Category: History

The Lancet Accused Snow of Being “in the Pocket of Business Interests”

(p. 365) It is hard now to appreciate just how radical and unwelcome Snow’s views were. Many authorities actively detested him for them. The Lancet concluded that he was in the pocket of business interests which wished to continue to fill the air with ‘pestilent vapours, miasms and loathsome abominations of every kind’ and make themselves rich by poisoning their neighbours. ‘After careful enquiry,’ the parliamentary inquiry concluded, ‘we see no reason to adopt this belief.’

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

If Truman Had Not Used the Bomb, Hundreds of Thousands More American Soldiers Would Have Died

MostControversialDecisionBK2011-08-10.jpg

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) . . . , the author reminds us of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who had died in the conventional bombings of places like Tokyo and Kyoto while Roosevelt was president, but with relatively little opprobrium attaching to FDR. Father Miscamble cites as well the horrific massacre of innocents for which the Japanese were responsible, a savagery still being unleashed in the summer of 1945, and the awful cost of battle in the Pacific, including 6,000 American dead and 20,000 wounded at Iwo Jima and 70,000 casualties suffered while capturing Okinawa. With these precedents, Herbert Hoover warned Truman that an invasion of the Japanese home islands could result in the loss of between half a million and a million American lives. Marshall, Leahy and Gen. Douglas MacArthur each had his own projected figures, none of them wildly different from Hoover’s.

Under these circumstances, it was inconceivable that Truman would not have ordered the use of a potentially war-winning weapon the moment it could be deployed. It is impossible to imagine the depth of the public’s fury if after the war Americans had discovered that their president, out of concern for his own conscience, had not used the weapons but instead condemned hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to certain death on the beaches and in the cities of mainland Japan.

For the full review, see:
ANNE JOLIS. “BOOKSHELF; In Defense Of ‘Little Boy’; Herbert Hoover warned President Truman that invading Japan would cost at least half a million American lives.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 13, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed:
Miscamble, Wilson D. The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan, Cambridge Essential Histories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

The Stinking Past

(p. 356) The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described. They worked in teams of three or four. One man – the most junior, we may assume – was lowered into the pit itself to scoop waste into buckets. A second stood by the pit to raise and lower the buckets, and the third and fourth carried the buckets to a waiting cart. Nightsoil work was dangerous as well as disagreeable. Workers ran the risk of asphyxiation and even of explosions since they worked by the light of a lantern in powerfully gaseous environments. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1753 related the case of one nightsoil man who went into a privy vault in a London tavern and was overcome almost at once by the foul air. ‘He call’d out for help, and immediately fell down on his face,’ one witness reported. A colleague who rushed to the man’s aid was similarly overcome. Two more men went to the vault, but could not get in because of the foul air, though they did manage to open the door a little, releasing the worst (p. 357) of the gases. By the time rescuers were able to haul the two men out, one was dead and the other was beyond help.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

In Middle Ages “Nearly Everyone Itched Nearly All the Time”

(p. 346) . . . in the Middle Ages the spread of plague made people consider more closely their attitude to hygiene and what they might do to modify their own susceptibility to outbreaks. Unfortunately, people everywhere came to exactly the wrong conclusion. All the best minds agreed that bathing opened the epidermal pores and encouraged deathly vapours to invade the body. The best policy was to plug the pores with dirt. For the next six hundred years most people didn’t wash, or even get wet, if they could help it – and in consequence they paid an uncomfortable price. Infections became part of everyday life. Boils grew commonplace. Rashes and blotches were routine. Nearly everyone itched nearly all the time. Discomfort was constant, serious illness accepted with resignation.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Coolidge Helped Americans Prosper by Letting Them Be Free”

(p. A15) Ronald Reagan, who grew up during the Coolidge presidency, admired “Silent Cal,” even going so far as to read a biography of the 30th president as he recovered from a surgery in 1985 and to praise him in letters to his constituents. To Reagan, Coolidge wasn’t silent, but was silenced by New Deal supporters, whose intellectual heirs control much of Washington today.
. . .
Unlike President Obama, President Coolidge didn’t want to “spread the wealth around,” but to grow it. He didn’t call for “shared sacrifice”–Americans had sacrificed enough during the great war–but for good character.
There “is no surer road to destruction than prosperity without character,” he said in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania in 1921. And from the White House lawn in 1924 he said, “I want the people of America to be able to work less for the Government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. That is the chief meaning of freedom.”
. . .
As Coolidge saw things in 1924, “A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude.” Coolidge helped Americans prosper by letting them be free.

For the full commentary, see:
CHARLES C. JOHNSON. “How Silent Cal Beat a Recession; The late president inherited a bad economy, and he cut taxes and slashed spending to spur growth.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 4, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Brits Sent Low Quality Goods to American Colonists

(p. 299) It was easy – and for many agents irresistibly tempting – to offload on to Americans clothes and furnishings that were unsold because they were no longer fashionable in England. ‘You cannot really form an idea of the trash that is to be found in the best shops,’ an English visitor named Margaret Hall wrote home to a friend. A cheerful catchphrase of English (p. 300) factories became: ‘It’s good enough for America.’ Being over-charged was a constant suspicion. Washington wrote furiously to Cary after one consignment that many of the products supplied were ‘mean in quality but not in price, for in this they excel indeed far above any I have ever had’.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Navigation Acts, Were “Insanely Inefficient, but Gratifyingly Lucrative to British Merchants and Manufacturers”

(p. 297) Many of Monticello’s quirks spring from the limitations of Jefferson’s workmen. He had to stick to a simple Doric style for the exterior columns because he could find no one with the skills to handle anything more complex. But the greatest problem of all, in terms of both expense and frustration, was a lack of home-grown materials. It is worth taking a minute to consider what the American colonists were up against in trying to build a civilization in a land without infrastructure.
(p. 298) Britain’s philosophy of empire was that America should provide it with raw materials at a fair price and take finished products in return. The system was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that any product bound for the New World had either to originate in Britain or pass through it on the way there, even if it had been created in, say, the West Indies, and ended up making a pointless double crossing of the Atlantic. The arrangement was insanely inefficient, but gratifyingly lucrative to British merchants and manufacturers, who essentially had a fast-growing continent at their commercial mercy. By the eve of the revolution America effectively was Britain’s export market. It took 80 per cent of British linen exports, 76 per cent of exported nails, 60 per cent of wrought iron and nearly half of all the glass sold abroad. In bulk terms, America annually imported 30,000 pounds of silk, 11,000 pounds of salt and over 130,000 beaver hats, among much else. Many of these things – not least the beaver hats – were made from materials that originated in America in the first place and could easily have been manufactured in American factories – a point that did not escape the Americans.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Deregulation Revived Railroads

RailroadMogulsCartoon2011-08-08.jpg

“ALL ABOARD: The Wasp magazine in 1881 lampooned railroad moguls as having regulators in the palms of their hands.” Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C8) Mr. Klein has written thoroughly researched and scrupulously objective biographies of the previously much maligned Jay Gould and E.H. Harriman, remaking their public images by presenting them in full. Now he has published the third and final volume of his magisterial history of the Union Pacific railroad, taking the company from 1969 to the present day.

Union Pacific–the only one of the transcontinentals to remain in business under its original name–is now a flourishing business. Thanks to a series of mergers, it is one of the largest railroads in the world, with more than 37,000 miles of track across most of the American West. Thanks to its investment in new technology, it is also among the most efficient.
In 1969, though, the future of American railroading was in doubt as the industry struggled against competition from airplanes, automobiles and trucks–all of which were in effect heavily subsidized through the government’s support for airports and the Interstate Highway System.
Another major factor in the decline of the railroads had been the stultifying hand of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC had come into existence in the late 19th century to limit the often high-handed ways of the railroads as they wrestled with the difficult economics of an industry that has very high fixed costs. ( . . . .) But the ICC soon evolved into a cartel mechanism that discouraged innovation and wrapped the railroad industry in a cocoon of stultifying rules.
Mr. Klein notes that in 1975 he wrote a gloomy article about the sad state of an industry with a colorful past: “Unlike many other historical romances,” he wrote back then, “the ending did not promise to be a happy one.”
Fortunately, a deregulation movement that began under the Carter administration–yes, the Carter administration–limited the power of the ICC and then abolished it altogether. As Mr. Klein shows in the well-written “Union Pacific,” the reduction of government interference left capitalism to work its magic and produce–with the help of dedicated and skillful management–the modern, efficient and profitable railroad that is the Union Pacific.

For the full review, see:
JOHN STEELE GORDON. “Tracks Across America.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., JUNE 11, 2011): C8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed in the part of the review quoted above:
Klein, Maury. Union Pacific: The Reconfiguration: America’s Greatest Railroad from 1969 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2011.

Obstacles to Curing Scurvy: A Deadly Experiment and Putting Theory Before Evidence

(p. 165) What was needed was some kind of distilled essence – an antiscorbutic, as the medical men termed it – that would be effective against scurvy but portable too. In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried (p. 166) to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods – bread and water chiefly – to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.
In roughly the same period, James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a more scientifically rigorous (and personally less risky) experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir – vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.