Wicked Lewiston by Stephen D. Branting

This book was printed for a very narrow audience, I'm afraid, but there's probably some overlap between my readers and that audience, which would consist of anyone who ever grew up or lived in Lewiston, Idaho, and is interested in the history of the place. Mr. Branting was one of my advisors in high school, and he's published several works on Lewiston history, very thoroughly researched.

Branting covers the spectrum from shady ladies of the evening, to grifters and con artists, kidnappers and killers. I always thought the Lewis-Clark valley was a quiet and peaceful sort of place, but he manages to give it a flavor of infamy in this book, without pandering to the salacious.

America: Imagine a World Without Her by Dinesh D'Souza

Heh. I have an old colleague whose last name is D'Souza. When I first typed the title this post, I had his name as the author of this book, rather than Dinesh D'Souza. The mind works in mysterious ways.

D'Souza does a pretty good rebuttal of the Progressive view of America, as quoted below,

"According to the progressive critique, America was found in an original act of piracy; the early settlers came from abroad and stole the country from the native Indians. Then America was built by theft; white Americans stole the labor of African Americans by enslaving them for 250 years. The theft continued through nearly a century of segregation, discrimination, and Jim Crow. The borders of America were also extended by theft; America stole half of Mexico in the Mexican War. Moreover, America's economic system, capitalism, is based on theft since it confers unjust profits on a few and deprives the majority of workers of their "fair share." Finally, American foreign policy is based on theft, what historian William Appleman Williams termed "empire as a way of life." America's actions abroad are aimed at plundering other people's land and resources so that we can continue to enjoy an outsized standard of living compared to the rest of the world."

As an unabashed, patriotic, white cismale American capitalist, I can say for my part that he was pretty much preaching to the choir while he demolished these premises one by one. Without Western capitalism and Judeo Christian values, not to mention technology and modern medicine, far more of the people on planet Earth would still be living lives "nasty, brutish, and short".

I wish I had the energy to do a more thorough discussion. It was a very good read.

New Deal or Raw Deal by Burton Folsom, Jr.

I learned a heck of a lot that I must have missed in school about the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal in this book. Folsom doesn't paint a very rosy picture of the president and his cabinet, who implemented some of the greatest social and political changes ever to hit the United States.

He goes into Roosevelt's personal history before he entered politics. Roosevelt had not had much success in his business ventures, seeming to always back the wrong horse. "...he assumed airplanes were only a passing fad, and he invested in a line of airships, called dirigibles, to fly from New York to Chicago." I can sympathize, I couldn't figure out why anyone in their right mind would want to buy a cell phone, back when they first came out.

Roosevelt surrounded himself with academics, with little practical economic or business experience. "Roosevelt regularly hosted a group of professors from Columbia University - they became his 'Brain Trust' - and they presented Roosevelt with a variety of ideas fashionable in academic circles."

There apparently were some very corrupt practices during that time period (as opposed to now?). When Hoover supported the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in distributing over 1.5 billion dollars to failing banks and industries, the businesses close to the Hoover administration were often the first to get the federal dollars.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act came about at this time. It paid subsidies to farmers who would agree NOT to grow certain crops - even as people in the country were standing in bread and soup lines, in order to bolster the price of exports. Farmers gamed the system, by leaving the required amount of acreage fallow, choosing the acreage that produced poorly anyway. Of if a particular crop was controlled, they'd produce excessively in another crop, which would then end up on the subsidy list the following year. In 1935, the United States ended up for nearly the first time in its histroy as a net food-importing nation.

Some of the first minimum wage laws were definitely the result of political corruption. The textile industry in the South produced a high quality product at a low cost due to low wages in the area. Northern politicians in Massachusetts led the fight in Congress to establish a minimum wage that would destroy the southern mills' competitive edge. Some of the rhetoric seems familiar, "...Congress couldn't make a man worth a certain amount by making it illegal to pay him any less. Instead, the man would end up unemployed." Interestingly enough, passage of minimum wage laws in Washington DC in 1938 resulted in massive layoffs of maids and unskilled workers by local hotels. But the politicians pressed on.

Roosevelt railed against "big business" and instituted confiscatory tax policies against the wealthy. In 1941, in addition to the already high tax rates in place from the New Deal, he proposed a 99.5% tax rate on all income over $100,000. When his budget director wondered why, Roosevelt said, "Why not? None of us is ever going to make $100,000 a year." Does this way of thinking sound at all familiar?

Roosevelt used the IRS as a  personal weapon against those who opposed him. I thought Tricky Dick Nixon had started that, but obviously not. He had political opponents, such as Huey Long (a corrupt politician himself) investigated for tax evasion after Long opposed his New Deal programs. Long said of the NRA, "Every fault of socialism is found in this bill, without one of its virtues." He refused money from the Public Works Administration for his state, which actually turned out for the best for the poeple of Lousiana, as the states that did benefit from PWA actually saw less economic development during that time than states that hadn't. Roosevelt also went after William Randolph Hearst and his newspapers, but was unable to find any evidence against him. He had Father Charles Couglin investigated, as well, for denouncing Roosevelt and his policies. Other political enemies also felt the might of the IRS.

Roosevelt in 1944 created an Economic Bill of Rights (I think our politicians today somehow mistake it for the original Bill) that included, "the right to a useful and remunerative job...the right of every family to a decent home...the right to a good education." Wow! The mind boggles at the programs our government has put in place over the years to enforce these "rights."

So, what are the lasting effects of the New Deal, eighty years later? Minimum wage laws were first passed in the New Deal Years. Social security started. The Wagner Act created the labor unions' devastating hold on many industries. Farm subsidies came into play, and are still being paid today. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was a welfare program that had its roots in that era, and grew throughout the years until 1996, when it was reformed, somewhat. The Smoot Hawley tariff worsened our trade relations, and we're still fighting those effects with new treaties, such as NAFTA. The Federal Reserve took us off the gold standard and sent us on a number of inflative spirals. The FDIC put taxpayers on the hook for banks' foolish behaviors. Income taxes became more progressive under FDR, and have been a bone of contention between the major parties ever since.

An informative, interesting, very readable book.

In Praise of Nepotism by Adam Bellow

In a blurb on the back of this book, John Patrick Diggins, Distinguished Professor of History at The City University of New York, says, "I read In Praise of Nepotism straight through in about a day and a half." I must confess, it's taking me more like a month and a half to finish it. This is not "fluff". Bellow really digs into history to lay out some (some? more like ALL!) of the nepotistic heritage of mankind and a few other species, besides.

For example, mole rats are, according to Bellow, "the world's most nepotistic animal". Their reproductive strategy is almost the same as an ant colony. Only one female in a colony is allowed to bear young, while all the others work as if they were drones digging burrows, gathering food, and starting new colonies. This is the only mammal that behaves in this fashion.

A more recent champion of nepotism is Greek prime minister Andreas Panadreou. After running an anti-corruption campaign, he appointed his wife, a thirty eight year old former flight attendant, chief policy advisor. His son was appointed deputy foreign minister, his wife's cousin deputy culture minister, and his personal physician minister of health.

Bellow takes us back to the Chou dynasty of China and mentions an odd and disturbing practice. During a famine in 593 B.C., the citizens of Sung were reduced to eating their children. "Because they couldn't bear to eat their own, however, they exchanged children with their neighbors before killing them." Huh? In latter day China, the Communist Party had denounced nepotism and hoped to end the practice, but most (over five thousand) of the recent  communist leadership got their positions in the government due to family connections. Bellow asks, "If even the Chinese Communists couldn't get rid of it, what realistic hope have we of doing so?"

He also uses the Bible to illustrate nepotism in history. He claims that much of the Old Testament is a series of "nepotistic parables that explore different aspects of Jewish family dynamics." I'd never looked at it in that light before, but it's substantially correct. Oddly enough, the New Testament Christian church under Saint Augustine, opposed the practice of adoption. Wow! Isn't the Catholic Church heavily involved in adoptions now? The basis for this seemed to be that leaving one's property to an adopted heir was an attempt to cheat God of what was rightfully his - read The Church's - money.

Eventually Bellow moves to the New World, after brief (who am I kidding?) stops in Africa, India, Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. As a shout out to my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, whom I know have read it, he references Albion's Seed in describing the four different migrations from the British Isles between 1629 and 1675. Each of these migrations brought with it a distinct culture, and a distinct style of nepotism. These differences, claims Bellow, would eventually lead to irreconcilable differences culminating in the Civil War.

Bellow also discusses our founding fathers, such as Jefferson, Washington, Adams and Hamilton, in terms of their nepotistic tendencies and strategies. Jefferson's administration, compared to the previous two, had the fewest nepotistic ties. However, once a representative of a family got appointed to a government position, it ended up as an inheritance to be passed along to other members of the family.

Painstaking research, broadening the definition of nepotism, and mining history have allowed Bellow to produce a definitive text on the subject. Maybe nepotism had something to do with it, though. Wasn't his father Saul Bellow? I think his talent stands on its own, but it might have gotten a nudge or two from Poppa somewhere along the line to get him noticed and published. I'm just sayin'.