From Now On, No More Defeats: The Siege, V: Mucking Around in Boats

Once upon a time in America, a union welding job at 1980s wages was such a horrible fate that you became a stripper to earn your way out. 

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I'm going to throw it out there that there's something toxic going on here, and it is not redeemed by Jennifer Beals ending up in a corps de ballet. Because a few years earlier, welders were "building them by the mile and cutting them off by the foot at places like the Bison Shipyard of North Tonawanda, New York, the pride of the New York Barge Canal (at least in North Tonawanda), and a few years later, people would have been a great deal happier to have a few years invested in seniority in that welding job, even at the expense of happy memories of performing classical dance in front of audiences of desperately signalling would be social climbers. 

I would put up images of the Bison Shipyard in its prime here, but the New York Museum of History is uninterested in reducing its patrimony that way. The City of Buffalo is not. North Tonawanda is, well, not too far from the town that's a bit of a running joke for a certain generation of Torontonians."** 

This is not what it would look like if more people had treated unionised factory welding jobs as good jobs back when they needed to be defended. And I do not say this as a victim of nostalgia for a 1950s that never was. I have a more complicated story to tell, if I ever get it untangled.

The Landing Craft, Tanks built at the Bison Shipyard are only one of a number of wartime shipbuilding projects that featured prefabrication by unskilled ("diluted") labour taking advantage of the fact that with enough solder, you can (temporarily) stick pretty much any piece of metal to any other. And that's entirely unfair, since although it might be taken to imply (correctly) that some Liberty ships, escort carriers and landing craft were a bit of a mess, the rest of them worked just fine and won the war, and that was kind of the point of building them in the first place. The Allies raised very large armies that happened to be on the wrong shore to fight the Axis. A great many boats were needed to deposit them on a hostile shore and make it possible for them to sustain themselves there and even fight their way inland to total victory.

That does not, by even the smallest of margins, however, exhaust the interest one might take in landing craft, because there is a lot of submerged history in these little boats. Which is why I'm going to start by talking about triremes. Of course.

From Now On, No More Defeats: The Siege, 4: The Black Gang

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In a different age, boys ran away to sea to become engineers. They learned quickly, they said in boozy, expansive addresses given before meetings of shipbuilding associations in the latter half of the 1930s, because of "spanner rash."

That's a joke about child abuse, hopefully a little less offensive when told by the men who suffered it. (It made men out of them! Except for the men who didn't get invited to give plenary addresses.) (Obligatory.) Like I said, a different age.

The thing about history is that it's long. You pretty much have to skip to the good bits, and that means a good bridging story. Like I said, a good bridging story. I guess that means that someone, someday, is going to have to do a list of good narrative tropes for grand historical heuristics. It could be like TVTropes, only it would make fun of tenured academics, instead of Joss Whedon and approximately a million anime people. Maybe a graduate student could put it together?

One grand trope says that everything's getting better. That's what you call the "Whig interpretation," and you might have noticed that I go for it a lot here. You might also have noticed that I went for the Reverend Thomas Malthus's throat last time. Which is odd, because if there was ever a Whig view of history. . . .

Here's the thing, though: we can't get away with skipping to the good bits when we want to talk about what's in the hole. The "Whig view of history" we talk about tends to mean people like Macaulay and Babbage (far more successful as a publicist than a computer engineer). That was the 1820s and 1830s, though, not the 1790s. What did it mean to be a Whig in the 1790s? It meant being a member of a faction of county political families that promoted the interests of certain bishops, who promoted the interests of certain reverends, who promoted the interests of their families. It is a grand circle of self-interest that naturally accretes self-justifying ideology. In Malthus, that ideology happened to be that society, by helping the poor, bred more of them, whereas the advance of theology (no, seriously) was just bearing fruit in the form of greater morality. It is a seductive argument against raising the Poor Rates that still resonates today. The brilliance of Malthus's argument was that he made it at a time when it remained to be demonstrated that the number of poor was rising, or, indeed, could rise at all, and that greater morality (ie, more, better paid Whig reverends) was the real solution to all of human problems.

And thus we get the idea of Malthusian growth, just at the moment that it was breaking down, and the road is opened for a new kind of Whiggism, in which scientific progress was key. But note that we're still talking about an advance in human knowledge. And if theology is a true study of a true thing, shouldn't better theology rebound on better science? That's not just an implicit argument in later Nineteenth Century Whiggism. It is right there in the prospectus. Seriously: the War of Science Against Religion guy argued that the reason that pagan Greek science passed on to the Arabs instead of the Byzantines was that the Arabs weren't idolators. (Actually, the Google Book search suggests that I understate: he was obsessed with the idea. Maybe Jared Diamond can steal that idea, too, after he's done with "fat continents versus tall continents.")

Why, we ask, did science unleash non-Malthusian growth, just at this time and at this place? Because, we're told in Lives of the Engineers, just at this point a bunch of Whiggish engineers started innovating. There was a great takeoff: Britain started making cheap cottons. Because of science. Which was unleashed by proper theology.

Of course, it isn't 1830, any more, and we don't (overtly) argue that if we can just stop thinking that the Trinity and consubstantiation are things, than, voila, our minds will be liberated to invent Bessemer steel and spinning jennies.

We believe in something else: the free market! (The following ideas were discovered by me, in a pure entrepeneurial effort out of  nothing, and have been copyrighted, or patented, or whatever the technical word is.)

 Rostow's Lund's 5 Stages [of ecomic growth]:

• Traditional society
  • characterized by subsistence agriculture or hunting & gathering; almost wholly a "primary" sector economy
  • limited technology;
  • A static or 'rigid' society: lack of class or individual economic mobility, with stability prioritized and change seen negatively
• Pre-conditions to "take-off"
  • external demand for raw materials initiates economic change;
  • development of more productive, commercial agriculture & cash crops not consumed by producers and/or largely exported
  • widespread and enhanced investment in changes to the physical environment to expand production (i.e. irrigation, canals, ports)
  • increasing spread of technology & advances in existing technologies
  • changing social structure, with previous social equilibrium now in flux
  • individual social mobility begins
  • development of national identity and shared economic interests
• Take off
  • manufacturing begins to rationalize and scale increases in a few leading industries, as goods are made both for export and domestic consumption
  • the "secondary" (goods-producing) sector expands and ratio of secondary vs. primary sectors in the economy shifts quickly towards secondary
  • textiles & apparel are usually the first "take-off" industry, as happened in Great Britain's classic "Industrial Revolution

See that? Textiles are first.Iron founding? Steam engines? Mass brewing? Railways? Heavy chemical industry and the spread of bleach and soap? The timing is wrong. The number series shows our takeoff happening between 1798 and 1815.

Now, admittedly, that number series has been comprehensively discredited, but only in the kind of boring, technical monographs that use databases developed in the last generation (probate inventories, if you were wondering), and which say nice things about Karl Polanyi. If we took that kind of thing seriously, we might end up throwing away the whole takeoff thesis, and replacing it with a story of Boseruppian growth. And, yes, that's a dig at the Gregory Clark school of long run economic history. I'm sorry, I can't help myself.

If you're a regular reader, you know that I have my own explanation, and that I think that there is a hidden variable here: huge, deficit-expanding wars. Lots of spending, lots of spanner rash. (There's an unavoidable amount of death and destruction, but I prefer to avert my eyes from that.) It's the navy that buys the cast iron and the mass-produced beer and the uniforms and the sailcloth and on an on....

Whereas if  you're an occasional reader, you want payoff. What the fuck does this mean for the Battle of the Atlantic?

I'm glad you asked...

The Plantation of the Atlantic, XIX: Pancakes Versus The Darkest Timeline

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Two conceits here: first, that economists, or economic historians, often keep their bodies in the real world, while their minds inhabit the Darkest Timeline. For the best of intentions, of course.  Marx said something about how philosophy had hitherto misconstrued its callling as explaining the world, whereas the point of any unclouded perception of the unbearable reality of the world as it to some extent already was, and would certainly become, was to change it. Or, as a victim of anti-authoritarian personality disorder in your life has already put it to you, "Wake up sheeple!"

Second, that the details of the history of technology undermine grand theory. Engels may have said that water mills gave us feudalism, longbows gave us capitalism, but that's wrong, albeit in a productive way. Start getting detailed, and someone else will get more so. Unless I'm misconstruing Freddie, which I could be. Ed Hundert guided me through The German Ideology; Leo Frankowski through Engels.

Details, damn it! Ruminations about the epistemic limits of the historian's craft aside, we lack the necessary full understanding of the past. People keep launching grand theories without trying to first understand the everyday stuff. There's just too many details that, at the rate that academic history tackles things, will require generations to work through.

Today's grand theorist is an economist who has launched a thousand economic histories (the Reverend Thomas Malthus, Whig, Broad Churchman, ninth wrangler, and giant of economics.

Today's detail is buckwheat.

That is to say, an annual grass of family Polygonaceae, colloquially the knotweed family, which contains some 1200 species, including useful ones such as sea grape, rhubarb, sorrel, and many that are not, hence "knotweed," or "sumpweed." The two species of  genus Fagopyrum known to agronomists as buckwheat, or ble noir, were eaten like wheat before they became an adjective describing a particular kind of pancake mix, and a raw material for some delicious dark honeys.

Once upon a time, farmers planted with an eye to attracting bees, instead of just hiring an apiarist. Wikipedia

So what's pancake mix got to do with Very Serious Matters, you ask? Well, patience, I answer. I'm going to try to develop a line of thought I've been developing for a very long time, ever since I watched  Soylent Green in a community centre gym because there was no movie theatre in a region half the size of New Jersey, almost two centuries after the first "white men" over-wintered there. That was a long time ago, but the population outflow from the region that continues today was already well on. It's not that this young boy had any doubts that overpopulation was a thing: it was just that it was a higher thing, with no relationship to the reality that he saw; and that taught him to believe in higher realities all the more.

Now, I am not going to launch into some sophomore's version of logical positivism here. What I am aiming at is "the darkest timeline." When does it paint itself over our more boring reality? I have an ongoing argument with Brett Holman that it is not just fear. Hope and fantasy are bound up in it, in the same way that our emotional reaction to horror movies is more complicated than pure revulsion and fear.

In particular, when an economist triumphantly predicts disaster in the near future "if this goes on," it is very hard to tell whether the prediction comes from fear and revulsion, or from some weird transposition through the coordinates of our m-dimensional dream space into a place where people are getting what they damn well deserve.

....The Darkest Timeline. And I say, well, "pancakes." That is, account for the pancakes first, and then we can have our darkest timeline.

Postblogging April, 1939: Guaranteeing Poland, Aid For Shippping, And the Advantages of Insidious Relations

Liveblogging April, 1939

My Dearest Reggie:

From Now On, No More Defeats: Gliding Away

For I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth....

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This should have gone up on 4/22 (if not 4/20), but I've had it in mind to do something with Notre Dame for a while, and by the middle of last week, I was also in the middle of that one, and you see where that went. 

22 April 1943 is the day of the Holy Thursday Massacre. Per Wikipedia, 21 of 27 Messerschmitt Me 323s were shot down attempting a resupply flight from Sicily to Tunis. According to Njaco at WW2Aircraft. Net, this is not quite what happened:

"The Holy Thursday Massacre came on the heels of the Palm Sunday Massacre which involved [the shootdown of 24] Ju 52s. ...

[On 22 April, 1943] [t]he Luftwaffe again tried to supply the forces in Tunisia. . . 10 Ju 52s of Kampfgruppe zbV 106 took off from Pomigliano at 06:40 hours bound for Tunis. The formation was led by Staffelkapitaen Oblt. Biedermann. the Junkers were supposed to fly with a group of 14 Me 323s which took off from Pomigliano at 07:10 hours with the maximum available fighter escort. . . .

....The fighter escort of 39 Bf 109s assembled over Trapani at 08:30 hours. Another 35 fighters were supposed to fly out from Tunis to meet the formation. At 08:35 hours, the formation overflew the island of Marettimo, west of Sicily and descended to a height of 20 to 50 meters above the sea. The specified route [was followed by the Ju52s, but not the 323s, which deviated for unknown reasons.] Most of the escort fighters which had taken off from Sicily stayed with the Ju 52s . . . . This splitting of the fighter force meant that the Giganten had only 36 escorts instead of the planned 104.

....The SAAF sent out 38 P-40s, covered by a[n] SAAF Spitfire squadron and additional flights of British and Polish-manned Spitfires. . . . [at] 09:25 hours, two large groups of Allied fighters began attacking the Me 323s between Cap Bon and the island of Zembra. Conditions were hazy. The first group of Allied fighters engaged the Bf 109s of II./JG 27 which were flying at an altitude of about 2400 meters, and forced them away from the transports. This allowed the second formation, which was larger and made up mainly of P-40s of the SAAF to attack the Giganten. . . ..The Allied fighters estimated the size of the Me 323 formation at 20 aircraft instead of the actual 14. Once attacked, the Me 323s took evasive action . . . . the Me 323s were shot down one after another . . . fighters from JG 27 . . . claimed 2 Kittyhawks [and a Spitfire].

.... . .  All 14 transports with 700 drums of fuel were shot down, [along with 7 fighters; only 19 of 138 shot down survived]. . . .

..  According to Me 323 pilot, Oblt. Ernst Peters, from the end of November 1942 to 22 April 1943, KGzbV 323 had transported 15,000 meteric tons of equipment to Tunis and Bizerte in approxiamately 1,200 sorties. Among the items delivered: 309 trucks, 51 medium prime movers up to 12 tonnes, 209 guns up to 150mm caliber, 324 light guns, 83 anti-tank and AA guns, 42 AA radars including'Wurzburg Riese' and 96 armoured troop carriers and self-propelled guns

Credit to Njaco where credit is due. There were 14 aircraft in the flight, not 27, and all were shot down, not 20 of 27. I would add that the Allied aircraft were from 1, 2, 4 and 5 Squadrons SAAF.  Or,  "shot down." 

If you  haven't heard of the Me323 before, here's today's stoner moment:

Per Wikipedia

Another view from the same source:

They sent men up in that? Yes, they did.

Gather the Bones, 17: To Our Mother of the Lakes

This.

Plus This

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Plus This

Equals This

Okay, look, I've done this before. My thesis is that the history of the United States needs to be understood from the claim that its received demography is impossible. First, not enough people crossed the Atlantic at the right time, and that those that did were mainly West Country men who sailed to the Newfoundland --and possibly a prior Greenland-- fishery, and who therefore entered North American population history through an opaque mechanism that is detached from the conventional chronology of settlement, and whose historical linguistic and ethnogenic consequences are not explored in that narrative.

Blah blah fancy talk: Men, mainly Welsh, Basque and Breton speakers, but also Moroccans, began entering North America through the Gulf of Saint Lawrence region in the first quarter of the Sixteenth Century, and possibly well before that. Prior to the establishment of the first Crown colonies, they and their descendants were well-distributed through the Eastern Seaboard, but nearly invisibly, since they embraced ethnogenesis as "Indians." Insofar as the typical American does not look Indian (and this point can be overstressed), it is because of the "leaky pump" that moved thousands of male labourers back and forth across the Atlantic every year. There is just not enough genetic material being moved in other ways. An implication that I will dig out here and underline is that the crazy people who claim to hear Welsh (and Basque, and "Moorish" spoken on the early American frontier need to be taken more seriously.    

Second: ethnogenesis works the other way. "Indian" populations transformed into "White," once it was in their interest to do so. I take this to be uncontroversial on its face to scientific investigator,** albeit endlessly amazing to people who should know better, even if the precise numbers and chronology can be debated. Why forget? Because of that "in their interest" clause. The process through which this was "forgotten" (and I think the scare quotes are amply justified) is where this thesis takes a turn through radical history. As a first pass, the argument begins with the very old one that the idea of race and nationality conceals the reality of class struggle. "Forgetting" allows the perpetuation of a Creole elite without challenging the ideology of American egalitarianism, specifically by allowing most Americans who want to claim the status to be "European White Americans," and have some small slice of power in society over the melatonin-challenged. But Marx was all about "proletarian" this and "means of production" that. Bullshit. This is about real estate.

So here's the radical claim buried here: that the pre-Columbian social order has been perpetuated forward. Hey, North Americans: when your oldest and richest families whimsically claim to be descended from an Indian princess, it's not whimsy. It's a statement about how their back forty came to be their back forty.

So that's the claim.

The motivator for revisiting this claim? Like many unwashed Internet dwellers, I visit Brad DeLong's sight frequently, and he's currently blogging from Notre Dame University in (actually, near)*** South Bend, Indiana, and I'm totally not jealous at all. 

So, anyway, Notre Dame. What do we know? That it's a Catholic university with a French name in the middle of Indiana, which some people are going to manage to find anomalous (see folk derivations of "hoosier" that manage to blatantly ignore the structure of a French borrowing), with a financially and sometimes competitively successful football team called the Fighting Irish that some people hate and many more people love, as happens with sport teams, and with the usual consequences. And that as far as my thesis goes, it's pretty much a sitting duck. I mean, come on: Our Mother? "Raise a volley cheer on high/Shake loose the thunder from the sky?"  I could go political here, sketch out a story in which Knute Rockne driving the Crimson off the battlefield is a victory for Middle America against Harvard, back in a day when Harvard football was thuggish and menacin as well as patrician, rather than hapless and charming, and that this somehow mirrors and reflects change within the Republican Party during the 1920s that one can then connect with Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, Jack Dempster, Conan the Barbarian, Robert Heinlein --really, with this cultural stuff, you can go anywhere. 

On the  other hand, Notre Dame can just as easily seen as a mix of old-fashioned Catholic piety and cliches imported from Europe. It's the Catholicism that immigrant and Irish brought with them, and which they turned against the old Wasp on the football field. Surely it's a stretch to find Notre Dame des Lacs more at home in the Eastern Woodlands cosmology than medieval Europe. After all, how much do we actually grasp about late Eastern Woodlands cosmology? When other anthropologists insisted on normalising the vast site of Cahokia as the capital of a proto-empire, Michael Byers struck back by identifying it as the site of a "World Renewal Cult Heterarchy." 

The New World does not necessarily follow Old World norms, says Byers. Think of, say, Cahokia, and all the Cahokia-lights that existed throughout the Eastern Woodlands, conceivably even on the future campus of Notre Dame, even if it doesn't look like a geographically promising candidate,  in terms of "heterarchy." Heterarchy is the opposite of Old World hierarchy. Heterarchic cult centres are places where multiple elective social affinities come together to perform a central ceremony of world renewal in the spring, in the context of an overall ritual centre in which many different cult practices, including the oft-cited astronomical observations are enacted in many kinds of edifices. Totally different from, say, old Athens or Rome. Arguably.

Notice how I managed to say "elective affinities" rather than "sodalities and fraternities?" At one level, the issue with Byers is that a university teacher has tried to make Cahokia strange through thick description, and ended up by describing ceremonial games played on specially-prepared plazas outside massive ritual edifices during elaborate in-gatherings of the community? 

So Cahokia was a strange and deeply different place that happened to be exactly like the one where Byers was educated and now works. At first glance, this is a staggering failure of the effort to "make it strange," an even greater failure than his original notion to call it Cahokia a mall: Cahokia was a Midwestern American mid-tier football school. 

But then there is Notre Dame. It is a loosey-goosey cultural claim to say, "Oh, yes, in the thirteenth century, there was this place called Cahokia, and we think we know how it works, and even though Cahokia-like places vanished over the next century or so, it's not like the Eastern Woodlands Indians stopped building ritual centres/towns, and Notre Dame could have been the site of one, to the extent that the archaeology will support, and nowadays Notre Dame University does all sorts of stuff that I can vaguely wave at as being like 'Southern Death Cult' stuff, and there you go." Not even an argument, but I just can't resist deploying it. That's the power of this kind of 'argument.'

It would be better, I think, to ground things. Literally. Let's talk real estate.

Old Europe: Puck's Gold

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Puck says:  "Weland gave the Sword, The Sword gave the Treasure, and the Treasure gave the Law. It's as natural as an oak growing." Apparently, the lesson is that Puck can't be trusted. The Urwald was willow, birch and lime, Puck. You should know that. Why are you lying to these children? Is there something that you're hiding? Probably. The Fey are tricksome folk, with treasure to hide.

Uncle Scrooge has to hide his treasure, too, albeit only from the Beagle Boys. We see him smiling above, but he wouldn't be smiling today. Except that, Scrooge McDuck being Scrooge McDuck, I imagine he shorted gold a month ago or so. (You can short commodities, right?)

Now I should probably motivate this post: half of it comes from listening to goldbugs. Yesterday, I actually got to hear someone ask, on CBC Radio, no less, "Is there gold in Fort Knox?" Apparently, he thinks that all the gold has been shipped to China. Because reasons. Anyway, the point is, unless you've actually bought physical gold coins and hidden them away in a money bin of your own, you'll be very sorry. Real soon.

Also, I was rereading the exemplary David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire (2006), another in the fine Penguin "History of Britain" series for academics looking to read themselves into an unfamiliar period so that they can do a Very Important Project, and not just because it's cool, and, look, Dean, I don't need to justify this to you, because there will be a Groundbreaking Publication imminently. Can haz tenure now? And Mattingly chanced to observe that what we assume to be (since we've all got "informal empire" in the back of our minds) Roman client states in southeastern England minted above a million gold coins in the century between Caesar and Claudius.

A. Million. Gold. Coins. That's 50 tons of gold, less rather than more. (83.5 grains for this one.) What the hell? Now let's motivate the conversation: let's suppose, just for the sake of the conversation, that the Roman Empire, fell, more or less, because its failure to manage its monetary system led its citizens to go Croat[o]an. Someone might say that this has some small contemporary relevance, but I'm not sure what to make of that article. I'm not even sure that "going Croatoan" is a thing, yet, even though it godamn well should be. Take it from someone who supervises a great many hardworking young people who keep taking one vocational course after another just to find themselves with more student loan debt and yet another line on their resume to justify sending out letters to employers that ignore them, because "supply side economic stimulus" means pushing the price of things lower, and why the fuck are we driving the price of educated and skilled people lower in this economy of ours....

Never mind, answered my own question there, I did. Anyway, Rome, informal empires, and gold.