The Leisurely Historian…

American policy with regard to science and technology in the twentieth century had often been canceled with what James C. Scott described in Seeing Like a State as a “high modernist ideology”: “…self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature… and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.” (Scott, 4) Implicit in Scott’s “mastery of nature” is one other important characteristic that he doesn’t spell out: the high modernist ideology takes previous modes of human interaction among people and with nature, and reduces these interrelations to zero-sum games. Under the ideological régime of high modernism, war becomes total war, health care shifts its focus from palliative care, abatement, and curing, to the wholesale elimination of specific ailments. Edmund Russell’s War & Nature and David McBride’s Missions for Science both explore American scientific policies that reflect this high modernist tendency toward extermination and elimination, as well as looking at the blowback from such an approach.

The concept of blowback originated within foreign policy and espionage circles. Essentially, the term describes when a completed operation, whether successful or not in achieving its intended goals, creates a situation that engenders unexpected negative outcomes for the original actor. While the term isn’t used much in scholarly work outside foreign policy, I believe it’s the best description of what we see in both books. Technologies were adopted for specific purposes, and were in some case effective and in some case ineffective. But in almost all cases, these technologies have unforeseen or unforeseeable consequences.

The narrative structure of Russell’s War and Nature fits nicely with this model of techno-political blowback to high modernist zero-sum tactics. Russell traces the coevolution of chemical-based warfare and pesticides in the period between the first World War and the early 1960s. (I use the term chemical-based weapons or warfare, rather than chemical weapons, as Russell’s definition includes more than conventional chemical weapons, to including incindiaries and potentially battlefield defoliants.) As both technologies were based on the development of new toxic chemicals, sometimes even the same chemicals, chemical manufacturers were able to rapidly shift from wartime to peacetime production, rapidly expanding in the process. Moreover, pesticides were seen as important to war efforts, as insect-borne contagion could be as dangerous to troops on the ground as mortar shells.
In looking at the language used in describing both chemical-based weapons and pesticides, Russell finds a common language of extermination and elimination.

The language used to describe chemical weapons reflects the general principle of total war. Moreover, he finds repeated use of the trope of equating enemy troops with bugs or insects, and calling for extermination. When looking at the language of insecticide advertisements and propaganda, he finds the converse—metaphors of war on insects, and the diseases that come with them. Government etymologists called for an outright war on the blight of insects, saying that nothing short of their complete elimination could ensure the survival and progress of the human species. In both of these examples, as well as tactics used “on the ground,” as it were, we find an overarching philosophy that the only solution for the problem of insects or enemy combatants was complete elimination—the type of zero-sum thinking that is inherent to high modernist ideology.

The final chapter of Russell’s book, however, is all about the blowback effect. The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 brought about a backlash against the widespread use of DDT, which had in the years since World War II been widely promoted as a safe insecticide, advertised both for its safety for users and its military prestige—it had been a key insecticide used by the American military during the war. Carson’s book promoted the idea that the chemical was environmentally disastrous and a carcinogen that was unsafe for home use. The chemical was banned within ten years of the book’s publication. 

Around the same time, public opinion toward the military use of chemicals began to shift. While the US chemical industry was miniscule before the first World War, it had grown quite rapidly, and was now a key component of the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address. By 1963, the use of chemical-based warfare was becoming a major point of contention in the escalating US presence in Vietnam. Those who opposed the war would point to the use of defoliants, and later napalm, as indication that the war had gone too far, had become too barbaric, while some on the right argued that the use of all-out chemical warfare would be the most efficacious way to decisively gain advantage in the war.

At around the same time, both chemical-based warfare and mass use of insecticide were suddenly met with a mass of public disapproval, after almost fifty years of being positively associated with US dominance as an international power.

David McBride’s Missions for Science deals with the impact of US scientific and technological interventions in four areas with Black Diaspora populations. In Haiti, Liberia, the US “Black Belt,” and the Panama Canal Zone, McBride chronicles the way that American scientific and technological interventions served the purpose of expanding US imperialism and hegemony. Regional leaders like William Tubman, Booker T. Washington, and “Papa Doc” Duvalier, often shared the faith in the high modernist ideology expressed by outsiders leading US intervention. But while the goal of expanding US imperialism, the hopes for the power of science and technology improving the lives of those in the affected areas often failed, sometimes catastrophically. Public health efforts in the Panama Canal Zone were initially effective, but those leading failed to continue with further, more far-reaching, measures. Technical education in the Black Belt failed to change the underlying disparity in the social and political makeup in the area.

The best illustration of the blowback against high modernist intervention is Haiti. In Haiti, you have all four elements that Scott describes as necessary to the creation of a full-on disaster of social engineering—the administrative reordering of society, high modernist ideology, an authoritarian state, and a prostrate civil society incapable of effective resistance. In Haiti, when the US took over the administration of the state in 1915, their public health efforts actually did much to upset the existing structure of medical care, while their efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases on the island were ultimately unsuccessful. By the time the US pulled out, the population was still impoverished, and suffered high disease rates. “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who began his career as a doctor and made a name for himself in the mass administration of penicillin, came of age in this period, and was educated according to US high modernist principles of medicine. In the case of Haiti, the blowback from high modernist scientific intervention not only included the destruction of a health care system more adequately suited to palliative care and abatement in an unsuccessful attempt at eradication of disease, but also included helping to create the ideology of a man who became a corrupt autocrat whose reign of terror greatly increased the suffering of the people that those intervening had originally intended to help.

There is a fundamental fallacy in the high modernist faith belief in zero-sum games, when it comes to science and technological intervention. Social intervention of this type cannot take into account all the variables—future discovery, the wisdom of existing social structures, and the inability of social engineering to account for the complexity of such structures—it is impossible to verify that a strategy is a zero-sum game when one cannot account for all the players, the rules, or the changes that may occur with future research. So it’s quite possible that blowback is inevitable.

However, both of these books reflect what strikes me as a rather wise ambivalence toward scientific intervention. On one hand, there are many examples of this sort of blowback, with often disastrous consequences. On the other hand, certain scientific advances, especially in medicine, are so groundbreaking and present so much opportunity for the betterment of peoples lives that denying access to such medicines and technologies seems inhumane and immoral. It’s a complex question, but both of those books help to shed light on the difficulties and complexities, and will hopefully help to inspire further research and thought on the topic.

I’m trying to do an autobiographical final project, so I attempted to do a reconstruction of the house I grew up in.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any pictures of it, so I did most of the "construction" from memory. This led to a few problems when I flew in to Ohio last night and got a picture of the place:

I’d remembered the roof on the front of the house, over the front entryway, as being peaked, for example.

So last night I did a lot of erasing and fixing and correcting, and I’m reasonably happy with the results:

(I gotta say, I’m also quite impressed with Sketchup’s ability to cast shadows fairly reasonably, too.)

Obviously, there’s some problems. The dormer’s kinda funky. The buttresses that hold up the roof– which are a pretty defining part of the house’s character, I left off, because I was having so much trouble with the roof’s overhang… has anyone else gotten the "follow me" approach to roofs to work? ‘Cause it worked in the video, but it ain’t workin’ for me. And that leads to another problem– there’s funky unnecessary lines everywhere, especially on the roof. And as my mother pointed out, the chimney’s too short, and a bit too far to the front, which would be a fire hazard.  So I guess it’s good that I’m just doing this virtually…

Let’s walk around to the back of the house, now…

I actually enjoyed this view– it may not look like much, but if you wanted to have this view of the house when I was growing up, you’d have had to have stood in my neighbor’s garage, and had the ability to see through walls. And he was an old man, a compulsive hoarder with about a million cats… So even if I could have seen through walls, I wouldn’t have gone into his garage to get that view, ’cause he scared me.

Notice how the roof line gets strange in the back? When I was a small child, my parents built  an addition on the back of the house. My mom had a serious illness in the middle of that, so there was about a year when I was small where the kitchen sink was a garden hose and a bucket. The wooden stairs out the back were there when I was small, but were later replaced when my father built a small porch.

There’s some problems from this side, too. The addition is actually not clapboard like the rest of the house, but board-and-batten. I got lazy on that one, and decided to use the clapboard, because I didn’t want to make a board-and-batten pattern.

Another problem is with the stovepipe for the wood stove that heats the addition– it’s crooked. I just noticed that a few minutes ago. I lined it up with the roof instead of making it parallel to the ground.

Again, the thing’s awash with unnecessary lines.

Overall, I learned a lot about Sketchup, and it was kind of fascinating to first attempt to replicate the building by memory, and then try to make it look like a photograph. I mean, I know that building pretty intimately– I scrubbed it every summer, and painted it more than once. But it’s kind of amazing how hard it is to remember the fine details. This morning, my family and I have sat around critiquing my Sketchup work, each of us remembering different little details about the way the house was built.

Oh– and finally, because technically the Sanborne Map thing, while it was by far the easiest part of the assignment, was integral to the assignment– here’s how my house, circa 1982, looks superimposed onto the map of the neighborhood from 1928.

Shockingly, there’s only one other building on my block that’s changed significantly other than the one I grew up in.

Incidentally, did anyone else find a way to get the Google Earth data to not come through to Sketchup in black and white? (Not the Sanborn stuff, the actually satellite images from GE…)

One of those questions that Americanist grad students in History get asked a lot is, "What was new about the New Deal?"

At first it struck me as a pretty obvious question– of course EVERYTHING was new about the New Deal. That’s definitely the story I heard growing up… But when you look at it, things get murky– Hoover wasn’t the laissez faire capitalist he’s often made out to be. In fact, he was a proponent of an interventionist federal government. FDR outspent every president before him on social welfare, but Hoover outspent every president before HIM.

So looking to resolve the question, and looking into it a bit, I’ve come up with– well, at least a theory. Hoover was a corporatist and an associationalist. He was for intervention, but not for the type of big state programs that the New Deal ushered in. And when he needed big state programs, he didn’t like to leave their management in the hands of the state alone.

In his essay “Three Facets of Hooverian Associationalism” Ellis Hawley argues that Hoover, in his time as Secretary of Commerce and President, created a new approach to federal regulation with regard to “problematic” industries, one that he sees as an outgrowth of progressive associationalism. While earlier progressive associationalism had approached the regulation of industry by the bringing together of interest groups that had a stake in the industry, from management, labor, and consumers, Hoover’s regulatory approach to troubled industries was essentially corporatist—characterized by the rationalization of troubled industries by new governmental agencies that were headed by individuals within the industry. Hawley further argues that the definition of “problem” industries included not only industries in decline, but nascent industries whose primary “difficulty” was a failure to efficiently meet their full potential.  F. Robert van der Linden’s Airlines and Air Mail and Douglas Craig’s Fireside Politics, two books that draw on Hawley’s work, both bring this particular dynamic into much closer focus, looking at the new industries of commercial aviation and radio, respectively.

Robert van der Linden draws very directly on Hawley’s work, framing his book in its introduction as an expansion of “Three Facets.” (viii) Where Hawley’s article focused primarily on the role Hoover played in regulating commercial aviation as Secretary of Commerce, van der Linden expands upon this work, looking at the arguably far greater role played by Hoover’s Postmaster General in regulating and rationalizing the industry after the Watres Act. While the Watres Act was essentially an expansion of Federal authority—giving Brown almost unchecked authority over the young airline industry, which was still dependent upon government subsidy in the form of Air Mail contracts—the way he went about implementing this authority is an excellent illustration of Hoover’s corporatist approach to regulation of industry.

In the conference of airline operators held May 19, 1930—the notorious “spoils conference”—Brown used the powers given him by the Watres Act to bring together the heads of the top companies to discuss, and resolve by means of cooperation, how to best rationalize the airline industry. This meeting, while it stunk of collusion to many contemporaries, embodied Hooverian corporatism. The nascent industry was a “problem” industry because it was failing to reach its potential—commercial airliners were failing to gain the desired numbers of air travelers, routes weren’t standardized, and there was a level of competition which, in the estimation of Brown and the heads of the top carriers, was unhealthy for the young industry. Brown brought together industry leaders to force consensus on these and other issues. The goal, more than simply the negotiation of Air Mail payment rates, was fairly explicitly to reshape the industry itself to something more in keeping with Taylorist notions of rational industrial management. The result was vertical integration of the industry, fusing several of the largest players to create a tighter oligopoly, and the exclusion of small upstart players to benefit “competition” among the remaining three behemoths.

The back-door collusion of this meeting eventually led to scandal when Hugo Black began his investigation and Roosevelt’s Postmaster General James Farley revoked the Air Mail contracts and assigned the military the task of flying the mail. However, military aviation quickly proved unable to safely and efficiently perform the task, and Air Mail contracts were re-awarded to the big three airlines. Moreover, the consolidations that Brown had overseen remained, and the three airlines created out of this conference remained as the core of the industry for half a century.

While Hawley and van der Linden see Hooverian corporatist regulation of “problem” industries as springing directly from the earlier principle of progressive associationalism, Douglas Craig interprets it as resulting from a failure of associationalism. Craig argues that the radio conferences of the 1920s reflect a more pure associationist approach, bringing together various interest groups to help steer the direction of the industry with direct Federal intervention being held back to a minimum, primarily in the maintaining of the Radio Act of 1912. Taking a stricter definition of associationalism, he argues that it is only when this sort of interest-group consensus building failed under the weight of the rapidly growing industry that Hooverian corporatist regulation came into play with the Radio Act of 1927 and the creation of the Federal Radio Commission.

Under the Radio Act of 1912, regulation of radio fell under the Department of Commerce, and thus—through most of the 1920s—under Hoover. When Hoover announced in 1926 that radio would be subject only to voluntary self-regulation until congress passed new legislation better defining the government’s rights and responsibilities in regulating radio, it could be argued that after his loss in court to the Intercity Radio Company, he decided that the young radio industry had officially reached the point of being a “problem” industry, and thus required a shift in tactics, away from traditional associationalism and toward corporatism.

The FRC was a clear example of corporatist regulation. The commissioners often were men who had worked within the industry, and often went on to executive positions within the networks after leaving the FRC. Moreover, the FRC favored commercial networks over the noncommercial independent operators, often placing a greater burden of proof upon them with regard to their commitment to public interest. While the commissioners were more overtly given the right to do so in legislation than Brown had been with the airlines, the FRC was also similar in that it helped to directly shape the industry, apportioning and taking away licenses of operators. While some of this reshaping was done in response to political pressures asserted by outspoken politicians, as with the rewarding of licenses to Southern operators to the detriment of operators in the North and East, it was always done in a spirit of cooperation with the major networks, who were also given a disproportionate number of clear channels.

As with the airline industry, the Hoover-era act that created this corporatist alignment of Federal and oligopolies’ interests was replaced by a New Deal piece of legislation that had little net effect. In the case of the radio industry, it was the creation of the FCC in 1934. Craig argues that the new, larger commission had only minor, almost negligible differences from the FRC when it came to issues of radio broadcast.

Both books further our understanding of Hawley’s initial argument. Hoover was an associationalist, but when a new industry became “problematic,” either by growing too slowly like commercial airliners, or too quickly, as in the case of radio, he felt that a greater deal of state intervention and regulation was necessary. Rather than the direct state intervention preferred by New Dealers, Hoover’s solution was to create regulating bodies that would represent the interests of both the state and the most successful companies in the industry. The result in both cases was the creation of an oligopoly—a collection of the “big three” companies that would submit to government regulation, and in exchange, were given the lion’s share of the industry and an opportunity to participate in their own regulation.

The authors don’t necessarily agree, however, on the net effect of this pattern. Robert van der Linden seems to be a fairly enthusiastic advocate of Hooverian corporatism, refusing to see collusion in Brown’s “spoils conferences,” and indeed avoiding the words “spoils” or “scandal.” He makes a point of mentioning Black’s membership in the KKK, but avoids the topic of Ford and Lindberg’s Nazi sympathies. Despite his enthusiasm for Hoover’s policies, however, one doesn’t get the impression that he lets it effect the quality of his scholarship, even if it colors his treatment of the subject. Craig, on the other hand, seems to mourn radio’s lost potential, especially the possibility that American radio could have adopted the Australian/Canadian model of public and commercial radio—something that the US didn’t achieve until the Johnson administration.

However, both authors seem to agree on the lasting impact made by Hooverian corporatist regulation. Both books end in the Roosevelt era, with that administration making little impact on the overall structure of the industries as they were engineered under Hoover. The big three networks and two of the big three airlines are still dominant. The FCC is still around. And as much as some people evoke the lasting impact of FDR’s interventionist state, we can see shadows of Hoover’s corporatist model in the way the Federal Government regulates many industries today.

I’m working on a lot of different things right now.

I gave up on the rubber sheeting project, basically because I’m realizing I have the basic understanding, and that it’s probably not going to be helpful for my final project. I’ve decided on doing the autobiographical mapping idea, mostly because it doesn’t involve a) too too much extra research, so I can put my time into the actual map-making, and b) it also doesn’t involve technology that is beyond the scope of this class– which I’m afraid most of my Boston Common ideas did. I also like the idea of being a bit introspective, making myself– and how to represent myself– the "problem" of the class. I was a lit and creative writing person in college, and to be honest, I miss some of the introspection and self-investigation that was required there… it’s just so easy to get swept up in the tides of history, and to lose site of yourself in that.

I toyed with the idea of doing more of a family history thing, but to be honest, it’s just not feasible. I have one surviving grandparent, no great aunts or uncles, no uncles, aunts, or cousins. My family is cut off and small, and there’s just been a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty uncovered whenever I try to learn too much about my family’s past. It’s a shame, too– if I’d done a family history project and it looked good, I bet my parents would have loved that as a Christmas present, if it was put in a nice frame.

Anyway, I’m excited to say I’ve  found a way to make my Sketchup map relevant to that final project– When I was at the LC, I was able to get a copy of the Sanborn Map for the block I grew up on. It’s been fascinating to look at those maps.

First off, I found that Tipp City, my home town, has hardly changed at all in the last eighty years or so. The 1926 map of my neighborhood is basically identical to the neighborhood I grew up in. There was a small grocer built since then, a block away, and there was a tiny creamery company that’s been converted into a two-and-a-half-car garage. But other than that, it’s the same. The same houses, the levee in my back yard had been built by then (it was built in the aftermath of the Great Dayton Flood of 1913, a pretty devastating flood that resulted in one of the largest and most innovative flood control efforts of its time.) My parent’s old house is there, as is my grandmother’s, next door. The houses of my childhood friends… Even the tomato canning plant on the next block, and the adjoining sewage pump house– which lets me know that by 1926, whomever lived in that house had to put up with the strange, sickly-sweet smell of tomatoes and sewage that my family dealt with every summer.

Everything’s pretty much as it would be in the 1980s.

Although there were some surprises– a block or so from my house, there was the old flour mill and the old buggy whip company. When I was growing up, the mill was abandoned, and later turned into a performing-arts center by the man who took it upon himself to attempt to turn our struggling little town into a town that tourists go to for crafts and antiques– it worked, by the way, and the place looks better than it ever did when I was growing up. The old buggy whip factory was a workshop for a family friend who restored antiques. I was surprised to learn that the mill was still a functioning flour mill as late as 1926, while the buggy whip factory had been converted into an auto dealership.

One thing that perplexed me was that certain sections of the town have been blacked out on the main map, including my neighborhood. The map’s key is of little help in figuring out why this is. The best guess I have is that these are the industrial areas of the town, and may for this reason be uninsurable.

Which leads me to another issue– when I went to look at some of the other years, I discovered that my block, which is actually one of the second set of lots laid out after the town was founded in 1840, was actually left off of the maps all together. Moreover, the house I grew up in, if memory serves, was built in 1907, but was absent from the 1916 map, not appearing until 1926. Could this be a function of my house being on the "bad side of town"?

Speaking of "bad sides of town," something in the above-linked wikipedia article caught my eye, and I want to now go back to the LC and look into it:

The early city was a popular stopping-off point for the boatmen [from the Miami-Erie Canal, which it was built along]. The
original downtown included a large number of bars and a red light
district.

Now, the fact that the town was a stop on the canal is pretty widely known. And the number of bars makes sense, given the architecture of a lot of the buildings downtown. But I never heard of Tipp City having a red light district, and that sort of fascinates me.

I want to look and see what I can find, see what I can tell from Sanborn maps and maybe some newspapers. I love the idea of the quiet, Mayberry-type town I grew up in as some sort of den of sin. It does make sense given one piece of local history that always stuck with me from childhood. Where the Eagles building now stands, there was a great wooden building– thinking back, it looked a bit like a giant saloon– on the corner of First and Main, a block or so from my house. First and Main was maybe 100, 200 feet from the Canal Lock. Anyway, a book on Tipp City history had a picture of the building, and a brief description. Aparently, it was burnt down in the early 1900s after a fight between the two brothers that owned it.

I’d love to learn a bit more about that, and look for the old Red Light district.