WYATT EARP’S GUNS

By William Urban

On April 17 two guns, one a shotgun, the other a revolver supposedly worn by Wyatt Earp at the famed gunfight at the OK Corral, will sell at auction in Arizona. What should be an exciting event has so far been a bit of a yawner, and it’s worth reflecting why.
One reason, perhaps, is that pubic interest has changed. Back in the 1950s, when the TV show first appeared, the character played by Hugh O’Brien was exactly what the public was looking for — a handsome, courageous, moral man with no interest beyond protecting the public. This had little resemblance to the real Wyatt Earp, but neither did parts of the book on which it was based, Stuart Lake’s Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. However, audiences were accustomed to film biographies that “improved” the story line of the lives of the people supposedly portrayed, and many Americans had been yearning for a law and order person who would be a model for American police forces.
Second, we now know much more about the real Wyatt Earp. There is no universally accepted view of what the gunfight was about, but it certainly wasn’t a showdown between good and evil. The cowboys weren’t saints, but today nobody portrays them as they had been seen in the Fifties. Wyatt and his brothers, too, are more complicated people, neither too good for this world nor too bad to have a place in it. Modern movies take a more sophisticated (or cynical) view of the events in Tombstone in late October of 1881, and portray more sex, violence and dusty clothes.
Third, the owner of the weapons has fallen far in the esteem of those who know Earp lore. Glenn Boyer’s first books were well received and are even today widely cited. But when people began asking what his sources for particular statements were, he was first evasive, implying that his reputation was beyond question, then he said that it was based on a manuscript by Wyatt’s contemporary, Ted Ten Eyck. When pressed, he finally admitted that he had made up the manuscript from sources here and there. His object, he said, was to trap “scholars” who were stealing his words without attribution.
I can understand his frustration. We have a regional radio personality who reads out marvelous stories without telling where he gets the material. I have recognized entire paragraphs of my articles without a word being changed. (Apparently I am a better writer than he is.) However, I know that complaining will have no impact and I’m really not hurt; moreover, I doubt that he is paid much, if anything. So I shut up and pay my PBS contribution like any good citizen who listens to NPR news, and I keep quiet about NPR’s liberal slant — I figure that folks smart enough to listen to public radio are also smart enough to tell hard news from soft propaganda.
Still, Boyer left a sufficient doubt about his honesty to make every intelligent reader of his books wonder what portion of his publications is good scholarship, what is made-up, and what is an elaborate practical joke. There is no doubt that he collected everything he could lay his hands on. For the authenticity we have to rely on his word. This is not always easy. For example, the serial number on the revolver has been filed off, making it impossible to date the weapon. (At least it isn’t the fictional Ned Buntline revolver from the television series.)
I had one phone conversation with Glenn Boyer. That was many years ago, shortly after I had discovered that Wyatt’s grandfather (Stuart Lake called him a judge, which was a stretch for a justice of the peace), his father, and his uncle had earned a rather nice income by buying up IOUs at a discount, then summoning the debtor to the grandfather’s justice of the peace court and requiring him to pay the debt and court costs as well. Then I learned from the land records that Wyatt’s father had returned to Monmouth from 1856 to 1859, a fact that Wyatt had never mentioned to his biographers and that local newsmen and county historians had forgotten about as well.
Boyer called up, presumably to ask about my sources, but it soon became clear that he wanted to tell me that he was the only person who knew anything about Wyatt Earp. I had first used the land records in the Recorder’s Office. Later I spent many hours in the storage area in the courthouse tower, working in winter temperatures below zero and summer temperatures above 100. At first the documents were all in file cabinets, so that all I had to do was systematically go through the court cases involving his grandfather; later, after the tower was determined to be overloaded, the weight was reduced by putting all the documents into large cardboard boxes and discarding the heavy metal file cabinets. After that I could get the heavy boxes down using a step ladder, but the contents were no longer in order.
From my experiences there and in the archives at WIU, where the tax records and bound newspapers were stored, I learned to tell students that a historian needs patience, luck, old clothing, and a strong back. I also emphasized the need to be polite and considerate of the needs of the courthouse personnel, who in Monmouth were super to work with; in other states and larger cities, I found out that was not always the case.
So when Boyer told me that he had lots of documents like those I had found, I was skeptical about his having slipped into Monmouth without anyone knowing it, found the records and photographed the pages I had used (this was pre-Xerox). Any stranger asking about Wyatt Earp without Ralph Eckley hearing of it strains the imagination. Ditto for Boyer having new information and not telling anyone about it.
The experts on the Tombstone discussion board generally share my skepticism for anything Boyer touched. My respect for their detailed knowledge is considerable — they have effectively memorized everything about the gunfight episode, and few would agree with the Tucson newspaper’s headline calling Wyatt a gunslinger.
This is of minimum interest to most Earp historians, of course. They still like the shoot-em-up stuff. The public does, too. Which is why some idiot will probably pay a lot of money for a weapon that Wyatt Earp may have owned, or could have owned, or at least looks like one he had handled.

Review Atlas (April 10, 2014), 4.

CHECHNYA, GEORGIA AND UKRAINE

By William Urban

Chechnya is where the Boston Marathon bombers came from; Georgia is the tiny mountainous state in the Caucasus region, lying between Russia and Turkey; Ukraine is on the fertile steppe south of Russia, the name meaning “over the border.” None have had a happy history, but oil politics and Vladimir Putin’s desire to restore Russia to great power status have led to Russian invasions. George W. Bush took seriously the 2008 Russian attack that overthrew the pro-American government in Georgia, but he was too busy trying to defend his Iraq policy from Democratic party attacks to do more than fly Georgian troops back from Iraq and to provide some equipment.

Within months Sen McCain was ridiculed for saying that Putin would first subdue Georgia, then Ukraine; and Tina Fey was making fun of Sarah Palin, pretending that she had said she could see Russia from her back yard. It was cool then to think that Russia was a normal country, and Secretary of State Clinton pushing the Reset Button (translated.as “overcharged”) symbolized a new relationship with the former USSR. The incorrect translation wasn’t her fault because, unlike Condoleezza Rice, she had never studied Russian. According to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton speaks no foreign language; and while Barack Obama remembers a bit of Indonesian from the time he attended school there, he says that foreign languages aren’t his thing.

Putin didn’t really care. He was fluent in German from his years as a KGB agent in East Berlin — ground zero of the Cold War. He knew how power operates, and he didn’t think much of the community organizer who had somehow become the leader of the free world. There may be been a bit of racism involved, too — that’s an unfortunate part of Russian culture — but basically he just despises amateurs.

At first President Obama thought that his charm offensive was working, but it wasn’t long before Putin’s body language showed how much he disdained his American counterpart. More recently, Putin has mocked him.

Putin wants to rebuild the Russian empire. Perhaps not that of Joseph Stalin, but certainly that of Nicholas II. His first strike was at Chechnya, which provoked little international furor. Chechen terrorists had struck at schools, hospitals and a large theater, and until recently was believed to have blown up apartment buildings. (Now it seems that the State Security forces — formerly the KGB — did so to justify the invasion that flattened the capital of Chechnya.)

Then it was Georgia’s turn. Unlike Iraq, Georgia did not have an insane dictator known for attempting to seize his neighbors’ oil resources, who repeatedly announced his determination to destroy Israel (and fired missiles there during the Gulf War), who used poison gas on opponents and buried others in mass graves, who bribed UN and European officials to evade the UN embargo and used the money to buy weapons and build palaces while leaving his people without proper medicines, who ignored UN inspectors so long and so blatantly that in 2003 everyone (except an obscure member of the Illinois legislature now in the Oval Office) believed that he had programs in place to develop more of these weapons. Even Saddam Hussein’s own generals believed that he had poison gas, and in 2009 550 tons of yellow cake uranium were transported from Iraq to Canada for storage. Georgia’s president liked America and wanted to emulate the customs that made us free and wealthy.

In short, there was no comparison of Georgia and Iraq, not even in the elections. In Georgia the president won 52% of the vote, while Saddam Hussein got a 99.9% approval shortly before being overthrown. Putin took advantage of traditional ethnic rivalries to send Russian troops “to restore order” and to protect the 48% who had not voted for the winner. This was the model for the Crimean crisis this year

Putin hadn’t expected to need to use force against Ukraine. In 2004 he had manipulated the presidential election to put Viktor Yanukovych in power. The public took to the street in what was called the Orange Revolution, and a pro-western president took charge. In 2014 Yanukovych, having won a contested election, reversed policy to move away from the European Union and to align his nation economically and politically with Russia. Once again the people flooded into the streets and drove him out of the country.

There had been massive government corruption and incompetence in Ukraine for over two decades now, but it was worse under Yanukovych. The current government has opened his palatial country home to tourists and school groups to demonstrate how brazenly he had ripped the system off.
Putin saw nothing wrong with this. After all, he took power by enriching a group of super-rich “oligarchs” who greatly resemble the tsarist nobles overthrown by the Social Democrats in March of 1917. (Lenin overthrew the new Russian Republic in November of that year.)

What should President Obama do now? Russia’s weak spot is the economy. If the price of oil goes below $110 a barrel, Putin is in trouble. For five years now Obama has been trying to keep oil prices high so that subsided wind and solar power might become competitive. Five years ago most of the world’s trouble spots were under control; now we can hardly count them. Five years ago the US was still a military superpower; now the Navy is taking cruisers out of service, cutting personnel, cancelling construction projects.

Putin has been watching. That is what is does well — after all, he was a career spy, trained in the hard politics of the communist era. Putin is also an opportunist — he can see how badly everything is going for the Obama administration.

Fortunately, Obama does not have to deal with the Soviet Union. There is no ideological pressure to spread Communism. All Putin wants, we hope, is to gather in the lost territories — Ukraine, Belarus (no problem there, since it’s run by a pro-Russian dictator), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (all NATO members) — and to dominate Europe. Certainly he wants to keep Cuba and Venezuela in his camp, Syria, too, and now perhaps Egypt also.

Putin has long term problems — a declining birthrate, alcoholism, crime, economic stagnation and ultra-nationalist nuts on his right — but if he can restore Russian pride and self-confidence, he might be able to turn those around.

Obama is giving him as much help as he can. Awkwardly, he doesn’t seem to know that he is doing it.

Review Atlas (April 3, 2014), 4.

ANOTHER VIEW OF DRONE WARFARE II

By William Urban

Akbar S. Ahmed’s highly praised book, the Thistle and the Drone, tells us that the War on Terror is failing because we have completely misunderstood the problem. Drones can kill people, but they are not effective against ideas. Ahmed says that our misunderstanding of the terrorists’ motivations has led several American administrations astray — the terrorists are motivated much less by Islam than by tribal pride and anger.
This is, he says, much like Scottish resistance to English efforts to break the clan system. The combination of English force and persuasion worked, after a fashion, but more in the Lowlands than in the Highlands. When Scots finally got the right to determine their own future, they voted to have their own parliament, their own soccer team, and God Knows What Else, except that religion has little to do with it. It’s all about ancient tribal identities and loyalties.
These sentiments can be self-destructive. Britain was a world soccer power, but now fields four so-so teams. That loss of prestige parallels Britain’s decline as a force in world politics and economic importance. Other peoples are willing to sacrifice much more in order to be independent and self-sufficient.
The first half of Ahmed’s book is very theoretical. The second half turns very dark. In his opinion all crude efforts to educate or modernize tribal peoples will fail. The “steamroller”, as he calls the forceful methods by which western or westernizing societies crush tribal practices, has so far resulted only in many millions of deaths, even larger numbers of displaced people, and many angry bearded men whom we call terrorists and therefore try to kill with drones.
Ahmed uses more space and more nasty adjectives to denounce America (and especially Barack Obama) than all the other countries put together, even though the total number of deaths by drones is far, far less than the slaughter of minority tribes in Kenya, Sudan, and several other African states; and urbanized, westernized Pakistanis have killed many more of the tribal peoples of the mountains than Obama has. Still, these wars are ours, too, he says, because the leaders of westernizing nations have seized upon the War on Terror to get American money and weapons which they use upon the tribal peoples who object to being subjected majority rule. When the politicians shout “al-Qaida,” we send special forces, drones, and lots of money.
This has caused the tribal peoples to see America behind all their problems and corruption; in their view, we have encouraged their governments to reduce them to look-alike, act-like robots with all the familiar vices of the modern western world, but with more slums and unemployment.
Ahmed’s solution to these problems is to back away from them. President Obama seems to have acted on this when he announced that “Osama bin Laden is dead and al-Qaida is on the run,” but then he had Benghazi. Now the Obama line is that there is a Core al-Qaida and a variety of wantabe local varieties, and that he has beaten the former. If we ignore the rest, they will ignore us. Forget Benghazi, which is now so long ago that who cares?
Ahmed would probably agree in principle. If America can deliver justice and respect, all we have to worry about are Muslims who have become persuaded that we are crusaders out to destroy Islam. But even more important are Muslims who dislike what they see of our society, with its loud music, sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, alcoholism, drug addiction, and attacks on religion.
This is something I will want to think about. We know that rural girls who run away to the big city often end up on street corners in short skirts, but that argument could deprive all women of opportunities to get an education, hold a job, and to become self-sufficient. Clan leaders with too much power become tiny tyrants, and ignorant clerics can make you believe that the sun revolves around the earth. Besides, I like central heating, flush toilets, books, a variety of foods, and the ability to travel.
Still, the modern world is often so dysfunctional that western intellectuals dream about how nice it would be to return to the happy days when everything was simpler and no one knew what poverty was. Some like to observe happy primitive peoples in their native environments and don’t want them to escape to the big cities for jobs, entertainment and interesting vices. But more people want variety and change, and some women do not want to have to marry an unbathed elderly uncle or someone they’ve never met.
“Dream on,” is all that I can say to plans to return everyone to an imagined better past, because that is merely an uninformed dream. If someone wants to go live in a tepee in this year’s winter, I have no objection. Just “good luck” on finding some woman who will do all the work while you try to figure out how to get the dead buffalo home. If your values allow you to kill it. And if you can.
I am unwilling to release kidnappers and murderers just because they are carrying out an ancient tradition or revenging old wrongs. Whether it’s the Hatfields and McCoys or street toughs, we have to find ways to make ourselves safe while still allowing those who want to be different to do so in way that do not harm others.
Ahmed calls for specially trained administrators to join with clan leaders and clerics to find ways to made tribal areas peaceful. He advocates using anthropologists who have not been ruined by modern theories to help us understand what is going on, then applying their knowledge. Then put up a sign: Politicians stay out.
This takes us to Ahmed’s last recommendation (which might be his most controversial): Give the tribal peoples their own lands.
If only the world were so simple. Who would get America’s Great Plains, the Sioux or the tribes that were there before the Sioux got the horse in 1790, then thundered out of Minnesota? Then we have the big questions — the Celtic and Germanic migrations, the settlement of the New World, Russians in Siberia, and every other group that has migrated to lands once held by tribal groups.

Review Atlas (March 14, 2014), 4.

ANOTHER VIEW OF DRONE WARFARE I

By William Urban

Akbar S. Ahmed currently holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University in Washington DC; earlier he was at the US Naval Academy and the Brookings Institute. He won the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2004 and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Therefore, he cannot be simply dismissed as another American-hating Muslim. He’s not even an Arab, but a Pakistani from the tribal highlands where many American drones have been employed. This tactic, he argues, is not only ineffective, but is counterproductive.
He has seen the effects first-hand. His first job, in 1966, was as a government representative to the highland tribes in Waziristan. He saw local society reflecting three institutions: 1) the tribal chiefs, 2) the local Mullahs, 3) the distant government as represented by local experts (in this case, by himself). The thesis of his book, The Thistle and the Drone, is that tribal societies are like thistles — they are hard to uproot, they stick back hard and they persist — and therefore any attempt to defeat them by assassination is not going to work.
This is a theme I had already been working on. My next book, Wars on the Periphery, deals with exactly such societies and the difficulties that urbanized centers encounter in dealing with them. It is not a new idea, but Ahmed deals with it more thoroughly and with more inside experience than most of the experts in the War on Terror.
All too often city sophisticates, both in the West and in westernizing nations, consider mountain folk stupid. I remember one example from right in the USA. In the summer of 2012 the United States Department of Agriculture praised its North Carolina agents for persuading more citizens to enroll in the food stamp program. Noting that one in seven Americans are on food stamps, but relatively few in the western part of the state, it emphasized the need to break “mountain pride.” Yes, pride in being self-reliant is depriving families of “healthy, nutritious food.”
There is something so bizarre about this that one cannot imagine any administration before Obama’s doing it. Except perhaps the Roosevelt era when the statement, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” became a laugh line.
Of course, the various levels of government usually do make our lives more comfortable and secure. It is hard to imagine private citizens being able to repair city streets or stop drunk drivers from racing down them. Once churches and communities could provide help for everyone in need, and big city political bosses could provide jobs. Those roles haven’t vanished, but our society has changed.
But has it changed so much that we want to take away people’s pride?
That is essentially Ahmed’s message. The tribal people of the world’s mountains and deserts may be poor in possessions, but they are rich in pride and traditions. They can support themselves, and when we freeze because our electricity grid is brought down by snow or terrorists, they will ask, “What is an electricity grid? And why would we want one?”
“Well,” we respond, “without electricity, Japanese television sets (or Chinese), German beer (or the St. Louis and Milwaukee copies), Iowa potato chips, Mexican tortilla chips, and American central heating, you couldn’t have watched the winter Olympics in Russia.”
“Why,” they might ask, “would we want to watch White people play in the snow? I didn’t know, half of the time, what they were doing.”
Hearing this, we might suspect they have sneaked a peak at the coverage.
Experts in modernization, encouraged by hearing this, might conclude that the tribesmen have heard something of the modern world, and therefore suggest that they watch porn.
Which brings us to Ahmed’s second point — tribal customs are very puritanical. First we want their women to uncover their hair, next to learn to drive, then to drive while talking on a cell phone and smoking. In this he agrees with Bernard Lewis, the long-time authority on the Middle East that modern Islamic scholars love to hate, in that the peaceful and compassionate religion of Islam has been hijacked by primitive demagogues.
Thus, both the jihadists and those who look to the Koran to understand the jihadists have misunderstood what is going on. Muslims who kill innocents or put on suicide vests are reflecting ancient primitive tribal customs, not the sophisticated theology of Islam.
There is nothing in the Koran to justify female genital mutilation or honor killings. These ideas grew out of internal Muslim disputes when leaders claimed leadership of Islam by being, as we say in the West, “More Catholic than the Pope.” One way to discredit opponents is to accuse them of being secular or corrupt or un-Islamic.
Some of these leaders are content to maintaining their petty tyrannies in the hills, but some want to reestablish the Caliphate that will supposedly bring in world peace, justice, and morality. But first they have to make themselves supreme over all Muslims, then over the entire world. Both of these themes play themselves out in al-Qaeda’s propaganda. Both can be achieved only by war.
The tactic is terrorism, which pits demands by the oppressed tribes for justice and revenge against the corruption and cowardliness of the West and its Middle Eastern imitators. Westernizing Muslims kill many more tribesmen than Americans do, as recent Pakistani air strikes demonstrated, but the tribes believe that without American money and weapons, those puppets of a foreign culture would quickly be overthrown. In short, the leaders of modernizing states such as Pakistan are as clueless as Barack Obama.
If this is so, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is of little importance. If that were settled by some means we cannot imagine, the contest of city and country would still be with us — and that is what drives jihadist terrorism.
Next week: the dark side of Ahmed’s view of America and the War on Terror.

Review Atlas (March 6, 2014), 4.

MONUMENTS MEN II

By William Urban

Last week I wrote about the Monuments Men movie, which the history department and the history club attended together. I knew all the places featured in the movie — Normandy, Ghent, Bruges, Aachen, Singen, Neuschwanstein — which probably provoked a stronger reaction from me than it did most of our crowd, and I thought of how those places looked when I first saw them, twenty years after the war. They had been restored already, because Frenchmen, Belgians and Germans alike believed that art and architecture defined them as a civilized people. This was a partial answer to the question raised repeatedly in the movie, “Is it worth risking a life to save a painting?”
I also had mental images of pictures I had seen of the wartime damage at each place — total destruction in some cases. None, fortunately, in Neuschwanstein, which would have been almost impossibly expensive to rebuilt. It wasn’t a real palace, anyway, but more a country hideaway for a mentally disturbed king. The other places were piles of rubble — Americans had plenty of ammunition and did not hesitate to use it. It was like Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe cartoon, where a British Tommy comes up to the two exhausted GIs at Anzio and comments “You blokes leave an awfully messy battlefield.”
Nick Mainz, who had read the book, said that the movie left a lot out. I can believe it. I hadn’t read it, so I can only guess that the episode right at the end was elaborated on somewhat. The squad had raced to Aussee in Austria in an attempt to get to the mine where the art was hidden, knowing that the Red Army was on its way, too — a brief scene at the capture of Berlin had suggested that Soviet Monuments Men knew about it.
That may have been so, but the movie improvised the ending. The real German officer refused to obey Hitler’s direct orders to destroy the art, and local miners removed the 500 pound bombs placed there by the demolition teams. Thus the Monuments Men had the time to carefully remove the Michelangelo statue — my thoughts about this week’s Associated Press story was to wonder if my uncle had written the 1945 AP story, but checking his letters I learned that he had hurried back to England because his daughter was ill. Still, he would have liked the movie. He was the correspondent who followed Eisenhower everywhere until the war had ended — they were both Kansas boys and became first name friends. He stayed in Germany and covered the Nuremberg Trials. When people tried to tell him that the Holocaust never happened, he would blow up. In a similar fashion, some people just can’t believe that Hitler would order the art destroyed. But if you can kill millions of people, why not art? Especially, if Wagner’s Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods) is your favorite opera. And if many of the thefts were from Jews.
Americans were stealing stuff right and left, too, including some of the gold shown in the movie. That story I know he wrote, as well as the one about the theft of the jewels belonging to the duke of Hesse. He didn’t get much himself, except in playing gin rummy with other correspondents. At a penny a point he was making $1000 a year. The lesson is, I guess, that reporters have a lot of time on their hands, and some of them didn’t know how to count cards. I learned not to sort my hand, but to leave the cards in random order. He also knew baseball well — give him the name of a team and a year, and he could rattle off the starting line-up and all the batting averages. A memory like that was useful for a correspondent, or for the art historians among the Monuments Men.
As for the Red Army, it at least had a justification for looting German art — the Nazis had leveled city after city in Russia and stole everything that they couldn’t blow up. The foremost example was the amber room that Nazi Monuments Men had taken the palace at Tsarkoye Selo in 1941 and transported to Koenigsberg, where it was apparently burned when the palace was stormed by the Red Army in 1945. When the Soviets denied having it, westerners suspected this was something like their denying they had evidence that Hitler was dead, when they did. If you run a government on the basis of obvious lies, it is hard to persuade people you are telling the truth even when you are. Parts of what might be the amber room keep appearing, but most likely it was destroyed during the house to house fighting.
I know one story of destruction by design. A friend that Jackie and I met when the Iron Curtain was falling told us that his first job as an art historian was to draw sketches of stolen art hidden in a cave. The Communists had not revealed having captured it, so they were destroying it. He couldn’t get paintings past the guards, but he carried out several iron stove decorations in his bag of sketchbooks, saying they were scrap metal. He showed them to us — museum quality work, but much less valuable than a rare painting.
Lastly, we lived in Yugoslavia in 1986, the year the Communist government decided that the high school building would be better used as an art gallery. The collection acquired by Ante Topic Mimara was controversial, to say the least. The story I heard was that he had acquired a train-load of Nazi art that he shunted around Eastern Europe until he got to Zagreb, where Tito allowed him to hide it until all potential heirs were dead. He presumably saved himself from prosecution by timely donations to important officials, who then denied that the items in question existed at all. In the end, most were second-rate, but second-rate can still be pretty good.
This was why the woman in Paris was so reluctant to cooperate — she believed that everyone was out to steal the art. Even Matt Damon.
Yes, preserving a cultural heritage was important.

Review Atlas (February 27, 2014), 4.

MONUMENTS MEN I

By William Urban

Reviews almost kept me from this movie, but I’m glad I went. Especially so because I liked the question that was constantly being put to the squad trying to recover the stolen Nazi art — Was it worth risking lives for art?
This is a variety of the question put by those who think there is nothing worth fighting for. Why risk a life for art? Why fight for a country? Yes, there is a difference, but a nation’s heritage is seen best in its art. Music can be played after a fire, drama can be performed and literature reprinted. But art is fragile, even art made of marble. That is why we honor Dolley Madison, the president’s wife in the War of 1812. Nothing was going well on the battlefield — and even the successful defense of Baltimore, where the National Anthem was composed, was successful only in that the British didn’t take the city, but the British sailed up the Potomac River and advanced on Washington. When warned that the redcoats were coming, Dolley Madison left her meal on the table, where the redcoats found it still warm. But she took the time to cut George Washington’s portrait out of the frame and save it from being burned. .The Executive Mansion was called the White House after it was painted to cover up the fire damage.
Certainly the 345 men and women who were Monuments Men thought it worth-while. They came from thirteen different nations, some from lands that had been looted to provide private art collections for Hitler, Goering, Rosenberg and other Nazi thugs who saw this as a cheap way to buy culture. That and listening to Wagner.
The movie was well-done, though critics have not praised it highly — they suggested that George Clooney couldn’t decide whether it was to be a serious film or a comedy, or if he was just another actor who should have majored in history before starting to write a script. The only point that bothered me was that the squad was “tasked with” this duty. The practice of making a noun (task) into a verb was not common until recent decades. In the 1940s they would have been “assigned the task.”
The movie brought many memories to mind. First of all of past colleagues who had talked to the students in my World War II classes about their experiences in the European theater — John Ketterer, Bob Buchholz, and Woody Ball. Carl Waring, a Wallace Hall janitor I spoke to daily for many years, drove a jeep ahead of Patton’s advance. He had incredible adventures right at the end of the war as the tank column roared into Germany and he was pushing to stay ahead. Once running into a road block put up by Hitler Jugend, he got out, rounded up some old men who then marched in parade step to the kids and told them the war was over. Of course, there were some youthful fanatics who insisted on fighting, so they got killed. When mothers complained, the commander got Carl back to France in a hurry. Mike McNall, his boss at Monmouth College, remembers that story, too.
My dissertation advisor, Archie Lewis, earned the Croix de Guerre for driving ahead of the American advance in France to ask if there were any snipers in the church towers. This was important, I understood, because surveyors used the tips of church steeples to measure property boundaries. He would ask villagers to check, then presumably see if they could get the snipers out. Our tank crews were of the opinion that their lives were more important than steeples, and they were in a hurry.
Fortunately, much of the most endangered art was put into safe-keeping at the onset of the war. Entire churches were stripped of their medieval windows and paintings, art galleries were emptied, and facades were covered with protective panels. The “phony war” of September 1939 to May of 1940 gave curators plenty of time, but also made politicians think that it was a waste of time and money.
The one country that took almost no precautions was Nazi Germany. Hitler called such fears “defeatism” and forbade any action that might lead civilians to doubt that he could prevent the allies from bombing German cities. As a result, once American bombers hit cities by day and British bombers raided by night, the cultural losses were severe. There was no such thing as “precision” bombing. First of all, German weather means lots of clouds and rain, then there was smoke from the first wave of bombers. Secondly, Germans did everything they could to throw off radio direction signals that navigators relied on to find the targets. Thirdly, German fighters disrupted formations, attacking from the front so fast that nose gunners couldn’t see the tiny dots coming until too late; and radar could not tell friend from foe at better than 95% accuracy, which would have had Americans shooting down a lot of their own aircraft. Last, since high-flying 8th Air Force bombers could only get 20% of their bombs within 1000 feet of the target, the best tactic was to have a mass of bombers drop all their bombs at once. Some were sure to hit.
Where I studied, in Hamburg, there had been three raids of more than 700 aircraft. The third night carpet bombing completely missed the target, but plastered the area hit by the first raid. The fire storm ate up the oxygen, suffocating everyone in the underground shelters. 42,000 people died. All the churches were destroyed. The downtown was gone.
Berlin was a wreck, too, made worse by the desperate fighting when the Red Army stormed the city defenses. 80,000 Russians died, 100,000 Germans. Then the city was divided into occupation zones the Russians getting most of the museums. Not surprisingly, it was Soviet Monuments Men who had the task of recovering stolen art and deciding where it would go.
Least cooperative were the Swiss, who had decided that whatever art was not claimed by the owners or their heirs would belong to Swiss bankers.
As for the Jews, who had a reasonable claim to some very important pictures, there has been some recent progress. Five Gustav Klimt paintings in Austria were restored to heirs in 2006, and two more are in Vienna law courts right now. Americans are discovering that some of the mementoes their grandfathers brought home were technically stolen property.

Review Atlas (Feb 20, 2014), 4

NO GLOBAL STARVATION, II

By William Urban

As noted last week, there are no global food shortages except in areas of war, insurrections and prolonged droughts or floods. Even China, where artificial famines caused by government programs once killed millions, the nation feeds itself. Today’s Communist rulers have generally recognized that individual farmers are more productive than state enterprises or communes, but for decades it was more important that the state take most of the harvest to support industrial development; in those years life was hard. The American equivalent of this is to protect the snail darter.
We have long known that modifying our agricultural methods has both good and bad aspects. Insecticides raise production significantly. Last summer I lost all but one plum — picked early— of what promised to be a bumper crop because I did not want to spray for the Japanese beetles. I have a neighbor who raises bees, and I thought that was a good reason to take a chance on the bugs; I also miss the fireflies that were once so plentiful. Not spraying may still have been the right choice, because bees are almost an endangered species.
The downside to insecticides is that they are effective only until the bugs evolve to resist the poisons; and fertilizers are expensive and easily overused. Changes in field management have consequences — abandoning deep plowing for minimum till allows harmful insects to survive winter freezes, but there is less erosion and all the problems that come from having the best soil washed into the rivers and eventually into the sea. Deforestation produces erosion, which is often made worse by raising goats on the denuded lands, because goats eat everything that could hold what soil remains. I’ve read that the first step toward restoring arid lands in Italy and North Africa is to eat the goats.
One promising means of breaking this cycle is genetic engineering. If, for example, scientists can modify corn so that its roots produce nitrogen as soy beans do, farmers could reduce the use of fertilizer. If corn stalks could be made less tasty to pests, farmers could use less insecticide. However, there are two major obstacles to overcome. Both are in public perception.
First, the public has been taught by decades of horror films to mistrust scientists, so that today the term Frankenfood is understood by almost everyone to represent the danger that modified genes would get loose, changing the genetic composition of other plants and even animals. There are good reasons for taking this seriously. The overuse of antibiotics may have speeded the evolution of dangerous bacteria that threaten everyone’s health. Also, the unwise disposition of hormones (as in flushing birth control pills down the toilet) may have contributed to the increasingly early sexual maturation of females and even the global epidemic of obesity. Note the use of “may” here. It could be diet, it could be our use of electric lights to stay up late, or it could be not having enough hard physical work. We don’t know enough except to say that something is going on. In short, are the returns worth the risks?
The public reaction to such scares is, alas, often as irrational as the belief in UFOs or global warming flooding us tomorrow. Not too many years ago the fear was that nuclear power station accidents would change our DNA, creating monsters where it did not kill everyone outright. It was wise to stop above-ground testing of nuclear weapons, but the concern evolved into a fear of irradiating food. No serious scientist believes that irradiating meat does anything beyond killing bacteria, but the public is afraid of anything to do with radiation except taking an occasional x-ray. Hence, we do almost no irradiation of food products despite the potential health benefits.
Sustainable agriculture is the flip side of commercial agriculture in that it produces too little food to sustain farmers .The Sustainability movement is strong and amazingly diverse. It is a close cousin of Environmentalism, Eat Locally, Recycling, and Community Gardens. But it is nothing new, and not altogether bad. It appeared in America before the Civil War, often in the form of religious groups (most prominently, the Latter Day Saints and the Amish), secular groups (Oneida, New Harmony, and Walden), and utopian socialists (the Fourier settlement in Nauvoo). Sixty years ago there was the Catholic Renaissance and its more secular cousin, the Rural Living Movement, both of which emphasized breaking with the modern world in favor of simple living.
Vegetarianism has a long history, based partly on a desire to have more a healthy diet, partly on distaste for killing animals, partly on political fashion that included a rejection of contemporary society. Vegan eating habits are more recent in the West, but were common among small sects in India. Humans have long associated hunting and the raising of animals with meat with masculinity and the military virtues of courage, strength and persistence, so vegetarians should be pacifists. Awkwardly, Hitler was a vegetarian. Nevertheless, progressives were eager to find some way to move toward the future society of cooperation and sharing. Bees, not wolves and deer, were the proper models for human beings.
It was also important that family farms were part of a competitive capitalist culture that had all the wrong values. So co-ops became popular in the Sixties and still remain so in the form of “fair trade” products such as coffee; feminists often praise third-world women’s cooperatives. Natural gas was the cure-all for our energy problems until it turned out we had lots of it. Now the push is for natural energy — wind and solar, but not the long-established use of water.to make electricity. Alternatively, farmers — now wearing the white hats — can make ethanol from corn and other bio-fuels from a variety of we thought were useless plants.
Ethanol brings us right back to food. It allows us to import less oil, and it is somewhat cleaner than gasoline. Western Illinois and Iowa benefit, but tortillas become more expensive in Mexico. Prices go up for all food products with ingredients coming from corn.
This shouldn’t make us uncomfortable. It is not like we are taking food out of poor people’s mouths.
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Review Atlas (Feb 13, 2014), 4.

NO GLOBAL STARVATION

By William Urban

We hear periodically that starvation is a world problem. Yes, there are places where people are dying, and more where hunger persists. The difference between starvation and hunger is significant, though alarmists seemingly seldom understand why. Starvation has an immediate impact — death. Hunger is long term — people still have enough strength to protest, to join in food riots.

However, the scenes of panic we associate with Indiana Jones movies (set in Asia in the 1930s) have vanished from India and China, and it’s hard to remember if any American mothers have ever formed mobs, brandishing empty food dishes and yelling that their children are dying. Black Friday sales day yes, but not in front of grocery stores.

There are malnourished Americans, usually because of a poor diet that reflects poor education, poverty, alcohol, drug use or just bad habits. We sometimes face hard choices — either diet drinks that are unhealthy or regular soft drinks that make you fat, or the local water. People with no fat on their bones are either mentally diseased homeless people who live under bridges rather than go to shelters or models in New Yorker ads. Obese people have been making poor nutrition choices, too — so much so that being overweight is a greater health problem than being too thin. Although we are told that “you can’t be too rich or too thin,” my own take, informed by the tabloid press, is that those ultra-thin people aren’t all that happy. We all know that it’s not easy to take off the pounds that holidays put on us, but the people who get back to normal by moderate diet and moderate exercise are happier than those who resort to extreme tactics.

The matter of being unhealthily fat is not simple. The charts are only moderately helpful, and anyone being weighed at a doctor’s office where they don’t care if you have ten pounds of clothing on can legitimate suspect that the nurses are looking for folks who have put on thirty or forty pounds since their last visit. There are multiple reasons for obesity, some of which we do not understand well. What is clear is that the world is producing enough food for everybody, and providing it in greater variety and abundance than at any time in human history.

We find shortages of food mainly in war-torn regions or where floods or droughts have occurred, or where — as in the Irish potato famine — crops have been hit by disease. Ireland had wheat, but grain farmers preferred to export it to England than give it to people who had no money. Crop failures usually result from cyclical patterns of weather — a hot decade in the Great Plains combined with plowing fields that should have been left as pasture produced the Dust Bowl of the Thirties.

My grandmother said that she didn’t need to travel. She could just sit on the porch and watch the states blow by. She could laugh because the next decade brought more rain and by the time the hot cycle returned when I was young, farmers (and the state and federal governments) had learned how to avoid a recurrence. Changing crops was one answer, putting more land in pasture was another, and small farmers just moving to the cities was yet another.

Short term natural disasters are not a problem in well-organized states. Even in Illinois, where we had little rain for much of the past summer, the crops were good. Long term problems, like the Sahel in Africa may be impossible to solve. Only the Israelis have been able to make the deserts bloom, and the Arabs will not forgive them for doing that (and for many other reasons, including for existing). Most regions remain habitable if people adapt and governments are responsive.

My example is the aforementioned Great Plains, which switched from raising corn to wheat. Corn needs water in the summer. Cycles of wet and dry means that some years there simply isn’t enough rain in Central Kansas for corn. Wheat, in contrast, needs moisture in the fall and spring, then is harvested in June and July, just before the summer dry spell sets in. Today Kansas farmers don’t plow until fall, but it wasn’t always that way. I remember the clouds of smoke from burning stubble, a practice now abandoned.

Forty years ago alarmists predicted that population growth would lead to massive starvation, the breakdown of law and order, and even the closing of universities (which would cause the alarmists to lose their jobs). Even in Monmouth people who had three children were chided for not caring about the future, while childless couples flaunted their superior morality.

So what happened? Why no massive starvation? Why was there a collapse in American births so great that most communities have had to consolidate schools? Why do we need immigrants to keep the economy going?

White and Black pregnancy rates have fallen below what is needed to replace those who die, and many pregnancies are unmarried teenagers who did not plan the blessed event. Even there the number is going down. Hispanic immigrants still have three and four children, but the second generation is taking up the voluntary two child policy.

Europe is below replacement, too, and Japan, too. Aging populations make people wonder who will pay the taxes needed for health, education, and welfare. Those are real problems, not starvation.

World food production has increased. First there was the Green Revolution that taught Asians and Africans how to use better seeds, then to apply fertilizer and insecticides. Experimentation produced better seeds and reduced the number of bulls that ranchers summarized as all horns and balls. More recently we have genetic engineering, which has been so successful that alarmists call it dangerous — perhaps even making people infertile. Lastly, the ability to move foodstuffs around, and the willingness of governments to give emergency aid, has practically put the traditional private charities out of business. The problem now is that deliveries of free food to troubled areas are ruining local farmers, so that when times become better, the food crisis will remain.

Ironic that a natural food shortage will be replaced by an artificial one. That’s the law of unintended consequences, and another reason not to jump blindly into radical solutions for any problem, especially not problems which appeal more to our emotions than our brains.

Review Atlas (Feb 6, 2014), 4.

CLIMATE CHANGE AGAIN?

By William Urban

It seems that whenever our weather is the coldest someone will announce that global warming is going to destroy us. NPR. must ask job applicants how fervently they believe in this.
Will this subject never go away? Probably not. How many times have religious enthusiasts predicted the end of the world? How many newspapers printed stories about the Mayan calendar, or how all our computers would cease to work on January 1, 2000?
Whether climate change is really a serious concern depends on who you listen to. Some global warming enthusiasts are like preachers, sincerely trying to save souls while there is still time. Awkwardly, a last minute conversation works for sinners trying to get into heaven, while the conversion deadline for climate change was decades ago — the changes are already underway and nothing we can do now will have an immediate impact. Long term maybe, immediate no.
Other global warming enthusiasts seem to be careerists who, having staked their reputations on it, are now panicked because their computer models are wrong. Such people do not easily admit their mistakes. Like desperate poker players, they push more chips onto the table. Doubling down is normally a bad strategy, but it has an internal logic — if they are right, persuading people that the end of the world as we know is nigh will guarantee them financial success and fame until that happens.
Not so long ago we were told that all serious climate scientists were in agreement that the situation was urgent, that there was no time to lose, and that anyone who disagreed was simply a Denier, the equivalent of the flat earth people. Then people began to realize that fifteen years had gone by without the predicted increase in global temperature. Various explanations were given, but these were undermined by leaks that showed the global warning enthusiasts were massaging the facts and attempting to silence critics. Changing “global warming” to “climate change” did not fend off the criticisms. Now more than 30,000 scientists who work on climate-related subjects have signed a statement saying that they disagree with the “consensus” that we are facing catastrophe.
It got worse when fracking provided us with enough natural gas to make the US energy independent. What did the enthusiasts do? They changed from praising natural gas as our best alternative to oil, to denouncing it..
Nuclear, of course, never stood a chance. We’ve never had a fatality from a nuclear accident in the US, but Hiroshima and Chernobyl made that irrelevant. France gets its energy from nuclear power, but Germany is closing down its plants. Go figure.
As for wind energy, when it was discovered that wind farms in California were killing eagles, the president gave them a thirty year exemption from laws protecting the birds. Meanwhile, the water-starved farmers of the San Joaquin Valley complain about the protection given to the Delta Smelt.
A decade ago it appeared that all the industrialized nations of the world had agreed on the global warming issue. However, by the time newly elected President Obama hurried from his Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to the Climate Summit in Denmark (braving record cold), the political climate had changed. Today almost nobody has the money to do what the experts say has to be done.
Only the president and his advisors (and the aforementioned careerists) now see the global warming situation as dire. Awkwardly, people remember President Obama’s many other promises and warnings, including the statement that his administration would be the most open and honest in American history, and that every proposed bill would be on the internet days ahead so that the public could read it. He did not finish that promise with the word “period”, which is just as well. Late night comics already have enough material to last them through the next election cycle.
On the good side, much has been done. Some of it in spite of government efforts. Pollution has been reduced because most people see this as affecting them immediately and directly. Even ethanol, once the sacred cow of green energy, has been recognized as creating as many problems as it solved. And bovine flatulence, once decried as a major threat to the environment, proved to be mere gas. The anti-meat crowd had seen this as a way to encourage vegetarianism (a seldom mentioned fellow traveler of the global warming crowd), but more has been done along that line by the rising cost of beef, pork and chicken, and by concerns over obesity.
The United States is now the leading energy producer in the world, despite President Obama’s efforts. The May issue of Atlantic proclaimed, “WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL.” However, the development of new sources of energy could turn the world economy upside down — as developing countries industrialize, so much CO2 will go into the atmosphere that climate change policies could become irrelevant.
This would also make green energy comparatively more expensive. (Expensive gas is good, President Obama’s energy advisor explained in 2009, because that would encourage people to turn from oil to wind and solar.)
To make the situation even more confusing, we just got another study that indicated such swift global warming that all those developing countries would be too warm to support human life. If that is so, it does not matter how cheap oil is, because the major cities are doomed. Starting with people living in Kingston, Jamaica, there will be a massive flight north within thirty-odd years. However, that flight is doomed, because the heat wave will follow right behind them, and major cities like New York will be under water.
In short, we have everything but an asteroid headed our way. But don’t fear, we are tracking more and more of them, too. And usually they hit only Siberia, where almost nobody will be living until the Chinese start moving north.
And the Russian ship filled with global warming scientists wanting to see for themselves how Antarctica is melting — it was stuck in ice so thick that several rescue efforts failed. Worse, the rescue ships got stuck, too.

Review Atlas (Jan 9, 2014), 4.

PS Scince is never settled. Were that so, Copernicus would have been burned at the stake, as was one scholar unwise enough to proclaim in the middle of Rome that the earth rotated around the sun.

Each of us has individual experiences, hence different memories of the past. This is certainly true about memories of Monmouth College. Memories are falible, but I have been pleased by the number of omments suggestiing that I got this essay pretty much right. Readers can decide for themselves the degree they agree, and express their feelings on the comments site.

PRESIDENTS I HAVE KNOWN

William Urban

When I heard that Mauri Ditzler was leaving for the lake-effect winters of Albion College, I once again reflected on the Monmouth college presidents I’ve known. Quite a diverse group.
I am in my forty-ninth year of college teaching, forty-eight at Monmouth College. I’ve served seven presidents, and I’ve interviewed Robert Gibson, who retired shortly before I came. I can’t comment directly on Gibson’s performance other than to note his retirement message saying that Monmouth College needed a different kind of leader to make the transition from a small Presbyterian school to one that could attract more students; however, I remember from my interview with him for the college history that he was a delightful person, and that he would have been a wonderful person to work for.
Of those presidents I knew, two were very good, two left unhappy, and the rest earned mixed reviews. I won’t say which is which, since all but Dick Stine are still living, but a stranger group could hardly have been collected. In a sense, one could say that until the hiring of Mauri Ditzler, the primary criterion for selecting each new president seemed to be that the new hire had to have little in common with the predecessor.
Most were comparatively young when hired, a reflection of the “ageism” involved in the process of selection — although nationally the average tenure of college presidents is only five years or so, no Monmouth College search committee seems to have seriously considered anyone older than fifty-five. (The one time I was on a search committee, in 1970, I liked an experienced applicant who was sixty, but everyone else wanted someone who would stay for two decades; I still think that if you can get Michael Jordan on your basketball team, you don’t ask how long he will stay.)
I should put the late Bill Amy into this list, because he was Acting President for a year. He did a good job and would have made a good college president, but he was persuaded to remain academic dean.
Of this group, Bill Amy may have looked and sounded most like a president, Dick Giese photographed best, and Bruce Haywood had the finest voice and was the best read. Duncan Wimpress was the most extroverted, playing impromptu sessions with student musicians and flying his own airplane with notorious abandon, Bruce Haywood was the most eager to escape the social spotlight, though he once performed an impressive piano duo. DeBow Freed was the most formal, Sue Huseman the least so. Dick Giese was the most knowledgeable about athletics, Duncan Wimpress the most willing to reach out to other cultures. Several were personally religious, but only DeBow Freed gave long prayers at faculty meetings. Whatever the college lacked in Freed’s days regarding salaries, benefits and student numbers, no one could say that Monmouth College didn’t have a prayer.
Two were very good orators: Duncan Wimpress and Bruce Haywood. Three were excellent in small groups: Dick Stine, DeBow Freed and Sue Huseman. Two were very witty in an understated way: DeBow Freed and Dick Giese. Freed brought his military skills at organization to bear, making very little go a long way and thereby restoring the college’s financial and moral foundations. Dick Giese had the golden touch with finances.
Dick Stine was the unluckiest, taking office when oil prices skyrocketed, the economy tanked, and the draft was ended. College enrollments across the country plummeted just as junior colleges sprang up all over the place, and students were responding to the Sixties by thinking that rules were suggestions for fuddy-duddies. Sue Huseman was the luckiest, holding office during the swiftest rise of the stock market in recent decades and through a period of political and social calm; in addition, she inherited Dick Valentine as admissions director.
Duncan Wimpress and Mauri Ditzler were the most determined to transform the college. Wimpress was successful because he rode a wave of first generation college students eager to get into any college anywhere, and he had to build dorms and classrooms for them. When he left — too early as it turned out — there was more debt than his successor could handle. It’s far too soon to judge the Ditzler legacy.
None of these individuals lacked talent or commitment and each contributed something important to the institution they served. Not surprisingly, some faculty members liked one more than another. Equally predictably, board members bonded better with some more than with others; and their gifts to the college (or their not-giving) reflected their preferences. But throughout the terms of these very different persons, the membership of the Board of Trustees remained amazing stable and their commitment to Monmouth College admirably consistent. The same can be said about the Monmouth community, alumni and friends.
I’ve not agreed with everything that every president has wanted to do, but I refused to sign faculty petitions to trustees to have two of them removed, thereby angering a few colleagues. I do think that there should be more interaction between faculty and trustees, and that the best way would be to have one evening a year in which trustees are scattered among small gatherings at faculty homes, with beer, wine and soft drinks, cushy chairs and a relaxed atmosphere, to talk about college life and the world in general.
It’s not likely. In the locale of my murder mysteries, Briarpatch College, the president gives trustees more information than they want and less than they need. That seems to be general in higher education.
One the whole it’s been a good run. There have been rough patches, but, hey, that’s life — no small college escapes national trends. But I’ve read the official histories of other colleges; where “onward and upward” was the only theme. But my experience hiking suggest that one cannot go up forever unless one starts very low. .Let’s say that there isn’t much of a sense of humor among those who have the final word on what to print in coffee table feel-good publications.
There are challenges ahead. I can guess what some of these may be — recruiting students in a competitive market, raising money in an era of slow growth and an uncertain stock market, and keeping the budget under control — but nothing is guaranteed. As is occasionally remarked, “predictions are hard, especially about the future.” That said, the view across the valley between the past and the future is promising.

Review-Atlas (December 6, 2013), 4.