Original Reviews

          Richard Goldstein’s title is taken from the hit song “New York, New York, It’s a Helluva of a Town.” It was in a Broadway musical called On the Town, a salute to the US Navy, which opened in 1944. The Army also had its musical review This is the Army with songs by Irving Berlin and the Air Force, Winged Victory by Moss Hart. They were good public relations for the armed forces. Though, used as recruiting vehicles, they rarely touched on the downside of the war.

          New York was the major port from which troops embarked for Europe. Hence there were tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and marines stationed in the city for brief periods or for the duration, if carrying on support tasks for the military. They needed to be entertained and their entertainment was part of New York’s war effort.

The port also shipped out a massive amount of war materiel. Goldstein cites the statistic that in World War II, it took a ton of ammunition, food, clothing, medical equipment, and petroleum products to keep one soldier in frontline combat for a month.

          The Midwestern industrial heartland and California manufactured most of the planes, tanks, and ships used in World War II. But employment in New York’s garment industry, electronics, printing and publishing, as well as entertainment, did lift it out of the Depression. However, disadvantaged by these patterns of military procurement, New York had catching up to do after the war.

          The Brooklyn Navy Yard was one exception to New York’s light industry. It built the battleships Missouri, Iowa, and North Carolina and many smaller war craft. But it was mainly involved in repair and maintenance. At one time it employed 75,000 workers.

          New York was the country’s ceremonial city; Goldstein describes one of its grand military parades. In June 1945, Dwight Eisenhower was home on leave and led a motorcade through New York’s streets that was cheered by an estimated four million people. It was Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse, both in uniform, in Times Square, which became the cover of Life magazine’s special issue commemorating V-J Day.

          This home front had its thrills but also its miseries, often long hours of work and crowded living conditions.  And anger. Goldstein has a chapter on the Harlem riots that took place in 1943. They were part of wave of riots and looting in many US cities, sparked by continuing racial segregation and differential treatment in the armed forces. There are several versions of the initial incident which sparked the riots, but all agree that it was fueled by pent up anger and frustration. African-American leaders and New York mayor Fiorella La Guardia worked to quell the violence, which occurred over several days and nights.

Even the casts for the musical reviews like On the Town, advertising the contribution of our fighting men and women to the war, were largely segregated. Although to the credit of the entertainment industry, it began calling on known black musicians.

          Goldstein has a chapter on an incident involving a B-25 Mitchel bomber that flew into the Empire State Building in July 1945. The pilot, intending to land at Newark airport, mistook the East River for the Hudson and could not pull up fast enough to keep from slamming into the Empire State Building between its 78^th and 79^th floors. The crash ignited the plane’s aviation fuel and the ensuing fire spread to the next six flours. The building remained standing and nearly all of the occupations exited safely.

          Goldstein ends with a short piece about the entry into the New York harbor of the transport ship, Joseph V. Connally, two years later. It was carrying 6,200 coffins containing dead soldiers. The reader is reminded that New York, a vibrant city during the war and an active home front, was still far removed from the fighting, and its sorrow.

           Gagadeesh Gokhale is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank. This reviewer happily receives his Social Security check every month and is more dependent upon that revenue stream that he had planned.

          Gokhale contends that the capacity of the US economy to meet its Social Security future obligations is in doubt, and the federal government underestimates the seriousness of the situation. His modeling does a better job, he claims, of calculating the size of the deficits and when they will occur. He is also interested in the distribution of costs and benefits over different populations based on demographic and economic trends over the next 75 years.

          The demographic and economic considerations that go into any calculation of the future viability of Social Security are among others: the ratio of worker participation to the total working population, real wages – which have been declining recently, and the effects of changing age distribution.

The impact of retiring baby-boomers is one of his concerns. They have done well in the thirty-five plus years that they have been part of the labor force. In the next few years they will be receiving benefits. Since Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program, there will have to be an equally wealthy generation of workers paying into the trust fund to make income equal to payouts.

There won’t be. Falling real wages are in part the result of the declining productivity of the American worker. This is due to a slower growth in capital stock, which Gokhale argues, reflects the poor savings rates of the American economy. He doesn’t mention this but the growth of the service sector relative to manufacturing is also contributing to lower productivity increases, because there are fewer gains to be had.

          Contemplating their less certain retirement incomes, the baby boomers may decide to stay in the labor force longer. The age of retirement for Social Security is 66, soon to be 67. But having watched their savings disappear as a result of the recent banking and mortgage crises, they may choose to extend their working life and collect Social Security. That means they will continue to pay their payroll tax of 6.2%, which is, of course, matched by their employer. On the other hand, many unemployed or frustrated workers, close to retirement, may choose to retire at 62. Those who are working in physically taxing jobs may need to retire early.

          Growing up in the 1950s, I often heard the old adage: “Don’t invest in the stock market unless you can afford to lose the money.” One proposed reform will allow individuals the choice of establishing personal retirement accounts that would buy securities with money diverted from (carved out of) their Social Security payments. In fact several of the incentives to do so in the conservative reform packages make this an almost impossible-to-reject alternative. Conservative reformers also propose that the Social Security trust fund switch from exclusively government bonds to a mix of securities and bonds, private and public. Gokhole agrees.

          This ‘privatizing’ of Social Security would reduce payroll taxes. Remembering that Social Security is pay-as-you-go, the federal government would have to divert money from its general revenues to keep existing benefits going. And the cost to the general taxpayer would be huge.

          Gokhale ponders other options for reducing the Social Security shortfall in addition to partially privatizing it. One proposal is to pay off the program’s ‘legacy costs’ by reinstating the estate tax and diverting that revenue directly to Social Security. These legacy costs arose because the benefits awarded to retirees before 1970 were in excess of their contributions. Another suggestion would be to tax health insurance and other non-taxed benefits that have eroded Social Security revenues. Roughly 10% of payrolls is now exempt from payroll taxes.

          Neither is likely to happen. But then neither is the privatization and eventual demise of Social Security. As has often been said, Social Security is the “third rail of American politics.” Touch it and you’re a goner. Let’s make sure the electricity stays on.

           Men to Boys argues that men are refusing to grow up. Boyfriends are stalling about getting married, those wedded having families. Late teens avoid entering the workforce. Men hide out in their garages rather than being a father to their children. And this contemporary immaturity is being fed by our commercial culture. Admitting to overstatement, Gary Cross has provoked the reader to think more carefully about the adolescent adult male.

          The unwillingness of males to face maturity, Cross argues, has been a long time in coming. Men of his father’s age, who grew up during World War II, faced the daunting prospect of living up to the accomplishments of the “greatest generation.” War makes men out of boys, for sure. The next generation of baby boomers, like him, did not always respect that model. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, they proposed to refashion patriarchy and much else that was wrong with American life. The author’s sons, he’s talking now about the third generation, intend to stay clear of male adulthood for as long as possible.

          Cross uses Hugh Hefner as his quintessential boy/man. And what better evidence than the magazine that made him rich and famous, Playboy. In his ‘den’ and in the company of all those Playboy bunnies, life could remain one of pleasure without responsibility or attachments. Hefner signaled an interesting trend in consumerism; it was now a man’s prerogative to decide what his penthouse should look like. Many males of the next generation had trouble imagining their penthouses. So they took off for Woodstock or Europe, in their own way prolonging their meander to adulthood.

          Cross depends heavily on radio, films, and television shows for his evidence. For example “Father Knows Best,” popular in the late ‘40s, is about an Olympian patriarch, hoping to fix the ordinary problems that arise in a family of three kids with some combination of sarcasm and ideas from progressive parenting. Dad seems astute in comparison to the three dippy kids, who try to get around the patriarch’s ‘wise’ decisions.

          That wasn’t the common response of the student radicals to their dad’s generation. Moral disdain for one’s elders was nothing new, but this generation busily went about fashioning a new man whose character was rooted in the popular humanistic philosophy. Hanging over their lives was ‘participation’ in the Vietnam War after our involvement deepened in 1964. That was good reason to dodge the consequences of being ‘over-eighteen’ (the draft) for as long as possible.

          Cross mentions one important difference between the Woodstock and earlier generations of boys. The Woodstock generation had more disposable income and their parents were allowing them to extend the leisure of their childhood even beyond the late teens. The combination of consumerism and leisure became themed: ‘the Pepsi Generation.’ This hugely successful ad campaign appealed to the pride of youth and peached their distinctiveness. Belonging to the Pepsi Generation provided at least a temporary substitute for professional achievement and other markers of maturity. The boy-man had become a respectable, central character on Madison Avenue. 

          Having convinced us of his evidence for childish foolishness, Cross makes an even more compelling point about video games. Video games, he contends, blur the distinction between adults and kids. They don’t have an ‘expiration date.’ And men continue to play the same video games with the absorption and regularity of teenaged boys. The resulting daily dose of violence, it is argued, leads boys to display an adult-like aggressiveness and men to exhibit a juvenile pugnacity.

          We adult males have had to contend with the fashionable, androgynous look of men modeling underwear – thanks to Calvin Klein. And more recently to the increasingly youthful celebrity look of smooth bodies and teenaged six packs. How can we hold on to that boy-man look in our 30s and 40s? We can’t, of course. But many of us have shed our grownup suits and ties.

           Mark Neely persuades us that historians have it wrong about the unlimited destructiveness of the American Civil War. Certainly the war was both destructive of southern cities and deadly for those civilians caught in its cross fire. But it was not the ‘total warfare’ associated with the twentieth century. For the most part belligerents observed the laws and customs of warfare.

          Those rules had been codified in the midst of the war by a law professor, Francis Lieber, at the instance of the Lincoln Administration. General Order #100, as it was referred to, was then imposed by the Commander-in-Chief on the Union army. Though limiting abuses of civilians, property, and prisoners of war, Lieber allowed some leeway, including retaliation.

          Viewing the Civil War from the perspective of Vietnam, recent scholarship has taken an interest in irregular warfare, particularly in Missouri. Guerrilla warfare quickly becomes ugly. In 1863, a Union general ordered the execution of ten Confederate sympathizers when a Union agent and informer was kidnapped and presumably shot. Jeff Davis then demanded that the general who had given the order, John McNeil, be handed over to the Confederacy for military trial. If that didn’t happen, one hundred Union soldiers (later changed to officers) would be shot in retaliation.

          With a multiplier of ten, this could quickly have gotten out of hand. But both sides cooled it. Florida’s Edmund Kirby Smith, who subsequently took charge of Confederate forces in the Trans-Mississippi Department, did not press the matter. And threats of retaliation were forgotten in the face of both Unionist and Confederate desire to keep the situation in Missouri from descending into slaughter.

The Union response to the Fort Pillow Massacre in April 1864, Neely argues, was another instance of observing the limits of warfare. The incident involved the Confederate execution of captured African-American soldiers serving in the Union army and their white officers, with a threat to continue doing so.  A Congressional investigation and much anguish on the part of the Lincoln Administration followed. But no retaliation. Though Lincoln decided to end prisoner exchange until such time as the Confederates changed their policy.

Suspending prisoner exchange after Fort Pillow, however, created huge prisoner-of-war populations impounded in temporary facilities, like Andersonville, Georgia. Photographs of liberated Union soldiers, now literally sin and bones, found their way into the Northern press. 

There was an immediate outcry for retaliation. A Senate resolution, in effect, would have led to prisoners in Union hands being starved to death. The resolution never got passed, in part because of the courageous campaign of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. A radical Republican and abolitionist, he nevertheless preached restraint to his fellow radicals. Had the resolution passed, it is unlikely that the Lincoln Administration would ever have starved Confederate prisoners. But Lincoln, seeking re-election, faced voters sick of the war and not interested in restraint.

          It is often claimed that the Civil War with its 620,000 military deaths was the most deadly war in American history. Neely points out that this is misleading. The figure combines both sides and includes non-combat deaths. Union dead are estimated to have been 360,000 and combat deaths 135,000. That is compared to 407,000 U.S. combat deaths in World War II. Both wars were about four years in length. The wounded had better treatment in World War II. There was almost no chance of dying from the diseases that had plagued large field armies prior to the twentieth century. The Germans respected the rules of war and for the most part did not execute prisoners. Nor for the most part did we.

          Oddly, Neely doesn’t make what is really the best argument for the American Civil War’s ‘limit’ in comparison with the barbarism of the Second World War. In the American Civil War there were civilians killed and cities destroyed but nothing in comparison to both in World War II.

          While there is much interest in the Civil War and World War II, World War I (The Great War) is less well served by the publishing industry. The Remains of Company D is a notable exception. Nelson centers his chronicle of Company D on his grandfather. John Nelson and Company D arrived in France in March 1918. He was badly wounded by German machine gun fire on July 19 and remained in military hospitals for the rest of the war. While he never talked about his war experience, Nelson notes that rather than his celebrating his birthday, each year he commemorated the day that he was nearly killed in a wheat field near Soissons.

          The most common conception of the First World War is that it got bogged down into trench warfare with periodic and deadly assaults and counter assaults that got nowhere but managed to get huge numbers casualties. The generals are faulted for not being more imaginative. While these notions may be part of the truth, Nelson tells a much different and more nuanced story of the American Expeditionary Force and in particular Company D.

          The elder Nelson’s war was a war of mechanized and industrialized killing. Not the first war in which it was used, the machine gun – not the riffle – was the decisive weapon of infantry warfare. But there were also tanks, air support for ground troops including reconnaissance planes, heavy artillery, flamethrowers, and hand grenades. Though first used in the American Civil War, land mines were less often mentioned but lots of barbed wire. Motorized transportation was less important; troops were moved by trains and walked from one sector to another.

          Poison gas was used by both sides, several different kinds: tear gas, chlorine, phosgene (Chloroformyl chlorine), and mustard gas. It was debilitating, and mustard gas particularly so. But rarely fatal. Gas was not used in World War II, even though both sides engaged in ‘all out warfare.’

          There was considerable enthusiasm for the war amongst young American males, despite what must have been widespread knowledge of its deadly character. The draft mobilized all able-bodied males between the ages of 21 and 30. But younger and older men could and did volunteer. (My father enlisted in 1917, just before his eighteenth birthday, with his parent’s consent.)  Nelson quotes letters home to friends from soldiers in the trenches urging them to enlist immediately so as not to miss the action. Often those enthusiastic letters were published in hometown papers. New World democracy was returning to Europe to defeat the forces of autocracy.

          By the summer of 1918, when Company D’s fight began, Germany’s Austrian ally was collapsing, as was the German home front. And the American intervention was beginning to alter the battlefield situation. Still the Germans were able to mount a spring offensive that brought them forty miles closer to Paris.

Even though many continued to fight to their death, the Boche, a pejorative tag, were giving up in large numbers. Tragically after having endured long hours under bombardment, American troops went ‘berserk,’ frequently killing German prisoners-of-war.  

We learned much about this phenomenon during our war in Vietnam, although in the case of World War I, going berserk generally did not involve killing civilians. World War I is different from our wars since then in that both sides respected civilian status. This despite the ‘Belgium atrocities’ rumored to have been committed by German soldiers. As with returning soldiers in later wars, World War I veterans manifested what we call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They called it ‘shell shock.’

          Though giving the reader perhaps too much of the details of battle, James Nelson provides a ‘first-hand’ account of the nature of warfare in the early twentieth century. He salutes the army in which his grandfather served. Rapidly assembled and trained, it was a remarkable fighting force.

           The Acropolis in Athens and particularly the Parthenon is one of those places that, no matter how glorious the anticipation, the viewer is never disappointed. Mary Beard’s book is both a guide to the site and a short history of its renown over the millennia.

At the foot of the Acropolis a modern museum with a magnificent view of the Parthenon stands almost empty. It was built in anticipation of the return of the “Elgin marbles” in time for the Olympics in 2004. That never happened.

          Thomas Bruce, the Seventh Earl of Elgin, was a British diplomat who held the position of British envoy to the Porte – the Ottoman Empire of which Greece was part – from 1799 to 1803. He obtained from the Porte an agreement that allowed him and his agents to draw, measure, put up scaffolding, and make plaster casts of the sculpture that remained on the standing parts of the building. He was also given permission to take away “pieces” of stone scattered about. Chisels, saws, ropes, and pulleys would remove a good portion of the sculpture on both porticos and most of its various stone friezes. 

          This was an entrepreneurial venture. Elgin subsequently offered to sell the sculpture he had carted away from the Acropolis to the British nation. After considerable debate, Parliament agreed. Although not without some hesitation about the legality of the removal. The good parliamentarians were assured, however, that the statues were better protected in a British museum than on a hill in a remote and poor province of the Ottoman Empire. Besides the French had shown an interest in becoming “protectors” of the classical tradition and hence its art.

          Mary Beard suggests that there is some credence to this safe haven argument. The protracted Greek war for independence, a few years later, caused considerable damage to the buildings on the Acropolis.

          In 1986 a huge reconstruction began and the progress is obvious if you visit the site. The Greeks are restoring the Parthenon to its condition after its almost destruction in 1687. In that year the Acropolis was bombarded by the Venetians, igniting the gun power stored in the building by the Turkish army.

          The contemporary reconstruction raises the interesting question: To which Parthenon should the building be restored? It was built in the fifth century BC but the original structure had been severely damaged by a fire in the third century AD. The mostly wooden statue of Athena would not have survived that fire. The roof was also destroyed, and when restored, it covered only the interior space, leaving the outer colonnade open to the sky. It eventually became a Byzantine church and the interior much altered, and finally a mosque. So there have been many Parthenons. Beard says that the Greek government’s decision to reconstruct the original version and remove all subsequent accruements is “turning a blind eye” to a longer history.

          Back to London and the issue of the Elgin marbles. They arrived with a patina which was literally scrubbed off in order to reveal their white marble. The Greeks painted their sculpture periodically, perhaps a skin color with colorful highlights. Or, and more likely, they were painted in bright reds, blues, and yellows. They, like all classical sculptures that arrived in European museums, were without their coats of paint. The modern aesthetic preference negated their being re-painted as part of their restoration and preservation.

          Beard recapitulates arguments for the Elgin marbles remaining in London. All Europeans are, after all, heirs to the Greek classical age, not just the present-day, largely Slav population of Greece. And after all, the bulk of the classical art now in European museums got there approximately the same way as the Parthenon’s marbles. Also the move would be from a London museum to one in at the foot of the Acropolis. So the Parthenon’s sculptures would not quite make it to that reunion with the ruin.

         Richard Wrangham is a biological anthropologist, a scholarly specialization that looks at human evolution in the context of other primates. In Catching Fire, he seeks to go understand the fossil record of human ancestory by looking at contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures.

The manipulation of fire began much earlier, he argues, than generally assumed. The genus Homo was already using fire 1.9 million years ago. And our extinct ancestors, Homo Erectus, cooked their food.

          Wrangham suggests how cooking foods was adaptive. Cooking allowed early humans to survive and reproduce better. To support his hypothesis he looks at the raw food fade several years back. Its enthusiasts ate mostly raw plants. A diet of raw food produced the desired weight loss but also irregular menstrual cycles and hence lowered reproductive success.

These raw food faddists gathered their food in grocery stores; the ancient hunger-gatherers who existed on raw plant food spent precious hours and energy foraging in the wild. Very rarely would raw meat have been consumed, mostly soft body parts and blood.

          Cooking food had numerous advantages over raw foods. Wrangham explains that cooking concentrates food nutrients and calories. It gelatinizes starch making it more digestible. Cooked foods also require less chewing time. Since digestion is an energy using activity; cooking foods cuts down on that expenditure.

Our digestive system has evolved to take advantage of cooked foods. We have weaker jaw bones and smaller teeth than closely related primates. We keep food in our stomachs for relatively less time. We can survive with smaller colons because cooking makes roughage in food more palatable.

          Cooking also reduces the level of toxins in food. And our bodies have adjusted to that detoxification. The downside of that is that we are more vulnerable to harmful bacteria found in meat. Hence we are told to cook our meat or use other ways of preserving it – drying, or adding acid, or salt.

Archeological evidence of evolutionary changes in the human species resulting from using fire in food preparation are hard to come by because the soft body parts involved in digestion do not survive. But evidence of cooking can be inferred from anatomical differences when compared with other primates.

These adaptive changes in anatomy, Wrangham proposes, occurred relatively sudden and were substantial rather than incremental. He doesn’t mention Stephen Jay Gould and his theory of punctuated equilibrium, but he sounds like Gould. Human species have experienced relative stability for long periods of time, interspersed with shorter periods of evolutionary change. One such instance of relatively rapid evolutionary change may have been initiated by the adoption of cooking our meals.

I was particularly taken with the proposition that babies could chew and digest food softened by cooking fires. So cooked food allowed mothers to wean their young earlier. Earlier weaning meant that mothers could recover from birthing more quickly. And crowd more babies into their reproductive years. More babies, more female survivals into adulthood and hence even more babies.

One particular organ that benefited from the greater concentration of food nutrients and calories as the result of cooking was the brain. Because we were able to divert energy from chewing and digestion, we could route the resources into larger brains. And indeed the increasing cranial capacity of the genus, Homo, Wrangham argues, occurred after the widespread consumption of cooked foods. Many aspects of human social evolution are the result of brain development and hence cooked food.

            As Wrangham proceeds, one is struck with how much his stories resemble ‘just so’ stories. In the case of animals, just so stories explain how a unique anatomical feature or behavior originated from some force, often magical. How the whale got its small throat which can only accommodate small prey. How the camel got his hump(s), etc. One can remain a bit dubious of Wrangham’s just so stores and yet recognize how important the cooking of food was to human evolution.