dramatize the intricacies of most questions—for example, the questions of whether the Lebanese state and the Palestinian Authority need to enforce a monopoly on violence, and on the relationship of a monopoly on violence to the privilege of sovereignty. Television is by its nature able to cover some subjects and not others. If you can trust Human Rights Watch, some 25 of around 3000 sorties unjustifiably, recklessly, and indiscriminately killed Lebanese civilians. The air strikes that didn’t did not as predictably get onto the news—although it is relevant that Hezbollah is less than helpful in getting reporters to those scenes. It is not easy to visually dramatize the problem of determining culpable error and degrees of culpability. Is the resulting coverage expressing a bias? If so, the simplest way to describe that bias is to call it a bias for the accessible visual story. Reporters themselves may have their politics affected by the resulting coverage, which may subsequently influence their ideas of what the real story is, but again, that later bias is in part a consequence of the nature of the medium, not itself the origin of choices about what the medium first transmitted. Are the news media generally much afflicted with liberal bias? My sense is that some of them are, on some questions, but there is striking evidence for the reverse proposition. My most vivid sense of this came during the Clinton presidency, when supposedly ‘liberal’ papers like The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times regularly hounded Clinton about alleged financial scandals grouped together as ‘Whitewater.’ Eventually, perjury and fellatio turned up, and yielded an impeachment, but for a good long time there was nothing much to show for all that muckraking, which didn’t make them lay off. The New York Times didn’t display any perceptible liberal bias in the Wen Ho Lee business—rather the contrary. If John Steele Gordon wonders why at least some liberals think that there is no great liberal bias in the media, part of the answer, I think, is all that very assiduous Clinton-baiting. In the wake of Watergate, a lot of reporters wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, even if Clinton wasn’t a very plausible Nixon. They were and remain broadly contemptuous of politicians, but that is not, for my money, a particularly liberal quality. If media people seem to enjoy thinking about themselves as people who see through things, rather than as people who look into things, they do not always have an ideological filter for who and what they want to see through. The self-description and its unexamined assumptions can be questioned, but this problem is not exactly liberal bias. In one of his recent posts, John Steele Gordon writes that “what’s needed, obviously, is diversity of opinion (and respect for opinions other than one’s own—not exactly a common feature among ideologues).” You can get diversity of opinion by trying to insure it within a news organization, or by multiplying the number of news organizations until you get some with different biases. We nowadays have the Fox network and talk radio, which do seem to have broken any possible liberal monopoly on the news media. I would have preferred to have gotten diversity through the first option, but the second may have to do. For whatever it is worth, in my admittedly limited experience people at Fox have a far sharper sense of ideological mission than do people at the ‘liberal’ networks, while people at the one Murdoch paper I know have a more explicit sense of ideological mission than do most people at The New York Times. If you have lived abroad, what is most striking about the American press is still how much (in comparative terms) it thinks it strives to appear neutral and maintain a separation between news and opinion. This was not always the case—I have the impression that before the 1950s, the American press was unabashedly partisan, generally very venomously so. The perception that the press is partisan probably shocks us because we are heirs to a relatively new tradition, where it is not supposed to be. It is also worth thinking about how much press biases matter in determining political outcomes. FDR faced what was on balance a savagely hostile press (although he was good at charming reporters). It got worse over time, but FDR kept winning elections, and if I remember correctly, by increasing margins.
August 23, 2006
Counterfactual Mediterranean Campaigns Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon speculated that “in 1940, what Hitler should have done was ignore Britain, which was effectively out of the war anyway in terms of offensive capability. Instead, he should have insisted on Tunisia’s being under German occupation; told Mussolini that Germany would ‘help’ in the conquest of North Africa (translation: get the hell out of the way); and taken largely defenseless Suez. Once he had Suez, the Royal Navy would have been forced out of the Mediterranean (because it couldn’t have been supplied through the Strait of Gibraltar), making that sea an Axis lake; the oil fields of the Middle East would have been his; Turkey and Greece would have had to do his bidding; and, bingo, he’s on Russia’s southern flank as well as her western one. Game, set, and match. How’s that for armchair generalship?” In my opinion, not that good, although a fair number of people have argued something similar, and it is worth thinking this through. My objections: Had Hitler insisted on occupying Tunisia, there is a real chance on Vichy never happening—instead, France might well have fought on from its Empire, which is what Reynaud, the Prime Minister, wanted to do, and what Churchill hoped for. One of the things that secured the Armistice was a German promise to leave the French Empire intact and the French navy alone. If Hitler hadn’t, and Reynaud had prevailed, the Axis seems likelier to have swiftly lost Libya than gained all of North Africa, and the Royal Navy would have been much less hard pressed around the world if it had possessed a large Free French Navy. If Germany had gained Tunis by threat and still gotten the armistice, could a German army have easily taken Suez? Egypt was at that moment indeed very lightly held. But possibly not. It would have taken some time to get a mechanized and motorized German army to Egypt, so British forces would almost certainly have been built up, with no invasion threat to pin them down—or even with the (receding) threat of invasion, Churchill sent precious armored units to Egypt. What would have had a great effect was what proved crucial in our history: Port capacity in most of Libya and Egypt was too feeble to supply a larger army than the one Rommel actually commanded (it was, after all, often too feeble to supply the army Rommel did command). There was no railroad in much of this area, and everything had to move by truck, including the gasoline for those trucks (German logistics normally depended on significant use of rail and horses; only British and American armies, and later Soviet armies, were entirely motorized and mechanized). A very interesting early essay on this problem is a chapter in Martin van Creveld’s pathbreaking Supply and War, one of the first great books on the history of logistics. If Germany could have supplied an army of a sufficient size, that army still might not have made it to Suez. It was usually easy for mechanized German armies to flank clumsier British forces when desert fighting necessarily meant an open flank, but the relatively narrow passage between the sea and the impassable Qattara depression made a position that could not be flanked. It has never been easy to dislodge British troops from such a position. Memorable attempts to do so run from Agincourt to El Alamein, and include celebrated Spanish examples and a very famous Belgian one. In the Second World War, German armies only looked irresistible when they fought in circumstances that played to their strengths. If Hitler had gotten to Suez, would the oil fields of the Middle East have been his? Iraq and Saudi Arabia were far away—as the great WWII historian Gerhard Weinberg has observed, conquering the Middle East looks most plausible when you restrict yourself to small-scale maps. British troops could reach Iraq by sea; German troops would have had to cross a lot of trackless desert. Getting much of the oil back to Germany in the face of the Royal Navy would have been no picnic. Getting Greece to do Germay’s bidding might have been possible—Metaxas’s dicatorship was ideologically sympathetic. Getting Mussolini to play along would have been tricky: In our history, Mussolini invaded Greece against Hitler’s wishes, and if Italy had been robbed of what looked like its chance for glory in Egypt, Mussolini would have been even balkier: Mussolini was at that point self-consciously waging a parallel war, rather than being an obedient junior partner. And by the way, keeping the Italians out of Egypt would have been tricky, too: Only crushing defeat made Italy accept German aid in North Africa, and Italians actually fought very well under Rommel, so keeping them out would have had a significant cost. Getting Turkey to do Hitler’s bidding would have been trickier yet. In our history, Turkey seems to have followed Ataturk’s alleged deathbed advice of 1938: Stay out until the last minute, then join whichever side England in on. Even very impressive German successes failed to alter Turkish fidelity to that advice: When Germany seemed about to take Stalingrad and had already seized some of the oilfields in the Caucuses, those Turks who thought it was time to ally with Germany were silenced by Inonu, Ataturk’s successor: ‘Wait until the Germans get to Batum, then ask me again.’ Being on Russia’s southern flank might also have been a debatable advantage. Russia’s southern flank was composed of mountains, and more mountains. Germans did not fight particularly effectively when attacking into mountains, rather than defending in them, and supplying those Germans would have been a misery. Russians fought very effectively when defending mountains (also cities, swamps, etc.) All of the above points to an oddity about most counterfactual history of the Second World War. Almost all of that voluminous genre explores the chances of Germany doing better than the historical Germany did. But the more you think about it, the larger one possibility looms: In our history, Germany did a lot better than she might have done, had her enemies been even a little luckier, or a little less self-destructive. Almost no alternate history explores the possible worlds we might inhabit if the Allies had gotten a few more of the breaks.
August 23, 2006
Studies Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:50 PM EST Joshua Zeitz offers a study that demonstrates liberal bias in the media. I’m happy to have it, needless to say, although I haven’t had time to look at it closely and I have no opinion on it. But it set me to thinking about “studies” in general. Some of them are attempts by social scientists to quantify and objectify what is basically unquantifiable and unobjectifiable, and need to be taken with considerable quantities of salt. My favorite example comes from a book by Charles Murray called Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. It tries to quantify genius (one cannot accuse Mr. Murray of aiming too low). It does this by looking at sources, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries in various fields, and ranking those mentioned in them by the number of mentions. (It’s more complicated than that, so I invite the reader to look at the details of the methodology in the book.) Now, it so happens that I have a particular and deep interest in what is usually called the “American popular song,” and in the source of so many of the standards of that genre, the Broadway musical. This form flourished from the early 20th century (Jerome Kern’s staggeringly beautiful “They Wouldn’t Believe Me,” 1913, is often considered the first standard) until the Beatles era, with a few late entries, such as Kander and Ebb (Cabaret and many others) and, of course, Stephen Sondheim. So, naturally, when the editor was kind enough to send me a copy of the book, I wondered how the great composers of this form stacked up among the geniuses of music in general. Beethoven and Mozart both get 100, J. S. Bach, curiously, only 87, and Haydn 56. King Henry VIII—who may or may not have written “Greensleeves”—gets a 2. It turns out that George Gershwin rated a 6. Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern rated 1. Frederick Loewe, the composer of My Fair Lady and three other shows of some, but much lesser, note, also rated 1. Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls, among many others), didn’t make the cut. This makes absolutely no sense whatever. Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers are, by orders of magnitude, the most important composers in terms of the history of the development of the Broadway musical, taking it from a mere trivial entertainment to a major art form. Richard Rodgers is, at least according to the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, the most frequently played composer of all time. Frederick Loewe, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the least musically interesting of the major Broadway composers. It is his sometime partner, Alan Jay Lerner, whose altogether wonderful lyrics lift their songs out of the ordinary. What accounts for this absurd result? Two things, I think. First, musical encyclopedias and dictionaries (13 of them were consulted) are written by musicologists, and musicologists are notoriously snobbish about music that is—ugh!—popular with the vulgar plebes. If you don’t know what a diminished seventh is, you can’t possibly know what music is important. As Rodgers and Hart explained, “Finer things are for the finer folk / Thus society began. / Caviar for peasants is a joke, / It’s too good for the average man.” So while Paul Hindemith, whose name and music, I am confident, are unfamiliar to the vast majority of Americans today, gets a 19, Irving Berlin (“Irving Berlin has no place in American music,” Jerome Kern once said, “Irving Berlin IS American music”) gets a 1. The fact that Irving Berlin is played endlessly, and Hindemith hardly at all, is regarded by all too many musicologists as a point in Hindemith’s favor. I have no doubt that the reason Gershwin rates a 6, while the other four of the “big five” Broadway composers rate a 1 or a 0, is that Gershwin sometimes wrote in classical forms and therefore could be taken seriously, while, say, Richard Rodgers was just a tunesmith, not to be considered in the same breath as, say, Giacomo Puccini. (Historical note: The Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar refused to allow Puccini to turn his play Liliom into an opera, fearing that he would be forgotten and only Puccini would be remembered. But he had no problem with allowing Rodgers and Hammerstein to turn the play into a Broadway musical. The name of the musical? Carousel. Molnar today is forgotten; Carousel and its extraordinary score most certainly are not.) Second, musicologists tend disproportionately to be German. And Fritz Loewe was born in Berlin. The point of all this is that these studies can produce data that is very useful ammunition in the give and take of argument. They don’t always make any sense.
August 23, 2006
When Elephants and Donkeys Fight, the Gnats Get Strained Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:45 AM EST I hesitate to get in between John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz for fear of being hit with all the spitballs and water balloons they’re lobbing back and forth. But I think this whole question of media bias is really one of definition. As we can see from the way Gordon shuns the label “conservative” and Zeitz admits only to being “somewhat liberal,” everybody locates the center close to his or her own opinions and evaluates the media using that frame of reference.* This reminds me of a manuscript we once received from a professor at a Canadian university. The subject was Harry Truman, and the author’s thesis was that everybody thinks Truman grew up poor, when in fact he was middle-class. The reason for this misapprehension, the author said, is that in America, you’re considered either rich or poor; there is no middle ground. We didn’t buy the article for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the basic premise is false. It’s true that Truman came from a modest background, but I don’t know anyone who thinks his family had to beg for crusts of bread on the street. But if the premise was a straw man, the professor’s explanation of it was even more wrong. In America, the popular myth is not that everyone is either rich or poor; it’s that everyone is middle-class. I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon, probably from the 1930s, that takes place at the graduation exercises of a wealthy boarding school. I don’t know if Helen Hokinson drew it, but it’s the type she would have drawn. Amid all the trappings of money and power, a young man standing at the podium gazes out over the well-dressed crowd and says, “. . . whilst we, the great middle class, are slowly being ground between the upper and nether millstones.” I had a friend in college whose father was a doctor. His family owned several homes and took frequent and expensive vacations, and I once ventured to suggest that they were rich. My friend looked at me like I was crazy. He explained that you can’t call yourself rich unless you have enough money to affect the movements of financial markets (or some such thing; this discussion took place late at night). Coming from the wealthy end of things, he was aware of degrees and distinctions of richness that I had never imagined; and similarly, people whose families had to scrape to get by will say, “No, we weren’t poor—we always had food on the table and a roof over our heads . . .” I think the same sort of thing is at work in the media-bias debate: Economically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as middle-class, and politically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as centrist. One reason may be that if you feel strongly about politics, you spend much more time reading commentators on your own side than those on the other. So you will be deeply familiar with fine distinctions within your tribe while tending to lump together everyone in the other tribe. People who are quite far to the left or right will say, “Who, me? I’m no liberal/conservative—not like those nuts who want to ban private schools/throw gays in jail” (or whatever wacky cause is being argued on the more feverish websites at the time). A similar phenomenon explains why it’s easier to visually tell apart members of your own race than those of a different one. That’s why Josh Zeitz can seriously assert that The New Republic is even-handed and The Weekly Standard is “an ideological rag.” In fact, if you read The Weekly Standard (or National Review, for that matter), you will see vigorous debate over immigration, religion, abortion, drug legalization, and many other topics, including the advisability of various past, present, and future wars. Now, I’m not saying that TWS is without flaw. While it hasn’t had a Stephen Glass episode, it does publish many articles just as lame as Michael Lewis’s paean to his wife’s rear end (which TNR published in 1994), and its spotty fact-checking lets through plenty of errors just as embarrassing as “In George Orwell’s 1984, the pigs took over” (as TNR asserted in 1984). But the two publications are equally open-minded and equally rigorous intellectually. For better or worse, TWS is to the right exactly what TNR (which has published a few articles by Josh over the years) is to the left. Josh doesn’t see this because his vantage point on left makes him acutely aware of all the internecine disputes in his own backyard while distancing him from the variety of opinion among conservatives, to the point where he can dismiss them all as what his fellow academics would call “the Other.” I think the same is true of John Steele Gordon and most other people who care enough about politics to assess the level of media bias. As Gordon admitted in a recent post, we strain at gnats that come from the opposing team while swallowing camels that come from our own. And that’s why the question of whether the media is biased can’t be answered definitively—one person’s bias is another person’s truth-telling. * yes, this is a popularized technicality from physics, but I couldn’t think of a better way of putting it.
August 23, 2006
Guano and Empires III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes that an exception to the rule that you can either conquer resources or buy them is the case of what he calls strategic resources. He adduces the case of Wilhelmine Germany and nitrates before the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. I am not sure why this is an exception, since Germany faced the following choices with nitrates: buy them or conquer them. Since conquest was vastly improbable, until that scientific breakthrough the best policy was to stockpile enough explosives and fertilizer to wage and win a war, and if this could not be done, avoid war with a superior naval power. In the event, Germany and Japan had shortages of strategic materials when contemplating war in the late 1930s, and at that point bought and stockpiled strategic materials. Both eventually ran down their stockpiles, although in the short term both managed to conquer more of the strategic materials they’d hoarded to win their first great victories (Japan conquered more oil in the Netherlands East Indies, Germany conquered the rich iron ore of Lorraine, and by that and other conquests overawed other suppliers of strategic materials, among them Rumania, Sweden, and the Soviet Union). My guess is that Mr. Gordon means that when a resource is strategic, you cannot count on buying it in wartime, and that is true, which is why people in such a situation who need to import those materials from overseas, when contemplating war with greatly superior naval powers, should think twice, then think some more. You can always try to build a better navy than the other fellow, or build a big enough navy to make him think twice, but that policy has at best a mixed track record: Germany tried it in the run-up to the First World War, thereby insuring British enmity and defeat. Japan tried it in the run-up to the Second World War, which did make Great Britain a bit cautious about provoking the Japanese, but this policy did not make the US all that cautious, so Japan tried conquering the resources. A wise but sadly ill-remembered old British maxim is always worth recalling: Nothing is as expensive as the world’s second-best navy. John Steele Gordon also “think(s) the Chinese attitude toward trade has been fashioned by its history”. I think many Chinese attitudes are fashioned by China’s history, but that this particular attitude has been fashioned by way of contemplation of other people’s histories. It seems possible that the Chinese subscribe to a particular interpretation of the relationship between trade and economic growth and think that in the wake of the Second World War, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan became rich because of neo-mercantilist policies rather than in spite of them, so they may be tempted to obstruct access to their own markets while thinking that they are successfully exploiting access to other markets. If so, the Chinese now believe in trade but not free trade, and may also think that you cannot necessarily buy some strategic materials in peacetime, if other purchasers are a lot richer, let alone in wartime, if they have larger navies. If the Chinese indeed think these two things, it will be very interesting to see what they do. They may believe that you can play the neo-mercantilist game for a long time if the other fellow is foolishly addicted to free trade. This is almost always a mistake, for one reason or another: sustained neo-mercantilist behavior can weaken other peoples’ commitment to free trade, thus in the long run hurting everyone, and neo-mercantilist theory can make you waste a lot of money: in Japan’s case, I think the lion’s share of state subsidies actually went to the hopelessly inefficient mining industry, and to cutting-edge projects like HD analog TV and 5th generation artificial intelligence (both of them notorious failures). Free traders believe that a neo-liberal world economy in the long run makes everyone richer. It is not enough for them to be right: other people have to agree with them. If the Chinese do not agree, they will also, in all likelihood, build a much bigger navy—and if they try that any time soon, it will probably be the second-best navy in the world. Finally, John Steele Gordon thinks “that, given its political baggage, the word imperialism should be either restricted entirely to the late nineteenth-century European race for empire or abandoned altogether.” I sympathize with some of his exasperation—the Mughals did indeed have an empire, as did, in a different sense, Stalin, and it is admittedly irritating to be told the contrary in a loud and imperious tone. But the subject of comparative imperialism is pretty interesting, and I think expanding and complicating our thinking about imperialism is better than junking the word.
August 22, 2006
Hillary Goes Electric Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:00 PM EST In a blog entry earlier today, John Steele Gordon wrote: “If newsrooms were populated almost entirely with people who had had posters of Barry Goldwater on their walls while they were growing up, they would suffer from exactly the same problem,” i.e., ideological bias. This has very little to do with his main point, but it’s interesting to note that in 1964, 17-year-old Hillary Rodham, who of course later married Bill Clinton, was a fervent Goldwater supporter, even knocking on doors in her Chicago suburb to campaign for him. Something seems to have happened over the next four years to make her reevaluate her views—though the folks at Daily Kos would say that she hasn’t changed much at all. To be sure, 1964 was a year of transition for many people—in fact, that year is the subject of the forthcoming October issue of American Heritage. Fans of this blog will be excited to learn that Joshua Zeitz has written an overview of 1964 for that issue, while John Steele Gordon contributes a piece on the 1964 World’s Fair. On a similar subject, and since it wouldn’t be an official Fred Schwarz post without mentions of punk rock and baseball, I’ll tell you that one of the most jarring moments in the recent Ramones documentary, End of the Century, came when Johnny Ramone, the band’s lead guitarist (who had an extensive baseball-card collection, by the way), said that he had been a Nixon supporter as far back as the 1960 election. What’s strange here is not that the man responsible for the distinctive sound of “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” and “Teenage Lobotomy” was a conservative; this was already fairly well known. That he’d been that way as early as 1960, though, when he was 10 years old and I was not yet born—that took a while for me to comprehend. And he stuck with it, proving that Hillary Rodham Clinton has been much more changeable over the years than Johnny Ramone in both politics and hairstyle. With Hillary, it’s mostly been a case of her adjusting to the times, whereas with Johnny, the times have come to him. I knew punk rock had irrevocably gone mainstream in the late 1980s, when I started hearing “Blitzkrieg Bop” on the P.A. system at Yankee Stadium. I’ll admit that I was guilty of some Hillary-style apostasy myself as a youngster. My first experience with baseball came in the fall of 1969, shortly after my family returned from a year abroad. At the time, everyone in my Long Island elementary school was crazy about the Mets, so I went along with the crowd and cheered them to a World Series victory. But late that season I had also seen a couple of Yankee games on television, and they seemed so pathetic (this was at the nadir of what Yankee fans call the Horace Clarke Era) that I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Over the winter I thought it over and decided that I sympathized more with the losers, so I switched to the Yankees, and I’ve been rooting for them ever since. Strange but true—I cast my lot with the Yankees because they were underdogs. After all, they hadn’t won the pennant since the ubiquitous year of 1964, and as far as I (born 1961) was concerned, that might as well have been the year Columbus landed. To conclude this ramble, I will throw in a couple more notes related to 1964. First, on the subject of people shying away from political labels, I recall what Bob Dylan sang that year: Now, I’m liberal, to a degree
And I want everybody to be free
But if you think I’ll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I’m crazy. In recent years Dylan has expressed admiration for Barry Goldwater, but back then he was still working to build a career, and he certainly knew what his audience would like. As you will read in our October issue, 1964 was the last year when it was easy to divide the world neatly into good (liberal/folkie/peacenik/northeastern/intellectual/bohemian) vs. bad (Eisenhower/businessman/southern/pop/conservative/square). The next year Dylan went electric and LBJ invaded Vietnam and riots broke out, and the whole thing started to collapse. Things must have seemed much clearer back in 1964. In fact, if you buy the CD of Bob Dylan’s 1964 concert at Philharmonic Hall and read Sean Wilentz’s self-loving liner notes, in which he worshipfully praises not only Dylan himself but also all of the elect who were brilliant and perceptive enough to be fans of his back then (including the teenaged Sean Wilentz), you’ll see that some people think it’s still 1964. Oh, and the other thing about 1964? Just that, to make this an even more typical Fred Schwarz post, I’ll bring in the book I’ve been reading lately. In this case it’s Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. Recently I was staring at the cover and noticed that the title contains the first names of both major presidential candidates in the 1964 election. I know I’m not the first person to point this out, but it’s an example of something we were discussing a few weeks back: coincidences and what we tend to read into them. Surely no one would suggest that William Makepeace Thackeray was clairvoyant enough in 1844 to predict the candidates in an election 120 years later. Yet many coincidences that seem equally unlikely and have equally innocent explanations are taken to mean much more. There, I think that clears out my notebook. If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.
August 22, 2006
Media Bias Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST Any scientist worth his Bunsen burner will tell you that it is when the data agrees with your hypothesis that you must be extra vigilant not to be led astray by it. If the data is contrary to your hypothesis, you will always double-check it. But when it agrees, it is a natural human tendency to say, “Aha! Just as I suspected,” and run with it. This human tendency is manifest far beyond the realms of science, of course. Bigots reinforce their beliefs by noting every instance that supports their bigotry but overlooking those that don’t. Political conservatives leap upon every example of fuzzy-headed liberal thinking but ignore the equally frequent instances of conservative rhetorical blather. Joshua Zeitz writes that “most media employees are liberal in their voting habits, but it does not show that the media has a liberal bias.” Maybe that is true on Vulcan, but back here on dear old planet Earth it is not. Liberals have feet fully formed of clay; they are, like the rest of us, miserable sinners. So when they see something that is agreeable to their philosophy, they have the all-too-human tendency to say, “Aha! Just as I suspected,” and run with it. And, of course, some don’t even bother to try to be objective. Here’s what Dan Rather—as powerful a newsman as could be found, at least until he tried to pass off obvious fakes as genuine documents in hopes of defeating George Bush—had to say on March 16th, 1995: “The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor.” That’s what liberal-to-a-man CBS News calls fair and balanced. I wonder what the visual was. Photographs by Jacob Riis perhaps. If newsrooms were populated almost entirely with people who had had posters of Barry Goldwater on their walls while they were growing up, they would suffer from exactly the same problem. What’s needed, obviously, is diversity of opinion (and respect for opinions other than one’s own—not exactly a common feature among ideologues). Liberals are often obsessed with diversity. Schools, corporations, neighborhoods, other people’s private clubs, must be meticulously diverse in terms of sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. But when it comes to diversity of opinion, liberals say, “. . . Oh, look at that bird over there. Isn’t that interesting?” They can’t change the subject fast enough. A newsroom where everyone votes Democratic? What’s the problem? Liberals aren’t biased. A political science faculty that is made up entirely of members of Americans for Democratic Action? So? They’ll give everyone a fair shake. After all, they’re liberals! Anyone want to buy a really neat-looking bridge over the East River?
August 22, 2006
Peter Jennings Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:20 AM EST Alexander Burns, our crack researcher/blogger/writer/jack-of-all-trades, has managed to locate the transcript of the ABC News report that John Steele Gordon mentioned last week. I stand by my demand that big claims be backed up with real evidence, and I don’t think Mr. Gordon initially met the burden of evidence. But lucky for him, Alex was able to produce the goods. In the transcript, dated early 1999, Peter Jennings refers to “Senator McConnell of Kentucky, very determined conservative member of the Republican party,” “Senator Rick Santorum, one of the younger members of the Senate, Republican, very determined conservative member of the Senate,” and “Mr. [Bob] Smith of New Hampshire, also another very, very conservative Republican intending to run for the presidency.” At no point did Jennings describe any of the Democratic senators as liberal, left-wing, or otherwise left of center. I’ll cheerfully concede the point: Jennings was singling out conservatives. I’ll add for good measure: John Steele Gordon remembered it right.
August 22, 2006
January 7, 1999 Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:20 AM EST In their emerging discussion about the (liberal?) media, both John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz have made reference to an ABC News Special Report from January 7, 1999. This edition of ABC News is a favorite example of those, like Bernard Goldberg, who seek to demonstrate media bias in favor of the left. I have located a transcript of the original ABC broadcast, which contains some information that will help inform the dispute at hand. During the broadcast, Peter Jennings and a group of commentators (Linda Douglass, Cokie Roberts, and Sam Donaldson) and guests (Jeffrey Toobin, Bill
Kristol, George Stephanopoulos, Terry Moran, and Michael Beschloss) discussed the beginning of the Senate’s trial of Bill Clinton. They began by talking about the divisions within the Senate, particularly over the question of whether witnesses should be included in the trial. Eventually, president pro tempore Strom Thurmond swore in William Rehnquist to oversee the proceedings, and the senators were called to sign an oath of impartiality. Mr. Gordon is right that, during the signing of the book, Peter Jennings identified several Republican senators as conservative. One was Bob Smith. Mr. Gordon is incorrect, though, in suggesting that he might have chosen “half a dozen other very conservative senators” as examples of Jennings’s ideological labeling. Jennings only identified two other senators as “conservative”: Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum. He also mentioned that John McCain’s politics leaned to the right. That, though, was in the context of a corny joke about the Arizona senator being left-handed, but “more right than left in his politics.” Context is important, too, for the other cases in which Jennings pointed out GOPers’ conservative politics. Joshua Zeitz has suggested one explanation for the identification of Bob Smith as a conservative: At the time, the senator was complaining that his party had abandoned its conservative underpinnings. The transcript of the broadcast suggests another reason: Smith was hoping to run for president, and Jennings was observing that an official with national ambitions would benefit from having such “strong political views.” This is hardly a disparaging mention of Smith’s conservatism. In pointing out the conservatism of Senators Santorum and McConnell, it is interesting to note that Jennings called each man a “very determined conservative.” In the context of the broadcast, this description functioned less as an ideological label than as an illustration of each man’s place in the impeachment debate. Republican commentator Bill Kristol had only a few minutes earlier finished describing the struggle, within the GOP caucus, between “moderate Republicans” and hard-line impeachment advocates like House Judiciary
Committee chairman Henry Hyde. Kristol argued that the moderates were deferring to the more implacable conservatives—”determined” supporters of impeachment like Santorum and McConnell. Jennings was identifying these two members as major actors within the dominant faction of the Republican caucus. That’s not bias; that’s accurate, relevant information. John Steele Gordon may very well be right that there is bias in the media. But in scholarship, as in law, such an argument requires evidence. Mr. Gordon included one piece of evidence and passed the argument on to Fred Barnes. As it turns out, that one piece of evidence is not evidence of anything at all. On the basis of their 1/7/99 broadcast, Jennings and his fellow ABC panelists could more effectively be criticized for being obsessed with describing senators’ hair than with pillorying their conservatism (John Kerry has “all that nice hair;” Fred Thompson is a “slightly balding character.”) Maybe that can be the subject of Bernard Goldberg’s next book.
August 21, 2006
Helping Out John Steele Gordon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:00 PM EST Mr. Gordon seems so agitated about liberal media bias that he’s having trouble constructing a good argument. I know I shouldn’t do this, but out of a sense of collegiality, I’ll help him out. In late 2005, two professors—Tim Groseclose, a political scientist at UCLA, and Jeffrey Milyo, an economist at the University of Missouri—published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, based on a scientific study they conducted of media bias. Devising an ideology gauge based on the same criteria that the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) uses to assign liberal and conservative scores to lawmakers, Groseclose and Milyo assigned 21 research assistants to score a wide range of news media, from 1995 to 2005. Of the 20 major media outlets they studied, 18 registered left of center. I’m going to give the study a read. It sounds fascinating. Mr. Gordon might give it a read, too. That said, the study rated the Drudge Report as slightly left of center. I’m open to the idea, but that fact alone raises an eyebrow. Note to Mr. Gordon: This would have been good evidence of liberal media bias. It’s much better than a made-up transcript of an ABC news report. One might even call it better scholarship than a made-up transcript of an ABC news report.
August 21, 2006
The Proof Is In The Evidence Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:35 PM EST Mr. Gordon advises me to “argue like a scholar, not a lawyer.” This is amusing, in that I have taken Mr. Gordon to task for committing what is arguably one of the cardinal sins of scholarship: boldly asserting a big idea without providing an iota of real evidence. Several days ago, in support of his contention that the media has a liberal bias, Mr. Gordon tried to reconstruct from memory the transcript of a Peter Jennings report that he recalls seeing in early 1999. He cannot quote directly from that transcript, because he has not located or cited it. Neither, I might add, is that transcript available on Lexis-Nexis. I searched but could not locate it. This isn’t to say that the transcript doesn’t exist somewhere. But if he wants to advise me on the exigencies of good scholarship, Mr. Gordon should either produce his evidence or concede that he has none. The second scrap of evidence that Mr. Gordon cited to prove liberal media bias is a speech by Fred Barnes, a conservative columnist and commentator. Barnes’s speech made an intelligent argument. But it was not a scientific survey or poll. It was an opinion piece, as Barnes himself admitted when, toward the start of his remarks, he said: “My topic today is how the mainstream media...stacks up in terms of the latter two journalistic standards, fairness and balance. In my opinion, they don’t stack up very well.” To be fair, Barnes (but not Mr. Gordon) invokes ample evidence. But this evidence doesn’t necessarily prove his point. 1) Barnes cites studies by Peter Brown and Hugh Hewitt that show that the vast majority of journalists at mainstream outlets voted for John Kerry and/or Democratic candidates for state and federal office. This proves that most media employees are liberal in their voting habits, but it does not show that the media has a liberal bias. I’m somewhat liberal myself, and I teach history. That doesn’t mean that I teach history with a liberal bias. 2) Barnes points out that many young journalists at The New Republic, a center-left magazine of news and opinion, have gone onto successful careers at large newspapers and magazines. By contrast, he claims that journalists who begin their career at The Weekly Standard have enjoyed no such luck. There’s a good reason for this. Compared with The New Republic, The Weekly Standard is an ideological rag. TNR is and has long been a maddeningly heterodox publication. It freely allows writers from conservative magazines like The Weekly Standard and The National Review to contribute pieces in its print and online publications. It encourages debate over liberal sacred cows (like abortion rights) and taboos (like school vouchers). It invites leading scholars to write its book, film, and art reviews. It was an early proponent of Bush’s Iraq War and has since subjected itself to intense scrutiny over that position. You’ll find no such intellectual rigor or even-handedness at The Weekly Standard. TNR places its reporters at good magazines because TNR is a good magazine. I have no problem with The Weekly Standard. It’s a good organ for conservative and neo-con opinion. But its mandate and program are different from that of TNR. 3) Barnes suggested that the mainstream press demonstrated unspeakable bias in its reporting of the Cindy Sheehan story last summer. Even if we concede his point, one could just as easily point to the mainstream media’s uncritical acceptance of the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had WMDs, and that the U.S. had rock-solid evidence to this effect. The NYT, after all, ran more than a few Judith Miller stories in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, and no reporter more dutifully printed the administration line than Judith Miller. 4) As further evidence of liberal media bias, Barnes pointed to a “well documented book written by a man named John O’Neill—himself a Swift Boat vet—who went into great detail about why John Kerry didn’t deserve his three Purple Hearts, etc. . . Normally in journalism, when somebody makes some serious charges against a well-known person, reporters look into the charges to see if they’re true or not. If they aren’t, reporters look into the motives behind the false charges—for instance, to find out if someone paid the person making the false charges, and so on. But that’s not what the media did in this case. The New York Times responded immediately by investigating the financing of the Swift Boat vets, rather than by trying to determine whether what they were saying was true. Ultimately, grudgingly—after bloggers and FOX News had covered the story sufficiently long that it couldn’t be ignored—the mainstream media had to pick up on the story. But its whole effort was aimed at knocking down what the Swift Boat vets were saying.” I ran a Lexis-Nexis search and found that the terms “John Kerry” and either “Swift Boat” or “Purple Heart” appeared in 53 separate NYT articles in 2004. The first article that cited the Kerry controversy appeared on April 21 and showed Kerry very much on the defensive. Another eight generic articles, tracing the he-said, she-said aspects of the controversy, ran between May 5 and August 20. Only then did the NYT run a full exposé of the anti-Kerry attacks. So Barnes is wrong. It took the NYT four months—and nine articles, which, to the chagrin of the Kerry campaign, repeatedly aired O’Neill’s charges—before the paper began systematically reporting on the links between the Republican party and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. I have no doubt that Barnes genuinely remembered history otherwise. But the facts do not bear out his contention. Like Mr. Gordon, he was working on memory, rather than hard research. In closing, Mr. Gordon points to a poll that reveals many journalists are worried about the absence of conservatives in the newsroom, but this poll proves no bias in the actual work that journalists do. So I repeat my challenge: show me the bias.
August 21, 2006
What Liberal Media? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:30 PM EST Mr. Zeitz gets very nasty when one of his sacred philosophical cows gets criticized. He should learn to practice a little comity. He should also argue like a scholar, not a lawyer. Scholars argue to find the truth. Lawyers are paid to win the argument and the truth be damned.
He writes, “In fact, I didn’t miss Mr. Gordon’s point. I understood it quite well. It wasn’t that complicated.”
No it wasn’t, but he still doesn’t get it, or doesn’t choose to. I realize now that by picking Bob Smith over half a dozen other very conservative senators I could just as easily have chosen, I gave Mr. Zeitz the opening he needed to ignore the thrust of my argument. He seized it with lawyer-like glee.
He writes, “He thinks that liberal bias runs rampant in the mainstream media. But the only evidence he was able to muster in favor of this charge was an unsupported, paraphrased anecdote about Peter Jennings and Sen. Bob Smith.”
See what I mean? It wasn’t an anecdote about Peter Jennings and Senator Bob Smith. It was an anecdote about Peter Jennings and the entire United States Senate, of which Bob Smith constituted one percent of the membership. “Able to muster”? Have I had a stroke that no one has told me about? What I wrote at the end of the post—it wasn’t that long a post and Mr. Zeitz might have done the readers of this blog the courtesy of reading to the end of it before rushing off to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade annual bingo game—was “I could go on and on, but fortunately I don’t have to.” I then invited readers to look at a speech by Fred Barnes, which noted much more evidence.
I realize that Fred Barnes is the executive editor of The Weekly Standard and therefore, as far as Mr. Zeitz is concerned, Beelzebub. But for those less ideologically blinkered, I still recommend it.
Mr. Zeitz writes, “Conservatives (and Mr. Gordon, who quotes freely from the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Weekly Standard, but who resists being labeled a conservative) . . .” I don’t read The Weekly Standard regularly. I think the last time was when I went to their tenth-anniversary lunch last year—hey, a free lunch is a free lunch—and received a copy. I am not a conservative, because I subscribe to no ideological bundle of pre-packaged ideas. Ideology for the most part is what half-wits use to give themselves the illusion they can think. Mr. Zeitz seems to think that since I don’t take communion at his church, I must do so at the only other church in town of whose existence he seems to be aware. Gilbert and Sullivan made fun of the false dichotomy between liberals and conservatives as far back as 1882, when Gilbert wrote in Iolanthe,
“Now Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative." Mr. Zeitz writes, “But they [those wascally conservatives, as Elmer Fudd would say] rarely produce solid evidence of this bias. In this case, Mr. Gordon charged bias. He offered evidence. I showed that his evidence simply doesn’t prove his case.”
No, he looked at one piece of the evidence, found something irrelevant he could use to dismiss it, and did so.
He writes, “I’d also recommend Eric Alterman’s book, What Liberal Media? Alterman is certainly no nonpartisan. He’s a very liberal columnist for The Nation. Alterman’s bias aside, his book is solidly researched and certainly goes a long way in disproving the ‘liberal media’ bugaboo.” Yeah, right. Mr. Alterman is so far to the left that he thinks the media as a whole is wildly biased towards the right. Ninety percent of journalists in the national media, according to poll after poll, vote for the most liberal candidate in the race, but Mr. Alterman thinks they are all clones of Bill Buckley. And he argues like a lawyer: Any evidence that fits his thesis is included; any that doesn’t is not. I could give an anecdote or two, but Mr. Zeitz would probably zero in on a comma fault, so instead I will just recommend the following, supplied by a kindly reader of this blog, from Reason Online, the Pew Research Center, the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, and National Review Online.
August 20, 2006
Chamberlain and Munich II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:45 PM EST I will gracefully give way to Fred Smoler’s obviously far greater knowledge of the historical literature regarding the military situation in Europe in 1938. Let me point out, however, that the figures of 5 and 47 for the number of operational Royal Air Force squadrons in 1938 and 1939 come from William Manchester’s biography of Churchill. Since he was on the go-to-war-in-1938 side of the argument, I assumed they were accurate. Obviously they were wildly off. I wonder what the situation regarding British radar installations was in the fall of 1938. They came in very handy in 1940.
August 20, 2006
What Liberal Media? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:45 PM EST In response to my last post, John Steele Gordon wrote: “Mr. Zeitz seems to have completely missed my point. I wasn’t talking about Senator Bob Smith. . . . What I was talking about was that Peter Jennings characterized many Republicans according to how conservative he perceived them to be. But he didn’t characterize a single Democrat, no matter how liberal. They were all just Democrats.” In fact, I didn’t miss Mr. Gordon’s point. I understood it quite well. It wasn’t that complicated. He thinks that liberal bias runs rampant in the mainstream media. But the only evidence he was able to muster in favor of this charge was an unsupported, paraphrased anecdote about Peter Jennings and Sen. Bob Smith. As I pointed out, there was very good cause for Jennings to label Smith a very conservative Republican. I think it’s Mr. Gordon who misses my point, and my point is about evidence. Conservatives (and Mr. Gordon, who quotes freely from the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Weekly Standard, but who resists being labeled a conservative) like to bandy about the charge of “liberal media bias.” But they rarely produce solid evidence of this bias. In this case, Mr. Gordon charged bias. He offered evidence. I showed that his evidence simply doesn’t prove his case. If Mr. Gordon has better evidence of liberal media bias, he should produce it. If he doesn’t, I’d suggest that he either run a Lexis-Nexis search to find a transcript of the Jennings commentary that he was paraphrasing (I tried but couldn’t locate the transcript), or that he visit Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt’s library maintains an extraordinary video archive of televised American news reports, running back to the 1970s. It’s an invaluable resource for historians of modern U.S. history. Visit the site here. There is a good counter-point to be made—to wit, that mainstream media bias exists, but that it is conservative bias. Liberal muckrakers at www.mediamatters.org keep a running tab of conservative bias in print and broadcast media. I’m not a devoted reader of the site, but its editors certainly do a thorough job of documenting the conservative tilt of many mainstream print and broadcast journalists. I’d also recommend Eric Alterman’s book, What Liberal Media?. Alterman is certainly no nonpartisan. He’s a very liberal columnist for The Nation. Alterman’s bias aside, his book is solidly researched and certainly goes a long way in disproving the “liberal media” bugaboo.
August 20, 2006
On Chamberlain and Munich Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:05 AM EST Fred Schwarz posts that John Steele Gordon has been defending Chamberlain’s decision not to fight for Czechoslovakia. I followed the links Fred posted, and they seem to contain only excerpts of what John Steel Gordon wrote, but one thing John Steele Gordon does write is, I think, absolutely wrong. In the post Fred links to, John Steele Gordon argues that “the biggest problem was air power . . . no invasion was possible as long as the Navy controlled the sea. . . . But by the 1930’s control of the sea was not possible without control of the air above it, and here Britain was far, far weaker than Germany. Had Hitler gained control of the air over the Channel for even a couple of days, he could have put an army on British shores and then Britain, with its weak army, would have been doomed. . . . So the growth of the Royal Air Force in these months, growing from 5 to 47 squadrons as Manchester states, was crucial. Britain could not have survived otherwise . . .” This is perfect nonsense, although nonsense with an interesting history of its own, of which more later. The figure of a total of 5 RAF squadrons in October of 1938 is absurd. According to the official history of British war production, in September of 1938 there were 30 operational fighter squadrons. Without hunting up the exact figures for October 1938, the figures for January of 1939 should do: 135 RAF squadrons. The number of fighter squadrons actually went down, to 27, because obsolete aircraft were being retired (the first Spitfires were delivered to fighter squadrons in 1938). As background, one of the greatest intelligence failures of the 1930s was the Allies’ often gross overestimate of the Luftwaffe’s strength. At the time of the Munich crisis most RAF and Luftwaffe aircraft were obsolete, and both sides were in the throes of rearmament. If both sides had fought with what was on hand, my memory is that Britain and France combined outnumbered German combat aircraft by something like 4:3, and that ratio excludes the not-insignificant Polish and Czech air forces. The catastrophic overestimate was fostered by sustained German propaganda and disinformation. There is no excuse for being taken in by that exercise more than 60 years on. The best book—by a very long chalk the best book—on the merits of fighting Hitler in 1938 rather than 1939 is by Williamson Murray, an excellent and celebrated military historian. That book is The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939, published by Princeton University Press in 1984. Anyone wanting to develop an informed opinion of this question should read Murray, or failing that a professional review of his book. The equally able and equally celebrated military historian Brian Bond did one in the English Historical Review, and there are others. By the way, neither of these men are the “liberals” Mr. Gordon so enjoys pillorying, nor are they the tenured Marxists he also mentions. At any rate, in 1938 the Luftwaffe was simply not ready for war. I have never read a professional study of the Luftwaffe that argued otherwise. Had it been ready for war, the relative strength of the Czech Army (and probably the Polish Army, which Polish historians think would have fought if Britain and France had, despite Poland’s animosity toward Czechoslovakia, and her territorial disputes), plus the relative strength of the French Army would have made it extremely unlikely that Germany could have quickly secured the bases that would have allowed her fighters to even reach the Channel, let alone contest it for any length of time. One reason, among many: If the war had broken out in October, the tanks Germany possessed would not have been able to do the only thing that made them truly formidable, which was impose a tempo of operations unmatchable by their adversaries. In 1938 German armor was not only relatively sparse, it was not designed to fight lightening campaigns during a European winter (neither was 1939 German armor). Suppose that the Wehrmacht did the impossible and somehow conquered both Czechoslovakia and France by June of 1939, the date by which (against all odds) it actually did that. Could the Luftwaffe have covered an invasion of Britain? Even a year later, in the summer of 1939, the Luftwaffe’s aircraft would have had no deployed air-launched torpedo, and most of its bombs would still have been 50-kilogram fragmentation or general-purpose bombs, which could not have pierced the deck armor of a Royal Navy light cruiser. In 1938, contrary to Mr. Gordon’s assertion, control of the Channel was more than possible without control of the air. That would also be true in 1939 and 1940. And if Germany had gotten control of the Channel, she could not have moved many troops across it. She did not have the sealift. If she had moved troops across it, she could not have supplied them. Professionals who have modeled the logistics of a 1940 Sea Lion—I mean professional militaries—have agreed about this since joint British-German war games in the 1960s. A very interesting recent book on the likely fate of a cross-Channel invasion in 1940—crushing defeat—gives the Germans every break by assuming that the RAF lost control of the Channel and that the Royal Navy declined to contest it. The book was published in 2004 (it is Martin Marix Evans’s Invasion! Operation Sea Lion, 1940), and anyone wanting to get a sense of some of the logistical obstacles facing a 1940 Sea Lion should read it. So where did this implausible defense of Chamberlain at Munich come from? It began in the early 1970s with Tory apologists like Maurice Cowling, who detested both the rise of the Labour Party after the war and the Social Democratic welfare states of postwar Western Europe, who mourned the loss of empire, and who did not admire Churchill for having waged and won the war that created our world. In the postwar world, there have been some on both left and right—their numbers seem to be increasing—who do not admire the Allied leaders of the Second World War, or accept what were long taken to be that war’s most urgent lessons. Cowling and his followers attempted to redeem Churchill’s disgraced opponent Chamberlain. Simultaneously, Munich became an analogy in both the Cold War world and the post-Cold War world, and as an analogy was detested on the left, where Churchill was not much admired for a host of reasons. The mutual hostility to Churchill made for an unwitting and unholy alliance, but that alliance has not yet managed to redeem Chamberlain at Munich.
August 19, 2006
Peter Jennings Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:00 PM EST Mr. Zeitz seems to have completely missed my point. I wasn’t talking about Senator Bob Smith. (I agree that Bob Smith was politically on his way around the bend at this point, which is why he is now in well deserved retirement in Florida.) What I was talking about was that Peter Jennings characterized many Republicans according to how conservative he perceived them to be. But he didn't characterize a single Democrat, no matter how liberal. They were all just Democrats. How conservative each Republican senator was was completely irrelevant to the proceedings, which was the taking of an oath to judge fairly and on the evidence. Unless, of course, one believes that conservatives can’t be trusted to observe their oaths while liberals unquestionably can be.
Peter Jennings, entirely unconsciously I’m sure, was being a good deal less than fair and balanced—to coin a phrase—in his coverage.
August 19, 2006
More on Self-Interest Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon and Josh Zeitz have said some interesting things about “self-interest”; John Steele Gordon has also recently posted on the notion of elites. He seems to think that Josh defines “self-interest” in narrowly economic terms, and that I similarly define “elite.” I don’t think this is an accurate characterization. Josh wrote of a preference of some white workers for racial status at the expense of economic interest—he called this a preference for “psychological wages”. While that phrase adapts economic language, it does so precisely to avoid a narrowly economic notion of self-interest. I defined elites as “groups with greatly disproportionate political power, or very high status, or very high income”, so income came last. John Steele Gordon also offered an expansive definition of self-interest, writing that “Mother Teresa was pursuing her self-interest in the slums of Calcutta, because she would have been miserable doing anything else. Self interest encompasses the totality of what human beings need and what they seek. The pursuit of self-interest, in other words, is simply what Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness.” I have a lot of sympathy for John Steele Gordon’s attempt to complicate our sense of what people may see as their self-interest, and I also have some reservations, because I think so broad a definition risks expanding our conception of self-interest too radically, and may diminish its value as an analytical tool. And it risks tautology, without necessarily achieving it. Some will say, okay, people seek whatever they think will make them happy—well, what else would they ever seek? Economics began as a discipline that assumed that a more narrow notion of self-interest could explain people’s motives and clarify their best course of action, at least once people began to value material condition more, and social rank and the ascetic manifestations of the religious impulse less. Economics was a discipline that would allow people to raise their material status, and it assumed that this would increasingly be what people cared to do. They would be more and more likely to pursue a particular form of happiness, and find it. This simplifies a lot about people, in the interest of explaining a lot about people. This does not mean that the founders of economics were right about people, but there are some reasons for hoping that they were right. If people have to choose between superior racial status and greater wealth, we want them to value greater wealth the more highly. If they cannot come to make that choice, they will never be reconciled to the defeat of the Confederate States of America or the Third Reich. We sometimes want them to value material well-being over what they see as moral excellence, because if they do not Hezbollah will never cease valuing the destruction of Tel Aviv over the preservation of South Beirut. These are great simplifications, but simplifying is part of what theories do. My impression is that people in modern societies often mix their preferences. While they may sometimes seek superior racial status over material well-being, they often think they are choosing both simultaneously. Australian white trade unionists supported racial exclusion of immigrants to keep up their own wages by limiting the supply of labor. So far, they seem to have been wrong. Australians now enjoy a higher standard of living than they did in the 1950s. If superior racial status turns out to be the same thing as wealth over the long run, we’re in trouble; if they are generally opposed ends, between which people must choose, we at least have a chance. So while we tend to complain about greed, and mourn the loss of the passion for honor, the eighteenth-century founders of economics thought that the world would be safer if people valued honor less and riches more. They had a case.
August 19, 2006
Guano and Empire II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:00 PM EST A few comments on this very interesting topic.
1) As Fred Smoler writes, you can either conquer resources you need or you can buy them. That’s usually true, unless the resource is strategic in nature. In the nineteenth century, Britannia did indeed rule the waves, and the sources of the nitrates that were becoming ever more vital both for war (to make gunpowder and, later, other explosives with) and agriculture (for fertilizer) were located overseas. Expansionist Wilhelmine Germany realized that its nitrate supply could be cut off by the Royal Navy at any time, rendering Germany militarily impotent, not to mention hungry. The result, in the first decade of the twentieth century, was the Haber-Bosch process for turning atmospheric nitrogen (about 80 percent of the air we breath is nitrogen) into ammonia, from which all manner of nitrogenous compounds can be made.
Had the Germans not been so damned good at chemistry, they couldn’t have started World War I.
2) I think the Chinese attitude toward trade has been fashioned by its history. Because China was so vast and diverse and resource-rich, it had little need of foreign trade for much of its history. Further, it was the greatest industrial power on earth in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, running huge trade surpluses with Europe (that’s how “china,” meaning tableware, entered the English language) and being paid largely in silver because there were few European goods that could compete in the Chinese market. But by the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had made Europe, especially Britain, dominant in trade goods and overwhelmingly powerful militarily. China, with the Manchu dynasty in serious decline, was forced into an endless series of humiliating treaties, including being forced to buy opium from India. These treaties were not only humiliating, they were often commercially unfair, forcing China to sell cheap and buy dear.
3) “Imperialism” is a very loaded word, dating only to the mid-nineteenth century. At first it had both positive connotations (bringing civilization to the less fortunate races—whether they wanted it or not, of course) and negative ones (“That odious system of bluster and swagger and might against right upon which Lord Beaconsfield [Disraeli] and his colleagues bestowed the tawdry nickname of Imperialism”—London Daily News, 1898). But by the twentieth, especially after World War I, the connotations became almost wholly negative. And of course Lenin and his followers quickly turned imperialism into an attribute solely of the capitalist powers. Communist powers never practiced imperialism. Heaven forefend. The Poles, Czechs, East Germans, Hungarians, etc., had a rather different view of Soviet “liberation” of course.
Personally, I think that, given its political baggage, the word imperialism should be either restricted entirely to the late nineteenth-century European race for empire or abandoned altogether. After all, I have never been able to figure out why the fifteenth-century Moghul conquest of much of the Indian subcontinent is simply history, but the British Indian hegemony acquired (“in a fit of absent-mindedness”) in the eighteenth century is “imperialism,” unless there’s an agenda at work.
August 19, 2006
Peter Jennings: Liberal Elite or Insider? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST I disagree generally with John Steele Gordon’s characterization of the “mainstream media,” but more on that soon. In the meantime, it’s worth noting something about the example that he cites—of Peter Jennings’s identification of Bob Smith as “the very conservative Republican senator from New Hampshire,” as compared with his identification of Barbara Mikulski as simply a Democrat from Maryland. Mr. Gordon seems to be reconstructing Jennings’s commentary from memory, rather than direct transcript. Granting him some slack, and assuming that his seven-year recollection is accurate: In February 1999, when this commentary would have aired on ABC, Bob Smith—then a U.S. Senator from New Hampshire—was publicly threatening to leave the Republican party. He claimed that the Republicans were not living up to their conservative principles. True to his word, in July 1999, just a few months after the Clinton impeachment trial, Smith left the GOP and became an independent, threatening to run for President on a separate Conservative party line. Smith eventually returned to the Republican fold but was denied renomination in 2002. He now lives in Florida. My point is this: If Jennings identified Smith as “the very conservative Republican senator from New Hampshire,” he was probably committing a verbal twitch. Most viewers wouldn’t have appreciated what Jennings, the consummate political insider, surely knew—to wit, that Smith was a self-styled conservative maverick who already had one foot out the GOP’s door. Mr. Gordon should probably find a better example of media bias.
August 19, 2006
Chamberlain and Hitler Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:40 PM EST I am much flattered that Fred Schwarz chose to alert the readers of this blog to my conversation on Powerline over the last few days regarding the question of whether Britain would have been better off going to war in 1938 instead of making the infamous deal in Munich. Scott Johnson chose to end the discussion, which is his privilege (it’s his blog, after all), by giving Sir Winston Churchill the last word on the subject. But being willing, as usual, to rush in where angels might well fear to tread (Who is this Churchill guy, anyway?), I replied as follows (slightly edited by me this morning):
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Please let me point out that I am an unqualified admirer of Sir Winston Churchill as both statesman and writer. More than any other single person in the twentieth century, he saved the world. And he is, I believe, the only writer of nonfiction—the vineyard in which I labor—ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But that, of course, is part of the problem. First, the sheer power of his prose—not to mention the sheer pleasure of reading him--tends to overwhelm us. Second, he is one of the few major figures to both make history and write it. Caesar and Grant were two others. That’s pretty exalted company. Churchill was very aware of that duality. In 1944 he wrote to Stalin, “I agree that we had better leave the past to history, but remember if I live long enough I may be one of the historians.” Indeed he was. And he quite deliberately shaped his history to make himself look good, which is why it must be used with caution. I would highly recommend David Reynolds’s In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War.
The trouble with counterfactual history, of course, is that we never get to know how it would have worked out in the real world. It’s a bit like wondering how a backgammon game would have turned out if one of the players on the third roll had gotten 4-3 instead of 5-2.
Had Chamberlain and Daladier made it plain (by mobilizing the Royal Navy, calling up reservists, burning embassy papers, etc., etc.) that they absolutely would go to war over Czechoslovakia, Hitler might have pulled back. Instead they made it as plain as if they had told him in so many words that they would accept whatever it took to avoid war. Naturally, Hitler drove the hardest of bargains and that convinced him that he could do it again and again. Hitler was much more reckless after Munich. As Donald Kagan wrote in On the Origins of War, there is no surer means of preserving the peace than to convince your enemy that you are willing to go to war. We’ve had to learn that lesson, yet again, in recent years.
Personally I think France was doomed regardless of when war broke out. The nation’s spirit was broken. Neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia would ever have invaded Germany had war come about, so Hitler could have safely moved many divisions and slammed into France with more than enough force to break that broken nation. Then only the Channel would have stood between him |
