Jews in America from 1800 until World War II --- Episode 2

        The Mass Migration of Jews To America in the Mid-1800s 

   The mass migration of German Jews to America that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century was intimately bound up with their earlier abandonment of the traditional trappings of Jewish identity. Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, was an essentially German movement, its prophet being the great Prussian Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, which led in turn to that other essentially German movement, Reform Judaism, encouraged Jews to, literally and metaphorically, leave the ghetto in which they had been confined and embrace the modernizing ideas of the wider Western European Enlightenment. This meant using German rather than Hebrew as the language of worship, abandoning traditions and customs that served to isolate Jews from the rest of society, and reforming Jewish education so that it prepared people for the world at large rather than schooling them in a separate culture. The hope that inspired these changes was that, in return for abandoning those aspects of their culture that identified them as radically different from others, the Jews would receive from the gentile world  a lifting of the discriminatory laws that affected almost every aspect of their lives, and a full acceptance as members of society with the same legal, financial, and political rights as other citizens.  Thus fully assimilated, Jews would no longer think of themselves as a separate race or nation, but rather as adherents of a religion. Their nationality would be GERMAN , and they would be not a bit less German for worshipping in a synagogue rather than a church.
   It was the dashing of this hope that persuaded hundreds of thousands of German Jews in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to turn their backs on their home country and look to America to find the freedom and equality they had failed to achieve in Germany. Thus, in the eyes of German Jews, America became not only a refuge from discrimination and prejudice, but also the national embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, the ideals of Haskalah. Many of them therefore ceased trying to become accepted as Germans  and sought to become accepted as Americans.  
 "Amerika, du hast es besser." These famous words of Goethe are contained in the poem "Den Vereingten Staaten" [ "To the United States" ] , written in 1827, when, as an old man, he reflected upon the advantages that youthful America had over the "Old Continent" in having no tradition, no "decaying castles," and being therefore free from the continuous strife that comes from long memories. The image of America that Goethe's poem conjures up is one of a tabula rasa, waiting, so to speak, to have its history written upon it. This was an image perfectly suited to arouse the interest and expectations of the German Jews, a group who longed to start afresh, free from the tensions and prejudices of the past. 
   And so, beginning in the 1820s, the rallying cry "On to America" echoed throughout the Jewish community in Germany. A whole movement grew up dedicated to the encouragement of migration to the United States, publicizing the financial, social and political advantages of the New World, and providing hope and support to those prepared to make what must have been an alarming as well as  an exciting fresh start. In books by Europeans who had been to America, in letters to relatives from those who had migrated, and in village meetings where people gathered to her firsthand accounts of American life from migrants who had returned to visit families, the image of America as "the common man's utopia" was spread, inspiring more and more Jews to set sail for the United States. 
   A typical example of such inspirational firsthand accounts is a letter written in November 1846 by the journalist and academic Max Lilienthal, which was published in the German Jewish weekly newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenbums. Extolling "the beautiful ground of civil equality" that he had discovered in America, Lilienthal announced : "The old Europe with its restrictions lies behind me like a bad dream. . . At last I breathe in liberty . . . Jew or Christian, Christian or Jew --- this old strife is forgotten, and only the man as such is respected and loved." Encouraging others to follow his example, he urged : "Shake off the centuries-old dust of Jew-pressure . . . become a human being like everybody else." And, he promised, in America : "Jewish hearts are open in welcome. Jewish organizations ready to help anyone. Why should you go on carrying the burden of legal exclusion ?" 
   The number of German Jews willing and eager to "shake off the centuries-old dust of Jew-pressure" was so large that it completely transformed the American Jewish community. In 1840, there were just 15,000 Jews in the United States ; by 1880, there were 280,000 , most of whom were of German origin. This influx of German Jews is known to Jewish historians as the "Second Migration" --- the "First Migration" being the arrival in the seventeenth century of a small community of Sephardic Jews. These were descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, who, by the nineteenth century, were a well-established part of American life. 
   These self-styled "old American Sephardic families" took pride in the fact that they had been in America for as many generations as the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and tended to treat the new German arrivals with the kind of lofty disdain with which the German Jews would later treat the Russians and Poles. The first German Jews to arrive in America accepted the leadership of the old Sephardic community and even adopted the Sephardic form of worship. When the number of German Jewish migrants began to increase dramatically, however, the balance of power shifted and the German Ashkenazi Jews replaced the Sephardim as the leaders of the Jewish community. 
   The mass influx into America of Russian and Polish Jews, which took place from 1880 to 1920, formed the "Third Migration," and was on an entirely different scale from the previous two, being measured not in the tens of thousands, or in the hundreds of thousands, but in millions. Roughly two and a half million Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in the United States during the Third Migration, bringing with them a very different kind of Jewish culture from that of either the Sephardim or the Germans. 
   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 1

             JEWS IN SCIENCE  IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE 
            NINETEENTH & EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES 


Isidor Rabi And Robert Oppenheimer : Both Were Physicists ; 
     Both Were From New York ; and Both Were Jewish 

   Isidor Rabi [ Rabi rhymes with "Bobby" ] once remarked that his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer was "a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters," who "never got to be an integrated personality."  What prevented Oppenheimer from being fully integrated, Rabi thought, was his denial of a central part of himself : his Jewishness. As the physicist Felix Bloch, echoing Rabi, once put it , Oppenheimer "tried to act as if he were not a Jew and succeeded well because he was a good actor." And, because he was acting, he lost sight of who he really was. Oppenheimer had an impressive and wide-ranging collection of talents, abilities and personal characteristics, but where the central, united core of his personality ought to have been, Rabi thought, there was a gap and so there was nothing to hold those "bright shining splinters" together. "I understood his problem, " Rabi said, and when asked what that problem was, replied simply : "Identity." 

    
Rabi spoke as someone who, by virtue of his background, intelligence, and education  was well placed to understand Oppenheimer's "problem." He and Oppenheimer had a great deal in common : they were roughly the same age [ Rabi was six years older] , they were both theoretical physicists, were both brought up in New York City and were both descended from European Jewish families. Behind this last similarity, however, lay a fundamental difference. Rabi was proud of his Jewish inheritance and happy to define himself in terms of it. Though he had no religious beliefs, and never prayed, he once said that when he saw Orthodox Jews at prayer, the thought that came into his mind was : "These are my people." 
   No such thought could have entered Oppenheimer's mind, no matter who he was looking at. There was no group to whom he could point and say : "These are my people," and not just because of his ambivalence about his Jewish background. It was also because that background itself, regardless of Oppenheimer's feelings about it, could not have provided him with a sense of belonging and, therefore, the sense of identity that Rabi thought was missing in him. Rabi, despite his lack of religious beliefs, was Jewish in a fairly straightforward and unambiguous way ; the Jews simply were "his people." Theirs was the community to which he belonged. One cannot say the same thing about Oppenheimer. The sense in which he was Jewish, the sense in which he did --- and did not --- come from, and belong to, a Jewish community, is far more complicated and, as Rabi has perceptively noted, crucial in understanding the fragility of his sense of identity. 

   For an understanding of the elusive nature of Oppenheimer's Jewishness, the contrast between his family background and Rabi's is instructive. Despite their many and important similarities, and despite the fact that they grew up within a few miles of each other, Rabi and Oppenheimer were born into and brought up in families that were culturally worlds apart. Rabi was a "Polish Jew." Born in Galicia to a poor, Yiddish-speaking family of Orthodox Jews, he came to New York as an infant and was raised, first in the crowded slums of the Lower East Side and then in a tiny apartment in the Brownsville Section of Brooklyn.   Oppenheimer was born not in Europe, but in New York City, to a WEALTHY FAMILY that had abandoned its Jewish faith and traditions a generation earlier. The bustling and crowded "Jewish Ghetto" of the Lower East Side would have seemed utterly alien to the young Oppenheimer, who was brought up in an enormous luxury apartment in the genteel Upper West Side. The family had never spoken Yiddish, and, though German was his father's first language, it ws never spoken at home. 

   And yet, despite regarding himself neither as German nor Jewish, Oppenheimer was seen, by Jews and non-Jews alike, as a "German Jew." In New York in the early twentieth century the central division among the Jewish community was between, on the one hand, the German Jews and, on the other, the Polish and Russian Jews --- the differences between the two groups accurately mirrored by the differences between Oppenheimer and Rabi. The German Jews, sometimes called "Uptown Jews," were on the whole wealthier, more assimilated and less religious than their Polish and Russian counterparts, to whom they were notoriously condescending. At the time of Oppenheimer's birth in 1904 there were more Polish and Russian Jews in New York than German Jews, but the Germans assumed leadership of the Jewish community and took it upon themselves to help "Americanize"the Russians and Poles, who reacted with resentment at what they saw as a dismissal of their religion and their customs. 
   What Rabi called Oppenheimer's problem---the problem of identity--- was, in fact, a problem for the entire American Jewish community, perhaps its central problem. Certainly it was the issue at the heart of the tension between the two groups of Jews in New York City. For the Russian and Polish Jews, their sense of identity was bound up with their Jewishness : their Orthodox religious beliefs, their Yiddish language and their Jewish culture and traditions. That sense of identity, that culture, however, had been abandoned by the German Jews before they even came to America. 
   
   

A Bit of Honest History of America --- Episode 5

    IMMIGRANTS AND REBELLION AGAINST THE RICH 

   How the immigration of different ethnic groups contributed to the fragmentation of the working class, how conflicts developed among groups facing the same difficult conditions, is shown in an article in a Bohemian newspaper Svornost, of February 27, 1880. A petition of 258 parents and guardians at the Throop School in New York, signed by over half the taxpayers of the school district, said "the petitioners have just as much right to request the teaching of Bohemian as have the German citizens to have German taught in the public schools. . . In opposition to this, Mr. Vocke claims that there is a great deal of difference between Germans and Bohemians, or in other words, they are superior." 
   The Irish, still recalling the hatred against them when they arrived, began to get jobs with the new political machines that wanted their vote. Those who became policemen encountered the new Jewish immigrants. On July 30, 1902, New York's Jewish community held a mass funeral for an important rabbi, and a riot took place, led by Irish who resented Jews coming into their neighborhood. The police force was dominantly Irish, and the official investigation of the riot indicated the police helped the rioters : ". . . it appears that charges of unprovoked and most brutal clubbing have been made against policemen, with the result that they were reprimanded or fined a day's pay  and were yet retained upon the force." 
   There was desperate economic competition among the newcomers. By 1880, Chinese immigrants, brought in by the railroads to do the backbreaking labor at pitiful wages, numbered 75,000 in California, almost one-tenth of the population. They became the objects of continuous violence. The novelist Bret Harte wrote an obituary for a Chinese man named Wan Lee : 

"Dead, my revered friends, dead. Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace 1869 by a mob of halfgrown boys and Christian school children."

In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885, whites attacked five hundred Chinese miners, massacring twenty-eight of them in cold blood. 
   The new immigrants became laborers, housepainters, stonecutters, ditchdiggers. They were often imported en masse by contractors. One Italian man, told he was going to Connecticut to work on the railroad, was taken instead to sulfate mines in the South, where he and his fellows were watched over by armed guards in their barracks and in the mines, given only enough money to pay for their railroad fare and tools, and very little to eat. He and others decided to escape. They were captured at gunpoint, ordered to work or die ; they still refused and were brought before a judge, put in manacles, and, five months after their arrival, finally dismissed. "My comrades took the train for New York. I had only one dollar, and with this, not knowing either the country or the language, I had to walk to New York. After forty-two days I arrived in the city utterly exhausted." 

   Their conditions led sometimes to rebellion. A contemporary observer told how "some Italians who worked in a locality near Deal Lake, New Jersey, failing to receive their wages, captured the contractor and shut him up in the shanty, where he remained a prisoner until the county sheriff came with a posse to his rescue."

   A traffic in immigrant child laborers developed, either by contract with desperate parents in the home country or by kidnapping. The children were then supervised by "padrones" in a form of slavery, sometimes sent out as beggar musicians. Droves of them roamed the streets of New York and Philadelphia. 

   As the immigrants became naturalized citizens, they were brought into the American two-party system, invited to be loyal to oe party or the other, their political energy thus siphoned into elections. An article in L'Italia, in November 1894, called for Italians to support the Republican party : 

     When American citizens of foreign birth refuse to ally themselves with the Republican Party, they make war upon their own welfare. The Republican Party stands for all that the people fight for in the Old World. It is the champion of freedom, progress, order, and the law. It is the steadfast foe of monarchial class rule. 

   There were 5 1/2 million immigrants in the 1880s, 4 million in the 1880s, creating a labor surplus that kept wages down. The immigrants were more controllable, more helpless than native workers ; they were culturally displaced, at odds with one another, therefore useful as strikebreakers. Often their children worked, intensifying the problem of an oversized labor force and joblessness ; in 1880 there were 1,118,000 children under sixteen [ one out of six] at work in the United States.  With everyone working long hours, families often became strangers to one another. 

   Women immigrants became servants, prostitutes, housewives, factory workers, and sometimes rebels. Leonora Barry was born in Ireland and brought to the United States. She got married, and when her husband died she went to work in a hosiery mill in upstate New York to support three young children, earning 65 cents her first week. She joined the Knights of Labor, which had fifty thousand women members in 192 women's assemblies by 1886. She became "master workman" of her assembly of 927 women, and was appointed to work for the Knights as a general investigator, to "go forth and educate her sister workingwomen and the public generally as to their needs and necessities." She described the biggest problem of women workers : "Through long years of endurance they have acquired, as a sort of second nature, the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no hope." Her report for the year 1888 showed : 537 requests to help women organize, 100 cities and towns visited, 1,900 leaflets distributed. 

                 MUCH MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED. 

   
   

   

A Bit of Honest History of America --- Episode 4

      Controlling the Working People With False Information 

   Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck. 
   In those years after the Civil War a man named Russell Conwell, a graduate of Yale Law School, a minister, and author of best-selling books, gave the same lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," more than five thousand times to audiences across the country, reaching several million people in all. His message was that anyone could get rich if he tried hard enough, if people looked closely enough, were "acres of diamonds." A sampling : 

     I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich . . . The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly . . . ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men. 
   . . . I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins . . . is to do wrong . . . let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings . . . 

    Conwell was a founder of Temple University. Rockefeller was a donor to colleges all over the country and helped found the University of Chicago. Huntington, of the Central Pacific, gave money to two Negro colleges, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute. Carnegie gave money to colleges and libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names. 
   The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings in this way, became known as philanthropists. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent ; they trained the middlemen in the American system --- the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians----those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.
   In the meantime, the spread of public school education enabled the learning of reading, writing, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate labor force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learn obedience to authority.  A journalist observer of the schools in the 1890s wrote :"The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent ; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly."
   Back in 1859, the desire of mill owners in the town of Lowell that their workers be educated was explained to the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education : 

     The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations.  

     Joel Spring, in his book Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, says : "The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental." 

   This continued into the twentieth century, when William Bagley's Classroom Management became a standard teacher training text, reprinted thirty times. Bagley said :"One who studies the educational theory aright can see in the mechanical routine of the classroom the educative forces that are slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature of law and order, fitfor the life of civilized society."
   It was in the middle and late nineteenth century that high schools developed as aids to the industrial system, that history was widely required in the curriculum to foster patriotism. Loyalty oaths, teacher certification, and the requirement of citizenship were introduced to control both the educational and the political quality of teachers. Also, in the latter part ofthe century, school officials --- not teachers --- were given control over textbooks. Laws passed by the states barred certain kinds of textbooks. Idaho and Montana, for instance, forbade textbooks propagating "political" doctrines, and the Dakota territory ruled that school libraries could not have "partisan political pamphlets or books."
   Against this gigantic organization of knowledge and education for orthodoxy and obedience, there arose a literature of dissent and protest, which had to make its way from reader to reader against great obstacles. Henry George, a self-educated workingman from a poor Philadelphia family, who became a newspaperman and an economist, wrote a book that was published in 1879 and sold millions of copies, not only in the United States , but all over the world. His book Progress and Poverty argued that the basis of wealth was land, that this was becoming monopolized, and that a single tax on land, abolishing all others, would bring enough revenue to solve the problems of poverty and equalize wealth in the nation. Readers may not have been persuaded of his solutions, but they could see in their own lives the accuracy of his observations : 


 It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised ; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share . . . This association of poverty with the progress is the great enigma of our times. . . There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment ; an increased bitterness among the working classes ; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution . . . The civilized world is trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge downward which will carry us back toward barbarism . . . 

   A different kind of challenge to the economic and social system was given by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts, who wrote, in simple, intriguing language, a novel called Looking Backward, in which the author falls asleep and wakes up in the year 2000, to find a socialist society in which people work and live cooperatively. Looking Backward, which described socialism vividly, lovingly, sold a million copies in a few years , and over a hundred groups were organized around the country to make the dream come true. 
   It seemed that despite the strenuous efforts of government, business, the church, the schools, to control their thinking, millions of Americans were ready to consider harsh criticism of the existing system, to contemplate other possible ways of living. They were helped in this by the great movements of workers and farmers that swept the country in the 1880s and 1890s. These movements went beyond the scattered strikes and tenants' struggles of the period of 1830--1877. They were nationwide movements,  more threatening than before to the ruling elite, more dangerously suggestive. It was a time when revolutionary organizations existed in major American cities, and revolutionary talk was in the air. 
   In the 1880sand 1890s, immigrants wrer pouring in from Europe at a faster rate than before. They all went through the harrowing ocean voyage of the poor. Now there were not so many Irish and German immigrants as Italians, Russians, Jews, Greeks ----people from Southern and Eastern Europe, even more alien to native-born Anglo-Saxons than the earlier newcomers. 

              TO BE CONTINUED. STAY TUNED. 

   

A Bit of Honest History Of America --- Episode 3

    Classical Legal Thought in 19th & Early 20th Centuries 

   The Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS] , despite its look of somber, black-robed fairness, was doing its bit for the ruling elite. How could it be independent, with its members chosen by the President and ratified by the Senate ? How could it e neutral between rich and poor when its members were often former wealthy lawyers, and almost always came from the upper class ? Early in the nineteenth century the Court laid the legal basis for a nationally regulated economy by establishing federal control over interstate commerce, and the legal basis for corporate capitalism by making the contract sacred.
   In 1895 the Court interpreted the Sherman Act so as to make it harmless. It said a monopoly of sugar refining was a monopoly in manufacturing, not commerce, and so could not be regulated by Congress though the Sherman Act. [ U.S. v. E. C. Knight Co] . The Court also said the Sherman Act could be used against interstate strikes [the railway strike of 1894] because they were in restrain of trade. It also declared unconstitutional a small attempt by Congress to tax high incomes at a higher rate. [Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company]. In later years it would refuse to break up the Standard Oil and American Tobacco monopolies, saying the Sherman Act barred only "unreasonable" combinations in restraint of trade. 
   A New York banker toasted the SCOTUS in 1895 : "I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States ---guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, enemy of spoliation, sheet anchor of the Republic." 
   Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the SCOTUS began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations. However, in 1877, a SCOTUS decision [ Munn v. Illinois] approved state laws regulating the prices charged to farmers for the use of grain elevators. The grain elevator company argued it was a person being deprived of property, thus violating the Fourteenth Amendment's declaration "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." SCOTUS disagreed, saying that grain elevators were not simply private property but were invested with a "public interest" and so could be regulated. 
   One year after that decision, the American Bar Association, organized by lawyers accustomed to serving the wealthy, began a national campaign of education to reverse the Court decision. Its presidents said, at different times : "If trusts are a defensive weapon of property interests against the communistic trend, they are desirable." And : "Monopoly is often a necessity and an advantage." 
   
   By 1886, they succeeded. State legislatures, under the pressure of aroused farmers, had passed laws to regulate the rates charged farmers by the railroads. SCOTUS that year [ Wabash v. Illinois] said states could not do this, that this was an intrusion on federal power. That year alone, SCOTUS did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations. 
    By this time, SCOTUS had accepted the argument that corporations were "persons" and their money was property protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Supposedly , the Amendment had been passed to protect Negro rights, but of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before SCOTUS between 1890 and 1910, NINETEEN dealt with the Negro, 288 dealt with corporations. 
   The justices of the SCOTUS were not simply interpreters of the Constitution. They were men of certain backgrounds, of certain interests. One of them [ Justice Samuel Miller] had said in 1875 :"It is vain to contend with Judges who have been at the bar the advocates for forty years of railroad companies, and all forms of associated capital . . ." In 1893, SCOTUS Justice David J. Brewer, addressing the New York State Bar Association, said : 

     It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few . . . The great majority of men are unwilling to endure that long self-denial and saving which makes accumulations possible . . . and hence it always has been, and until human nature is remodeled always will be true, that the wealth of a nation is in the hands of a few, while the many subsist upon the proceeds of their daily toil. 

   This was not just a whim of the 1880s and 1890s---it went back to the Founding Brothers, who had learned their law in the era of Blackstone's Commentaries, which said : "So great is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it ; no, not even for the common good of the whole community." 

        MUCH MORE TO COME. 

A Bit of Honest History of America--- Episode 3

         THE CAPTAINS OF THE INDUSTRIAL EMPIRES 

   Andrew Carnegie was a telegraph clerk at seventeen, then secretary to the head of Pennsylvania Railroad, then broker in Wall Street selling railroad bonds for huge commissions, and was soon a millionaire.  He went toLondon in 1872, saw the Bessemer method of producing steel, and returned to the United States to build a million-dollar steel plant.Foreign competition was kept out by a high tariff conveniently set by Congress, and by1880 Carnegie was producing 10,000 tons of steel a month, making $1.5 million a year in profit. By 1900 he was making $40 million a year, and that year, at a dinner party, he agreed to sell his steel company to J.P. Morgan. He scribbled the price on a note : $492,000,000. 
   Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie's corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 [ about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companies] and took a fee of 150 million for arranging the consolidation.  How could dividends be paid to all those stockholders and bondholders ? By making sure Congress passe tariffs keeping out foreign steel ; by closing off competition and maintaining the price at $28 a ton ; AND BY WORKING 200,000 MEN TWELVE HOURS A DAY FOR WAGES THAT BARELY KEPT THEIR FAMILIES ALIVE. 
   And so it went, in industry after industry---shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the "welfare state." By the turn of the century, American Telephone and Telegraph had a monopoly of the nation's telephone system, International Harvester made 85 percent of all farm machinery, and in every other industry resources became concentrated, controlled. The banks had interests in so many of these monopolies as to create an interlocking network of powerful corporation directors, each of whom sat on the boards of many other corporations. According to a Senate report of the early twentieth century, Morgan at his peak sat on the board of forty-eight corporations, Rockefeller, thirty-seven corporations. 
  Meanwhile, the government of the United States was behaving almost exactly as Karl Marx described a capitalist state : pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich. Not that the rich agreed among themselves ; they had disputes over policies.  But the purpose of the state was to settle upper-class disputes peacefully, control lower-class rebellion, and adopt policies that would further the long-range stability of the system. The arrangement between Democrats and Republicans to elect Rutherford Hayes in 1877 set the tone. Whether Democrats or Republicans won, NATIONAL POLICY WOULD NOT CHANGE IN ANY IMPORTANT WAY. 

   When Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, ran for President in 1884, the general impression in the country was that he opposed the power of monopolies and corporations, and that the Republican party, whose candidate was James Blaine, stood for the wealthy. But when Cleveland defeated Blaine, Jay Gould wired him :"I feel . . . that the vast business interests of the country will be entirely safe in your hands." AND HE WAS RIGHT. 
   One of Cleveland's chief advisers was William Whitney, a millionaire and corporation lawyer, who married into the Standard Oil fortune and was appointed Secretary of the Navy by Cleveland. He immediately set about to create a "steel navy," buying the steel at artificially high prices from Carnegie's plants. Cleveland himself assured industrialists that his election should not frighten them. "No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President . . . a transfer of executive control from one party to another does not mean any serious disturbance of existing conditions." 
   The presidential election itself had avoided real issues ;  there was no clear understanding of which interests would gain and which would lose if certain policies were adopted. It took the usual form of election campaigns, concealing the basic similarity of the parties by dwelling on personalities, gossip, trivialities. Henry Adams, an astute literary commentator of that era, wrote to a friend about the election : 

   We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved . . . But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress. 

   In 1887, with a huge surplus in the treasury, Cleveland vetoed a bill appropriating $100,000 to give relief to Texas farmers to help them buy seed grain during a drought. He said : "Federal aid in such cases . . . encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character." But that same year, Cleveland used his gold surplus to pay off wealthy bondholders at $28 above the $100 value of each bond --- a gift of $45 million. 
   The chief reform of the Cleveland administration gives away the secret of reform legislation in America. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was supposed to regulate the railroads on behalf of the consumers. But Richard Olney, a lawyer for the Boston and Maine and other railroads, and soon to be Cleveland's attorney general, told railroad officials who complained about the Interstate Commerce Commission that it would not be wise to abolish the Commission "from a railroad point of view." He explained : 

   The Commission . . . is or can be made, of great use tothe railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal . . . The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it. 

   Cleveland himself, in his 1887 State of the Union message, had made a similar point, adding a warning : "Opportunity for safe, careful, and deliberate reform is now offered ; and none of us should be unmindful of a time when an abused and irritated people . . . may insist upon a radical and sweeping rectification of their wrongs."
   Republican Benjamin Harrison, who succeeded Cleveland as President from 1889 to 1893, was described by Matthew Josephson, in his colorful study of the post--Civil War years, The Politicos : "Benjamin Harrison had the exclusive distinction of having served the railway corporations in the dual capacity of lawyer and soldier. He prosecuted the strikers[of1877] in the federal courts. . . and he also organized and commanded a company of soldiers during the strike. . ." 
  Harrison's term also saw a gesture toward reform. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890, called itself "An Act to protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraints" and made it illegal to form a " combination or conspiracy" to restrain trade in interstate or foreign commerce. Senator John Sherman, author of the Act, explained the need to conciliate the critics of monopoly : "They had monopolies . . . of old, but never before such giants as in our day. You must heed their appeal or be ready for the socialist, the communist, the nihilist. Society is now disturbed by forces never felt before . . ." 
   When Cleveland was elected President again in 1892, Andrew Carnegie, in Europe, received a letter from the manager of his steel plants, Henry Clay Frick : "I am very sorry for President Harrison, but I cannot see that our interests are going to be affected one way or the other by the change in administration." Cleveland, facing the agitation in the country caused by the panic and depression of 1893, used troops to break up "Coxey's Army," a demonstration of unemployed men who had come to Washington, and again to break up the national strike on the railroads the following year. 

                         MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED. 
  

   

A BIT of HONEST HISTORY OF AMERICA --- Episode 2

     OUR RAILROADS WERE BUILT MOSTLY ON FRAUD

   The wild fraud on the railroads led to more control of railroad finances by bankers, who wanted more stability ---- profit by law rather than by theft. By the 1890s, most of the country's railway mileage was concentrated in six huge systems. Four of these were completely or partially controlled by the House of Morgan, and two others by the bankers Kuhn, Loeb, and Company. 
   J.P.Morgan had started before the war, as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract. 
   Morgan has escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon's father had written to him that "a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable." 
   It was the firm of Drexel, Morgan and Company that was given a U.S. government contract to float a bond issue of $260 million. The government could have sold the bonds directly ; it chose to pay the bankers $5 million in commission. 
   On January 2, 1889, as Gustavus Myers reports : 

     . . . a circular marked "Private and Confidential" was issued by the three banking houses of Drexel, Morgan & Company, Brown Brothers & Company, and Kidder, Peabody & Company. The most painstaking care was exercised that this document should not find its way into the press or otherwise become public . . . Why this fear ? Because the circular was an invitation . . . to the great railroad magnates to assemble at Morgan's house, No. 219 Madison Avenue, there to form, in the phrase of the day, an iron-clad combination . . . a compact which would efface competition among certain railroads, and unite those interests in an agreement by which the people of the United States would be bled even more effectively than before. 

   There was a human cost to this exciting story of financial ingenuity. That year, 1889, records of the Interstate Commerce Commission showed that 22,000 railroad workers were killed or injured. 
   In 1895 the gold reserve of the United States was depleted, while twenty-six New York City banks had $129 million in gold in their vaults. A syndicate of bankers headed by J. P. Morgan & Company,  August Belmont & Company, the National City Bank, and others offered to give the government gold in exchange for bonds. President Grover Cleveland agreed. The bankers immediately resold the bonds at higher prices, making $18 million profit. 
   A journalist wrote : "If a man wants to buy beef, he must go to the butcher . . . If Mr. Cleveland wants much gold, he must go to the big banker." 
   While making his fortune, Morgan brought rationality and organization to the national economy. He kept the system stable. He said : "We do not want financial convulsions and have one thing one day and another thing another day." He linked railroads to one another, all of them to banks, banks to insurance companies. By 1900, he controlled 100,000 miles of railroad, half the country's mileage. 
   Three insurance companies dominated by the Morgan group had a billion dollars in assets.  They had $50 million a year to invest --- money given by ordinary people for their insurance policies.  Louis Brandeis, describing in his book Other People's Money [ before he became a Supreme Court justice] , wrote : "They control the people through the people's own money." 
   John D. Rockefeller started as a bookkeeper in Cleveland, became a merchant, accumulated money, and decided that, in the new industry of oil, who controlled the oil refineries controlled the industry. He bought his first oil refinery in1862, and by 1870 set up Standard Oil Company of Ohio, made secret agreements with railroads to ship his oil with them if they gave him rebates --- discounts --- on their prices, and thus drove competitors out of business. 
  One independent refiner said : "If we did not sell out . . . we would be crushed out. . . There was only one buyer on the market and we had to sell at their terms." Memos like this one passed passed among Standard Oil officials : "Wilkerson & Co. received car of oil Monday 13th . . . Please turn another screw." A rival refinery in Buffalo was rocked by a small explosion arranged by Standard Oil officials with the refinery's chief mechanic. 
   The Standard Oil Company, by 1899, was a holding company which controlled the stock of many other companies. The capital was $110 million, the profit was $45 million a year, and John D. Rockefeller's fortune was estimated at $200 million. Before long he wouldmove into iron, copper, coal, shipping, and banking [ Chase Manhattan Bank ] . Profits would be $81 million a year, and the Rockefeller fortune would total two billion dollars. 

   THIS SAD SAGA WILL CONTINUE. STAY TUNED. 

    
   

A bit of honest history of America --- Episode 1

ROBBER BARONS AND HORATIO ALGER BULLSHIT 

  In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the black would be put back ; the strikes of the white workers would not be tolerated ; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression --- a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth. 
   Between the Civil War and 1900, steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron [ before the Bessemer process, iron was hardened into steel at the rate of 3 to 5 tons a day ; now the same amount can be processed in 15 minutes] . Machines could now drive steel tools. Oil could lubricate machines and light homes, streets, factories. People and goods could move by railroad, propelled by steam along steel rails ; by 1900 there were 193,000 miles of railroad. The telephone, the typewriter, and the adding machine speeded up the work of business. 
  Machines changed farming. Before the Civil War it took 61 hours of labor to produce an acre of wheat. By 1900, it took 3 hours, 19 minutes. Manufactured ice enabled the transport of food over long distances, and the industry of meatpacking was born. 
   Steam drove textile mill spindles ; it drove sewing machines. It came from coal.  Pneumatic drills now drilled deeper into the earth for coal. In 1860, 14 million tons of coal were mined ; by 1884 it was 100 million tons. More coal meant more steel, because coal furnaces converted iron into steel ; by 1880 a million tons of steel were being produced ; by 1910, 25 million tons. By now electricity was beginning to replace steam. Electrical wire needed copper, of which 30,000 tons were produced in 1880 ; 500,000 tons by 1910. 
   To accomplish all this required ingenious inventors of new processes and new machines, clever organizers and administrators of the new corporations, a country rich with land and minerals, and a huge supply of human beings to do the back-breaking, unhealthful, and dangerous work.  Immigrants would come from Europe and China, to make the new labor force. Farmers unable to buy the new machinery or pay the new railroad rates would move to the cities. Between 1860 and 1914, New York grew from 850,000 to 4 million, Chicago from 110,000 to 2 million, Philadelphia from 650,000 to 1.5 million. 
   In some cases the inventor himself became the organizer of businesses --- like Thomas Edison, inventor of electrical devices. In other cases, the businessman compiled other people's inventions, like Gustave Swift, a Chicago butcher who put together the ice-cooled railway car with the ice-cooled warehouse to make the first national meatpacking company in 1885. James Duke used a new cigarette-rolling machine that could roll, paste, and cut tubes of tobacco into 100,000 cigarettes a day ; in 1890 he combined the four biggest cigarette producers to form the American Tobacco Company.  
   WHILE SOME MILLIONAIRES STARTED IN POVERTY, MOST DID NOT.  A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad, and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle-or upper-class families. THE HORATIO ALGER STORIES OF "RAGS TO RICHES" WERE TRUE FOR A VERY FEW MEN, BUT MOSTLY A MYTH, AND A USEFUL MYTH FOR CONTROL. 
  Most of the fortune building was done legally, with the collaboration of the government and the courts. Sometimes the collaboration had to be paid for. Thomas Edison promised New Jersey politicians $1,000 each in return for favorable legislation. Daniel Drew and Jay Gould spent $1 million to bribe the New York legislature to legalize their issue of $8 million in "watered stock" [ stock not representing real value] on the Erie Railroad.
   The first transcontinental railroad was built with blood, sweat, politics and thievery, out of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. The Central Pacific started on the West Coast going east ; it spent $200,000 in Washington on bribes to get 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in bonds, and paid $79 million, an overpayment of $36 million, to a construction company which really was its own. The construction was done by three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese, over a period of four years, working for one or two dollars a day. 
   The Union Pacific started in Nebraska going west. It had been given 12 million acres of free land and $27 million in government bonds. It created the Credit Mobilier company and gave them $94 million for construction when the actual cost was $44 million. Shares were sold cheaply to Congressmen to prevent investigation. This was at teh suggestion of Massachusetts Congressman Oakes Ames, a shovel manufacturer and director of Credit Mobilier, who said : "There is no difficulty in getting men to look after their own property." The Union Pacific used twenty thousand workers ---war veterans, and Irish immigrants, who laid five miles of track a day and died by the hundreds in the heat, the cold, and the battles with the Indians opposing the invasion of their territory. 
   Both railroads used longer, twisting routes to get subsidies from towns they went through. In 1869, amid music and speeches, the two crooked lines met in Utah. 

              MUCH MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED. 

It's the system, sweetie pies.---Episode 2

How In The Hell Did Aristocracies Come Into Existence     ?

   The archaeological guess is that the change in economic forms accounts for the rise of a narrow elite, with control over ALL THE RESOURCES OF THE SOCIETY ( intellectual as well as material, religious as well as political ). Whether this change was in the nature of new forms of production through the use of metal or new forms of agriculture through the use of irrigation resources, the people WHO INITIALLY GOT CONTROL of these revolutionary forms IMMEDIATELY MONOPOLIZED the key economic resource of society.  They could do anything they wanted thereafter, provided that they remained a relatively homogeneous and peaceful group. By and large they remained homogeneous and at peace among themselves. THEY decided how to divide up the power, how to divide up the wealth, who should be king, and which family should become the royal dynasty.  { Much like the oligarchic system of early 21st-century USA. } The instability in these societies usually came NOT from within , but from external invasions by new people --- in the case of Mesopotamia, from the north, and in the case of Egypt, from the sea or the desert --- who at various times pushed into these wealthy river valleys and gained control.  Their control usually collapsed or was overthrown a few generations later by the old native aristocracy or by later invaders. But all the invaders perpetuated the existing social structure, taking over the prerogatives of the old aristocracy.

   The social structure of the ancient near Eastern societies, once established,was perpetuated in the Hellenistic empires that replaced the old Near Eastern dynasties after the conquest of the Near East by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E. The Hellenistic empires were conquered, in turn, by the Romans in the second and first centuries B.C.E.  By and large, the Romans also perpetuated the Mediterranean social structure they had found. 

                   HERE'S THE POINT, DEAR HEARTS 

     The exploitation of serfs by their lords then, was not an invention of the Middles Ages [ 300-1500 A.C.E.] Medieval people inherited the rule of lords over peasants. They knew no other way of life or alternative organization of rural society. It was natural to them that a few lords should own all the land while the mass of peasants TOILED THEIR LIVES AWAY ---- that was the very nature of society. Medieval people did not give this social structure as second thought ; just as 21st-century westerners, for the most part, take middle-class society for granted, so medieval Europeans took for granted the aristocratic--peasant organization of society. 

   The social system of lord and peasant was not questioned, but medieval men and women had to justify it and to organize it, and they did so in a number of ways. Variations in the social patterns of the ancient Near East and medieval Europe are NOT fundamental changes. They are simply variations of the methods and ideology of organization. The ancient social structure was elaborated or varied in different places at different periods, but mainly it was simply perpetuated for thousands of years. 
   To understand medieval people, one must understand how uneducated and downright stupid the masses were, and how much the minority aristocrats liked it that way. Until the twelfth century, at least, medieval people were not even aware that the oppressed peasants could possibly overthrow the aristocrats. Their way of life had always been there ; to reject it was to disappear into primitivism, into the void of barbarism. Under thses circumstances, it is remarkable that anything ever changed in the middle Ages --- for their heritage was extraordinary. Medieval social theory, at least before the twelfth century, was entirely A JUSTIFICATION OF THE EXISTING SYSTEM, and even in this respect, medieval people inherited a tradition from early mediterranean civilization. { Got that, bucko ?? } 


   SYSTEM JUSTIFICATION WAS A PRODUCT OF RELIGION

   In the ancient world, in Egypt and Mesopotmia, the social structure was justified on religious grounds. It was God's plan for the world ---God's will --- and acceptance of the social forms was a religious duty. [ And, bear in mind, this was before Madison Avenue advertising, TV reality shows, Rush Limbaugh on a.m. radio, Fox News, movies, social media, and even World Wrestling.] Medieval men inherited that attitude and built upon it. They had more difficulty than the Egyptians, in doing so however, because certain strains within Christianity were incompatible with the ancient system. THERE IS AN EGALITARIAN STRAIN IN THE BIBLE [ particularly in the Hebrew prophets and in the New Testament] , for example, that runs counter to the ancient traditions of exploitation and domination. { Some called this "A liberal in the wood pile !" } Medieval people had to relate these two traditions, and they came out heavily (before the late middle ages, almost exclusively) on the side of the ancient, class-dominated, authoritarian society. 
   

It's the system, sweetie pies. ----Episode 1

      And in the Beginning, There Were Aristocrats and Peasants


   Did we humans start living in communities, growing and capturing food, forming governments, making laws, following various religions, killing one another in wars, and blaming and hating those in the other group only a few hundred years ago ? Nope, it started more like 6, 215 years ago [ Okay, that's a tad specific, but it was somewhere around then] in the Mesopotamian Tigris-Euphrates valley and probably a little later in the Egyptian Nile valley. That is the point where civilization began, if we define civilization primarily as structured society, organized government, and specialized economy over a large area. Humans were no longer all gatherers or all hunters.  They became kings, priests, soldiers, farmers, or craftspeople. 

   The earliest civilized communities of the ancient Near East were dominated by a small, self-sustaining aristocracy{No, camel breath, NOT democracy.} as early as 3000 B.C.E. The nobility, or elite, of these Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies controlled nearly all the economic resources of these societies. [ Hmm, sounds familiar.] One of the noble families appeared from somewhere and became the ruling dynasty. From these families and from the ranks of the bureaucrats who served the monarchy were drawn the priests who controlled the temples. Thus the ideology of the ruling religious group sanctioned the prevailing government and social structure. { Hey, pay attention : certain powerful forces determined THE SYSTEM, even way back 6,000 years ago, and THE SYSTEM has been creating the structure of government, law, religion, and society ever since. } 

    In these early societies there were, in essence, only two social groups or classes. One class was the elite : the aristocratic group that that controlled both rural and urban wealth and dominated the religious institutions, the government[ Hey, that's just like the 21st century in the US ], and the bureaucracy. The other class was a mass peasantry, who may or may not have been slaves, , but in any case existed solely to serve the ruling elite class. [ Just a tad more inequality of income and wealth, and we 'mericans will have returned to Square One.] 

   It is said in the Hebrew Bible that the Hebrews were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt.The point here is that almost everybody was a slave (legally or empirically) unto Pharaoh and unto a small elite. It could be said, indeed, that these were one-class societies. Only the aristocracy had any real consciousness of its identity, its rights, or its destiny. The aristocracy held a monopoly of power, learning, and culture, and they alone had a sense of their special and privileged place in the world. [ Well, things are that way now, except business entities called corporations have replaced long-forgotten Pharaoh. ] 

   In the social history of premodern western civilization --- whether the modern era is designated as beginning in 1500 or in the late eighteenth century---a series of elitists have perpetuated control over the resources of society. It is a history in which successive challenges were made on moral and ideological grounds to the aristocratic control of society and its resources. Obviously, there is a substantial pattern of change and development in premodern social history, and these changes are highly significant and deserve close examination. Nevertheless, the factor of continuity --- of the perpetuation down to the modern industrial world of a one-class social structure, or, stated differently, of the domination of a minority aristocracy --- is one of the fundamental facts and continuing conditions of the history of western civilization. 

          How in the Hell Did An Aristocracy Come into Existence 
                                     in the First Place ? 



    This is a toughie. We don't have records to examine and find the answer. Literacy did not begin in Mesopotamia and Egypt until the late part of the fourth millennium B.C.E. , and in the first written records the aristocrats had already emerged and the forms of government and social control had already been established. The frigging SYSTEM was in place before there was a single written record generated.  Archaeological evidence, which is piss poor evidence for determining how aristocracies came into existence, is all tat historians ever found to work with. Archaeologists work with material objects, and the process of prehistorical change has therefore been established according to the materialistic bias. Archaeologists are bound toattribute social changes to alterations in the means of production because their evidence only discloses such alterations.  Artifacts alone, without written records, cannot reveal great changes in human values or ideological unheavals that may have dtermined social change.   Some dumbass historians have speculated a great intellectual  revolution, some tremendous shift in human consciousness, behind the emergence of the first ancient civilizations, but in the absence of written records, this explanation can be no more than a wild guess. 

   

Those who write and those who read---Episode 3

                                              

   

Those who write and those who read---Episode 2

                                             REREADING 

   Curiously enough, one cannot read a book : one can only reread it.  A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. Here's why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work on upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is --- a work of fiction or a work of science(the boundary line between the two is not as clear as it is generally believed) --- a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book. 
   Now, this being so, we should ponder the question how does the mind work when the sullen reader is confronted by the sunny book. First, the sullen mood melts away, and for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game. The effort to begin a book, especially if it is praised by people whom the young reader secretly deems to be too old-fashioned or too serious, this effort is often difficult to make ; but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant. Since the master artist used her/his imagination in creating the book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use her/his imagination too.
   There are at least two varieties of imagination in the reader's case. So it's important to decide which of the two to use in reading a book. First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. (There are various subvarieties here, in this first section of emotional reading.) A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which she/he nostalgically recalls as part of her/his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, she/he identifies herself/himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination scholars like Robert Penn Warren wanted readers to use.

   So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader, according to scholars such as RPW ? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, according to many literary scholars, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader's mind and the author's mind. RPW believed we ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in the aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy--- passionately enjoy with tears and shivers --- the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what is important is that the reader must know when and where to curb her/his imagination and this she/he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at her/his disposal. We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author's people. The color of Fanny Price's eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important. 

Those who write and those who read ---Episode 1

          BEING A SERIOUS READER OF DECENT WRITING

                        Read, Digest, and Think DETAILS 

 In reading, one should notice and massage details. There's nothing wrong with admiring the generalization, once the reader has already collected the details and carefully arranged them. If one begins by looking at the finished collection, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book. Nothing is more boring or unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madam Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. Or, what about reading a novel by Franzen, Foer, DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, or any of the so-called post-post-modern writers, and by page 50, concluding that the author's message is some simple, general theme such as "man's cruelty to man," or "man's cruelty to the environment," or conclude that the book is just a ridiculous collection of abstruse crap, etc., etc. ?  We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.

Another question : Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel ? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from commercial best-sellers that are touted by book clubs and the New York Times Best Seller List under the heading of historical novels ? But what about the masterpieces ? Can we rely on Jane Austen's picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman's parlor ? And Great Expectations, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred, thirty-five years ago ? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels that literate people consider masterpieces.  The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales.  

Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius, not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace : these do not bother about any reinventing of the world ; they merely try to squeeze the best they can of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction. The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. 

ORGANIZE YOUR MIND --- THINK ABOUT NUMBERS -- Episode 2

                           THOSE INTERESTING PRIMES --- continued

   Prime numbers are like atoms. They are the building blocks of all integers. Every integer is either itself a prime or the product of primes. For example, 11 is a prime ; 12 is the product of the primes 2, 2, 3 ; 13 is a prime ; 14 is the product of the primes 2 and 7; 15 is the product of the primes 3 and 5 ; and so on. Some 2,500 years ago, Euclid gave a proof that "the supply of primes is inexhaustible. [ This has been discussed before, but bears repeating.]  
   Assume, said Euclid, that there is a finite number of primes. Then, one of them, call it P, will be the largest. Now consider the number Q, larger than P, that is equal to the product of the consecutive whole numbers from 2 to P plus the number 1. In other words, Q = (2 x 3 x 4 . . . x P) + 1. From the form of the number Q, it is obvious that no integer from 2 to P divides evenly into it ; each each division would leave a remainder of 1. If Q is not prime, it must be evenly divisible by some prime larger than P. On the other hand, if Q is prime, Q itself is a prime larger than P. Either possibility implies the existence of a prime number larger than the assumed largest prime P. This means, of course, that the concept of "the largest prime" is a fiction. But if there's no such beast, the number of primes must be infinite. 
   As of this writing, the largest known prime is a 909, 526-digit number formed by raising 2 to the 3, 021,377th power and subtracting 1. The prime was found on January 27, 1998, by the GIMPS project( Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search), in which 4,000 "primees" (prime number groupies) communicated over the Internet and pooled their computers for the hunt. Each of the 4,000 computers was assigned an interval of numbers to check. Roland Clarkson, a 19-year-old sophomore at California State University Dominguez Hills, was the lucky primee whose 200 Mhz Pentium-based home PC, after 46 days of running part time, examining the numbers in his assigned interval, proved the primality of 2 raised to the 3, 021, 377th power -- 1. 
   The hunt for large primes has come a long way since the seventeenth century, when Marin Mersenne, a Parisian monk, took time out from his monastic duties to search for primes. A number like 2 raised to the 3, 021th power ---1 that is the form 2 to the nth --1 is said to be a Mersenne number.  For a Mersenne number to be prime, n itself must be prime. Thus, since 2 raised to the 3, 021, 377th power --1 is prime, 3, 027, 377 must also be prime. But n being prime does not guarantee that the corresponding Mersenne number is prime. When n takes on the first four prime numbers, Mersenne primes are indeed generated : 

     For n = 2, 2 squared - 1 = 3
     For n =3, 2 raised to the third power -1 = 7 
     For n = 5, 2 raised to the 5th power -1 = 31
     For n = 7, 2 raised to the 7th power - 1 = 127 

   But when n is the fifth prime number, 11, the corresponding Mersenne number proves to be composite (2 raised to the 11th power -1 is 2,047, whose prime factors are 23 and 89) . In 1644, Mersenne himself claimed that when n took on the values of the sixth, seventh, and eighth prime numbers, namely, 13, 17, and 19, the corresponding Mersenne numbers, 2 raised to the 13th power - 1 (or 8,191), 2 raised to the 17th power - 1 (or 131, 071 ) and 2 raised to the 19th power - 1 (or 524,287) were primes. He was right. 

    The monk also made the bold claim that 2 raised to the 67th power -1 was prime.  The claim was not disputed for more than 250 years. Then, in 1903, Frank Nelson Cole of Columbia University delivered a talk with the unassuming title "On the Factorization of Large Numbers" at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society. Cole, who was always a man of very few words, walked to the board and, saying nothing, proceeded to chalk up the arithmetic for raising 2 to the sixty-seventh power. Then he carefully subtracted 1 [ getting the 21-digit monstrosity 147, 573, 952, 589, 676, 412, 927]. Without a word he moved over to a clear space on the board and multiplied out, by longhand : 

          193,707, 721 x 761, 838, 257, 287 

   The two calculations agreed. Mersenne's conjecture --if such it was --- vanished into the limbo of mathematical mythology. For the first time on record, an audience of the American Mathematical Society vigorously applauded the author of a paper delivered before it. Cole took his seat without having uttered a word. Nobody asked him a question. 
   

ORGANIZE YOUR MIND --- THINK ABOUT NUMBERS ---- Episode 1

                                 WHY THINK ABOUT NUMBERS ?

     If one plays around with numbers, one doesn't have to concern herself with the concrete world and all its contradictions. Toying with number proofs involves perfect abstract generality. Here's an example. It concerns the primes, which---as you probably remember from high school --- are those integers that can't be divided into smaller integers without remainder. One proposition about primes states that there is no largest prime number. { What this means of course is that the number of prime numbers is infinite. But at the time this proposition was first advanced, mathematicians danced around using the term "infinite."} Here is the proof. Assume that there is in fact a largest prime number. Call this number Pn. This means that the sequence of primes (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, . . . Pn) is exhaustive and finite : ( 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, . . . , Pn) is all the primes there are. Now think about the number R, which we're defining as the number you get when you multiply all the primes up to Pn together and then add 1. R is obviously bigger than Pn. But is R prime ? If it is, we have an immediate contradiction, because we already assumed that Pn was the largest possible prime. But if R isn't prime, what can it be divided by? It obviously can't be divided by any of the primes in the sequence (2, 3, 5, . . ., Pn) , because by dividing R by any of these will leave the remainder 1. But this sequence is all the primes there are, and the primes are ultimately the only numbers that a non-prime can be divided by. So if R isn't prime, and if none of the primes (2, 3, 5, . . . , Pn) can divide it, there must be some other prime that divides R. But this contradicts the assumption that (2, 3, 5, 7, . . . , Pn) is exhaustive of all the prime numbers. Either way, we have a clear contradiction.  By removing false assumptions, we conclude that there is no largest prime. This, so far as our minds can currently stretch, is a fact. 

         THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF PRIME NUMBERS

   As we've already seen, the prime numbers are integers like 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and 17, which are evenly divisible only by themselves and the number 1. We happen to have ten fingers, and our number system is conveniently based on ten digits. But the same primes, with all the same properties, exist in any number system. If we had twenty-six fingers and constructed our number system accordingly, there would still be primes. It's easy to conceive of a culture that doesn't use base 10. We have plenty of examples. Computers use a binary system, and the Babylonians had a base-60 system, vestiges of which are evident in the way we measure time(sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour) . Cumbersome as this sexagesimal system was, it, too, contains the same primes. So does the octary system that Reverend Hugh Jones, a mathematician at the College of William and Mary, championed in the eighteenth century as more natural for women than base-10 because of women's experience in the kitchen working with multiples of 8 (32 ounces in a quart, 16 ounces in a pound ). [ Come on, girls, let's hear it for Rev. Jones !!!! ] 
   G.H. Hardy, a number theorist, believed numbers constituted the true fabric of the universe. In an address to a group of physicists in 1922, he took the provocative position that it is the mathematician who is in "much more direct contact with reality. This may seem a paradox, since it is the physicist who deals with the subject-matter usually described as 'real'."  But "a chair or a star is not in the least like what it seems to be ; the more we think of it, the fuzzier its outlines become in the haze of sensation which surrounds it ; but "2" or "317" has nothing to do with sensation, and its properties stand out the more clearly we scrutinize it . . . 317 is a prime,not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way." 

BUILDING A LOGICAL MIND --- Episode 6

                CAN WE LIVE IN A COMMONSENSE WORLD
                YET "KNOW" MANY ABSTRACT TRUTHS ? 

      Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is. "Us"meaning laymen. It's like a million Copernican Revolutions all happening at the same time. As in for instance we "know," as high-school graduates and readers of Newsweek, that time is relative, that quantum particles can be both there and not, that space is curved, that colors do not inhere in objects themselves, that astronomic singularities have infinite density, that or love for our children is evolutionarily programmed, that there is a blind spot in the center of our vision that our brains automatically fill in. We "know" that our thoughts and feelings are really just chemical transfers in 2.8 pounds of electrified pudding. We "know" we are mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen, and hydrogen is flammable, and yet we are not flammable. We "know" a near-infinity of truths that contradict our immediate commonsense experience of the world. And yet we have to live and function in the world. So we abstract, compartmentalize : there's stuff we know and stuff we "KNOW" : I "know" my love for my child is a function of natural selection,but I know I love him, and I feel and act on what I know. Viewed objectively, the whole thing is extremely schizoid ; yet the fact of the matter is that as subjective laymen we don't feel the conflict. Because of course our lives are 99.9% concretely operational, and we operate concretely on what we know, not on what we "KNOW." 
   Understand that we talking about laymen like you and me, not about giants of philosophy and math, many of whom had well-documented trouble navigating the real world----Einstein leaving home in his pajamas,  Kurt Godel (genius logician and mathematician) unable to feed himself, and so on. To appreciate what the inner lives of great scientists / mathematicians / metaphysicians are like, we need only sit in a quiet spot and try to form a truly rigorous and coherent idea --- as opposed to a fuzzy or Newsweekish idea --- of what we really mean by "omnipotent," "three," or "finite but unbounded." I.E., to try to do some disciplined or directed ABSTRACT thinking. There's a very definite but inarticulable strain on the seams of the mind involved in this kind of thinking. One of the quickest routes to to this feeling is to try to think hard about dimension. There is something we "KNOW," which is that spatial dimensions beyond the Big 3 exist. Some can even construct a tesseract or hypercube out of cardboard. A weird sort of cube-within-a-cube, a tesseract is a 3-D projection of a 4-D object. The trick is imagining the tesseract's relevant lines and planes at 90 degrees to each other, because the 4th spatial dimension is one that somehow exists at perfect right angles to the length, width, and depth of our regular visual field. We"KNOW" all this, but now try to rally and truly picture it concretely. You can feel. almost immediately, a strain at the very root of yourself, the first popped threads of a mind starting to give at the seams. 

BUILDING A LOGICAL MIND --- Episode 5 x

                             Oops, I Gotta Go Back To Induction 
             { Plus, I Forgot To Discuss Abstract Thinking } 

                            ABSTRACT THINKING 

   The dreads and dangers of abstract thinking are a big reason why we now like to stay constantly busy and bombarded with stimuli from TV, iPods, radio, smart phones, the social media on the internet, and the search engines on computers. We sit for hours staring at computer screens and we walk down crowded sidewalks of large cities with electronic "buds" plugged into our ears. Abstract thinking tends most often to strike during moments of quiet repose, such as, for example, in the early morning before the alarm goes off. You might lie there in the quiet of your bedroom without the slightest doubt that the floor will support you when your feet eventually touch down. But, then you start thinking that it's at least theoretically possible that some flaw in the floor's construction or its molecular integrity could make it buckle, or that even some aberrant bit of quantum flux or something could cause you to melt right through. I mean, it's not logically impossible or anything. Obviously you're too smart to be much concerned that the floor might give way when you finally do get out of bed. It's just that certain moods and systems of thinking are more abstract, not just focused on whatever needs or obligations you're going to get out of bed to attend to. This, of course, is just a silly example. The abstract question you're lying there considering is whether you are truly justified in your confidence about the floor. The initial answer, which is yes, lies in the fact that you've gotten out of bed in the mornings thousands --- actually well over tend thousand times so far, and each time the floor has supported you. It's the same way you're also justified in believing that the sun will come up, that your spouse or companion will know your name, that when you feel a certain set of sensations it means you are getting ready to sneeze, etc., etc. Because they've happened over and over before. The principle involved is really the only way we can predict any of the phenomena we just automatically count on without having to think about them.  And the vast bulk of daily life is composed of these sorts of phenomena ; and without this confidence based on past experience we'd all go insane, or at least we'd be unable to function because we'd have to stop and deliberate every last little thing. It's a fact : life as we know it would be impossible without this confidence. Still, though : Is the confidence actually justified, or just highly convenient ? This is abstract thinking, with its distinctive staircase-shaped graph, and you're now several levels up. You're no longer thinking just about the floor and your weight, or about your confidence concerning same and how necessary to basic survival this kind of confidence seems to be. You're now thinking about some more general rule, law, or principle by which this unconsidered confidence in all its myriad forms and intensities is in fact justified instead of being just being a series of tics or reflexes that propel you through the day. Another sure sign it's abstract thinking : You haven't moved yet.  It feels like tremendous energy and effort is being expended and you're still lying perfectly still. All this is just going on in your mind. It's extremely weird ; no wonder most people don't like it. It suddenly makes sense why the insane are so often represented as grabbing their head or beating it against something. If you had the right classes in school, however, you might now recall that the rule or principle you want does exist ---- its official name is the Principle of Induction.  It is the fundamental principle of modern science. Without the Principle of Induction, experiments couldn't confirm a hypothesis, and nothing in the physical universe could be  predicted with any confidence at all. There could be no natural laws or scientific truths. The Principle of Induction states that if something x has happened in certain particular circumstances n times in the past, we are justified in believing that the same circumstances will produce x  on the ( n + 1 )th occasion.  The Principle of Induction is wholly respectable and authoritative, and it seems like a well-lit exit out of the whole problem. Until, that is, it happens to strike you (as can occur only in very abstract moods or when there's an unusual amount of time before the alarm goes off) that the Principle of Induction is itself merely an abstraction from experience----and so now what exactly is it that justifies our confidence in the Principle of Induction ? This latest thought may or may not be accompanied by a concrete memory of several weeks spent on a relative's farm during childhood. There were four chickens in a wire coop off the garage, the brightest of whom was called Mr. Chicken. Every morning, the farm's hired man's appearance in the coop area with a certain burlap sack caused Mr. Chicken to get excited and start doing warmup-pecks at  the ground, because he knew it was feeding time. It was always around the same time t every morning, and Mr. Chicken had figured out that t(man + sack) = food, and thus was confidently doing his warmup-pecks on that last Sunday morning when the hired man suddenly reached out and grabbed Mr. Chicken and in one smooth motion wrung his neck and put him in the burlap sack and bore him off to the kitchen. Memories like this tend to remain quite vivid, if you have any. But with the thrust of the story, lying here in your bed, being that Mr. Chicken appears now actually to have been correct---according to the Principle of Induction --- in expecting nothing but breakfast from that (n + 1)th appearance of man + sack at t. Something about the fact that Mr. Chicken not only didn't suspect a thing but appears to have been wholly justified in not suspecting a thing---this seems concretely creepy and upsetting. Finding some higher-level justification for your confidence in the Principle of Induction seems much more urgent when you realize that, without this justification, our own situation is basically indistinguishable from that of Mr. Chicken. But the conclusion, abstract as it is, seems inescapable : what justifies our confidence in the Principle of Induction is that it has always worked in the past, at least up to now. Meaning that our only real justification for the Principle of Induction is the Principle of Induction, which seems shaky and question-begging in the extreme.