Thinking About Future Readings

At the last meeting of the History Book Club, we discussed a number of possible books to read in the future and agreed on selections for July and August. We then quickly added Bismarck: The Story of a Fighter by Emil Ludwig, Eden and Cedar Paul (Translator). The discussion of the book would be for September.

We had failed to notice that the book was first published in 1926. The book is also 703 pages -- much longer than our usual choices. 635 pages are text, the rest is an index. There seem to be no notes. While Barnes and Noble is distributing a reprint on paper, the book is available in a number of electronic forms free of charge.

The person who suggested this book wrote to me saying:

I had picked up the book in Barnes and Noble, but in investigating online I find that a more recent book on Bismarck, titled " Bismarck, a life" is by Jonathan Steinberg, who was professor of modern Europian history at the University of Pennsylvania, received a good New York Times review, is easily available and about the same length. Emil Ludwig died in 1948; it is not clear to me why Barnes and Noble had it rather than the Steinberg in their biography section. I suggest we revisit the September selection at the next meeting. I  apologize for my making a hasty 

The Steirberg biography is 582 pages and was published in 2011, A second member wrote that she is currently reading the Steinberg biography and recommends it. A third member mentioned that Bookfinder allows users to search online used book providers and obtain books at lower prices, especially useful for older books.

Answer the following poll to express your preference.  (Click on the red x in the upper left hand corner if an add appears on the questionnaire.)

What Do You Want to Read Next

Please vote on your preference for a topic for the next book we choose. You can see some typical books for each category on this page of our History Book Club website. (Click on the red x in the upper left hand corner if an add appears on the questionnaire.)

A Biography of Henry A. Wallace

Last night more than a dozen members met to discuss American Dreamer: The Life of Henry A. Wallace by John C. Culver and John Hyde.

We began the meeting by questioning some of the rules which we had made for ourselves. We have in the past limited the books we read to some 300 pages in length, but American Dreamer was more than 500 pages and we felt it worth reading at that length. It was suggested that many good books that greatly exceeded our limit could be divided into two roughly equal sections to be read and discussed over two months.

We have also limited our readings to paperback books, but there are good books available only in hardback (and ebook format) that are as affordable as paperback books. Perhaps hardback and longer books might be brought up for consideration, with the final decision based on the individual book and taken by the people present.

The discussion of Henry Wallace began with a brief summary of his career for those who had not read the book:

• As Secretary of Agriculture for the first two terms of the FDR administration he oversaw the transformation of the government's role in American agriculture. During the Depression the government played a key role in saving American farmers from the worst aspects of the Depression. Many of the programs have continued until today.
• He served as Vice President in FDR's third term, making an important contribution to war mobilization.
• He served as Secretary of Commerce in FDR's forth term, until fired by President Truman.
• He was the point man for FDR's cabinet on the development of the atom bomb, coordinating with the scientists who led the program.
• He ran for President in 1948 as candidate for the Progressive Party, in a campaign that failed badly/
• He was a founder of Pioneer hi-bred, and his family eventually sold their interest in the firm for more than a billion dollars.
• He deserves substantial credit of the introduction of hybrid corn which greatly increased corn production and came to dominate corn production in American farms. He also deserves credit for the development of improved varieties of chickens that eventually came to dominate world egg production.
• He was a college graduate at a time when that was rare. he was one of the first people to receive a masters degree in agricultural economics, and his work in agricultural economics was influential nationally and internationally.
• He was an influential editor of farming publications.
• He was the scion of an important Mid Western family. His father before him had been Secretary of Agriculture. The family owned an influential agricultural periodical.

As the list above shows, he was an exceptionally talented man in many ways. He had great strength as an expert on agriculture and agricultural economics. He apparently was a strong manager, able to bring order to the USDA as it grew from 40,000 to more than 140,000 staff members. 

On the other hand, he seemed less talented in foreign affairs, and appeared to be taken in by Russian propaganda; he was perhaps too supportive of communists and leftists on the staff of the government agencies he led. 

A Republican from a Republican family, he came to oppose the Hoover administration and their farm policies, and was an important supporter of FDR in 1932 and 1936 in the Mid Western farm states. While that service to FDR earned him a cabinet appointment, he seemed to lack many of the skills needed for a successful politician. He was later elected Vice President due to the Roosevelt support. One of our members who had actually seen a Wallace stump speech had been unimpressed by the performance; we supposed he was not good at "working a room". Certainly by the time he ran for president he was hurt by his support for racial equality, his international views which were widely perceived as too liberal, his religious views which many saw as flaky, and his campaign that was poorly conducted. In light of these weaknesses, we wondered that he was allowed such freedom to deliver major speeches without White House clearance. 

Last month we discussed The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 by Michael Beschloss. Again, this month we commented on the petty backbiting within FDR's cabinet. We noted that Roosevelt was quite sick in 1944 and until he died in 1944; diarists noted his physical and mental deterioration. We wondered in that context about his choice of Truman rather than Wallace for Vice President. Was Wallace too liberal? Were there skeletons in his closet that might emerge? Was FDR influenced by conservatives in his circle to choose more conservative Truman. (We concluded Truman came to be a better president than might have seemed likely to his contemporaries in 1944.) Perhaps it was simply that FDR had a better chance of winning the election with Truman than with Wallace as his running mate.

We speculated on Wallace's personality. One of our members disliked him for his treatment of his wife. He seldom consulted her opinion, making decisions alone that greatly affected her. (Some thought that was not untypical of the time.) One of our members who had lived for years in Iowa thought that he shared many of the characteristics of people she had known there. He was also seen as analytically inclined, deeply involved in a life of the mind, and perhaps less people oriented as a result. He was deeply attached to actual farming, and indeed farmed a victory garden as Vice President, buying and actually running a farm after he retired from government. Perhaps some of these characteristics as much as his outspoken liberalism made him unattractive as a candidate to the professional polls.

Henry Wallace knew a lot, but perhaps he didn't know what he didn't know. Perhaps he ventured too far into areas in which he was not expert.

It was commented that it is difficult now to fully identify with the thinking of the time. The people who had lived through two world wars, the Spanish flu epidemic, and the Great Depression --people who had been deeply shocked by the Holocaust, bombing of civilian populations, and the atom bomb -- were deeply concerned to avoid World War III. Europe was in ruins, threatened by famine. People lived in a world in which the great empires (British, French, Dutch, Belgian) had been deeply wounded and were dying, but were not yet dead. The USSR had taken over a broad swath of Europe, leftest movements were on the rise in Western Europe, and the Communists were soon to win the Civil War in China.

Today, more than half a century after the decisions made during and immediately after World War II, we know how things turned out. We tend to assume that the ways not chosen were not only not worthy of choice but not worthy of consideration. The people of the time did not have those advantages, and were dealing with decisions critical for the future of the world in a time of great uncertainty. Their's was a dilemma we can hardly fathom.

All who had read the book thought it was very good. The authors combined deep insight into their subject with considerable ability to tell the story well. This ranks as one of our best reads!

Here are a couple of posts written by one of our members on the book. (May 8. June 13)

Beschloss' The Conquerors: White House Decision Making on the Holocaust and Conquered Germany

Last night 14 members of the History Book Club met at Barnes and Noble Montrose Crossing to discuss The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 by Michael Beschloss. How appropriate that the discussion took place on May 8th, Victory Day, the anniversary of the Nazi surrender to the USSR ending World War II.

Beschloss has focused this relatively short book on a narrow set of events, especially those relevant to the U.S. policy with respect to the Holocaust and with respect to treatment of Germany when conquered. To properly reflect the interactions of most interest to Beschloss in this book, club members suggested that the title and subtitle should have focused on Henry Morganthau Jr (the Secretary of the Treasury) and Roosevelt -- the principle protagonists in the book. There is a large supporting cast in the text, including Truman, Churchill, Stalin, Secretary of State Hull, and Secretary of War Stimson.

One theme of the meeting was that it was important to have an understanding of the broader situation just before, during and shortly after World War II to properly understand the content of this book. It is now hard to identify with the hardships Americans suffered in the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II. But those would seem good times compared to the suffering in England; the human suffering in Germany and Russia was much greater. We recalled that some movies made after the war showed the devastation it caused (e.g. The Third Man, Judgement at Nuremberg, Open City). Our recent reading of Embracing Defeat on the aftermath of the war in Japan was mentioned.

U.S. Army Photo: U.S. Army tanks entering Nuremberg

It was also important to understand the complexity of the situation that decision makers in Washington were facing. Treasury Secretary Morganthau had been faced with reconciling Keynesian stimulus policies with conservative federal budgetary theory during the New Deal; he had had to manage the lend lease financing; his Department had to finance World War II through the sale of War Bonds; he had to lead the Treasury in the negotiations leading to the Bretton Woods system regulating global finance after the war and the creation of the International Finance Corporation. The most secular of Jews, of German Jewish ancestry, he had to deal with the leaders of the American Jewish community who saw him as their natural representative in the Roosevelt cabinet, as well as with his increasing knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, and with the prejudice against him by anti-Semites in the cabinet and in the country.

President Roosevelt was simultaneously"

• Holding together the Democratic Party which in his day included southern Conservatives, big city machines and bosses, and a range of liberals from Wilsonian Progressives to American Communists
• Leading the Democratic Party in elections that had to be won in order to assure the support and continuation of his policies
• Convincing the public first to prepare for war and then to fight the war, a task made difficult by isolationism, anti-war sentiment, racism, and ethnic divisions within the country
• Providing leadership for the federal bureaucracy and the Congress to obtain and implement the legislation he needed
• As commander in chief, leading the military in the conduct of the most complex war in history
• Creating and leading an alliance of the most diverse and fractious nations in the conduct of the war.

Other government leaders were also dealing with hugely complex and unprecedented problems and situations.

The book in its narrow focus on a couple of the issues faced by these decision makers ran the risk of making its seem smaller and more petty than they really were.

We noted that great presidents of the United States -- Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt -- handled all of these challenges at least adequately, and some of them brilliantly.

Still some of us found Roosevelt's unwillingness to share results of the summit meetings with his cabinet to be shocking, especially since those cabinet members then had their Departmental staffs prepare to implement policies that differed significantly from those which Roosevelt chose. The failure to provide Vice President Truman with information on international agreements, government programs, and FDR's own thinking proved especially dangerous for the country when Roosevelt died and Truman was thrust into the presidency. The degree to which Roosevelt's abilities were deteriorating in the last year of his life, when his responsibilities were huge, was very unsettling.

There was some discussion of our own difficulty in seeing the uncertainty that decision makers felt at the time. We have the benefit of hindsight -- of decades of illumination from the opening of Soviet, English, and American archives, and of knowing how the options that were accepted ultimately worked out. The people with the responsibilities at the time really could not know how their decisions would work out, and indeed, we can not really know whether alternative decisions would have been better than those actually made at the time.

Former prisoners of the "little camp" in Buchenwald. (Photo courtesy USHMM)

Should the U.S. air force have bombed railroads leading to the concentration camps and the gas chambers, or was it better to continue focusing all the air power on ending the war quickly? Why didn't U.S. troops push to enter Berlin before the Russians, and would subsequent events have been better if they had? Was the lack of concern for the victims of the Holocaust simply wrong; was it simply insensitivity to civilian deaths (e.g. Stalin and the kulaks and pograms, Americans and Hiroshima and Nagasaki)?

We recognized the anti-Semitism in America in the 1040s, but were surprised by its casual expression in the highest levels of the government. We understood the book's argument that people within the State Department and War Department bureaucracy were blocking offers of sanctuary to European Jews. Still we recognized that hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved had the U.S. government acted with proper compassion; the failure to bring Jews refugees to our shores stands as a stain on the Roosevelt administration and on the United States.

We wondered why the French had been granted a zone of occupation in occupied Germany and so great a role in the post war global government. (Perhaps we fail to consider the importance of the French empire in Africa, French Indochina, and elsewhere.) While Americans (especially Wilsonian liberals imbued with support for self determination) opposed the imperial aspirations of allies, Churchill very much wanted a restoration of British imperial power, and the Soviets were establishing imperial control over what would become the Warsaw Pact nations.

We discussed the Soviet demand for reparations from the Germans, recognizing how greatly Russian industrial infrastructure had been destroyed by the German invasion. On the other hand, the Soviets also took a great deal from other countries over which they had gained control in the war, including Manchuria as well as central and eastern Europe. So too we discussed the Marshall plan and the provision of emergency aid to European allies after the war, and the decision of Stalin to forego U.S. humanitarian relief rather than accept the strings that would have been attached.

Opinion of the book was very divided: some really disliked it, others liked it very much. It was seen as relatively easy to read. There was wide agreement that the book would have benefited from stronger edition; it was commented that publishing houses are now less likely than in the past to provide that service for books, authors and readers. Michael Beschloss had obviously done a great deal of research in the preparation of the book, and it benefited from his access to foreign archives. The focus fit with his expertise as a historian of the American presidency. However, at least one member commented that he might have better integrated the individual facts he found into the narrative. A couple of members mentioned that a stronger introductory chapter might have helped, especially had it identified the thesis he was trying to advance in the rest of the book. Others seemed more content with the structure.

Click here for a comment on the book posted by one of our members.

Manias, Panics and Crashes

Last night the History Book Club met to discuss Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber. This is a classic book, regularly cited by other economists. It was first published in 1978, but we read the sixth edition published in 2011. That edition covered the U.S. housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis which led to the Great Recession.

18 members participated in a lively discussion. In fact, the discussion was so lively that we drew in a couple of passing B&N customers. There was agreement that the book was a tough read -- one member suggested it be marketed as a cure for insomnia. On the other hand it deals with a timely topic of great interest to the members.

The book provides a theory of how financial bubbles start, evolve, pop and crash. (The theory is well described in this review of the book.) It then shows how the theory applies to a large number of financial bubbles that have occurred over several centuries, including the tulip mania in Holland in the 17th century.

The discussion was introduced by a member who has had a long career as a professional economist. (Here are notes he provided on the book.)  He told us that the book mentioned several of the well known theories of business cycles, failing to mention the long term Kondratiev waves relating to technological revolutions. (The implication is that Kindelberger and Alber because they to incorporate the mechanisms of the business cycles have produced only a partial model.) He suggested that the book so emphasized the historical record because it was probably written to counteract a very conservative trend in economic theory in the American universities at the time of its first printing.

Our economist led us into a discussion of the Bretton Woods Agreements, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He was especially negative about the emphasis of the IMF for many years on austerity measures as the only solution for developing countries that got into financial problems. He noted examples from his own experience of UN-World Bank projects that failed to recognize the intersectoral nature of development projects, preferring instead relatively narrowly focused, single sector projects.

In the latter part of Manias, Panics and Crashes, it is suggested that in the last 40 years, the pattern of financial crises has changed. Not only are these crises more likely to affect several countries, but (according to the authors) the changes in the changes in the relative values of currencies that follow a crash lead to bubbles in the countries that become newly attractive to investors, thus triggering new crises. It was noted that 1971, 40 years before this edition was published, was when the Nixon administration took the dollar off the gold standard, marking the end of the Bretton Woods system. In that system, countries were obligated to link their currencies to gold or the U.S. dollar, allowing the value to move in only a narrow range. Since 1971, currencies have floated, changing greatly in relative values during financial crises. Moreover, the magnitude of international financial flows has magnified enormously over time with globalization of financial systems.

Kindleberger and Alber stress the role of "lender of last resort" in dealing with financial crises. The most important of these today are the central banks of the United States, the European Union, and Japan, as well as the IMF. The authors noted the problems faced by the managers of the lenders of last resort in choosing how and when to intervene to deal with crises.

We also discussed the current effort to reform the IMF. When it was created in the 1940s, the United States and the colonial powers controlled most of the world's economy. In 2014 it is predicted that developing and emerging nations will produce more than half of the world's GDP. The reform efforts are intended to increase the funds available to the IMF, and change the quotas to more accurately reflect the current economic conditions. Unfortunately, it appears that the United States Congress is too deadlocked over domestic economic issues to ratify the new IMF agreements.

The fundamental issue addressed by the book is the instability of financial systems. It was suggested that one problem is that the systems involved are hugely complex and getting more so. Their management thus is difficult and getting more difficult. There was also a significant point made that economic knowledge does not seem to be adequate to the job. Mention was made of Nassim Talib's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable in respect to its description of the failure of financial models in the last U.S. bubble, crisis and crash. It was also mentioned that whenever rules are put into effect to control the rate of growth of credit, people invent new ways to circumvent those rules (legally or illegally).

The group tossed around the question, "what is money", recognizing that the question itself was beyond our capability, although we noted that at least one city in New York state has its own money in circulation in parallel with the dollar. We chatted about virtual money in cyberspace and a recent bubble in its worth. Similarly we wondered what was real about "value"; what does it mean when a Chinese vase if auctioned for millions of dollars? How could the land around the Tokyo royal palace have had a nominal price comparable to that of all the land in California? One of our members suggested that for these things to have any real meaning one had to know who were the buyers and bidders, and who were the sellers.

We also discussed the political problems involved in increasing the stability of the financial system. Politics define the rules of the game and the regulatory agencies that enforce them. These rules and regulators in theory can damp the rate of increase and decrease of prices and can provide negative feedback (as central banks modify interest rates to provide negative feedback to control inflation). However, the rules and regulators depend on political action. Financial firms and the big players in financial markets often lobby effectively to limit the rules and reduce the authority of regulators. Moreover, the public -- participating too often in the mania -- also discourage politicians from putting effective regulations in place to ameliorate the instability of financial systems.

Mention was made of The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David Stockman. Central banks are currently intervening in financial markets to an unprecedented level, flooding the world with new money in order to restore the economic growth of the United States, Europe and Japan, thereby to create jobs and decrease unemployment. Interest rates are being kept very low. Money has been flowing into the United States from Europe due to the financial insecurity related to the crises in Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Portugal and other countries. There must soon be an unwinding of these policies as the central banks refocus on debt; they will have to sell off troubled assets that they acquired as lenders of last resort. The question is whether they will navigate this untested unwinding successfully, or whether it will lead into still another crisis.

Kindleberger and Alber hold that the world has faced unprecedented challenges of managing contagion of financial crises in a globalized economy with floating currencies. Our members wondered if the world will face still a more complex and more dangerous challenges as the central banks try to unwind from the last crisis.

These might help as you read the book:

• "Manias, Panics, and Crashes by Charles P. Kindleberger" (blog post with good description of the model)
• "Not bad, but more popular than it deserves: A Review of 'Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises'"
• "Manias, Panics and Crashes" (a Power Point presentation summarizing the book.)

Here are some blog posts by one of our members on reading the book:

• "A thought about investing"
• "A thought about the housing bubble"
• "More on Manias, Panics and Crashes"
• "The Kindleberger Model"
• "Does Kahneman clarify Manias, Panics and Crashes?"
• "A thought about economic bubbles."
• "A thought on reading about the 4 decade long cycle of economic crises."

Preferences for the July Book

We have chosen books for April, May and June.

• April: Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber

• May: The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 by Michael Beschloss

• June: American Dreamer: The Life of Henry A. Wallace by John C. Culver

We have discussed books that we might read in the following month. They are reflected in the History Book Club website.

Please now vote on the kind of history you would like to read for July. (Free Java software is required to vote.)

God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution

Last night 16 members of the Book Club met to discuss God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution by Christopher Hill. We kicked off the discussion suggesting that the 17th century might, as Hill suggests, have been a decisive century in English history; in 1600 there were still traces of the Middle Ages in British society, but by 1700 Britain was ready to enter into the age of the Industrial Revolution.

It was suggested that Hill may have painted too favorable a picture of Cromwell, excusing his changes in policy and, for example, treating his Irish war too favorably. Surely the Irish see Cromwell as a far more sinister character than that described in this book.

We discussed Cromwell's rise to power. Starting as a member of the lesser branch of a well connected but only locally powerful family, he rose through Parliamentary duties and -- more importantly -- his military career. Blessed with a talent for tactics, he rose to be general in command of the New Model Army, than overall commander, and ultimately Protector of England with more power than the deposed monarch.

Cromwell rose through the English Civil War (1641-1649), the invasion and subjugation of Ireland and the war with Scotland. He pursued a pro trade policy and his western strategy resulted in the British acquisition of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 (and the shipment of tens of thousands of Irish to Jamaica). Yet his death was quickly followed by the Glorious Revolution; two years after his death his body was exhumed and hanged. We wondered about the sources of his policy preferences and managerial abilities.

We noted the chapter in the book which demonstrated that people writing about Cromwell over the centuries have come to very different conclusions about his character and intentions. It was noted that he was pragmatic, and that while he listened to others he held his own council. Ultimately we did not understand the man very well.

We spent considerable time discussing the religious situation in Britain in the 17th century. There was a deep anger between the Catholics and Protestants, a competition for the nature of the Anglican church, and considerable conflict between the many groups of Dissenters considering migrating to the American colonies where his friend Roger Williams was making his own life.

We also noted the economic bases of the conflicts, noting how much property changed hands during the Civil War and the related turmoil. We discussed the enclosure movement and the Levelers movement. We also noted that the little ice age was creating havoc in European agriculture in the early part of the 17th century. The emergence of the local squires as more powerful as a result of the civil war (and the monarchy and aristocracy as being restored in power at the end of the century). For many, the priority in those times may have been simple survival and protection of what they had.

There are several members present with considerable interest in military history and we spent some time discussing the New Model Army, a standing army of well trained and paid troops that produced victory in the Civil War for the Parliamentary side.

Several of the members said that they found the book hard to read, largely because it assumed more background information than we possessed. One member drew upon Antonia Fraser's Cromwell which she had previously read. One member said she liked the book, another said that it had stimulated him to read a lot of other related material. One of the members had previously distributed the following references via the club's Yahoo Listserve.

• British Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1638-60
• English Dissenters

Another brought a copy of the Wikipedia Cromwell entry.

One of the members has posted a review of the book.

Following the discussion of the book, there was a discussion of future readings. The books previously chosen are  Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber (April 10) and The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 by Michael Beschloss (May 8(. Last night we selected American Dreamer: The Life of Henry A. Wallace by John C. Culver for future reading (June 12).

We discussed further readings. There continues to be interest in finding a book on the history of a church or religious movement, but it was hoped that such a book would be of modest size and well written as well as dealing with a limited period of time. There continues to be interest in reading about history in regions we have not yet touched, with specific recommendations about recent Russian history. And of course there continues to be interest in American history. The "possible future reading" list will soon be updated to reflect these priorities.