Coolidge and Hoover

 Even those in the city or the suburbs who did not make a fortune benefited from rising standards of living. They read the sophisticated advertisements, visited the expanding chain stores, admired a cornucopia of goods (many wrapped in the glistening new substance of cellophane), succumbed to salesmanship as slickly synthetic as rayon or plastic, and bought exciting "durables" like vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, coffee percolators, phonographs, telephones and radios. Auto-mobiles, naturally, were the prime icons in this consumer revolution. And by 1925 Henry Ford's assembly line was turning out a Model T every ten seconds. Buying on the instalment plan, factory workers themselves could acquire a Tin Lizzie, which sold for as little as 30o dollars. But few of those who built the cars relished the dictatorial brand of welfare capitalism which caused Ford to be described as "an industrial Fascist—the Mussolini of Detroit." Automobiles were vehicles of emancipation. They took city folks with leisure to the baseball game, the speakeasy or the cinema (a secular shrine now more patronised than the church). Holiday-makers drove to the sea-side where they wore skin-tight swimsuits and acquired a tan; before the war genteel people had protected their pallor from the glare—but this was the era of the "solar revolution" and heliotherapy was all the rage. Cars fostered a more mobile frame of mind (as well as ribbon developments of gas stations and hot dog stands). Flappers in flivvers set new fashions. They abandoned their chaperones, discarded their corsets, bobbed their hair, rouged their cheeks, painted their fingernails, wore flesh-coloured stockings, drank cocktails and smoked in public—the sale of cigarettes increased from 47 billion in 192o to 125 billion in 1930. Mat they did in private was a subject of much prurient speculation. The practice of vamping seemed suggestive. So did the vogue for "It," defined by Elinor Glyn as "that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes." There were grounds for regarding dances like the Charleston and the Black Bottom as syncopated sensuality, and cheek-to-cheek foxtrots were thought to be vertical indications of horizontal inclinations. Freud was almost as popular as Ford. It was commonly supposed that as hemlines went up morals went down. And moralists denounced automobiles as mobile houses of prostitution. Probably there was an increase in promiscuity. It was stimulated by the new tabloid press ( The Graphic was known as "The Pornographic") and by Prohibition, introduced in 1919, which led to a widespread flouting of traditional standards. In the view of Colonel Robert McCormick, boss of the Chicago Tribune, even the Teapot Dome oil affair (a notorious government corruption scandal) was the fault of Prohibition, which had turned the United States into a nation of lawbreakers. There was certainly a grow-ing acceptance of divorce. But sex was by no means the only American preoccupation in an age which witnessed crazes for mah-jongg, Cou6ism (an early form of psychotherapy), marathon dances, crossword puzzles and miniature golf; or which hero-worshipped Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, Rudy Vallee and Charles Lindbergh, to say nothing of a host of movie stars. The car itself could be as much of a distraction from sex as an encouragement to it. John Steinbeck was doubtless exaggerating in Cannery Row when he said that most babies were conceived in Model Ts; but he may well have been right to say that two generations of Ameri-cans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris. Meanwhile, down on farms lit by kerosene lamps and approached over dirt roads, rural America endured dearth amid plenty thanks to chronic over-production together with low prices, and revolted against the spree of the cities. Old Puritanism condemned new hedonism, especially where the illegal liquor business was concerned. But Prohibitionists were also protesting against an urban culture, a culture spawned by immigrants and deemed to be radical, degenerate and vicious. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which at its peak during the mid-192os attracted five million members, was also a form of rustic rebellion. True, the white-hooded Hydras, Kleagles, Terrors, Furies and Exalted Cyclopses of the "Invisible Empire" had legions of enemies, not just their traditional black targets in the countryside but a burgeoning city population of Catholics, Jews, aliens and assorted moral "deviants." Still here was bucolic bigotry combined with small-town fascism. Equally obscurantist were legislators who banned the teaching of evolution in several southern states, which led to the celebrated "Monkey Trial" in 1925. When John Thomas Scopes, a biology instructor, was fined TOO dollars for disseminating Darwinism at the Central High School in Day-ton, Tennessee, that flail of the "booboisie," H. L. Mencken, characteristically concluded that "the mob has made its superstitions official."69 In fact it was a reassertion of that old-time fundamentalism so deeply rooted in the soil of the countryside. Of course, the divide between metropolitan and rural life was never hard and fast. Progressive ideas, for example, flourished in the forests of Wisconsin and the cornfields of Nebraska. And even the most hardened urbanites cherished a nostalgia for a pastoral past. In his celebrated model village filled with antiques (including fiddlers playing square dances), Henry Ford tried to recreate it, as John Dos Passos said, so that everything might be the way it used to be, in the days of horses and buggies. Bound up with God, motherhood and apple pie, such Arcadian simplicities were so much a part of ideal America that even silent Calvin
Coolidge waxed lyrical about them. In his Autobiography, a deadly reflection of a desiccated personality; Coolidge eulogised the pristine, natural quality of New England life as he had experienced it in boyhood. Despite the drudgery and inconvenience, the rough overalls and cowhide boots, he enthused about picnics, parties, fairs and husking bees. "Even when I try to divest it of the halo which I know always surrounds the past," he wrote, "I am unable to create any other impression than that it was fresh and clean."  Honest, frugal, backward-looking and (in public at least) `.`as expansive as a letter-box," Coolidge seemed to embody immemorial American verities and values. Though not without sly and sometimes cruel wit, he spoke (when he spoke) in strings of cliches agreeable both to Main Street and to Park Row—when given their theme, a journalist such as James Thurber could report his speeches without the inconvenience of having to listen to them. After Harding's death in 1923, Coolidge was sworn in as President by his father, who was a notary public, at a simple ceremony in the lamp-lit living-room-cum-office of his white Plymouth house. Undemonstrative though he was, Coolidge permitted himself to be photographed hay-making during the 1924 election—his spotless smock was much mocked. Yet the small-town President was indulgent towards capitalists of great wealth. As that spokesman for Middle America William Allen White said, President Coolidge pitchforked the muck of oil and petty graft from the Augean stables of the White House, but he let in, all smartly frock-coated, plug-hatted, high-collared, bespatted and smugly proud, another crew which was to devastate his country more terribly than Harding's greasy playfellows. All the day the friends and emissaries of Kreuger, the match king, Insull, the utilities king, Wiggin, the wizard, Mitchell, the manipulator, Doherty, the monarch of gas, the Morgans, the Rockefellers, and Mellon in per-son, the bad and the good, unchecked and unidentified, sat at his council table.
Coolidge believed that government was the handmaiden of commerce. He also believed, more fervently than Jefferson himself, that less government was better government. So while big business grabbed "the country by the throat," as the Progressive senator George Norris remarked, Coolidge displayed a "genius" for "alert inactivity."This carrot-topped, blue-eyed, sharp-featured, freckle-faced, twangy-voiced chief executive was a political minimalist. When, in 1928, Treasury Department officials showed him how vital it was to control the runaway investment market, the President froze them off with a blast of silence. Then, like the good husbandman he was, Coolidge spent the afternoon in the basement of the White House counting the apples in a barrel sent to him by a friend from Vermont. Coolidge's successor, Herbert Hoover, was also a countryman, the first president to be born west of the Mississippi. Hoover made much of his idyllic youth amid the Iowan corn, where his father had been a Quaker blacksmith. He extolled the delights of Aunt Millie's cooking, the joys of the swimming hole, the thrill of Indian taught hunting, the happiness of fishing with a willow pole and "butcher-string line, fixed with hooks, ten for a dime, whose compelling lure is one segment of an angleworm and whose incantation is spitting on the bait."76 Of course, Hoover was no hick. Orphaned at a tender age, he had become a successful mining engi-neer, travelled all over the world and amassed at least a million dollars by the time he was 4o—he reckoned that anyone who could not make a for-tune by that age was "not worth much."77 Turning to public service, he had fulfilled his ambition to be a "food dictator"78 at home and abroad during and after the war. Hoover paid lip-service to cooperation, which meant that everyone should get together and do exactly as he told them. According to a member of his staff, he expressed himself in few words: "One was 'yes' and the other was 'no.'  But his "herculean efforts" saved "perhaps one-third of the population of postwar Europe" from starva-tion."' Moreover, tough and curt, pragmatic and idealistic, he refused to allow Western hostility towards Bolshevism to stop him from feeding mil-lions of Russians during the disastrous famine of 1921-2. As Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, Hoover proved equally abrupt and adept. Laissez-faire was all very well but Hoover took action where necessary. Thus, for example, he controlled the distribution of radio frequencies. (This infuriated the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who told him to keep his "minions of Satan" away from her stations because when she offered prayers to the Almighty "I must fit into His wave reception."" Then she eloped on a motorcycle with Hoover's inspector.) Hoover was an early believer that radio was "the most important new instrument for intellectual communication since Gutenberg began to cast in movable type."82 And he was the first American president to appear on television. He was also, in the words of Walter Lippmann, "the first American President whose whole public career has been presented through the machinery of modern publicity . . . [which portrays] him as the master organizer, the irresistible engineer, the supreme economist."83 As Secretary of Commerce Hoover issued a plethora of publicity material and as Republican candidate for the presidency he employed the most sophisticated propaganda techniques. One of his advisers was the New York advertising man Bruce Barton, who had done such a remarkable job of promoting Jesus Christ in The Man Nobody Knows (1925)—the Son of God was famously billed as a dynamic entrepreneur who had taken twelve men from the lowest rungs of business life and created an organisation which changed the world. Barton's talents were deployed to point out that Hoover was not, as H. L. Mencken charged, "a fat Coolidge." Rather he was a progressive conservative, a forward-looking political engineer who was at the same time wedded to the homespun val-ues of American individualism. Hoover had seen American farmers, whom he had encouraged to over-produce during the war, reduced almost to the status of peasants during the 192os. Mencken went so far as to say that farmers were not members of the human race. But Hoover lost no opportunity to praise them. They were a breed set apart from "the insidi-ous forces of moral degeneration which are such corroding influences in the life of our great cities."
from: The Dark Valley

Moods from All Things Shining; On Descartes and Kant

ONE EXEMPLAR OF THE experience of the sacred that we have used consistently is the experience of moods. We described the gods of Homer in terms of the overpowering moods that they set and the actions that they draw out of people, by virtue of those moods. But we have seen other moods as well: the mood of patriotism in Aeschylus, of agape in John and Paul, of bliss in Dante, and of joy and gratitude in Luther. A crucial feature of the Enlightenment is that moods—insofar as they are discussed at all—are stripped of the central features that have characterized them in earlier epochs. Typically moods were public and shareable—one could catch the mood of fierce courage from being in the presence of Ares or Achilles, or one could catch the mood of agape from being in the presence of Jesus. But in our cur-rent Cartesian characterization of the individual as a subject, moods become private, inner states that are essentially unavailable to others. We will see that the older, public notion of moods as the stand-in for the sacred is crucial to Melville's way of resisting all forms of will and all forms of monotheism. It should be clear from what we have said that one does not have to believe that the Greek gods actually existed in order to gain some-thing deep and important from Homer's sense of the sacred. (The same holds for Jesus the performer of physically impossible miracles.) One does, however, have to reject the modern idea that to be a human agent is to be the sole and self-sufficient source of the actions one per-forms. Because this modern notion of human agency is so pervasive, it can lead us to act in ways that cover up the phenomena that Homer was sensitive to. To see this we need to trace briefly the genesis of the modern view of the self. Before Descartes people had little sense of an inner self. As we saw, St. Augustine had to work to make people believe they had one. It seemed obvious that we are beings essentially open to all sorts of forces from without. And in Dante's world, the human soul was receptive both to God's divine love and to Satan's pull toward autonomy. Indeed, one thing the Homeric and the Medieval worlds have in common is the idea that we are at our best when we don't allow our own thoughts and ideas to get in the way of what we are directly drawn to do. Descartes by contrast, building on Augustine, brought to the fore the idea that we are self-sufficient beings who stand on our own and are defined by our private thoughts and desires. If I want to know who I am, in this Cartesian view, I can do no better than to look within—to ask myself which thoughts I accept as mine. Under Descartes' influence, then, we have come to understand ourselves as subjects—sites of inner thoughts, desires, and volitions—while "the external world," according to Descartes, consisted of meaningless objects—those nonsubjective entities that stand over against me. Before Descartes, people did not understand themselves as sub-jects and objects, but rather as God's creatures. After Descartes, we have come to see ourselves as almost infinitely free assigners of meaning who can give whatever meaning we choose to the meaningless objects around us. This completely overthrows the more traditional idea that we are beings open to the world and its various forces upon us. For the first time in human history, therefore, people were confronted by the question: how ought we to live if we understand ourselves in this completely self-contained way? Descartes thought he had the answer. He claimed that with his reason and experience he could find rules for figuring out rationally what in each situation was the right thing to do. He was determined to work out his ethics as soon as he finished his work in science and mathematics. He notes:
Nest I should remain irresolute in my actions in the interval... I drew up for myself a provisional code of morals, consisting of some three or four maxims."
To further work out his philosophy, he tells us, he retired to a warm room where he was free from passions. But Descartes apparently found no way to base an ethics on the austere world of subjects and objects, so, while his contributions to science and mathematics are important breakthroughs, he never re-turned to developing his ethics. Still, he managed to reconfigure the Western world entirely, taking the willfulness that in Dante had been the defining feature of evil and making it the most fundamental and God-like aspect of human being. In this way he contributed a crucial step toward nihilism.
DESCARTES' UNDERSTANDING OF FREEDOM WAS so radical that it needed an articulator; this was the great eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that if we are self-sufficient subjects then there can be no law about how we should act other than the law we give to ourselves. In Kant's view the subject replaces God as the orderer of the world. Kant argued famously that Enlightenment means learning finally to take responsibility for your own actions. In other words, the maturity that comes with Enlightenment requires me to obey the Pope or the King only if I freely choose to do so. Autonomy, or setting up one's own laws and choosing to act in accordance with them—the ulti-mate sinfulness of the souls in Dante's Dis—now becomes the highest human good. This Kantian view owes a debt to Luther and is, at the same time, a deviation from his position. True, Luther emphasizes the impor-tance of the individual. But it is essential to Luther's Christianity that the mood of joy and gratitude comes from the experience of receiving God's grace. It is only because I feel indebted to God that I am in a position to be certain about how I ought to act. So Luther can say: "Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me." The certainty is an
existential certainty in Luther—it is being joyfully committed to act-ing in the way I know I must. By the time Kant turns it into a recipe for ethical activity, how-ever, it has turned around completely—as Kant himself recognizes. Whereas in Luther the source of my existential certainty about how to act is my experience of Jesus' unfailing love for me, in Kant I alone take responsibility for all my acts. And indeed, according to Kant, this is a sign of my maturity. There are lots of details in Kant about what features this self-given law ought to have, but the essential point here is that the moral law must be given to us by ourselves. In Kant's terminology, we are self-law-givers—"autonomous" agents who ought to act in accordance with the principles we set for ourselves. Nothing outside of us—no God or other force, no impulse, no revered text, no parental de-mand, custom, or state decree—can be that upon which we base our actions when we are acting at our best. All external forces are denigrated by Kant as "heteronymous determinations of the will."" That is, other-given causes of our actions. If we allow these external forces to influence us in our actions, then we are failing to live up to the demands placed upon us as the kind of free, self-sufficient beings we essentially are." Although the Kantian view is formulated in abstract language, its basic impulse is woven deeply into the modern world. It is natural and intuitive to us to think that a person is criticizable if he fails to take responsibility for his actions. Human actions just are, in the modern conception, behaviors for which the human agent is responsible. As we have seen, in the middle of the twentieth century the French philoso-pher Jean-Paul Sartre worked out the logical extension of this view in his existentialist philosophy. "Existentialism," Sartre writes, "places the entire responsibility for [man's] existence squarely upon his own shoul-ders."36 We have come a long way from Homer's endorsement of Hel-en's sense that when she ran off with Paris Aphrodite drew her to do so.
The modern view that we are entirely responsible for our existence stands in radical contrast with the Homeric idea that we act at our best when we open ourselves to being drawn from without. Indeed, once we see the force of this contrast it becomes obvious why Homeric phenomena are covered up in our modern world. What Homer considers to be the paradigm of human excellence seems to Kant, and to most of us, hardly to count as human action at all. Homeric excellence, to the modern world, looks like heteronymous determination of the will—wrongful abandonment of our freedom. Helen's running off with Paris seems to us an addiction or a compulsion. She seems to us out of control—an eminently criticizable case of a woman who loves too much. The danger of the Kantian position is that by making us entirely responsible for our actions we place in our own hands the question of what matters most. But the history of the last 150 years suggests that we are not the proper source for meaning in the world. Indeed, the step is very short from the Kantian notion of the human being as a fully autonomous self to the Nietzschean notion of the human being as a free spirit who makes up whatever meanings he likes. Precisely because they are freely made up, however, meanings can also be freely taken back. Therefore, they have no authority over the maker. And this is just the active nihilism that Dante already recognized could not sustain a meaningful conception of human existence. Writing less than a century after Kant, and a generation before Nietzsche, Herman Melville could already see the threat of this nihil-ism looming. Even more amazing, though, is that he could envision the recovery of Homer's polytheistic gods as a way to surmount it.

Sea Power and the Large Policy and on McKinley

From The War Lovers:
 Lodge had written an article for the June issue of the North American Review, a highbrow journal of affairs, called "England, Venezuela, and the Monroe Doctrine," in which he stretched the Monroe Doctrine to declare America's "rightful supremacy in the Western Hemisphere" —a doctrine to be asserted "peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must." In Congress Lodge had been for the past nine months chief architect of something called "the Large Policy," to distinguish America's territorial ambition from that more distasteful European term, "imperialism." Lodge wanted to sprinkle the globe with American territorial possessions that would protect and open up trade. The junior senator from Massachusetts had started the course of American expansionism, as he so often did, arm in arm with Roosevelt. Back in 1890 Roosevelt had read a book called The Influence of Sea Power on History by Alfred Thayer Mahan. Soon he and Lodge were dissecting Mahan's theories over dinner. Captain, later Admiral, Mahan was an unlikely Poseidon. He disliked sea duty and during the Civil War his ship had showed up too late for its only battle. A tall, thin figure with an under-shot chin covered up by a beard, he had a bad drinking habit (to medicate nervous headaches so severe he feared a breakdown) and a deep Christian faith. Regarded as something of a nuisance by most of his superiors, he nevertheless became the most influential naval officer in history, if ideas can be measured against exploits in battle. Drawing heavily on social Darwinist notions
*(In a letter to his mother two months later, Lodge described the origin of the word " jingo" —from an 1870s English music-hall ballad during a war scare over Turkey: "We don't want to fight / But by jingo if we do /We've got the men/We've got the money too." )
of the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, Mahan saw sea power as the key to world dominance. Great Britain was his model and inspiration: an empire built on a great navy that protected trade across the seven seas. Mahan's ideas, coming as the Euro-pean powers were carving up the "uncivilized" world and jos-tling against British naval supremacy, caused a global sensation. In 1894 Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany wrote a friend, "I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan's book and am trying to learn it by heart." The kaiser ordered The Influence of Sea Power on History placed in the wardroom of every ship in Germany's High Seas Fleet. The Japanese adapted it as a text at their naval academy.22 Lodge would use Mahan as a preacher used the Bible. For three days in March 1895 he had held forth on the floor of the U.S. Senate to expound his Large Policy. By his desk he erected a large map upon which were placed large red Maltese crosses to signify future American possessions: Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, a canal across the Panamanian isthmus. "It is the sea power which is essential to the greatness of every splendid people," he declared. 23 Lodge was startled, even a little overwhelmed, by the reaction in the chamber. "It was by far the most successful speech ... I ever made in Congress," he wrote his mother. "I was in desperate earnest.... As I spoke the Senators all came in from the cloak-rooms, members of the House appeared, the messengers and doorkeepers came in. I knew I had absolute attention everywhere and I vaguely [realized] that the chamber was filled & that men were standing all around the walls.... When I sat down every-body crowded around to shake my hand, something quite common in the House but which hardly ever happens in the Senate."
and
In hindsight it is difficult to understand why Roosevelt and Lodge were so baffled by Reed, so slow to grasp his basic dis-agreement on something as fundamental as American foreign policy. It may be that Roosevelt and Lodge were so fond of Reed, so impressed by his commanding presence in the House — and by his intelligence and wit over dinner—that they chose to over-look philosophical differences for as long as possible. It is also true that Roosevelt and Lodge themselves came fairly late to a coherent foreign policy. While they shared a strong sense of manifest destiny for their "race" from at least the early 1880s, it was only during the 1890s that the two Harvard men imbibed enough of the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan to formulate fully articulated expansionist policies. While Roosevelt had long been ready to go to war almost anywhere, his motivations were personal and atavistic, not subject to close self-examination. And while more measured and intellectual, Lodge did not give his Large Policy speech until March 1895. In time Roosevelt and Lodge might have found a way to bridge their policy differences with Reed, though only with dif-ficulty and with large doses of humor and goodwill. Yet there was a deeper divide between Reed and the others. Lodge and
Roosevelt were full of righteousness (and self-righteousness). Reed was proud but too acerbic and world-weary in his view of human nature to mount the secular pulpit for very long or with real conviction. And while Lodge and Roosevelt cloaked their actions in moral authority, they were willing to be expedi-ent, to make common cause with some fairly crude characters to advance their ambitions. Reed, for all his worldliness, was not. He would not compromise his integrity to reach for higher office, no matter how much he desired it. From his chair overlooking Lafayette Square, Henry Adams had affected a resigned amusement over the presidential contest. He called McKinley a "sad jellyfish." Reed, he regretted, was just "too clever" for the "Bankers' Party," by which he meant the Republicans.' Reed was indeed sometimes too clever for his own good. For a man of deep New England reserve, an emotional stoic proud of his passivity, he was remarkably undisciplined in his personal remarks. His biting comments about feckless poli-ticians and their greedy backers came from a deep bitterness forged by a prickly sense of honor and conscience that was at war with his political ambition. Reed did wish to become president, and he not unreasonably regarded himself as the best man for the job. But the Speaker simply refused to sell favors and buy sup-port, a scruple that did not burden his rival, William McKinley.
 William F. McKinley had a deceptive blandness. In a pleasing baritone he spoke in syrupy, forgettable platitudes, and he was known as a compromiser, a smoother-over, not as a take-charge leader. But he was a good vote-getter, winning the governor-ship of Ohio after losing out to Reed as Speaker in 1889. During the Civil War, McKinley's most notable achievement had been to drive a coffee wagon into the midst of the fighting at Antietam in order to hand out sandwiches to the combatants. He had been a brave soldier, but he had never aimed a weapon
or fired a shot— and he never bragged about his experiences or even talked about the war. He had seen war at Antietam, where more soldiers died in a single morning than in any American, battle before or since, and he hated it. McKinley's God was a loving one. Childless, he was devoted to his wife, Ida, a clinging semi-invalid prone to seizures. When she had an episode at the dinner table, he would gently drape a handkerchief across her face to conceal her twitching." McKinley's other partner in life was as crude and brutish as McKinley was gentle and decorous. Mark Hanna was a success-ful industrialist of the Gilded Age who believed that the way to get ahead was to bring together business and government, and the way to do that was to spread around cash. All questions of government in a democracy, Hanna said, were "questions of money." Hanna had plenty of money, knew how to raise more, and he used it to further the political fortunes of William McKinley. It would be misleading, however, to suggest that Hanna used McKinley as a tool of the business interests. For all his apparent spinelessness, McKinley was able to get men to do what he wanted. In his relationship with Hanna, McKinley was undoubtedly the senior partner. And though gruff, Hanna seems to have been more affectionate than manipulative toward his friend. He appreciated McKinley's innocence, his uncontrived air of virtue notwithstanding  his political flexibility. As a politician, a fellow once joked, McKinley kept his ear so close to the ground that it was "full of grasshoppers."

The Dark Valley on Japan

Admittedly, Japan's advance since the nominal restoration of power to the emperors in 1868—the beginning of the Meiji ("Enlightened Rule") era—had been one of the most astonishing achievements of modern times. Within the lifespan of Prince Saionji,,Japan had turned itself from a backward, isolated state into the greatest power in the Orient. It had defeated Russia, annexed Korea, Taiwan and other islands, and was casting avaricious glances towards China. Before 1853 any Japanese who built an ocean-going vessel was liable to the death penalty; by the 1920s Japan pos-sessed the third largest shipping industry and navy, and the largest fishing fleet, in the world. Other manufacturing enterprises had also sprung from nothing, such as textiles. When the ailing Lord Northcliffe visited Tokyo in 1921, he noticed that all the weaving machinery had been made in Britain and that "it takes at least three Japs to do the work of one Euro-pean."Within a decade the "rising giant of the East" was poised to over-take John Bull's massive production of cotton textiles and one Japanese did the work of ten Britons thanks to the Toyoda automatic loom—when Platt Bros of Oldham bought the right to manufacture it in England they had to be taught how to do so by Toyoda engineers. The Japanese them-selves were always willing to imitate and improve on Western technology. Their success also resulted from an ability to translate patriarchal fealty into commercial loyalty, something the big business combines (zaibatsu) exploited to keep their wages and prices low. Routed by the trade mark "Made in Japan," foreigners increasingly took refuge behind tariff barriers. When the global Depression led to even fiercer competition, the Japanese felt a strong temptation "to cast the samurai sword into the mercantile scales" that seemed so unfairly weighted against them:73 This aggressive proclivity was encouraged by further Japanese resent-ments towards the West. Like those other victors, France and Italy, Japan emerged from the First World War with the neuroses of a defeated nation. Denied its demands at Versailles, it was humiliated at the Washington Naval Conference in 1922. By the terms of the agreement Japan was allowed fewer warships than America and Britain, who, as a subsequent Prime Minister Baron Hiranuma said, discarded their old alliance "just as she would a worn-out sandal."74 Two years later the United States prohib-ited Japanese immigration, at a stroke turning gratitude for American aid after the earthquake into bitterness. Nippon declared a national day of mourning, and one man protested by committing suicide in front of the American embassy. Militarism, so unpopular after the war that (as in
France) soldiers preferred to wear mufti, revived. Liberal internationalists like Saionji found it increasingly difficult to maintain their predominance. Nationalist secret societies and blood brotherhoods proliferated, some of them engaging in political assassination. The outstanding proponent of the nationalist cause, Kita Ikki, declared that his country was entitled to seek equality with millionaire empires like Britain and huge landowners like Russia: "Japan with her scattered fringe of islands is one of the prole tariat, and she has the right to declare war on the big monopoly powers." Kita's radical rhetoric, which influenced men such as Prince Konoe, reinforced the traditional idea that it was Japan's manifest destiny to bring "the eight corners of the world under one roof " (hakko-ichiu). At its most mistily magnanimous this was the aspiration to achieve universal brotherhood. Japanese were taught to regard themselves as the chosen people, the uniquely virtuous Yamato, the children of the sun. As "a messianic nation" they were, to quote a Western observer, "charged with a divine mission to subjugate, pacify and civilize the world."77 Or as a Japa-nese professor explained, "Nippon's national flag is an ensign of 'red heart' or fiery sincerity. It alludes to the heavenly mission of Japan to tranquillize the whole world."78 So high-minded notions of fraternity were imperceptibly transformed into self-serving ones of hegemony. Patriotic devo-tion tended to become imperialistic fanaticism. Major-General Nonaka expressed his country's burgeoning ambitions graphically: "The ultimate conclusion of politics is the conquest of the world by one imperial power . . . The Japanese nation, in view of her glorious history and posi-tion, should brace herself to fill her destined role."The inspiration and the focus of the national cult was, of course, the emperor himself, who was worshipped as a living god. Actually Hirohito, ruling in his father's stead, expressed some doubts about his divine ancestry. But Saionji assured him that it was a useful myth. In particular, the belief that the 2,600-year-old dynasty had descended in direct line of succession from the sun goddess acted as a social cement for a people still torn by ancient clan rivalries. The imperial indoctrination began at school, where children bowed towards the Son of Heaven's picture and repeated that their dearest ambition was "To die for the Emperor." (One lot of pupils nearly did when, during a fire, their headmaster neglected them and injured himself in order to rescue the Emperor's photograph.) Hirohito, a small, delicate, sensitive young man, intelligent but lacking in self-confidence, had been brought up to pay an even stricter regard to duty. Though short-sighted, he had been for a time denied spectacles lest they cast doubt on his divinity. He was so governed by protocol that almost any impromptu action was rebuked; later he was not even permitted to travel in the same railway carriage as his own children because there was no precedent for it. From his youth Hirohito had been drilled in the samurai's chivalric code of bushido, itself largely a Meiji fabrication designed to provide (along with Shinto) a "new Japanese religion of loyalty and patriotism."" In this it was similar to the "invented tradition" of ritual with which the British monarchy attempted to secure the allegiance of the masses in a democratic age.82 And it is significant that Hirohito regarded his experi-ences at the court of Windsor, itself a monument to clotted formality, as a singular taste of freedom. During his European tour, which took place in 1921, he danced, hunted, wore plus-fours, ate bacon and eggs for breakfast (a custom he continued in Japan) and so enjoyed playing golf with the Prince of Wales that he built a nine-hole course in the grounds of the Imperial Palace. In France, Hirohito bought a bust of Napoleon, which he placed in his study. It was joined in the later 1920s by one of Darwin and after 1945 by one of Lincoln. Doubtless the last two sculptures reflected his interest in marine biology and his accommodation with the United States. But the bust of Napoleon was not the purchase of a man impatient for martial glory. Hirohito was horrified by the sight of Verdun. As one court official later remarked, he was not only a scientist and "an extremely liberal person," he was also "a pacifist."83 After his father's death (in 1926) Hirohito chose Showa, or "Radiant Peace," as the name for his new reign. Moreover, no one knew better than Hirohito that the emperor's powers, though theoretically as absolute as a theocracy could make them, were in practice negligible. In fact the only way to preserve his power was not to exercise it. As Saionji said, the emperor could not command the armed forces in case he was dis-obeyed, thus casting an "inexcusable blemish on sovereign authority."84 Nor was the emperor always even kept informed of what was done in his name. When the army, pursuing its aggressive designs against China, assassinated the Chinese warlord Chang Tso-lin (known as the Old Mar-shal) in 1928, the new Prime Minister, Baron Tanaka, told Hirohito that no Japanese officers were involved. Later Tanaka admitted the truth to the Emperor, who was so angry that he did not "care to listen to him again"—whereupon the premier resigned in tears.85 The fact was that Japan had always been a country of subtlety and circumspection, of Shoguns, mayors of the palace, rois faineants. Gekokujo, insubordination by which juniors were in some ways able to dictate to seniors, was a potent factor in Japanese life. Where sovereignty lay during the I92os (and afterwards) remained a mystery.

The War Lovers

By Evan Thomas
Roosevelt's rallying cry to the Anglo-Saxon women of Amer-ica was to get busy and have more babies. He called this compe-tition with the immigrant classes "the warfare of the cradle."44 Lodge's solution was to try to keep out the lesser races through tighter immigration laws. For many years Lodge sponsored leg-islation in Congress to exclude immigrants who could not read or write. He offered up all sorts of dubious arguments for this, including a reference to a chart of "the distribution of ability" by race in the United States, showing that, according to the Encyclopedia of American Biography, the "English Race" had produced more "statesmen, soldiers, and clergy" (1,542, 1,260, and 1,520, respectively) than, say, the Irish (9, 18, and 28).John F. Kennedy's grandfather, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, once a congress-man from Boston, liked to tell the story of being accosted by Lodge in January 1897 after the House had voted down Lodge's bill to restrict immigration. "You are an impudent young man," Lodge sneered. "Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?" Fitzgerald responded, "As much right as your father or mine. It was only the difference of a few ships."
and
At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 one of the most popular attractions was Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The spectacle marked the somewhat tawdry end of an era. The range wars and guerrilla skirmishes between cavalrymen and Indians were over, and in Cody's extravaganza the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee was reduced to theater, its brave veterans to bit-part actors in a carnival show.2° The truly enduring note at the exposition was struck by a young college professor lecturing to the American Historical Association, which held its annual meeting in the White City from July 11 to 13. In "The Frontier in American History," Frederick Jackson Turner argued that American exceptionalism was rooted in the individualism and self-reliance of the frontier settler. Jackson pointed to a little-known U.S. Census Bureau pamphlet that had declared in 1891 that the frontier was now "closed"—there was no more land to conquer and settle. What would happen to the best and most distinctive qualities of the American spirit, Turner asked, if there was nowhere left for Americans to go? Turner's address, though factually a stretch (open space still abounded), would become during the first half of the twentieth century one of the most important and oft-quoted speeches ever made by a historian. At the time, however, it got little attention. The night of July 12 was hot; most historians tried boating or the giant Ferris wheel, or went in search of ice cream. Even Turner's parents failed to show up at his lecture.21 But Theodore Roosevelt was paying attention. He wrote Turner, "I have been greatly interested in your pamphlet on the Frontier....I think you have struck some first class ideas, and have put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely."22 Roosevelt had been thinking about American expansionism. He was writing the third volume of his treatise on the American frontier spirit, The Winning of the West. But he also had a more personal agenda. With conquest comes conflict, and the closing of the American frontier suggested peace upon the land. Roosevelt yearned for conflict—for the ultimate conflict of war. But where? Mexico, perhaps? That war had already been fought once, in the war to annex Texas and California in 1846-48. In a border incident in August 1886 an American army captain was killed by some Mexican troops. Staying at his ranch at Medora, in the Dakota Territory, Roosevelt immediately wrote his friend Lodge, then a congressman: "I have written Secretary [of War William] Endicott offering to raise some companies of horse riflemen out here in the event of trouble with Mexico. Will you telegraph me at once if war becomes inevitable? ... I think there is some good fighting stuff among these harum-scarum rough riders out here." Thus did Roosevelt first dream of the fighting unit that would make him famous, but it remained a dream: the border dispute with Mexico was soon settled. Roosevelt continued to chafe. In his more bellicose moods it sometimes seemed that just about any war would do. In 1889 he wrote his British friend the diplomat (later ambassador to the United States) Cecil ("Springy") Spring Rice: "Frankly, I don't know that I should be sorry to see a bit of a spar with Germany; the burning of New York and a few other seacoast cities would be a good object lesson on the need of an adequate system of coastal defenses." Roosevelt loved hyperbole, but he was apparently serious.

More from Innocence

by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Count, whose digestion was not always reliable, pecked and sipped. How large my nephew's nose is! he thought. How large his hands! From this angle he reminds me of someone quite outside the family, I think perhaps Cesare Pavese, with those brilliant eyes, not gray, not green exactly. The large nose makes him look kindly, and I know that he is kindly, but he doesn't get any easier to talk to. In the Inferno the only ones condemned to silence are those who have be-trayed their masters, Brutus and Judas in particular. Dante must have thought of them, before their punishment, as chat-terers, or even as serious conversationalists, always first with the news. But, in Cesare's case, what if he were condemned to talk!
and
Curious that advice is just as irritating when it's wrong as when it's right.
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She had baptized him Salvatore in honor of the Savior
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Ugliness is a hard thing to forgive at the age of ten.
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Neurology, however, made its appeal in the simplest possible way, for its own sake. As a junior he made notes on case after case of back injuries which had been caused two or perhaps three years earlier when the patients had come to grief in a truck or some military vehicle which had run over a mine or a pot-hole. The surgeons had removed the injured disc from the spine and fused the vertebrae above and below it to make as neat a job as possible. And now there was no inflammation, nothing to be read from X-rays or tests on the cerebrospinal fluid, and yet the patients complained of
agonising pain. There were women, too, admitted to the hospital who were unable to move one arm or both, who couldn't stoop down to lift their children, whose faces were distorted and fixed into a singer's open-mouthed grimace. The pain was in their imagination, but as real, of course, as if it wasn't. In fact, it was impossible in these circumstances to attach any meaning to 'real' or to 'imagination'. There was no acceptable diagnosis to make. He was in the face of pain which left no trace, and healing without explanation. The specialists, however confident, knew no more, perhaps less, than a dog who lies down in the shade until it feels better. But whatever exists, can be known. Salvatore didn't delude himself that he was capable of great discoveries. But he thought he might set himself to see why no discoveries had been made so far. 'Gentlemen,' Professor Landino began, with a smile which acknowledged the women students but implied that he was too old to learn new tricks, 'not for nothing is neuralgia associated with artists, sensitives and degenerates.' He paused on these last words, giving them equal weight. 'We define neuralgia as pain whose origin is not clearly traceable.'
and
The great advantage which made him inclined to welcome decay was that the substitues were such an improvement on the originals. Glasses were stronger than eyes and replaceable. Frescobaldi told me that he experienced the greatest pleasure of his life when he got his false teeth. They eat so rapidly nowadays at Frescobaldi that one is often home at ten."
and
Lady Jones had an unwholesome craving for admissions from young girls that fun was being had. Indeed time spent without fun she apparently thought of as squandered.
and
`You take her feet.' And Barney picked up Signora Gentilini's ankles, swollen in their strap shoes. Cesare, at the top-heavy other end, walked backwards. The weight of the Signora, who was quite a short woman, was unbelievable. There was a stiffness, too, in her deep sighs, as though she was wearing leaden corsets. At the corner of her bright red lips a bubble rose and fell cautiously. Her right hand still kept its grip on the long handles of the grey suede bag which matched her outfit and which was now dragging along the ground. They had to avoid the front rooms through which the guests were milling, the kitchens and the kitchen passages.
and
 The party had really been given by and for Annunziata, to celebrate the gradual withdrawal of evacuees, refugees and partisans from the various rooms, the removal of the corpses in the rose-hedge and the digging up of barrels of oil under the graves in the chapel where no graves were supposed to be. There was wine, no food, but lights in the garden, where the great rose-bushes rampaged. Chiara, small, thin, and still as flat as a board, wore a black dress because her uncle had been killed and her aunt was dead. She moved from one group to another and they interrupted what they were saying and gave her an affectionate word. From head to heel long shivers of excitement passed through her at the realisation of what could be made manifest, like the scent of the roses itself, from human beings known and half known to each other, dressed differently, speaking and behaving differ-ently from their everyday or earthly selves. The women were made up; the men, who couldn't be, compensated by the additional effort they made, as though they were compelled to amuse on penalty of sinking into the earth. Only gradually it came to her — or perhaps it was more and more so as the night went on — that as she listened, anxious to learn, almost' all of them turned out to be speaking unkindly about someone else who was present, but out of earshot. The unkindness produced laughter and a kind of gentle intoxication. The garden was divided not only into moonlight and shadow but into areas of risk and safety as the guests, moving up or down, in or out, or under cover of the music, might or might not happen to overhear what was being said about them.
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It was Nieve's theory that all women were obsessively interested in their own bodies- that was why they found doctors attractive and why doctors were so much more fortunate than lawyers.
and
Giancarlo had never taken his sister quite seriously, even now, when she had embarked on the process of dying. In fact, she didn't take herself quite seriously either, in the sense that she did not believe she had the capacity to do harm. Perhaps this in itself might be considered a little crazy, but sometimes those who are considered crazy or even malicious are only those who choose the wrong moment

Sympathy for the Devil: Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw

An excerpt: Notoriously indifferent to kids, Gore was nevertheless so often asked to act as godfather, he had honed a line he would reprise for generations. 'Always a godfather, never a god." He bestowed a thin smile on Sean. 'Aren't you a pretty little girl." "I'm a boy," Sean protested. "Well, then, aren't you a pretty little boy." "Gore Vee-doll," Sean chirped. Pleased that a child knew his name, Gore leaned down to the pretty little boy, who declaimed in clearly enunciated syllables, "I want to eat you." The reaction . . . There was none. Everybody froze. At a loss for words, reduced to dumb miming, Gore wiggled his ears, then per-formed a trick that made it appear that he had detached the last joint from his thumb. This set Sean giggling, and the rest of us joined in, laughing in relief. While Linda bundled Sean off to bed, I poured Gore a glass of white wine and Howard a vodka on the rocks. Gore surprised me, saying he too wanted vodka. Had Sean's remark rattled him that badly? At dinner, Donald Stewart urged Mary Lee Settle to tell us about the National Book Award. Tall and striking, she had once been a model and still carried herself at sixty with a stylish panache. Strolling with me through Trastevere, she had sidestepped thundering motor scooters, delighted that the drivers all shot her admiring glances. In my eagerness not to get run over, I hadn't noticed this. Mary Lee was later quoted as claiming that winning the Na-tional Book Award was "one of the most unpleasant experiences I have ever had." But that night she was ebullient and explained that Blood Tie had at first been published to near-total silence. Few re-views, paltry sales. Then Anatole Broyard had written an enthusiastic notice in the daily New York Times, and Settle's good friend Vance Bourjaily, a member of the fiction jury, used the review to persuade the other National Book Award judges to vote for her. "It was a miracle," Mary Lee marveled. "The New York Times hadn't reviewed me for thirteen years."
"That's the way of the Great Gray Goose," said Gore, gulping down a second vodka. 'After The City and the Pillar, the Times re-fused to review my next six books." He recited their titles like the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary—The Season of Comfort, A Search for the King, Dark Green, Bright Red, The Judgment of Paris, Messiah, A Thirsty Era. From the way he talked, you'd never know that his taboo-breaking novel had had its advocates. Thomas Mann had hailed it as "a noble work." Howard, hyperalert to trouble, urged Gore to switch to wine. Gore insisted on more vodka. "It's interesting how alcohol affects different writers," he said, as if that were what we had been discussing—alcohol and authors. "Whenever I read Faulkner and he rambles on about 'the ancient avatar of the evening sun slipping down the crepuscular sky,' I know he was hitting the sauce. On the other hand, your sainted father," he said, nodding to Teresa Waugh D'Arms, "became meaner and more concise the drunker he got. Every sentence had a dagger in it." When Mary Lee Settle began waxing sentimental about their days on the Hudson River, Gore brought up the names of several men at Bard College and asked if she had slept with them after he had. "Time to go home," Howard broke in. With no protest, Gore pitched unsteadily to his feet, and the two of them departed. The next day he phoned to deliver a line that he doubtlessly wished he had thought of when Sean said he wanted to eat him. "Who was that dwarf you hired to get the evening off to such a
rousing start?"

J.B. Priestly on Time

In such quotations Time can be turned into something else; for this reason they are no use to us, Time and not something else being our subject here. But there can hardly be a more elusive subject. Either it recedes or transforms itself on our approach. Perhaps Carlyle, whom few read nowadays, is our man here, simply thundering away with "That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide"—and so on. Add to him a few select and more amusing passages from his contemporary Lewis Carroll (the Mad Hatter's tea party, for example) and we might begin creeping a little closer to our subject. To Carlyle Time is a mystery, to Lewis Carroll it is a joke; and both of them do better than their fellow authors, with their snappy judgments and platitudes about Time, pretending to know everything when in fact they know nothing. The idea of Time as a combined joke-mystery is not to be despised. Our favorite images of Time are of course all these tides, floods, rivers, streams—anything, it appears, that suggests moving water. The forward-flowing tide of time. Or, and I think better: Time's waters will not ebb nor stay. And perhaps the most familiar of all, from Isaac Watts's famous hymn: Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away. This seems a fine image until we begin to think about it (though, to be fair to Watts, he
probably never intended us to think about it). These sons that are being borne away—where are they going? Ob-viously, they are being floated into the past. Some of them were around last year, now they have gone. This seems all right until we realize that, if this stream is bearing all its sons away, it must be flowing from the future into the past. And if so, tomorrow's rough water might drown somebody yesterday. And if we feel this will not do, and we reverse the movement of the stream, making it roll from the past into the future, then nobody would have been borne away. We would all be floating happily together, catching an oc-casional glimpse of Alfred the Great, Chaucer, and Nell Gwyn. This is a fine fantasic idea, everybody in the past floating into the future, but it is certainly not what the hymn-writer meant. Moving water has been our favorite image of Time probably because it does suggest the stealthy but irresistible passing of the days, months, years. Intellectually it is not a satisfying image because oceans and tides have shores, floods and rivers and streams have banks, so that we can-not help wondering what these shores and banks are, what it is that stands still while time keeps flowing.
and
Extremes of optimism and pessimism, progress and regress, the claims of novelty and tradition, what was too new and what was too old; science challenging religion, Socialism and Communism denouncing Capitalism, real-ism opposing romanticism; Out of these opposites and the battles between them came that extraordinary energy of the 19th century and all those great seminal ideas that we in our century inherited and, instead of driving them out with ideas of our own, proceeded to put into practice on a large and often catastrophic scale. And in this huge but creative turbulence, the idea of Time, linear, inescapable, queerly accelerated (just as Evo-lution had been accelerated), played a considerable part. The clock struck oftener and ticked louder. There were many attempts, on different levels of intelli-gence and feeling, to escape. Schopenhauer almost returned to the vast life-denying outlook of ancient India; Nietzsche offered a new version of the old Greek idea of Eternal Recurrence; Bergson, reversing the usual process, dived into Time to discover a semi-magical duration. The Transcendentalists could hardly write five lines without men-tioning Eternity. With the continuing help of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Rome embraced new converts, from Oxford and many another place, and as a bonus produced Papal Infallibility. Romanticism; strong in the first half of the century but weakening later, was among other things an attempt to escape this idea of Time, to return to those magical places of the Middle Ages. Spiritualism, beginning as a fashion-able fad about the middle of the century, soon included among its devotees several distinguished scientists. True, it seemed to accept without question a linear one-dimen-sional Time; common to those on this side or the other side of the grave; but it was one form of protest against Time as a conveyor belt carrying us to extinction. Then Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant gave the later 19th century the Theosophical movement, which introduced into innumerable teashops and parlors Reincarnation, Karma, Astral Planes, and various lost continents. These were the years when Myers and Gurney were the pioneers of psychical research and published the first and perhaps the best book of its kind, Phantasms of the Living. Then in the later 1880s and early 1890s, Hinton and sev-eral other speculative mathematicians were responsible for a curious little flurry of books about the fourth dimension. Hinton was a genuine original who has not had the attention he deserves; in one of his awkward attempts at storytelling, An Unfinished Communication, he surprisingly anticipates Ouspensky's theory of recurrence. This is surprising because Hinton and his fellow fourth-dimension theorists had not associated this unknown dimension with Time. This was left to a young man of genius, Herbert George Wells, a former science instructor still in his twenties, who in 1895 published The Time Machine. It will at least serve as a bridge between the last century and this one if I add a note here about H. G. Wells. I was fairly well acquainted with him during the last 20 years of his life, and my admiration and affection for him are on record in more than one place. Thinking about him now, with the ideas of Time still in mind, I find myself regretting deeply, for his sake as well as ours, his later attitude toward the Time problem. He must have deliberately turned away from it, no doubt believing that other things were more important, but I always felt that this decision had left him feeling uneasy. He was irritable when the subject came up. He pooh-poohed Dunne, whom he had known long before An Experiment With Time; he dismissed with a snort Ouspensky and his followers, without knowing much about them; and although he was never rude about it, he deplored the way in which I was bothering my head about Time in the '30s. He was like a man who, having wrongly given up playing an instrument for which he had a flair, then refused to listen to anybody else playing it. And I feel strongly that if Wells, after writing his Out-line of History, had dedicated himself to solving the riddle of Time, he would have saved himself much disappoint-ment later, he would have rediscovered his astonishing gift of intuition, he would have left us, at this date, far deeper in his debt. His last thin cry of despair, Mind at the End of its Tether, must be taken for what it is, the work of a dying man, unconsciously projecting his own dissolution upon the universe. But I think he might never have written it if, instead of ceaselessly pleading for "open Conspiracies" and scientific world governments, he had brought all his great gifts to the Sphinx of Time. After all, it was a certain idea of Time, which he might have challenged and then destroyed, that encouraged the age to reject his open conspiracies and calls for world government.

Pops by Terry Teachout

The boats that plied the river had already started to deprovincialize the Midwest by the time Mark Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi, and no sooner did jazz take shape in New Orleans than it, too, made its steam-powered way to sleepy towns whose citizens had never dreamed of such stupendous novelties as a dance orchestra consisting of well-dressed black men who played music as strange as the boats themselves. Most people who know something of jazz know that the riverboats helped to disseminate it, though their mental image of how this happened is often vague. (Anyone who thinks jazz steamed up the river to Chicago needs to look at a map.) Early jazz musicians fanned out in all directions from New Orleans, and the members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who went to New York in 1917, played an even more far-reaching part in the music's spread by mak-ing the first jazz recordings, which within months of their release were being imitated by men who knew nothing of Basin Street, Buddy Bolden, or Joe Oliver. But the riverboats that cruised the Mississippi still have a special place in the history of American music, for they were the finishing schools in which numerous New Orleans instrumentalists, Louis Armstrong foremost among them, perfected their craft under the instruction of a man who knew little of jazz but everything about discipline. Fate Marable was red-haired, light-skinned, and proud of his for-mal musical training. He was not, however, a Creole of color, and he didn't even come from New Orleans. He was born in Paducah, a town in Kentucky that is located at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, and it was there, in 1907, that he landed a job with the Streckfus Steamboat Line, a family-owned company whose elab-orately appointed excursion boats cruised the length of the Missis-
sippi, promising infinite splendor in their newspaper ads: "One block long, 75 feet wide, 5000 passengers, three roomy decks open on all sides, 500 rockers, 250o comfortable seats, 5000 electric lights, moo electric fans. Best dance music in the United States. 1500 couples can dance on the dance floor at one time!" It was Marable who kept them dancing on the S.S. Sidney, having first lured them onto the boat with his calliope solos. His fans included Theodore Roosevelt, who was once seen dancing to his jaunty version of "Turkey in the Straw." Marable was light enough to pass for white, and a 1916 photograph shows him leading a quintet of white instrumentalists, wearing a rak-ishly cocked cap and a knowing half smile. After 1917, though, he worked only with black players, and in that same year he started billing his ensembles as "jazz" bands. The expression was more than just a nod to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which popularized the use of the still-unfamiliar word. A ragtime pianist, Marable had been haunting the honky-tonks of New Orleans and paying attention to what he heard. "We were playing in and out of New Orleans all the time," he remembered, "and I began to notice the type of music they were playing there. It just got under my skin." In the winter of 1917, Marable and Joseph Streckfus, a white pi-anist turned steamboat pilot who supervised the music played on the Streckfus Line, started hiring New Orleans musicians for their local cruises. Pleased with the results, they decided in 1919 to send a New Orleans—based group on the Sidney's summer cruise. The eight-piece Metropolitan Jaz-E-Saz Orchestra included Armstrong, the drum-mer Warren "Baby" Dodds (pronounced "dots"), and the bassist George "Pops" Foster, all of whom would later leave New Orleans to have major careers in Chicago and New York. At the time, though, they were unknown beyond the city limits, and Streckfus, fearing that a full-strength dose of their hot music might overstimulate his patrons ordered them to avoid the bluesy slow drags. Instead the Jaz-E-Sazzers played popular songs, every fourth one a waltz, in the bouncy manner of Art Hickman's successful San Francisco dance band, seasoning them with a pinch of jazz.
IN THE EARLY THIRTIES jazz had no history save for what was en-graved in the memories of the men who made it and the grooves of the records they cut. Buddy Bolden and Bix Beiderbecke were dead, and Joe Oliver, Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Becher had dropped out of sight. The only music that mattered was the music of the moment. Then Benny Goodman, who had listened to the Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens when he was in knee pants, recorded a Fletcher Henderson—arranged version of Morton's "King Porter Stomp" in July of 1935 that became a surprise hit and an an-them of the era of big-band swing that was around the corner. It was "King Porter Stomp" that drove the crowd wild at the Palomar Ball-room in Los Angeles a few weeks later. "That number started off with Bunny Berigan playing a trumpet solo, the saxophones and rhythm behind him," Goodman recalled. "Before he'd played four bars, there was such a yelling and stomping and carrying on in that hall that I thought a riot had broken out. When I went into my solo, the noise was even louder. Finally the truth got through to me: We were causing the riot." In that same year Bob Crosby, Bing's brother, started fronting a band whose members, many of whom were from
New Orleans, cut a series of swinging instrumentals for Decca based 011 78s by Oliver, Beiderbecke, and Louis Armstrong, most of which were then out of print. The surviving members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band reor-ganized the following year and began playing in public for the first time since 1925, an event that caught the ear of Time: "Hot jazz cultists who have learned to treasure the Dixieland's out of print phonograph records as classics and museum pieces never believed they might actually hear them together again." A few months earlier Time had published an article on the swing craze that made promi-nent mention of Oliver, Beiderbecke, and Armstrong ("His trumpet solos . . . are as important to many lovers of American syncopation as Beethoven's 9th Symphony is to subscribers of the New York Phil-harmonic"). Hugues Panassie's Le jazz hot, mentioned in a footnote, was translated into English and rushed into print as Hot Jazz: A Guide to Swing Music around the same time that Otis Ferguson, one of America's first important jazz critics, began contributing essays about Beiderbecke, Goodman, and other musicians to the New Republic. By 1938 interest in the early days of jazz was picking up speed. On January 16 the Goodman band gave a concert at Carnegie Hall that included musical impressions of Armstrong and Beiderbecke played by Harry James and Bobby Hackett. The next day Eddie Condon took Jess Stacy, Goodman's pianist, and a group of like-minded players into a New York studio and cut the first 78 sides to be released by Commodore, an independent record label founded by Milt Gabler that was devoted to small-group jazz. The launch of Commodore Records inspired a piece in Life called "Swing: The Hottest and Best Kind of Jazz Reaches Its Golden Age." In May Jelly Roll Morton emerged from the shadows to make the first in a series of autobiographical recordings for the Library of Congress in which jbhaezowzt:onl,d,BFoethare story of New Orleans jazz from his solipsistic point of view. Three months later he went public, sending an irate letter to in which he proclaimed himself to be the "creator" of many years I was Number One man with the Victor Recording Company. Tiger Rag was transformed into jazz by me . . .
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The bottom fell out of big-band jazz in the winter of 1946. Time ran an obituary for the era: "The big brassy jazz bands had become a luxury that people were unwilling to pay for. . . In the past eight weeks, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Les Brown and Jack Teagarden decided to disband. Gene Krupa and Jimmy Dorsey cut salaries. This week Woody Herman gave up too." Joe Glaser needed no journalist to read him the writing on the wall. "Promoters all over are going broke — bookings are being cancelled at the last minute — I can name at least half a dozen Colored bands that will disband in the next 3o days and at least 3o white bands that will disband," he had written to Joe Garland that summer.

The Attractions and Dangers of Autonomy from ATS

 ARISTOTLE'S DESCRIPTION OF the Prime Mover is that it moves all other beings by way of the attraction of its perfection. The last lines of The Paradiso describe the Christian version of the Greek Supreme Being taking control of Dante's desire and will:
... I could feel my being turned . . . by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.
The Dante who, thanks to the troubadours, found that the most important experience in his life was his love for an individual woman, has been drawn into the orbit of The Prime Mover. His individual will along with his love of Beatrice and his political commitments have been overwhelmed by the bliss of contemplating God. One might say Dante has been Missed out. While bliss wipes you out, joy makes you more intensely you. And in Dante's world every joy is meaning-less compared to the bliss of the beatific vision. "Bliss beyond bliss, all other joys transcending," he says. Dante is ultimately absorbed into the love of all creatures for their Creator. But is this really the way to a fulfilled existence? It seems more like the way to avoid a meaningful life rather than the way to attain one. Indeed, it might be a medieval form of nihilism; for it says that there is nothing in this life that has any meaning whatsoever—even Beatrice's saving love or Dante's deep political motivations are trivial compared with the love of God. It is here that Dante inadvertently shows us that the Greek metaphysics Aquinas is working with undermines the agape love we saw in the early Christianity of John and Paul. On the early Christian model one lives in the world with Jesus in you, and that means you live in the mood of joy not bliss, a mood that guides you to definite and directed action in the world of the word made flesh. The concept of the love of God is therefore ambiguous. In Dante's world it turns out to mean the love of each of us for Aristotle's Supreme Being, whereas in the Gospel it means Jesus' love for each of us. In Dante's final mystical merging there is no place for Jesus as an embodied object and paradigm of agape love. Dante's final experience is merely that God's radiance is "painted with man's image." Jesus is just a face, in Dante's view, with no body beneath it to hold it up. In sum, the medieval attempt to articulate Christianity in Aristotelian terms must fail. The negative message of the Inferno is phenomenologically apt: autonomy really does lead to active nihilism, since when all meaning originates with us nothing has authority over us or the power to move us. But, if we try to put the Christian love of an incarnate Jesus into Aristotelian terms we end up with a Supreme Being and a love so overwhelming and passive that it wipes out individuality and all meaningful differences. Dante's unconditional commitment that has drawn him to Beatrice, and that might have offered him and his medieval Christian culture a new source of personal meaning, is wiped out by an impersonal, Greek, mystical experience. Indeed, it turns out that what has been called the Medieval Synthesis Aquinas's and Dante's achievement of conceptualizing the Christian revelation in Aristotelian terms—is not the answer to nihilism but another step in its direction.
ST. THOMAS, FOLLOWING ARISTOTLE, claimed that the highest goal in life was the beatific vision of the Prime Mover—renamed The Supreme Being. St. Thomas understood this as the bliss of directly contemplating God. But as we have just seen, in Dante's poem this leaves no place for Jesus and agape love, nor for a community of joyful Christians, nor, indeed, for individual selves. Martin Luther, writing a century after Thomas and Dante, was determined to rescue Christianity from Aristotle and get back to the early Christianity expressed in the letters of Paul. Luther minces no words in stating his disgust at the disastrous influence of Aristotle:
It grieves me to the quick that this damned, conceited, rascally heathen has deluded and made fools of so many of the best Christians with his misleading writings. God has plagued us thus for our sins.
And he adds:
The universities need a good, stiff reform. . . . It is my advice that the books of Aristotle, . . . which have hitherto been es-teemed the best, be entirely removed from the curriculum.
Luther thus decisively breaks with the attempt to bring together Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian experience. He could be criti-cizing St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Dante when he says: "It does [the sinner] no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross." Or more succinctly: "The 'theologian of glory' calls the bad good and the good bad. The 'Theologian of the cross,' says what a thing is."25 That is, Christians are not called to experience the Greek-type pure presence of the divine, but are called to relate to Jesus, the "Word made Flesh" as described by John and experienced by Paul. In general, Luther had no use for mystics and monks. Both types were cut off from the world in which, according to Luther, communal joy—rather than blissed-out contemplation of God—is the conta-gious Christian mood. Luther is adamant that
we . . . ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christians to one another.
Rather than leave the world by contemplating God's truth in the depth of the self as Augustine did, or by merging with the love mov-ing creation as Dante did, the Christian is reborn "a new man in a new world." A new world was, indeed, on the horizon. Thanks to Luther the Aristotelian/Thomistic/Dantian theology ceased to hold center stage in our cultural understanding of ourselves. The reborn Christian, whose mood is directly shared with Jesus and with all other Chris-tians, does not need the mediation of popes and priests. According to Luther, every Christian is a Pope and "all they which faithfully believe in Christ are saints."" This is not a way of being a self-sufficient or autonomous being, - but it does open the possibility of thinking of oneself as at least self-sufficient vis a vis the church—up to then the most powerful institu-tion in the West. In the new world of the Enlightenment that Luther ushers in, this can come to sound very self-sufficient, especially when he says:
[A] Christian man, if ye define him rightly, is free from all laws, and is not subject unto any creature, either within or with-out. . . . For he hath such a gift, such a treasure in his heart, that although it seemeth to be but little, yet notwithstanding the smallness thereof, is greater than heaven and earth, because Christ, which is this gift, is greater."
Luther's reformation, and the Protestant Reformation more gen-erally, thus provided a corrective to the medieval passive nihilism of Dante. But its emphasis on individual freedom also prepared the way rforrthe active nihilism associated with the death of God. Luther's cor-rective to medieval nihilism centers on his insistence that God's love embraces  us despite our sins. The mood of Christianity in Luther, therefore, is joy and gratitude.3° In Luther's own life this mood gave him a certainty about how to act. This certainty was manifest in his famous statement at the Diet of Worms in 1521: "Here I stand; I can do no other." Certainty about how to act in this world therefore a certainty for which one would "die a thousand deaths," as Luther says in his commentary on Paul's Letter to the Romans—stands in stark contrast with the hope that a mood of bliss might lift one out of this world and its commitments, as in the medieval nihilism of Dante. But the corrective came at the price of meaning. In order to em-phasize the peculiarities of this mood of joy and gratitude, Luther stressed that it was experienced in terms of a personal and individ-ual relation to Jesus. This personal and individual relation to Jesus is not the same as the Enlightenment celebration of the independent individual, but it was a step in that direction. Reform Christianity had the effect of emphasizing the individual as defined by his inner thoughts and desires at the expense of a God-given hierarchy of or-dered, worldly meanings outside the individual. Indeed, in Luther's account of Christianity the world in its politi-cal, religious, and environmental forms is entirely disenchanted. We have now traveled far from Dante's medieval hierarchy of meanings—in which the value of everything is written on its face. Rather, each in-dividual is as a king, according to Luther, since one no longer follows the laws in service to the king and his state. One is indebted instead to the mood that Jesus' love and suffering instills in you, and it is this mood that determines what is lawful. That is to say, as Jesus said, love fulfills the Law. One is no longer dependent on the priests and their mediation or intercession in one's relations with God. Rather, Jesus justifies you as an individual by giving his grace and love to you directly. This brings us a long way toward the Enlightenment understand-ing of the self as the self-sufficient source of meaning in the universe. But unlike the Enlightenment thinkers, especially Descartes and Kant, Luther still had a strong sense of the individual's dependence on a Savior. According to him, works of devotion offered by the church
and by individuals are worthless, willful acts of pride, unless they are experienced in faith and humility. We can't give faith to ourselves any more than we can give ourselves our other moods:
Faith is a living and unshakeable confidence . . . [it] makes us joy-ful, high-spirited, and eager in our relations with God and with all mankind. . . . Righteousness of this kind cannot be brought about in the ordinary course of nature, by our own free will, or by our own powers. No one can give faith to himself . . . "
Descartes took the next big step toward nihilism by denigrating receptivity entirely and focusing exclusively on what one can obtain by one's own willpower.
IT IS NOT UNTIL the early seventeenth century that we arrive at the French philosopher Rene Descartes, the only reconfigurer in the West besides the Jesus figure we have described. Just as Jesus established our Christian World with its saints and sinners, Descartes established Our Modern World in which we understand ourselves as self-sufficient subjects standing over against self-sufficient objects. He does this by drawing on Augustine's discovery of the inner depths of the soul and on Luther's emphasis on each Christian's independence. But Luther, with his understanding of moods—especially agape and gratitude—preserves a sense of the necessary receptivity of the Christian while Descartes claims that human subjects at their best are completely de-tached, self-contained, and, far from being passive, have a willpower SO great that it rivals God's. He says:
It is free-will alone ... which I find to be so great in me that I can conceive no other idea to be more great; it is indeed the case that it is for the most part this will that causes me to know that in some manner I bear the image and likeness of God."

Dark Valley on the Japanese Earthquake

As THE inflationary crisis was reaching its climax in Germany, a cataclysm of an entirely different kind occurred on the other side of the globe. Moments before noon on Saturday 1 September 1923, Japan was struck by a massive earthquake. The inhabitants were accustomed to seismic upheavals, superstition attributing them to the movements of the giant catfish Narnazu which lived under their volcanic isles. Indeed, when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited Japan he was amazed to discover that
the needle on the seismometer was never still. But this was different. It measured 8.3 on the Richter Scale, which made it significantly stronger than the force that had razed San Francisco in 1906, and its epicentre was only 3o miles south of Yokohama. According to witnesses, the first shock felt like "a grinding blow beneath our feet." It rose to a sickening "crescendo of turmoil." This lasted only about fifteen seconds but its effect was stupendous. As the captain of a ves-sel in the port of Yokohama observed, the whole city undulated "like the surface of the ocean under a great storm." With a deafening roar nearly all the buildings in Yokohama and most of those in Tokyo toppled to the ground. Acres were flattened and many thousands were killed at once. Rows of new houses vanished under landslides while medieval ruins, buried for hundreds of years, suddenly came to light. Roads were gashed with crevasses large enough to swallow an automobile; trains crashed as railway lines buckled and bridges collapsed; tram and telegraph wires fes-tooned the streets like monstrous spiders' webs. What one witness called the "insanely malicious forces of nature" appeared to have battered nearby villages into the ground with "a gigantic flail."While the earth continued to tremble and choking yellow dust filled the air, the survivors, many crazed with fear, fled into parks and open spaces. Almost at once fires began, as charcoal cooking braziers (hibachi) kin-dled the remains of wood and paper dwellings. Gas flaring from broken pipes added to the conflagration. It was fanned by a wind known as tatsumaki—the dragon's twist. This spread sparks to the futons, or padded quilts, carried by many refugees, turning them into involuntary pyro-maniacs. It also drove flames over the wide Sumida River, where thou-sands of people sheltering at a clothing depot in the working-class suburb of Honjo were incinerated. In Yokohama huge oil storage tanks on the hillside burst, releasing an avalanche of fuel which quickly ignited. Many sought refuge in canals or at sea, only to be burned alive as streams of blaz-ing oil covered the water. Boats in the harbour were set alight or sunk by tidal waves. On land incandescent tempests erupted. They were nothing like the familiar city blazes known as the "flowers of Edo," but rather a ter-rifying adumbration of the fire-storms caused by saturation bombing dur-ing the Second World War. Many suffocated, like those in the crush at Hongo Station. Others were whirled into the air, human brands plucked from the burning. Thousands died in "ghastly, grotesque attitudes,"62 their arms upraised in a hopeless attempt to ward off the furnace heat. After dark, people ten miles away could read by its light. Immersed in billows of flame which roared like heavy guns, Yokohama presented "an amazing, grand and terrifying spectacle."63 Amid the glare and stench of death, the impression of war was compounded: soldiers started to dynamite build-ings in order to make fire-breaks and to shoot the wild animals which were roaming the streets after escaping from their shattered cages in the zoo. Despite all efforts the holocaust lasted for several days. The Japanese responded variously. In the frenzied exodus from the cities some fugitives were trampled underfoot. Martial law was declared, but there were cases of hysteria, cowardice, looting and "foul work by ghouls.”64 Large stocks of rice had been destroyed and food riots occurred. More horrible was the wave of paranoia which soon engulfed the nation. Searching for scape-goats, people blamed the inferno on immigrant Korean workers—for whom they felt an atavistic racial antagonism. The authorities claimed to have uncovered a gigantic Korean plot involving arson, looting, bombing and murder. Fifteen thousand Koreans were interned and many others were tortured and massacred. Some were literally crucified. Japanese youths armed with spears and swords acted as vigilantes and "appeared to have lost their reason. "65 The police behaved no better, rounding up a number of left-wing radicals, some of whom were beaten and killed. An army officer took the opportunity to assassinate the imprisoned anarchist leader Osugi, breaking his back with a ju-jitsu hold and then strangling his common-law wife and child. He was never brought to justice. Fears of subversion were not entirely groundless. Among the crowd seeking sanctuary inside the walled and moated gardens of the Imperial Palace, one man cried ominously: "Remember Russia!"66 Later these 247-acre grounds, with their exquisite pavilions and pools, terraces and court-yards, streams, bridges and flowers, were thrown open to refugees. The Prince Regent Hirohito, who had become head of state in 1921 as a result of his father's madness, was absent from Tokyo but several members of his family were killed. Although he soon returned, there was some resentment at his failure adequately to reassure and commiserate with his subjects. Doubtless Hirohito was inhibited by protocol, which ruled out sponta-neous demonstrations of emotion. But three months after the earthquake a young socialist attempted to assassinate him because he had not raised an ideal state on the ruins. It was one of the many paradoxes of Japan that violent social indisci-pline could coexist with adamantine social order. Zen Buddhism, with its doctrine that salvation lies in following the dictates of one's heart whatever the earthly consequences, encouraged a sublime nonconformity. At the same time the Japanese were so devoted to the ideal of national polity (kokutai) that they sometimes burst the bounds of orthodoxy and became more imperial than the Emperor. Yet their commitment to fulfilling obli-
gations at any cost, not excepting hara-kiri, resulted in a community spirit almost inconceivable to individualistic foreigners, who were inclined to disparage it as an archaic hangover from feudalism or a sinister portent of the "hive mentality." However, many Westerners caught up in the earth-quake benefited from the self-denying code of their Oriental servants, who often sacrificed their own interests in order to save their employers' lives or to rescue their possessions. Most Japanese, indeed, behaved with exemplary courage and restraint, and some were heroic. So bad had the destruction been in Tokyo that it was initially feared that the capital would have to be moved to another site. But citizens took heart from Premier Yamamoto's exhortation to "unite and rebuild." Salvage work began almost immediately and some construction started before the ashes were cool. People waited stoically in food queues two miles long. There were many patriotic demonstrations. None was more moving than that prompted by a schoolmaster who, after fire had swept through a host of his companions, cried: 'All present shout three banzais with me." Two hundred voices were raised in the most pitiful cheer ever heard." Because communications were cut, the outside world was slow to grasp the scale of the Japanese tragedy: perhaps 140,000 dead, tens of thousands injured and devastation which was likened to that of Armageddon. As one witness wrote, "Imagine the Somme battle-fields and the ruins of Ypres on a gigantic but concentrated scale and you have a picture, though not even realistic enough, of Tokyo and the country around.” At two billion dol-lars, the cost of renovation amounted to 4o per cent of the country's gross national product. It not only wiped out the 400-million-dollar profit which Japan had made out of the First World War, it crippled the entire economy. In the words of an American authority, this was "the greatest financial catastrophe of the age." Foreign countries, particularly the United States, responded generously to the disaster, donating millions of dollars and enabling relief agencies like the Red Cross to deliver food, clothing, tents, medical supplies and other aid to the stricken cities. But this largesse did little more than point up the contrast between America's wealth and Japan's poverty. It was poverty so acute that the masses could seldom afford to eat much more than rice and salt—Prince Saionji hailed it as a notable improvement when they were later able to augment this diet with bean paste (mire) and soy sauce. During the various economic crises of the 192os, farmers—and agriculture employed half of Japan's 6o million people—had no recourse but to sell their daughters into prostitution. Sometimes it seemed as though this were Japan's most prosperous business

Dark Valley on inflation in Germany

 January 1919 there were 9 marks to the dollar; three years later there were 192. Stimulated by the assassination of the Jewish foreign minister Walter Rathenau in 1922, the "currency debauch" worsened. The British ambassador quipped that "German finance is dying beyond its means."3' In January 1923 it seemed that France was determined to finish the work of war and peace, for Poincare insisted that Germany pay while making it impossible for it to do so. As Britain dithered and the United States with-drew, France began to exploit the Ruhr, Germany's industrial powerhouse, for its own ends. Berlin retaliated with a doomed strategy of passive re-sistance which cost 4o million marks a day. Forgetting their own puni-tive treatment of defeated Russia, the Germans found a new unity in com-mon mortification. The Reichsbank made valiant efforts to hold the mark at a rate of about 2,000 to the dollar. But when these efforts failed it rose to astronomical heights. In July 1923 there were 353,412 marks to the dollar; in August, 4,620,455; in September, 98,860,000; in October, 25,260,208,000; in November, 4,200,000,000,000. It was the most colos-sal inflation in history, making the assignats of the French Revolution look almost as good as gold. To produce this currency 300 paper mills and 2,000 printing plants worked round the clock; eventually it cost more to print the notes than they were worth. Banks had to take on more clerks to count the noughts. They used the blank side of the notes as scrap paper because it was cheaper than buying pads. Eventually stacks of cash were not counted at all but weighed or measured with a ruler. Life was transformed into a bizarre paperchase. Patrons of restaurants found their meals becoming more expensive as they ate. Factory workers saw their wages shrinking in value as they queued to collect them. How-ever fast they ran to the shops, prices outstripped them. Shopkeepers, indeed, looked on their customers almost as thieves for taking goods which could only be replaced at prohibitive expense. Peasants refused to sell their produce for paper money, saying: "We don't want any Jew-confetti from Berlin."32 Beggars rejected anything less than a million marks. New notes appeared, issued by municipalities and acceptable locally. Forgeries added to the confusion. Some people paid in kind:
The Roots of Fascism 3 3 theatre seats were sold for a couple of eggs; prostitutes offered their ser-vices for cigarettes. Interest rates rose to 20 per cent a day and loans were made in terms of rye or coal or even electric kilowatts. Bureaucrats in the Finance Ministry took part of their salaries in potatoes. Those who possessed foreign currency were impossibly rich, for no one had enough marks to change anything but the smallest denominations. Ten dollars would purchase a large modern house. Foreign profiteers took advantage of the situation to make a killing, while American tourists lit their cigarettes with million-mark notes and pasted larger denominations on their suitcases, further exacerbating German chauvinism. In the words of one contemporary, "Germany was a rapidly decomposing corpse, on which the birds of prey were swooping down from all directions."33 At the height of the inflation, according to a familiar story, a woman who left a basket of marks on the pavement came back to find the basket stolen and the marks in the gutter. Currency notes were used as lavatory paper. Ger-mans talked of the death of money. Stephan Zweig minted a compelling metaphor for that awesome demise in his story of a blind man whose family had secretly sold his cherished collection of drawings in order to keep alive, replacing them in his portfolio with blank sheets of paper.34 In the same vein, Hitler dismissed the Treaty of Versailles as a scrap of paper. Not everyone suffered. Landowners actually benefited, often paying off their mortgages in depreciated marks. So did industrialists, especially if they sold abroad. Trade-unionists had a measure of protection. But at a time when a pound of ersatz butter could cost a labourer's daily wage and it might take five months' earnings to buy a suit of clothes, the working class was sucked into a maelstrom of misery. Even worse off were pension-ers and those living on fixed incomes. Their savings vanished and they faced not only indigence but starvation. Here was a revolution as sweeping as that of the Bolsheviks. At a stroke property was destroyed and "the bourgeoisie was proletarianised."35 Middle-class values were turned upside down: debtors were virtuous while thrift was a vice; wealth was no longer the index of worth. As one contemporary said, "Inflation finished the process of moral decay which the war had started." Crime spread: so many potato fields were raided that police had to guard them in order to preserve the seed crop. There was an increase in suicide, malnutrition, illness and emigration. Infant mortality rates rose. Economic paralysis set in, unemployment grew, strikes and disturbances spread, shops were ransacked and towns looted. Corruption and anti-Semitism flourished—the Jews were accused of exploiting the tragedy. Germany's physical and psychic health decayed together. Life became "madness, nightmare, desperation, chaos."36 Observing that the inflation had revived Germany's "old, bristling, savage spirit," D. H. Lawrence said: "Money becomes insane, and people with it. "37 Sexual decadence seemed to be a by-product of the bankruptcy of traditional values. A foreigner exclaimed, "Nothing brought you so much face to face with the patho-logical distortion of Germany's postwar mentality as the weird night life of Berlin."38 Describing the way in which inflation infected everything, one historian has written that it was a "revolutionary influence much more powerful than the war itself."39 Inevitably this crisis threatened Germany's fragile democracy. Since the State was unable to protect its citizens they were bound to look elsewhere, especially when, in September 1923, the impotent government surren-dered to French coercion in the Ruhr. Many workers turned to the Com-munists; Saxony and Thuringia were menaced by Red revolution. Many of the dispossessed middle class were seduced by right-wing movements. None was more rabid than the National Socialist party, which promised to restore a strong, unified Reich that was both anti-capitalist and anti-Bolshevist. And no one articulated petty-bourgeois bitterness more vehe-mently than its leader, Adolf Hitler, who larded his speeches with hideous invective against money-grubbing Jews.
and
Noting that Germans needed to humiliate others in order to compensate for their own sense of mass worthlessness during the "witches' sabbath of devaluation,"43 Elias Canetti thought that without it the Rihrer could not have induced them to par-ticipate in the destruction of the Jews. Hitler was a small, nondescript figure. His complexion was pallid, his limbs were ill-coordinated, his lank hair flopped over a receding fore-head, his toothbrush moustache was the image of Charlie Chaplin's. Only expressive, sensitive hands and luminous blue eyes saved him from being totally unprepossessing. In his heavy boots, blue serge suit, broad-brimmed black hat and dirty mackintosh, he resembled, in the words of his affluent acolyte "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, "a suburban hairdresser on his day off" or "a waiter in a railway station restaurant." Hitler's style of life was shabbier still. He rented a small, dingy room in a poor district of Munich. It contained a single bed, a few sticks of furniture and a couple of threadbare rugs to cover the worn linoleum. Hitler's habits were Bohemian: he was erratic and unpunctual. So were his tastes: he had an insatiable appetite for sweet things, cream cakes, coffee flavoured with squares of chocolate, white wine enriched with spoonfuls of castor sugar. In the presence of upper-class people his manners were gauche. Yet even at this stage Hitler had developed "unmistakably Napoleonic and Messianic airs."Accompanied by a savage Alsatian dog, he swaggered about pack-ing a pistol and cracking a rhinoceros-hide whip. His pretensions knew no bounds. He once exclaimed, "I must enter Berlin like Christ in the Tem-ple of Jerusalem and scourge out the money-lenders."Absurd as his rhetoric sounds, when Hitler spoke he convinced audiences that he really was the saviour of Germany. He was transfigured by oratory. No prophet ever had a more vivid appreciation of the "magic power of the spoken word." As he wrote in Mein Kampf: The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. And all great movements are popular movements, volcanic erup-tions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses.
Hitler despised the kind of middle-class political meetings where professo-rial figures in frock coats and monocles read their speeches in hushed tones to a somnolent audience. "Only a storm of hot passion can turn the des-tinies of peoples," he believed, "and he alone can arouse passion who bears it within himself." Hitler himself was so passionate that Hanfstaengl described his perorations as "an orgasm of words."They induced ecstasy in his audiences and it later became his practice, at the climax, to crush his spectacles in his clenched fist. To quote another witness, who had never experienced such "hypnotic mass-excitement," he displayed the "fanati-cally hysteric romanticism of a brutal will."But if Hitler played the demiurge he also learned the tricks of the demagogue. Apparently he stud-ied the techniques of Ferdl Weiss, a popular Munich comedian. He rehearsed in front of a looking-glass, timed his entry to perfection, used every aid—bands, banners, spotlights, salutes. Emblazoned all around was the swastika, described by Barbusse as "two interlaced gibbets."5° Hitler varied his rhythm and orchestrated the crowd's responses like an inspired musician.
Hitler ost about five pounds in weight during every speech- he sweated so profusely that the dye running from his suit stained his shirt and underwear blue.

Dark Valley on Mussolini

 Referring to his own Stormtroopers, Hitler remarked: "The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt. The march on Rome, in 1922, was one of the turning-points of history."4 Few at the time could see this. The New York Times commented patron-isingly that the Fascists had achieved a "revolution of the peculiar and rela-tively harmless Italian type. "Is Mussolini formed a coalition government, preserved an impression of continuity and never became a totalitarian ruler to compare with Hitler or Stalin. He donned a frock coat and a butterfly collar when visiting the King and had himself schooled in bour-geois etiquette (though he never became a Beau Brummell and could still sometimes be seen eating his food with a knife). He tried to project an image of dignity and respectability, controlling his own press, bribing or intimidating foreign correspondents—subjecting them, as he cynically put it, to "the olive or the club."i6 Privileged journalists were allowed to interview him, first in the Chigi Palace and later in the gold-coloured Palazzo Venezia. This was a great fortress in the centre of Rome, built by medieval popes with stones taken from the Colosseum and now staffed by Fascist lackeys in silver-laced uniforms. Here, in the grand echoing Hall of the Mappa Mundi, home of the first terrestrial globe, Mussolini was to establish his office. It had three huge windows, painted columns, gilded torches (fitted with electric lights) in the corners, a decorated ceiling featuring the Lion of St. Mark and the she-wolf of Rome, and mosaic tiles on the floor depicting nude women and children bearing fruit. The hall was so large that Mussolini communicated with entering flunkeys by hand signals and it was empty apart from Mus-solini's massive rosewood desk, itself unadorned except by a bronze lion. Approaching the dictator was an ordeal, for he seldom greeted guests at
the door and later decreed that his ministers should run the last 20 yards into his presence. Enthroned on high, Mussolini exuded animal magne-tism. But he could be modest, courteous, charming and sardonic. Many visitors were impressed, not least Winston Churchill, who was suspected of wishing to become an English Mussolini. Churchill did not altogether discourage this notion before 1935, saying that in Italy he would be a Fas-cist and stressing the need for leaders who "feel themselves to be uplifted above the general mass." There were no giant peaks on the "democratic plateau," there was no "venerated 'El Capitan' or 11 Duce,' casting its majestic shadow in the evening light."'7 Witnesses less susceptible to the allurements of power were inclined to dismiss Mussolini as a comic-opera Caesar, "a Napoleon turned pugilist."" One woman journalist (whom he tried to seduce) was put off by Mus-solini's "absurd attitudinising"—the scowling forehead, the rolling eyes, the pouting mouth, the snapping jaw, the shaven head thrown back, the huge chin thrust out.'9 Mussolini's compulsive exhibitionism was part of his cult of machismo. Whenever possible he bared his chest for the benefit of the cameras and he made much of his furious bouts of exercise—riding, fencing, swimming, bicycling, boxing, playing tennis, doing gymnastics. More private manifestations of virility were visited on the many females who succumbed to his crude advances. Indifferent to the looks of his con-quests (though he liked them to smell strongly of scent or sweat—he him-self seldom washed, preferring to dab his body with eau-de-Cologne), Mussolini thrust himself forward with sadistic vigour, dragging them to the floor while removing neither his trousers nor his shoes. Apparently "his brutality and savage curses in moments of climax were followed by words of tenderness, however brief and however commonplace, when he was satisfied." And at least one woman was favoured, after he had lifted himself from her person, with an air on his violin.2° Equally theatrical were Mussolini's public performances, his harangues to crowds from his balcony, which he called his "stage." He spoke in short, strident sentences, making chopping gestures with his right hand. Often he paused and posed for dramatic effect—head up, torso erect, arms akimbo—looking like nothing so much as a music hall villain. Yet Mussolini was no more the comic figure he seems in flickering news-reels than he was the old-fashioned accommodationist visualised by other politicians at home and abroad. He was a peculiarly twentieth-century species of political gangster. Fascism was not just the negation of democ-racy, it was government by terror. Mussolini certainly snuffed out parlia-mentary power. But he also encouraged acts of violence against his opponents, of which the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 is the best-known example. Mussolini relished thuggery as a form of manliness and declared that his regime "could not be prosecuted except at the bar of history."2' This conveniently remote tribunal enabled him to rule by means of crime. He employed ruffians such as Roberto Farinacci, the viciously anti-Semitic boss of Cremona who was sometimes known as "Mussolini's left hand." He suppressed civil liberties, expro-priated property, imposed censorship, tapped telephones, destroyed inde-pendent trade unions, imprisoned people without trial. He appointed himself "head" of government and built up a mystique of the Duce, the infallible, omnipotent Leader, who was capable of performing miracles. (It was said that he stopped Mount Etna's lava from destroying a village.) Nothing less than playing the role of quasi-divine dictator could satisfy Mussolini's extravagant longings. As he said soon after coming to power, "I am possessed by a frenzied ambition which torments and devours me from within like a physical illness. It is, through my own will-power, to carve a mark on the age—like a lion with his claws, like this." Then with outspread fingers he made a savage, slashing motion. It was a symbolic gesture hardly impaired by the fact that he bit his fin-ger nails "not merely to the quick but almost to the moons." Whether they regarded him as saviour, buffoon or barbarian, contemporaries were bound to acknowledge that Mussolini had made his mark. Out of the blazing passions of war and the blighted hopes of peace he had distilled a new political force. It drew strength both from national exaltation and from national humiliation; for despite victory won at such terrible cost Italy remained, as Mussolini insisted, in comparison to more exalted pow-ers a "proletarian nation."24 It also drew strength from fears of Bolshevism, which was widely seen not as an alternative form of tyranny but as the stark antithesis of Fascism. Communists themselves identified Fascism as the final crisis of capitalism, in which the workers were terrorised into submission. Capitalists, or some of them, believed that the political dynamism and discipline of Fascism complemented their own economic efforts, especially after the Crash. "In 1929 the pillars of the temple that seemed to defy the centuries crumbled in a vast uproar," Mussolini declared. "The crisis through which we are passing is not a crisis in the sys-tem; it is a crisis of the system. "25 During this crisis the global battle-lines between Left and Right hardened, leaving little room for compromise. Many non-Fascists admired Mussolini for having created a state which seemed strong enough to withstand the economic holocaust. Many others feared that Mussolini's Roman Empire would plunge Europe into a new dark age. After the Great War T S. Eliot had described the Waste Land as "a heap of broken images." With equal pessimism the Auden generation witnessed the consecration of the new icons of Fascism—black shirts, loud-speakers, rubber truncheons, barbed wire, jackboots.
A DRESS rehearsal for the world crisis of 1929 seemed to be taking place in the Germany of 1923. The lost war and the cruel peace had reduced the new Weimar Republic to a condition bordering on anarchy. Short-lived governments were challenged by separatist organisations and putsches from the Left and Right. There was a rash of political assassinations. Riots and strikes proliferated. Poverty and hunger stalked the land. France's intransigent President Poincare demanded prompt payment of repara-tions, fixed at the enormous sum of 132 billion gold marks; and when the Germans defaulted in January 1923 French troops marched into the Rhineland, proposing to dig out the Ruhr's coal, as Lloyd George said, with bayonets. More insidious still, inflation was destroying the value of money like some financial cancer. In this poisoned atmosphere extremist political groups flourished, among them the small but well-disciplined National Socialist party in Bavaria. Its spell-binding leader Adolf Hitler intuitively grasped the fact that the social chaos caused by the mark's precipitous fall was the humus of Nazism.