101: David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity

David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity both updates and spatializes classical Marxist theory and situates studies of place within the context of post-1973 global capitalism.  He argues that postmodernity is a historical-geographical condition that is an aesthetic response to the crisis of overaccumulation.  Throughout, he emphasizes the continuity from modernity to postmodernity, the connection between new cultural and economic practices, the post-1973 development of flexible capital accumulation on a global scale, and new ways of thinking about time-space compression.  Some of his main points:

• modernity was at once transient, fleeting, contingent AND eternal and immutable; the project of Modernism was effectively the last hurrah of the Enlightenment project: to create a scientific narrative of chaos that could both rationalize internal social fragmentation within a narrative of Progress AND break from the past
• Postmodernism, on the other hand, celebrates difference, fragmentation, and the vernacular; it is spatial and pragmatic rather than temporal and abstract, and it revels in chaos and complexity.  As opposed to the Modernist city, the PoMo city is not divided into functional zones but instead develops by its own logic into something apolitically beautiful in its chaos.
• Both Modernism and Postmodernism are dialectically related to their particular "regime of accumulation," the particular configuration of capitalists, workers, state employees, financiers, and other political-economic agents that stabilizes the net product between consumption and accumulation.  In the first half of the 20th century, Fordism kept the regime of accumulation stable by slowly shaping global mass-production and mass-consumption into a core/periphery model with the US in the center.  

63: George Rogers Taylor's The Transportation Revolution

In The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860, George Rogers Taylor argues that transportation played a key role in the shift from a "colonially oriented economy" to a "national economy" by 1860 by facilitating the shift from an "extractive-commercial" economy to an industrial one.  Because the US is so vast, revolutions in transportation and communication were the only way to connect the country enough to facilitate the massive growth in the later decades of the 19th century.

This book was published in 1951, and it provides a clear, readable survey of the development of the various transportation networks in the US.  Taylor builds his history out of histories of the various transportation modes, economic data from government sources, photos from Culver and other readily accessible archives, and detailed tables that piece together the costs associated with building roads, canals, steamboats, and railroads, with an eye toward the rather substantial federal subsidies that went into transportation in the 19th century.  He also integrates economic history, labor history, and discussions of industrialization and urbanization, so that transportation development occurs within its larger social, geographic, and economic contexts.

41: Jack Greene's Pursuits of Happiness

In Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture, Jack Green situates the American colonies within the larger British colonial empire and determines that they all followed a normative pattern of cultural and social development.

The usual interpretation of American cultural development is the "declension" model.  This model argues that all of American culture followed the pattern seen in New England, where a highly organized, religious, communal culture declined into individualism, liberalism, and entrepreneurial priorities.  While Greene agrees that the declension model makes sense for New England, he argues that the rest of the English colonies in America, the Caribbean, and Ireland followed a "developmental" model, which had three phases:

• social simplification: most colonies started out as pure business ventures in a difficult, undeveloped world; this raw environment and more permissive, materialistic, and secular culture took only the basics of English culture (probably because people were more interested in surviving)
• social elaboration: slowly, economies improved, living conditions and thus life expectancies improved, and the early egalitarianism settled into a relaxed but hierarchical form in most of the non-New England colonies by the mid 18th century
• social replication: economies and populations expanded, people built towns and trading centers, occupational and social structures became more differentiated, culture became more secular, and colonists started to look to England for models of colonial behavior

In America, this process was best modelled by the Chesapeake colonies.  Also in America, the developmental process occurred within an ideology that set up America as 'a place in which free people could pursue their own individual happiness in safety and with a fair prospect that they might be successful in their several quests.'  Eventually, all the colonies, even New England, got on board with this idea, though New England was careful to couch the quest for individual wealth and personal happiness in the pursuit of safety and community consensus.

And why the development of a relatively uniform worldview in the colonies, which in turn derived from a increasingly uniform (and increasingly British) infrastructure and culture, matter?  Greene argues that the convergence of colonial cultures - each with their own twists on British culture, but still - was critical for the formation of an American cultural order, which in turn was necessary if America was going to revolt against England.

Maybe (probably) I'm missing something here, but Pursuits of Happiness kind of feels like Jack Greene is shooting a dead horse: yes, New England was different from the rest of the country; yes, Puritans were an anomaly in their home country as well as in the New World; yes, the colonists on the eastern seaboard came from England, so American culture had close ties to English culture; no, American culture didn't all start in New England.  More importantly, the theory of a unitary American culture was debunked in the 1960s, and the notion that New England was the genesis of American culture came under attack around the same time.  Also, do cultures really progress in a linear fashion?  This is likely a strong synthesis of work on the American Revolutionary period, but it feels more akin to Bernard Bailyn than to, say, Amy Kaplan or Bill Cronon.

1: Alan Brinkley's Voices of Protest

I've spent, oh, probably six hours now with Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, partly because Brinkley has a tendency to jump right into his story without much introductory or concluding material, and partly because he's built the entire book out of fascinating vignettes and anecdotes - both writing strategies that make Voices hard to skim.  It's ok, though: it's New Years Day, it's chilly outside, I have coffee and tea and a space heater.  And besides, as it turns out, attempts to explain the popularity of charismatic leaders mostly make for good reading.

Brinkley's goal with this book is to determine why, exactly, Huey Long and Father Coughlin became so popular and thus so politically powerful that FDR considered them threatening, even dangerous.  Why would FDR care about a US Senator from Louisiana (Long) and a radio priest from a Detroit suburb (Coughlin?)

I can't say that Brinkley satisfactorily answers that question for me.  He argues that in the depths of the Depression, in a newly industrialized nation with a brand new mass culture, both men told the people what they wanted to hear: that bankers, financiers, and the extremely wealthy had stolen their communities and their individuality, and that only through a redistribution of wealth could they get their old lives back.  The argument sounds like something from one of my old marketing profs: if you want people to listen to you, go stand in the middle of a highway and point in the direction of traffic.  I don't have a problem with the argument so much - hey, I think my marketing prof was onto something - but I'm not crazy about how Brinkley goes about proving it.  Why?

Well, mostly, it's the way he approaches his subjects.  Take his portrayal of Huey Long.  According to Brinkley, Long was a loud guy, a partier and a political steamroller who had mad skillz at getting people to do whatever he told them to do.  He dropped out of high school, worked as a travelling salesman for a few years, and then convinced Tulane to let him into their law school - where instead of going to class, he read for a year and passed the bar with ease.  His wild campaigns for office were equal parts bribery, flyering, making stump speeches, and spewing vitriol at the competition.  After only a year as governor of Louisiana, his patronage system had created such a cohesive political machine that it took him an average of three minutes to get a bill passed in the state legislature, and even janitors, bridge builders, and schoolteachers sang his praises lest he replace them with a more loyal party member.  Party members paid their dues via automatic payroll deductions, as a horrified Treasury Department discovered in a 1932 investigation. 

But despite his flagrant disregard for, oh, normal democratic things like voting and separation of powers, he cared immensely about the people; those bills that took three minutes a piece to pass were for things like roads, new hospitals, and textbooks.  In the depths of the Depression, he was convinced that the money was somewhere, most likely in the pockets of the rich, and he was determined to get some of it for his constituents.  His falling-out with FDR was over his "Share the Wealth" plan, which called for an income cap, a radical redistribution of wealth, guaranteed pensions, and more.  As a Senator, he helped get the first woman elected to a full US Senate term.  Like, he was too nice.  Ok, a lot of this was probably self-serving, but still, reading about this guy is like watching Lincoln: I'm still wondering how such altruism, such egotism, and such obvious corruption could coexist so easily in the same body.

And Brinkley, kinda like Spielberg, doesn't really tell us.  It's like he's so busy focusing on Long that he forgets about the many people he worked with to make the magic happen, or like his sources (which, from what I can tell, are mostly newspapers and other publicly available sources?) don't have any info on the nitty gritty of creating a political machine so powerful that you think you can manipulate FDR into doing your bidding (he tried.  It didn't work.  And then he mysteriously got killed.  Weird.)  And for the love of god, who was he?  Brinkley mentions that Long travelled with an entourage because he hated to be touched and, later in the book, that he had few, if any, close friends; he also seems to have been well-known in DC clubs and bars until he abruptly quit drinking in 1935.  His wife and three children are hardly mentioned at all.  This is all unexplained.  Was he human?  Or just some symbolic, evacuated hull of power?

If it's the latter, then we're in Ernesto Laclau territory, where a public figure (Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Obama) is less a person than a receptacle for other people's hopes and dreams.  Laclau's approach is a useful way to get at the cultural meaning(s) of a public figure, but I'm not sure how good it is for charting the mechanics of their popularity or the trajectory of their rise and fall.