About 15% of FHA borrowers who took out a loan between June 2021 and March 2024 fell seriously delinquent within a year.

I smell fraud.

A mortgage borrower who defaults within a year is not typically a victim of economic circumstances. I wonder how many of the alleged borrowers and their alleged homes even exist. The mortgage bankers who sold those loans to the government agencies ought to either buy them back or go to jail.

The WSJ reports,

[Kevin Warsh, recently appointed Fed chair] convened several task forces, one of which will examine how the Fed “understands and responds to the drivers of inflation.” Its three leaders’ recommendations could be a chance for Warsh to put a new stamp on how the central bank tackles rising prices.

…[Thomas Sargent] and a co-author used “unpleasant monetarist arithmetic” to show that if people don’t believe their government will eventually raise enough taxes to pay back debt, the central bank can be powerless to stop inflation.

I come to the same view, although Sargent and I have very different views of how this takes place. I think that the Fed is powerless because whenever the government needs help marketing its debt, the Fed will have no choice.

Andreas Steno Larsen writes,

The entire funding base of the US government is, at the margin, LEVERED. The buyers are not holding the bonds with their own money.. they are holding them with borrowed money, rolled overnight, against collateral that gets marked to market daily. That is a magnificent machine when repo is cheap and calm, and a doomsday device if repo ever seizes: a repo spike forces margin calls, margin calls force bond sales, bond sales push yields up, higher yields trigger MORE margin calls.. and suddenly the buyer of last resort is selling into a falling market.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. This was the financial crisis of 2008 in a nutshell. Investment bankers funding securities backed by 30-year mortgages with repo loans that were good for overnight, or at most a week. And when the AAA ratings of those securities were called into question, the repo market collapsed.

Have a nice day.

Gad Levanon writes,

the hiring freeze is concentrated in exactly the sectors that absorb new graduates: tech, consulting, and finance stopped hiring while in-person service sectors kept adding workers.

…The share of each cohort holding a bachelor’s degree has been rising for decades, so every year more graduates compete for the professional entry jobs a degree is supposed to unlock, while young workers without degrees have grown scarcer, tightening the market they compete in. That trend is too gradual to explain a break in the last three years by itself. But it’s the background condition that made the graduate market vulnerable: a long-building oversupply that the hiring freeze and AI turned from pressure into inversion.

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Labor Matters

For young workers, the college advantage is breaking down

Back in the spring I wrote that unemployment among young college graduates was unusually high. We now have CPS data through July 2026, the first months to capture the class of 2026’s job search, and the update strengthens the story…

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9 days ago · 9 likes · Labor Matters

There were more than 117,000 local school districts in the U.S. in the 1939-40 school year….Today, there are only 13,318 local school districts in the U.S., including the sprawling citywide districts of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

…School choice provides a chance for a better education. But it doesn’t provide a vehicle for neighbors to get to know each other and work together for good schools. The social capital that comes with small school districts and local elections, has, tragically, become a luxury good.

The consolidation phenomenon gave power to unions and bureaucrats, taking it away from school principals and parents. The results speak for themselves.

Bruno V. Manno writes,

The some-college, no-credential population, known as stopouts, accounts for nearly one in five working-age American adults. And the trend line is going the wrong way. That population grew by nearly 800,000 individuals between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years, even as national college completion rates hit a 12-year high.

…The bachelor’s degree is becoming modular, assembled from pieces that can be front-loaded in high school, compressed at a four-year institution, or completed at a community college, rather than delivered as one fixed, four-year product.

Lauren Hall writes.

The academic job market is brutal. If you don’t get tenure, you may not get another academic job. If you lose an academic job, it’s very unlikely another will appear. If you’re lucky enough that another one does appear, you will have to uproot your entire life and family and move somewhere else, usually not in a place you actually want to live. The system we’ve built demands that we enter a Hunger Games-esque competition for far fewer jobs than there are applicants and once we’re lucky enough to get hired we then publish constantly, with minimal support, under threat of permanent exile, while peer reviewers, unpaid and overwhelmed, wave through work nobody has time to check and for-profit journal corporations rake in the profits. We should be asking what kinds of behavior that system encourages and we should stop being surprised by what that system produces.

And in the last ten or fifteen years, layered onto this system was a rule that white males were not wanted. It didn’t bother me, personally, because I had ditched academia long before that rule emerged.

Hall writes,

I’m my college’s academic integrity officer, and the vast majority of student integrity violations never get reported, because faculty have learned that reporting is more work for them than letting it go. While each individual decision is understandable, collectively, they dissolve the infrastructure the whole enterprise stands on. My colleague James Stacey Taylor (of the workshop citation correction) has spent recent years chasing down serious plagiarism cases and doing amazing work, but I think he knows he’s tilting at windmills because the misconduct is that widespread.

My Ph.D dissertation was plagiarized by the young Amherst professor who interviewed me when I was on the job market. He was never punished for it. When I wrote my thesis adviser, Robert Solow, he wrote back that the plagiarist was “wrong, of course,” but that I should do nothing about it.

So this is the culture that taxpayers and wealthy donors pay for.

Hall writes,

My solution is (almost) never burn it all down, but this is the closest I get.

So she is almost all the way to brokenist. I’m there.

Kelsey Piper writes,

The headline claims of “2x growth” come from numbers that have been massaged to the point of being useless for understanding what kids are learning. And insofar as there’s a secret sauce to Alpha School — and there’s definitely something — it is decidedly not the collection of edtech apps that they package as Timeback. I’ve tested those out and suspect whatever makes Alpha tick cannot be found in those apps.

…In general, the overwhelming majority of the differences between schools in student performance are driven by the self-selection of involved parents and motivated students. It stands to reason that a school serving the children of people who can afford to pay $75,000 a year is going to have better outcomes than any school that doesn’t, even if instructional quality is no better or worse.

And this:

the effect of most edtech is almost nothing; it would work OK if used as intended consistently, but almost no one uses it as intended consistently. Most students will barely use it at all if they can help it, which means it is generally not anywhere near as good as high-quality instruction from an excellent teacher or even average instruction from an average teacher.

This fits with (a) what I call the Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions nearly always have no significant long-term effects, and (b) the claim that I have been making lately that education is in the social realm, where tools built for the digital realm may not be effective.

My bottom line is that if you compare Alpha School to its hype or to some imaginary version of what other schools look like, you can trash it. But if you compare it to actually-existing public school, it will come out ahead for many students, especially for those who select to stay there.

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The Argument

Why parents love a school with bogus numbers

Alpha School — a franchise of private schools advertising their ability to teach students more than traditional schools in vastly less time — are cropping up all over the country. There’s one in my neighborhood, and there’s another across the bay in San Francisco that charges $75,000 a year. …

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9 days ago · 54 likes · 6 comments · Kelsey Piper

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The Radical Moderate's Guide to Life

Jason Arday, Brittle Institutions, and False Choices

At a manuscript workshop for my second book, a colleague who takes sourcing very seriously flagged one of my citations. I had cited a study and generalized its findings to physicians as a whole. My colleague actually checked the footnotes and found the study had an n of five. Even worse, the five weren’t physicians, …

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16 days ago · 26 likes · 12 comments · Lauren Hall

As I worked with Claude on describing the cultural icons of the 1950s, I realized that we need an entire lecture on Jews joining the elite. And we have to point out that it was taken for granted that only males could go to Ivy League colleges and only heterosexuality was normal.

An American, Chicago Born

The Fifties — The New Jewish Elite

Opening: The Sentence

A novel published in 1953 begins with a young man announcing himself to the country: “I am an American, Chicago born.” The novel is The Adventures of Augie March, the young man is its narrator, and the author is Saul Bellow, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had crossed into Canada and then into Chicago, a boy raised partly in Yiddish who had grown up being told, in a hundred quiet ways, that the great American novel belonged to someone else — to the Protestant heirs of Hawthorne and James and Hemingway, not to the grandchildren of the shtetl. And here he was, in the first line of his breakthrough book, simply taking it: claiming the country, claiming Chicago, claiming the American language itself and bending it to a rhythm that carried the cadence of the immigrant street into high literature. The sentence is a small act of possession, and the possession is the subject of this lecture.

For these were the years in which the children and grandchildren of the great Jewish immigration — the two million who had come from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and the closing of the gates in the 1920s — moved from the margins of American life to its center, and in moving changed what the center sounded like. They arrived on the page and on the stage, in the universities and the laboratories, and in the very way educated Americans learned to understand their own minds. It was a genuine widening of the country, an old society opening to people it had recently kept out, which makes it one of the era’s real adaptations rather than one of its rebellions. And like every arrival it was incomplete, and it carried in it a catastrophe not yet spoken of and a set of doors still closed, so that the lecture that celebrates one barrier falling ends by pointing at the ones still standing. Bellow, who is largely unread by the young today, was as central to the literary life of his moment as any American has ever been, and his sentence is the door swinging open.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Newcomers on the Page

Bellow was the towering figure, and Augie March won the National Book Award and announced a voice that fused the vernacular of the Chicago streets with the ambition of Melville, a prose that went at the world, as its hero said, free-style. But he was one of a company. Bernard Malamud gave the same material a different key — tenderness, fable, the moral parable — in The Assistant in 1957, the story of a failing immigrant grocer and the drifter who robs and then redeems him, and in the stories of The Magic Barrel, where suffering is the price and the proof of becoming a mensch. Philip Roth was the youngest and the sharpest, and he arrived in 1959 with Goodbye, Columbus, a novella that turned the knife on the newly comfortable suburban Jewish family from the inside, mocking the very arrival the older writers had labored toward — the rebellion against comfort by the generation that had never known anything else, which points ahead to everything the next decade would bring.

Herman Wouk is the instructive counter-case, and worth keeping for exactly that reason. An observant Jew and a natural conservative, Wouk wrote the era’s great bestsellers on the side of order rather than revolt: The Caine Mutiny in 1951, which stages a shipboard rebellion against a cracked captain and then, in its famous reversal, comes down on the side of the flawed authority that stands between a soft society and its enemies; and Marjorie Morningstar, whose heroine dreams of the stage and ends, without tragedy and without irony, a contented suburban wife. Where Bellow and Roth unsettled the surface, Wouk ratified it, and the two impulses running side by side within the same arriving community is truer to the moment than either alone. Across the northern border the phenomenon had its cousin in Mordecai Richler, whose Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in 1959 did for immigrant Montreal what the others did for New York and Chicago, a reminder that the arrival was a continental event. The careers ran on for decades past this period, to bigger books and Nobel Prizes, so hold each to its work of the fifties and let the rest be a gesture forward. What matters here is the fact of it: within a single generation, the outsiders had become the center of American letters.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Songbook

If the novelists were arriving, the songwriters had already arrived, a rung higher and a generation earlier, and their arrival was so complete that the country no longer noticed it. By the fifties the reigning power on Broadway was the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who had remade the American musical with Oklahoma! in 1943 and gone on to define the postwar form — South Pacific, The King and I, and in 1959 The Sound of Music — shows so wholesome and so central that the country experienced them as plain Americana rather than as the work of Jewish artists. Behind them stood the giants who had built the national songbook itself. Irving Berlin, a cantor’s son born in the Russian empire who had come through Ellis Island as a boy, wrote both “God Bless America” and “White Christmas” — the immigrant supplying the native-born with their patriotic anthem and their Christmas one alike. George Gershwin, another son of Russian Jewish immigrants, had left at his death in 1937 a body of song and the opera Porgy and Bess that were already American classics. Full possession of the popular music of the United States had passed, quietly and almost invisibly, to the children of the Lower East Side.

And then, in 1957, the arrival turned and used its position to unsettle the very form it had mastered. West Side Story was the work of four Jewish artists at the dead center of American culture — Leonard Bernstein composing, Stephen Sondheim writing the lyrics, Arthur Laurents the book, Jerome Robbins directing and choreographing — and they took the comfortable Rodgers-and-Hammerstein musical and set it on the street, on gang warfare and ethnic hatred and a love that ends in a killing, with jazz and dissonance and knife-edge dance where the older shows had put a waltz. It is the establishment turning a blade on itself, the same community that had written the country’s reassuring anthems now writing its unease. And the thread runs on, just past this period, to 1964 and Fiddler on the Roof, the moment the mainstream American musical finally turned around and looked back at the shtetl the grandfathers had fled — the arrival at last secure enough to sing, in a Broadway house, about where it had come from.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Gate and the Walk Down Massachusetts Avenue

The arrival reached the institutions that credential the elite, and there it met the machinery the overview described, remade in these very years. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, had set out in the thirties to break what he called the hereditary aristocracy of wealth, to pull the bright poor boy from the small town into a world that had been reserved for the well-born, and his instrument was the aptitude test, which by the fifties had become the standard gate of American higher education. The test was built to measure talent rather than breeding, and its measurable effect was to widen the door for the Jewish student, whose academic record was strong and whose exclusion had rested on the older and franker machinery of the admissions office. The change was real, and it was slow, and it was grudging: the Jewish quota lingered at Harvard for years after Conant left, and Conant himself was no philo-Semite but a man who shared the mild antisemitism of his class and opened the door anyway, because his principle required it.

How much prejudice remained is best told by a short walk. Paul Samuelson took his doctorate at Harvard around 1941, the most brilliant young economist the department had produced in a generation, and the department did not keep him. The chairman found his mathematics distasteful and, it is generally understood, found the brash young Jew distasteful too, and so the greatest economic theorist of the American century was allowed to walk two miles down Massachusetts Avenue to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which had been a nonentity in economics and which Samuelson proceeded to build into the best department in the world. Harvard’s genteel prejudice was MIT’s making. It is a near-perfect parable of the whole phenomenon: the old institution’s loss became a new institution’s glory, and the excluded, denied a place at the summit, went and built a rival summit. One thing the meritocratic gate did not touch should be marked here and will return at the end. It opened to talent and it opened almost entirely to men; Harvard College and its peers remained male, their women held in the coordinate colleges at arm’s length, and the reform that prided itself on fairness did not think to ask why.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Thing Not Spoken

Under all of this arriving lay a silence, and the silence is the strangest fact of the decade’s Jewish life. The catastrophe in Europe — the murder of six million, a third of the world’s Jews, the thing not yet commonly called the Holocaust because the word had not yet settled to it — was, in the America of the fifties, mostly not discussed. The survivors who had reached the country were often silent, from trauma and from a wish to build a life forward rather than dwell in the pit. American Jews, in the middle of the very assimilation this lecture has been describing, had reasons of their own not to press the horror on their neighbors, not to appear as a people apart, marked and mourning. And the culture had no vocabulary for it yet, no shape in which to hold a thing so large.

Where the country approached it at all, it approached it softened. The one form in which the murder entered the American living room was the diary of a murdered Dutch girl, published in English in 1952, made into a Broadway play in 1955 and a film in 1959 — and the Anne Frank that America embraced was the hopeful one, the girl remembered for her assurance that she still believed, in spite of everything, that people were good at heart, the line lifted from a story that ends in Bergen-Belsen and used to make the unbearable bearable. The full darkness stayed offstage. Only at the very end of this period did the silence begin to break, when Israel put Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and the survivors testified before the world’s cameras, and when Hannah Arendt, covering it, published in 1963 her unsettling phrase about the banality of evil. And there is a connection worth naming plainly, because it runs beneath the whole lecture. The reason so much of this genius — the analysts, the physicists, the composers, the scholars — was in New York and Los Angeles rather than Vienna and Berlin is precisely the catastrophe the culture was not discussing. The arriving elite was, in significant part, a refugee elite, the survivors and escapees of a horror their adopted country had not yet found a way to speak of.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Basement of the Mind

Nowhere did the émigré mind reshape America more deeply than in how Americans learned to understand themselves, and the vehicle was Sigmund Freud. Freud himself had fled Vienna for London in 1938 and died there the next year, but his movement scattered into the English-speaking world and took root in the United States as it had nowhere else on earth — carried by the analysts who had escaped Hitler’s Europe, Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim and Erich Fromm and Theodor Reik and the architects of the ego psychology that would rule the American clinic. By the fifties psychoanalysis had captured American psychiatry, the couch had become a possession of the educated urban class, and a vulgarized Freud saturated the whole culture: the parenting advice, the movie villain explained by a buried childhood wound, the cocktail chatter of complexes and repression and the telling slip. A Viennese Jewish science of the mind had become, for a couple of decades, something close to the official psychology of the American elite.

Its central idea is why it belongs in this series at all, because Freud’s picture of the person is the surface-and-undercurrent structure of the whole age stated as a theory of the individual mind. Beneath the composed social self, he taught, runs a churning basement of buried drives, and the burying costs something, and what is pressed down returns as neurosis and leaks out sideways. To the educated of the fifties, suspicious that the placid surface of their world was a performance over something truer and more turbulent, “repression” was the word they had been looking for. Yet the doctrine faced two ways at once, and the tension is the point. In the clinic its practical aim was adjustment — to shore up the managing ego, to reconcile the patient to the family and the job, to help him fit back in — which made it, in daily practice, a quiet servant of the very conformity the era prized. The same loosening reached the nursery through Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose Baby and Child Care of 1946 became one of the bestselling books in American history and taught a gentler, more permissive, psychologically-minded style of raising children that displaced the rigid scheduling of the previous generation. A decade later, conservatives would blame that permissiveness for the rebels it had supposedly raised, calling them the Spock-marked generation.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Freud Against Freud

The adjustment-minded Freud of the clinic was not the only Freud available, and in these same years a handful of thinkers read the master against himself and drew from him a doctrine of liberation instead. Herbert Marcuse, a refugee of the Frankfurt School, published Eros and Civilization in 1955 and argued that civilization demanded far more repression than it actually needed — a “surplus repression” imposed to keep people working and obedient — and that a freer, less repressed order was possible, in which the buried energies might be released rather than merely managed. Norman O. Brown followed in 1959 with Life Against Death, a stranger and more mystical reading that pressed toward the same conclusion, that repression itself was the disease and the unbinding of the body the cure. These books turned Freud from a theorist of adjustment into a prophet of release, and though they sold modestly at the time, they were handing the coming decade its theory: the argument that liberation meant letting up the repression, which the Beats and the sexual insurgents of the previous lecture were already living on instinct, was now available as a philosophy. The establishment had put Freud on the couch to make people cohere. The insurgents read the same texts to justify blowing the lid off.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Closing: The Circle Drawn Around Men

The arrival was real, and it was drawn in a particular shape, and the shape is where the decade seeds the revolt that follows it. The center had learned to admit the once-excluded on the ground of talent, and it drew that new circle almost entirely around men, and it left two other exclusions not merely standing but dignified by the era’s own authorities.

The meritocratic university opened to the immigrant’s grandson and stayed shut to his sister. The reigning psychology, for its part, did not merely overlook women; it furnished the age’s confinement of them with the prestige of science. The popular Freud taught penis envy and the female as a defective variant of the male, taught that a mature woman surrendered one kind of pleasure for another and that the woman who chafed at the housewife’s role was suffering a neurosis to be analyzed into contentment — so that a real grievance could be reclassified as a private sickness. When the trap was finally named, in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, at the very edge of this period, its indictment fell partly on exactly this psychology and the problem it had insisted had no name. And the same profession that had arrived as a liberator served, on another front, as an enforcer: it classified homosexuality as a mental disorder, a sickness listed in its manual and treated with everything up to aversion therapy, while the government in these same Cold War years purged suspected homosexuals from its employ as security risks, a lavender scare running quietly alongside the red. The irony sits close to the surface of everything these lectures have covered — that Baldwin, and any number of the very analysts and artists and composers carrying this culture forward, were gay men living under a diagnosis their own intellectual establishment had written.

A caution belongs here, in the evenhanded spirit the series has tried to keep. These limits were nearly invisible at the time, to almost everyone, including many of the people they bound; it does the period no justice to arraign it for failing to be the present. The truer thing is that the same postwar order which enforced these exclusions was also, by widening its gates to talent and loosening its old certainties, generating the confidence and the vocabulary that would let them be named and refused. The arrangement produced its own critics, exactly as the placid surface produced its own dissolvers. The immigrant’s grandson had claimed his place as an American, Chicago born. His sister, and his gay cousin, and the Black family across the city line, had heard the claim and would shortly make it their own. That is the decade handing itself forward, and it is where these lectures end.

[ END OF LECTURE ]

End of Lecture — An American, Chicago Born

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The Picture Window

The Fifties — Suburbia and Television

Opening: The Blue Glow

Come down any street in one of the new subdivisions on a weekday evening in 1957 — a street that had been a potato field five years before — and the houses are the same house, set back the same distance, each with its picture window facing the road. Behind most of those windows, at the same hour, the same blue light is flickering, because behind them the same program is playing, and the laughter that comes from one open door comes a beat later from the next. A traveling salesman could have driven the length of the country that evening and watched the same joke land in a hundred thousand living rooms in sequence, following the time zones west like a wave.

That picture holds the two great facts of the era’s ordinary life, and they are the subject. The first is the house itself and the world built around it — the suburb, a new kind of place that remade where Americans lived, how they shopped, what they drove, and what they ate. The second is the blue light — television, a machine that in a single decade went from a curiosity to a fixture in nearly every home and gave the country a common set of references broader than anything it had possessed before or has possessed since. Beneath the surface these lectures keep returning to, this was the surface itself: prosperous, placid, formal, and astonishingly shared. The signs of rebellion under it belong to the next hour. This one is the world the rebellion was rebelling against, and it is worth taking seriously on its own terms, because tens of millions of people found it, after the Depression their parents had endured and the war they had just won, very close to paradise.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The World Built to Order

The scale of the move is hard to overstate. In the fifteen years after the war the country threw up whole cities where there had been farmland, and the population of the suburbs roughly doubled, until by the early sixties as many Americans lived in suburbs as in the central cities. The overview traced the men who built them — Levitt above all, who broke the house into two dozen operations and ran crews down the street like an assembly line laid flat — so recall only the machinery that made the buyer possible. The federal government, through mortgage insurance for ordinary borrowers and for veterans, underwrote long, low-interest loans that brought the monthly cost of owning a new house below the cost of renting an old apartment, so that for a young family the rational thing was to buy, and buy new, and buy in the county. A down payment a returning soldier could manage put him in a house with a lawn.

The house reorganized the day around the automobile. It sat too far from work to walk and too far from the streetcar line to ride, so the family needed a car, and soon enough two, and the whole landscape reshaped itself to serve them. The commercial strip replaced the downtown; the parking lot became the first thing you saw and the last thing you crossed. Into that car-shaped country came a new kind of commerce built for people who arrived at thirty miles an hour: the drive-in, the motel at the interchange, the hamburger stand engineered for speed that the overview met in Ray Kroc. And it came indoors, too, in the invention of a Viennese émigré named Victor Gruen — a socialist who had fled Hitler’s Vienna and who gave America, at Southdale outside Minneapolis in 1956, the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall. Gruen meant it as a gift to the placeless suburb: a town square with the weather turned off, a civic center where a community without a Main Street could gather, with apartments and schools and clinics around the shops. Only the shops got built. He lived to see the parking lots multiply around his idea and disowned the whole progeny in disgust, an idealist appalled by what the market made of his dream.

Inside the house the kitchen filled with machines, and the machines carried a meaning beyond convenience. The automatic washer, the electric range, the great humming refrigerator, the dishwasher — these were the pride of the new domestic life, and the earlier lecture on the Cold War showed how heavy that meaning could be, when a Vice President and a Soviet premier stood in a model of exactly this kitchen in Moscow and argued the merits of two civilizations over the washing machine. The appliance was an argument. A country that could put one in the home of an ordinary steelworker had, its people believed, settled the question the century was asking.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Line on the Map

The suburb was genuinely liberating for the millions it took in, and it was closed by design to millions of others, and both of those things are true at once and neither cancels the other. The closing was not an accident of private prejudice working itself out house by house. It was written into the rules of the government subsidy that built the place, and the rules were drawn in the 1930s, in the same New Deal that the earlier lectures credited with so much else.

Two agencies drew them. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, created in 1933, produced surveys of American cities that graded every neighborhood from A down to D for the safety of lending there, and shaded the worst grade in red on the map — and a neighborhood with Black residents in it was graded red almost automatically, whatever the state of its houses, which is the literal origin of the word redlining. The more powerful engine was the Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934, whose manual for appraisers taught that property held its value only where the population was of one race, recommended written covenants barring resale to the unwanted as a condition of a sound loan, and would not insure mortgages in or near Black neighborhoods. Since the whole postwar suburb was floated on FHA and veterans’ mortgage insurance, the subsidy that carried a generation of white working families up into the middle class was, by explicit written rule, withheld from Black families who had fought the same war and paid the same taxes.

The courts touched the edges of this and left the center standing. A case that began in St. Louis reached the Supreme Court in 1948: a Black family named Shelley had bought a house on Labadie Avenue that carried a covenant forbidding its sale to anyone not white, and a neighbor went to court to undo the sale. The justices ruled that while such a covenant was a private agreement, a court that enforced one would be making the state itself the instrument of the discrimination, which the Constitution forbade — a real and early victory. It changed the law and barely dented the practice, because the FHA’s appraisers and the private agents who steered buyers went on doing by administrative habit what the courts had told them they could no longer do by decree. St. Louis shows the result in its starkest form, partly because the city had legally divorced itself from its county back in 1876 and sat as an island unto itself. As the federal money financed the white subdivisions spreading across the county and starved the city core of loans, the metropolitan area sorted itself with unusual precision into a Black city and a white county, divided by a municipal boundary and a color line that mostly ran along the same streets. The common culture forming on the television screen was, on the ground, a culture two nations watched from separate rooms.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Box in the Corner

Now the blue light itself. On the night of the nineteenth of January, 1953, roughly forty-four million Americans watched Lucy Ricardo have her baby on I Love Lucy — more people than watched Dwight Eisenhower take the oath of office the very next morning — and they watched it on a program that was not permitted to speak the word “pregnant” and had a rabbi, a priest, and a minister review its scripts. That single evening measures the thing that had happened. In the space of a few years the country had acquired a hearth it all sat around at once. There had never been anything quite like it: a nation of tens of millions, spread across a continent, tuned on the same nights to the same two or three channels, laughing at the same jokes and carrying the same handful of faces around in their heads. The technology made a common culture possible, and the smallness of the dial — three networks and little else — made it nearly universal, and that combination was a historical accident that opened in these years and has never come again, for the moment the channels multiplied the common room broke back into a thousand smaller ones.

The machinery behind Lucy is worth a moment, because it was invented on the spot and quietly reorganized the whole business. Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball’s husband and partner, insisted on filming the show in Hollywood before a live audience with several cameras running at once, on real film rather than the blurry kinescopes the networks used — and, crucially, he arranged to keep the film. When the episodes could be shown again, and again, and sold to stations for years after their first run, the rerun was born, and with it the entire economics of syndication, in which a show that has finished making new episodes goes on earning forever. A Cuban bandleader had discovered where the money in television actually lay.

What played on the box, mostly, was comfort. The family situation comedies gave the suburb back a flattering image of itself: Ozzie and Harriet, an actual family playing a version of themselves, so wholesome it became a byword for the era’s placid ideal — and which, in one of the era’s neat little ironies, used the last minutes of its episodes to turn its own younger son Ricky into a genuine rock-and-roll star, smuggling the coming rebellion into the very heart of the surface, a thread the next lecture will pick up. There was Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights, presiding stiffly over a variety hour that could put a plate-spinner and an opera singer and, in time, the decade’s most dangerous young musicians before the whole family at once. There was Milton Berle, who had sold sets by the millions in the early years simply by being unmissable. And there were the westerns, which at their high tide filled something close to a quarter of the prime evening hours — a country that had finished settling its frontier only two generations before reassuring itself, night after night, with clean stories of a simpler moral world set safely in its own past.

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The Hours of the Day

The box kept a schedule, and the schedule mapped the day of the household so exactly that you could nearly read the hour from what was on. The morning and the early afternoon belonged to the woman alone in the house with her work, and to her the networks sold the daytime serials that had come over from radio, where, as the Depression lectures noted, the soap makers had sponsored and named them. To her they also sold the game show, and the sharpest specimen of the age was Queen for a Day. Ordinary women came on and competed by telling the country their misfortunes — a sick child, a husband unable to work, a household lacking the one machine that might ease an impossible week — and an applause meter measured the studio audience’s pity, and the woman whose hardship drew the loudest sympathy was draped in a velvet robe and a sable-trimmed cape, crowned, handed roses, and sent home with the washing machine or the wheelchair she had asked for. Sentiment, dependence, and the appliance as salvation, all inside a half hour, and a clear window onto how the era saw the woman and what it offered her.

When school let out the dial passed to the children, who came home to the slapstick of the Three Stooges and the reruns of a caped Superman, and who owned the whole of Saturday morning, an empire of cartoons built expressly for them and for the cereal makers who paid to reach them. Then the father came home and the evening drew the family together for the shared prime-time hours, and the common culture reached its daily peak. It was mostly a placid arrangement, and where its placidity was exposed as fraud the exposure landed hard: the quiz-show scandal of the late fifties, when the country learned that its most gripping program of clever contestants had been secretly fed the answers, briefly shook the trust the living room placed in the box. Kennedy’s new broadcasting chief told the industry in 1961 that its offerings, watched end to end, amounted to a vast wasteland. The audience mostly kept watching anyway.

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How the Country Learned of Itself

One part of the schedule grew from an afterthought into an institution over the course of the decade, and it would matter more than any of the rest. At the start of the fifties the evening news was a fifteen-minute reading of headlines by a man at a desk, an appendage to the entertainment. By the early sixties it had become the way the nation learned of itself. The team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who signed off each night saying good night to each other, drew audiences a variety show would have envied; and at the other network Walter Cronkite took the anchor chair and would in time be measured, in the polls, as the most trusted man in the country. In the autumn of 1963 the broadcast stretched from fifteen minutes to a full half hour, a small change that marked a large one: the television set had become the hearth where the family not only laughed together but found out together what had happened in the world that day. A country that had read its news in a thousand different papers, each with its own city and its own slant, now increasingly heard it in one of two or three voices, at the same hour, in the same words.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Closing: Four Days in November

The medium and the era came of age in the same instant, and it fell on a weekend at the end of November 1963. When the President was shot in Dallas on a Friday afternoon, the country turned to the box in the corner and did not turn away for four days. The networks put aside their schedules and their commercials and simply stayed on the air, and a nation of families sat before the same sets and learned together, in the same moment, that the President was dead; watched together the return of the body, the widow in her stained suit, the small son’s salute; and watched, on the Sunday, live and unbelieving, as a man stepped out of a crowd in a police basement and shot the President’s accused killer before their eyes. For four days the whole common culture this lecture has described — the shared hearth, the same images in every head, the single voice speaking to the entire house at once — held the country in one long collective vigil, and did it with a dignity that surprised even the men who ran it.

It was the surface at its most complete, and it was very nearly the last time it would be so whole. The placid suburb, the flattering sitcom, the reassuring western, the trusted voice at the desk: all of it rested on a sameness that felt permanent and was not. Underneath the picture window, in the coffeehouses and the record stores and the minds of the children who had grown up in front of the box, other things were already stirring that the surface could not contain and would not survive. Those are the undercurrents, and they are where the account turns next.

[ END OF LECTURE ]

End of Lecture — The Picture Window

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The Promissory Note

The Fifties — The Color Line, 1947–1963

Opening: An Orange Station Wagon

In the spring of 1961, after a Cardinals exhibition game at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg, three of the best baseball players in America would walk out of the ballpark, cross the street, and climb into an orange station wagon that carried them to a boarding house in the Black section of town, because the hotel where their teammates stayed would not have them. The three were Bill White, the first baseman; Curt Flood, the center fielder; and Bob Gibson, the pitcher — men who within a few years would win world championships for St. Louis, and who in March of 1961 could not sleep under the same roof as the men they won them with.

The breakfast was what brought it into the open. On the ninth of March the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce held its annual “Salute to Baseball,” a morning to toast the teams that brought the city its spring tourist money, and the invitations went only to the white players. White saw the guest list posted in the clubhouse and went to the Associated Press. He was not a man easily dismissed as a malcontent — college-educated, precise, courteous — and what he said carried the further because of it. “When will we be made to feel like humans?” he asked. The thing, he told a reporter, kept gnawing at his heart. Two local Black physicians who had for years opened their homes to the ballplayers, Ralph Wimbish and Robert Swain of the NAACP, had lately decided to stop, precisely so that the clubs would have to face what they had been able to ignore. The Cardinals’ own publicity man, sent down to calm White before he made more noise, took one look at the situation and told him to make more noise.

What the club did in answer is the part worth holding onto. The Cardinals rented an entire motel the next spring so that the whole team, Black and white, could live together with their wives and children under one roof. And Stan Musial — the greatest Cardinal of them all, a man who every spring rented a private house for his family and had no need of any motel — gave up the house and moved into the motel with the team. The most beloved white player in the city lent his enormous standing to the simple proposition that the team would stay together. Passing tourists on the highway could see the result: Black and white children in the same swimming pool, players’ families at the same cookout, in a Florida where such a sight was still rare enough to stop traffic.

Fourteen years had passed since Jackie Robinson walked onto Ebbets Field and broke the color line in the national game. That a Black man could star for a great team was, by 1961, settled and celebrated. That he could sleep in the same hotel was not. The distance between those two facts is the subject: the long gap between what the country had conceded in principle and what it still withheld in practice, a gap that had been festering under the placid surface of the age and was, in these years, forcing itself at last into the open.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Engines

The gap had been there since the founding, written into a republic that declared all men created equal and held four million of them as property, and it had survived a civil war and the collapse of Reconstruction into the system of law and custom the South called segregation and the country as a whole mostly tolerated. What changed in these years was not the principle, which had been available since Jefferson wrote it down, but the pressure behind it, and the pressure came from forces the earlier lectures have already met.

The first was movement. For decades Black Americans had been leaving the rural South for the cities of the North and West — the Great Migration, one of the largest internal movements of people in the country’s history — and in leaving they changed their weight. In the South they had been kept from the ballot; in Chicago and Detroit and New York they could vote, and in numbers large enough that both parties had to court them, which gave the question a purchase in national politics it had never had. The second was the war. A million Black Americans had served in the Second World War, fighting a racial tyranny abroad under a flag that segregated them in its own ranks, and they came home unwilling to be told they were unfit for a lunch counter. The third was the Cold War, which the earlier lectures traced in its foreign aspect and which had a domestic edge here: in a global contest for the loyalty of Asia and Africa and the newly independent nations, most of them not white, a lynching in Mississippi was a gift to Soviet propaganda, and the State Department knew it, so that the federal government acquired a reason of its own, rooted in national strategy, to want Jim Crow gone. The fourth was television. Cruelty that had been a local matter, known in the South and unseen elsewhere, now arrived in Northern living rooms in the evening — the mob, the dogs, the hoses — and a nation that could look away from a newspaper found it harder to look away from the film.

Against these pressures stood institutions and traditions that did not yield easily, and it does the period no service to pretend the resistance was mere wickedness. The federal structure genuinely divided authority, and left a great deal of ordinary life to the states, so that a governor could plausibly claim he was defending local self-government and not merely a racial order. The white South was defending a way of living it had known for generations and sincerely believed in, and experienced each federal intrusion as an assault on its homes and its customs by a distant power. And the Democratic Party, as the overview showed, was chained to that South, its senators holding their chairmanships by seniority and able to strangle any bill, so that a Democratic president who moved on race risked breaking his own coalition. The story of these sixteen years is the story of the pressure at last exceeding the resistance, told through the institutions that had to bend.

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The Law Moves

The first breach came in the courts, patiently and by design. A brilliant Black lawyer named Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of the Howard law school, had worked out the strategy in the 1930s: rather than assault segregation head-on, chip at its weakest edge, the graduate and professional schools, where the states plainly provided nothing equal for Black students, and build a chain of precedents that would in time make the whole doctrine of “separate but equal” collapse under its own logic. Houston trained the man who would carry it out, Thurgood Marshall, and won the early cases, and then died in 1950, four years before the verdict he had made inevitable.

That verdict was Brown v. Board of Education, handed down in May of 1954 by the Warren Court the earlier lectures have followed. Marshall argued it; the Court ruled, without a single dissent, that separate schools were inherently unequal, and struck down the constitutional foundation the whole Southern system rested on. It was, again, the unelected branch supplying a motion the elected branches would not make. But a ruling is not a fact on the ground, and the Court, in a second decision the following year, ordered desegregation to proceed “with all deliberate speed” — a phrase soft enough to be read as permission to delay, and so it was read. The white South answered with what it called massive resistance. A hundred and one members of Congress signed a manifesto denouncing the decision; state legislatures passed laws to obstruct it; one Virginia county closed its public schools entirely rather than integrate them, for five years. Robinson had integrated a baseball diamond by playing well. Integrating a schoolhouse would require the force of the state, and the state was in no hurry to supply it.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Blood and Buses

The pressure that the courts could not generate came instead from below, and it began in blood. In the summer of 1955 a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till, visiting family in Mississippi, was said to have spoken forwardly to a white woman in a store, and for that two men took him in the night, tortured him, shot him, and sank his body in a river. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, brought him home to Chicago and insisted on an open casket, so that the tens of thousands who filed past and the millions who saw the photographs in the Black press would see exactly what had been done to her boy. An all-white jury acquitted the killers, who later sold their confession to a magazine, safe from a second trial. For a generation of young Black Americans, the murder of Emmett Till was the moment the abstraction became unbearable.

That winter the abstraction found its form of answer. In Montgomery, Alabama, in December of 1955, a seamstress and NAACP secretary named Rosa Parks declined to give up her bus seat to a white man and was arrested — no accident of tired feet, but a deliberate act by a trained activist whom the city’s Black leadership had been waiting for. They had the organization ready; the Women’s Political Council and a veteran organizer named E. D. Nixon put a boycott of the buses into motion within days, and to lead it they turned to the new pastor in town, twenty-six years old, named Martin Luther King, Jr. The Black citizens of Montgomery walked and carpooled and stayed off the buses for three hundred and eighty-one days, through the bombing of King’s house and the harassment of their car pools, until the federal courts ruled the segregation of the buses unconstitutional and the city gave way. The boycott made King a national figure and demonstrated a new weapon — the disciplined, nonviolent withdrawal of cooperation, borrowed in part from Gandhi and rooted in the Black church — that could bring economic and moral pressure to bear where votes and lawsuits could not reach.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Soldiers at Central High

In 1957 the conflict between the pressure and the resistance produced its first great constitutional crisis, and it turned on federal power as much as on race. Nine Black students prepared to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, under a federal court order, and the governor, Orval Faubus, called out the Arkansas National Guard to bar the door against them. A photograph went around the world of one of the nine, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, walking alone through a screaming mob, and the NAACP’s Daisy Bates shepherded the students through weeks of siege. Dwight Eisenhower, who had been cool to Brown and doubted that law could change the human heart, now faced a governor openly defying a federal court, and on that ground — the supremacy of federal authority over a defiant state — he acted, federalizing the Guard and sending the 101st Airborne Division to escort nine children into a high school. Federal troops had not enforced the rights of Black citizens in the South since Reconstruction. The soldiers stayed the year.

Congress, meanwhile, produced the first civil rights act since Reconstruction that same year, a measure aimed mainly at voting and so weakened in the passage that it accomplished little in the near term. Its chief significance was that it passed at all, and that the man who maneuvered it through a Senate full of Southern committee chairmen was the majority leader, Lyndon Johnson of Texas — a Southerner himself, who understood the machinery well enough to move it, and who would return to this business later with far greater effect.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Young Take Over

At the start of 1960 the movement changed hands and quickened. On the first of February four freshmen from a Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter reserved for whites, ordered coffee, were refused, and stayed in their seats. The next day they came back with more, and the day after with more still, and within weeks the sit-in had spread to dozens of cities across the South — students in coats and ties, doing their homework at the counters while food was thrown at them, keeping a discipline that made their tormentors look like the savages. Out of the sit-ins came a new organization of the young, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, impatient with the caution of their elders.

The next year they took the buses. An interracial group calling themselves Freedom Riders set out in 1961 to test whether the desegregation of interstate travel the courts had ordered meant anything in the Deep South, and found out that it did not. One of their buses was firebombed in Anniston, Alabama; in Birmingham and Montgomery the riders were beaten with pipes and bats while the police arranged to arrive late. The Kennedy administration, new in office and reluctant to spend its Southern political capital, wished the whole thing would stop, and then found it could not let American citizens be beaten off public buses, and grudgingly sent marshals and pressed the regulators until the interstate terminals were desegregated in fact. The following year a Black Air Force veteran named James Meredith sought to enroll at the University of Mississippi, the governor stood in his way, and the campus erupted in a night of rioting that left two dead and ended only when federal troops restored order and walked Meredith to class. Each of these was the same lesson taught again: the order existed on paper, and turning the paper into fact required someone to put their body in the way, and someone with a badge or a bayonet to make the state comply.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Birmingham and the March

In the spring of 1963 the movement chose its ground deliberately, and chose Birmingham, the most rigidly segregated big city in the South, whose commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, could be relied upon to answer provocation with brutality in front of the cameras. King was arrested there and wrote, on the margins of a newspaper, a letter to white clergymen who had called his campaign unwise and untimely — a patient, blistering defense of the refusal to wait any longer, on the ground that justice too long delayed is justice denied. And when the campaign sent its children to march, Connor turned police dogs and fire hoses on them, and the film of it — of water strong enough to strip bark off trees knocking schoolchildren down the street, of dogs lunging at teenagers — went out on the evening news and did more to move Northern opinion than a decade of argument. Birmingham desegregated its downtown under the pressure. That June the governor of Alabama stood in a schoolhouse door to bar two Black students, and that evening President Kennedy went on television and named the thing at last a moral issue, as old as the scriptures and as plain as the Constitution, and promised the civil rights bill that would become the great law of the following year. Hours after he spoke, the NAACP’s man in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was shot dead in his own driveway.

The period closes, as it should, at the Lincoln Memorial on the twenty-eighth of August, 1963. A quarter of a million people came to Washington, in a march conceived and driven by two men the histories often crowd out — A. Philip Randolph, the old labor leader who had first threatened such a march back in 1941, and Bayard Rustin, the organizer who built the thing in eight weeks and was kept from its front rank because he was a homosexual and a former Communist and his enemies would have used it. From the steps King spoke the words that gave this lecture its title. He said the marchers had come to the capital to cash a check — that the founders had signed a promissory note to which every American was to be heir, guaranteeing the rights of life and liberty, and that America had defaulted on that note where its Black citizens were concerned, returning it marked insufficient funds. They refused, he said, to believe the bank of justice bankrupt. Then he set the note aside and told the country about his dream.

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Closing: What Was Paid and What Was Owed

The note was not paid in full that afternoon, and it would be a false comfort to end as though it were. Within weeks a bomb in a Birmingham church killed four girls in their Sunday dresses. Within months the President who had finally spoken was dead. The great laws that the era had made ready — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — belong to the years just past this account’s close, pushed through at last by the Southerner Lyndon Johnson, and even they left whole territories of the problem untouched: the segregation of the Northern city, which no court had ordered and no law easily reached; the economic distance that legal equality did nothing by itself to close; the anger that would break, within two years of the March, into the burning of Watts and turn the movement toward harder questions than a lunch counter. The creed and the practice had been forced closer together than they had ever been, and they were not yet the same thing.

Return, at the end, to the three men in the orange station wagon, because their later lives measure both the distance traveled and the distance left. Bob Gibson pitched the Cardinals to the championships of 1964 and 1967 and to the edge of a third, as fierce and proud a competitor as the game has seen, and was received into its hall of fame. Bill White, who had stood up in St. Petersburg and refused to feel less than human, went on to become the first Black man to broadcast the games regularly and then the first to run a major league, president of the National League. And Curt Flood, a few years after this period ends, was traded like a parcel from one city to another and refused to report, and challenged the reserve clause that bound a ballplayer to one team for life with no more say in it than a chattel — telling the commissioner that he was not a piece of property to be bought and sold, and calling himself, for all his salary, a well-paid slave. He lost, and it cost him his career, and the freedom he sued for arrived a few years later for everyone but him. The pride that made White speak at the breakfast was the same pride that made Flood refuse the trade, and it was the same pride that had walked Montgomery for a year and sat at the counters in Greensboro: the refusal, at last, to be treated as less than a man. That refusal is what these years put beyond taking back, even as they left the larger debt still standing on the books.

[ END OF LECTURE ]

Chronology, 1947–1963

• 1947, April — Jackie Robinson debuts for the Brooklyn Dodgers

• 1948, July — Truman desegregates the armed forces (E.O. 9981)

• 1950 — Charles Hamilton Houston dies; Sweatt and McLaurin chip at “separate but equal”

• 1954, May 17 — Brown v. Board of Education

• 1955, August — the murder of Emmett Till

• 1955, December — Rosa Parks arrested; the Montgomery bus boycott begins

• 1956 — the Southern Manifesto; the boycott wins in the courts

• 1957, September — Little Rock; Eisenhower sends the 101st Airborne

• 1957 — first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction

• 1960, February — the Greensboro sit-ins; SNCC founded

• 1961 — the Freedom Rides; the Cardinals confront segregated spring training

• 1962, September–October — James Meredith and the riot at Ole Miss

• 1963, spring — Birmingham; King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

• 1963, June — Kennedy’s civil rights address; Medgar Evers murdered

• 1963, August 28 — the March on Washington; “I Have a Dream”

End of Lecture — The Promissory Note

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UPDATE: A related article in Quillette on a revival of a 1972 play based on House Un-American Activities transcripts.

The Sphere and the Wall

The Fifties — The Cold War, Part Two: 1957–1963

Opening: A Courtroom in St. Louis

On the morning of the sixth of June, 1956, in a courtroom of the federal building in St. Louis, a young woman named Ann Kling sat before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and declined, courteously and without a tremor, to become an informer. She was not evasive about herself. She told the committee where she was born, in Bradford, Pennsylvania; that she had gone to the University of Missouri and taken her degree in 1944; that she had joined the Communist Party in St. Louis that same year, in the last summer of the war, when the Soviet Union was an ally and the Party seemed to a certain kind of idealistic young person the party of the future; that she had worked in its district office writing leaflets and running the mimeograph, and had kept things going when the men went off to the Army; and that she had left it all in 1947 and been, as she put it, expelled for desertion. She would tell them anything they wished to know about her own life. What she would not do was name anyone else. “I am not a tattletale,” she said, “and I don’t want to snitch on anybody.” When they directed her to answer, she said that telling on other people was an abhorrent thing to her, and that her conscience would not permit it.

The committee understood the ground she had chosen, and understood that it was dangerous. That same morning other St. Louis witnesses had refused to answer on the Fifth Amendment, the privilege against self-incrimination, which was the safe refusal, the one the courts had ruled could not be punished. Ann Kling did not hide behind the Fifth. She rested on conscience and on the First Amendment, which was the brave refusal and the exposed one, the refusal that left a witness open to a charge of contempt of Congress. She knew it. Her lawyer had spoken only the day before to the counsel in a pending case on exactly this question, and she told the committee she would wait and see what the Supreme Court had to say.

The questioning pressed hardest on a man named Ralph Shaw, whom the committee’s informants had named as the organizer of the St. Louis Party, and whose duties, they had been told, Ann had carried on while he served in the Army. She turned aside every question about him, until the counsel put to her not a question about the Party but a question about a family: was Ralph Shaw not her brother-in-law? To that, and only that, she said yes. He was her husband’s sister’s husband — the man who, with his wife Sarah, had brought Ann together with Merle Kling in the first place. So the plain shape of what the committee was asking became clear. It was asking a woman to name, as subversives, the relatives who had given her her marriage. She would not do it, and for refusing she was cited for contempt, and she went home to University City to wait.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Bet Comes Due

The wait was not long, and the bet came good. On the seventeenth of June, 1957 — one of the days that season when the Warren Court handed down decision after decision curbing the anti-Communist machinery — the Court ruled in Watkins v. United States on the case her lawyer had been watching. John Watkins was a labor organizer who had done just what Ann Kling did: answered fully about himself and refused to name others he believed had long since left the Party. Chief Justice Warren, writing for the Court, reversed his contempt conviction and laid down the principle that there was no power in Congress to expose private persons for the sake of exposure, and that a witness was entitled to know how the questions put to him served a genuine legislative purpose. It was precisely the ground on which Ann had stood a year early. In the wake of the decision her contempt charge was dropped. One may reasonably suspect that the United States Attorney was glad of the excuse — the case had never been popular in St. Louis. Even the Globe-Democrat, a conservative paper not given to sympathy for former Communists, had told her story kindly, as the story of a woman who had left the Party for love and marriage, and a prosecutor reading his morning paper could see which way the wind in the city blew.

Before the law reached her, though, people had. This is the part of the episode most worth holding onto, because it runs against the grain of the fear. A hearing of that kind was designed to make association poisonous, to teach a community that standing near an accused person was itself a danger. In her case the design failed. Jerome Rubenstein, one of the attorneys, stayed with the family through the ordeal. And at Washington University, where Merle Kling was a young member of the faculty, the chairman of his department declared that Merle’s position was in no way compromised by his wife’s summons or his family’s past. The chairman was Thomas Eliot — a man of the founding Eliot family of the university, and no radical anyone could wave away, but a New Deal Democrat who had helped draft the Social Security Act and sat in Congress, and who would in a few years become the university’s chancellor. When a man of that standing put himself between a faculty member and the pressure of the moment, the pressure broke against him. The machinery built to isolate people met, in one Missouri family, a set of ordinary loyalties that would not isolate them.

Something of the episode stayed in the family for good. Ann and Merle Kling carried out of it a settled contempt for Richard Nixon, who had no part in the St. Louis hearing but who had shown, in the Hiss case a few years before, how a young man could ride this kind of proceeding to national office — who had made the exposure hearing a ladder, and climbed it. That the residue took the shape of a lifelong dislike of one man is the way great public fevers usually settle into private life: not as a thesis about an era, but as a name one does not care to hear spoken well.

The thread that runs from that courtroom outward is the one carried over from the first part of this account. The era justified extraordinary measures by the Communist threat, and the measures ran along a single logic from the small to the enormous — from a subpoena served on a St. Louis housewife to a government overthrown in secret in Guatemala. What follows in this lecture is the same era’s contest abroad, in the years when the fear was at its height and the cracks in the adversary, had anyone cared to read them, were widest. And the hinge of it all is the very year the fever began to break in the law. In June of 1957 the Court told the committee it could not expose for exposure’s sake. In October of the same year, a small metal sphere crossed the American sky and changed the subject.

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The Beep in the Sky

On the fourth of October, 1957, the Soviet Union put into orbit a polished aluminum ball the size of a beach ball, called Sputnik, which circled the earth every ninety-six minutes and broadcast a steady beep that any ham operator could tune in as it passed overhead. It weighed a hundred and eighty pounds and did nothing but orbit and beep, and it terrified the United States. The terror had a logic: if the Soviets could loft that ball, they could loft a warhead, and the ocean that had protected the country through all its wars no longer protected it. But the terror ran past logic into the national character. Americans stood in their yards at dusk to watch the thing go over, a Russian machine crossing an American sky as if it owned it, and asked how a backward peasant country that had been an ally within living memory had beaten the arsenal of democracy into space.

The answer the country gave itself was that it had gone soft — that its schools taught life adjustment while Soviet schools taught physics, that its children read about Dick and Jane while Soviet children did calculus. Books deploring the state of American education, which had been selling already, now sold furiously. Congress, which could rarely be moved to spend on schools, passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958, pouring federal money into science and mathematics and foreign languages, the word “Defense” in the title doing the work of making a school appropriation into a weapon. A new civilian space agency, NASA, was stood up the same year. The first American answer to Sputnik, a Vanguard rocket, rose four feet off its pad on live television that December and fell back and exploded, and the newspapers called it Flopnik, and the humiliation was complete until Wernher von Braun’s team put up a satellite of their own early in 1958.

Beneath the schoolroom panic ran a graver one about missiles. It was widely asserted, and believed, that the Soviets had opened a “missile gap,” pulling ahead in the intercontinental rockets that would decide a war, and the charge became a weapon in the 1960 election, wielded against the party in power. Like the bomber gap that had frightened the country a few years before, the missile gap was an illusion; when the reconnaissance satellites finally looked, the gap ran the other way, and heavily, in America’s favor. The pattern set in the first part of this account held with a grim regularity: a real Soviet achievement, correctly alarming, was folded into an image of relentless Soviet superiority that the facts did not support. And the achievements kept coming to feed the image. In April of 1961 the Soviets put the first human being into orbit, Yuri Gagarin, once again first, once again while America was still preparing, and the sting of it drove a young President, a few weeks later, to commit the country to landing a man on the moon before the decade was out.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Adversary Overrated

The overestimate was not confined to rockets and schoolrooms. It reached into the coolest and most numerate quarter of American life, the economics profession, and there it lasted longest. In 1961 the most widely used economics textbook in the country, written by an economist who would soon win the Nobel Prize, carried a chart comparing American and Soviet output and projecting the lines forward. Soviet production stood at about half the American level, but it was assumed to be growing so much faster that the chart showed the two lines crossing — the Soviet economy overtaking the American — somewhere between 1984 and 1997. The projection was not a fringe opinion; it was the mainstream teaching, printed for millions of students, and it was echoed in the other leading textbooks of the day. As the decades passed and the crossing failed to arrive, later editions did not abandon the forecast but slid the date quietly forward, to the turn of the century and beyond, attributing the delay to bad weather and other misfortunes rather than to anything wrong in the seeing.

The error was the same one the country was making everywhere, dressed in equations. A command economy could point its whole strength at heavy industry and steel and rockets, unbothered by what its consumers wanted, and to observers who mistook that single-mindedness for efficiency it looked like a machine that must, in time, outproduce a democracy distracted by refrigerators and automobiles. What the observers could not see, because the closed society kept it hidden and the official numbers concealed it, was that the same command that could build a rocket could not reliably deliver bread, that the collective farms were a slow catastrophe, and that a system holding its people by force was spending strength it did not have. The intelligence agencies overestimated Soviet output year after year. The economists projected its triumph. The country had frightened itself into crediting its rival with a vigor the rival was faking.

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The Kitchen and the Summit

The contest was not all rockets and abstractions; it had its farces and its face-to-face encounters, and no two men embodied them better than the ebullient Soviet premier and the American Vice President. In the summer of 1959, at an American exhibition in Moscow, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev fell into an impromptu argument in the middle of a model American kitchen, surrounded by the washing machines and dishwashers and bright appliances of an ordinary suburban house, and the two of them jabbed fingers at each other over which system better served the common man. Nixon’s argument was the kitchen itself — that the true measure of a society was whether the wife of a steelworker could own such things, and in America she could. It was a shrewd choice of battlefield, because on the ground of consumer abundance the contest was already decided, and the cameras that carried the exchange home showed it.

That autumn Khrushchev came to America, and toured it for thirteen days, and revealed himself as the great human character of the Cold War — a coal miner’s son of little schooling, crude and quick and theatrical, by turns charming and menacing. He argued with corn farmers in Iowa, watched Hollywood shoot a musical and pronounced the dancing decadent, and, informed that he could not go to Disneyland for reasons of security, threw a public tantrum, demanding to know whether there was cholera there or whether gangsters had seized the place. The buffoonery was real and so was the danger, and both were instructive: this was the man whose finger was on the other button, and he was neither the cold master-planner of American nightmare nor a fool, but something more unsettling than either, a gambler.

The gambles turned dark the next spring. In May of 1960 the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane deep over their territory and captured its pilot alive, and the Eisenhower administration, not knowing the pilot had survived, put out a cover story about a lost weather plane. Khrushchev sprang the trap, produced the pilot and the wreckage and the surveillance cameras, and left the President of the United States caught in a plain public lie. The summit meeting in Paris that was to have crowned years of cautious thaw collapsed within days, Khrushchev storming out, the invitation for Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union withdrawn. Whatever softening the two sides had managed in the middle of the decade hardened again, and the new administration that took office in 1961 inherited a contest that had turned cold once more.

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Kennedy’s Inheritance and the Wall

The young President inherited it and stumbled at once. In April of 1961 a brigade of Cuban exiles, trained and armed by the Central Intelligence Agency under a plan laid in the previous administration, landed at the Bay of Pigs to overthrow Fidel Castro, who had taken Cuba two years before and drawn it toward Moscow. The landing was a fiasco; the promised rising did not come, the air cover was withheld, and within days the brigade was dead or captured. Kennedy took the blame publicly and drew from it a lasting distrust of the confident men of the intelligence agencies, which would serve him well before long. Two months later he met Khrushchev in Vienna, and the Soviet premier, smelling weakness after Cuba, bullied and blustered and pressed him hard over Berlin, and Kennedy came away shaken.

Berlin was the running sore, and in the summer of 1961 it produced the emblem of the whole era. West Berlin was an island of the free world set deep inside communist East Germany, and through it East Germans had been draining westward for years — nearly three million since the war, a thousand and more on some days, and the ones who left were disproportionately the young, the skilled, the educated, the people a country cannot spare. On the thirteenth of August the East German regime, with Soviet backing, sealed the border in the night with wire and then with concrete, and built the wall that would stand for twenty-eight years. In the West the wall was received as an act of aggression, one more advance of an expanding tyranny, and Kennedy could say only that a wall was a great deal better than a war. But consider what the wall in fact was. A regime does not build a wall to keep an enemy out; the guns of this one faced inward. It was a structure built to keep a nation’s own people from leaving it — a confession, in concrete and barbed wire, that given the chance to walk away, enough of its citizens would walk that the state could survive only by caging them. The most alarming symbol of Soviet strength in these years was, read honestly, the plainest admission of Soviet failure. Almost no one in the West read it so.

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Thirteen Days

The confrontation that had been building since the war came to its head over Cuba in October of 1962, and for a fortnight the world stood closer to destruction than it had ever stood. American reconnaissance photographs revealed that the Soviets were secretly installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles from Florida, weapons that would fall on American cities with almost no warning. Kennedy convened his advisers in secret, and the generals urged him to bomb the sites and invade, which would very likely have meant war. He chose instead a naval blockade of the island, which he called a quarantine, and a public demand that the missiles be removed, and then the two governments stood facing each other with the machinery of annihilation cocked while the world held its breath. Soviet ships steamed toward the blockade line and, at the last, turned back. On the worst day an American plane was shot down over Cuba and its pilot killed, and the pressure to strike became nearly irresistible, and still Kennedy held.

It ended not in a battle but in a bargain, and a retreat. Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba, and, in a part of the deal kept secret at the time, a quiet American promise to remove some obsolete missiles from Turkey. Because the concession was hidden, the world saw only that the Soviet premier had put missiles into Cuba and then, faced with American resolve, had taken them out again — that the man who had bullied Kennedy in Vienna had, at the brink, been the one to blink. It was recorded as an American triumph and a Soviet humiliation, and within his own government it was recorded against Khrushchev’s name.

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Closing: The Confession and the Verdict

The lecture that began in a St. Louis courtroom ends with two confessions, one of concrete and one delivered in a Kremlin meeting room, and both of them say the thing the era could not hear.

The wall was the first. For as long as it stood the West pointed to it as the proof of communism’s menace, and it was that; but it was first of all the proof of communism’s weakness, a regime reduced to imprisoning its own population to keep the population from voting with its feet. The second came in October of 1964, when Nikita Khrushchev, returning from a holiday, was met by his own colleagues and informed that he was finished. They forced him into retirement — the first ruler in the history of the Soviet state to be removed by his fellows rather than dying in office or being shot — and the charges they brought against him amounted to the complaint that he had run the system badly: the harebrained schemes, the farms that could not feed the country so that the workers’ state had been reduced to buying grain from Canada, the reckless gamble over Cuba that had ended in retreat. The men who ran the machine had concluded, and acted on the conclusion, that the machine was being run into the ground. They reached that verdict in the very years when the United States was most convinced that the machine was a juggernaut destined to bury it. That is the whole of the theme these two lectures have carried, stated by the adversary’s own leadership: the enemy the country had imagined ten feet tall was, at the moment of the country’s greatest fear, quietly firing its captain for driving badly.

There is a smaller verdict worth setting beside the large one, and it returns to where this account began. When the machinery of that fear reached into an ordinary family in St. Louis and asked a young woman to inform on the relatives who had given her her marriage, she declined, and the law in time agreed she had the right to, and the people around her declined to abandon her while she waited. The great contest abroad was decided by the hidden rot in a closed system that the frightened could not see. The small contest at home was decided by a conscience that would not bend and by a handful of neighbors who would not treat a friend as radioactive. Both outcomes rebuked the overestimate of the age, the one at the scale of empires and the other at the scale of a single kitchen table, and both were invisible to a country too busy watching the sky for the next beeping sphere to notice that it had already won.

[ END OF LECTURE ]

Chronology, 1956–1964

• 1956, June — Ann Kling testifies before HUAC in St. Louis; cited for contempt

• 1957, June 17 — Watkins v. United States; her contempt charge later dropped

• 1957, October 4 — Sputnik launched

• 1957, December — Vanguard rocket fails on live television (”Flopnik”)

• 1958, January — Explorer 1, the first American satellite

• 1958 — National Defense Education Act; NASA established

• 1959, January — Castro takes power in Cuba

• 1959, July — the “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow

• 1959, September — Khrushchev’s tour of the United States

• 1960, May — U-2 shot down; the Paris summit collapses

• 1961, April — Bay of Pigs; Gagarin orbits the earth

• 1961, June — Kennedy and Khrushchev meet at Vienna

• 1961, August 13 — the Berlin Wall goes up

• 1962, October — the Cuban missile crisis

• 1963, November — Kennedy assassinated in Dallas

• 1964, October — Khrushchev removed by his own colleagues

End of Cold War, Part Two — The Sphere and the Wall

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The Enemy Ten Feet Tall

The Fifties — The Cold War, Part One: 1947–1956

Opening: “Have You No Sense of Decency?”

By the spring of 1954 the junior senator from Wisconsin had been the most feared man in American public life for four years, and on the ninth of June, in the Senate Caucus Room, before the television cameras that had carried the Army-McCarthy hearings into living rooms for a month, he destroyed himself in the space of a few sentences. The Army’s counsel was a courtly Boston lawyer named Joseph Welch, and McCarthy, cornered and casting about for a blow to land, chose to attack a young associate in Welch’s own firm for having once belonged, in his student days, to a left-wing lawyers’ guild. It was gratuitous, and it was cruel, and Welch had not expected it. He let a silence fall, and then he said that until that moment he had never truly grasped the senator’s cruelty or recklessness, and he asked the question that has outlived every speech McCarthy ever gave: had the senator no sense of decency, at long last? When McCarthy tried to press on, Welch cut him off and would not yield, and the gallery broke into applause — spectators applauding in a Senate hearing, against a sitting senator — and McCarthy sat blinking, turning to his aides, asking what it was he had done. He had done nothing he had not done a hundred times before. What had changed was that the country was watching, and had begun to be ashamed.

That scene is the natural place to begin, because it is where the fever broke. But the fever is the subject, not the man who ran the highest one, and the fever was real, older than McCarthy, shared across both parties, and rooted in a fear that was not baseless. A great theme runs under this lecture and the one that follows it, and it is worth stating plainly at the outset: the United States came to see its adversary as more disciplined, more efficient, and more inevitable than that adversary in fact was. It imagined an enemy ten feet tall. That image was not stupid — the Soviet system was closed, its numbers were fabricated, and much of its real weakness was genuinely hidden from view — but it was wrong, and being wrong about it shaped what American leaders felt free to do and, more tellingly, what they felt they could not afford to do. How that image was built, what real events fed it, and what it was constitutionally unable to see is the story from the first postwar alarm to the year the adversary’s own house shook in plain sight.

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The Long Telegram

The intellectual frame arrived before the institutions did, in a very long cable. In February of 1946 a mid-level diplomat in the Moscow embassy named George Kennan, asked to explain why the Soviets were behaving as they were, answered at eight thousand words. The Soviet state, he wrote, was driven not by anything the West did but by an insecurity so ancient and so total that it required a hostile outer world to justify the dictatorship at home; it could not be charmed and would not be reasoned with, and it would press outward wherever it met no resistance, and recede wherever it met firm and patient counter-pressure. The following year, publishing the argument in Foreign Affairs over the signature “X,” he gave the policy its name: containment. The book that Kennan wrote, however, is not the book that was read. He had meant a political and economic contest, the shoring up of confident societies against subversion; what the government built from his argument, over his own growing dismay, was a global military posture, an arms race, and a permanent war footing. The doctrine mutated as it passed through the institutions, which is a pattern this whole era will show — an idea enters the machinery of a great state and comes out the other side transformed into something its author no longer recognizes.

The machinery came quickly. In March of 1947 the President went before Congress to ask aid for Greece and Turkey and, in doing so, committed the country in principle to the support of free peoples everywhere resisting subjugation — the Truman Doctrine, a sentence that would be cashed in places Truman never imagined. That June, Secretary of State Marshall offered Europe the vast recovery program that bears his name, some thirteen billion dollars to rebuild the economies in which, it was feared, hunger would otherwise ripen into communism. In 1948 the Soviets blockaded the western sectors of Berlin, and rather than fight or withdraw the West supplied a city of two million by air for eleven months, a plane landing every few minutes, a contest of nerve won without a shot. In 1949 came the North Atlantic alliance, the first peacetime military commitment to Europe in the Republic’s history, a plain departure from the tradition against entangling alliances that the country judged the moment to require. And in 1950 a State Department team under Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor and his temperamental opposite, produced the document known as NSC-68, which called for a tripling of military spending and a permanent mobilization of the whole society against the Soviet threat — a blueprint that sat on the shelf as too expensive until a war in Asia, that same year, made it national policy overnight.

Under all of it lay a set of asymmetries the era felt in its bones. The adversary was closed and could enforce obedience; the open society could not. The adversary could reach into the West’s own political life — its unions, its student movements, later its civil rights organizations — and there was no reciprocal reach, because in a country where the Party controlled all political activity there was no independent movement for the West to influence in return. The adversary’s leaders could concentrate single-mindedly on military power and imperial expansion; American leaders had to please farmers and steelworkers and voters, and could give the contest only what a democracy’s crowded attention would spare. Each of these was a real feature of the difference between the two systems. Each was also read in the most alarming possible direction, as though discipline were the same thing as strength and the freedom to ignore one’s own people were an advantage rather than the seed of a rot that would, in the end, prove fatal.

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The Year Everything Broke

Two events in 1949 turned a wary confidence into something closer to panic. In late August the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb, years before American estimates had thought it possible, and the monopoly on which the whole postwar sense of security had rested was simply gone. Within months the explanation arrived in the person of Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had worked at Los Alamos and who confessed, in early 1950, to having handed the implosion design to Moscow throughout the war. The bomb had not merely been matched; it had been stolen, from inside the most secret project the country had ever run, which meant the enemy was not only strong but among us.

Then, in October, the world’s most populous country went communist. Mao’s forces completed their conquest of the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek’s government fled to Taiwan, and a quarter of humanity passed, as Americans understood it, into the enemy camp. The government refused to recognize the new regime and worked for two decades to keep it out of China’s seat at the United Nations, so that the Security Council would not gain a second communist veto — a fiction maintained long after it had ceased to persuade anyone. At home the loss produced a bitter and consequential question: who lost China? The question assumed the country had been America’s to lose, and its pursuit fell hardest on the men best equipped to have understood what happened — the State Department’s China specialists, Foreign Service officers like John Stewart Service and John Paton Davies and John Carter Vincent, who had reported honestly through the war that the Nationalist government was corrupt and failing and that the Communists were winning. For having been right they were accused of having wished it so, hounded through loyalty hearings, and driven out of the service. The scholar Owen Lattimore was named by McCarthy, falsely and flamboyantly, as the top Soviet agent in America. The immediate result was that the government purged itself of nearly everyone who knew East Asia deeply, which is one reason it would blunder there so badly in the decade to come — a case, and not the last, of the fear doing lasting damage to the very institutions that were supposed to protect the country.

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Fire in Asia

On the twenty-fifth of June, 1950, the army of communist North Korea poured across the thirty-eighth parallel, and the abstract contest became a shooting war. To the men in Washington the invasion looked like the opening move of a coordinated communist offensive, Moscow testing whether the West would fight; that it was in large part Kim Il-sung’s own project, reluctantly blessed by Stalin, was not visible from where they stood, and the reading that mattered was the alarming one. Truman committed American forces under a United Nations flag, and NSC-68’s expensive vision of permanent rearmament became policy in a matter of weeks.

The war ran through violent reversals that mirrored the era’s swings of confidence. Driven to a last corner of the peninsula around Pusan, the American and allied forces seemed near to being pushed into the sea. Then, in September, MacArthur executed the landing at Inchon — an amphibious assault against a tidal harbor his own planners called impossible, brilliant and vindicated, which cut the North Korean army in half and sent it reeling back. Triumph curdled into overreach: the United Nations forces drove north toward the Yalu and the Chinese border, MacArthur promising the troops home by Christmas, and in November three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers came across the river and hurled them back down the peninsula in one of the worst reverses in American arms. The line eventually stabilized near where the war had begun, and there it stuck. MacArthur, chafing at a war he was forbidden to win, wanting to bomb China and unleash Chiang and perhaps use the atomic bomb, took his case to the public over the head of his commander, and in April of 1951 Truman relieved him — a deeply unpopular act at the time, and a necessary assertion that the elected government, and not a five-star general, decided where and how far the country went to war. MacArthur came home to ticker tape and told Congress that old soldiers just fade away, and faded. The fighting ground on into 1953 and ended in an armistice at the same parallel where it started, having cost some thirty-six thousand American dead and a far vaster number of Koreans and Chinese, and having settled nothing except that the contest would be permanent.

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The Enemy Within

The hunt at home was not McCarthy’s invention, and it did not begin with him. In 1947, well before anyone had heard of the senator, Truman established a loyalty program for federal employees, with boards empowered to weigh a person’s associations and beliefs and an Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations to weigh them against. That same year the House Un-American Activities Committee opened its long inquiry into Hollywood, and ten writers and directors who refused on principle to answer whether they had been communists went to prison for contempt and out into a blacklist that would wreck careers for a decade. The machinery of suspicion was built by the mainstream of both parties, in earnest, and in response to things that had actually happened.

Two cases gave the fear its human shape. Alger Hiss was a polished New Dealer, a State Department man who had been at Yalta, the very picture of the eastern establishment; when a rumpled former communist named Whittaker Chambers accused him of having passed secrets in the thirties, and produced microfilm hidden theatrically in a hollowed pumpkin, the confrontation split the country along lines of class and loyalty that would last a generation. A young congressman named Richard Nixon built his early career on pursuing it. Hiss could not be tried for espionage, the statute having run, but he was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying it, and Chambers set down the whole tragedy in a memoir, Witness, that became scripture for a rising conservatism. The other case ended in the electric chair: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, tried for running the spy ring that had helped deliver the bomb, convicted in 1951 and executed in 1953, the only American civilians ever put to death for espionage. That Julius was in fact a Soviet agent the later evidence would confirm; that Ethel was largely a lever to pressure her husband, and was sent to her death partly on her brother’s testimony that he afterward admitted he had shaded, is the kind of fact that makes the period so hard to hold steadily. The spies were real. The response to them was often unjust. Both things are true at once, and McCarthy is what happens when a demagogue discovers that a real fear can be ridden.

He rode it from February of 1950, when he stood up in Wheeling, West Virginia, and waved a piece of paper he said listed communists in the State Department — the number on it changed with the retelling, and no one ever saw the list, and it did not matter, because the accusation was the whole of the act. For four years he accused and bullied and was fed by informants and feared by men who should have faced him down, his young counsel Roy Cohn at his shoulder. What finally undid him was the medium that had not existed when the Red Scare began. In March of 1954 Edward Murrow devoted a broadcast of See It Now to the senator, letting McCarthy’s own filmed words indict him, and closed by reminding the audience that the fault lay not in their stars but in themselves. Then the Army hearings put McCarthy live on television for weeks, and the country watched him at length, and did not like what it saw, and Welch asked his question, and it was over. The Senate condemned him that December, and he drank himself to death within three years, a spent man at forty-eight. The apparatus of loyalty oaths and blacklists he had ridden outlived him; it was the Warren Court, as the overview showed, that began dismantling the legal scaffolding a few years on.

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The Bomb and the Man

The gravest decision of these years was made quietly, and its human cost was exacted quietly too. When the Soviet bomb ended the monopoly in 1949, the question at once arose whether to build a weapon of another order entirely — the “Super,” a thermonuclear bomb a thousand times more powerful than the one that had leveled Hiroshima. The scientific advisory committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the building of the first bomb, recommended against a crash program, partly on the strategic ground that it was not needed and partly on the moral ground that a weapon of essentially unlimited destructiveness was a thing a nation ought to hesitate to make. Truman, feeling he had no choice once the possibility existed, ordered it built anyway, and in November of 1952 the first thermonuclear device vaporized a Pacific island and left a crater where an atoll had been. The physicist Edward Teller, who had pushed hardest for it, became known as the father of the H-bomb, and Oppenheimer, who had hesitated, became a marked man.

His reckoning came in 1954. Oppenheimer had a left-wing past — friends, a brother, a dead former lover in the Communist Party of the thirties, and a muddled old episode in which he had given shifting accounts of an approach by a suspected intermediary. None of it was new, and all of it had been known when he was cleared to build the bomb. But he had made enemies, chief among them Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission, whom he had humiliated in public testimony, and in the temper of the times an old file could be reopened and read in the worst light. A security board was convened, an aggressive counsel took Oppenheimer’s shifting decade-old story apart on the stand, and Teller testified, with exquisite reluctance, that he would feel safer with the nation’s secrets in other hands. The board stripped Oppenheimer of his clearance, ending his public life, on the eve of the expiration of that clearance in any case — the point was not to keep him from secrets but to pronounce him unfit. The man who had given the country the weapon was cast out by the security state the weapon had brought into being. The verdict stood for sixty-eight years, until the government formally set it aside as the product of a flawed and unfair process, long after it could do him any good.

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Wars in the Shadows and the Coin of the Realm

Containment had a second arm that the public did not see. In 1953 the Central Intelligence Agency, working with British intelligence, engineered the overthrow of the elected prime minister of Iran, who had nationalized the oil, and restored the Shah to full power. The next year it toppled the elected government of Guatemala, which had expropriated the lands of an American fruit company, and installed a colonel more to Washington’s liking. These operations were cheap, quick, and judged at the time to be triumphs, and they established a habit — that a great democracy could remake the governments of smaller countries in secret, outside the view of its own citizens, whenever the contest with communism seemed to require it. The bills for both would come due later, in revolution and civil war, but that is a matter for other lectures.

What the covert arm expresses in the extreme, the ordinary politics of the era expressed everywhere: anti-communism had become the coin in which every public purpose had to be paid. Foreign aid was sold not as charity but as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the new nations. When Eisenhower won the largest public-works program in the country’s history, the network of interstate highways authorized in 1956, it was passed as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, its roadbeds justified as evacuation routes and troop corridors for an atomic war. A nation could scarcely propose to build a school, fund a laboratory, or pave a road without first demonstrating that the enemy made it necessary. The contest had become the frame through which the society saw its every ambition.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Adversary Overrated

Here the theme of the lecture comes to the surface. The events just recounted were real, and each was correctly understood to be a setback: the bomb was gone, China was lost, Korea was a bloody draw. What was added to the facts, and was not warranted by them, was the conviction that these setbacks revealed a rival of superior efficiency, marching to an assured future. The military version of the error was the “bomber gap” of the mid-fifties, the widespread belief — encouraged when the Soviets flew the same squadron of heavy bombers in repeated circles over a Moscow parade to inflate the count — that Soviet air power had pulled ahead, a belief that drove real spending before reconnaissance quietly showed it to be false. The economic version ran deeper and lasted longer. The Central Intelligence Agency itself persistently overestimated the size and growth of the Soviet economy; and among academic economists a kind of credulous respect took hold, an assumption that a system which could simply command its resources into heavy industry and investment must be growing faster than a democracy distracted by the wants of consumers. That assumption would find its most confident expression a few years past this lecture’s close, in the best-selling economics textbook in America, whose editions carried a chart projecting that Soviet output would overtake American output before the century was out — a projection revised and postponed edition after edition, never quite abandoned, as the reality it described receded.

Nothing in the discussion of the age supplied the missing half of the picture. Almost no one asked aloud whether a system that had to shoot its own security chief in the scramble after its dictator died, that fabricated its harvests and terrorized its farmers, that could hold its empire only by force and could not feed its cities well, might be brittle rather than formidable. The closed society hid its weaknesses, and the open society, gazing at the smooth grey wall, supplied in imagination the strength it could not see. It is the central irony of the era that the country most frightened of losing a competition of systems had, in fact, already won it, and did not know.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

The Cracks of 1956

And then, at the far end of this first period, the wall cracked in full view. Stalin had died in March of 1953 — died alone on the floor of his dacha, it was said, because his terrified guards dared not enter without a summons, a fitting end to a rule of fear. The scramble to succeed him was itself a confession: within months Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the secret police, had been arrested by his own colleagues and shot, and the survivors edged toward a collective rule from which, over the next few years, an unlikely figure emerged on top. Nikita Khrushchev was a miner’s son with little schooling, blunt and shrewd and theatrical, capable of genuine courage and genuine brutality, and he did in February of 1956 a thing no one had thought possible. Before a closed session of the Party Congress he denounced Stalin — named the purges, the tortures, the murders of loyal communists — in a speech that was supposed to stay secret and was around the world within months. It shook every communist party on earth. Here was the system indicting itself, admitting that its recent god had been a monster, and a clear-eyed observer might have read in it the first tremor of an eventual collapse.

The West mostly did not read it so. When the tremor reached the streets, in Hungary that autumn, and a whole nation rose and declared itself free of Moscow, the American rhetoric of “rollback” and “liberation” that Secretary Dulles had broadcast for years met its test — and the United States, with Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest and its own attention split by a simultaneous crisis at Suez, did nothing. The uprising was crushed, thousands were killed, two hundred thousand fled, and the real boundary of the contest stood revealed: containment held the line, but it would not cross it, and the captive nations would stay captive. Later that November, receiving Western diplomats in Moscow, Khrushchev said the sentence that American headlines rendered as a threat to bury them — he meant that communism would outlast capitalism and be present at its funeral, a boast about history rather than about missiles, though few who read it that morning drew the distinction.

So the first period closes on a paradox that its own participants could not quite see. In the same months, the adversary showed its teeth in Budapest and showed its rot in the Secret Speech, and the West took careful note of the first and almost none of the second. The enemy still stood, to American eyes, ten feet tall. What that enemy would do next, and how a country that had frightened itself for a decade would answer a beeping metal sphere crossing its sky, is where the account resumes.

[ END OF LECTURE ]

Chronology, 1946–1956

• 1946, February — Kennan’s Long Telegram from Moscow

• 1947, March — Truman Doctrine; federal loyalty program (E.O. 9835)

• 1947, June — Marshall Plan announced

• 1947 — HUAC’s Hollywood hearings; the Hollywood Ten

• 1948 — Berlin Blockade begins; the Airlift; Hiss accused before HUAC

• 1949, April — North Atlantic Treaty (NATO)

• 1949, August — first Soviet atomic test

• 1949, October — People’s Republic of China proclaimed

• 1950, January — Hiss convicted of perjury; Fuchs confesses

• 1950, February — McCarthy’s Wheeling speech

• 1950, April — NSC-68

• 1950, June — Korean War begins

• 1950, September — Inchon landing

• 1951, April — Truman relieves MacArthur

• 1951 — Dennis v. United States upholds Smith Act convictions

• 1952, November — first U.S. thermonuclear test (”Ivy Mike”)

• 1953, March — death of Stalin

• 1953, June — the Rosenbergs executed

• 1953 — CIA-backed coup in Iran

• 1954, April–June — Army-McCarthy hearings; “have you no sense of decency?”

• 1954 — Oppenheimer stripped of security clearance; CIA-backed coup in Guatemala

• 1954, December — Senate condemns McCarthy

• 1956, February — Khrushchev’s Secret Speech

• 1956, October–November — Hungarian uprising crushed; “we will bury you”

End of Cold War, Part One — The Enemy Ten Feet Tall

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The Middle of the Road

The Fifties — Lecture One: Politics and the Economy

Opening: Two Men Under the Lights

On the evening of the twenty-sixth of September, 1960, in a television studio in Chicago, two candidates for the presidency faced the cameras together for the first time in the country’s history, and something on the order of seventy million Americans — better than a third of the whole population — sat in their living rooms and watched them argue.

One of the two was not well. Richard Nixon, the Vice President, had banged his knee on a car door in August, taken an infection, and spent two weeks in the hospital; he came to the studio underweight and pale, his collar loose on a neck that had thinned, and he declined the professional makeup the network offered, letting an aide dab a drugstore powder over the blue shadow of his beard. He wore a gray suit, and the set behind him was gray, and under the heat of the lights he began to sweat, and the camera watched him lift his handkerchief to his lip. Across from him John Kennedy, four years the younger and just off a campaign swing through California, arrived tanned and rested in a dark suit that stood out cleanly from the background, and when he spoke he spoke to the lens rather than to his opponent, as though addressing each household in turn.

A curious thing about that first debate is how little the two men actually disagreed. They quarreled over whether the country should defend two specks of island off the China coast, Quemoy and Matsu; over a supposed “missile gap” that the Soviets were said to have opened and that turned out, when the reconnaissance was in, to run the other way; over which of them would prosecute the Cold War with more vigor and restore more of the national prestige. On the shape of the contest with Moscow, on the necessity of the contest, on the broad settlement at home, they stood on nearly the same ground, and the argument was less about where to steer the country than about which man would drive the same road faster. A legend grew up afterward that those who heard the debate on the radio judged it a draw or gave the edge to Nixon, while those who watched it on television gave it to Kennedy — the evidence for that split is thinner than the retelling suggests, and rests on a single small survey — but the retelling survived because it captured something true. What the audience took away was not a difference of policy. It was a difference of surfaces, and the surface had begun to decide things.

The narrowness of that disagreement is the truth about the politics of the age, and the abundance that filled the living rooms where it was watched is the truth about the economy. The two facts are the subject.

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Part One: The Narrow Channel

The channel within which respectable political opinion ran had rarely been so narrow, and the clearest proof is what both parties wanted in 1948. In that year a good many Democrats and a good many Republicans alike tried to lay hold of the same man, Dwight Eisenhower, whose politics no one actually knew — Democratic leaders sounded him out for their own ticket before it was settled that he was a Republican at all, and Harry Truman is said to have offered to step aside and run beneath him. A country whose two parties reach for the identical candidate is a country whose parties have moved close together, and Eisenhower, when he did run and win in 1952, described his own position with a phrase that served as the motto of the decade: he governed, he said, down the middle of the road.

Down the middle meant a settled agreement on the two questions that mattered most, and a determination to let a third one lie. On the Cold War there was, in effect, one foreign policy, carried across the party line by the understanding that Senator Vandenberg had made famous — that politics stopped at the water’s edge. Containment abroad, a large standing military, alliances of a kind the Republic had shunned for a century and a half: these were now the property of both parties, and a politician who questioned the framework put himself outside the conversation rather than inside the opposition. On the New Deal at home the Republicans had made their peace; Eisenhower took no swing at Social Security or the other load-bearing walls the Thirties had put up, and by declining to tear them down he ratified them. The two upheavals that a later memory magnifies were, at the time, glancing. Truman’s astonishment of the pollsters in 1948, when he beat Dewey after the newspaper had already printed the wrong result, changed the occupant of the office without changing its direction. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, passed over Truman’s veto to fence in the unions the Wagner Act had freed, marked the outer boundary of the postwar labor settlement and then held as that boundary for a generation.

The third question — the place of the Negro in American life — both parties agreed to approach slowly, because both parties had reasons of their own to go slow. The Democrats were yoked to the Solid South, whose senators held their committee chairmanships by seniority and could throttle any bill that touched the racial order. The Republicans, the party of Lincoln by inheritance, had made few inroads in the South and little effort in the cities, and their Northern leaders found in the Southern filibuster a convenient wall against having to act. Eisenhower himself thought the law could not change what was in men’s hearts and was privately cool to the whole enterprise. The result was that on the gravest domestic question of the century, the elected branches of the government, Democratic and Republican alike, had agreed in practice to do very little.

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Part Two: The Court That Moved

When the men who stand for election agree to hold still, movement, if it is to come at all, must come from the one branch that stands for nothing. The most consequential political actor of these years wore a robe. Earl Warren had been the Republican governor of California and his party’s candidate for Vice President in 1948; Eisenhower named him Chief Justice in 1953, expecting a safe and moderate administrator, and lived to regard the appointment as among the larger miscalculations of his presidency. For the Court that Warren led did what the Congress and the White House would not.

In 1954 it ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education, that segregated public schooling violated the Constitution, and in a single unanimous paragraph pulled down the legal doctrine on which the whole Southern order rested — the substance of that decision and the storm it loosed belong to a later hour, but the fact of it belongs here, as the clearest case of the Court supplying a motion the elected government had refused to make. Three years on, the Court turned to the machinery of the anti-Communist crusade. On a single day in June of 1957 that came to be called Red Monday, it handed down decisions that reined in the House Un-American Activities Committee by limiting its power to expose men for exposure’s sake, and that gutted the prosecutions of American Communists under the Smith Act by insisting the government prove more than the advocacy of an idea. The details of the loyalty panics that these rulings checked are matter for the lecture on the Cold War at home; what matters in an overview of the period’s politics is the pattern. The country’s real turns were being taken by nine appointed men, because the hundreds of elected ones had bound themselves to the middle of the road.

The reach only widened as the decade turned. In 1962, in Engel v. Vitale, the Court forbade the states to open the school day with an official prayer, and told a nation in the middle of a religious revival — church rolls at their fullest, the words “under God” lately written into the Pledge — that the government it elected could not lead its children in worship; few decisions of the era struck more directly against the settled sentiment of the majority. That same year, in Baker v. Carr, it took up the malapportioned legislatures in which a rural county of a few thousand might carry the same weight as a city of millions, and opened the way to the principle that would come to be called one person, one vote — the achievement Warren himself, looking back, would name the most important of his years on the bench, because it redrew the map of representation that had frozen rural power in place for generations. And in 1963, at the very edge of our period, Gideon v. Wainwright held that a poor man hauled into a serious criminal trial must be given a lawyer whether he could pay for one or not, the first great stone laid in a rebuilding of criminal procedure that the Court would carry much further in the years just beyond.

The reaction measured the significance. Along the highways of the South and the West there rose billboards demanding the impeachment of Earl Warren, put up by men who understood, correctly, that the Court had become the place where the era’s consensus was being forced open. That a body designed to be insulated from politics had become the most potent political force of the decade is the kind of adaptation this whole series is concerned with — an old institution, pressed by a question the newer institutions would not touch, expanding to fill the vacuum.

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Part Three: The Arithmetic of Abundance

While the politics ran in its narrow channel, the population itself was doing something without precedent. Americans were having children at a rate no one had forecast and demographers still find slightly astonishing. Births had run near two and a half million a year in the depths of the Depression; they crossed three and a half million as the soldiers came home and kept climbing, reaching a peak above four million in the late Fifties and holding there. The country that had numbered a hundred and fifty-one million in 1950 numbered a hundred and seventy-nine million by 1960, and almost all of that increase was homegrown, because the other tap was nearly closed. The foreign-born, better than one American in seven at the century’s opening, had fallen to about one in fifteen by 1950 and kept falling, the delayed working-out of the immigration restrictions of the Twenties, which stayed on the books until 1965. This was a nation swelling from within, digesting the last great wave rather than drinking a new one.

The swelling had a shape on the ground, and the shape was the suburb. The new families streamed out of the cities into subdivisions thrown up in what had lately been potato fields and orchards, drawn by cheap mortgages that the government stood behind and cheap gasoline and, before long, the great ribbons of interstate highway the Congress voted in 1956. Behind them, in the older cores of the industrial cities, another migration was filling the blocks the departing whites left — Black families still coming up out of the rural South into the neighborhoods that restrictive covenants and lending practice hemmed them into, so that the same years built the green new suburb and the crowded new ghetto by a single motion, the one draining into the other.

The work Americans did was changing with the places they lived. The farm, which had held a third of the labor force within living memory, was emptying fast as machines did the work of hands, and the men and women leaving it were not going into the factory. In 1956, for the first time in the country’s history, the white-collar workers — the clerks and salesmen and managers and engineers, the people who worked in offices and wore the clean shirt to do it — outnumbered the blue-collar workers who made things with their hands. A nation was becoming a nation of employees, of salaried men in the middle ranks of large organizations, and the transformation reached even into the schools. College was becoming an ordinary expectation of the middle class rather than a mark of the elite, though its doors opened unevenly: the prestige men’s colleges, most of the Ivy League among them, still took no women into their undergraduate halls, keeping their coordinate women’s colleges beside them, while women found their places more readily at the state universities and the teachers’ colleges. Women were, in any case, a minority of all students and a shrinking share of degrees, for the returning veterans on the GI Bill had flooded the campuses with men, and the joke that a young woman went to college chiefly for her “Mrs. degree” carried the assumption of the age.

And in the new houses, two machines defined the life. In 1950 fewer than one household in ten owned a television set; by 1960 nearly nine in ten did, the fastest adoption of any device in the nation’s history to that point. The automobile, which the Twenties had made a middle-class possession, now passed into three-quarters of households and beyond, with the two-car family beginning to appear in the driveways of the subdivision. The white shirt in the office, the set glowing in the parlor, the car in the drive, the third and fourth child in the nursery: the arithmetic of abundance came to rest in these particulars.

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Part Four: The Men Who Built the Suburb

The abundance had authors, and the striking thing about the men who built the physical world of the Fifties — the point David Halberstam draws out better than anyone, and the one worth carrying out of this lecture — is how little they resembled the credentialed professionals who ran the great corporations. They were outsiders, most of them, without much formal schooling, who understood the wants of the ordinary middle-class family because they had come out of it and had never left it in their heads.

William Levitt, who did for the house what Henry Ford had done for the car, had passed through New York University without troubling to finish; he broke the building of a home into twenty-seven separate operations and sent crews down the street doing one operation each, and put up his Levittowns at a pace and a price that let a veteran buy a whole house for less than the down payment on the old kind. Ray Kroc was a salesman past fifty, peddling the multiple-spindle machines that mixed milkshakes, when he drove out to San Bernardino to see why one hamburger stand had ordered eight of them; he found the McDonald brothers’ assembly-line kitchen, recognized what it could become, and spent his second act franchising it across the country. Kemmons Wilson, a Memphis builder with a high-school education, took his family on a driving vacation to Washington in 1951, found the roadside lodging shabby and dear and full of surcharges for the children, and went home and built the Holiday Inn, a clean and predictable room at a fixed price with the kids free — the whole enterprise born of one bad trip. Harland Sanders was past sixty, drawing his first Social Security check, when he took to the road in a white suit to sell his method of frying chicken to other men’s restaurants.

Set these builders of the drive-in world against the other figure the decade produced, the man in the gray flannel suit who rode the commuter train to a desk in the tower of a great corporation, and a tension appears inside the economy itself. Charles Wilson, the head of General Motors whom Eisenhower made his Secretary of Defense, told the Senate at his confirmation that he had long assumed what was good for the country was good for General Motors and the reverse as well — and the sentence became famous because it caught the mood of an age in which the large organization and the national interest were coming to seem like the same thing, and the good employee and the good citizen the same man. The conforming company man and the untutored outsider who built the world that company man lived in were both creatures of the boom, and the friction between them — between the impulse to fit smoothly into a large machine and the impulse to strike off alone and make something — runs under the surface of the whole period.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Closing: The Surface and What Moved Beneath It

Seen from the street, the America of these years presented a remarkably calm and formal face. Men wore the white shirt and the tie to the ballpark, women wore dresses and gloves to travel, church membership climbed to the highest mark the country had ever recorded, and the two political parties stood so near each other that a national election could turn on which candidate had shaved more closely and sweated less under the lights. It was a surface of order, of consensus, of a middle of the road broad enough that most of the traffic could keep to it.

Beneath the surface the ground was already shifting, and the same overview that shows the calm shows the movement if it is read closely. The elected government held still on the largest question while nine appointed judges began, against fierce resistance, to force it open. The affluence pouring into the new houses was quietly dissolving the constraints of scarcity that had governed American life since the founding, and remaking where people lived and what they did and how long they stayed in school. The outsiders were rebuilding the landscape faster than anyone in authority had planned. And in the same living rooms where the placid families gathered around the glowing set, a younger generation was forming that would find the whole arrangement — the white shirt, the company, the middle of the road — worth rebelling against. The conformity was real, chosen, and comfortable for those it fit. The signs of rebellion were real too, and already present, waiting under the calm. The Court that had decided Gideon on the last stretch of the road to Dallas would go on, in the few years past our close, to Miranda and the rest of the rights revolution — so that even the boldest actor of these placid years was only beginning the work it would be known for. Holding the calm surface and the moving ground at once, across politics and race and the life of the mind and the culture of the screen, is the work of the lectures that follow.

[ END OF LECTURE ]

End of Lecture One — The Middle of the Road

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with the total employee compensation of $12.96 trillion in the United States, you can argue that only about half of that market (at the most) is open to disruption from AI replacement products,

Another way to think of this is that AI might be able to earn as much as half of the current U.S. labor force. To me, that sounds optimistic.

Damodaran tries his best to arrive at a quantitative valuation.

With Anthropic, for instance, where the rumored pricing for the IPO is $2 trillion, allowing the company premium pricing margins (after-tax operating margin of 30%) and above-average risk (cost of capital of 10%), the company will have to generate close to $1.2 trillion in revenues, if the AI market matures in ten years, and close to $2 trillion, if the wait is 15 years.

…Using an aggregated market pricing of $5 trillion (probably a conservative judgment, given the VC pricing of hundreds of companies in the space) attached to all AI product and service companies, and assigning a blended operating margin of 20% for the industry, the revenues that you would need for the entire business to breakeven would be $5 trillion, with a 10-year wait, and more than $8 trillion, if the wait is 15 years. Looking back at the discussion of the total addressable market in the earlier section, you can see that this would represent quite a reach, a manifestation of the big market delusion.

From his conclusion (TAM = total addressable market):

a $22 trillion TAM for AI is fiction and recognize that having your ARR grow 80% a year last year is not even close to being a rationale for why you should buy Anthropic at a $2 trillion pricing.

I’m not going to short Anthropic or other AI companies, because prices in the short run can get more irrational. But I’m not going to be a buyer, and I even may try to find an index fund that doesn’t buy AI stocks.

Christopher Mims writes,

The bet is that a fundamentally new architecture has the potential to take AI to places that today’s LLM-based AIs can’t venture. And one day, pioneers hope to merge these two schools of artificial thought.

…The control systems of today’s more sophisticated robots rely on physics-based simulations of the physical realm. These, too, are world models, though they are painstakingly coded and highly specialized. What works for one kind of robot doesn’t work on another.

Today’s world-model startups want to create a control system that’s as versatile when piloting robots as today’s LLMs are when crafting text

As I wrote before, the physical world is harder to master than the digital world.

“The real world is very complex, and has a lot of special cases and hard edges, and you can’t approximately miss something,” says Konidaris. “If you hit something while moving your robot, everything changes.”

Hollis Robbins writes,

Interpretation is the service with LLMs, not delivery. The model cannot not read and digest everything you send. That is the whole point.

Her excellent essay makes the point that the sort of privacy that was built into snail mail is not as easy to protect with email and probably impossible to protect with Chatbot conversations.

She relates this to the problem of accountability for the actions of AI agents. By now, I assume you’ve read or at least heard about the paper by Tyler Cowen and Sonia Pearson.

Peter Diamandis writes,

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said this week that the public’s negative view of AI stems from a deeper crisis of trust. Not from his risk warnings. Not from dystopian science fiction. From a fundamental breakdown between what the tech industry promises and what the public experiences. He said the most accurate criticism of AI companies is that they have not delivered on their big promises to benefit the world.

…Farzad’s response on X was the best I received. Prove out the abundance thesis in the most visible areas. Health. Housing. Education. Cost of living.

But if I am right, the models cannot deliver on those things. Health is a physical problem. Housing, education, and the cost of living are social problems. The models are masters of the digital world. But the physical world and the social world are outside their current circle of competence.

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substacks referenced above: @

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Many people who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder cannot distinguish truth from their emotional reactions. In other words, they regard their personal emotional responses to the world as infallible guides to truth — and regard any questioning of their conclusions as a personal attack. “If I feel it, it must be true” is how they approach the world.

…Cluster B pathologies are deeply embedded in our institutions these days. I’d say the Arday disaster has a lot to do with this, in that the people who kept promoting him throughout his career have absorbed classic Cluster B thinking, and made an ideology out of it.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

Institutions—to be functional—generally have to been scaled-up teams. That women are systematically worse at teams than men means that the feminisation of institutions and organisations tends to degrade their functionality.

On at least a few occasions, I have traced the deterioration of higher education to the loss of values that males naturally support and females tend to support less.

Stefanie Stantcheva and others write,

Our paper yields three sets of findings. The first set of results documents a sharp rise in anger in political discourse, with anger emerging as the dominant emotion among citizens, voters, and policymakers alike.

…Anger also rises within the same users, conditional on policy topic. In voter tweets, changes in the anger rates and posting volume of continuing 3 users account for most of the aggregate increase. The rise appears across political parties and demographic groups.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Steve Stewart-Williams writes,

According to Yong and colleagues, many of the aches and pains of modern life can be traced in part to these mismatches. Large cities, inequality, and complex social hierarchies ramp up status competition, stress, and loneliness. Artificial environments and sedentary lifestyles undermine health and well-being. Screens, social media, and information overload bombard us with more stimulation and information than we evolved to handle. And 24-hour news gives us constant exposure to distant wars, pandemics, and other crises, keeping ancient threat-detection mechanisms working overtime.

It’s worth pointing out that although the modern world is mismatched with human nature in some ways, in other ways it’s better adapted to our evolved needs and wants than more natural environments are. It would be surprising if this weren’t the case, given that we ourselves created the modern world. We’ve got food on tap metaphorically, water on tap literally, and the safest environments humans have ever inhabited. We’ve got more options for work, leisure, and lifestyle than our ancestors could dream of. We’ve got glasses, contraception, air conditioning, heating, and medicine that actually works.

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The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

Mismatched

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14 days ago · 13 likes · Steve Stewart-Williams

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Lorenzo from Oz

Why we need to talk about female behaviour within organisations

The first post in this series on using evolutionary reasoning discussed pitfalls of evolutionary reasoning and advanced 42 propositions about human tool use, cooperation and mating patterns. The second post advanced another 78 propositions on norms, language, prestige, propriety, social aggression, diet, religion, and murdering our way to niceness. The…

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16 days ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Lorenzo Warby

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The Furnace

The Second World War — Lecture Three: The Home Front

Opening: Four Days on the Ways

On the eighth of November, 1942, at Henry Kaiser’s shipyard in Richmond, California, a crew laid the keel of a cargo ship. Four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-six minutes later they launched her. She was the Robert E. Peary, a ten-thousand-ton Liberty ship of the standard emergency design, and she was assembled from prefabricated sections the way a later age would assemble a machine on a line — whole deckhouses and hull segments built elsewhere and craned into place, welded rather than riveted, by men and a great many women who had never built a ship and in most cases had never seen the sea. She was a stunt, and everyone knew it; the yard had rehearsed the sections in advance and thrown its whole strength at the one hull to set a record for the newsreels. But a stunt is only possible on the foundation of a routine, and the routine underneath it was the astonishing thing. The Richmond yards, and Kaiser’s yards up the coast at Portland, were turning out Liberty ships at a steady clip of better than one a day, and the country as a whole, before the war ended, would build them faster than German submarines could sink them, which was the entire point, and which decided the Battle of the Atlantic as surely as any action at sea.

Henry Kaiser had never built a ship in his life before the war. He was a road contractor and a dam builder — he had helped pour Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee, moved mountains of earth on government contracts across the West — and he came to shipbuilding as an outsider who did not know that the things he proposed to do were held to be impossible, and so did them. He broke the hull into subassemblies the way he had broken a highway into gradable sections. He welded where the old yards riveted, because a welder could be trained in weeks where a riveter took years, and the men and women he needed did not exist yet and would have to be made. He built whole towns around the yards to house workers who arrived by the trainload from Oklahoma and Arkansas and the cotton South. And because those workers fell sick and got hurt and had nowhere to go, he built them a system of prepaid group medicine to keep them on the job — the germ of what would outlast him as Kaiser Permanente, a private answer to a problem the country had not yet decided was the government’s.

The Robert E. Peary is a good place to begin because she is the whole story in miniature. A private empire built on public contracts; a workforce conjured out of migration and trained in a hurry; a technology reinvented under the pressure of need; a government that supplied the demand and the money and the priorities and then largely got out of the way of men who could deliver; and, over all of it, the sheer scale of American production, which is the fact from which everything else on the home front follows. The armies whose campaigns the last lecture traced were the visible edge of this. Behind them stood the yards and the assembly lines and the rationed kitchens and a federal government swollen past anything in the Republic’s experience, and a President who had spent a decade enlarging his office and now enlarged it again. How the country became the arsenal, what the arsenal cost it in its own institutions and traditions, and what of the transformation it kept when the guns fell silent — that is the subject.

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Part One: The Arithmetic of Abundance

Begin with the numbers, because they are almost literally incredible.

In 1939 the United States was still, after a decade, a Depression economy. Some nine million men and women were out of work, better than fourteen in every hundred who wanted a job; the great plants ran at a fraction of capacity. Then the orders came — first Allied orders under Lend-Lease, then the country’s own rearmament, then, after Pearl Harbor, the bottomless demand of a two-ocean war — and the idle economy woke and stretched and discovered how much it could do.

American factories built roughly three hundred thousand military aircraft in under four years, in a country that had built a few thousand a year before the war. They built something on the order of eighty-six thousand tanks, twelve thousand major warships and merchant hulls, two and a half million trucks, and small arms and shells and boots and rations in quantities that supplied not only American forces but, through Lend-Lease, the British and the Soviets and the Chinese besides. The gross output of the economy, corrected for inflation, very nearly doubled between 1939 and 1944. By 1944 the United States alone was out-producing all the Axis powers combined, and doing it while its own civilians ate better and lived better than the civilians of any other combatant on earth.

Wages rose. Overtime became the ordinary condition of industrial life. Families that had spent ten years scrimping found themselves, suddenly, with money and nothing much to spend it on, because the things they might have bought were no longer being made.

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Part Two: The Managed Economy

An economy does not double itself in five years by accident, and it does not convert from washing machines to bombsights on its own. Somebody had to decide who got the steel and the aluminum and the rubber and the machine tools, because there was not enough of any of them to satisfy the Army and the Navy and the shipyards and the aircraft plants and the civilian economy all at once, and a market left to bid freely for scarce materials in a bottomless emergency would have bid the prices to the moon and armed no one in particular very well. So the country did a thing deeply against its own grain: it put the allocation of resources, for the duration, under the hand of the state.

The instrument was the War Production Board, set up early in 1942, and its chairman was Donald Nelson, a mild, capable executive borrowed from Sears, Roebuck — a man who had spent his career deciding what a great retailer should stock, now asked to decide what a continent should build. Nelson’s board halted the manufacture of automobiles for private sale within weeks of Pearl Harbor and turned the auto industry, the largest concentration of manufacturing skill on earth, wholesale over to war work; Ford’s vast new plant at Willow Run, built to disgorge a heavy bomber an hour, is the monument of that conversion. The board rationed the strategic metals, set the priorities, and presided over the alphabet of subsidiary agencies that grew up around it. And Nelson himself is a study in the limits of the arrangement, because he never fully controlled the thing he chaired. The Army and Navy procurement officers, who actually placed the orders and held the contracts, ran their own show and rolled over him when they chose; the production miracle happened around Nelson as much as through him, driven by the uniformed services and the industrialists more than by the civilian board that was supposed to ride herd on both.

Above the whole tangle Roosevelt eventually set a single man to knock heads together: James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, whom he pulled off the Supreme Court and installed in the White House itself as director of what became the Office of War Mobilization. Byrnes settled the endless jurisdictional wars among the agencies, decided the disputes that reached the President’s desk before they reached it, and wielded so much of Roosevelt’s authority over the domestic war that the newspapers took to calling him the Assistant President — a man of enormous power whom most Americans could not have named, running the internal war from a corner of the West Wing while the President ran the alliance.

The part of the managed economy that every household felt was price control and rationing, and here the state reached past the factory and into the pantry. In a full-employment economy awash in wages and starved of goods, prices wanted to fly upward — the classic condition of too much money chasing too few things — and unchecked inflation would have robbed every fixed income, poisoned labor relations, and made a mockery of the war bonds the government was busy selling. So the Office of Price Administration froze prices and rationed the scarce goods, and it became the most intimate and the most resented arm of the wartime state. Its first administrator was Leon Henderson, a blunt, combative New Deal economist who understood that his job was to be hated and did it without flinching; he posed for the cameras as “Mr. Inflation” to dramatize the enemy, held the line on prices against the fury of farmers and manufacturers and unions alike, and was duly driven out of office by the resentment he had provoked, a casualty of doing an unpopular thing well.

Under the OPA, sugar was rationed, then coffee, then meat, butter, canned goods, shoes, gasoline, tires. Every household got its ration books, the little booklets of stamps that had to be surrendered along with the money before the grocer would part with the goods; the red points for meats and fats, the blue points for processed foods, became a second currency that a nation of housewives learned to manage with a precision the Treasury might have envied. A black market grew up in the interstices, because black markets always do, and the enforcement of price ceilings against one’s own neighbors put a strain on the American disposition. They accepted it, grumbling, for the duration and not one day longer — the rationing and the controls were dismantled with almost indecent haste the moment the war ended — and the grumbling itself is the historically revealing thing. The country adapted its market economy to the discipline of a command economy under the lash of total war, and it did so provisionally, holding its nose, with a clear inner reservation that this was an emergency measure and no part of the permanent order. The tradition bent under the environmental pressure and then, when the pressure lifted, sprang most of the way back.

The same logic that froze prices froze wages, and the freezing of wages threw off a consequence no one intended and the country lives with still. To hold down the wage side of the inflationary spiral, the government capped what employers could pay — and left them, in a labor market so starved of workers that plants were poaching one another’s hands, scrambling for some legal way to sweeten an offer that the ceiling forbade them to raise in cash. The loophole they found was the fringe benefit. Contributions an employer made to a health plan or a pension for its workers were ruled to fall outside the wage ceiling, and shortly outside the worker’s taxable income as well, so that a dollar spent on a man’s health insurance escaped both the wage cap and the tax that would have shrunk a dollar handed him in his pay envelope. Employers seized on it to compete for labor they could not outbid in wages, unions bargained for it, and health coverage migrated in a few years from a rarity to a standard attachment of the industrial job — the arrangement Henry Kaiser had improvised for his shipyard crews now generalized across the economy by the accident of the wage freeze. That the United States would come to fund the medical care of most of its working population through the employer rather than the state or the individual was decided, in effect, by a wartime expedient meant to do something else entirely, and it outlasted every board and every control that had produced it.

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Part Three: Paying for It

A war on this scale had to be paid for, and the manner of the paying worked a quieter revolution than the rationing, and a more lasting one.

The government met perhaps two-fifths of the war’s colossal cost out of taxation and borrowed the rest, and both halves changed the citizen’s relationship to the state. Borrowing meant the war bond, and the war bond drives became one of the defining rituals of the home front — a deliberate campaign to soak up the surplus wages that had nowhere to go, to fight inflation by locking away purchasing power, and to bind every citizen, financially and emotionally, into the war effort. Movie stars barnstormed the country selling bonds; children bought war stamps at school and pasted them into books; the radio ran bond marathons, the most famous of them a single day in 1943 when the singer Kate Smith went on the air over and over for eighteen hours and sold thirty-nine million dollars in bonds by the sheer accumulated weight of her sincerity, a performance a sociologist later dissected as a small masterpiece of mass persuasion. The bond was salesmanship, and it was also participation: a way for the great civilian majority to feel that it had a stake and a share in a war being fought by other people’s sons.

Taxation was the deeper change. Before the war the federal income tax was a tax on the prosperous — some four million Americans filed, the well-to-do and the rich, and the ordinary wage earner paid it no mind because it did not touch him. The war made it a mass tax. To raise the sums the war demanded, Congress reached down into the broad middle and the working class, lowered the thresholds, and by 1943 something like forty-two million Americans owed the federal income tax where four million had before. The tax came home, for the first time, to the factory hand and the clerk and the schoolteacher, and it has never left.

The old system asked the citizen to reckon up his prior year’s income and pay the tax in a lump the following spring — a manageable thing for a small class of the comfortable, an impossibility for forty million wage earners living close to the bone. The answer was to deduct the tax from each paycheck as it was earned — pay as you go, the employer withholding the government’s share before the worker ever saw it. The idea for easing the changeover came from Beardsley Ruml, the treasurer of Macy’s department store, who proposed forgiving a year’s back taxes so that no one would owe two years at once in the switch; the technical work of designing the withholding machinery itself was done inside the Treasury’s tax-research division, and among the young economists in that small group was a thirty-year-old named Milton Friedman. The irony is one the historians have not let go of, and Friedman did not shrink from it in later life: the man who would become the century’s most formidable champion of small government and the free market helped, as a wartime staffer, to build the collection engine of the modern state — testifying for withholding before Congress, working out its mechanics, and reflecting decades afterward that it had been a fine expedient for a war and a grave thing to have fastened on the country in peacetime, a device he wished he could see abolished and knew never would be. Withholding solved the collection problem at a stroke, and it did something subtler besides: it made the tax nearly painless by making it nearly invisible, taken before the money was ever in hand, so that the citizen felt the deduction as a smaller thing than a bill he had to write. It was sold as a wartime expedient, and it stayed, because once the machinery existed no government was going to give it up.

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Part Four: Dr. Win-the-War

At the center of all this stood a President who had already, before a shot was fired, done more to enlarge his office than any man since Lincoln, and who now enlarged it again under the cover of the war. The changes Roosevelt worked in the presidency are the institutional heart of the home-front story, and they run in two directions at once — the eclipse of the reform that had made him, and the swelling of the executive power that would outlive him.

Roosevelt himself announced the first of these with characteristic slyness at a press conference late in December of 1943. Asked about the New Deal, he spun the reporters a parable. Some years back, he said, the patient — the country — had fallen gravely ill of an internal disorder, and a specialist called Dr. New Deal had been brought in and had pulled him through. But now the same patient had been in a bad accident, had broken bones, needed a different kind of doctor, an orthopedic surgeon, and so Dr. New Deal had stepped aside for Dr. Win-the-War. It was a graceful way of announcing a retreat. The reforming energy of the 1930s was spent, and Roosevelt knew it, and he chose to spend what political capital remained to him on the war rather than on the domestic crusade that had defined him.

The retreat was not entirely his choice, because Congress had already begun the work for him. The elections of 1938 and 1942 had strengthened a conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats that had had enough of the New Deal, and once the war provided both the pretext and the full employment that made relief unnecessary, that coalition set about dismantling the emergency agencies of the Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps was abolished; the Works Progress Administration, which had employed millions of the jobless, was shut down — given, in Roosevelt’s phrase, an honorable discharge — because in an economy crying out for workers there were no jobless left for it to employ; the National Youth Administration followed. The alphabet agencies of relief died, one after another, killed partly by prosperity and partly by a Congress glad to be rid of them. The New Deal as a program of reform was over, and the war had ended it.

What grew as the reform receded was the executive itself. A world war run from Washington meant that power flowed to the only branch that could act with speed and secrecy and unity of command, and Roosevelt gathered it. He governed the domestic war very largely by executive order, standing up agency after agency by his own decree — the War Production Board, the Office of Price Administration, the Office of War Mobilization, the War Relocation Authority, the Fair Employment Practice Committee, a whole shadow government of war boards answerable to the President and created without waiting on Congress. The emergency became a standing grant of discretion; the President asked for extraordinary powers and got them, and used them, and the machinery of an executive branch that could reach into prices and wages and production and the movement of whole populations was assembled in those years and never fully taken down. Historians would later trace the lineage of what they called the imperial presidency back to exactly this moment — the war that taught the office how large it could be.

Roosevelt ran the whole apparatus in his own peculiar way, which was to trust no single subordinate too far and to keep the ultimate decisions in his own hands. He deliberately gave overlapping authority to rival men and rival agencies, let them fight, and reserved to himself the power to settle the fight — a method that looked like chaos and functioned as control, since it meant that every important thread ran back to the President and no baron beneath him could grow too strong. He kept his own counsel to a degree that exasperated his aides; men left his office each certain they had his agreement, and discovered later that he had committed to nothing. It was maddening to work for and formidably effective, and it concentrated in one shrewd, genial, endlessly indirect man a sum of power the Republic had never lodged in a single office before.

And then, in 1944, he did the thing no President had done and the unwritten rule of the Republic had forbidden since Washington laid it down: he ran for a fourth term, having already broken the two-term tradition in 1940 with the war coming on. He was, by then, a visibly dying man — the photographs from that last year show it, the gray face and the sunken eyes — and the inner circle knew his heart was failing and kept it from the country, and the country reelected him, because in the middle of a world war the electorate was not disposed to change captains and Roosevelt had made himself indispensable to a degree that no successor could easily inherit. The fourth term was the outer limit of the personal presidency he had built. It so alarmed the country in retrospect that within a few years of his death the Constitution was amended to forbid any President from ever attempting it again — a reform that was, at bottom, a verdict on how far the office had grown under his hand, and a decision that this particular adaptation was one the Republic would not keep.

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Part Five: The Nation in Motion

While the government swelled in Washington, the population itself came loose from its moorings and moved, on a scale not seen since the settlement of the West, and the movement remade the human map of the country.

Something like fifteen million Americans changed their county of residence during the war, and many millions more moved within their counties, drawn by the pull of the war plants and pushed by the collapse of the old rural economy. The jobs were where the contracts were — in Detroit and its ring of aircraft and tank plants, on the shipbuilding coasts of California and the Gulf, at the sprawling new works thrown up in places that had been small towns and were now boomtowns overnight. The San Francisco Bay Area filled with shipyard workers; Los Angeles became an aircraft city; the Willow Run plant outside Detroit drew a workforce so large and so suddenly that there was nowhere to house them, and they lived in trailer camps and shacks and slept in shifts in rented beds. The boomtowns strained past their capacity — too few houses, too few schools, too few sewers, too little of everything but work and wages — and the friction of too many strangers packed too close would presently boil over.

Two migrations within the great migration deserve their own names. The first was the second wave of the Black exodus from the South, which the earlier lectures of this series traced in its beginnings after the First War and which the Second War now vastly accelerated. The war plants of the North and West, desperate for hands, opened their gates at last to Black workers who had been shut out of industrial work for a generation, and hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners left the cotton country for Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and Oakland, trading the sharecropper’s cabin for the assembly line and the segregation of the countryside for the different and denser segregation of the Northern city. They carried their votes north, into states where those votes could be cast and counted, and the political consequences of that transfer would reshape both parties in the generation to come. The second migration was of women into the paid workforce and, above all, into industrial work that had been the preserve of men. Some six million women took jobs during the war who had not held them before; the married woman working outside the home, long frowned upon, became for the duration an act of patriotism; and the figure of Rosie the Riveter — the woman in the coveralls with the welding torch, doing a man’s job in a man’s plant — became one of the enduring images of the era. How much of that was permanent and how much provisional is a question the peace would answer, and the answer, when it came, was that most of the women were expected to give the jobs back to the returning men and most of them did, though the memory of the wages and the competence did not go back, and it waited.

The war reached into the ordinary texture of daily life in ways large and small. Families were scattered — the father in the service, the mother on the swing shift, the children shifting for themselves in the afternoons, the phrase “latchkey child” entering the language. Victory gardens sprang up in backyards and vacant lots, forty percent of the nation’s vegetables grown at home by people doing their bit and stretching the ration. Hollywood went to war with a will, the studios turning out combat pictures and morale pictures under the friendly eye of a government propaganda office, and the director Frank Capra, drafted into uniform, made a series of documentary films to explain to American soldiers and citizens alike why they fought. Radio carried the war into every parlor, the correspondents’ voices and the President’s fireside chats and the bond drives and the serials all braided together. It was a country more mobilized in its feelings, more of one mind, than it had been in living memory or would be again — and the unity, real as it was, had seams, and to the seams we now turn.

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Part Six: The Contradictions of a Free People at War

A war fought, in its official telling, for freedom and against a racial tyranny was fought by a country that maintained a racial order of its own, and the contradiction did not escape the people living inside it. The war put that contradiction under a pressure it had not felt before, and the pressure produced both the first cracks in the old order and some of the ugliest episodes of the home front.

The cracks came first from Black Americans, who declined to fight a war against racism abroad while accepting it without complaint at home. The Black press gave the sentiment a slogan — the Double V, victory over the enemy abroad and victory over discrimination at home — and the slogan captured a mood that had hardened. Its most consequential exponent was A. Philip Randolph, the dignified and implacable head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union of the Black men who made up the service crews of the railroad Pullman cars. In 1941, with the defense plants booming and Black workers still locked out of them, Randolph threatened to march a hundred thousand Black Americans on Washington to demand their share of the war work — a demonstration that would have been an acute embarrassment to a country lecturing the world about freedom, staged in a segregated capital, on the eve of war. Roosevelt did not want that march, and to prevent it he issued Executive Order 8802, forbidding discrimination by race in the defense industries and the federal government and setting up a Fair Employment Practice Committee to enforce it. The committee was weak, and the enforcement was thin, and the order left the armed forces themselves segregated as they had always been. But the transaction is a clean example of the environment forcing an institutional adaptation: the war’s ravenous demand for labor gave Black workers a leverage they had never possessed, Randolph had the wit to use it, and a President who cared little for the cause conceded to it because the war left him no comfortable room to refuse. It was the first federal action against employment discrimination since Reconstruction, wrung from a reluctant administration by the pressure of the moment, and the movement that produced it did not disband when the moment passed.

The migrations that fed the war plants also fed a racial friction that the crowded boomtowns could not contain. In the summer of 1943 Detroit — swollen with Southern migrants, Black and white, competing for too little housing and too few streetcar seats in the summer heat — exploded into a race riot that ran for days and left thirty-four dead, most of them Black, before federal troops restored order. In Los Angeles that same season, white servicemen roamed the streets attacking young Mexican American men in the flamboyant zoot suits that had become a badge of youth and defiance, in what the papers called the zoot suit riots. These were the collisions of a population wrenched loose and jammed together faster than any city’s institutions could absorb, and they were a warning, largely unheeded at the time, of the racial reckoning that the great wartime migration was carrying into the Northern and Western cities for the postwar decades to inherit.

And then there is the episode in which an American tradition did not merely bend under the pressure but broke: the internment of the Japanese Americans. In the fear and fury that followed Pearl Harbor, with the Pacific coast convinced it was next and rumor running ahead of fact, the demand rose to remove the people of Japanese descent from the coastal states as a security threat. There was no evidence of disloyalty worth the name, and the great majority of those marked for removal were American citizens by birth. But the coast had been schooled for two generations in the exclusion of the Japanese — the very laws and attitudes the earlier lectures of this series traced, the alien land acts and the naturalization bar and the long campaign to keep California white — and that inheritance now supplied a ready channel for the war’s fear to run in. In February of 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and under its authority some hundred and twenty thousand men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them citizens, were ordered from their homes, permitted a suitcase apiece, made to sell or abandon their farms and shops and houses at ruinous loss, and moved inland to a string of hastily built camps behind wire in the deserts and wastes of the interior.

The administration of it fell to a new agency, the War Relocation Authority, and its first head was Milton Eisenhower — the younger brother of the general — who lasted barely ninety days in the job before the distaste of it drove him out, and who called the whole business, in later life, a mistake he regretted to the end of his days. His successor, Dillon Myer, ran the camps for the duration and came to believe the policy was wrong even as he executed it. The Supreme Court, asked to judge the thing, upheld it: in the Korematsu case, decided in 1944, the Court ruled that the military necessity of wartime justified the removal, a decision that stood as precedent for decades and was disavowed only long after, and that stands now as one of the least defensible in the Court’s history. The bitter irony that the men of the segregated Japanese American combat unit, the 442nd, were among the most decorated soldiers in the Army even as their families sat behind wire is a fact that needs no underlining. Decades later the government of the United States formally apologized for the internment and paid reparations to the survivors — an admission, rare in the history of states, that the thing had been a wrong and not a necessity.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Part Seven: The Mobilized Mind

The war conscripted the country’s scientists as surely as its young men, and out of that conscription came an institution that had not existed before and has governed American science ever since.

The man who built it was Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer from MIT, an administrator of genius and considerable steel, who understood before almost anyone in Washington that the coming war would be a war of laboratories and who set out to organize the nation’s science for it. He persuaded Roosevelt, in a single brief meeting, to create a federal office to marshal the universities and the industrial laboratories for war research, and as head of what became the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush invented the modern relationship between the government and the scientist. Rather than draft the physicists into uniform and put them to work in military laboratories, he left them in their universities and their companies and paid them by contract to do the war’s research where they stood — a pattern of federal money flowing to independent laboratories that would become, after the war, the permanent architecture of American science.

The output of that arrangement was formidable and, in one case, world-altering. The laboratories perfected radar, the invisible eye that won the air and the sea; they built the proximity fuze, a shell that sensed its target and burst near it without a direct hit, which transformed anti-aircraft fire and naval gunnery; they turned penicillin from a laboratory curiosity into a mass-produced drug that saved uncountable lives, and DDT into a weapon against the insect-borne diseases that had killed more soldiers than bullets in every prior war. And behind the deepest curtain of secrecy the war produced, the same partnership of government money, university brains, and industrial muscle undertook the largest scientific and engineering project in history — the building of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project belongs, in its origins, to the home front: it was a vast industrial enterprise, whole secret cities raised in Tennessee and Washington State and New Mexico, tens of thousands of workers laboring at tasks they were forbidden to understand, two billion dollars spent without a line item that Congress could see, all of it hidden from a public that learned of its existence only when the weapon was used. What belongs here is the machinery that made it — the marriage of the federal treasury to the research laboratory that Bush had brokered, which won the war’s technical battles and then, in the peace, became a standing institution. Bush laid the case for keeping it in a report he handed the government as the war ended, arguing that the nation should go on funding basic research in peacetime as a permanent public responsibility; and the research state he proposed, the endless flow of federal dollars into American science, was duly built and never dismantled.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Part Eight: What Was Known

The last lecture set down a promissory note that must now be paid. As the global war took shape and ran its course, the deliberate extermination of the Jews of Europe was underway, and the record of what the United States knew of it, and did about it, belongs here.

The essential facts of the killing reached the West in the course of 1942 — reliable reports, transmitted through neutral channels, that the German regime was engaged in the systematic murder of the whole Jewish population within its reach, not as a byproduct of war but as a policy pursued for its own sake. By the end of that year the Allied governments had confirmed enough to issue a joint declaration condemning the extermination in so many words. The information existed. What it did not do was move the machinery of rescue, for two reasons that compounded each other.

The first was the settled conviction, held from the top of the war effort down, that nothing must be allowed to compete with the single overriding aim of military victory, and that the surest and only real rescue of Europe’s Jews lay in the swiftest possible defeat of Germany. By this logic every proposal for a rescue that would divert shipping, or troops, or aircraft, or diplomatic energy from the war was refused, because the war came first and the war was held to be the rescue. The logic was not simply a mask for indifference — the fastest defeat of Germany did in fact end the killing, for those who survived to see it — and the logic also served, conveniently, to justify doing very nearly nothing while the killing went on.

The second reason was closer to home and less defensible. The machinery of American refugee policy sat within the State Department, and there it encountered officials who did not want the refugees, who regarded the whole issue as a distraction and the immigrants as undesirable, and who used the immigration restrictions the earlier lectures traced — the tight national quotas of the 1920s, still in force — as a wall against the desperate. The most notorious of them, Breckinridge Long, an assistant secretary of state, quietly throttled the flow of visas by piling procedural obstacles in the path of any Jew trying to reach America, so that even the meager quotas went unfilled while the ships of Europe’s Jews were turned away. A conference the Allies convened at Bermuda in 1943, ostensibly to address the refugee crisis, produced a great deal of talk and nothing of substance, and was understood by those who watched it closely to have been designed to produce nothing — a performance of concern in place of action.

The thing was broken open, at last, from inside the government itself, and by an unlikely quarter. The lawyers of the Treasury Department, working under Secretary Henry Morgenthau — a Dutchess County neighbor and old friend of the President, and the highest-placed Jew in the administration — stumbled onto the evidence of the State Department’s obstruction while chasing a licensing question, and were appalled by what they found. One of them, a young attorney named Josiah DuBois, drafted a report and titled it, in the first draft, a report on the acquiescence of this government in the murder of the Jews, and threatened to resign and take the whole thing public if nothing was done. Morgenthau carried the substance of it to Roosevelt in January of 1944, and the President, faced with the prospect of a scandal in an election year, acted: he created by executive order the War Refugee Board, a body charged at last with the actual work of rescue. It came terribly late — most of those who were going to die were already dead — and it worked on a shoestring, and yet in its short life it managed to save perhaps some tens of thousands, funding the operations of rescuers on the ground in Europe, among them the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, whose work in Budapest it helped underwrite.

There remained the question of the camps themselves, and in particular whether the Allies, whose bombers by 1944 were flying over the very region where the largest killing center lay, should bomb the gas chambers or the rail lines that fed them. The request was made and was refused, on the grounds that the aircraft were needed for the military targets that would win the war and shorten the killing, and the argument over whether that refusal was right — whether such a raid was even feasible, whether it would have saved lives or cost them, whether the men who declined it were reasoning or rationalizing — has never been settled. What can be said plainly is this: the rescue of the Jews was never adopted as an aim of the war, was never permitted to compete with victory, and was obstructed at the working level by men within the American government who did not want the victims saved. The country that did more than any other to destroy the regime that committed the crime did remarkably little, while there was still time, to pull the crime’s victims from the fire.

[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]

Closing: What the Country Kept

The war ended the way the last lecture described, in the ruin of the enemy capitals and the flash over the two Japanese cities, and Roosevelt did not live to see it finished — the great stroke felled him at Warm Springs in April of 1945, and the plain man from Missouri who succeeded him inherited a war nearly won and a peace not yet imagined. What remains, at the close of the home-front story, is the reckoning of what the furnace of those years had made, and what of it the country chose to keep.

A great deal of the wartime apparatus was struck down the moment the emergency passed, and struck down eagerly, because the country had accepted it only as an emergency. The price controls and the rationing were dismantled within months, the ration books thrown away with something like joy. The war production boards were wound up, the controls on materials lifted, the command economy demobilized as fast as the armies. The country reached back, with evident relief, for the free market and the private bargain it had suspended for the duration, and the reaching-back is itself the evidence that the suspension had never been meant to last.

It reached back over the strenuous objection of much of the economics profession, which feared the reaching-back would be a catastrophe, and which was wrong. A large body of expert opinion held that the controls should be kept in place well past the war, on the conviction that lifting them would loose a ruinous inflation, and held further that the sudden demobilization of twelve million servicemen and the collapse of war spending would throw the economy straight back into the Depression from which the war had rescued it. The most explicit of these forecasts came from Paul Samuelson, already among the ablest economists of his generation, who wrote in 1943 that a rapid demobilization, a liquidation of price controls, and a sharp fall in deficit spending would usher in “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” Others of the first rank agreed; the expectation of a postwar slump was close to the consensus of the profession. Then the war ended, and the controls came off, and the soldiers came home, and the government spending fell off a cliff — every condition the forecasters had dreaded was met — and the depression did not come. The pent-up savings of the war years met the pent-up demand for the goods that had gone unmade, the returning veterans were cushioned by the GI Bill and absorbed into a booming private economy, and unemployment, instead of soaring, stayed low while employment climbed past its wartime peak. Samuelson had hedged his prophecy with conditions, and the conditions largely came to pass and the prophecy still failed, which is the instructive part. The men who understood the economy best, equipped with the newest and most confident tools their science had yet produced, looked at the transition and saw disaster where prosperity was coming. It is worth carrying out of this lecture as a caution: that the causes of unemployment and inflation are less well understood, even by those whose profession it is to understand them, than the confidence of the forecasts tends to suggest.

But other transformations proved permanent, and they add up to a country structurally different from the one that had entered the war. The federal government was vastly larger and reached vastly further into the economy and the daily life of the citizen, and it never shrank back to its prewar dimensions. The income tax had become a mass tax collected by withholding, and the whole population now stood in a direct financial relationship to the national treasury that it had never known before. The presidency had grown into something like the office we would recognize, the commanding executive at the center of national life, its wartime powers only partly relinquished. The partnership of government and science had been institutionalized into a permanent research state. The demographic map had been redrawn by a migration that carried millions of Black Southerners into the Northern and Western cities, with all the political and social consequence that would flow from it, and had drawn millions of women into a workforce whose memory of their competence outlasted their departure from it. The Black freedom movement had discovered its leverage and its slogans and its capacity to extract concessions from a reluctant state, and it did not lay those down. And returning from the war came sixteen million veterans, to whom a grateful and slightly nervous Congress had voted, in 1944, an extraordinary charter — the GI Bill, which would send them to college by the millions and lend them the money to buy houses, and which would build the suburban, educated, homeowning middle class that defined the America of the next generation.

The country had been put through a furnace, and it came out changed in ways it had chosen and ways it had not, keeping some of the changes deliberately and some without ever quite deciding to. It had proved that it could out-produce the world and govern an economy by command and reshape itself under pressure faster than it would have believed possible, and it had also shown, in the camps in the desert and the visas that went unissued, how its oldest promises could give way when the pressure bore hard enough on the wrong people. It stood, in the summer of 1945, the strongest nation on the face of the earth by an almost embarrassing margin, in possession of a weapon no one else yet held, with its cities untouched and its factories humming and its rivals in ruins — and with the enormous and unwelcome question of what to do with all that power now pressing in, as the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union began, even before the shooting stopped, to curdle into the long antagonism that would organize the world for the next half century. That question, and the weapon, and the peace that was really the opening of a colder war, are where we turn next.

[ END OF LECTURE ]

End of Lecture 4.3 — The Home Front

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The democratic individual wants to judge for himself, yet no individual can judge everything for himself. We lack the time and capacity to investigate every proposition we depend on, so we have to accept much of what we believe from others.

…The democratic problem of knowledge runs deeper, then, than “think for yourself”. We have to trust others, but the harder problem is learning whom, why, and when.

…Citizens who administer towns, serve on juries, and live with the consequences of political choices learn the same respect for particulars. Political participation does more than disperse power; it teaches people how to discipline reason.

…Tocqueville refuses to resolve the tensions equality creates. It encourages independent judgment and delivers people defenseless to majority opinion. It weakens inherited authority while creating a need for new authority. It stimulates self-improvement while indefinite perfectibility breeds restlessness.

Gerard Baker writes,

The widespread popular dissatisfaction with the working of modern American capitalism may be the product of some real, objective problems in the way American capitalism is working: income and wealth inequality on a scale not seen in a century; the concentration of economic, cultural and increasingly political power in a class of technology leaders whose products are dissolving the bonds that keep society together; the tightening nexus between business elites and the people who control the political process; rampant corruption and a political establishment that doesn’t seem interested in accountability

I stress again the contrast with the Web. In the early days, the Web dispersed power. As of now, AI concentrates it. The concentration of epistemological power in the AI models, in contrast to the democratic mind described by Tocqueville, is particularly jarring.

Noah Smith writes,

Liberals have always been rightfully suspicious that the super-rich would use their wealth to sway political opinion. But before the 2016 election, attitudes toward tech companies were broadly benign on the left. What changed was the narrative that disinformation (“fake news”) on Facebook swung the election to Trump.

And this carries over into hostility toward AI and toward data centers.

It is hard to accept political opposition on its face. Those of us on the right would like to blame academia for brainwashing students, even though studies of student beliefs show little or no effect from faculty ideology. And those on the left want to portray conservative tech executives as manipulative.

Healthy suspicion of the influence of money in politics is one thing; seeing all of economic history as a clash between rich technologists and democracy is just silly.

Smith predicts,

Popular fear of AI, and the data centers that power it, is leading to a grassroots democratic backlash against the very industry that Acemoglu and Johnson peg as the greatest threat.

No amount of Big Tech money or Marc Andreessen blog posts is going to stop this backlash. Henry Farrell’s worldview will be proven wrong, even as his policy ideas are vindicated. In the end, the government will probably end up quasi-nationalizing the big AI companies in some way, in order to ensure that this powerful technology serves the interest of the nation.

For “interest of the nation” substitute “interests of a particular political faction.” If Smith is right, the market will be superseded by a European Union style elitist class.

Interviewed by Brink Lindsey, Jonathan Rauch says,

voters in America and the world don’t know how good they’ve got it. They enjoy a level of peace, freedom, prosperity, and knowledge, which is unparalleled in human affairs. And that’s especially true of the United States of America, which has never been more prosperous, more secure. Life spans have never been longer, two-year dip recently. And you know you can recite all those things as well as I can. And so aren’t they being more than a bit spoiled to think that now is one of the worst times in American history? Isn’t there just at some level a fundamental failure of perception here …there’s almost a kind of immorality in people’s not understanding and appreciating how fortunate they are to be Americans and how fortunate they are to be alive right now.

Lindsey uses his time to talk about the plight of non-college-educated white men. But the ingratitude is worst among the college educated. This conversation frustrated me.

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The Permanent Problem

Jonathan Rauch on responding to the crisis of liberalism

Liberal values and institutions now face aggressive challenges from both right and left extremism, so how should defenders of the embattled liberal center respond? It’s become clear now that the question exposes an important fault line running through today’s contemporary center-left and center-right. On one side are those convinced that the rise of ext…

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22 days ago · 2 likes · Brink Lindsey

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Noahpinion

The poverty of anti-tech thought

It has come to my attention that the noted political scientist Henry Farrell has been writing some very testy responses to me. The first two, in 2024, totally slipped by unnoticed…

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23 days ago · 212 likes · 20 comments · Noah Smith

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This essay makes three main points. First, even though US growth rates have been stable at roughly 2 percent per year for 150 years, it is distinctly possible that automating intelligence leads economic growth rates to accelerate. Second, this acceleration is likely to be slowed by the presence of "weak links." While we each have access to 100 million times more transistors on our desktop computer than people in the 1970s, we are not 100 million times more productive. Computers can invert matrices at lightning speed, but we humans must still decide what matrix to invert, what hypothesis to test, and so on. Accelerating economic growth requires the vast majority of the weak links to be automated away, which delays the large gains. Finally, even though weak links slow the benefits, they may actually speed up the risks. When a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, damaging one link in the chain can be very costly. A powerful AI that is superhuman at software engineering could be misused by a bad actor to do substantial harm by hacking the financial system or a virology lab.

This is a fairly standard economist’s take, I think. Jones hedges by writing

We begin by outlining two scenarios for the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy: one in which AI drastically accelerates economic growth and another in which AI is “business as usual.” Both scenarios are possible, and both scenarios have features that are informative about the future consequences of AI. . .This essay provides one perspective based on economic research, but the perspective is inherently speculative and will likely prove to be incorrect on many dimensions.

Hollis Robbins writes,

Colleges and universities are currently a brake on AI progress. As cultural institutions, responsible for forming the next generation of young people, the message is a lot of hand flapping about “needing to be workforce ready” and “don’t cheat” and “here are your required courses to graduate.” I’ve been focused for three years on the strangeness of higher ed’s preoccupation with “general education” and the sector’s commitment to staying the course while technology marches forward.

This is another difference between the 1990s and today. When I launched my web site in 1994, the academy was way ahead of the private sector with respect to using the Internet.

Peter Diamandis writes,

Schools teach algebra, history, biology, and standardized test preparation. Parents want AI literacy, mindset, and entrepreneurial thinking.

…I asked students, teachers, and professionals whether a college degree will become less important in an AI world. 79% said yes.

…The Socratic method is the pedagogy for the AI age.

…The ban-on-AI approach is the ban-on-calculator approach. It failed then and it will fail now. Write policy that mandates AI literacy, not AI prohibition.

Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen write,

1. We do not see widespread, economy-wide job displacement associated with AI.

2. However, young workers in AI-exposed occupations are increasingly falling behind their less-exposed peers. Employment among workers ages 22–25 in highly AI-exposed occupations now stands about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with employment among similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen

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Anecdotal Value

Universities would prefer not to.

Four years after ChatGPT caught so many by surprise, the primary role of higher education seems to be slowing down the public’s transition to the AI era. For many faculty, this is a win. For those focused on the future, this is the biggest institutional failure since the Victorian Post Office, with its monopoly on telegraph lines, dismissed the telephon…

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a month ago · 15 likes · 9 comments · Hollis Robbins

Peer culture is a key factor associated with fertility. Having very helpful versus relatively unsupportive friends can increase desired family size for young Americans by nearly an entire child per family and can increase couple intentions to have another child by about 10 percentage points (an increase of about a third).

My wife grew up on a cul de sac. I grew up on a cul de sac. When we had our first child, we moved to a cul de sac. The thing about cul de sacs is that they are kiddie communes. They make it much easier to have children.

The big apartment buildings in cities just do not do that. I’ll bet that South Korea does not have many cul de sacs.

Simon Maass writes,

The “Beat generation,” whose members became known as “beatniks,” was a highly influential cultural current that emerged in the US during the late 1940s and 1950s. Among other interests, it focused on transgressive and bohemian lifestyles, drug use, the rejection of bourgeois American mores, and enjoyment of jazz music. In many ways, the Beat generation paved the way for the hippie phenomenon that would replace it in the late 1960s.

…The poet Charles Bukowski once referred to the Beat generation by the names of four of its major authors: “Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso.” All four struggled with mental illness. David S. Wills has published well-researched and enlightening essays on the Beat generation through his website Beatdom. In one article, he notes that it was common for members of the Beat generation to be institutionalised for mental illness: “many of those who fell under the Beat label ended up in the ‘nuthouse.’”

Something to consider when my lecture series on 20th century American history moves to the 1950s.

Moses Sternstein writes,

if before, status games might be variously won or lost at the county, town, or church-level (i.e. the local maxima), then now, the high watermark of status is determined by the Pareto-distributed hierarchy of influencers and other rich n’ famous who bare their “day to day” lives for everyone to see (i.e. decidedly not-local, even if not quite global, maxima).

The result is that the Joneses to keep up with aren’t next door—they’re the top 1% of “creators” on tiktok or whatever who are “here, in social media land, with the rest of us,” but are, in reality, nothing like the rest of us.

Patrick Collison writes,

(This isn't the list of books that I think one ought to read -- it's just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here.)

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
Seeing Like a State
The Dream Machine
The Sovereign Individual
The Beginning of Infinity
Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman
Softwar
Ashlee Vance's Elon biography
The Mythical Man-Month

…

I have read The Mythical Man-Month, plus a couple of other books later down on the list. I probably have absorbed some other ideas by osmosis. But I doubt that anyone other than Patrick has absorbed all of them.

Pointer from Tanner Greer, who writes,

The upshot of all this is that books have an inordinate impact on the Silicon Valley mindspace. Often these books are stilted academic titles, works which at first glance have no obvious connection to software. “It’s interesting how Seeing Like A State has made it into the vague tech canon,” Jasmine Sun comments, “despite being from a random anarchist anthropologist who specialized in Southeast Asian agrarian societies.”

“Vague tech canon” is a clever phrase. Siloed off on so many little mountains, I could not speak of a common DC canon, vague or otherwise. But for Silicon Valley the term is just—there are no formal canonizers in Silicon Valley, and thus no formal canon. But a “vague” canon, the sort that ties together any historical community of requisite intelligence and literacy, certainly exists.

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Random Walk

Of Burritos and the Price of Status

can’t stop consooming…

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21 days ago · 5 likes · Moses Sternstein

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Aporia

The Beats: Decadence and Disease

Written by Simon Maass…

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23 days ago · 21 likes · 6 comments · Aporia

When Manhattan Institute senior fellow James Manzi used AI to classify some 600,000 social-science abstracts from 1960 to 2024, he found that roughly 90 percent of politically relevant research leaned left. In the top four sociology journals, the share of papers focusing on inequality has risen to about 75 percent, on average….

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocated $35.3 billion in total grants in 2025, and its initiative on “Health Disparities and Racial or Ethnic Minority Health Research” received over $5 billion in 2024. Significant bias could be corrected if just one-half of 1 percent of the NIH’s budget were directed toward heterodox research. The same is true for the National Science Foundation and every other government organization that allocates research grant funding.

I would argue for blowing up the whole system. Government funding controls research, and progressives control government funding.

I am a brokenist on this one. Don’t try to mend it. End it.

Austin Scholar writes,

if a teenager asked me why they should bother to learn to write in the age of AI, I would tell them this: writing is thinking. Writing still matters because it’s one of the best tools in the world for clarifying ideas, deepening understanding, and generating original thought. AI can produce text. It cannot create connections in your mind between disparate topics, use your personal experience to come up with examples or reasoning, or figure out for you how new knowledge fits into your existing knowledge map.

She explains the learning science behind this.

Matt Continetti writes,

Michigan’s administrators say they have the students’ best interests in mind. The no-grades policy, they add, will allow freshmen to “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys.”

My goodness. How can freshmen “acclimate to the demands of college” when a college makes no demands? And since when are “intrinsic motivations” enough for good work? A few students may be intrinsically motivated to attend every class, complete every assignment and meet with professors during office hours. They’re the exception. And they should be rewarded for their effort with an exceptional grade.

When I was a freshman at Swarthmore College, the first semester was all pass-fail. This allows you to take risks as you are exploring the curriculum. I also came in with a semester’s worth of AP credits, and my last two years I was in the Honors Program which is pass-fail until you have outside examiners at the end. So I had only two semesters of grades on my transcript.

Swarthmore had self-motivated students, like me. And it had small seminars, where a professor knew the students.

I don’t see grades as a necessary way to toughen up students. At Michigan, the problem is giant classes where students are anonymous. In higher education in general, the problem is too many students being shoved through the system who don’t belong there in the first place.

Ashley Rubin writes,

My specific focus was the role of political considerations in the production and reception of sociological research.

…The field is heterogeneous (and good, high-quality work is produced), but at the same time there are serious problems, and they have become institutionalized. I identify three major categories:

1. deep and long-standing contestation over the mission of the field and standards and criteria that should drive research production and reception

2. topical skews and blindspots making us less than the systematic study of society

3. both hidden and high-profile episodes of informal and formal social control of scholarly production based on political considerations

Her essay describes, in an apologetic tone, a report on sociology for the Vanderbilt-WashU commission on scholarly standards. She remarks,

my optimism about sociology declined over the course of the project.

And I have been saying for years that economics is on the road to sociology.

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Ashley Rubin

Publishing the Sociology Report for the Vanderbilt-WashU Commission

My disciplinary report on Sociology, written for the Vanderbilt-WashU Commission on Scholarly Standards, came out today…

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a month ago · 28 likes · 2 comments · Ashley Rubin

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Austin Scholar

Austin Scholar #228: Why learn to write in the age of AI?

Hey, y’all…

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25 days ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · Austin Scholar

Think of three realms: the digital realm, the physical realm, and the social realm.

Impressive as they are, LLMs have only shown the ability to master the digital realm. The physical realm, with its many arrangements of particles and millennia of evolution, is more complex. The human social realm, with the rapidity of cultural evolution, has reached an even higher level of complexity.

When we hope for today’s models to cure cancer, we are expecting the masters of the digital realm to solve a problem outside of the digital realm. Cancer is a problem in the physical realm. And it may also have causes in the social realm.

When we hope for artificial intelligence to revolutionize education, we are asking it to solve a problem in the social realm. Those of us who follow the Alpha School by reading the Austin Scholar substack know how much she emphasizes the role of motivation strategies in addition to the AI learning tools.

Cybersecurity appears to be a problem in the digital realm. But it is actually a problem in the social realm. I want convenient access to certain computer files, such as my bank account, because of their relevance to my social world. But by the same token criminals would like to impersonate me in order to have access to such files. The easier it is for me to access a file, the easier it is to impersonate me. As systems have evolved in recent decades, the drive to make it harder to impersonate has made access less convenient. I waste much more time trying to authenticate myself than I did twenty years ago. Yet vulnerability remains. As Thomas Sowell says about problems in the social world, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

Modern philosophers, following Descartes, tend to gloss over the social realm. They want to retreat to the room where he meditated and emerged with “I think, therefore I am.” But “I think” is not the best way to describe how we acquire knowledge. Thinking is social. We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.

The digital realm is very important. The major LLM labs have achieved a great deal. I am grateful to be able to use their tools. But I take seriously the importance of the physical realm, which is more complex. I also take seriously the importance of the social realm, which is even more complex. So I doubt that genuine artificial intelligence is close at hand.

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Substack created an alternative to this business model by shifting the journalism tax from advertisers directly onto consumers. Now, instead of indirectly subsidising reporters’ careers by buying products from the companies that market them through print ads and TV spots, readers could pay them directly via the online marketplace of journalism that is Substack.

The problem with this model is obvious: it will never come close to producing revenue on the scale that mass advertising generated for media corporations. From the perspective of advertisers, of course, that’s a good thing: their profits aren’t being siphoned off by an industry they have nothing to do with. From the perspective of news consumers, though, it sucks. It means less journalism, and journalism of a much lower quality.

We have known since Varian and Shapiro wrote Information Rules that, although obtaining revenues for digital goods is a challenge, there are more choices than just advertising or subscription. In my early days of writing “Arguing in my spare time” essays, I favored the bundling model. But I have come around to seeing the value of the patronage model, or what Andrey Mir (mentioned using Mir’s longer surname by Woodhouse) calls “donscription.”

Authors want two things. We want money, yes, but we also want a wide following. On Substack, those are in conflict. You can have more readers if you have more free content. But you convert more readers to paying subscribers by putting more content behind a paywall.

Richard Audoly and others write,

Following both the dotcom recession and the GFC, the decline in the labor share during expansion is steeper than in earlier cycles. Moreover, unlike in pre-2000 episodes, the labor share does not meaningfully rebound later in the expansion.

The 21st century has seen soaring prices for houses and for equities. It has seen an increase in capital income relative to labor income. In which direction does causality run, or is it bidirectional?

Scott Sumner writes,

Because currency is not a close substitute with other financial assets, if the government doubles the stock of currency it doesn’t cause the public to choose to hold 10% of their income as cash instead of 5%, rather they continue holding about 5% and NGDP doubles.

He has much more to say, in an essay about John Cochrane’s views. Like me, Cochrane emphasizes substitutability between money and other forms of government debt. But unlike me, Cochrane assumes that everyone is making forward-looking calculations about future government borrowing.

Jun Zhu and others write,

Used in isolation, demand-side tools will be partially absorbed by higher housing costs where supply cannot respond. The widening gap across income groups also demands attention; actions to increase supply—especially more affordable, entry-level homes—will help to bridge this gap.

…Continued cost and rate pressures in expensive MSAs will likely push co-residence back up,

Pointer from Kevin Erdmann. Once again, subsidizing demand and restricting supply gets the expected result: no more people in homes, but higher rents and prices.

Note that rent control is a two-fer. It subsidizes demand, by artificially depressing rents. And it restricts supply, but punishing anyone who would dare to build an apartment.

Ed Henderson writes,

Developers aren’t avoiding Maryland because they don’t believe in the market. Some of these are fundamentally strong submarkets with real population and real demand. They’re pulling back because the math stopped working. Rent control is the clearest culprit. When policy caps what a stabilized asset can earn, it changes the return projection on every deal in the pipeline. The crane doesn’t show up because the spreadsheet says don’t. That’s not a complicated sequence of events.

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Ed Henderson | DMV CRE

Nobody Lost. But Virginia Knows How to Win.

I’ve been watching cranes my whole career. Where they show up tells you everything — where capital is confident, where the math still works, where someone ran a pro forma and didn’t throw it in the trash…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · Ed Henderson

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Erdmann Housing Tracker

Urban Institute looks at young adults at home.

The Urban Institute has a helpful look under the hood at young adults between 25 and 34 living at home. “High Housing Costs Are Keeping More Young Adults in Their Parents’ Homes”, by Jun Zhu, Jung Hyun Choi, and Laurie Goodman…

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22 days ago · 5 likes · Kevin Erdmann

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The Pursuit of Happiness

John Cochrane on monetarism

Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now…

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23 days ago · 6 likes · Scott Sumner

The Second World War

Lecture Two: The Military History

Opening: The Blow Not Struck

In April 1942, George Marshall flew to London to win a war in a single stroke.

He carried a plan. The United States had been in the war for four months, and Marshall—Chief of Staff of the Army, a man whose austere self-command made Roosevelt slightly afraid of him—believed the way to beat Germany was the way that looked most obvious on a map. You concentrated overwhelming force at the decisive point, and the decisive point was northern France. Everything else was a detour. Build up American divisions in Britain through 1942, and in 1943 hurl them across the Channel straight at the German army in the West. Strike the enemy where he was strongest, break him there, and end it.

To Marshall, British reluctance to embrace this looked like a failure of nerve—and worse, a failure of focus. The British kept talking about the Mediterranean, about the Middle East, about Egypt and the Suez Canal and the sea lanes to India. To an American eye, this was an empire defending itself, dressing up the protection of its colonial lifelines as grand strategy. Marshall wanted to kill the German army. The British, he suspected, wanted to save their empire, and were prepared to let the war wander around the edges of the Mediterranean for years while they did it.

The British thought he was the one who did not understand. They had been fighting since 1939. They had been thrown off the continent at Dunkirk. They knew, in their bodies, what the Wehrmacht could do to an army that landed unready on a hostile shore. And what Marshall proposed—hurling a green, half-trained American force, short of landing craft and short of experience, across the Channel against battle-hardened German divisions—struck men like Alan Brooke, the head of the British army, as something close to madness. It would not be a decisive blow. It would be a massacre on the beaches, and the survivors pushed back into the sea. Then in August 1942 came Dieppe, a raid on the French coast that ended in slaughter, and the British caution looked less like timidity and more like knowledge.

This fear—that an opposed landing in France would end in catastrophe—did not go away when the argument ended. It haunted Allied commanders straight through to the morning of D-Day itself, two years later, when Eisenhower carried a note in his pocket taking the blame for a failure he thought entirely possible.

So the British argued for a different strategy. Not a direct confrontation with the mighty Germans, but an assault on what Churchill called the “soft underbelly” of the Axis: strike first in the Mediterranean, where the enemy was weaker and success was likelier. Clear North Africa, knock Italy out of the war, and blood the American army against Germans somewhere it could afford to lose. Roosevelt, over Marshall’s objection, agreed—he wanted American soldiers fighting Germans in 1942, not waiting in England for 1943—and in November the Allies landed in North Africa.

It worked, on its own terms. The Americans got into the fight. They learned, painfully, at places like Kasserine Pass how much they still had to learn. North Africa was cleared; Sicily followed; Italy was invaded and Mussolini fell.

But the underbelly was not soft, and it was not free. Every division committed to the Mediterranean, every landing craft—and landing craft were the scarcest currency of the entire war—was a division and a craft not available for France. The Mediterranean was a machine for consuming exactly the resources a cross-Channel invasion required. By the time the Allies met at Casablanca in January 1943, the arithmetic was already decided, whatever anyone wished. There would be no invasion of France that year. Marshall had lost the argument for the second time, and the great blow he had wanted to strike in 1943 would not fall until June of 1944.

Why it took so long to reach that beach—why a war that began in 1939 did not return to France until 1944—is the question this lecture answers. To see it whole, we have to go back to the beginning.

A Timeline of the War

1939 — The war begins

• September 1: Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war two days later.

• Autumn 1939–spring 1940: the Sitzkrieg, or “Phoney War”—declarations without fighting in the West.

1940 — The year of German triumph

• May 10: Germany strikes west through the Low Countries and France—the same day Chamberlain falls and Churchill becomes Prime Minister.

• Late May–June: Dunkirk; France surrenders on June 22. Britain stands alone.

• July–October: the Battle of Britain—the first German defeat, fought entirely in the air.

1941 — The war goes global

• June 22: Germany invades the Soviet Union. Vast advances—but the drive stalls before Moscow in December, and there is no knockout blow.

• December 7: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war.

1942 — The hinge

• Winter–spring: Japan overruns the Pacific and Southeast Asia—the Philippines, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies.

• June: Midway—the U.S. Navy halts the Japanese tide in a single day.

• October–November: three near-simultaneous turns—El Alamein in Egypt, Stalingrad’s encirclement in Russia, and the Anglo-American landings in North Africa.

1943 — The turn becomes undeniable

• February: the German Sixth Army surrenders at Stalingrad.

• July: Kursk breaks German offensive power in the East for good; the Allies land in Sicily.

• September: Italy invaded, Mussolini gone, Italy out of the war.

1944 — The decisive year

• June 6: D-Day—the Allies return to France at last.

• Summer: the Soviet offensive shatters German Army Group Centre; Paris is liberated in August.

• Pacific: the Marianas fall, putting Japan in range of American bombers; Leyte Gulf destroys the Japanese fleet.

1945 — Victory

• Spring: the Allies cross the Rhine, the Soviets take Berlin; Germany surrenders on May 8.

• August: atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan surrenders.

The Western Theater

Across every theater the same rhythm holds: in 1941 the Allies are retreating almost everywhere, through 1942 they are holding, and only from 1943 onward are they advancing. The Western theater shows this rhythm in its purest form—it opens with the worst defeat of the war and closes with the enemy’s capital in ruins.

The Battle of France, 1940. When Germany struck west on May 10, 1940, the Allies expected a replay of the last war—a grinding contest of trenches along a fixed line. Instead the Germans sent their armor through the Ardennes, the wooded hills the French had thought impassable and left lightly held. The panzers broke through at Sedan, wheeled north, and reached the Channel in ten days, trapping the best Allied armies against the sea. What saved them was not a victory but an evacuation: at Dunkirk, across nine days at the end of May, a fleet of warships and small civilian boats lifted some 340,000 men off the beaches and back to England. They came home without their guns, their tanks, their trucks—an army rescued but disarmed. France surrendered on June 22. In six weeks the strongest army in Western Europe had ceased to exist, and Britain stood alone.

The Battle of Britain, 1940. Hitler’s next step required crossing the Channel, and to cross the Channel he first needed the sky. Through the summer and autumn of 1940 the German air force tried to break the Royal Air Force and failed—worn down by British radar, by the narrow endurance of its own fighters over English soil, and by the pilots the RAF kept throwing back into the air. It was the first German defeat of the war, and it was fought entirely overhead. Denied control of the air, Hitler shelved the invasion and turned east. Britain had not won the war, but it had survived to keep fighting it—and as long as Britain held, there remained a base from which the West could one day be retaken.

The Battle of the Atlantic. Beneath all of this ran the longest campaign of the war, the one on which every other Western effort depended. Britain was an island that could not feed itself or arm itself without what came across the Atlantic—food, fuel, raw materials, and eventually the American armies and their equipment massing for the return to France. Germany’s answer was the U-boat: sink the ships faster than they could be built or replaced, and Britain would be starved out of the war without a single German soldier setting foot on the island. For a long stretch it very nearly worked. Sailing in convoys, the merchant ships crossed an ocean in which packs of submarines waited, and through 1942 and into the spring of 1943 the sinkings ran at a rate the Allies could not sustain—hundreds of ships and thousands of merchant sailors going down into the freezing North Atlantic, the tonnage lost outrunning the tonnage built. It was, Churchill later said, the only thing in the war that truly frightened him.

Then, in the spring of 1943, the balance tipped—not by any single stroke but by many advances arriving together. More escort ships and small escort carriers closed the gap in mid-ocean where aircraft had not been able to reach; long-range patrol planes covered the rest; better radar, and the steady work of breaking the U-boats’ codes, let the convoys find the submarines before the submarines found them.

The codebreaking in particular was a triumph hidden for decades after the war. The German navy encrypted its orders on the Enigma machine, a device its operators believed produced unbreakable cipher—and at Bletchley Park, in England, a team of mathematicians and cryptanalysts broke it anyway, building some of the earliest computing machines to do it. When Bletchley could read the U-boats’ signals, the Allies could route convoys around the waiting wolfpacks and vector their hunters straight onto the submarines; when the Germans changed their system and the codebreakers went blind, the sinkings climbed again. The secret war over the U-boats’ messages ran the length of the battle, and the side that could read the other’s mail held an advantage that could tip a convoy between safe passage and slaughter.

In a few brutal months the hunters became the hunted, and U-boat losses rose so steeply that Germany pulled its submarines back from the North Atlantic. The lifeline held. And because it held, everything else in the West became possible: the buildup in Britain, the bomber fleets, and the great crossing to Normandy all rested on the ships that kept getting through.

North Africa and Italy, 1942–1943. The return to the continent began not in France but, as we have seen, along the “soft underbelly.” Before the Anglo-American landings, though, came the raid that shadowed every plan that followed. In August 1942 an Allied force of roughly six thousand men, most of them Canadian, assaulted the French port of Dieppe. It was a catastrophe. More than half were killed, wounded, or captured in a single morning; tanks foundered on the steep shingle beach, unable to climb the seawall, and the survivors were thrown back into the sea before noon. Dieppe taught hard lessons that the Allies never forgot. Assaulting a defended port head-on was suicide—so the eventual invasion of France would land on open beaches and bring its harbors with it, towed in pieces across the Channel. A landing needed overwhelming bombardment, specialized armor, and total command of sea and air—so the whole technical apparatus of D-Day was built precisely because Dieppe had shown what happened without it. And it hardened the conviction, already strong in British minds, that a premature crossing would fail. The expensive rehearsal shaped both the argument and its eventual answer.

The main effort came in November 1942, when Anglo-American forces landed in North Africa and, together with the British drive west from El Alamein, caught the Germans and Italians in a closing vise. Here the American army learned its trade the hard way—at Kasserine Pass in early 1943 the Germans handled the green U.S. troops roughly, and the lesson stuck. By May the Axis forces in Africa surrendered. Sicily followed in July; the invasion of the Italian mainland in September knocked Mussolini from power and took Italy out of the war. But the Germans poured troops down the peninsula and fought for every ridge. Italy did not collapse—it became a slow, bloody grind up a mountainous spine, tying down Allied divisions for the rest of the war. The underbelly, it turned out, was not soft.

D-Day and the return to France, 1944. On the morning of June 6, 1944, the Allies came back to the continent they had been driven from four years before. It was the largest amphibious assault in history—thousands of ships, five beaches along the Normandy coast, airborne divisions dropped inland in the dark. Everything Dieppe had taught was present: the artificial harbors, the massed naval and air bombardment, the specialized armor built to clear obstacles and climb seawalls. And still it was not certain. The fear that an opposed landing would end in slaughter—the fear that had haunted Allied commanders since Dunkirk—was alive that morning in Eisenhower himself, who had written a note in advance taking full blame for the failure he thought entirely possible, and folded it into his wallet. He never had to use it. The Allies held the beaches, built up faster than the Germans could counterattack, and in August broke out of Normandy. Paris was liberated that month, and the German army in the West fell back toward its own frontier.

Into Germany, 1944–1945. The advance was neither smooth nor cheap. A bold gamble to leap the Rhine in the autumn of 1944 failed at Arnhem. In December the Germans gathered their last reserves for a surprise blow through the Ardennes—the same ground as 1940—and tore a bulge in the American line before the offensive was contained. It was the final spasm. In the spring of 1945 the Allies crossed the Rhine and drove into the heart of Germany from the west while the Soviets closed from the east. Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. The war that had begun with German armor racing to the Channel ended with Allied armies meeting in the ruins of the Reich.

The Eastern Front

Everything about the Eastern Front was larger and worse. This was where the German army was actually destroyed—the majority of its dead were made here, in a war fought on a front a thousand miles wide, across a scale of space and death that the Western theater never approached. It was a war between two dictatorships that had already shown, at home, how little either valued human life, and now turned that indifference outward against each other. Hitler did not intend an ordinary war of conquest in the East. He intended a war of annihilation—to destroy the Soviet state, enslave its peoples, and murder its Jews. That is the fact that sets this theater apart: the fighting and the killing were not separate stories. The same advance that carried the German army toward Moscow carried the machinery of mass murder behind it.

Barbarossa, 1941. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union along an enormous front—the largest invasion in history. The opening months were a catastrophe for the Soviets. Whole armies were encircled and captured, hundreds of thousands at a time; the Red Army reeled back hundreds of miles, and it seemed the Soviet state might simply collapse. But behind the front, something else began at once. Special killing squads—the Einsatzgruppen—followed the army into the occupied territories and began murdering Jews en masse, shooting them at the edges of pits in towns and forests across the newly conquered lands. This was the Holocaust in its first form, by bullet rather than by gas chamber, and it started in the summer of 1941, in the wake of the advancing army.

The advance did not stop, but it did not finish, either. The Germans reached the outskirts of Moscow in December, close enough to see the city—and there they were halted, by the Russian winter for which they were not equipped, by lengthening supply lines, and by a Soviet counterattack drawn from reserves Hitler had not known existed. The knockout blow had failed. And a Germany that could not win quickly in the East had entered a war it was not built to fight—a long one.

Stalingrad, 1942. In 1942 the Germans struck south, toward the oil of the Caucasus and toward the city on the Volga that bore Stalin’s name. Stalingrad became the emblem of the whole front: a battle fought street by street, house by house, room by room, in the rubble of a burning city, at a cost in lives that beggars description. Both dictators poured men into it and forbade retreat. Then, in November, the Soviets did not fight the Germans in the city—they struck the weaker allied armies on the flanks, broke through, and closed a ring around the entire German Sixth Army inside Stalingrad. Hitler forbade breakout. The trapped army starved and froze through the winter, and in February 1943 what was left of it surrendered. An entire German field army had been destroyed. It was the psychological turning point of the war in the East.

Kursk, 1943. That summer the Germans mounted one last great offensive in the East, against a Soviet bulge in the line at Kursk. The Soviets knew it was coming, and had dug in with depth the attackers could not chew through. It became the largest clash of armor the world had seen, and it ended with the German offensive spent and broken. After Kursk, the initiative in the East passed permanently to the Soviets. The Germans would never again mount a strategic offensive there. From this point the front moved only one direction—westward, toward Germany—and it did not stop.

The Soviet advance, 1944–1945. In the summer of 1944, as the Western Allies were fighting in Normandy, the Soviets launched a massive offensive that shattered the German center and destroyed an entire army group—a blow larger than anything happening in the West, and one that broke the back of German power on the continent. The Red Army rolled forward across the borderlands and into Poland, and as it advanced it overran the sites of the mass murder—the camps in the East, where by now the killing had moved from the pits to the gas chambers, and where the scale of what had been done became visible as the Germans retreated. Through late 1944 and into 1945 the Soviets drove west across Eastern Europe, and in the spring of 1945 they fought their way into Berlin itself, block by block, to the bunker where Hitler took his own life. Germany surrendered days later. The regime that had launched a war of annihilation in the East was destroyed, in the end, by the state it had set out to annihilate.

The Pacific

The Pacific war was unlike the others. It was fought across an ocean rather than a continent, and so it was first of all a naval and air war, in which the decisive weapon was not the tank but the aircraft carrier, and the object was not ground but distance—the vast reaches of sea between Japan and everything it had seized. The same rhythm holds here as elsewhere: through early 1942 Japan advances almost unchecked, by mid-1942 it is stopped, and from 1943 the tide runs the other way. But here the turn came faster and earlier than in any other theater.

The Japanese tide, 1941–1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was meant to cripple the American fleet long enough for Japan to seize an empire and fortify it before the United States could recover. For a few months it worked spectacularly. Japan swept across the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia—the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, the great British naval base at Singapore, the Dutch East Indies with their oil. It was a run of conquest as swift as Germany’s in 1940. But Pearl Harbor had missed its most important targets: the American aircraft carriers, which had not been in port. In a war that would be decided by carriers, the weapon that mattered most had survived.

Coral Sea and Midway, 1942. The tide turned in the space of a month. In May, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, an American fleet checked a Japanese advance toward Australia—the first time a Japanese thrust had been stopped. Then in June came Midway. The Japanese sailed east to destroy what remained of the American fleet and were instead ambushed—American codebreakers had learned their plan—and in a single morning four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk. It was the decisive battle of the Pacific war. Japan never replaced those carriers or the trained aircrews that went down with them, and after Midway it was never again able to mount a strategic offensive. Barely six months after Pearl Harbor, the initiative had already passed to the United States.

Island-hopping, 1943–1944. Now came the long problem of reaching Japan across an ocean studded with fortified islands. The answer was a strategy of selection rather than conquest. Rather than storm every island Japan held—each one costly, each one defended to the last man—the Americans took only the ones they needed, the islands whose airfields and anchorages would carry the advance forward, and simply bypassed the rest. The strongpoints left behind were cut off, their garrisons stranded and useless, withering on the vine while the war moved past them. Underneath this, a quieter campaign did decisive work: American submarines strangled Japanese shipping, sinking the tankers and freighters that carried oil and raw materials home, until the island empire Japan had conquered could no longer supply the home islands that had conquered it. The fighting on the islands that were taken—Tarawa, Saipan, later Iwo Jima and Okinawa—was savage beyond almost anything in the war, defenders fighting to nearly the last man. But the direction never reversed. In 1944 the capture of the Marianas—Saipan, Tinian, Guam—put the new long-range B-29 bombers within reach of Japan itself, and that same year, at Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history destroyed what remained of the Japanese fleet as a fighting force.

The end, 1945. By 1945 Japan was, in a strategic sense, already beaten—its fleet sunk, its shipping cut, its cities burning under bombers it could no longer stop. But “beaten” and “surrendered” were not the same thing, and the closer the war came to Japan itself, the more ferocious the defense grew. Iwo Jima and Okinawa were bloodbaths; kamikaze pilots flew their aircraft into ships; and Allied planners looking ahead to an invasion of the home islands forecast casualties on a horrific scale, measured against the fanaticism those two battles had shown. It was into this expectation—an invasion everyone dreaded—that the atomic bomb arrived. It was the endpoint of the strategic-bombing logic the whole island campaign had been building toward: the islands had been won to put bombers over Japan, and this was the ultimate bomb. In August 1945 atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Soviet Union declared war and swept into Manchuria; and Japan surrendered. The war that had begun for America at Pearl Harbor ended in the ruin of the empire that had struck there.

Conclusion

Three theaters, three different wars—a war of beaches and hedgerows in the West, a war of annihilation across a thousand miles of the East, a war of carriers and islands across the Pacific—and yet a single shape runs through all three. In 1941 the Allies were losing everywhere: France fallen, Britain besieged, the Soviet armies reeling back toward Moscow, the Pacific swallowed by Japan. By the end of 1942 the losing had stopped—at Stalingrad, at El Alamein, at Midway, in the mid-Atlantic—and from 1943 onward the Allies advanced on every front until the enemy capitals fell.

Which returns us to the puzzle we began with. Why did a war that began in 1939 not return to France until 1944? The answer runs through everything we have traced. Because Britain nearly starved before the Atlantic was won; because the Americans were green and had to learn their trade in Africa and Italy before they could be trusted against the German army in France; because the landing craft that a cross-Channel assault required were the scarcest thing in the war, and were being spent in the Mediterranean; and because the memory of Dunkirk and Dieppe made every commander certain that a premature crossing would end in slaughter. The road to that beach in Normandy ran through all of it—the convoys, the desert, the mountains of Italy—and it could not have been shorter than it was.

It is worth holding two facts together at the end. The war in the West and the Pacific is the war Americans remember—Normandy, Midway, the flag on Iwo Jima. But the German army was broken in the East, at a cost the Western Allies never had to pay; for every American who died defeating Germany, dozens of Soviet soldiers did. Both things are true, and a clear view of the war keeps them both in sight.

That is the shape of the fighting. But armies are only the visible edge of a nation at war. Behind the men on those beaches stood factories and shipyards, rationed households and mobilized science, millions of workers and the arguments a democracy has with itself even as it fights. How the United States became the arsenal that made this victory possible—and what the war did to American society in the making—is where we turn next.

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The Unmaking of the Peace

America and the World at War — Lecture 4.1

Opening: A Vote at Oxford

On the ninth of February, 1933, the undergraduates of the Oxford Union — the debating society of the oldest university in the English-speaking world, the nursery of the men who would run the British Empire — took up a motion for the evening’s argument: That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country. They debated it with the wit and the seriousness the Union prided itself on, and then they divided, and the motion carried, two hundred and seventy-five votes to one hundred and fifty-three. The cream of English youth had resolved, on the record, that there was no cause for which it would take up arms.

Nine days earlier, in Berlin, Adolf Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany.

The coincidence was not lost on anyone. In London the newspapers thundered; Winston Churchill, then a backbencher whom no one in power was heeding, called the vote an abject and shameless avowal, and worried aloud about how it would read in the chancelleries of the dictators, who were busy teaching their own young men the opposite lesson. Whether the boys at Oxford truly meant it, whether a debating motion settled anything, whether the dictators read English student journalism at all — these are fair questions, and the honest answer is that the vote probably changed nothing directly. What it captured was a mood, and the mood was real and it was general across the democracies: a deep, principled, and entirely understandable exhaustion with war, in a generation that had grown up counting the names on the memorials. The trenches of the last war had killed the better part of a generation of young Europeans and had taught the survivors that such a thing must never be permitted again. Out of that conviction, the finest and most decent conviction of the age, the democracies would spend the next six years doing almost everything except the one thing that might have prevented the catastrophe, which was to arm and to stand.

The men rising in Rome and Moscow and Tokyo and Berlin had drawn the opposite conclusion from the same war. That divergence — between nations that had resolved never to fight again and nations that had resolved to fight and win — is the political story of how the peace came apart.

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Part One: A Skeleton of the War

Before the narrative, a bare frame to hang it on — the dozen turning points, in order, so that the elaboration that follows has a spine to attach to.

• October 1922 — Mussolini’s March on Rome; the first Fascist government in Europe.

• September 1931 — Japan seizes Manchuria; the postwar order’s first open breach.

• March 1936 — Hitler remilitarizes the Rhineland, and the democracies do nothing.

• September 1938 — Munich; Czechoslovakia is dismembered to buy a peace that lasts a year.

• August 1939 — the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; the two great ideological enemies divide Eastern Europe, and Poland is doomed.

• September 1939 — Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war.

• June 1940 — France falls; Britain stands alone.

• March 1941 — the United States, still neutral, passes Lend-Lease and becomes the arsenal of democracy.

• June 1941 — Germany invades the Soviet Union.

• December 1941 — Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; the war becomes global, and American.

• September 1943 — Italy surrenders.

• June 1944 — the Allies land in Normandy.

• May 1945 — Germany surrenders.

• August 1945 — atomic bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan surrenders.

Twenty-three years from the first line to the last, and most of the damage done in the final six. The narrative now doubles back to the beginning to explain how a continent of exhausted, peace-loving democracies arrived, step by reluctant step, at the largest war in the history of the species.

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Part Two: A World Out of Joint

The peace that came apart in the 1930s had been badly made and was, by then, badly kept. To understand why the strong men rose, begin with the disorder they rose to answer, because a great deal of what followed makes sense only as a series of adaptations to an environment that had lost its shape.

The settlement of 1919 had satisfied almost no one. Germany emerged from it humiliated, disarmed, saddled with guilt and reparations, and convinced — with more justice than the victors liked to admit — that it had been promised a fair peace and handed a punitive one. Italy had fought on the winning side and come away feeling cheated of its reward, nursing the grievance its nationalists called the mutilated victory. Japan had fought on the winning side too, and had been denied even a clause affirming racial equality in the founding covenant of the new League, and had watched the United States a few years later slam its immigration gates specifically against Japanese, an insult that the earlier lectures of this series traced and that Tokyo never forgot. The new states of Eastern Europe were fragile, quarrelsome, and full of stranded minorities. And the one power with the industrial weight to underwrite the whole arrangement, the United States, had built the League of Nations at Versailles and then, as the lectures on Wilson’s defeat described, refused to join its own creation and retreated across the ocean into a normalcy that was really a withdrawal.

For a few years in the middle 1920s the disorder seemed to be healing. Then came the event the last several lectures have anatomized: the American slump that became the Great Depression that became, with terrible speed, a global collapse. The same catastrophe that filled the Hoovervilles and blew the topsoil off the Kansas plains did its work in every industrial country at once, and everywhere it discredited the men and the systems in charge. Where liberal, parliamentary government was young and shallow-rooted, it did not survive the discrediting. The Depression is the solvent in which the interwar order finally dissolved, and the dictators are best understood as what rose out of the solution — hard answers offered to frightened peoples by men who promised order, work, bread, and national greatness, and who were believed because the alternative on offer had so plainly failed.

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Part Three: The Strong Men

Four regimes drove the story, and they were not variations on a single thing. They shared a contempt for parliaments and a cult of the leader and a taste for the mass rally, and they differed profoundly in their aims and their crimes.

Italy came first, and gave the age its word. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist newspaperman with a genius for theater, assembled the discontented veterans and the frightened middle class of a country terrified of Bolshevism, dressed them in black shirts, and in October of 1922 threatened to march on Rome unless he were given power — whereupon the King, rather than call out the army that could easily have scattered the marchers, handed him the government. Mussolini spent the 1920s inventing Fascism as he went: the one party, the corporate state, the suppression of the free press and the free union, the endless choreography of strength, and the cultivation of a personal myth as Il Duce, the Leader who made the trains run and drained the marshes and restored to Italians the imagined grandeur of Rome. His regime was brutal but, by the standards of what was coming, almost restrained; its deepest cruelties in this period were reserved for its colonial war in Ethiopia, where Italian forces used poison gas against tribesmen with spears. Mussolini was the prototype, admired and imitated, and he would end the decade as the junior and increasingly nervous partner of a pupil who had far outgrown him.

The Soviet Union was the terror the others defined themselves against, and was itself a terror on a scale the others had not yet reached. Joseph Stalin, having maneuvered himself into sole command of the Bolshevik state by the end of the 1920s, set out to drag a peasant country into industrial modernity in a single decade by main force. He collectivized the farms, breaking the independent peasantry as a class, and when the countryside resisted he let famine do the disciplining; in Ukraine and the grain regions several millions starved to death, in the early 1930s, inside a state that went on exporting grain while its own people ate seed and worse. Then, from 1936, he turned the terror on his own party and army and people in the paroxysm called the Great Purge — the show trials in which the old revolutionaries confessed, after torture, to fantastical crimes and were shot; the midnight arrests; the quotas of enemies to be found and liquidated in every district; the vast archipelago of slave-labor camps that swallowed millions. He decapitated his own officer corps on the eve of the greatest war in his country’s history, shooting the marshals and generals who would shortly have been needed. This was the regime that the Western democracies would, within a few years, be obliged to take into their arms as an indispensable ally, and the moral vertigo of that embrace is part of the story still to come.

Japan followed a path that fit no European template. It had modernized faster than any non-Western nation, built a first-class navy and army, and then run into the wall every industrial power without an empire ran into: it had almost no oil, no iron, no rubber of its own, and depended for them on trade with powers — the British, the Dutch, above all the Americans — that Japan increasingly regarded as a ring of Western colonizers penning it in. The Depression, which shattered Japan’s export trade, discredited its fragile civilian parliamentary politics and delivered the initiative to a nationalist officer corps that had come to regard assassination as a legitimate instrument, murdering the prime ministers and financiers who counseled restraint. In September of 1931 that army, acting very largely on its own, manufactured a pretext and overran Manchuria, the resource-rich Chinese province, converting it into a puppet state — and when the civilian government in Tokyo proved unable to stop it, the lesson taken was that boldness paid. By 1937 Japan was in a full and horrific war to subdue China proper, its rationale a fusion of hard calculation and grand idea: the calculation that a great power must command its own resources and markets, and the idea, sincerely held by many, that Japan was destined to lead Asia out from under white colonial rule into a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere — a liberation that in practice meant Japanese domination as absolute as anything it replaced.

Germany was the engine of the catastrophe, because its leader wanted the catastrophe. Adolf Hitler rose on the wreckage of the Depression, which turned his fringe party of cranks and street-fighters into the largest in the Reichstag as unemployment climbed toward a third of the workforce, and in January of 1933 the conservative politicians who thought they could use him and control him made him Chancellor. Within months the controlling was over and the one-party state was built — the other parties dissolved, the unions crushed, the opponents and the merely inconvenient sent to the new camps, the first of which, Dachau, opened that spring. Two convictions sat at the center of Hitler’s mind, and he had stated both openly years before, in a book few of his future victims had bothered to finish. The first was Lebensraum, living space: the doctrine that the German people required vast new lands in the East, in Poland and Ukraine and Russia, which would be conquered, cleared of their inhabitants, and colonized by Germans, a project of racial empire on the European continent itself. The second was that the Jews were the racial poison at the root of every German misfortune, a people to be stripped of rights, driven out, and — the logic of the rhetoric pointed here from the beginning, however few believed he meant it literally — ultimately eliminated. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship; the organized pogrom of November 1938 that came to be called Kristallnacht burned the synagogues and looted the shops and shipped tens of thousands to the camps. The machinery of mass murder itself belongs to a later lecture. What belongs here is that its blueprint was ideological, was announced in advance, and was the actual purpose of the regime rather than an incident of the war it launched.

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Part Four: The Tired Democracies and the Empty Chair

Against these four stood the democracies, and the democracies were tired, divided, and — in the case of the strongest of them — absent.

Britain in the 1930s was a nation that wished above all not to repeat 1916. The memory of the Somme, where twenty thousand British men had died in a single morning, sat under all its politics, and it produced a foreign policy of appeasement that later generations have found it easy to despise and that deserves, from this series, a fairer hearing. The men who practiced it, Neville Chamberlain foremost, were not cowards or fools. They governed an over-extended empire they could not defend everywhere at once; they faced the appalling arithmetic of a possible war against Germany, Italy, and Japan simultaneously, with no reliable ally, since the United States had withdrawn and the Soviet Union was an ideological horror; they knew Britain’s rearmament lagged and needed time; and they carried the sincere moral conviction that another great war would be a crime against their own people that must be averted almost at any cost. Appeasement was the policy of decent men reasoning from real constraints toward a catastrophe. France was worse placed still: bled white in the last war, its birth rate too low to replace the dead, its politics fractured between a revolutionary left and a right whose bitterest partisans preferred the thought of Hitler to the thought of their own socialists, its governments falling every few months, its whole strategy poured into a defensive concrete line and a defensive frame of mind. Two exhausted democracies, each hoping the other would supply the resolve neither had.

Over them all presided the League of Nations, the machinery of collective security that was supposed to make aggression impossible by uniting the world against any aggressor — and that failed its two great tests in succession. When Japan seized Manchuria, the League appointed a commission, which traveled, deliberated, and eventually reported that aggression had indeed occurred; Japan responded by walking out of the League, keeping Manchuria, and suffering nothing. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the League voted actual economic sanctions — and then Britain and France, terrified of driving Mussolini into Hitler’s arms, left the sanctions toothless, declined to close the Suez Canal to his troopships, and were caught scheming in secret, in the leaked Hoare–Laval Pact, to hand Mussolini most of Ethiopia outright. The scandal destroyed what credibility the League had left. The lesson every dictator drew was identical and correct: the machinery would grind and report and resolve, and it would not fight, because the great powers that alone could give it force would always find their own interests on the other side of the ledger.

And the chair that might have changed the arithmetic stood empty. The United States, which Wilson had meant to be the keystone of the whole security structure, had refused to join it and remained outside it, a spectator with the largest economy on earth. Its absence was felt in every calculation, and its presence, when it finally came, would decide everything.

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Part Five: The Slide to September

From 1935 the descent has a terrible momentum, each step teaching Hitler that the next could be taken.

He rearmed openly, repudiating the Versailles limits, and nothing happened. In March of 1936 he sent his still-weak army into the demilitarized Rhineland, his own generals sick with fear that the French would march and end him — and the French, paralyzed and leaderless, did not move, and the greatest gamble of his early career paid, and he learned that the democracies would flinch. That same year he and Mussolini found each other, intervening together on the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, which became the proving ground for German tactics and aircraft and the forge of the Rome–Berlin alignment they called the Axis; Japan was drawn toward them by a shared hatred of communism in the Anti-Comintern Pact. In March of 1938 Hitler annexed his native Austria, the Anschluss, marching in to cheering crowds. And then he turned on Czechoslovakia, demanding the German-speaking borderlands, the Sudetenland, and threatening war to take them.

Munich, in September of 1938, is the name that came to stand for the whole policy. Chamberlain flew to Germany — an old man in his sixties boarding an aircraft for nearly the first time, so far outside the normal order of things was the errand — and at a four-power conference from which the Czechs themselves were excluded, Britain and France agreed to give Hitler the Sudetenland in exchange for his promise that he wanted nothing more. Chamberlain came home to London waving the paper and telling the cheering crowds it meant peace for our time, and he believed it, and much of a relieved Britain believed it with him. Six months later, in March of 1939, Hitler marched into Prague and swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia, a country with no German grievance attached, and the promise stood revealed as worthless and the policy as dead. Chamberlain, at last, drew a line: Britain and France guaranteed the independence of Poland, which everyone could see was next.

The guarantee needed the Soviet Union to mean anything, since only Russia could put an army on Poland’s eastern flank — and here came the thunderclap that scrambled every assumption. Through the summer of 1939 the democracies negotiated half-heartedly with Stalin, distrusting him, while Stalin, distrusting them more and reading Munich as proof that the West meant to point Hitler eastward and stand aside, made his own calculation. In August, the dismissal of his Jewish foreign minister signaled the turn, and on the twenty-third the world woke to the news that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union — the two regimes that had defined themselves as each other’s mortal enemy, whose propagandists had spent a decade promising to destroy one another — had signed a pact of non-aggression. Ribbentrop and Molotov had raised their glasses in the Kremlin over a secret map that divided Poland between them and parceled out the Baltic states and Finland to Stalin as his price. The pact freed Hitler from the fear of a two-front war. On the first of September his armies crossed into Poland; on the third, Britain and France, their bluff called and their guarantee owed, declared war. Two weeks after that, Stalin’s armies came in from the east to take their share, and Poland ceased to exist between them.

The three aggressor powers would formalize their partnership the next year in the Tripartite Pact, the Axis of Germany, Italy, and Japan. It is worth marking how loose and mistrustful that partnership always was: they never seriously coordinated their strategies, never shared their real plans, and pursued three separate wars for three separate sets of aims that happened to point at the same enemies. It was an alignment of appetites, and its incoherence would matter.

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Part Six: The Reluctant Republic

Across the ocean, the country this series is actually about watched the peace come apart and wanted, more than it wanted almost anything, to stay out of it.

American isolationism in the 1930s was not a fringe sentiment or a failure of nerve. It was a considered national conviction, resting on hard experience, and it had built itself into law. The experience was the last war: a widespread and bitter conviction, by the 1930s, that the country had been maneuvered into the trenches of 1917 by British propaganda and by the greed of bankers and arms-makers, a conviction a Senate committee under Gerald Nye spent two years documenting to the nation’s satisfaction, fixing in the public mind the image of the war profiteer, the merchant of death, who had sold the Republic’s blood for his dividends. Out of that conviction Congress passed the Neutrality Acts, a series of laws designed to lash the country to the mast in advance — forbidding Americans to sell arms to, or lend money to, or sail on the ships of, any nation at war, so that the paths by which the country believed it had slid into the last conflict would be closed by statute before the next one could pull it in. The mood ran so deep that in 1938 an amendment to the Constitution requiring a national popular referendum before any declaration of war — save in case of direct invasion — came within a couple of dozen votes of clearing the House of Representatives. A country that would seriously consider stripping its own Congress of the power to declare war, and handing it to a plebiscite, is a country whose determination to stay out is difficult now to overstate.

In Pawnee County, Frank held that determination as plain common sense: the quarrels of Europe had cost the country dearly once for nothing anyone could name, his own boys were now of an age to be sent, and he could see no earthly reason to spend them on another round of it. His instinct was the instinct of the great middle of the country, and it found its voice, in 1940, in the America First Committee, a genuine mass movement, millions strong, that spanned the political spectrum and counted among its members people of every kind of decency. Its most famous voice was the most admired man in America, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who argued with real force that the country’s interest lay in an armed neutrality behind its two oceans and no business in Europe’s war. And its cause was gravely wounded from within when Lindbergh, in a speech at Des Moines in September of 1941, named the groups he said were pushing America toward war — the British, the Roosevelt administration, and the Jews — and the movement could not scrub the stain of that from itself, because the thing he had reached for in that sentence was the same poison that was loose in Europe.

Against all this leaned the President, who had concluded early that a world dominated by Hitler was intolerable to American security and who had to move a reluctant country toward that conclusion faster than it wished to go and slower than the crisis demanded, feeling always for the edge of what the public and the Congress would bear. The shock that moved opinion fastest was the fall of France in the spring of 1940 — the sudden, stunning collapse of the great continental democracy in six weeks, leaving Britain alone under the German air assault, the Blitz, whose nightly bombing of London came into American parlors through the calm, grave broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow from the rooftops, the first time a European catastrophe had reached American living rooms live, as it happened, in a human voice. Roosevelt found the room the emergency gave him. He traded fifty old destroyers to Britain for bases; in a fireside chat at the end of 1940 he told the country it must become the great arsenal of democracy, the workshop that would arm the nations fighting Hitler so that American boys need not fight him themselves; and in March of 1941 he pushed through Congress the Lend-Lease Act, which let him lend and lease the matériel of war to Britain and, soon, to anyone whose defense he deemed vital to America, tearing a great hole in the neutrality laws in the name of keeping the country out by keeping others in the fight. That summer he met Churchill secretly aboard warships off Newfoundland, and the two men issued the Atlantic Charter, a statement of the war’s purposes — self-determination, free trade, a peace of security for all nations — proclaimed by one nation at war and one nation still officially at peace, a set of aims for a postwar world the United States had not yet entered. By the autumn American destroyers were escorting convoys and shooting at U-boats in an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic; a German torpedo sank the destroyer Reuben James with most of her crew five weeks before Pearl Harbor. The country was, in every way but the formal declaration, already fighting. It took a blow from the other side of the world to make it admit as much.

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Part Seven: The World Set Alight

The year 1941 turned a European war and an Asian war into a single war around the globe, in two strokes six months apart.

The first was Hitler’s. On the twenty-second of June, 1941, having conquered or cowed the whole European continent west of Russia, he tore up his pact with Stalin and launched the largest invasion in history eastward into the Soviet Union — three million men on a front of a thousand miles. This was the war he had always meant to fight, the war for living space, and he meant it to be a war of annihilation without precedent, in which the Slavic populations would be starved and enslaved and the Jews of the East murdered wholesale behind the advancing front. It transformed the strategic map at a stroke. The Soviet Union, the terror-state, was now fighting Germany for its life, which made it overnight the ally of Britain and the beneficiary of American Lend-Lease, and confronted the democracies with the permanent moral discomfort of a war in which their indispensable partner in the destruction of one mass-murdering tyranny was itself a mass-murdering tyranny.

The second stroke was Japan’s, and America was its target. Japan’s war in China had stalled into a bottomless quagmire, and its decision to occupy French Indochina in 1941 brought down upon it the response Washington intended as a deterrent: the United States froze Japanese assets and cut off the oil, and since Japan imported the overwhelming bulk of its oil from the United States, this confronted Tokyo with a strangling clock. The deterrent produced the opposite of deterrence. Faced with the choice of backing down in China — unthinkable to the men in charge — or seizing the oil of the Dutch East Indies before the fuel ran out, Japan resolved to seize it, and calculated that it must first cripple the one force that could stop it, the American Pacific Fleet. On the seventh of December, 1941, Japanese carrier aircraft struck that fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, and the long American argument about whether to enter the war ended in a single Sunday morning. Isolationism did not so much lose the argument as evaporate; America First dissolved within days. Four days later Hitler, under no clear obligation to do so, declared war on the United States as well — perhaps his single most consequential blunder, for it resolved Roosevelt’s hardest problem, freeing him to throw American weight first against Germany, the enemy he had always judged the graver, in the strategy the Allies called Germany First.

One thing must be said plainly here and developed later. As this global war took shape, and through every conference and campaign that followed, the deliberate extermination of Europe’s Jews was underway, and the rescue of the Jews was not adopted as an Allied war aim and was not permitted to compete with the single overriding goal of military victory. That failure, and what was known of it and when, belongs to the lecture on American society at war, where it can be given the weight it demands.

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Part Eight: The Grand Alliance and the World to Come

The war that America now entered it would fight in two capacities at once: as a belligerent bent on winning, and as the emerging architect of whatever should come after. The military story runs in the next lecture. The political story is the story of the Grand Alliance and the peace it planned while the war still raged.

The alliance rested on three men who trusted one another very little and needed one another entirely: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, the Big Three. They coordinated first at a distance and then face to face. At Casablanca early in 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill, meeting without Stalin, announced that they would accept nothing short of the unconditional surrender of the enemy — a doctrine meant to reassure the suspicious Stalin that there would be no separate peace, and to ensure that no postwar Germany could claim, as it had after 1918, that it had been tricked rather than beaten. At Tehran, in the last days of 1943, the three met together for the first time, and the political shape of the endgame began to harden: the Western commitment to a cross-Channel invasion that would open the second front Stalin had demanded for two years, and Stalin’s own pledge to enter the war against Japan once Germany was beaten. The operational bargaining over the invasion belongs to the military lecture. What belongs here is the human texture of it — Roosevelt’s vast confidence that he could charm and manage Stalin as he had managed a hundred domestic politicians, and the gaunt, dying figure of Harry Hopkins at his elbow, the former relief administrator now serving as the President’s own emissary between the capitals, keeping the improbable partnership alive on personal thread.

At Yalta, in the Crimea, in February of 1945, with Germany’s defeat now certain and the shape of the postwar world the real business, the bargains grew harder and their consequences longer. The Red Army already stood on the ground of Eastern Europe, and possession, as always, set the terms. Stalin conceded, on paper, free elections in a liberated Poland and the other occupied countries; he conceded a voting formula for the new world organization; he confirmed his promise to strike Japan within months of Germany’s fall, for a price in Asian territory. Roosevelt, visibly failing — he had two months to live, and the photographs from Yalta show it — judged that Soviet goodwill was worth courting because he believed the postwar peace depended on it, and took Stalin’s paper promises as the best obtainable from a man whose armies already held the ground the promises concerned. When those promises about free elections proved worthless, and Eastern Europe disappeared behind what would soon be called an iron curtain, Yalta became a word of reproach in American politics, a supposed betrayal for which Roosevelt’s memory would be arraigned by men who rarely explained what leverage he was thought to have declined to use. That quarrel opens onto the Cold War, and the lectures that will follow it.

Alongside the bargaining over borders ran a quieter and, in the long run, perhaps a weightier labor: the construction, this time, of a postwar order the United States would actually inhabit. The memory of 1920 hung over all of it — the memory of a President who had built the League and then watched his own Senate refuse to enter it, leaving the structure of peace standing hollow. The men of the 1940s were determined not to repeat the withdrawal. In the summer of 1944, at a resort in the New Hampshire mountains called Bretton Woods, the financial delegates of forty-four nations designed the monetary architecture of the postwar world — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, a system of fixed exchange rates anchored on the American dollar — in a negotiation that was, beneath its technicalities, the formal passing of financial primacy across the Atlantic. The intellectual giant of the conference was the Englishman John Maynard Keynes, arguing brilliantly for a more balanced system on behalf of a Britain that was bankrupt and knew it; the man who won was the American Treasury official Harry Dexter White, whose dollar-centered plan prevailed because the power to underwrite the world now lay in Washington and no longer in London. That same autumn, at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, the framework of a new world body took shape, and the following spring, at San Francisco, the delegates of fifty nations wrote the Charter of the United Nations. Its patient American architect was the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, a Tennessean of Wilsonian faith who had carried the internationalist cause from the isolationist battles of the 1930s all the way to this, and who is remembered as the father of the organization. This time the structure would not stand hollow. This time the United States would join, and would house the thing in its own largest city, and would remain — the great reversal of the interwar retreat, the moment the Republic decided to stay inside the world it had done so much to remake.

Roosevelt did not live to see it finished. On the twelfth of April, 1945, at the small Georgia cottage where he had gone to rest, the President who had led the country through the Depression and most of the war died of a stroke, and the Vice President, a plain-spoken former haberdasher and senator from Missouri named Harry Truman, who had been told almost nothing of the great secrets of the war, learned that the whole weight of it had fallen on him. Less than a month later Germany surrendered, and the war in Europe was over. What remained was Japan, and the weapon that Truman now learned existed, and the terrible closing act that opens the next lecture — where the American way of war, and the two flashes of light over Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended it, must be reckoned with directly.

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End of Lecture 4.1

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