Category Archives: book

mumbai through a glass darkly

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I swore yesterday to try to write nothing about Mumbai, besides linking to helpMumbai.com and NDTV. Certainly you should first read the reflections of Suketu Mehta, who I met at Nieman two years ago and thought of immediately this week. But I thought of something simple to bring to the party – spurred by  the 1982 film I finally saw  for the first time Friday night, which suddenly felt sort of timely. What would the guy above be feeling this week? (I’m not the only one asking, it seems.)

Above, you see Ben Kingsley as the young lawyer coaching fellow Indian-descent South Africans in the ways of satyagraha: later, in clips much less available, he strenuously opposes partition. But what did he say on the subject? I wondered.  I guessed rightly that better scholars than I had asked the same, and found what I was looking for here and here. (No doubt there’s even better than that by Indian scholars, but I’m still in baby steps here.)  Gandhi particularly saw the trouble that the two-state solution would mean for Bengal and for Kashmir – and he visited the latter, he wrote, he was heartened by the co-mingling of cultures, where acolytes of all religions had gathered to host him:

We have drunk the poison of mutual hatred and so this nectar of fraternization tastes all the sweeter and the sweetness should never wear out. … In the present exuberance one hears also the cry of “Long Live Hindustan and Pakistan,” from the joint throats of the Hindus and the Muslims.

But the political realities of each component elite (I’m not qualified to go into detail) crossed with British hurry to be rid of the expensive Raj – and the result is actually well limned in Deepa Mehta’s 1998 film, which led my fiancee to pledge war against all things British.

Given this week, I’m guessing Gandhiji would no longer do the same. We can only hope that the arc of history does bend toward justice – even if it’s as slow as he suggested in 1921:

gandhi1921“As yet I only see as through a glass darkly, and therefore have to carry conviction by slow and laborious processes, and then, too, not always with success.”

Superman vs. the VFW?

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In the department of stuff you come across while looking for something else, I found this radio show (the link brings on streaming audio). Click, and you can listen to a “thousands of GI’s” protesting “racial discrimination in state hiring,” and a kind of unusual ally has their backs: Superman, who flies in to stop the state troopers ordered to fire on the vets. Not unusual, it turns out, for the Superman radio show of 1940-1951, whose stories never appeared in comics and which also featured Superman vs. The Clan of the Fiery Cross (also known as the KKK).

This is all old news to true geeks, and doubtless other better writers than I, like  Michael Chabon. But I stumbled across it while poking around for something almost no one remembers (sort of my specialty): the American Veterans Committee.

AVC was a short-lived World War II veterans’ organization whose slogan was “Citizens First, Veterans Second.” And that story about the veterans protest was grounded in the same reality that gave AVC nearly a million members at its start.

By mid-1946, when that story ran,  literally 12,000 active-duty soldiers were busy protesting at bases around the world, accusing the Truman administrationof dragging its feet in getting them home. One famously told Truman, “Give us our independence or go home to yours!”  AVC, founded by the fellow below (who is not, as he seems, Orson Welles), had on its board civil rights icon Medgar Evers and Howard Zinn, among others. Many were writers, like Benjamin Bradlee and E.J. Kahn, and doubtless others found their way to that Superman show. In September of ’46, the AVC issued a special commendation to the producers of the show for its quiet linking of veterans with “social tolerance.”

bolteun

Actually, the VFW had issued a similar award the month before, though it was for promoting “the American way” – code for crushing “commie” stuff like those  “tolerant” Superman shows, which shut down in 1951 in favor of the commie-busting TV version.  No place in the new Cold War for such thoughts — or for a veterans group that saw itself as composed of angelic troublemakers (e.g.  sleeping in L.A. streets as a housing protest).  By the time the 1954  Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency tamed Superman completely, the AVC had mostly collapsed under a not-unfamiliar perfect storm of personality clashes, sectarian-left noise (snooze) and McCarthyism. Leaving veterans of that war to choose between the American Legion and the VFW, as odious to them as to many OEF/OIF vets now.  Its founders basically did neither, choosing instead journalism, or film, or think tanks like the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.

What happened next is still happening: some will be in the book. Stay tuned for some character sketches.

But I wonder if it would be too much of a cheat to lede my “necessary war” chapter with that fictional scene of “thousands of GIs.” (What do you think?)

stray news, necessary wars and fantasy presidents

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It’s been an odd week, since I last posted: and now an odd Thanksgiving, with attention split between the chapter I’m working on (more on that in a bit), family stuff, and the desire to check the latest from Mumbai, as one of those surreally-huge crises threatens to split the world and our brains. Below are some quick links, in lieu of a full post.

Why am I otherwise AWOL? I think it’s like those first weeks working on the Civil War chapter, when I was struck dumb by the hugeness of its pain. Now, writing about what most call The Good War,  I’m similarly cowed.  I do think my chapter’s title will borrow instead from Samuel Hynes, who writes and speaks of a “necessary war,”  as much of an oxymoron as that still feels.  (While I can’t claim to have come up with a satisfactory alternative, that phrase that still feels a contradiction — the tool of the Mumbai gunmen, not sensible people.)

I’ll provide a little more later, but meanwhile:

  • The “Hempstead 15,” that group of Iraq vets and activists arrested October 15 at Hofstra University, have secured equal treatment for their cases by the Nassau County DA’s office. Which is to say that they’ve received the adjournment in contemplation of dismissal (ACD) that was once standard for  direct-action types,  before the Patriot Act: further legal action will continue, with a lawsuit by Sgt. Nick Morgan, whose face was badly damaged when he was trampled, and with the court-martial of Sgt. Mathis Chiroux, who still faces trial for his May refusal to deploy to Iraq.
  • sarah_hale_portraitAt my other shop, an interesting riff on the woman who gave us the Thanksgiving holiday (and Vassar College), Sarah Josepha Buell Hale. While fact-checking the piece, I also found out that Hale’s son went to West Point, and suggested a poem by one of my almost-characters on her magazine: Edgar Poe, he son wrote, “is seen as a man of talent here, but he is too mad a poet to like mathematics.” That line could title a biography.
  • On the good-news front, the reviews of Milk are even better than I’d hoped. Milk, writes David Denby in the New Yorker,  “comes across as an idiosyncratic man, a rule-bound New York Jew who finds his calling in the beautiful and sensually relaxed Mediterranean-style city.” This Bronx shiksa felt the same way for a few years of my life.
  • As for Mumbai, I will not make the mistake of many whose business it is to chat, and default to some usual position — e.g. Fox positing a delay in closing Guantanamo or the rumors of Obama-staff presence that led normally sober media temporarily astray. But here’s the helpMumbai Page, for any Mumbaikers or travelers who might stumble here and want to know how to get/give concrete assistance.
  • And because it’s Thanksgiving week, I’ll give in to the temptation to end with a video joke — but of my geeky sort, which was fortunately shared by enough others to make this clip a Youtube favorite:

Author on Sally Hemings: “she would have been on a coin”

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Reed Annette Gordon03
A few months ago Annette Gordon-Reed,  professor, attorney and historian, launched her new book The Hemingses of Monticello. The book comes four years after DNA evidence finally quieted most critics that had claimed that Thomas Jefferson couldn’t possibly be the father of the children of the enslaved Sally Hemings.  (Click the first link for video of her conversation with Charlie Rose.)

A while back,  I caught up with Gordon-Reed for a brief chat— about history and women’s sexual power;  how working at Rikers Island prepared her for controversy;  and how it felt to raise a 15-year-old daughter while writing about a teenager who became pregnant by a President.
First of all,  thanks for an incredible book.  I think of it almost like a painting — it has all these layers and layers, and we kind of watch you apply each one. With each, the picture gets clearer and clearer.

It looks from the outside that  you’ve reinvented yourself a few times, like most women at this point in our lives.  On the way to becoming a breakthrough historian, you went from ow did you go from the uptown New York law firm Cahill ,Gordon & Reindel to general counsel for the New York City Board of Corrections?

Starting out at the firm, I learned how to work hard, and how to do the right thing. But then I saw an ad in the newspaper for this small, obscure agency.  What the Bd of Corrections does is oversee the Dept of Corrections, and what we did is draw up minimum standards for the treatment of inmates.

In addition to helping set standards for religious observances, and so forth, my main job was to hear inmate appeals, for disciplinary hearings – which meant that I spent a lot of time going to Rikers Island.

That’ll change your life, right there.

Especially then, when we were hovering between 19,000 and 20,000 inmates at Rikers and area jails. It was eye-opening, though  also in many ways frustrating and depressing — to see so many young people behind bars.

No wonder you decided to jump to academia.

Well, I’d always wanted to be  a writer. I tried to do it as a lawyer, but I couldn’t make the time.  Becoming a law professor gave me the chance. I’s  thought about getting a doctorate in history —but I couldnt tell my husband, after he moved here with me from Southern California, thanks, I’m gonna stop working.    Being a law professor, you’re supposed to write and publish. I thought about writing about the law, but then I went back to my first love — history.

Did your skills as a lawyer prepare you to handle the controversies around the Jefferson and Hemings families?

I knew that Jefferson is, will always be, in some ways a contentious figure. Especially after I decided to take on what people have written abt Sally Hemings. Continue reading →

The XX factor in Obama’s transition

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On my way to New York today, where I plan on seeing Jeffrey Renard Allen give a reading in my old ‘hood and cover tomorrow’s hearing for the Iraq vets that make up the Hempstead 15. But to wrap up the election thread for this week, here’s the news blog I wrote for WVFC, since I really do think that the presence of women in Obama’s team has the capacity to be quietly transformational. (For video for all of the women below, you have to click on my original post.)

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It’s been eight years since we has such a new slate of advisors to look at, and ponder what their role will be in the changes afoot. The women below come from a range of backgrounds, from corporate boardrooms (several on the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women) to California classrooms and governor’s mansions.) It would be foolish to make generalizations about a government with so many representatives of The New Menopause in key positions.

But we can dream — that our concerns will certainly not be left behind, and that midlife’s particular mix of idealism, sense of humor, deep worry, and renewed energy can both add power to the new policies being developed and ensure that they’re grounded by real-world, physical realities.

More details later, but here’s an initial honor roll, with as much video as felt appropriate:

At the helm: One of the transition team’s three co-chairs is Chicago attorney Valerie Jarrett, 51, CEO of The Habitat Company (seen above(.  A Newsweek profile in May noted: “Jarrett got her start working for Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor. Her grandfather ran the Chicago Housing Authority in the 1940s. Obama has long turned to her for advice. When he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate, he first had to convince Michelle and Jarrett that it was a good idea. He’s been seeking her counsel ever since.”

Show him the money:  Speaking of the governor’s mansion, Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm, 49, (above with First Lady Michelle Obama) is a core member of  the newly-announced team of economic advisers. Granholm joins not just Warren Buffet but
Laura D’Andrea Tyson, dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors;  Anne Mulcahy, 57, Chairman and CEO, Xerox;
and Hyatt exec Penny Pritzker. 49.

    In the boardroom:

    Granholm, who was mentioned as a dark-horse vice-presidential candidate, is also on the transition team’s Advisory Board, which also includes Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, 51,  who was profiled by Newsmix in July as a veep prospect; Susan Rice (above), 43, Brookings Institution fellow and former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs; and former EPA chair Carol Browner (below), the longest-serving administrator in the
    history of the agency, staying through both terms of the Clinton
    presidency.

    The long arms of the law: Women helping power the transition’s legal team include  general counsel (and Harvard Law school classmate) Cassandra Butts, former senior vice president for domestic policy at the Center for American
    Progress and senior adviser to Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.);  Lisa Brown, the Executive Director of the American Constitution Society, and Melody Barnes, 43, of the Center for American Progress as co-directors of agency review; and Clinton adviser Christine A. Varney, 52, as counsel for personnel.

    That different voice: Get used to another face next to the familiar Obama spokespersons Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod:  Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, 40-year-old Stephanie Cutter (seen above dueling with Chris Matthews during the campaign). During the Clinton Administration, Cutter worked as deputy communications director in both the White House and U.S. EPA.

    We at WVFC now know we have to get busy deciding who on this list we should try to interview and profile. We’d welcome readers’ comments — both about who we should talk to, and what questions you want to ask them when we do!

    — Chris L.

    So much for the loneliness of the long-distance runner

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    National Novel Writing Month? Me?

    Normally, I’m one of those skeptical of the enterprise, the idea that a jillion people checking in online and pushing out 50,000 words had anything to do with producing quality work. Still, over the years I’ve thought of doing it, worried about it, then as I put aside the idea that fiction is what I do, mostly cheered on a friend or two from way on the sidelines.

    But now, if I’m going to fulfill my contract with University of California Press, and deliver a 110,000 word nonfiction narrative by January 1 – desperate measures are called for. So when I got a note from the online community Red Room about participating in NaNoWriMo, I had one question: “Does it have to be fiction?”

    The FAQ says nothing about nonfiction, so I decided to take the plunge.

    After all, I just stopped calling myself a “novelist” three years ago. My book has plots, characters, more themes than you can shake a stick at and is as vivid as I can make it considering I can’t make shit up.

    I’m hoping that adding the structure and mass mutual cheerleading of NaNoWriMo to my daily practice will add to my determination to produce against all odds – with little else that matters. I have six chapters, a prologue and an epilogue nowhere near drafted – and that doesn’t count fact-checking and revision. It’s still impossible. I’m still determined to do it. If it takes a jillion writers in a jillion cities, well, I never did put much stock in all that stuff about the loneliness of the long-distance runner.

    “the illusion that they have rights”

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    Many people I know, especially veterans (even antiwar vets), have mixed feelings about Lieutenant Ehren Watada, whose trial was blocked today by a federal judge. Some vets saw it as a betrayal of those under his command, others that the war was best resisted from within, For other, including myself, the ambivalence stems from  the way his original decision — as the first Army officer to refuse to deploy to Iraq — was first taken up by (admittedly hard-working and sincere) front groups for front groups for the ossified sectarian left (whose militant rhetoric makes most of us giggle these days). All of which made it harder for many to simply look at what the 27-year-old college and OCS graduate was actually saying, about what he still considers an illegal order. Thank god for non-front groups like CCW and Vets for Peace, from whom I got the news today.

    Those of you who’ve checked this page out more than once (why? Please comment, and lemme know!) know I’ve mostly been mired in the previous century, and mostly enmeshed in the lives of the Civil War vets who years later spoke out — opposing the annexation of what would become Watada’s home state, and joining in a grand effort to stop the Philippine War. “It is nothing but a wanton stretch of power. It is
    lust for power and greed for land veneered with the tawdriness of false humanity,” wrote one, by then a U.S. senator as well as a survivor of the Battles of Shiloh and Spotsylvania. His sentiment echoes Watada’s, but the quote that gave this post a title is from far earlier, because I think it’s more relevant to what Watada faces next.

    The judge in the case, Benjamin Settle, only dismissed three of the five counts against Watada:

    Settle barred the military from retrying Watada on charges of missing his redeployment to Iraq, taking part in a news conference and participating in a Veterans for Peace national convention.

    But the court did not rule out the possibility that the Army, after considering legal issues, could retry Watada on two counts of conduct unbecoming an officer resulting from his media interviews.

    Watada’s attorney sensibly told the press that he hopes to get those charges dropped. That could be done without explicit vindication of Watada’s position. But part of me wants to see that second trial, if only to prove Sylvanus Thayer wrong.

    Thayer, the “Father of West Point,” in 1819 blamed a early mutiny at the academy on “the erroneous and unmilitary impressions of the Cadets that they have rights to defend.”

    Someone should write a book about soldiers and vets who hold on to that “erroneous” impression. Oh right, I forgot.

    Congratulations, Lt. Watada. When can I give you a call?

    while I was gone

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    That’s also the title of a terrific, underrated novel by Sue Miller, which kept me up reading a few nights during my long interregnum from this blog. Few writers — maybe Tolstoy or Lynne Sharon Schwartz –  combine as well gripping suspense and an incredible amount of thoughtfulness about marriage.

    I’d kept thinking I would do an entry when I was finally free of my the 19th century — but like Marx or Baudelaire, I’m finding that exit is taking far longer than I’d hoped.

    Part of the delay happened because my responsibilities at my paid blog gig changed, in a way that takes up more of my time and brain space than I like. (See the posts following this one for details.)

    But the loong gestation was perhaps more the nature of the material itself — including two frigging new characters that nosed in insistently, kind of at the last minute. Just as I was about to write, “Dissent from soldiers was confined to diaries then,” along came..

    Benjamin Grierson (left), longtime commander of the Buffalo Soldiers, and Silas Soule (below right),  who came from one of those fine raging-abolitionist families (his brother named after William Lloyd Garrison).

    I’d thought of pasting, and will at the end of this post, Soule’s testimony to an Army inquiry about Colorado’s Sand Creek Massacre, which he answers in classic soldier’s understatement.

    Were these families, women and children, scalped and mutilated?

    Yes, sir. They were.

    Soule was far less understated in a letter to a fellow soldier:  “I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.

    Continue reading →

    older cities of dreams

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    Which of these venerable, beloved by artists (and thus too costly for most), old streets came first?

    Philly’s Old City, where I sit now (in a cafe I already love)?

    Or its jealous cousin in my hometown?

    I suspect the latter, due to the Dutch assault on the Lenape land predating the days of William Penn.

    However, both bow down to their ancestor above, in the country of *my* particular forefathers. I’d love to live there too.

    of body counts and word counts

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    The quietude here has been almost a good sign: I’m finally sucked in by the book.  I walk to the gym thinking about Donelson Caffery and Lewis Douglass, sleep followed by the ghost of Bierce. I then have to remember to work in the data I sort of started with, about desertion and dissent and the size and strength of armies.

    Now, when I look at Civil War photos of famous officers, their facial hair looks painted into the faces of children – just as I felt about this one of Bierce in uniform, or the one at right (after the war ended, age 22).

    I’ve also been haunted by the way Walt Whitman, via his biographer Roy Morris, explained the way the last two years of the Civil War were fought:

    Grant was a new type of warrior for a new kind of war, one based less on grand heroics and noble gestures than on the simple ciphering of sums he had learned in his brother’s dry-goods store. With the war now entering its fourth spring, the North had roughly twice the number of soldiers as the South, and the new Union general-in-chief intended, with Abraham Lincoln’s enthusiastic backing, to improve those odds by forcibly subtracting, one by one, the country’s dwindling stock of defenders. When enough Rebels had been subtracted, the North would win. It was as simple – and brutal — as that.

    None of the pounds of Civil War lit and film I’d consumed for this chapter, none of the dry monographs or discussions on H-WAR listservs had sung that song so clearly to me. And it brought first to my mind Vietnam and body counts, the official obsession with the number of enemy dead.

    I took a very deep breath.  Then I decided to try to fact-check: While I count Roy Morris as a personal avatar (nearly as much as Adam Hochschild) and adore Whitman, that kind of connection felt almost too easy. And after shaking the dust off my ears from the arguments of Civil War historians (e.g. “Grant wasn’t the butcher they said he was!”),  I was only more confused. I tried to call some trusted vets, like my friend Capt. Montalvan, for some insight, but they were all at the conventions. So I kept digging and found the shit: “The American Way of Operational Art: Attrition or Maneuver?“,  by a commander/prof at the Army War College at Fort Leavenworth. And lo and behold, perhaps I should have trusted Roy Morris.

    While everyone admired the brilliant maneuver campaigns conducted by Lee, they adopted the techniques of the bloody but successful campaign of attrition waged by Grant. Professor Weigley concluded that “Despite the veneration of R.E. Lee
    in American military hagiography, it was U.S. Grant whose theories of strategy actually prevailed.” ….Operational planning focused on how to best wear down the enemy’s
    vast human resources. Our well known attrition concept in Vietnam  that relied on higher “body counts” as a measure of success needs no further description.”

    There you have it, from the Army War College. Not just from the old poet medic, whose boyfriend broke after Antietam and begged for discharge, and said years later when asked if he ever thought about the wounded he tended back then: “I have never left them.”

    (As for the word counts in the sub title: As thrilled as I am to be dreaming the book, I’m simultaneously watching my word count and worrying. So far 4500 words on this chapter, and I’m just now at New Years’ 1863. No wonder Frederic Tuten once called me a graphomaniac).