Viral History

Newt 1968: Gingrich led protests against nude censorship

2012-01-26T10:19:00.001-05:00

Newt Gingrich as professor at West Georgia College, circa 1975.

In the continuing spirit of our recent posts on the 2012 Republican candidates, we give you this nice piece of reporting yestersday from Reuters, sent to us by the Free Expression Network (FEN). Enjoy...

(Reuters) - Republican candidate Newt Gingrich attacks President Barack Obama as a "radical" and "community organizer," but as a Tulane University graduate student in 1968, he helped lead an anti-censorship protest in defense of sexually explicit photographs.

While Republican foe Mitt Romney steered clear of the college campus tumult that year by doing Mormon missionary work in France, (see our post Mitt Romney Part III, the next "Baby Boomer" President? ) Gingrich warned Tulane's president of an impending "clash of wills" over the university administrator's decision to ban publication of explicit photographs in "Sophia," a literary supplement for the student newspaper "The Tulane Hullabaloo."

The episode illustrates some of the same pugnaciousness that Gingrich now displays as a candidate for the Republican nomination.

It also underscores a sharp evolution in his views on civil protest, an issue that has played out during the campaign because of the growing strength of the Occupy Wall Street movement. During a forum last November, Gingrich suggested that participants in the Wall Street protests, "Go get a job, right after you take a bath."

. ....

A spokesman for Gingrich's presidential campaign did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Accounts published by the Hullabaloo, retrieved from university archives, describe the standoff over two artistic images the literary magazine sought to publish.

HUMAN BODY PARTS

One photo showed a Baton Rouge sculptor posing beside what was described as a "mechanized box" carrying "symbolic descriptions" of human body parts, including sex organs. The second image showed a naked sculptor posing with a statue that depicted what Hullabaloo described as "male and female figures with enlarged sexual organs."

A proposed caption described one photograph as "an ironical statement on the fad for nudism."

Tulane authorities at the time, including President Herbert Longenecker, banned publication, argued that the images "are considered to be obscene" and could expose the university to "criminal prosecution."

Demonstrations erupted, including a picket of Longenecker's residence. Within days, the movement split into factions. Gingrich's group called itself Mobilization of Responsible Tulane Students, otherwise known as MORTS. The same day that MORTS announced its formation, student picket lines spread to the New Orleans offices of Merrill Lynch, a local bank, a department store and a local TV station.

On March 11, 1968, MORTS leaders, including Gingrich, met with Longenecker and other college officials. Typewritten minutes held in college archives show that Gingrich was one of the more outspoken leaders at the meeting, employing the kind of bombastic rhetoric that has been a trademark of his national political career.

"It is now a question of power and if the student body wants to demonstrate until May - we are down to a clash of wills," Gingrich told Longenecker, according to the minutes, which were obtained by Reuters. As the meeting concluded, Gingrich warned: "There will be increasing attempts of the student body ... to test the guide-lines and test the administration. As long as the student body is aroused it will meet."

Eventually, the protests waned and the university held firm on the photograph ban. Some members of Gingrich's protest group later went on to form the Tulane Liberation Front, which occupied a student center and demanded that the swimming pool be opened to the general public.

Though college campuses were hotbeds for political dissent into the 1970s, Gingrich's student activism waned. University records show that by the summer of 1969, his protest days were behind him. He had
persuaded Tulane to allow him to teach a non-credit course in futurology called "When You are 49; The Year 2000."

Reporting By Mark Hosenball in Washington; additional reporting by Kathy Finn in New Orleans; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Philip Barbara http://blogs.reuters.com/search/journalist.php?edition=us&n=philip.barb

POLITICS: Why Newt Gingrich won South Carolina and may become President!

2012-01-24T10:16:00.002-05:00

I think I have figured out the message that worked among Republicans in South Carolina, has been driving the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street-ers, and could work nationwide in 2012. It comes straight out of the 1976 movie Network.

Click on top to see the original. (Ignore the French subtitles. This was the best clip I could find of the full scene.) Doesn't he look more than vaguely like Newt?

Better yet, rent the movie from Netflix and see it in full context.  But before getting carried away, remember, in the film, Howard Beale (the ranting, mentally unstable newsman played brilliantly by Peter Finch) is totally exploited by the TV network executives (Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall) , and ultimately assassinated on air when his ratings go down.

The public hot button, then as now, is the same: rage. Rage from the left, rage from the right, no matter.  We live in hard times: depression, recession, fear, unfairness, broken dreams, empty promises, corruption, shrill politics, arrogant finance, social gridlock, and the rest.  How can there not be outrage?

The one who can figure out how best to tap it -- be it Gingrich through his rants, Obama though his intellect, or someone else -- will be hard to stop.

THE GOLD RING: Read the opening chapter.

2012-01-23T13:17:00.002-05:00

Today, just in time to make money in the new year, we give you the opening chapter of THE GOLD RING -- the classic story of speculators Jay Gould and Jim Fisk and their daring plot to corner the US gold market, culminating in the disaster of Black Friday, 1989. We hope you enjoy it. nsider buying the full book. .

THE GOLD RING:
Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869

Part I: The Ring

Chapter I: WAR

On MONDAY MORNING, March 2, 1868, The New York Times carried a dispatch from Galveston, Texas, on the western frontier. A desper- ado named D. McKinney had shot a man named Clay Sharcy in nearby Navasota. McKinney had been drinking that morning and had drawn his pistol on saloonkeepers who refused to serve him free liquor. The sheriff arrested McKinney and set out, along with deputies on horseback, to deliver the prisoner to nearby Anderson to stand trial.

But the people of Navasota took unkindly to outlaws in their town. That night along the road, the posse carrying McKinney was stopped by sixty armed men, “disguised and blackened.” The vigilantes disarmed the sheriff and deputies and then took McKinney and tied him securely, and hung him by the neck to a tree limb. The rope broke, so they hung the outlaw again to a sturdier branch that was more than ten feet from the ground. This time the rope held. The armed men dispersed, leaving McKinney’s body dangling in the wind.

No further arrests were reported in the case.

On that same morning in New York City, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the seventy-four-year-old “Commodore” and master of the New York Central Railroad, sent shudders through Wall Street by declaring war on his chief competitor, the Erie Railway Company. After months of legal sniping and maneuvering, Vanderbilt now threatened to gobble up Erie just as he had al- ready gobbled up the New York Central, the Hudson, and the Harlem River railroads in stock “corners” that had made heads spin. Backed by a personal fortune estimated at $30 to $60 million, Vanderbilt ordered his brokers on the Stock Exchange to buy Erie shares by the fistful. At the same time, his lawyers obtained decrees from friendly New York judges that prohibited Erie from is- suing any additional stock or convertible bonds.

Then as now, stock-takeover wars gave smart operators an opportunity to get rich. Vanderbilt’s reputation for ruthless competition over the course of sixty years fueled their anticipation. His name had long been a household word. Vanderbilt—tall, physically tough, and handsome—had made his orig- inal fortune in steamships, running passengers first from Staten Island up the Hudson River and later to Europe. In 1856 the Commodore almost single- handedly organized the overthrow of the government of Nicaragua to preserve his exclusive right of transit across the isthmus to the Pacific. Years earlier, he had committed his own wife to an asylum until she agreed to live in a new mansion on Manhattan Island.

Long before government securities regulations, antitrust laws, the Fed- eral Reserve, or any effective controls in the United States, big-money stock operations were bare-knuckle affairs. Wall Street after the Civil War was an untamed frontier, like Texas and the Wild West.

Organized finance in New York dated back at least to 1792, when brokers had gathered under a buttonwood tree to trade real estate and old U.S. Con- tinental money. But the Stock Exchange remained small potatoes. Then the Civil War and the rise of the railroads launched a speculative fever in America. In December 1865 the Exchange moved from a small room on “Change Alley”—off Broad Street, near Wall—to a grand, hundred-foot tall marble palace on Wall Street.

The men who now gambled their fortunes on the Exchange moved with swagger and bravado. “[S]tockbrokers are a jolly, good-hearted, free-and-easy class of men,” wrote observer Kinehan Cornwallis, “who spend their money fast when they are making it fast, and sometimes even when they are not doing so.”

But Vanderbilt’s assault on the Erie Railway surpassed anything yet seen.

Vanderbilt was the biggest shark in this sea; the smaller carnivores smacked their lips at the coming feeding frenzy.

Opposing the Commodore was an old rival, Daniel Drew, the Erie Rail- way Company’s seventy-one-year-old chairman and treasurer. A notorious stock manipulator, Drew veiled his shrewdness behind a country-bumpkin Bible-quoting front. Years before, when he was a cattle drover, Drew had fed his cows salt and let them drink gallons of water before weighing them for sale—the original “watered stock.” A trustee of the Methodist Episcopal Church and semiliterate, like Vanderbilt, Drew became Erie’s treasurer in 1853 and thereafter bilked the line mercilessly. As treasurer, Drew knew company secrets and could control or foresee every jiggle or waggle in Erie stock prices. Unhindered by today’s legal bars on insider trading, he made money every time.

“I got to be a millionaire before I hardly know’d it, hardly,” “Uncle Dan’l” said. He had no intention of letting Vanderbilt walk away with his cash cow now.

When it was first built twenty years earlier, designers had considered the Erie Railway a technological marvel. Stretching from Jersey City westward across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Southern New York to Buffalo, it was the first rail link to the Great Lakes. There it connected to points west. But by the late 1860s, although still one of the United States’ corporate goliaths, the Erie had deteriorated from years of neglect. Engineers jokingly called the aging rails and roadbed “two thin streaks of rust.” Drew’s corrupt management of the company had earned Erie a reputation as “the scarlet woman of Wall Street.”

Vanderbilt saw the Erie Railway as competition. By the early 1860s the Commodore had changed his business vision. He had sold his steamship em- pire and cast his lot with the United States’ newest transportation medium, railroads. Starting from scratch, Vanderbilt had built an empire of steel rails that would ultimately increase his fortune from $10 million to an unheard of $100 million during his last fifteen years of life. By 1867 the Commodore had dazzled the financial world by capturing and consolidating three moribund lines into the New York Central system, which now stretched from New York, north to Albany, then across to Buffalo, where it connected, like the Erie Railway, to points west.

With Erie in his pocket, Vanderbilt could control all rail traffic between New York and the western frontier. No federal bans against regional monop- olies would be imposed for decades. So the Commodore, the self-proclaimed “friend of the iron road,” began buying up Erie shares and soon he controlled several seats on the board of directors.

Confident and vain, Vanderbilt forced the issue in November 1867. He proposed a merger under which Erie and his own New York Central would set joint freight rates and pool their profits. To Vanderbilt’s surprise, the Erie board rejected the plan. Daniel Drew had corralled enough allies to outvote Vanderbilt’s directors. In February 1868 the board added injury to insult by agreeing with the Michigan Southern Railroad, the primary link from Buffalo to Chicago, to build a special narrow-gauge line from Chicago that would connect with Erie in the east, diverting traffic away from the New York Central.

The Commodore steamed. The Erie Railway Company had deceived him.

Throwing a tantrum, Vanderbilt announced that he would simply buy Erie and set policy as he pleased: no bother with tender offers, waiting periods, disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, or other legal mumbo jumbo.

It seemed the fight would be over before it began. Who could resist an on- slaught of Vanderbilt money and clout? Keen observers, however, knew that Vanderbilt and Drew had been banging heads for forty years in business wars over steamboats and railroads. And this time, Uncle Dan’l seemed oddly serene. Old Cornele could bluster all day long, but Brother Drew had two aces up his sleeve. In anticipation of the fight, Drew had elevated onto the Erie board two obscure young protégés cut from his own mold of fiscal connivance. They were quick, arrogant, and unscrupulous; to Drew’s mind, the smartest young men on Wall Street.

So it happened that Jay Gould, thirty-one years old, and James Fisk, Jr., thirty-two, entered the annals of Americana.

Jay Gould

At first, Gould and Fisk were nonentities in the conflict—”Mr. Fish” or “Fiske” or “J. Gould” to the newspapers. Jay Gould, quiet and fidgety, with in- tense eyes and a brilliant mind for numbers and detail, already had a purple reputation on Wall Street. In 1858 the twenty-two-year-old Gould had convinced an elderly New York millionaire named Charles Leupp to invest $60,000 in a tannery business that Gould managed. After a falling out, Leupp shot himself in the head with a revolver. Gossip, true or not, had it that Jay had cheated the old man and driven him to suicide.

Psychoanalysts would have marveled at Jay’s upbringing. Born in 1836 to dirt-poor dairy farmers in rural Roxbury, New York, his mother had died when he was five years old. His father, John Burr Gould, outwardly ridiculed the boy, telling him he was “not worth much” around the farm. When Jay complained about going to school, his father locked him in the cellar for days until Jay’s five sisters raised a ruckus. A frail youngster, Jay had learned to survive by bending rules. He sometimes cheated at wrestling with his boyhood friend John Burroughs.

When Burroughs complained, Jay had said, “But I’m on top, ain’t I?” One night when Jay was eight years old, a gang of fifteen gun-toting men dressed as Indians broke into the family farmhouse and dragged his father from bed. The men, part of a terrorist wave during the so-called “Rent Wars” in upstate New York, threatened to tar and feather John Burr Gould unless he joined their anti-landlord movement. He refused. His little son, watching from behind a door, admired how his father stood his ground. “Conscious of right, he shrank from no sense of fear,” Jay wrote.

Jay went on to invent a mousetrap; he wrote and self-published a 450- page History of Delaware County and ran the ill-fated tannery with Leupp. Then he came to New York in 1858 to make his fortune. There he joined two other brokers in 1862 to form Smith, Gould, Martin &Company and started buying railroad stocks. Like other young men of destiny—J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie, among others—Jay avoided military service by purchasing a $300 replacement under the eminently unfair Civil War conscription acts.

By 1867 he had accumulated a stake in the Erie Railway big enough to be courted by the embattled company treasurer.

Jim Fisk, dressed as "Admiral" of his
Narragansett Steamship Company.

James Fisk, Jr., by contrast, was a chubby, outgoing showman who spent his money on women, diamond stickpins, and good times. A year older than Gould, Fisk first learned his business smarts as a teenager, when he worked as a barker with Van Amburgh’s traveling circus. Later he peddled housewares with his father through small towns in Vermont’s Green Mountains. When business was slow, James Junior persuaded his father to decorate his mer- chandise carts like circus wagons with bright colors and glittering harnesses and ride into town at a full gallop, handing out pennies and candies to children. The customers loved the spectacle. The business became so successful that Boston’s Jordan Marsh retail firm hired Jim as its Washington sales agent early in the Civil War.

During the war, Jim distinguished himself in the cloak-and-dagger cotton smuggling trade. He bought cheap contraband cotton from Confederate ware- houses, sneaked it past Union lines, and shipped it north for Jordan Marsh to weave into uniforms for Lincoln’s army.

Jim’s mother died when he was an infant, but his father and stepmother doted on him. When a schoolteacher whipped Jim for pulling a prank, his father was so indignant that he kept the boy home for months.

Jim told a story about a woman who came to him one day when he was peddling with his father. She complained that Fisk Senior had cheated her on a handkerchief. The handkerchief had cost nine pence—a few pennies in the then-local New England currency.

Jim thought a moment, then stuck up for Dad. “No! The old man would- n’t have told a lie for nine pence,” said he, “though he would have told eight of them for a dollar!”

Jim Fisk migrated to New York in 1864 and proceeded to lose all his money in the stock market. Before he left town broke, he gave fair warning of his return. “Wall Street has ruined me, and Wall Street shall pay for it,” Jim said. He refueled his bank account in Boston and returned to New York the next year. He soon charmed his way into the good graces of Daniel Drew by doing favors for the Erie treasurer and acting as the old man’s agent on secret stock trades. By the time he needed to plant an ally on the Erie board, Uncle Dan’l had been much impressed by young Jim Fisk’s peculiar talents and his loyalty to him.

Jay probably considered Jim Fisk a loud-mouthed buffoon when they first met on the Erie board in late 1867. Fisk likely shared the general view of Gould as a sinister manipulator. On the surface, they differed as night from day. But underneath, powerful forces bonded them. Both had experienced grinding rural poverty in the uncaring society of the mid-1800s; both had clawed their way up to affluence by their wits. Fisk and Gould shared a self- confidence that bordered on arrogance, a disdain for public opinion, and mountains of ambition.

Prudent young men would have avoided a blood battle with the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt. But Gould and Fisk had watched Uncle Dan’l Drew enrich himself from Erie. Now, given the chance of a lifetime, the two pro- tégés wanted their own turn at the trough.

First, Drew’s lawyers found a friendly judge who issued decrees to nullify Vanderbilt’s decrees. Vanderbilt’s judges responded by decreeing the new de- crees null and void. As the legal eagles sparred with injunctions and counter injunctions, Fisk and Gould discovered a more potent weapon in the base- ment of Erie’s Wall Street offices—a printing press.

Wasting no time and ignoring Vanderbilt’s court decrees, Gould, Fisk, and Drew got secret approval from their friendly board majority to issue $10 million in bonds convertible into shares of Erie stock, supposedly to purchase new steel rails and equipment for the Erie line. Saturday night and Sunday, March 8 and 9, the printing press cranked out page after page of fresh Erie stock certificates. On Sunday they issued 50,000 shares and parceled them out in two 25,000-share blocks to Fisk’s and Gould’s personal brokerages: Fisk and Belden, and Smith, Gould, Martin & Company.

Jim Fisk explained the strategy: “If this damned printing press doesn’t break down, we’ll give the old hog [Vanderbilt] all he wants of Erie.”

As the Stock Exchange prepared to open on Monday morning, March 10, the Erie directors lay in ambush. In these stressful moments, Jay Gould steadied himself by tearing corners of newspaper pages into confetti.

Trading in railroad stocks on the New York Stock Exchange took place in the Long Room, a large, high-ceilinged chamber with tall windows that looked out onto New Street; it was unfurnished except for an elevated dais at the Wall Street end, and it had an upper gallery for spectators. It also had a separate gallery for telegraph operators, who flashed the latest prices almost instantaneously to brokers’ offices miles away. At ten o’clock every morning (including Saturdays), the chairman, standing on the dais, banged his gavel and called the first stock to trade for ten minutes, then the next, and so on down the list.

When he reached Erie that morning, Vanderbilt’s agents grabbed the stock as fast as it was offered. The roomful of brokers raised a clamor. After the allotted ten minutes, the speculators rushed outside into the street to con- tinue the frenzy, leaving the deserted Exchange floor behind, oblivious to the winter cold. Mobs formed around the Drew and Vanderbilt brokers on the sidewalk as the price ran from $78 to almost $83 per share.

Shortly after noon, the tide turned. Brokers allied with Gould and Fisk suddenly offered Erie stock in blocks of a hundred or five hundred shares. The mob sensed danger. An apparently unlimited supply of Erie stock was flooding the street. In a “violent panic,” the price dropped from $83 to $71. Vanderbilt brokers learned that one brokerage was delivering crisp, new certificates signed only the day before. The “bull clique” was “demoralized,” wrote a Herald reporter.

Vanderbilt’s agents ran to the Commodore’s office with news of the watered stock and asked what to do. “Do?” Cornele roared. “Buy all the stock the sons-of-bitches offer to sell! They think they can pick my pocket, do they? Well, by God, I’ll show ‘em that there’s such a thing as law in this State!”

Vanderbilt kept buying, but theatrics aside, his raid was dead. After spending $8 to $10 million on Erie stock, he was still no closer to controlling the company, and the value of his newly acquired shares was falling fast.

Fisk, Gould, and Drew were elated. Flushed with victory, they met the next morning in their West and Duane Street offices. Stock Exchange messengers carried in bags of money—the proceeds from Vanderbilt’s purchases of funny stock. Like a medieval warlock and his two sorcerer’s assistants, the three men amused themselves by sorting the money and tying it into bundles.

But Vanderbilt found no humor in the situation. Not only was the Erie raid a public embarrassment, it had become expensive. Even his own deep pockets felt the pinch.

Vanderbilt wielded power beyond the sheer weight of money, though, particularly through his relationship with William Magear Tweed, the reign- ing boss of New York’s Tammany Hall, who in 1868 controlled the New York judicial system.

Vanderbilt turned to George Barnard, a justice of the New York Supreme Court. Barnard had been handpicked, nominated, and sustained by Tweed and was widely known as a “slave of the [Tammany] ring.” Barnard was very helpful.

New York State had only one level of courts at that time. New York Supreme Court judges held trials and issued orders with no appeal short of the United States Supreme Court. After a hastily called hearing, Judge Barnard found that Drew, Fisk, and Gould had violated the earlier injunctions by issuing the Erie convertible bonds. He declared them in contempt. Even as the trio then celebrated their victory over Vanderbilt’s stock raid, news arrived in their suite that New York police were en route to arrest them.

Erie’s top directors had to choose between spending time in the Ludlow Street Jail, New York’s pen for civil cases, or getting out of town.

By nightfall, Drew and a dozen other Erie officials had packed their money, stocks, bonds, and records—including the $8 million in cash fleeced from Vanderbilt—and were heading across the Hudson River. They would set up Erie-in-exile at Taylor’s Hotel in Jersey City, New Jersey—beyond the reach of New York justice.

Fisk and Gould only narrowly escaped the law. They left Drew, and before leaving New York, they stopped at Delmonico’s restaurant at Broadway and Chambers Street to further celebrate their victory with steak and cham- pagne. A messenger interrupted their meal with news that the police were heading over to their table at that instant. Leaving dinner half finished, Fisk and Gould raced outside into a waiting carriage that took them down to the foot of Canal Street. There they hired a small lifeboat with two deckhands to attempt to cross the river.

The fog that night was so dense that they almost collided with a steam powered ferryboat. After rowing in circles for hours in the cold, they landed in Jersey thoroughly drenched.

Two other Erie directors who dawdled in New York were arrested by Barnard’s police and spent the night behind bars.

If you enjoyed the excerpt, click here to check out the book.

GUEST BLOGGER: Joseph Farris on a soldier's-eye view of World War II

2012-01-19T09:59:00.018-05:00

Long before becoming a popular cartoonist for The New Yorker and other top magazines, Joseph Farris shipped out to World War II from his home in Danbury, Connecticut, as a young Army Private aboard the U.S.S. General Gordon in October 1944, bound for France as part of Company M, 398th Infantry. Here, he found time to hone his craft through dozens of wartime sketches and paintings while sending over 400 letters home. He recently published an illustrated memoir of his wartime experience -- A SOLDIER'S SKETCHBOOK: From the Frontlines of World War II. We are happy today to give you an excerpt. Enjoy....

HILL 578

Our morale couldn’t have dropped much lower than on that fateful day of November 20th, 1944. The Company M morning reports coldly reported that Lt. Gray, our platoon leader, had been killed in action. He was tall, slender and handsome, probably in his 30’s. We were all fond of him and more importantly, we had full confidence in his leadership.

We were a heavy machine gun squad assigned to Co. L rifle company and because of the bulkiness and weight of our weapons, we lost contact with them. Hill 578 was steep and forested and Lt. Gray ordered us to pause while he tried to connect with Co. L. We smiled as he crawled past me. He knelt behind a tree and peered ahead when suddenly a shot rang out. It left a small, almost inconspicuous hole in the side of his head. We had suffered our first KIA during our first combat with the enemy. We heard that when the Germans retreated, they left behind one out of every ten as sniper. We now had to be alert in every direction-front, side, back, above and below for hidden mines.

Tech. Sergeant Ted Lederer immediately took charge, made contact with the rifle company and led us to the top of Hill 578 where we commenced to dig in when all hell broke loose. We quickly full-loaded my machine gun and the first gunner sprayed the area indiscriminately. I, the second-gunner, was feeding the ammunition belt. I looked up at the first gunner and was startled to see that he was covering his eyes with one hand and firing wildly with the other. I quickly pushed him aside and took over the gun. We didn’t expect to come out of the battle alive but after much firing, we finally wiped out the enemy. The first-gunner shamefully crawled down to the foxhole in front of us to see if the rifleman who had dived into his unfinished hole to escape our “friendly” fire was safe. The rifleman turned out to be a friend from the same hometown as the first gunner! The squad leader had also lost control of himself and both he and the first gunner were taken off the front lines and sent back. We never saw either again. I became squad leader. I was a battle hardened twenty-year-old.

Three enemy snipers had been captured and it was quite certain that one of the three had killed Lt. Gray. One of the rifle platoon leaders, a close friend of the Lieutenant’s, marched the prisoners into the woods. We heard three shots. Lieutenant Gray had been avenged.

Joseph Farris is has been a contract cartoonist with The New Yorker since 1971, and has done covers for The New Yorker, Barron's, Harvard Magazine, ABA Journal, Indiana Alumni, Industry Week and many others. For almost twenty years his cartoons were featured in Stern magazine in Germany. Visit him at www.josephfarris.com.

GUEST BLOGGER: James Landers on the history of customer coupons

2012-01-17T12:01:00.000-05:00

One of the original consumer "coupons," innovated by Coca-Cola's Asa Chandler in 1887.

Couponing has become increasingly popular in recent years, especially since the economic downturn of 2008 as consumers have to scrape by on less. But coupons and the practices they support have been around for a lot longer in this country:

The first real coupons appeared in 1887 when the Coca-Cola Company was incorporated with drugstore owner (and soon-to-be business tycoon) Asa Candler as a partner. Chandler had the revolutionary idea of supplying soda fountains with free syrup and giving out slips of paper that entitled holders to a free drink. The campaign was incredibly successful. By 1913, an estimated one in nine Americans had received a free Coke, for a total of about 8.5 million drinks. In this way the birth of the coupon coincided with, and heralded in, the ascension of an iconic American corporation.

Candler invented the word "coupon," from the French "couper", which means "to cut."

In the early 1900s, C.W. Post used widespread coupon distribution to market his new Grape Nuts breakfast cereal. Each coupon offered a one-cent discount on a single box. Post's campaign too was extremely successful and helped both to skyrocket his own company while establishing the concept coupons in the American consciousness.

Post also utilized other innovative advertising techniques such as free samples, product demonstrations, and recipe booklets. Other cereal companies followed Post's example and promoted themselves by printing coupons on their packages; many continue to do so today.

Coupons grew more popular during the first half of the 20th century. They got a serious boost during the Depression of the 1930s, when people found it absolutely necessary to conserve money even on groceries. Clipping coupons became part of the household routine.

Chain supermarkets employed large-scale coupon giveaways during their expansion in the 1940s. These campaigns helped to cement their central position in the food industry and dominate the market over older, local shops. In 1957, the Nielsen Coupon Clearing House, an institution dealing solely in coupon redemption, was founded. Its creation symbolized the growing importance of the coupon industry in America.

The industry continued to grow in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, both in coupon users and methods of distribution. By 1965, half the households in America were using coupons. Coupons began to appear in newspapers, on sales receipts at grocery stores, and on shelves in electronic form.

The advent of the Internet in the early 1990s brought the first appearance of online-distributed, printable coupons. By 2003, 77% of consumers used coupons in some form. Over the next few years, new technologies like smartphone apps allowed for even more opportunities and mediums for coupon distribution.

The U.S. government distributed coupons for the first time in 2009 -- over 64 million of them, each offering $40 off the purchase of a digital-to-analog television converter box.

The history of the coupon in America is the story of a single bright idea that spawned a booming and vital industry, one that continues to grow and diversify today, spurred on by the climate of economic instability just as it was in the 1930s.

James Landers is with the site Couponing that offers top-retailer coupon information, couponing tips and how-to guides.

Mitt Romney, Part III: The next "baby boomer" president?

2012-01-12T09:21:00.001-05:00

That's 19-year old Mitt Romney on the right, holding the sign that says "Speak Out! Don't sit in!" Romney was one of about 150 students protesting against an anti-draft "sit-in" at Stanford University in May 1966.

Here's one last thought about Mitt Romney before I drop the subject for the week--

As a proud member of the "baby boom" generation (born October 1951 and weaned on "Rocky and Bullwinkle"), I pay special attention to people my age. And when it comes to politics, I always assume that anyone from my era who grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s had to be shaped by it in some fundamental way. But the question is -- how?

So far, we have had two "baby boom" presidents in America. They were different as night and day:

Democrat Bill Clinton, born 1946, spent the late 1960s in college (Georgetown, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then Yale Law School), joined anti-War protests, enjoyed the chance to "not inhale" marijuana, avoided the draft, and emerged as a leftist George McGovern-style politico.
Republican George W. Bush, also born 1946, joined the opposite crowd. At Yale he was a frat brother and "Skull and Bones"-er, then he joined the Texas Air National Guard (though carefully avoided Vietnam) before starting Harvard Business School. You'd never catch him at some hippy anti-war rally, and his drug of choice was alcohol until he gave it up in the mid-1980s.

Anyone in college in the late 1960s knew both of these types. But now we have Mitt Romney, possibly a third "baby boom" president. Where does he fit? Not surprisingly, someplace else.

Mitt Romney (born 1947) spent most of the turbulent late 1960s out of the country. In mid-1966, he left for a 3-year Mormon missionary assignment to France, a traditional rite-of-passage in his family. During this time, stationed in Le Harve, then Nantes, Bordeaux, and Paris, young Mitt mostly kept away from politics, even as his father was running for President in 1967 and 1968. (See Part II of this series.) Mitt's missionary work forbid him from smoking, drinking, or dating (though he already was committed to his future wife Anne back in the USA).

He avoided military service in Vietnam during these years first through a student draft deferment and then a ministerial deferment.

Still, Mitt had a point of view. The Vietnam War was an increasingly hot issue in 1966 and 1967 as President Lyndon B. Johnson was escalating American involvement from 16,500 to almost 500,000 troops, mostly draftees. Not surprisingly, protests centered on college campuses, and focused on the draft. "Hell no !! We won't go !!!"

At first, Mitt supported the War. The photograph at the top of this post, published recently by the London Daily Mail, shows 19 year-old Mitt at Stanford University -- where he studied for one year before leaving for France. Mitt is on the far right holding a picket sign. Here's how the MailOnline described the scene: "The photograph was taken on May 20, 1966, shortly after a group of students had taken over the office of Stanford University President Wallace Sterling.... They were protesting at the introduction of a test designed to help the authorities decide who was eligible for the draft. Mr Romney was one of approximately 150 conservative students who counter-picketed the sit-in."

In other words, Romney was protesting against the protesters -- supporting the War and the draft, despite his own deferment.

In France as a Mormon missionary during 1967-1969, Mitt hardly escaped the maelstrom. He was present in Paris for the May 1968 Paris general strike and student revolt. According to various accounts, he was frequently challenged by French students about America's role in Vietnam (France itself had left Vietnam in 1954 after its defeat at Dien Bien Phu), which Mitt always still backed.

When Mitt returned to the US in mid-1969 to finish school at Brigham Young University, his draft deferment ran out. But he had luck on his side and drew a number 300 in the 1969 draft lottery, making him effectively exempt. (Full disclosure: I pulled a number 14 in the 1970 lottery, creating some major life complications back then. Maybe more on that some other time.) Mitt was surprised at how things had changed while he was away, particularly his own father's new strong views against the War. Mitt quickly changed as well. In 1970, the Boston Globe quoted him as criticizing the War. "If it wasn't a political blunder to move into Vietnam," he told a reporter, "I don't know what is."

By mid-1971, however, all this was over. Mitt had enrolled at the Harvard Business and Law schools and was on to his next career in business and finance.

So what does this tell us about Mitt Romney? Which side of the 1960s culture wars was he on? Apparently both at different times, and neither very strongly. Mitt followed his own drummer -- to France, to Brigham Young, and to Harvard. And apparently he is following his own drummer still.

Special Feature: Primary Schedule Map

2012-01-11T09:19:00.000-05:00

After Mitt Romney's big win yesterday in New Hampshire, it remains to be seen if the Republican presidential nomination race now will quickly finish, or whether the anti-Romneys -- Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Santorum, Perry and the rest -- can drag it out. Either way, to help follow the action, here (below) is a special treat courtesy of our techno-wizard friends at ESRI in Redlands, California, the country's leading experts in cutting-edge Geospatial technology.

It is an interactive "smart map" of this year's presidential primary contest. Click on the different buttons (the map, the dates, the state names) and see what happens.

Smart maps like this (or "Geospatial Information Systems") are one of the great innovation of our time, from the navigation systems in our cars to Google Earth to the data-rich displays on CNN and other TV networks to the GIS grids used by governments for complex infrastructure planning. This relatively simple one just scratches the surface. Click here to see a few more.

Presidential Primary Election Calendar Map
Use this timeline map to see the sequence of US primaries and caucuses in 2012. Clicking on a state will show you the number of registered voters and their political attitudes.

REALITY CHECK: Mitt Romney -- Some relevant family history. Part II, "Brainwashing."

2012-01-08T16:14:00.001-05:00

Yes, Mitt Romney has flip-flopped. In 2002, he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a pro-choice moderate. Today in 2012 he paints himself a dedicated pro-life conservative. Who is the real Mitt? This contradiction has raised alarms for true believers on both sides, making it his biggest single vulnerability today as a candidate for President of the United States.

But Mitt Romney has navigated this minefield with spectacular ease. It's as if he's been preparing for it his entire life. And that, in fact, is where the real truth lies. Mitt has a family skeleton on this point.

In Part I of this post (click here), I mentioned that Mitt's father, three-term Michigan governor George W. Romney, also ran for the White House back in 1968, when Mitt was just 21 years old. But George Romney in late 1967, just as his campaign was getting started, saw it collapse over a classic verbal gaffe -- telling a reporter he had been "brainwashed" by Pentagon officials into supporting the Vietnam war. (See the full actual 1967 clip, above.)

For his father George, this ultimate "flip-flip" exploded as a national embarrassment. For young Mitt, it taught a painful lesson.

The gaffe

Son and father, Mitt and George Romney, with mother Lenore, early 1960s.

George Romney started his campaign for president with high hopes. He had won his third election as Michigan governor in 1966 by a 580,000 vote margin, making him one of the most successful and popular Republicans in the country. He had strong backing from Party leaders wanting to avoid a repeat of Barry Goldwater's disastrous 1964 defeat. He led Richard Nixon by 8 full points in the Gallop Poll for the Republican nomination at the opening of 1967.

But George Romney still had to address the key burning issue facing the country that year: the Vietnam War.

Since August 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson had pressed the US Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing military intervention in South Vietnam, Johnson had escalated American involvement from 16,500 to almost 500,000 troops in 1967, including large numbers of draftees and accompanied by massive bombing of the North. Casualties mounted; over 30,000 US soldiers would die under LBJ's watch with no clear strategy and no end in sight.

Still, at this early stage, few American politicians dared to publicly criticize the War for fear of being labelled disloyal, unpatriotic, or weak -- despite the fact that an increasingly militant antiwar movement was taking hold across the country.

George Romney had visited Vietnam in 1965, been briefed by military leaders, and been an early strong supporter of the War. But like many Americans, he grew skeptical over time. On August 31, 1967, in a routine interview with Detroit station WKBD-TV, reporter Lou Gordon confronted Romney on the issue. He quoted Romney's early support of the War, then quoted his recent criticism, and asked about the contradiction. The result was disaster.

Listen to Romney's answer (click on the image above). At the time, most people simply heard the word "brainwashing" and ignored the rest. And why not? It was a terrible choice. Barely a decade since the Korean War in which North Koreans used psychological torture against American POWs -- actual "brainwashing" -- it sounded whiney and evasive, like Romney was charging the American generals with bad faith, while also acknowledging his own ignorance and suggesting some psychological disorder. All this, plus he was criticizing a wartime president with soldiers under fire.

The reaction was immediate. Vermont Governor Philip H. Hoff, a friendly Republican who had accompanied Romney on his 1965 trip to Vietnam and attended the same briefings with the generals, called Romney's remark "outrageous, kind of stinking ... Either he's a most naïve man or he lacks judgment."  Senator Eugene McCarthy (D.-Minnesota), running against LBJ for the Democratic nomination, turned it into a joke, saying that in Romney's case, "a light rinse would have been sufficient." Within days, Romney's support cratered, plummeting from 24% down to 14% in the Gallup Poll, giving Richard Nixon a large lead.

After that, critics would label Romney as indecisive and inept.   Two weeks before the New Hampshire primary in March 1968, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller would announce his own availability for the Republican nomination and George Romney would pull out of the race.

But listen to the rest of Romney's actual answer to the 1967 question -- not just the word "brainwashing." What he said, in sum, was that on his original 1965 visit to Vietnam, the generals gave him an unrealistic, over-optimistic report based on bad information, and that, since then, he had done his own independent homework, studied the facts, and changed his mind. The bottom line? George Romney was right about Vietnam. LBJ and his generals had misled the country into a war that ultimately cost some 58,000 American lives.

Impact on young Mitt
Young Mitt Romney was not at his father's side during this crisis. Instead, Mitt was off in France in 1967 and 1968 on a Morman missionary adventure. Still, he followed his father's campaign closely. At the end, he received a letter from his father telling him simply "Your mother and I are not personally distressed. As a matter of fact, we are relieved."

Mitt as a 21 year-old, certainly understood his father's 1967 views on Vietnam, and was even quoted himself as criticizing the War in a 1970 interview with the Boston Globe.  "If it wasn't a political blunder to move into Vietnam," he told the reporter, "I don't know what is."

Recently, Mitt Romney talked about the episode to the Washington Post, how it made him more cautious and circumspect. "My own experience has taught me you have to exercise care," he explained. For instance: "After 9/11, I got a question about whether the [Olympic] Games [which he was then managing in Salt Lake City] would be cancelled if another terrorist incident occurred ... I could see the headline. 'Romney May Consider Canceling the Games' ... So I knew I couldn't answer the question directly. I said that it would be 'unthinkable' to cancel the Games."

As for the "brainwashing" episode itself, Mitt said this: "My father later did not look back.... It was not a big issue in our house."

Let's hope that Mitt Romney learned the right lesson from his father's 1967 disaster.  Right or wrong, in politics, how you say something can be just as important as what you say.   Mitt has had several years to prepare to explain his flip flops on Obama's health care bill, his Massachusetts pro-choice statements, and the rest. You won't hear Mitt Romney complain about being "brainwashed" by anyone. But hopefully, this will not stop him in the future from actually keeping his mind open and changing it when it's the right thing to do.

REALITY CHECK: Mitt Romney - Some relevant family history. Part I, Goldwater 1964.

2012-01-05T15:42:00.013-05:00

It is no secret that Mitt Romney -- this week's Iowa Caucus winner and now clear frontrunner for the Republican 2012 presidential nomination -- is not the first member of his family to seek the White House. Mitt's father, three-term Michigan governor George W. Romney, also made the attempt back in 1968. Mitt was just 21 years old at the time, and his father came achingly close before seeing his campaign for the Republican ticket collapse over a classic verbal gaffe -- telling reporters he had been "brainwashed" by Pentagon officials into supporting the Vietnam war. But more on that later.

Then-Michigan Gov. George Romney (father of now-presidential
candidate Mitt Romney), seated in 1964 with then-Republican presidential
candidate Barry Goldwater, whom Romney refused to enforse and called
an "extremist." At the podium is future president Gerald Ford, then still
a Congressman from Michigan.

Mitt's father also played a key role in the bitter 1964 Republican split over its nomination that year of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, the arch-conservative who lost in a landslide to Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson while inspiring future conservative leaders like Ronald Reagan. This is where we'll start right now.

Today's 2012 Republican presidential contest has much in common with 1964. Then as now, conservative activists had launched a strident revolt against what they considered a much-too-"moderate" party elite.

Today, the two sides are personified by Mitt Romney, the more moderate, versus several competing conservative "anti-Romneys" -- Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and the rest. Back in 1964, these two sides were led by Goldwater on the right and, for the moderates, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. George Romney stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Rockefeller.

It is easy today to forget the passions of 1964. President John Kennedy had just been assassinated a few months earlier in November 1963. Americans feared nuclear annihilation from Soviet Russia, and agitation for (and against) Civil Rights reached its peak. The watershed 1964 Civil Rights Act passed the Senate that summer only after a two-month filibuster.

Barry Goldwater, a World War II Air Force pilot, two-term US Senator, and author of The Conscience of a Conservative, happily represented the far right. He saved his sharpest elbows for eastern moderates in his own Party. "[S]ometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea," he once told reporters in 1961. As for Russian communists, he joked that the U.S. military should just "lob one [nuclear bomb] into the men's room of the Kremlin" and solve the problem for good.

Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act which, in the heat of that year, drew major attention, especially in the South. He denied being racist, but when asked to renounce prejudice in a formal way, he refused -- presumably to avoid offending southern white supporters. "In your heart you know he's right," chanted friends. Enemies replied: "In your guts, you know he's nuts."

Nelson and Happy Rockefeller on their 1963 honeymoon.

Nelson Rockefeller, by contrast, oozed with eastern elitism. The wealthy grandson of Standard Oil titan John D. Rockefeller, the New York governor not only practiced liberal big-city politics but also crossed a cultural taboo in 1963 by divorcing his wife and immediately marrying a women fifteen years younger named Happy who also had recently divorced her own husband and ceded him custody of their four children. Few doubted that the two had carried on a secret affair for years. In 1964, adultury still mattered.

Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller fought a string of bitter primary contests in early 1964, but Goldwater's triumph in California gave him by far the most delegates. When the Party met for its nominating convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, tension boiled. A last-ditch stop-Goldwater effort quickly materialized. Leading it was George W. Romney.

George Romney had been elected Michigan governor in 1962. A former auto executive, he had created a state income tax and, like Rockefeller, was a strong civil rights backer. In June 1964, watching the growing split in his Party, Romney had no trouble picking sides. He joined 12 other Republican governors that month in blasting Goldwater, declaring "I will do everything within my power to keep him from becoming the party's presidential nominee." Reaching the convention in San Francisco, he told the platform committee to "unequivocally reject extremism of the right and the left" -- a clear slap at Goldwater and his followers.

Charges of "extremism" against Goldwater crescendoed over the next few days, culminating in an ugly scene as Nelson Rockefeller himself was loudly booed when he addressed the convention(see clip above). Eight different candidates received first ballot votes (including 41 for Romney), but this was not enough to stop the inevitable. In accepting the nomination, Goldwater shot back at his critics: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

After San Francisco, Republican moderates abandoned the party in droves. Still, Barry Goldwater hoped he might be able to win over George Romney. He reached out, and Romney apparently was willing to try to bridge the gap. That August, just prior to a meeting in Pennsylvania, Romney sent Goldwater (via his vice presidential running mate Congressman William Miller (R-NY)) a brief statement on civil rights and asked Goldwater to endorse it as a way to de-fuse the issue. According to journalists Roland Evans and Robert Novak, the statement read in part as follows: "The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others. Neither can we permit states rights at the expense of human rights."

Goldwater refused, and after that George Romney drew the line. He refused to endorse Goldwater or to appear with him publicly. Later, he wrote Goldwater a twelve page private letter explaining his reasons, focusing on civil rights In the end, Romney won re-election that year as Michigan governor by 380,000 votes as Goldwater was losing the state by over a million.

All of which brings us back to Mitt Romney and 2012. Talking a few years ago to Tim Russert about his father (who died in 1995), Mitt described the 1964 confrontation in these terms: “my dad walked out of the Republican convention in 1964 in San Francisco in part because Barry Goldwater in his speech gave my dad the impression that he was someone who would be weak on civil rights.”

As Mitt Romney today prepares to fight the conservative wing of his modern Republican Party in a contest not much different from the Goldwater insurgency of 1964, will Mitt have the same backbone as his father to stand up for his "moderate" beliefs, even at the cost of catcalls and boos from the right wing chorus? Stay tuned.....

In Part II, we'll talk about that "brainwashing" episode. I think you'll be surprised at the truth.....

Next up, Rick Santorum.

2011-12-30T11:54:00.005-05:00

OK, yes, I confess again. I've met Rick Santorum, but also only once, and also having nothing to do with politics -- at least directly.

Back during the 1990s, when I was working at the US Department of Agriculture as administrator of the Federal crop insurance program, a problem came up involving Pennsylvania farmers. The farmers had suffered crop losses and they complained to their United States Senator, then Rick Santorum, about how the government programs were covering the loss. Santorum's office, in turn, asked that I come to Capitol Hill on behalf of USDA and brief him on the situation.

The result was a small, informal, half-hour meeting with Senator Santorum in his office. What I remember most about it was how well it went. Santorum was friendly and good-natured, but also focused and effective. He had a bright young staff member specializing in agriculture programs and he let her take the lead on the technical points. He listened, he asked good questions, he let people speak, and in the end he pressed us very strongly -- in a friendly way -- on how to get the best deal for his Pennsylvania farmers. It was just what a Senator should do, and we ended up with a solution.

So what's the problem? I always find it strange when political figures who come across as likeable and reasonable face-to-face on relatively small issues -- like agriculture programs affecting, in this case, a few dozen farmers -- can turn around and take positions on big things affecting large numbers of people that are simply mean-spirited and harmful.

Rick Santorum, whatever he says about limited government, has made a point of being the strongest voice in the current political contest for government intrusion into people's' private lives based on his religious beliefs -- be it Terri Schiavo (chief sponsor of the bill for Washington to interfere in her case), recognition of gay relationships (opposes both gay marriage and civil unions), permitting abortions even in pressing personal circumstances, and so on down the list.

Rick Santorum's own web page (click here to visit it) makes this unabashedly clear. It touts his ties to the most pointed cultural advocates in the country: "Sarah Palin praised Rick for his 'consistency on protecting the sanctity of life.' Mike Huckabee said he 'adores Rick Santorum’s conviction.' Glenn Beck called Rick Santorum the 'next George Washington,' and encouraged voters 'to take a look at him.' And Rush Limbaugh said it would be 'great' if Rick Santorum became President." He makes no secret of fighting his campaign on behalf of religion. Again quoting his web page: "Rick understands that our freedom to practice our faith is not just under attack through the redefinition of marriage, but in nearly every facet of the popular culture."

Rick Santorum is now the latest Republican candidate to enjoy a surge in public opinion polls for the Iowa Caucuses. (Click here for the latest from Real Clear Politics.) Think I'm exaggerating? Check out this video clip of Santorum discussing science and religion. Yes, he is a very nice person and appears to be very sincere. But is this who you want running public policy in the USA?

REALITY CHECK: Newt Gingrich as historian?

2011-12-27T14:45:00.004-05:00

OK, I confess. Yes, I've met Newt Gingrich. But only once, and it had nothing to do with politics -- at least not directly.

I happen to belong to a very fine organization called the Capitol Hill Civil War Roundtable, a proud coven of Washington, D.C.-area history zealots enamored with the Civil War. Yes, that includes me. I love going to their meetings when I can. They usually bring in a guest speaker, and they manage to attract some terrific ones -- authors of new Civil War books, expert guides from local Virginia civil war battlefields, staff experts from museums, so on.

For a speaker, they can be a tough audience. Everyone in the room is an expert, and if you make even the slightest mistake in describing a Civil War battle or personality, someone will always catch it. (Full disclosure: I gave a talk to the group once about my own book DARK HORSE on the assassination of president James A. Garfield, focusing on Garfield's time in the Civil War, and it was great time, even if a few members made a point to stress that Garfield, as anyone should know, was only a very minor Civil War figure as compared to Winfield Scott Hancock, who opposed Garfield in the 1880 presidential election, who was much more important.)

In any event, one time, as its monthly guest, the group invited Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and current leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Gingrich, along with a fine co-author named William Forstchen, had just published a new book called Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War (2005) -- a "what if" story showing how, with a few key changes, fortunes at the famous 1863 battle easily could have changed, with Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia winning the day over the Union's Army of the Potomac. It was the first of a trilogy that later would be followed by Grant Comes East (2006) and Never Call Retreat (2007).

As much as I hate to admit it, and as much as I may dislike his politics, to his credit, Speaker Gingrich did a very nice job that day talking about the Civil War and his book.  He knew his facts, he knew his story, and he knew his audience. After a brief talk, he let the group pepper him with questions for almost an hour -- sharp, hard questions from people who really knew their Civil War stuff.  Gingrich was clearly in his element -- relaxed, engaging, interesting, and looking like he was clearly enjoying himself.

The book itself was generally well received among Civil War fans, even if somewhat slanted toward the South, and it made no pretense at scholarship (no footnotes or archive references, for instance).  Here's how Publisher's Weekly summed it up--

"This well-executed alternative history imagines a Confederate victory at Gettysburg. Former House speaker Gingrich (Contract with America) and historical fiction author Forstchen (Down to the Sea) create a plausible scenario: Robert E. Lee resolves to command, rather than merely coordinate, the efforts of that gaggle of prima donnas known as the high command of the Army of Northern Virginia. Thus, when he leads them into battle against the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, he does not commit his soldiers to a desperate head-butting on the ground chosen by the Union's General Meade. Instead, he maneuvers around the Union flank, placing his tightly run army between Meade and Washington, D.C., scooping up Union supplies and forcing Meade to launch desperate attacks with disastrous results for the Union cause.

"The authors show thorough knowledge of the people, weapons, tactics and ambience of the Civil War, though their portrayals of historical figures like Lee, Meade, Longstreet and Richard Ewell betray a certain bias (the Confederate men are noble and wise, the Union leaders hot-tempered and vindictive). The novel has a narrative drive and vigor that makes the climactic battle scene a real masterpiece of its kind (it's not for the weak of stomach). The military minutiae probably makes the book inaccessible to anyone who's not a Civil War buff or military fiction fan, but those two sizable groups will find this a veritable feast."

So does writing a first-rate Civil War book qualify somebody to be President of the United States? Not really, and I'm definitely with the group that thinks Gingrich is too bombastic, erratic, self-absorbed, confrontational, and out of touch for the job -- before even starting on his positions on policy issues.

Still, after you finish voting against him in the primary or caucus of your choice, don't hesitate for a minute about buying one of his Civil War books. You'll be glad you did both things.

REALITY CHECK: Who really is Ron Paul ??

2011-12-23T15:17:00.000-05:00

Yes, it is amazing that the Republican Party is now on the verge of making Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) the front runner for its nomination for President of the United States. Paul holds a clear edge in the upcoming Iowa Caucuses (click here for the latest polls from Real Clear Politics) and, if he wins there, he will be a clear, legitimate first-tier contender.

Why is this so strange? Who, really, is Ron Paul? Sometimes he talks like the ultimate peace-nik and civil libertarian; other times like a right wing ideologue ready to let poor people starve and sick people die. He is always engaging, consistent, and unabashed. Where is truth?

Take a listen to this video (above). 2012 is not the first time Ron Paul has run for President, and it was not always as a Republican.

Back in 1988, Congressman Paul, a practicing doctor (obstetrician) in Texas who has already served eight years on Capitol Hill (1976-1984), ran for President on the Libertarian Party ticket. During that campaign, Paul received an invitation to match wits with the leading conservative intellectual of the day, William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review and author of the seminal book God and Man at Yale.  Buckley back then hosted a weekly TV show called Firing Line that was the cutting edge forum for conservatives.

The video above is the result. During this one-hour program, Buckley grills Paul on what he considered a long list of Paul's unrealistic, radical views, including the abolition of the FBI, the CIA, the draft, the entire Federal income tax, and about 40 percent of the United States government.

Several things about it are striking: (a) how well Paul defend's himself against Buckley's attacks, (b) the consistency between his views in 1988 and 2012, (c) the fact that Paul's views -- particularly on taxes -- that were considered so extreme by a conservative like Buckley have now become Republican mainstream and (d) that as recently as 1988, a major TV show in America could still present an intelligent, respectful, interesting, and thoughtful debate on these points.

Congressman/Doctor Paul won 432,179 popular votes for President as a Libertarian in 1988, about 0.5 percent of the total, and would then return to Congress in 1997.   Deep changes are taking place this year in the American body politic, and the emergence of libertarian Ron Paul as the Republican front runner for president may be the most dramatic sign yet.

Who, really, is Ron Paul? Check out the video. And if you like the first part, here are the links to Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

And if you happen to live in Iowa or New Hampshire, do not vote without seeing this first !   Enjoy.

Next up: DARK HORSE

2011-12-16T16:53:00.001-05:00

Which was the worst presidential campaign in American history, from the viewpoint of the winning candidate? How about 1880, when the bad blood and infighting got so intense that the new president was shot in the back four months into his term by a follower of a rival faction in his own party -- in an argument over patronage jobs?

Today, on the eve of what promises to be a rocky, ugly 2012 political year, we proudly announce the new Viral History Press LLC edition of DARK HORSE: The Surprise Election and Politicial Murder of President James A. Garfield.

For this year, it is exclusively at Amazon.com.

Check out possible savings here.

James Garfield's 1880 "dark horse" nomination for president after the longest-ever Republican convention (36 ballots), his victory in the closest-ever presidential popular vote, his struggle with feuding factions once elected, and its climax of violence, all produced one of the most dramatic presidential odysseys of the Gilded Age. The era's decency is seen contrasted against sharp and bitter partisanship, hauntingly familiar to modern America. But in this case, it ended in the pistol shots of assassin Charles Guiteau.

Featured on C-SPAN's "Booknotes" and NPR's "All Things Considered" when first released in 2003, DARK HORSE has since become a true underground classic in political circles.

Now we are making it available again. You can read the story yourself and share it with your politico friends.

Own Clyde Tolson's actual apartment ! Yes, this is FOR REAL !!

2011-12-15T13:59:00.004-05:00

The Marlyn building, 3901 Cathedral Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. -- just a short walk from J. Edgar Hoover's own home on 30th Place, NW.

Yes it's true. The actual apartment of Clyde Tolson, long-time friend, companion, associate (and more?) of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, is now for sale and your's for the tantalizing, reduced price of $379,900. Thanks to our friend Ryan Stroschein for sending us the link to this amazing real estate listing. Here's how the agent describes it:

Hoover and Tolson with matching hats, 1950s.

"Reduced 14K! Historic 2 BR condo

w/ updated kitchen & Ba. In

James Goode's book Best Addresses"

Unit 515 @ The Marlyn was a long

term residence of FBI Dir. J. Edgar

Hoover's closest colleague - Assoc.

Dir. Clyde Tolson. The unit

has a sense of openness & old world

charm w/ a DR leading to step

down LR w/ a picture window

to enjoy sunset views. Garage

pking & storage unit. Pets OK."

And yes, the apartment is just a short walk or drive from Hoover's own home during the period on 30th Place, NW.

Interested? Here's a link to the real estate listing with lots of photos. Happy shopping !!

CONTEST: Who is your favorite rattlesnake? Does this sign remind you of someone? Send us a comment. We'll post the best ones.

2011-12-11T16:25:00.000-05:00

Sign from a hiking trail at the Torrey Pines State Nature Reserve near San Diego, California. They love their snakes there.

Boss Tweed: A few more cartoons, from people besides Thomas Nast

2011-12-11T15:51:00.000-05:00

Thomas Nast of Harper's Weekly was not the only cartoonist to aim his pencil at William M. Tweed, Boss of Tammany Hall. When the scandal broke in 1871 after The New-York Times published proof of massive frauds by Tweed and his circle, every paper in town with an artist on staff joined the frenzy. Here are few samples:

This unsigned, front-page drawing from the Evening Telegram, a friendly newspaper (that was taking plenty of subsidy money from City Hall), shows Tweed before the scandal, celebrating New Year's Eve at a party for his Tammany crowd at the New York Academy of Music on Union Square.

Just a few months later, the same Evening Telegram changed its tune after the Tweed frauds became public knowledge. Holding onto the City Treasury vault are the core members of Tweed's Ring: (from left) City Chamberlain Peter ("Brains") Sweeny, Comptroller Richard ("Slippery Dick") Connolly, Tweed, and the mayor, A. Oakey Hall.

As the scandal worsened, Sweeny and Hall tried to save themselves by blaming Connolly, the Comptroller, for the massive thefts. Here, they try to convince Connolly (seated in the center) to take the fall by resigning his post, thereby admitting guilt. Connolly, of course, refuses. "Tamani Tycooni invite Connolli to Hari-Kari -- No-go-he." From Frank Leslie's Illustrated, October 7, 1871.

In the end, all four of the Ring members are forced out, though only Tweed spends time in prison. Sweeny and Connolly flee to Europe and Hall wins an acquittal after three criminal trials. This drawing by artist A. Hoyt shows Tweed leading them off into the subset.

Click here to read the opening chapter of Boss Tweed: the Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York.

Click here to buy the book on Amazon, Kindle, or Nook.

A rare Tweed photo -- at his clubhouse in Greenwich, Connecticut

2011-12-07T17:56:00.000-05:00

Yes, that's Boss Tweed. He's the one with the beard, sitting up front in the middle, a white hat in his lap, surrounded by his friends. Tweed had so, so very many friends back then, in 1870 -- before they all abandoned him in the scandal.

But surprisingly, this is not New York City. By 1870, as Tweed sat at his very pinnacle of power as supreme leader of New York's political and financial worlds, having made himself filthy rich from years of graft, Tweed had largely moved his summer headquarters away from his usual Manhattan haunts -- his law office on Duane Street and his mansion on Fifth Avenue at 43rd -- to Greenwich, Connecticut.

Tweed owned two steam-powered yachts (even though he got constantly sea-sick and hated being on the water) to make the quick trip from lower Manhattan across the Long Island Sound to Greenwich. In Greenwich, he owned a 40-acre estate with wide green lawns and gardens. And on a beautiful, sunny inlet called Indian Harbor, he founded his own playhouse-- the Americus Club -- where he served as president.

Tweed's political friends from New York City all jumped at the chance to join him there. They all loved making the summer weekend pilgrammages to Greenwich. By all accounts, they had a wonderful time and lots of fun -- with swimming, boat races, fancy dinners, lots of music, brandy and cigars. They laughed and talked and told stories until the late night hours.

Back in New York, the high society Union League and Manhattan Clubs would never allow these grubby politicians inside, but Tweed happily relished their company.

Also back in New York, forces were secretly converging during that summer of 1870 to destroy Tweed's life: Thomas Nast's relentless stream of humiliating cartoons, the relentless attacks by the New York Times (which soon would obtain a stolen copy of the Tweed Ring's secret account books, disclosing an amazing record of theft and kickbacks), and secret plotting by enemies inside his own camp. Within a year, Tweed would be toppled from power. Within two years, he would be in prison. After that, he would never walk free again, and his reputation would be blackened for over a century.

But look at Tweed on this pretty summer day in 1870. He looks as if he didn't have a care in the world, surrounded by friends at his Greenwich summer retreat.

If only time could have stopped for him at that moment.

Thanks to our friend Alan Bennett for finding this photo on Greenwich Nostalgia group page on Facebook.

Thomas Nast cartoons -- some appetizers

2011-12-05T16:09:00.001-05:00

Thomas Nast in the early 1870s, about the time of his
Tweed cartoons.

You can't tell the story of New York's Boss Tweed, who ruled the City with greed and grandeur in the years after the Civil War and was driven from power in a citizens' uprising in 1872, without the fantastic drawings of Thomas Nast -- the brilliant, young cartoonist for Harper's Weekly.

Here are a few appetizer samples.

Click here for more of the story -- from our newly-reissued book Boss Tweed: the Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York.

"As long as I count the ballots, what are you going to do about it?" This is the most famous quote attibuted to Tweed. In truth, there is no evidence that he ever said it. Most likely, Nast simply made it up to get people mad at the Boss.

In 1871, Tweed chose these three leading New York businessmen -- John Jacob Astor III, Moses Taylor, and Marshall O. Roberts -- to examine the City's financial books. The three spent just six hours at it, looked only at the papers Tweed showed them, and didn't ask any questions. Based on this, they gave the City's finances a clean bill of health -- somehow missing over $100 million in frauds. Nast dismissed them as "Three Blind Mice."

This cartoon, from June 1871, is the first where Nast uses the famous quote "What are you going to do about it?"

Notice the big object on the front of Tweed's shirt, looking big as a grapefruit. It is a 10.5-carat diamond pin costing that some of Tweed's friends game him that year as a Christmas present. It cost $15,500 in 1871 dollars -- about half a million in modern money. Nast made it a regular feature.

Here is Tweed stealing from the Public Treasury to pay off his poor, immigrant supporters. Tweed was no Robin Hood. He stole from the rich, but kept most of it for himself and his friends. Even so, the poor got a better deal from Tweed than from anyone else.

The answer to today's bad economy? Bring back BOSS TWEED !!

2011-11-30T13:08:00.007-05:00

Thomas Nast's lasting image of Boss Tweed as the classic American pol,
from Harper's Weekly, October 21, 1871.

Please don't misunderstand. Stealing is wrong. Graft is bad.

Still, watching today's politicians in Washington tripping over themselves trying to figure out ways to stimulate the economy -- or trying to fix it by cutting back -- I get nostalgic for the master. Bring back Boss Tweed.

William Magear Tweed, Boss of New York's Tammany Hall machine in the 1860s and 70s, controlled mayors, governors, newspapers, and companies. He used his power to steal from the city and county -- for an astounding estimated $100 million (billions of dollars in modern money) during his relatively brief time at the pinnacle.

But Tweed kept his power not just by stealing elections (which he did often). He also used his power to build. Talk about infrastructure? Tweed and his Tammany crowd did more to modernize New York City than anyone else in their generation. Tweed didn't need a "Stimulus Package" to grease the economy. He used the direct method -- graft.

Tweed spent the city into a $100 million deficit, mostly with money borrowed from investors in Europe who had no idea he was cheating them. Most of the cash went to pay politicians and hire legions of laborers. Was some of it stolen? Of course! But along the way, it helped spark an economic boom.

Boss Tweed knew how to spread the wealth around. The rich, the poor, all prospered. Stock prices and property values both soared under Tweed. Taxes stayed low. His system collapsed only when the New York Times got its hands on a purloined copy of the Tweed Ring's secret account books and printed it on its front page -- the journalistic coup of the Nineteenth Century. By then, Tweed had been humiliated by the cartoons of Thomas Nast of Harper's Weekly (see above), making him an easy mark.

A year after Tweed fell from power, in 1873, a financial panic hit New York and threw the city and country into the worst economic depression of the Nineteenth Century.

Graft aside, Tweed's regime left the city and country wonderfully enriched: Their fingerprints are on every major NY creation of the Gilded Age: Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Tweed Courthouse, new widened streets and sidewalks, the New York Stock Exchange, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mount Sinai Hospital, and dozens of charities. The list is almost endless. And they left a tradition of political inclusion, a "wide tent" approach that modern politicians could only envy.

Except for all the stealing, the frauds and deceit, and the years in prison -- of which there were plenty and which, to be clear, were very very wrong -- he was a great man.

Tweed would know how to get the country moving again in today's financial mess. But don't watch too closely. Tweed's methods were not for the squeamish, and "transparency" was not part of his approach.

For more, see the new Viral History Press edition of Boss Tweed, the Corrupt who Conveived the Soul of Modorn New York.

Welcome Back BOSS TWEED

2011-11-28T11:45:00.002-05:00

Do modern politicians give you the creeps, migranes, stomach cramps, and worse?

Are you sick to death of Romney, Perry, Newt, Ron Paul, even Obama -- with almost a full year left till Election Day?

Don't fret. TWEED IS BACK !!

Today, we proudly announce the new Viral History Press LLC edition of BOSS TWEED: the Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York.

Tweed counting the votes, according to Thomas Nast, 1871.

Tweed was the baddest, most crooked politician ever to breathe oxygen on American soil. No contest. No excuses. He stole more money, fixed more elections, and paid more bribes than anyone else. A New York jury convicted him on 204 counts of fraud -- and the city still honors him today by putting his name on, of all things, the County Courthouse in lower Manhattan.

It took Thomas Nast's brilliant cartoons and a city-wide revolt to drag him from power. Still, Tweed escaped from prison, fled to Spain, was recaptured and brought back, publicly confessed, died behind bars, and people loved him even more.

Read his incredible story -- a New York Times notable book. (Click here for all the great reviews.) Share it with your political friends.

This year, skip the mealy-mouthed modern mediocrities and give BOSS TWEED for the holidays.

Can't decide? Read the first chapter right now for free.

Buy it before January 1 and enjoy our big holiday savings.

HOOVER: A journalist's view -- Charles Elliott on searching J. Edgar's trash.

2011-11-24T21:00:00.000-05:00

Another great comment I received on my recent Washington Post article "Five Myths about J. Edgar Hoover," came from Charles Elliott, a journalist at the time who participated in a key investigation of Hoover. Here's his full description of the episode from his blog Clarity Research: Ruminations of a researcher/writer. He's given us permission to reprint it here:

Columnist Jack Andrerson, circa 1970. Anderson
reached an average 40 million readers through his
"Washington Merry-Go Round" column, and had
a proud spot on President Nixon's "Enemies List."

When I saw it recently, Clint Eastwood’s interesting new film, “J. Edgar,” stirred old memories for me. I know firsthand that he got at least one thing wrong, and missed another major opportunity to accurately portray long-time FBI director Hoover in his last days.

In 1971, I was a young reporter in Washington, D.C. Eager to prove my investigative reporting chops in the big leagues, I had just transitioned to a position as a leg man for columnist and ABC TV personality Jack Anderson. Anderson had heard that President Richard Nixon wanted to replace the top G-man. So Anderson decided to put Hoover under surveillance using the same techniques that the FBI was then known to be using against Jane Fonda and others accused of no crimes but being harassed by the government for opposing its policies, especially the Vietnam War.

I was sent out to interview Hoover’s neighbors in his upscale Northwest Washington neighborhood, stake out his house, follow his chauffeured limo, watch him and his number two man, Clyde Tolson, as they ate lunch every day at that same corner table in the Rib Room at the Mayflower Hotel up on Connecticut, and pick up Hoover’s trash.

There is a reference in the film to the possibility of going to Tolson’s “house” for dinner. But I know firsthand that Tolson actually had a highrise apartment in 1971, not a house. I know because Anderson had heard that Tolson owned a collection of antique vehicles formerly belonging to major crime figures arrested by the FBI. So he sent me out to look. Tolson’s building had a parking structure underneath, I found, and there were, indeed, several antique black vehicles from the 1930s parked there.

The Eastwood film does not include any reference to Anderson or my work for him. But at least two major biographies of Hoover included an account of my escapades picking up Hoover’s trash. I did so on several occasions, the most notable being one morning with a reporter from Washingtonian Magazine riding along with me.

The L-shaped alley adjacent to Hoover’s two-story brick house ran behind to the west and then on the north to the street east of the house. When we pulled up to the trash cans in the alley beside the house, we noticed that Hoover’s limo was still at the curb out front, engine running, and a film crew from ABC was across the street. Apparently the film crew wanted to grab a quick interview with Hoover on the way to work, but Hoover was refusing to come out of the house until they left.

Hoover's official car in 1971, a Cadillac Fleetwood,
recently sold on eBay for $6,677.77.
Click here for that story.

Nonetheless, I opened the trunk of a large car I had borrowed for the occasion, and began loading Hoover’s trash into the car. Suddenly the film crew noticed me and began filming. That alerted the people in the house to my presence. Within a minute or two, Hoover’s chauffeur — a tall black man who seemed to be nearly seven feet tall — came to the side gate and loomed over me.

“What do you think you are doing?” he demanded.

I knew the applicable law at the time in Washington was English common law, which held anything put out as trash to have been abandoned by the former owner. Anyone could legally pick it up.

“He put it out to be picked up and I am picking it up,” I said simply, continuing to load the car. Fortunately the film crew continued to film. My chances of being assaulted or at least physically restrained seemed diminished by their presence. I flashed them a “V” for victory.

Meanwhile, my companion from Washingtonian remained in the front passenger seat in the car, but he was now shaking like a leaf.

“Don’t you think you’ve got enough?!?” he kept asking piteously. “Don’t you think you’ve got enough?”

Charles Elliot in 1971 standing by Hoover's trash can, in
alley on north side of Hoover's Washington, D.C. home.
Photo by ABC News.

When I finished my work to my satisfaction, I closed the trunk and we drove away.

Anderson reported on the basis of these forays into Hoover’s wasteland that the top G-man meticulously wrote menus for his housekeeper to prepare on small stationery emblazoned, “From the Desk of the Director.” While he and Clyde generally had a light lunch at the Rib Room, evening meals were heavy with beef and rich desserts. Although Hoover had railed against the evils of drink in WTCU publications, the trash included miniature Jack Daniels Black Label Whiskey bottles. The public and private man seemed greatly at variance. And there were Gelusil packages, too. Anderson suggested tongue-in-cheek that it was possible Hoover no longer had the stomach for his job.

Hoover responded dourly, “The only time I have indigestion is when I read a certain man’s column!”

From my perspective, the major thing the Eastwood film missed, though, was Hoover’s severe paranoia in his last years. Hoover’s neighbors told me that he would not enter or leave his waiting car at the curb any time a long-haired youthful neighbor was anywhere within sight. And they pointed out that he placed a hat on the rear shelf of the limo, then sat on the other side and hunkered down. At the Rib Room, I also observed, Hoover and Tolson sat side-by-side with their backs to a wall, and vigilantly faced the entry way. The last time Hoover saw me there, he scowled at me.

He must have been particularly shocked when he began trying to find out who I was, and learned that my roommate was the son of an FBI Special Agent stationed in Oregon, and that the large apartment we shared with two other young men had been rented in the agent’s name. I do know that the agent was soon on the phone to his son, and the son made certain that I moved out. But not before a couple of men — one older, one younger — showed up with a large old Graphflex camera outside the building as I arrived home from the office. Since Anderson by then had written about my work regarding Hoover, I considered the possibility that they were with a wire service or some other news organization newly interested in my story.

“Who are you guys with?” I asked as they blinded me with the flash, taking pictures.

“Oh,” said the older fellow in ominous tones, “we’re just neighbors!”

While taking the last of my things out of that apartment one day when my roommate was absent, I found a letter from Hoover to my former pal. “Thank you for your actions in regard to this Charles Elliott matter,” Hoover wrote, adding to my astonishment that he especially appreciated my roommate’s “concern for my personal safety.”

I also know Eastwood’s film got the entry hall of Hoover’s house all wrong, since I went to the door one morning and looked in through the screen while Hoover was away at work and a cleaning crew was in there with everything wide open. That entry way was sparse in the film, but the real one would have provided a telling indication of his character, since immediately to the right inside was a pedestal with an imposing, life-sized bust of J. Edgar Hoover. And the wall behind it was covered with such things as framed letters of commendation, plaques awarded for achievement and photos of Himself posing with presidents including Harding, Coolidge, Roosevelt, and Truman.

After his death, Hoover’s closed coffin was placed in the Rotunda of the Capitol, and more than 25,000 visitors passed by to pay their final respects. The coffin was kept closed. A camera was set up at the bier, and everyone who passed by was filmed. Someone was making a movie, checking to see who showed up. As I recall, I smiled into the camera. That time, too.

Chuck Elliott is a retired journalist who served as a featured daily columnist, investigative reporter and editor in local news and was managing editor of the nation's leading trade magazine for the propane industry. He has three published books on Southern California history, is a nationally published poet with more than 280 poems online at The Beautyseer Channel on YouTube, an award-winning fine art photographer, and freelances as a writer and marketing consultant. Visit him at Linked (http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=81992875&trk=tab_pro), read his Clarity Research blog, and check out his poetry on YouTube.

Happy Thanksgiving !!!

2011-11-24T08:00:00.001-05:00

HOOVER: Andrew Simpson on J. Edgar as a student at George Washington University

2011-11-22T11:19:00.001-05:00

Hoover at the time he attended
George Washington University Law School

Another great comment we received was from Andrew Simpson, who wrote this piece originally in 2009 for Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies, "Schooling J. Edgar: The Shaping of Hoover's Legal Philiosophy at The George Washington University." He gives us permission to print this condensed version here. For the full article, contact Andrew below.

        From 1913 to 1917, the man who would become one of the most powerful and controversial figures in American history was a mere law student, wrestling with the same kind of work that hundreds of thousands of students have done since. This was not J. Edgar Hoover, fighter of subversives and criminals, but John Edgar Hoover, a young man in his late teens and early twenties trying to pass Contracts, Torts, and the assortment of other classes he needed to get his law degree.

     Hoover attended The George Washington University Law School starting in the fall of 1913, immediately after graduating from Central High School in Washington, D.C. He chose GW because he could help support his family by working as a clerk in the Library of Congress by day and taking his classes in the early evening. So when Hoover sat down at the New Masonic Temple at the intersection of 13th Street, New York Avenue, and H Street (the home of GW’s law school from 1910 to 1920) in September 1913 for his first class, he was just a boy of 18.

     When J. Edgar Hoover entered law school, the legal education system was in a state of transformation.The George Washington University adopted the case method of instruction around 1905-1906, when professors visited other schools and witnessed how effective it was when combined with the Socratic method of questioning students.

A meticulous student
      The methodical and meticulous Hoover who reveled in organizing and cataloguing information as a
career bureaucrat probably enjoyed the formalized structure of the case method as a student. His law
school notebooks contain thousands of pages of notes, one page per case (sometimes with glued-additions). He followed the same process for each case: write out the plaintiff’s and defendant’s claims, summarize the details of the case, indicate the relevant point of law under consideration, and indicate the court’s ruling on the matter. Under this section, he always included a “notes” section in which he would draw out the lesson, rule, or legal principle to be derived from the case. Sometimes he would even include an opinion on the ruling, although it is not clear whether the occasional “this decision is not good” or “the opinion in this case is very good and of great use” came from his textbook, his professor, or Hoover himself.

Grades
      According to his transcript held at The George Washington University registrar’s office, Hoover’s academic performance during his first year was mediocre at best: four B’s, four C’s, and one D. Over the years his grades steadily improved as he buried himself in his work. In a 1953 profile of Hoover,
a former law school classmate described him as “slim, dark, and intense. He sat off by himself against the wall and always had the answers. None of us got to know him very well.” By the time he graduated with his L.L.B. in 1916, he was tied for 15th place in class ranking out of a group of 67. In his final year at GW,during which he worked to receive his L.L.M., his marks were all A’s and B’s.

       Hoover’s highest marks came during his final semester at GW from Bankruptcy. He scored a 98%.

Impact of Professor Gregory
       The professor whose legal philosophy might have had the most impact on shaping Hoover’s views was Charles Noble Gregory, dean of the law school from 1911-1914 and Hoover’s contracts professor.h Gregory was not only a founding member of the American Society of International Law and former president of the American Association of Law Schools, but also was consulted about various international and domestic situations as they arose. For example, he weighed in on the liability of the White Star Company for the Titanic tragedy in 1912. The White House even solicited Gregory’s opinion on the constitutionality of the national budget proposal that same year.

       During the lead-up to World War I, Gregory was an outspoken critic of German submarine warfare on neutral U.S. ships, arguing that Americans had the right to trade with whoever they wanted. Gregory’s legal ideas intersect with Hoover’s philosophy on the subjects of alien immigrants and radicalism.

       Charles Noble Gregory had demonstrated in the past that deportation of anarchists based on their political beliefs was entirely legal -- a key foundation to Hover's later role in the Justice Departm,ent's 1919-1920 Palmer Raids.

       Although we may not know how much he discussed his views on alien radicals in class, Gregory
illuminated his interpretation of the law clearly in an article he wrote for the Juridical Review entitled, “A Question of International Law in the Deportation of Aliens.” Before moving on to the trickier international issues with deportations, he examined the settled case law in the United States. He unequivocally determined that the Supreme Court has “upheld the validity of a statute for the deportation of alien anarchists” and quotes from a case that decrees “The constitutionality of the legislation in question in its general aspect is no longer open to discussion in this Court.” Going further, he pointed out that cases involving aliens “of the excludable class could not be reviewed by the Courts on habeus corpus…” Summing up this argument, Gregory writes, “It seems that the lawfulness of exclusion or deportation of aliens…must be taken as quite fully settled.”

     A few years after writing the Juridical Review article, Gregory presented a paper at the meeting
of the American Society of International Law entitled “The Expulsion of Aliens,” in which he stated that “the maintenance of a rigorous surveillance of anarchists” and the statute “for deporting them [was] held lawful and constitutional.”

       If the case method is about extracting legal principles from settled case law, then the young Hoover, sitting in a classroom during his first year, would no doubt have absorbed the principle that the United States had every right to deport alien radicals.

Many influences
       We will never know precisely how significantly these men contributed to Hoover’s view of the law. No doubt there were many sources and experiences that shaped this complex man – his parents, his religion, his jobs, his bosses and mentors. The Bureau celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2008, and upon that occasion it is worth considering those who schooled the young man who, one day, would lead it for almost half the period of its existence.

Andrew Simpson is a historical consultant at History Associates, Inc. For the full article or any questions or comments, please contact him at ats1214@gmail.com or else post a comment here.

HOOVER: Lane Bonner with the view of an FBI veteran

2011-11-18T08:50:00.001-05:00

One of the more detailed, thoughtful comments I received on my recent Washington Post article "Five Myths about J. Edgar Hoover," came from Lane Bonner, a long-time FBI agent, clerk, and spokesman, now living in Florida. Mr. Bonner has graciously given me permission to publish it here:

J. Edgar Hoover (right) with President Lyndon B. Johnson.

I worked for Mr. Hoover and the FBI in Washington, D.C. as a clerk from 1957-1962; Miami Field Office, 1962 - 1968 (Technical Surveillance Clerk in the Organized Crime Program); as a Special Agent, Oklahoma City Field Office 1968-1969, Baltimore Field Office 1969-1981 (also as a Supervisory Special Agent on the criminal side of the house, and the division Media Rep (PIO); at FBI Headquarters (HQ) as a national spokesman; and as Chief of the FBI-HQ Press Office 1986-1988 when I retired. Since 1990, I have been a Special Investigator under contract to the FBI (background investigations).

During my HQ days as a clerk and as an agent, I met many of Mr. Hoover's early officials. I also did considerable research on Mr. Hoover's stewardship of the FBI. As a senior tour leader at FBI-HQ and because I had prior military experience, I was assigned by Mr. DeLoach to assist (driving, etc) various journalists covering the FBI.

My exceptions/additions to your article ("5 Myth about J Edgar Hoover") are these:

Intimidating Officials
1. There is absolutely no evidence that Mr. Hoover blackmailed or attempted to intimidate any officials. Conversely, Mr. Hoover had an excellent relationship with most of the congressional committee chairmen. He knew how to keep Congress happy, which was essential to getting his budgets approved. These chairmen knew exactly what the FBI was doing in those days. Unfortunately, much of their dialogue is not in the public domain,

Civil Rights

2. Having been the clerical complaint clerk (first point of contact with FBI for citizens referring non-emergency matters) in the Miami Field Office 1966-1968 (when President Johnson shut down our wiretap/eavesdropping program which was administered according to existing law at that time), I was well briefed on the FBI's response to civil rights matters. These were given the highest priority of the time (2 weeks for a full-field investigation). At that time, the FBI was making great headway in discreetly and overtly investigating and neutralizing the KKK and other radical groups according to the law at that time.

Much of the criticism toward Mr. Hoover's civil rights policy stemmed from a response memo from Mr. Hoover to a member of Congress inquiring about Mr. Hoover's views on expanding the jurisdiction of the FBI. (This memo, as I recall, was written in the late 40's). Mr. Hoover honestly responded that by increasing the FBI's jurisdiction in the area of civil rights, the ability of the FBI to investigate other priorities ESTABLISHED BY CONGRESS, including the investigation/recovery of stolen motor vehicles, a very important matter to representatives from auto manufacturing states, would be greatly diminished. That memo has been held against Mr. Hoover by certain journalists since the 70's.

It was alleged that Mr. Hoover was dragged kicking and screaming into the CR arena. Mr. Hoover, I'm told, was generally against the expansion of Federal powers/jurisdiction. Don't forget, too, it was the FBI under Mr. Hoover that solved the murders of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, etc., etc,

Dr. King
3. Mr. Hoover was not investigating the civil rights movement or its leaders in the 1960s. There was a legitimate investigation of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA) that led us to Dr. King. The CPUSA was allegedly attempting to exploit the civil rights movement. It was Robert Kennedy who authorized the wiretaps of MLK,

Public Relations

Dr. Martin Luther King speaking in the mid-1960s.

4. Mr. Hoover knew the value of and had an effective public affairs apparatus. It was not designed to enhance his reputation, it was intended to engender public respect for and encourage public cooperation with the FBI - period. Mr. Hoover knew that public cooperation was essential to getting the FBI mission accomplished.

I am not saying Mr. Hoover was perfect, who is? But, as a loyal and patriotic American who turned a corrupt and inefficient agency into the premier law agency in the world - he deserves an honorable place in history. I am also amused that Mr. Hoover's detractors came out of the woodwork only after his death when he was unable to defend himself, following a distinguished career of doing exactly what Congress and the various administrations hired him to do.

Again, thanks for a very good article. Respectfully, Lane Bonner, Jr., Plant City, Florida.

Still more J. Edgar snapshots, including in the White House, 1930s-1970s.

2011-11-17T17:08:00.002-05:00

Posing at New York City dog show with contestant. (No, it's not his own, though he had dogs most of his life.)

Showing Shirley Temple a comparison microscope in the FBI lab.

A few White House photos:

Standing with John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.

Confiding with Richard M. Nixon.

Standing behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt (at desk).

Standing behind John F. Kennedy (at desk) and Bobby Kennedy (standing).

Receiving an award from Dwight D. Eisenhower. Notice Richard Nixon, as VP, standing behind Ike's shoulder.

More photos of J. Edgar Hoover in the 1930s

2011-11-16T09:04:00.000-05:00

Here are a few more photos of Hoover, mostly from the 1930s (from the National Archives):

Clowning around with two show girls.

At the Stork Club in New York City.

With actor Edward G. Robinson.

Explaining an operation with his office map.

Wearing reading glasses.

At his office desk.

J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson -- the actual photos

2011-11-14T18:30:00.002-05:00

The new film J. Edgar takes the well-known relationship between long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo diCaprio) and his long-time FBI number-two Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) and develops it into a major theme. What do we actually know about it? Hoover and Tolson worked together more than 40 years. They traveled together on vacation and official business, rode to work together, shared lunch nearly every day at Washington’s Mayflower hotel and sometimes even wore matching suits.

Hoover, at his death, left Tolson most of his estate. Their relationship, by all appearances, was stable, discreet and long-lasting. But what they did physically behind closed doors, if anything, they kept between them.

Photos like these from the 1930s of Hoover and Tolson together, however, tell a story:

Hoover and Tolson are in the middle, wearing matching suits.

Hoover and Tolson attending a prize fight in New York City.

Again, Hoover and Tolson stand in the middle, with matching suits and spats.

Hoover sits at his desk, and Tolson stands directly behind him, hand on Hoover's chair.

Hoover and Tolson on vacation.

Tolson and Hoover, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio (on right) and Armie Hammer (on left).

A few cartoons of J. Edgar Hoover

2011-11-13T10:10:00.001-05:00

GUEST BLOGGER: Tom Copeland on Remembering the Centralia Tragedy of November 11, 1919

2011-11-11T10:00:00.004-05:00

A rare photo from 1919 of Centralia, Washington, showing the American Legion's memorial service held a few days after the Armistice Day violence.

As we remember and celebrate the veterans of all America's wars this Armistice Day 2011, our Guest Blogger Tom Copeland reminds us of heroes on the home front who also took couragous stands to protect our freedoms.

On November 11, 1919, during an Armistice Day parade in the central Washington State town of Centralia, a crowd of World War I veterans stormed the local branch building of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.). This sparked a violent confrontation in which four veterans were shot dead and one I.W.W. member was lynched.

The Centralia Tragedy – portrayed briefly in the new film J. Edgar starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the 48-year director of the FBI -- represented the high-water mark of the suppression of domestic labor radicalism after the Great War. (Click here for (a) more detail on the violence itself and (b) some rare video of the aftermath.)

During the 1920s, the Centralia case became a national cause célèbre. Juries found four Wobblies guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced them to over a decade in jail. No one was ever charged with the mob lynching of "Wobbly" (as I.W.W. members were called) Wesley Everest.

I became interested in this case in the early 1970s, while attending Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. I discovered that a 1910 graduate, Elmer Smith, had advised the I.W.W. that they had a right to defend their hall that day in 1919 from the anticipated attack by the American Legion.

I spent the next 20 years tracking down Smith’s life by interviewing surviving relatives (Smith died in 1932), uncovering his partly censored FBI files, and piecing together records from historical archives across the country. In 1993, the University of Washington published my biography of Smith: The Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies.

Smith’s life as a lawyer fascinated me, particularly his tireless dedication to the rights of working people through his defense of the I.W.W. prisoners. Smith was arrested numerous times for speaking out on behalf if the I.W.W., kidnapped briefly by the American Legion in California after quoting Abraham Lincoln, disbarred from practicing law (partly for telling a joke!), and later reinstated. The Centralia case became the driving force in his career, and his work kept alive the cause of the I.W.W. prisoners and eventually led to their freedom.

Smith, a nonviolent man, knew that his 1919 advice to the I.W.W. helped precipitate violence. His lifelong efforts to free the imprisoned men ignited anti-radical passions wherever he went. Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, called him “a determined advocate and an admirer of the men he defended.”
Smith's personal life mirrored the optimism and crushing reality of I.W.W. fortunes in the Pacific Northwest after World War I. He was a man of many weaknesses. He had a rigid morality caused and was sometimes naïve, judgmental, and driven by guilt for his role in the Centralia case. Although outwardly confident, he took on more responsibility that he could handle, and constant pressure from his work created stress that eventually ruined his health.

Poster to honor I.W.W. victim of
the 1919 Centralia lynching.

Despite these flaws, he was admired by workers and displayed extraordinary fearlessness in standing up to intimidation and personal threats of violence, and he never responded in anger. “It was hard for Elmer to believe that a person could be a no-good-son-of-a-bitch,” one of his friends remembered. “The weakness with Elmer is that he trusted too easy. His strength was also his weakness. He had an overwhelming faith in the goodness of his fellow man.”

The Centralia Tragedy has been largely forgotten outside the Pacific Northwest. On this 92nd anniversary, let us remember those workers (and lawyers!) who fought for their rights to organize against great obstacles. As Smith once said:

“How they say to me ‘Elmer, you are fanning the fire of discontent with your speeches!’ Of course I am! Did ever anything worthwhile ever come to pass in the history of the world without fanning the fire of discontent? No! … By the Almighty I will fan the fire of discontent till I draw my last breath.”

By fanning the fire of discontent during his lifetime, Elmer Smith helped keep the flame of justice alive for later generations.

Tom Copeland is the author of The Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies. He is also an independent consultant: tomcopeland@live.com

Special Holiday Sale on all books from Viral History Press

2011-11-07T14:39:00.001-05:00

Order between now and January 1, 2012 and save:

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Boss Tweed: Read the opening chapter

2011-11-07T11:34:00.003-05:00

Today, we give you a free peek at the opening chapter of Boss Tweed, in its entirely. We hope you enjoy it. If so, please consider buying the full book. Just click here.

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BOSS TWEED:
The Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York

• 1 • ALONE

April 12, 1878:

TWEED WAS DYING that morning, locked inside New York City’s Ludlow Street Jail at Grand Street on the lower East Side. At about 11:40 am, he began to whisper; his lawyer William Edelstein had to lean close and place his ear by Tweed’s lips to hear over the noise of horses and people on the street, women haggling at the nearby Essex Street Market. “Well, Tilden and Fairchild have killed me,” he said. Tweed had saved his last words for his tormentors: Charles Fairchild, the New York State Attorney General who had cheated him, broken his pledge to free him in exchange for a full confession, and Samuel Tilden, the New York Governor who’d built a national political career on Tweed’s downfall and now demanded he die behind bars.

         “I hope they are satisfied now.” He smiled faintly. A few minutes later, he lost consciousness.

         For two weeks, Tweed had borne a cascade of ailments: fever, bronchitis, pneumonia. Months earlier, he’d suffered a heart attack, aggravated by kidney failure brought on by Bright’s disease. His huge, 300-pound body, once known for its swagger, now sagged on the narrow bed, struggling to breathe; his sporadic coughs hung in the cool, dank air. Hollowed cheeks and a thin ghost-white beard dominated his long face. Blue eyes that once twinkled for friends and glared at enemies seemed vacant, haunted by depression. At noon, just as mid-day bells sounded from the Essex Street Market tower, Tweed died, prematurely old at 55 years, surrounded by strangers.

         It had been almost five years since Tweed had walked the streets of New York City, his life-long home, as a free man. A year before that, Tweed had stood at the height of power and could laugh at bureaucrats like Fairchild and Tilden who’d begged him for favors like everyone else. He, William M. Tweed, had been the single most influential man in New York City and a rising force on the national stage. Physically imposing and mentally sharp, Tweed reigned supreme. He was more than simply boss of Tammany Hall, commissioner of PublicWorks, and state senator. He controlled judges, mayors, governors, and newspapers. He flaunted his wealth, conspicuous and garish beyond anything supportable by his government salaries or even traditional “honest graft”* as practiced by generations of politicians before and since.
_______________
* “Honest graft” was defined by Tammany chief George Washington Plunkitt in 1905 as “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em”—basically exploiting insider influence as opposed to direct stealing from the city treasury. In practice, it amounted to both, but with discretion and moderation.

         Tweed was the third-largest landowner in the city, director of the Erie
Railroad, the Tenth National Bank, and the New-York Printing Company, proprietor of the Metropolitan Hotel, and president of the Americus Club. He owned two steam-powered yachts, a Fifth Avenue mansion, an estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a shirtfront diamond pin valued at over $15,000. Still, he gloried as friend to the poor, champion of immigrants, builder of a greater New York, and arbiter of influence and patronage. And he stole … on a massive scale.

         Once the proof of Tweed’s thefts from the city exploded in newspaper banner headlines, his house of cards collapsed. City investigators ultimately figured that Tweed and his city “ring,” during a three-year period, had made off with a staggering $60 million from the local treasury—an amount larger than the entire annual U.S. federal budget up until the CivilWar. Even then, political enemies and lawmen couldn’t touch him; it would take a popular uprising to topple Tweed, led by a newspaper, the New-York Times, and a magazine, HarpersWeekly. Only after newspapers had produced the evidence did prosecutors like Tilden and Fairchild dare put Tweed behind bars.

         In December 1873, a jury had convicted Tweed on 204 counts of criminal misdemeanor fraud growing from the famous “Tweed Ring” scandals and Judge Noah Davis had sentenced him to twelve years’ imprisonment on Blackwell’s Island.* Judge Davis had overstepped; the charges each actually
carried a jail term of just a few months and an appeals court had freed Tweed a year later over the discrepancy, but Tilden had intervened again and or-dered Tweed immediately rearrested and Judge Davis had set bail at an impossibly high $3 million.**
_________________________
*   Located in the middle of the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, it is now called Roosevelt Island.
** About $60 million in modern dollars. Generally, to compare modern dollars with dollars in the 1860s or 1870s, multiply by twenty.

   Now, six years later, Tweed alone remained in jail. All his friends and fellow thieves, the other Ring fugitives, had fled the country or settled their charges with the government. Tweed alone had become the scapegoat, the face of corruption. Increasingly, reformers criticized the prosecutors themselves for their clumsy handling of the case, running up huge legal costs while failing to recover more than a pittance of stolen city funds.

         Tweed hated prison; it defied him—despite the fact that jailors gave him every comfort money could buy: a private room, hot meals, a bathtub, a window to the street, and friends to visit. He grew impatient at the lawyers’ wrangling. In December 1875, he’d escaped and fled. One night that month, he snuck away from his jail guards and secretly crossed the Hudson River to New Jersey. He later admitted paying $60,000 in bribes to finance the dramatic breakout. Once loose, he traveled in disguise, wearing a wig, clean-shaven face, and workman’s clothes, and using a false name. He reached Cuba and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Spain, but only to face arrest. Spanish authorities had seized him on his arrival at Vigo and handed him back to a United States Navy frigate that returned him to New York City.

         Then, back behind bars, exhausted, destitute, and sick, Tweed tried to surrender: “I am an old man, greatly broken in health, cast down in spirit, and can no longer bear my burden,” he’d written from jail, agreeing with Fairchild and Tilden to throw himself on their mercy. After years of denials,
he now offered them a full confession of his crimes, including names of accomplices, surrender of all his property, and help in any legal steps to recover stolen city funds—all in exchange for his freedom. He wanted to be with his wife and children, he said, to live out his last years.

         He delivered his confession both in writing and through eleven days of riveting public testimony before a committee of city aldermen investigating his crimes. Newspapers carried full transcripts of the startling disclosures as Tweed appeared day after day in a packed City Hall chamber and unflinchingly poured out his secrets, explaining how he’d bribed the state legislature, fixed elections, skimmed money from city contractors, and systematically diverted public funds. Parts of his story had little or no corroboration, raising suspi-cions he’d exaggerated his own guilt simply to flatter his jailers and help win his release. He made no excuses, no alibis, and no complaints; sitting in the stuffy room he answered every question, rarely showing temper or impatience.

         New Yorkers who earlier had despised Tweed for his arrogance and greed now grudgingly grew to respect “the old man”—for his terrible mistakes, his punishment, and his apparent atonement. The aldermen who took his testimony supported Tweed’s plea for release from jail, as did old political rivals like “Honest John” Kelly, Tweed’s replacement as leader of Tammany Hall.

         But Tilden and Fairchild, sitting at the state capitol in Albany, were deaf to his pleas. Samuel Tilden had already run for president of the United States in 1876; he’d received more popular votes than Rutherford B. Hayes and lost the presidency by a single electoral vote in a contested outcome. He was considering a second try in 1880. Fairchild too saw higher political office in his future, including a possible run for the New York governor’s mansion. Why should either risk his reputation now over Tweed?

         His last appearance outside Ludlow Street Jail came on March 26, 1878, two weeks before his death. Sheriffs had taken Tweed to the state Supreme Court to testify in one of the many lawsuits resulting from his scandals. As guards led him through the marble courthouse corridors, he eagerly greeted the two or three old-timers who weren’t ashamed to shake his hand, even though he was now the city’s most notorious villain. Newsmen noticed how Tweed now walked with a limp and spoke in a rasping voice. When Tweed took the witness stand, he delivered a prepared statement: “Under promises made to me by the officials of the State and the city, I was induced to give evidence before the Common Council of this city…as to what are called ‘Ring Frauds,’” he read. “I am advised by my counsel not to answer a single question put to me on this case… until the promises made to me… are fulfilled and I am liberated.”

         The judge accepted Tweed’s response at face value and allowed him to leave the court without being cross-examined by any of the lawyers.

         Six days later, Tweed got his answer. Attorney General Fairchild issued a public letter denying he’d made any deals with Tweed—despite contrary statements he’d given earlier to Tweed’s own lawyer and to John Kelly. Fairchild declared the whole incident a sham and a trick; he never bothered
even to send Tweed a copy of the letter. Tweed read it in the newspapers. When he saw Fairchild’s denial, he knew his game was up. A few days later came the fever, then the cough, then pneumonia.

         John Murray Carnochan, Tweed’s physician at Ludlow Street Jail, didn’t hesitate to pinpoint the cause of death. “Behind all these phases of disease,” he told newspaper writers after the autopsy, “was [Tweed’s] great nervous prostration, brought about by his prolonged confinement in an unhealthful locality”— the moldy jailhouse on Ludlow Street—“and by the unfavorable result of the efforts recently made to effect his release.”

         Tweed’s family had largely abandoned him by the time he died. Public shame had driven them away. Mary Jane, his wife of thirty-three years, had gone to Paris with their grown son William Jr.; she traveled under the false name “Weed” to avoid any connection with her disgraced husband. “My
wife!…She is God’s own workmanship,” he confided to an interviewer. “The only thing against her is that she had such a worthless husband.” Tweed’s two youngest sons, 10-year-old George and 14-year-old Charles, had been kept in a New England boarding school for the past five years and forbidden
to see their father. Tweed’s two oldest daughters, Mary Amelia and Lizzie, both lived with husbands in New Orleans, a thousand miles away, both taking the same married name, Maginnis.

         Of all Tweed’s children, only his daughter Josephine, 24 years old, still lived in New York City. She came frequently to the Ludlow Street Jail to visit her father and always tried to act cheerful around him. She’d come quickly this morning on hearing from the doctors, but had stepped away from her father’s bedside to fetch him his favorite treat of tea and ice cream. She hadn’t come back yet when he died at noon.

         News of Tweed’s death spread quickly through the busy metropolis of 900,000 souls. New Yorkers had known him for twenty-five years as hero, villain, and criminal. Tweed once had counted his friends and colleagues in the thousands. “Nine men out of ten either know me or I know them,” he’d bragged back in the 1860s, when he still commanded the city’s respect, “women and children you may include.” Now, crowds gathered at newspaper offices and government buildings with public bulletin boards—over a hundred people at City Hall alone. Boys selling extra editions of the New

York Sun, the World, and the Herald made a fast business. The Boss dead? It couldn’t be true! One rumor had it that Tweed had faked his own demise as just another gimmick to win release from jail.

         Most New Yorkers sympathized at the news. “Poor old man, poor man, but perhaps it was best for him,” Judge Van Vorst of the Court of Common Pleas told a reporter.  “Tweed had a great many friends among the poor andfriendless,” added Bernard Reilly, sheriff of New York County. “Other people will regret his death because they think he has been rather harshly dealt with… he cannot be considered wholly as a bad man. He erred deplorably. And he has paid for his errors by dying in prison.”

         But self-styled reformers rejected any pity for Tweed. They’d won a great victory by overthrowing Tweed’s corrupt machine and refused to compromise now over misplaced sentiment for a sick old man. The New-York Times had dramatically unearthed and disclosed the Tweed Ring’s secret accounts—the greatest journalistic scoop to that time, directly leading to Tweed’s demise.
Now it led the assault: “Such talents as [Tweed] had were devoted to cheating the people and robbing the public Treasury,” insisted its lead editorial the next day, adding “his tastes were gross, his life impure, and his influence, both political and personal, more pernicious than that of any other public man of his generation.”

Nast's final drawing of Tweed before the Boss's death, Harper's Weekly, January 26, 1878.

          Thomas Nast, the brilliant young illustrator whose cartoons in Harper’s Weekly had made Tweed a laughingstock to New York’s illiterate masses, still featured the ex-Boss in his weekly drawings. These days he portrayed Tweed as a tiny parakeet—no longer the fierce Tammany Tiger but instead a pathetic “jailbird” with prison stripes on his feathers and a ball and chain locked to his ankle.

   Nast’s final drawing of Tweed, published in January 1878, had mocked the appeals for Tweed’s release by showing miniature jailbird Tweed gripped in a giant hand called “Prison,” ready to crush him at a whim. “[I]f it be right that men should be punished for great offenses, there was nothing unkind,
unjust, or unreasonable in the punishment of Tweed,” echoed a Harper’sWeekly editorial that week. It was right that Tweed should die in jail a broken man, others said. “Without his boldness and skill the gigantic Ring robberies would not have been committed,” concluded James Gordon Bennett, Jr.’s New York Herald. The “finger of scorn,” as Tom Nast had drawn it, must follow him to the grave.

         William Magear Tweed had left enormous footprints on his city; he had built as grandly as he’d stolen. His monuments dotted every corner of Manhattan— the new Brooklyn Bridge rising across the East River, the opulent new County Courthouse by City Hall, the widened, paved streets up Broadway
and around Central Park. Just as striking were shadows of his crimes — the huge debt and ruined credit that would haunt city finances for a generation, the broken lives and shattered trust of former friends. Tweed had defined a grimy reality of American politics, perfecting forms of graft and voting-box abuse mimicked by political bosses for the next century, but never on so grand a scale. His fall had created a new role for a free press in the public arena, and his legal persecution had set a tone for political scandals lasting generations.

         Fittingly, his most famous quotation is something he never said, at least publicly—“As long as I count the ballots, what are you going to do about it.” Thomas Nast had put the words in his mouth in a Harper’sWeekly cartoon in 1871.

         The morning after Tweed died in jail, newspapers crammed their front pages with stories of his life and times. Politicians rushed to claim credit for having a hand in his downfall; only a rare friend dared to wax nostalgic for old Tammany Hall. People bought extra copies of the newspapers to save for children and grandchildren; they sensed the passing of a monumental figure. Tweed’s story would dominate church sermons and saloon arguments for weeks. “The career of Tweed was in many respects one of the most remark-able known to our peculiar land of peculiar institutions,” the Washington Post noted.18 How could one raised so high fall so low?

         History would blacken Tweed’s name, portraying him as the worst municipal thief, the most corrupt politician, the craftiest ballot-box fixer—a stereotype used to tarnish entire generations of American political professionals. Already, he’d become a caricature: More people knew Tweed as the
comical thug in Nast’s Harper’sWeekly cartoons, the shameless villain in the New-York Times exposes, or the legendary wire-puller of Tammany Hall than as the vital flesh and blood person who’d walked the streets of Gotham for fifty-five years. He left a strange puzzle. Except for his stealing, Tweed would have been a great man; but had he been honest, he wouldn’t have been Tweed and would not have left nearly so great a mark.

If you enjoyed the excerpt, please consider buying the full book. Just click here. Or check out the new eBook edition on Amazon Kindle or Nook.

SPECIAL FEATURE: a free peek at Young J. Edgar

2011-11-05T11:51:00.001-04:00

Before seeing the new film J. Edgar with Leonardo DiCaprio, take a free peek at the opening chapter of Young J. Edgar, presented in its entirely. We hope you enjoy it.

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YOUNG J. EDGAR:

Hoover and the Red Scare, 1919-1920

1. Denials

Washington, D.C., May 10, 1924, four years after the Palmer Raids.

THE DOOR CLOSED and J. Edgar Hoover found himself alone with his

boss, Harlan Fiske Stone, the new Attorney General of the United

The photo shows J. Edgar Hoover, circa 1920.

States. “He told me brusquely to sit down and looked at

me intently over the desk,” Edgar recalled years later,

telling the story for the hundredth time. He snapped to

the command. Stone cut an imposing figure. He stood

six and a half feet tall, weighed 250 pounds, was almost

twice Edgar’s age of 29, and a full head higher. Stone

loved fishing, and proudly displayed a medal he’d won

from the Long Island Country Club for hauling in a 36-

ounce trout.

Stone wasted no time on small talk. Edgar tried to

raise administrative odds and ends, but Stone cut him off.

“Then he said to me ‘Young man, I want you to be

Acting Director of the Bureau of Investigation.’”

J. Edgar Hoover still had boyish good looks in 1924: wavy dark hair, a

bright face, and flashy brown eyes. He dressed smart in the latest fashions,

double-breasted suits, vests, spats, cashmeres and tweeds, crisp white shirts,

like any other up and coming child of the Jazz Age. He spit out his words in

a confidant fast staccato, a delivery he had forced on himself as a teenager to

stop stuttering. He had to be thrilled at the offer. The new Attorney General

was paying him a stunning compliment and offering a rare career opportunity.

He looked back across the desk at Stone and studied the older man’s brown

eyes peering back over his glasses, the bushy eyebrows, the massive forehead,

the receding brown hair.

Leonardo DiCaprio as young Hoover
from the film "J. Edgar"

“I’ll take the job, Mr. Stone, but only

on certain conditions,” he answered. Harlan

Stone gave a quizzical look. It took a rare

cockiness for anyone, certainly a youngster like

J. Edgar Hoover, to play coy at a moment like

this, on being offered a top Federal post.

Stone had spent weeks trying to decide

whom to pick as the new chief for the Bureau

of Investigation. Scandal engulfed Washington

in 1924, the notorious

“Teapot Dome,” named for the stretch of Wyoming desert that held

one of the United States Navy’s principal oil reserves. Interior Secretary Albert

B. Fall faced prison for leasing these lands to oil industry friends in 1922

in exchange for bribes, prompting a criminal prosecution making headlines

across the country. But the scandal went deeper. Senate hearings that spring

had uncovered a sewer of corruption at the Department of Justice and its Bureau

of Investigation: graft and kickbacks from gangsters and bootleggers,

agents with criminal records, badges being issued to private provocateurs

(called “dollar-a-year men”) who grew rich on extortion, and Bureau agents

assigned to harass members of Congress. As the details came out, insiders

tagged Justice with a new name: the Department of Easy Virtue.

Harlan Fiske Stone in 1924.

           In March 1924, a new President, Calvin Coolidge,

brought in a new Attorney General to clean up the mess, an

old-line reformer and long-time dean of New York’s

Columbia University Law School. This new man was

Harlan Fiske Stone.

           Reaching Washington in April 1924, Stone barely

knew where to start. “When I became Attorney General, the

Bureau of Investigation was…in exceedingly bad odor,” he

recalled. Reaching the Justice Department building on

Vermont Avenue, Stone found himself an outsider,

surrounded by strangers. “I don’t know whom to trust; I

don’t know any of these people,” he lamented.

              Installing a new chief at the Bureau of Investigation

would be his biggest step yet. The day before, on May 9, 1924, he had fired the Bureau’s corrupt

sitting Director, a cigar-chomping, wise-cracking former private detective namedWilliam J. Burns. Now,

to replace him—at least temporarily—he had sent for J. Edgar Hoover.

             Edgar had no social pedigree and no Ivy League diploma. He had earned

his law degree from George Washington University and his father had been

a mere government clerk, a map printer at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.

And he was so young, younger than most of the Bureau agents he’d be

expected to supervise. Would they respect him? Would he have the backbone

to stand up to older entrenched powers? Oddly, Harlan Stone thought

yes.Who could miss the hard work, the professional polish, the competence

of the young man? Stone frequently saw Edgar working long hours at the office,

staying well past dinner each night and routinely working on weekends.

Edgar had a command of detail, an ability to decide questions, and a willingness

to give orders. He seemed to have no social life, no girl friends and few

close office buddies. Other than belonging to a handful of men’s clubs like the

Masons, the Sigma Delta and Kappa Alpha fraternities, and the University

Club, he made his job his life.

            And now, this latest wrinkle—the fact that this young J. Edgar Hoover

had the composure and confidence to set his own conditions on the job as Bureau

Chief—only deepened Harlan Stone’s growing respect.

           “What are they?” the Attorney General asked.

           Edgar had come prepared. As Stone studied him from across his polished

desktop, Edgar proceeded to lay out an agenda of ideas that couldn’t help but

impress even the most zealous reformer. “The Bureau must be divorced from

politics and not be a catch-all for political hacks. Appointments must be

based on merit. Promotions will be made only on proven ability. And the bureau

will be responsible only to the Attorney General.”

           Despite his age, Edgar already counted himself a Justice Department veteran

by 1924, having worked there for seven years since starting in 1917 as a

22-year-old clerk. It had been Edgar’s first job after earning his law degree, and

he’d made the most of it.

         America had entered WorldWar I during that summer of 1917 and Edgar

should have topped any list for military service. He was smart, fit, and welltrained,

valedictorian of his high school graduating class, captain of its cadet

corps and leader of its track and debate teams. He even led the school’s cadets

marching down Pennsylvania Avenue inWoodrowWilson’s 1913 inaugural

parade. Born and raised inWashington, D.C. in a modest neighborhood near

the U.S. Capitol, a few boyhood friends still called him “Speed,” a nickname

he earned as a 10-year old when he carried grocery bags for a few nickels for

old ladies in the neighborhood. A typical high school report card gave him

good grades for English, French, History and Physics, but perfect grades,

straight E’s, for Neatness.

           His mother raised him Lutheran and he once sang soprano in the church

choir, through he switched and joined a Presbyterian church as a teenager,

drawn by a charismatic local preacher who organized baseball games and got

Edgar to teach Sunday school.

            But family duty had squelched any thought of his joining the Army in

1917. That spring, Edgar’s father had been forced by higher-ups to quit his job

as a Federal government clerk after 42 years, losing his pension and leaving

the family with no income. Earlier, his father had been committed to an asylum

in Laurel, Maryland, for chronic depression, what his doctors called

“melancholia,” a little-understood, debilitating condition marked by dejection,

self-loathing, disinterest in the outside word and suicidal thoughts.

Edgar, the youngest of three children, became his parents’ main financial support.

So as America went to war in 1917 and he watched school friends ship

off to face death in European trenches, Edgar stayed home and used a family

tie to win a draft-exempt desk job at the Justice Department.

             At Justice, Edgar had engineered a meteoric rise. During the War, he

went to work for the newly-formedWar Alien Enemy Bureau, responsible for

tracking German residents on U.S. soil. He earned repeated promotions and,

after the Armistice, won a spot on the Attorney General’s staff, then another

series of promotions in the Department’s Bureau of Investigation. By 1924,

Edgar had climbed the ladder to become one of Justice’s top officials.

            He had mostly kept his nose clean during Teapot Dome. As the scandals

worsened, he avoided them by burying himself in the Bureau’s routine paperwork

and a few special cases that caught his eye. By the time the new Attorney

General called him in for a talk, he had prepared himself to deliver a

perfect pitch. Harlan Stone found Edgar’s conditions very appropriate; in fact,

they were exactly what he wanted to hear. “I wouldn’t give [the job] to you

under any other conditions,” Stone told him from across the desk. Then, just

as abruptly, he ended the conversation. “That’s all. Good day.”

           Edgar followed Stone’s lead in executing a catalog of new reforms. He

fired scores of incompetents, hacks, and dollar-a-year men, raised standards

for new recruits, and directed his agents to stop the political witch hunts and

keep the Bureau’s activities “limited strictly to investigations of violations of

law,” as Stone put it. In applying the rules, Edgar refused to be bullied by

politicians, and Stone consistently backed him. Stone was delighted with his

protégé. He praised Edgar as “a man of exceptional intelligence, alertness,

and executive ability” who gave “far greater promise than any other man I had

heard of.”

             Stone took only seven months to declare his experiment a success. In

December 1924, he named Edgar the permanent Director of the Bureau of Investigation,

later renamed the FBI.

           J. Edgar Hoover would hold the Directorship for forty-eight years, until

the day he died in 1972 as the most controversial law enforcement figure of

the Twentieth Century. He would achieve mythic status in America, building

the FBI into a pillar of government, with over 8,600 agents and a budget

of $336 million. His reorganization of the Bureau in the 1920s under Harlan

Fiske Stone drew wide praise. In the 1930s, he made headlines solving the

Lindbergh baby kidnapping case and capturing or killing gangsters like John

Dillinger, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Lester “Baby Face” Nelson. He

introduced scientific crime fighting, an FBI National Academy and Crime

Laboratory, Uniform Crime Reports, and a Fingerprint Division whose files

by 1974 held a staggering 159 million sets of prints. In the 1940s and 1950s,

boys across the country dreamed of growing up to be G-Men, portrayed on

screen by movie and television stars like James Cagney, Jimmy Stewart, and

Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.

             But all these achievements came with a cost. By the 1960s, his abusive

probes of leftists, VietnamWar protestors, and Civil Rights leaders likeMartin

Luther King, Jr. made him a figure to be feared. Stories abounded about

Hoover’s power, how he could blackmail presidents, senators, and movie stars

with voluminous, secret sex files that he kept on so many. Even after death,

his legend grew. Congressional probes would reveal decades of FBI abuses:

black bag jobs, covert wiretaps, and systematic violations of law. Later biographies

cast him in surprising roles, some doubtful, some plausible, from stories

of cross-dressing to suggestions of his being one of America’s highest ranking

gay men, or the descendant of an African-American ancestor.*
________________________
* Hoover’s homosexuality, now part of the accepted legend, has never been established and is
doubted by some biographers. The cross-dressing story, unearthed by Anthony Summers in his 1993

biography, has raised particular doubts because it seems contrary to Hoover’s extreme discretion and

self-discipline; its sourcing has been questioned by, among others, biographers Athan Theoharis

and Richard Hack. If Hoover had a gay relationship, it was probably a stable, monogamous, and

discreet one with long-time confidante and FBI associate director Clyde Tolson, but this too is unproven.

Hoover’s attraction to sex secrets and sex files, though, is well established. The possibility

of his having an African-American ancestor, explored by Millie McGhee, is not unlikely given

Hoover’s father’s family roots in Virginia and Maryland in the Antebellum South.
__________________________

              Throughout his life, Edgar never tired of telling the story of how Harlan

Stone first asked him to take the job of Director back inMay 1924. He made

it part of his legend. He required every young FBI recruit for the next fifty

years to learn it in basic training. He insisted that every authorized FBI history

feature it as an icon. No one ever questioned the story’s truth.

            But this too, like most things involving J. Edgar Hoover, had a dark side.

The story was based on a lie. In fact, it was Edgar’s favorite kind: the elegant

silence of a kept secret. The conception was not immaculate at all. In convincing

Harlan Stone to give him the acting job that day in 1924, bright,

fresh-faced, earnest young J. Edgar Hoover had cheated the older man.



                Of all the abuses bothering Harlan Fiske Stone on that cool spring day in

May 1924 when he decided to choose Edgar as his instrument to reform the

tarnished Bureau of Investigation, none rankled him more than the anticommunist

crackdowns of 1919 and 1920, already known infamously as the

Palmer Raids. They were named for his predecessor, Attorney General A.

Mitchell Palmer, once a leading progressive who now lived in sad obscurity

inWashington, D.C. But back during his height of power in 1919 and 1920,

Palmer had directed Federal agents and local police to go and round up between

5,000 and 10,000 people in a three-month orgy of government bullying.

Many were held for months in cramped, filthy, makeshift prisons, beaten,

brutalized, railroaded, denied lawyers or access to family members, then released

with no explanation, never charged with a crime.

            The nation had seemed to go berserk that year, hypnotized by a Red

Scare, with Palmer and his circle fanning a paranoid fever against communists,

anarchists, radicals, socialists, or anyone not “100 percent American,”

as they called it.

            Only the outspoken resistance of a handful of lawyers had turned public

opinion against the crackdown and saved thousands of innocent people from

being deported. Harlan Fiske Stone had been one of these dissenters. At the

panic’s height, he had risked his job and reputation to denounce the Red

Raids. Stone had submitted public testimony to a Senate investigating committee

accusing Palmer and his Justice Department of ignoring constitutional

rights, conducting warrantless arrests and searches, and abusing Federal

power.8

             J. Edgar Hoover had been Palmer’s Special Assistant when the Raids

began on November 7, 1919, and he had his fingerprints all over them.

Palmer had assigned Edgar to run the Justice Department’s Radical Division

which planned and led the operation. Edgar publicly argued its highest profile

legal cases and sat at Palmer’s right hand on Capitol Hill when Palmer testified

about the Raids to two different Congressional investigating committees.

In internal debates, Edgar consistently argued the most strident views:

demanding more arrests, higher bail, fewer rights for detainees, and a tougher

line against anyone who stood in the way. Edgar had ordered Bureau agents

to compile large dossiers against many of its critics, painting them as Parlor

Bolshevists and Red sympathizers, ammunition to smear them at a moment’s

notice. His files covered 450,000 people by 1921, a remarkable feat for the

pre-computer age, and they included many of Harlan Stone’s closest personal

friends, including lawyers, professors, and even a sitting United States

Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis.

            None of these facts, though, seemed to reach Harlan Stone inMay 1924.

Instead, as the new Attorney General, Stone got exactly the opposite impression:

that young J. Edgar Hoover had played at most a minor role in the

affair. It only made sense: Edgar had been just 24 years old at the time of

Palmer’s Raids, just two years out of law school. “[H]e was just a kid, and he

always insisted that he was only doing his job,” claimed Ugo Carusi, Harlan

Stone’s executive assistant, “and I wouldn’t challenge that, because I can’t

imagine policy being made by a fellow in his early twenties.”9

          Edgar himself would spend a lifetime denying any major role in the Raids.

His FBI publicity machine would blast as a “vicious and false…smear” that

he had led them. Edgar would tell one biographer that he “parted company”

with his Justice Department bosses “in the illegal methods and the brutality

sometimes employed in rounding up aliens [and was] appalled [by] agents who

lacked any knowledge of the rules of evidence and who made arrests which

could not stand up in court.”10 In 1924, he would tell Roger Baldwin, head of

the recently formed American Civil Liberties Union, created in response to

the Raids, that he played only an “unwilling part.”

             And Harlan Stone believed it.

             To most Americans, it didn’t seem to matter. The world had changed

quickly since the dark days of 1919. America entered the Roaring Twenties,

a happy time of Coolidge prosperity, of jazz, flappers, and speakeasies, Babe

Ruth on the diamond, Jack Dempsey in the ring, Al Jolson on Broadway, live

ballroom music on the radio,Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish on the silent silver

screen, Post Toasties on the breakfast table, F. Scott Fitzgerald on the

bookshelf, and Sigmund Freud in the bedroom. Life was good. People had little

time to care about communists or other spooks.

               But back in 1919, just four years earlier, it had all made perfect sense—

the Red Scare, the Raids, the fear. Most thinking, informed Americans

agreed:WorldWar I had ended but the country was still fighting, against anarchists

and communists at home just as surely as it had fought the Kaiser’s

Germany in Europe the year before. American soldiers still faced bullets onRussian soil in 1919 and

Bolshevism was sweeping the world. Anarchists had

exploded bombs in American streets and people had been killed. Radicals

had infiltrated labor unions and threatened to topple major industries. The

country demanded safety and somebody had to act.

               A.Mitchell Palmer and his team had taken responsibility. Had there been

excesses? Certainly. But that didn’t change the fact. The principal fact was the

bombs, and the danger of more bombs, and the duty to protect Americans.

Everything else took a back seat.

If you enjoyed the excerpt, please consider buying the full book. Just click here.

Or check out the new eBook edition on Amazon Kindle or Nook.

My favorite photo of J. Edgar Hoover

2011-11-01T14:28:00.001-04:00

J. Edgar Hoover, circa 8 years old, with his bike.

For the upcoming new movie J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, here is my favorite picture of the real-life future tough, gruff, civil-liberties-stomping autocratic crime-fighter, J. Edgar Hoover himself.
I spent two years of my life getting to know Hoover while researching and writing my own book YOUNG J. EDGAR: Hoover the and Red Scare 1919-1920, and found him surprisingly sympathetic in his early years.

Yes, he grew up with a very dark side: Hoover would become Director for Life of the FBI, holding the job for 48 years under nine presidents (Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon) from 1924 till his death in 1972. He would use his secret FBI files to blackmail presidents, senators, and movie stars, and felt no scruples conducting sabotage, black bag jobs, or secret wiretaps against any person or group he considered "subversive." By the 1960s, this included mostly civil rights leaders and anti-Vietnam War protestors. He would aid Senator Joe McCarthy in his anti-Communist witch hunts, and remains today a widely hated figure.

DiCaprio as Hoover, looking a bit older,
but still with his bike.

On the good side, he used his organizational brilliance in the late 1920s and 1930s to build the then-dysfunctional Bureau into a modern professional force with scientific methods, a national academy and lab, a Most Wanted List, finger print files, and a strict agent code of conduct. At his peak, he made the G-Man brand so popular that it was tougher to become a rookie FBI agent than it was to get into an Ivy League college.

How did he get this way? In the photo, you see Edgar as a shockingly-normal boy playing with his bicycle. Hoover grew up in the Capitol Hill section of Washington, D.C., son of a lifelong government clerk, youngest of four kids, a spoiled, mother's favorite. He sang in his church choir, carried groceries for old ladies, and starred on his high school track, debate, and cadet teams. He made lots of friends. His classmates elected him their valedictorian. He worked his way through Law School and graduated in 1917 as America entered World War I.

What changed Edgar from this normal, smart, eager child of the Jazz Age into the corrupt autocrat of later years? This was the question behind my own book, Young J. Edgar (which tells of Hoover's first big assignment in the 1919 Justice Depatment, running the notorious anti-Communist crackdown called the Palmer Raids) and seems to be a key theme of the upcoming Eastwood-DiCaprio film as well.

Enjoy the movie, and please check out the book while you're at it.

BOOKS- Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam

2011-10-30T11:42:00.000-04:00

Here's a first look at a great new book by Cold War historian Jim Hershberg on the Vietnam War, from Publishers Weekly. Check it out:

Operation Marigold is typically treated as little more than a footnote to the American war in Vietnam, but cold war historian Jim Hershberg, of George Washington University, unalterably changes that view.

President Lyndon Johnson, who scuttled
1966 peace talks by turning loose the bombers.

This book delves into every aspect of Operation Marigold, a failed secret mission led by Polish diplomat Janusz Lewandowski, to set up peace negotiations between the U.S. and North Vietnam in the last weeks of 1966. The conventional wisdom was that the presumptive talks had little chance of success, since both sides believed they could prevail militarily and had no reason to talk, which is what President Johnson claimed to his dying day.

Based on his reading of newly released documents and primary sources—including his own interviews with Lewandowski—Hershberg shows that Johnson’s decision to resume bombing Hanoi after a five-month pause caused the collapse of the talks before
they began.

Hershberg also convincingly shows that the Poles (along with Italian diplomats) had authorization from the Vietnamese Communists to approach the Americans to start peace talks—something Johnson and his supporters argued was not the case.

This is a well-written, in-depth look at the facts of a controversial and convoluted peace effort that could have significantly altered the course of the Vietnam War. Maps, photos. -- Publisher’s Weekly, October 10, 2011.

Jim Hershberg if also the author of James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age.

ON HISTORY: The phenomenon of Drunk History

2011-10-27T18:09:00.001-04:00

How do you get 1.5 million people to sit through a six minute film on the testy relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass during the Civil War and how it shaped the elimination of slavery? Or get another 1.3 million to watch another six minute film on Nicola Tesla and his early experiments in electricity? Or get another 1.3 million to watch a five minute video about Benjamin Franklin?

Here’s an idea: How about getting the film’s narrator to first swallow down an entire bottle of brandy, or a bottle and a half of wine, and then stagger through the story in semi-coherent rants, occasionally collapsing on a sofa or babbling to themselves, while celebrity actors like Will Farrell and John C. Reilly play the key title roles? This, basically, is the concept behind Drunk History, a wildly popular production of the Funny or Die web site.

Here’s a sample above. Try it out, or visit their web site for more.

It’s always good to find new, interesting ways to tell history, ways that get people to listen and make them passionate about it.

Here’s to a clever idea. I need a drink.

All things J. Edgar Hoover

2011-10-27T09:41:00.013-04:00

J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s, after having
led the FBI for over 40 years.

This month, we give you all things J. Edgar Hoover: photos, movie links, books excerpts, cartoons, and the rest. Check this page for the latest, below:


   -- Own Clyde Tolson's actual apartment ! Yes, this is FOR REAL !!

     -- Hoover: Andrew Simpson on J. Edgar as a student at George Washington University

   -- Hoover: A journalist's view -- Charles Elliott on searching J. Edgar''s trash.

      -- Hoover: The view of an FBI veteran;

      -- Still more snapshots of J. Edgar, including in the White House, 1930s-1970.

      -- More photos of J. Edgar hoover in the 1930s.

      -- J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson -- the actual photos

      -- A few cartoons of J. Edgar Hoover.

        -- "The Real J. Edgar Hoover," interview with NPR's "On Point," 11/9/2011.

        -- "Five Myths about J. Edgar Hoover," Washington Post, 11/9/2011.

       -- Washington Post web conversation on Hoover "5 Myths" article.

       --SPECIAL FEATURE: a free peek at Young J. Edgar, the opening chapter in its entirely.

       -- My favorite photo of J. Edgar Hoover

       -- SNEAK PREVIEW: New edition of YOUNG J. EDGAR now available on Amazon.com

       -- MOVIES: Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover -- Looking good so far.

DiCaprio as J. Edgar, from the new movie.

"Mr. Black said he had been interested in Hoover ever since his brother gave him a copy of a book called 'Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties.'”
-- Interview with Dustin Lance Black, screenwriter for the firm "J. Edgar," WSJ "Speakeasy," 11/4/2011.

Hoover in 1924, from the new
edition of Young J. Edgar.

SNEAK PREVIEW: New edition of YOUNG J. EDGAR now available on Amazon.com

2011-10-17T15:59:00.005-04:00

I am especially proud to announce that the very first book to be published by Viral History Press LLC, a new edition of Young J. Edgar, is now available in paperback on Amazon.com -- and at a discounted price !!

If you haven't read it, please check it out. We wanted particularly to make it available both on time for Halloween (there is no spookier Fed than Hoover) and certainly before the new Clint Eastwood-directed blockboster movie J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, opens in theaters November 9.

If you insist on an eBook (Kindle, Nook, or Apple), please be patient. These will be available soon.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks for book excerpts and thoughts on Hoover and the movie. Meanwhile, here's the link to Young J. Edgar on Amazon.com.

Also found at Barnes & Noble; here's some coupons.

Enjoy.

From the back cover:

On June 2, 1919, bombs exploded simultaneously in nine American cities, including one that destroyed the

home of the Attorney General of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer. In the aftermath of World War I, America

faced a new enemy — radical communism. Palmer vowed a crackdown.

To lead it, he chose his youngest assistant, twenty-four year-old J. Edgar Hoover. Under Palmer’s wing, Hoover

helped execute a series of brutal nationwide raids, bursting into homes without warning, arresting over 10,000

Americans and assembling secret files on hundreds of thousands of suspects and political enemies. Hoover

survived to emerge as the most controversial American law enforcement figure of the Twentieth Century, a

person uniquely praised, feared, and condemned.

Young J. Edgar brings to life Palmer’s raids and Hoover ’s coming of age. It reaches the heart of our current

debate on personal freedom in a time of war and fear.

BOOKS -- 1861: Civil War Awakening

2011-09-26T15:22:00.002-04:00

Recently the Delmarva Review asked me to write a few words about the new book by Adam Goodheart, that focuses on the opening months of the Civil War. Here's what I came up with. It's in their new issue, just out this week:

1861: The Civil War Awakening

By Adam Goodheart

460 pages

Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

Review by Ken Ackerman

For Civil War buffs, these are salad days. With the 150^th marking of the Great Conflict just begun, we can expect a happy great flood of top-notch books marking every step in the War. 1861: The Civil War Awakening is a good one, a tasty appetizer to the coming feast.

Adam Goodheart, journalist and New York Times Civil War blogger, gives us not the great battles to come, but an appealing, human scale introduction to the people and country preparing to fight them. He tells his story through portraits and panoramas, from Fort Sumter with its outnumbered Union defenders, to the first slaves to taste freedom at Virginia’s Fortress Monroe, saved by the clever strategy of its commanding general, lawyer-politician Benjamin Butler, who cuts the legal knot by declaring them enemy “contraband.” We follow Elmer Ellsworth, creator of the Zouaves regiment, an early version of today’s military Special Forces, and the New York Fireman who volunteer for his. We meet future president James A. Garfield as a young school teacher bringing a deep idealistic intellect to framing the North’s will to fight. And many more.

Then there is Abraham Lincoln. Goodheart gives us a Lincoln still wrestling with unprecedented crises, maligned by all sides until he finally finds his own authentic voice that July.

Adam Goodheart is a fine writer and a pleasure to read. You will appreciate the future volumes on Gettysburg, Antietam, and the rest much more from having first learned the terrain through the lens of this evocative book.

MOVIES: Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover -- Looking good so far.

2011-09-23T11:04:00.007-04:00

Leonardo DiCaprio as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

The new Clint Eastwood-directed bio-pic J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role as Hoover, the legendary autocrat who sat atop the FBI for five decades, released this week its official trailer/preview. (To see it, click on the image at the bottom. The movie itself comes out in November.) The trailer runs just two minutes, 29 seconds -- obviously too short to judge the entire film. But having spent two years of my life getting to know Mr. Hoover while researching and writing my own book about him called Young J. Edgar, I must say I liked what I saw.

Photo shows Hoover at about 22 years old.

J. Edgar Hoover casts a long shadow over modern America, and a good, truthful movie about him is long overdue. Hoover was the most controversial law man  in 20th century America. He served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for an astonishing 48 years, holding the post under nine presidents from Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s to Richard M. Nixon in the 1970s. Though considered a hero and role model most of his life, investigations after his 1972 death confirmed massive abuses of power, illegal wiretaps, bugs, break-ins, and secret files on hundreds of thousands of people which he used as blackmail against presidents and movie stars.   Hoover stands today as one of the most hated men in American history—a probably gay man who harassed gays, a possible descendant of an African American who harassed civil rights leaders, a top law enforcement official who placed himself above the law and ruined many peoples' lives, all making him something of a monster.

But in truth, I found Hoover -- at least the younger one I wrote about in my book -- to be oddly sympathetic.   Hoover did not step into the world as an evil villain. To a great extent, this side of him was shaped by events and forces that engulfed him during his lifetime, especially his younger formative years.  This is not to make excuses for Hoover's very long record on the dark side, but simply dismissing him as a cartoon villain and cross-dresser misses the deeper lessons.

Hoover came to work at the Justice Department in 1917 as a eager, bright young man ready to impress his superiors and save the country.  Within four short years, he had risen to become deputy director of the Bureau of Investigation and had already played a lead role in the Palmer Raids, one of the most eggregious civil liberties abuses in US history. This transformation -- from bright young man to hardened bureaucrat --fascinated me, especially since, to my eye, post-9/11 America seemed to be a period not unlike Hoover's own formative years during the 1919-1920 Red Scare. It is a core theme of my own book Young J. Edgar, and, based on the trailer, it also seems to be at the heart of the new film.

I have been following the Eastwood-DiCaprio project for months through news reports and Washington gossip. I was impressed early on by two things--

First, the writer, Dustin Lance Black, who also wrote the screenplay for Milk (the movie about assassinated San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk), reportedly spent several months in Washington while developing the script doing primary research at the National Archives and Library of Congress. To understand J. Edgar Hoover, there is no substitute for seeing the FBI files. They are simply stunning, a dazzling reflection of the man who created them. They make endlessly fascinating reading and paint a stark portrait of absolute power breeding absolute corruption.

Second, when the movie crew came to Washington, D.C. last May, one place they filmed was at the Library of Congress, one of my own favorite research haunts. I heard many stories from friends there about the movie crew and how they did their work: their eye for detail, making a point to show, for instance, Hoover/DiCaprio's fascination with the Library's card catalogue. The real-life Hoover actually worked at the Library of Congress during law school in 1914-17 and its card cataloue was a key inspiration for him in designing his FBI files.

The new trailer released this week shows the film dwelling not so much on the usual tawdry stuff about Hoover's alleged cross-dressing or his actual fascination with celebrity sex gossip. Yes, he very likely had a gay relationship with FBI assistant director Clyde Tolson, but much of the rest is widely disputed. Rather, the film appears to focus on the real tension of Hoover's life -- his war (as he saw it) of good against evil, society against anarchy, patriots against traitors, subversives, and phonies, all giving him an excuse to bend the law as he saw fit and to hold power at all costs.

I fully expect to have my own list of nit-picks and criticisms once I see the entire film in November. But for now, based on the trailer, I like what I see.