Dog Days Classics: Lanny Budd, Upton Sinclair’s Ideal Idler

"It was profoundly true that movements of the spirit came first, and that events of history were consequences thereof." -Upton Sinclair, Wide is the Gate Several years ago I was directed toward Upton Sinclair’s socialist-minded quasi-spy novels about a young man named Lanning Prescott Budd. The 11 books span the breadth of time from the onset of The Great War to the rise of the Cold War, but as I have been able to acquire only the first half of the series, my investigation has followed Lanny only so far as the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. A New York Times reflection on the books gives a decent introduction to the protagonist: Born in 1900, he was the illegitimate child of an …

Dog Days Classics: The Wages of Whiteness and the White People Who Love Them

July, 1956. It had been over a decade since the Carnegie Foundation solicited Gunnar Myrdal’s opinion on American race relations. A Nobel Prize in economics and Swedish citizenship rendered him an objective observer. That year James Baldwin wrote a scathing critique of what is now a long forgotten book—Daniel Guerin’s Negroes on the March. “Labor’s interests may often be identical with the Negro’s interests,” Baldwin explains, “but Mr. Guerin fails to understand that, in the light of the white worker’s desire to achieve greater status, his aims and those of the Negro often clash quite bitterly.” (Baldwin, “The Crusade of Indignation”) In the 1986, sociologists …

Dog Days Classics: Robert H. Wiebe and The Search for Order

“Men in confusion clutched what they knew.” This is how Robert Wiebe describes the actions of America’s leaders in their “rudimentary bureaucracy” as the nation entered World War I in 1917. Much of the debacle that followed – both the wave of violent repression at home and the political failures of Woodrow Wilson, outfoxed at Versailles and in the Senate – resulted from just such limits of knowledge and practice. In essence, Progressive leaders used old solutions to solve new problems. But rather than a condemnation of human weakness, this sentence encapsulates Wiebe’s subtly empathetic historical vision: that historical actors of all stripes – radical or conservative, …

Dog Days Classics: A Look Back at Barbara Fields’s “Ideology and Race in American History”

Thirty years after its original publication, Barbara Fields’s essay, “Ideology and Race in American History,” remains one of the preeminent academic investigations into the development of race and racial ideology within American history. I was first exposed to Barbara Fields’s work during a graduate seminar at Columbia University on the post-Reconstruction American South. Fields’s analysis of the roots of racial ideology in American society had a profound impact on my own intellectual outlook. In this post, I aim to reexamine Fields’s classic essay, “Ideology and Race in American History,” along with a later piece, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of …

Microwaving the Classics: Our 2012 Dog Days Series

We at ToM have started a yearly tradition of looking back at the works that most shaped our creative and intellectual development over the years, particularly scholarly works read in college or grad school.  Last year we featured pieces that looked back on the following works: The American Political Tradition Discipline and Punish Orientalism Contested Truths The Power Broker The Long Twentieth Century Boss This year, we are privileged to have several contributors weigh in on their biggest influences and best-loved works, beginning with Keith Orejel's meditation on the groundbreaking essays of Barbara Fields, and followed by Jude Webre on Robert Wiebe's The Search for …

Dog Days Classics: Political Boss and Midwestern Pharaoh: Richard J. Daley’s Chicago Legacy

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1971) and American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (2001) Few cities outside of New York have drawn the kind of critical attention like the capital of the American Midwest, Chicago. The Windy City, the City of Big Shoulders, the Second City, and numerous other titles have sought to capture the essence of Chicago. Though far younger than New York, Chicago’s historiography covers numerous ethnic and racial groups, changing as the city’s face has changed over the course of the 20th century. Harold Gosnell’s Machine Politics: The Chicago Model provided one of the clearest takes by a political scientist regarding …

Dog Days Classics: Revisiting the Long Twentieth Century

Today we begin to look at more recent works that influenced us -- at least "recent" in historians' terms, which in this case means 1994.  Last week we looked at classics like The American Political Tradition (1948) and Orientalism (1978).  Today we go all the way back to Renaissance Genoa to find the origins of the current capitalist death-spiral (or, as the Germans say, the pharfignewton) in Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, 1994 Historians have a habit of expanding and contracting time to suit their schema – there is the “short twentieth century,” the “long …

Dog Days Classics: Robert Caro’s Controversial Portrait of Robert Moses and New York

“Surely the greatest book ever written about a city.” - David Halberstam Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, 1974 Since its initial 1974 publication, rarely has book dominated a subject the way Robert Caro’s The Power Broker has. Caro defined Moses as an overbearing, racist, once idealistic public servant who became an obsessed power mongering city planner single handedly undermining New York’s neighborhoods and communities through massive highway and public works projects. Under Caro’s watchful eye, Moses crafted cities much as Le Corbusier might have decades earlier, all flow and no people. Minority and low income communities found …

Dog Days Classics: All About Utility, Freedom, Love, Valour, Compassion

Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence This book is one that I suspected might not hold up as well today as it did when I first read it as a History major in college. At the time, Rodgers’s study of how phrases like “natural rights,” “the people,” and “the interests” evolved in American discourse over time was truly eye-opening. The garden variety insight that “natural rights” might not mean the same thing to various people over time is not much to write home about, but Rodgers goes well beyond it to show how Americans wavered between Benthamite utilitarianism and Wilsonian idealism for much of their history, from belief in …

Dog Days Classics: Said Said What? Orientalism and the Other

Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978 Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism is without a doubt a massively influential work that grad students and others sometimes use far too carelessly. Along with later works such as 1993’s Culture and Imperialism, Said established a critical insight into how Western works, fictional and historical, created a discourse about the East that conflated it with femininity, emotionality, and sensuality that left Eastern culture submissive to the masculine, scientific, and rational West. The book exploded the idea of an objective history and raised questions about the efficacy of Western histories of the East. After all, the West’s imposition of the above traits on …