The Wilson Quarterly - From The Editors

From the Editors: The Gospel According to Jefferson

Cullen Nutt — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

Last week I ventured a few hundred yards from the WQ’s offices to see a Smithsonian exhibit of Thomas Jefferson’s theological magnum opus. Popularly known as the Jefferson Bible, its official title is more ambitious: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English.

The original copy of the slender red volume, which Jefferson constructed in retirement in 1819 and 1820, sits on display in a glass box in the National Museum of American History. The book is open to a two page spread. Hastily sketched dividing lines break each page into two columns for a total of four across—Greek and Latin in the two on the left, French and English in the two on the right. The columns carry verses cut out from elsewhere and pasted onto the pages. The second chapter of Luke, verse 46, appears in English at the top right, separated from the modern reader by glass and a few inches. Mary and Joseph are searching Jerusalem for the 12-year-old Jesus, who went missing after the Passover feast. They discover their precocious son dazzling the religious teachers in the temple. Verse 48 reads: “And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” Then—scissor and paste work fully evident—the narrative jumps to verses 51 and 52, whereupon Mary and Joseph, Jesus safely in tow, return to their native Nazareth.

Welcome to the religious world of Thomas Jefferson, where scripture he deemed implausible or inaccurate fell to the cutting room floor. The offending two verses in this case are crucial: “And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” Why, Jesus asks, did you not first search for me in the temple, where I attend to “my father’s business”? This is the first intimation in Luke’s gospel that Jesus is the son of God.

That, one guesses, is why Jefferson left it out. He doubted Jesus’ divinity, and omitted from his 84-page New Testament aggregation anything he considered supernatural. Curators Harry Rubenstein and Barbara Clark Smith, who accompanied me through the exhibit, said Jefferson was applying Enlightenment principles of reason to Christianity. Why, by Jefferson’s reckoning, sully the “most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man” with the virgin birth, miracles, and the redemption?

Jefferson was intensely private in these beliefs. Throughout his political career, both before and after the birth of the new United States, he lobbied for religious freedom. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia. On the eve of the 1800 election, Jefferson’s detractors accused him of being impious or, worse, an atheist. Presbyterian minister and university president William Linn warned that electing Jefferson would “destroy religion, introduce immorality and loosen all the bonds of society.”

Jefferson won, and the republic got along fine (and, in fact, doubled in size thanks to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803). Ten years into his retirement at Monticello, at age 76, Jefferson finally began compiling his text, about which he had been corresponding with like-minded Enlightenment intellectuals for decades. None of Jefferson’s peers appears to have gone so far as to dismember and rearrange the Bible. “It’s extremely unique,” said Rubenstein. Clark Smith attributed it to Jefferson’s intellectual audacity. “It’s the same attitude he has toward the monarchy.”

Jefferson used six copies of the New Testament for his task: two each in English and French, and two more that combined Latin and Greek. The two in English—King James New Testament versions from 1804—are also on display in the exhibit. They bear gaping voids where Jefferson manually extracted boxes of text.

Jefferson meant for the final product to be private, but it didn’t remain that way. In 1895, Smithsonian librarian Cyrus Adler bought the volume from Carolina Randolph, Jefferson’s great-granddaughter, for $400. Exhibitions brought greater public awareness. In 1902, John F. Lacey, a congressman from Iowa, proposed that every member of Congress receive a copy of the book, provoking a backlash from some Christians. Lacey, himself a practicing believer, fired back: “No one that examines this little volume, whether he be saint or sinner, will rise from his perusal without having a loftier idea of the teaching of our Savior.”

Lacey’s proposal passed, and Jefferson’s work won broader readership in the 20th century, beginning with the first publication by the Government Printing Office two years later. (Senators received copies until the 1950s, when the 1904 press run was exhausted.) The original book showed its age, however. The Smithsonian eventually removed it from public display. Ninety-eight percent of the pages contained cracks or tears. A painstaking conservation process completed in 2011 restored the book’s structural integrity and brought it back into public view. (The exhibit will remain open until July 15, 2012.) Rubenstein and Clark Smith have also written an authoritative introduction to a new edition of the book, now available from the Smithsonian.

The curators said the public reception of the exhibit has been warm, and surprisingly free of controversy. Jefferson himself anticipated—and dismissed—the doubters. “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which [Jesus] wished any one to be,” he wrote to a counterpart, “sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.”

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From the Editors: Meg s Mags

Megan Buskey — Wed, 09 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

As editor of the WQ’s In Essence section, I flip through hundreds of magazines and journals each quarter in search of noteworthy articles. Most publications offer up a few satisfying bits from time to time, but some have been so consistent that discovering them in the WQ mailbox in the morning makes my day a good deal brighter. My 10 current favorites are below. These are publications that print interesting and well-honed arguments in elegant, if not always enlivening, prose.

P.S: I left many small magazines I admire off the list (Brick, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Paris Review, to name but a few) because they have a more distinctively literary focus.

THE AMERICAN INTEREST (Web | Facebook)

The American Interest has many of the same virtues as the WQ: It runs pieces by scholars and policy practitioners written for the intelligent and curious general reader. Unlike the WQ, the AI has a rather specific bailiwick: America’s role in the world. (It also prints in color! We’re jealous.) I particularly enjoy Walter Russell Mead’s blog on the AI Web site—the man seems incapable of writing a frivolous post.

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR (Web | Facebook)

The American Scholar has long been heralded for its commitment to the world of ideas. What makes it so special is that it does not see personal essays, fiction, or poetry as antithetical to that mission. Eighty years after it put out its first issue, it is still serving the life of the mind in all its manifestations.

CABINET (Web | Facebook)

Cabinet, a beautiful quarterly magazine with an appetite for science, never fails to enlighten. Interest rather than topicality seems to be the editors’ main criterion for selecting essays. One recurring column has a different writer consider the virtues and demerits of a single color. (The Winter 2011 issue features the novelist Tom McCarthy on blue.) But Cabinet is not just quirk. Many of its writers and editors are in or refugees from academia, giving the magazine a more rigorous feel than most.

DEMOCRACY: A JOURNAL OF IDEAS (Web | Facebook)

Democracy has some serious progressive bona fides: In its pages, contributing editor Ethan Porter outlined a vision for tax receipts that was later adopted by the White House, and Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, now a Massachusetts Senate candidate, introduced her blueprint for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. A go-to for policy wonks, this quarterly doesn’t stiff literary-minded readers. Recent pieces from contributors David Rieff and Amy Wilentz have been delights to read.

n+1 (Web | Facebook)

If you want to know the concerns of young, intellectual New York, subscribe to n+1. Eight years after the editors pooled what little cash they had to bring out the first issue, n+1 is on its way to becoming a literary institution. And for good reason: Tremendous talents like essayist Elif Batuman got their start there. Don’t miss its Web site, which boasts standalone reviews of noteworthy books and film.

NATIONAL AFFAIRS (Web | Facebook)

National Affairs could be called the conservative sibling of Democracy (and, to extend the metaphor further, the child of the now-defunct conservative magazine The Public Interest.) Like Democracy, National Affairs eschews policy minutiae for the big ideas animating discussions on its side of the aisle. If you want to know what conservatives are debating, read this magazine.

THE NBER DIGEST (Web)

The Digest is put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan think tank par excellence. Each monthly issue contains cogent summaries of some of the working papers produced by its hundreds of research associates, many of whom teach at leading universities. Recent issues have spotlighted research on the effectiveness of charter schools and the impact of ethnic and religious diversity on charitable giving. For those wary of the discipline’s intricacies, be assured The NBER Digest is eminently readable, and at four pages long, a slip of a publication.

THE POINT (Web |Facebook)

The brainchild of a group of University of Chicago graduate students, The Point bares its connection to the academy proudly. But part of its mission is to insist that contemporary culture deserves the same deep scrutiny usually reserved for the canonical. Only in The Point would you find a 13,000 word essay that juxtaposes Stendhal and the notorious 1990s dating manual The Game.

RARITAN (Web)

Raritan, with its monotone covers and text-only interior, is something of a publishing throwback. The same could be said of its editorial mission, which clears space for meaty essays from many disciplines. One of my favorite Raritan pieces is Stanford anthropologist T. M. Lurhmann’s account of conducting an ethnography of women in halfway houses in Chicago. (It’s not available online, but we ran an In Essence item about it in the WQ.)

THE THREEPENNY REVIEW (Web | Facebook)

The Threepenny Review falls on the literary side of the small mag spectrum, but its interests within that space are wide: Its writers contemplate everything from film to architecture to the Flemish painter Bruegel with the same seriousness. Add to that a spare but boldly artistic design, with a nice helping of historical photos that render well in black and white.

From the Editors: Afghanistan s New Writers

Darcy Courteau — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

There is a small group of Afghan women whose names—Nasima, Farahnaz, Norwan—show up in my inbox weekly. I’ve never met these women, but I’ve been helping to edit their poems and essays for nearly two years. Founded in 2009 by American journalists and writers, the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP) mentors Afghan women and publishes their work in an online magazine run by volunteers.

Once recruited, I wondered if I was right for the job. Wary of ghettoization, I’d avoided women’s studies and writing groups in college, and while earning an MFA, I took the minimum of writing workshops required—for me, writing isn’t a social activity. It isn’t therapy, either, and my favorite authors give voice to loners and reprobates. But for women writers living in a country where they are often silenced—under the Taliban, they weren’t allowed to go to school after age eight—telling their stories and getting together to talk about writing could be seen as acts of defiance. Good enough for me, I thought.

Editing for AWWP brings with it, of course, a somewhat different set of concerns than those I find at the WQ. The Afghan writers compose in English, their second language, and I’m often called to work on poetry—a form not customarily edited but for the language issue. Fortunately, the writers’ English is very good, and when it does falter, often produces serendipitous word choices. It’s the slicker idioms—“achieving success” or “making dreams come true”—that are not so great on the page. Remembering that good writers, whether American or Afghan, appreciate an honest edit, I swat buzzwords like flies. In general, the writers are delighted to see their work receive serious treatment. After getting a poem back, one wrote, “I love my poems after the edits—it is like when you iron the clothes!”

That feedback, however, is rare, passed along from the directing editor. What I’ve learned about the women is mostly through their work. There is a lot of self-affirming pride in it, devotion to Allah and to family, but also pointed questions about the justice of some traditions. Violence and the threat of violence are everywhere, in memories of war, refugee life, and domestic assault. One woman tells of a husband who beat her so viciously that she left him. “I was tired of all the sacrifices and love and I no longer wanted to be the kind girl,” she writes, even while promising him her loyalty from a distance, “so that the meaning of love will not go away." Her voice, bitter, chilled, and complicated, has stayed with me since, and I’ve asked the directing editor to let me work on her future essays.

But even in that story there is hope, and many pieces end with a pledge to help build a better country. In the past eight months, Christopher Merrill, director of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, has twice paid student groups a visit in Afghanistan. (Read his reflections on the experience for Granta here; see his WQ reviews here.) The mood was anxious, he reported, when I pumped him for details over the phone. Afghans were desperate to build civil structures like schools and courthouses before the NATO pullout in 2014. But despite the tension, the Afghan students were overwhelmingly eager to talk about poetry. They are already steeped, Chris found, in a rich literary tradition that claims Rumi as the national poet: “They know his ghazals by heart.”

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Photo by DVIDSHUB via flickr

From the Editors: Deep Throat Vitriol

Steven Lagerfeld — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

When the manuscript of contributing editor Max Holland’s Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat came my way last year, I searched in vain for an excerpt that could run in the WQ. Now I’m doubly sorry it didn’t work out, because Leak’s reconsideration of the myths surrounding Watergate is stirring useful controversy about how the scandal came to light and its lessons for today.

Leak is really two books. One is a dramatic retelling of the story of Mark Felt, the top FBI official who became Deep Throat, the famous anonymous source who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein penetrate the secrets surrounding the Watergate scandal. In the mythology surrounding Watergate, Deep Throat (Felt’s identity wasn’t revealed until 2005) was a public spirited official whose revelations helped save the country from a lawless administration. But in Holland’s persuasive telling, Felt emerges as a villain worthy of Shakespeare, his only goal to win the top spot at the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover’s death. Felt talked to the two reporters only to make his rival, acting director L. Patrick Gray, appear incompetent and to convince Nixon to put the veteran Felt in charge. (And, ironically, Felt was forced out of the FBI by the machinations of another canny rival.)

The second book in Leak looks at the larger mythology surrounding Watergate and its central story line that two intrepid reporters prevailed against all odds in revealing high level malfeasance. In fact, Holland says, Woodward, Bernstein, and other reporters did excellent work, but they didn’t do much that official investigators in the FBI and elsewhere weren’t already doing. “The main effect of Deep Throat’s leaks was merely to accelerate the scandal by perhaps six months or a year.”

That’s where the shooting starts. Woodward and Bernstein, quoted in a Daily Beast article by former Post reporter Lloyd Grove, deny that they painted Felt as a hero, but much more vehemently defend the impact of their reporting. They also fired at Holland before an audience of newspaper editors.

Barry Sussman, a Post editor who worked closely with the two reporters (and later broke with them), argues that the pair drastically inflated Felt’s role in revealing the Watergate story and that Leak’s case fatally hinges on its acceptance of their view, but he defends the importance of the Post’s reporting. A good overview, with Holland’s response, is here.

Leak has inaugurated a rough and tumble argument—even John Dean has weighed in with a positive notice of the book—reviving debates that many, whether out of weariness or irritation, would prefer to leave untouched. In an interview with Grove, Bernstein tried to brush off Holland’s book, saying, “I think we live in an age of too much revisionism that oversimplifies and twists complicated events, and this is a classic example.” It may be that a Fourth Estate battered by changing economics doesn’t need another challenge. But if it isn’t interested in the pursuit of truth, what is it for?

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Photo credit: C-SPAN

From the Editors: Slideshow: Feeding the Future

Erica Bleeg — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Nestled in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the Salatin family’s Polyface Farm encompasses 550 acres of woodland and pasture. A working farm, it has also become a mecca for the local foods movement. (All photos © Erica Bleeg.)

By Erica Bleeg

Walking through cow pastures and hog paddocks is part of my research. I teach two university courses on writing about food, and have a keen interest in where it’s sourced. Spring is the time to see a farm’s operations in full swing, so I recently headed over to Polyface, a Swoope, Va. farm that thrives without using chemical fertilizers, herbicides, hormones, or antibiotics.

Once known predominantly among readers of the trade journal Stockman Grass Farmer, Polyface’s owner, Joel Salatin, has gained a broader audience through trumpeting his humane and ecologically sound approach to agriculture. The 55-year-old Salatin has also made a mission of cultivating new farmers. For every farmer under 35, there are six over 65, and the USDA predicts that within the next 20 years a quarter of all farmers will retire. “There’s a brain-drain of knowledge about agriculture,” said Salatin.

Beginning wasn’t easy for Salatin. After a stint as a newspaper reporter, he returned to the family farm in 1982. “It was nip and tuck,” he remembered. “We lived on $300 a month.” Now Polyface brings in about eight summer interns in their teens and twenties to help with the season’s blaze of production, and two full-time apprentices work year-round. Salatin’s son, Daniel, lives on the farm with his wife and three children and manages the operation, often directing Salatin the Elder on chores.

Polyface rents an additional 1,200 acres where younger farmers live and work as independent contractors, borrowing equipment and raising livestock that feed Polyface’s business. “They can begin with zero capital,” said Salatin. Two such contractors have since successfully launched their own businesses. “In the end,” said Salatin, “This germinates new young farmers.”

Joel Salatin encourages visiting college students to smell the mix of manure and wood chips lifted from a hog paddock. The hogs aerate it while rooting with their snouts, transforming what could be toxic waste into rich, nearly odorless fertilizer.

Just two to three months old, pigs huddle together for warmth on a brisk April morning. At nine months and weighing about 300 pounds, they’ll be “ready to go,” says 26-year-old apprentice Noah Beyeler, farm talk for “ready for slaughter.” Polyface sells about 50 percent of all pig shoulders and hams to nearby Chipotle restaurants.

With the aid of a forklift, apprentice manager Eric Barth, 26, moves a 308-pound hog feeder toward the barn paddock. Expensive equipment contributes to steep upfront costs for new farmers. According to a survey conducted by the National Young Farmers’ Coalition, 78 percent of farmers cite lack of capital as the biggest challenge to beginners, followed by access to land and credit.

Eric Barth, Daniel Salatin, and Noah Beyeler select pigs whose post-slaughter weight appears to be less than 100 pounds, typical for barbeque. These would fill orders from the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. and an Arlington, Va. restaurant. Polyface also sells its meat and eggs in an on-site store. Seeing these men capture pigs recalls a Ralph Waldo Emerson observation Michael Pollan cites in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

Homemade pens keep broiler chickens on grass and safe from predators. The broilers go out on pasture at three weeks of age; they’ll grow for about five more weeks before reaching processing weight. Here Daniel Salatin refills their water supply. In the last three weeks of life the broilers grow over an ounce a day, he says, and “if any stress—like not enough water or feed—interrupts that growth process, you can’t get that back.”

Barred Plymouth Rock hens roam the pasture that cattle grazed only the day before. The hens follow the cattle, picking protein-rich grubs from cow patties, aerating the soil as they peck, and fertilizing it with their own nitrogen-dense droppings. In the backdrop is one of Joel Salatin’s inventions, the portable eggmobile where hens lay eggs in interior cubbyholes.

Unlike cattle finished on manure-laden feedlots, and fed a potentially poisonous mix of corn and antibiotics, the cattle at Polyface feed on grass, their natural diet.

“What you never, ever want to do is violate the law of the second bite,” Joel Salatin once advised Michael Pollan. A single bite at the top of the grass is optimal for stimulating regrowth. To prevent overgrazing, the cattle at Polyface are moved almost daily to fresh pasture, a process that takes Daniel less than five minutes.

Daniel points to two cattle bringing up the back: “See how the mother cow walks a little and then she’ll stop, waiting for her calf to catch up?”

Of continuing the work of his father’s business, “I’ve never thought of doing anything different,” Daniel says. The chore he most enjoyed as a child was herding cattle. Here, his two sons lend a hand.

Joel Salatin, a Christian, considers his work “a ministry in every sense of the word, except we’re for profit. We are in the healing business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the culture. Ultimately, if our work is not healing, it’s not worth doing.”

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From the Editors: Remote Possibilities

Steven Lagerfeld — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Is it possible anymore to speak of a person being in a “remote location”? A writer I know told me recently of editing an essay on her iPhone while camping in Alaska, and it’s almost commonplace to note that African farmers now check commodity prices on their mobile phones. We’re all familiar with the many everyday efficiencies and pleasures—and anxieties and irritations—that come from being constantly and ever more intricately connected, but what has been the result in the larger sense? Have we been brought any closer together as individuals, groups, or nations?

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, we shape our technologies and then they shape us. But it’s not at all clear how much they shape us, or how quickly. In his essay for this issue’s cover story, “The Age of Connection,” Ethan Zuckerman, a noted observer of the Internet, points out that the new technologies haven’t yet done much to nudge people from their comfortable information pathways. Yes, social media allow people to share great quantities of material, but unless they have unusually curious and wide-ranging friends, little of what is sent their way is likely to broaden their horizons. There still is not much of an audience for news from abroad—for instance, virtually no one in the United States paid attention to the early online posts about the Tunisian street vendor whose fiery protest suicide precipitated the Arab Spring.

Tom Vanderbilt's essay on the impact of the telephone suggests another answer to the “how much, how fast” question: not as much or as fast as you might imagine. Yet Christine Rosen, in comparing the world of the handwritten letter with that of the e-mail, finds that, for better or worse, much has already changed.

“Already” is the operative term, because it suggests more to come. We are only at the beginning of what will be a long process. If we are wise, we will watch as our technologies shape us, and then reshape them according to the lessons we have learned.

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From the Editors: Terrorism s Two-Way Street

Cullen Nutt — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Five prominent Web forums for jihadist conversation and terrorist propaganda have been mysteriously unavailable for more than a week, according to a report in today’s Washington Post. A frustrated jihadist site administrator fumed: “The media arena is witnessing a vicious attack by the cross and its helpers on the jihadi media castles.” The lengthy blackouts—the first forum went down on March 22—have all the hallmarks of a cyberattack, though the Post quotes unnamed American officials disavowing U.S. responsibility.

Whoever is behind the outage, the incident illustrates a point specialists have been making lately: The Internet is not the open avenue for terrorists we once assumed it was. As Manuel R. Torres Soriano points out in a new article in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, the Web is a two-way street. In 2010, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (an Al Qaeda affiliate) attempted to publish step by step instructions for making a pipe bomb using kitchen ingredients. The recipe was to appear in the inaugural issue of Inspire, its English-language Webzine. But when would-be jihadists downloaded Inspire, they found a bowdlerized and garbled version of the original. Computer code lifted from a Web recipe for “The Best Cupcakes in America” had replaced the deadly bomb plans. Media outlets dubbed the incident “Operation Cupcake”; British cyber spooks had reportedly hijacked Al Qaeda’s flashy new magazine. (The original magazine with the actual bomb instructions reappeared online several weeks later, however.)

“The new opportunities available to terrorists thanks to cyberspace are balanced by new vulnerabilities,” writes Soriano, a political science professor at Pablo de Olavide University of Seville in Spain. Terrorists live in fear of hacking and surveillance. In the Arab world, they flit from one public Internet café to another to avoid detection, and constantly struggle to block infiltrators from entering their Web forums or infecting their files. Soriano quotes a senior forum administrator who gravely warns his comrades to take care. “These cafés are under tight surveillance because the tyrant security agencies are fully aware of all the IP addresses of every Internet café.”

In the current WQ we highlight Thomas Rid’s provocative article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, “Cyber War Will Not Take Place,” which in many ways echoes Soriano. Rid argues that it’s not as easy as it seems for malefactors to exploit the Web. (Rid, a reader in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and a former public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, wrote “Cracks in the Jihad” for the WQ in 2010.) Complex cyber operations require expertise and generous financing. Western militaries and intelligence agencies have plenty of both. Al Qaeda sympathizers do not. “The Web acts as a leveler,” writes Soriano, “each new advantage for the terrorists is accompanied by a new opportunity to weaken such groups.”

Photo by kirk lau via flickr

From the Editors: Kennan and the Classics

Cullen Nutt — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

John Lewis Gaddis labored as George F. Kennan’s authorized biographer for more than 30 years. And that was while Kennan, who died at age 101 in 2005, was still living. Appearing last week at the Wilson Center to discuss George F. Kennan: An American Life, Gaddis marveled: “I was Kennan’s Boswell longer than Boswell was Johnson’s Boswell.”

Gaddis spent another six years finishing what became a 784-page tome. In his review for The Wilson Quarterly, Martin Walker called it “as near a definitive biography as we are likely to get of one of the most singular and significant Americans of his century.”

Gaddis, a former Wilson Center fellow who is Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale, focused in his talk on the surprising impact of classic works of literature and scholarship on the prolific Kennan’s ideas. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), for example, figures in Kennan’s famous article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which proposed an American strategy of containment vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The article appeared under the byline “X” in July 1947, only to have Kennan’s name attached to it in very short order. How did Kennan’s secret get out? The answer, his secretary Dorothy Hessman told Gaddis, was obvious enough: “Of all the people in Washington, only Kennan would have cited Gibbon.”

Watch the entirety of Gaddis's appearance here.

Photo: John Lewis Gaddis at the Wilson Center

From the Editors: Is It 1837 All Over Again?

Cullen Nutt — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Alasdair Roberts’ forthcoming book America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837 reminds us that the Great Depression of the 1930s, examined in our Winter 2012 cluster, was not the country’s first experience with financial catastrophe. Roberts, a professor at Suffolk University Law School and former Woodrow Wilson Center fellow, who recently wrote about Wikileaks for the WQ, explains why the First Depression is worth remembering.

You’ve written widely on a distinctly contemporary set of topics: governance in the 21st century, government secrecy, and financial administration in a globalized economy. What prompted your interest in the Panic of 1837?

Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, there’s been a lot of talk about the decline of American economic power. Some have said that the United States will be charting unfamiliar waters, in which it’s more vulnerable to external pressures. But that isn’t right: in fact, for most of its history, the United States hasn’t been a hegemon. It’s been subject to the ebbs and flows of the international economy. So I thought I would tell a story about what politics is like in such circumstances. The book is about the past, but it might also tell us something about the future.

As you say, Americans forget that outside of a unique period after World War II, the United States has not been an economic hegemon. What changes when we’re not on top?

When you’re not the hegemon, domestic politics is more difficult. Often, it’s the politics of constraint—that is, explaining to voters what can’t be done, because of the demands of the global marketplace. This is a difficult, unpleasant kind of politics. Indeed, it might not even be right to call it “domestic” politics at all. In a very open economy, the line between domestic and foreign policy breaks down. As I show in the book, many local issues suddenly acquire international significance. When there were riots in Philadelphia in 1844, for example, there was real concern in London—because holders of Pennsylvania bonds wondered whether the government had enough control of the population to collect the taxes needed to make its loan payments. About one third of American states were already in default to foreign lenders.

You’ve spent a lot of time reading about American economic and governmental crises, both then and now. What keeps you up at night?

Two things. The first is the strong temptation to indulge in unjustified optimism. No one likes facing the prospect of severe losses in wellbeing. So it is tempting to deny the severity of an economic crisis—to hope that the worst is over, or that we will grow our way out of the problem, or that some modest policy initiative will make everything right. These are all excuses for inaction, and sometimes delay just makes things worse.

The other problem is limited peripheral vision. When you’re a largely self-contained economy, you get used to the notion that domestic problems have domestic causes. And if you see no immediate threats to your well-being close to home, you tend to assume that all is well. But in an open economy, what happens far away still matters. For example: what happens to the U.S. economy if Greece defaults, and the European economy and financial system are badly rattled? And what other dominos like Greece are out there, and starting to wobble?

From the Editors: What We re Reading

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Steven Lagerfeld: E-books are so convenient that I pick them up (turn them on?) only when convenience is a top priority, so it wasn’t until I took a long plane trip recently that I got to two that I had been keen to read for awhile. The authors, Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, have both written for the WQ, and Cowen is a member of our board of editorial advisers. Not only that, but the pair are the co-proprietors of my favorite blog,Marginal Revolution.

In The Great Stagnation, Cowen makes the provocative argument that all the digital wonders of the past few decades can’t hold a candle to earlier transformative technologies such as the car and the railroad, which not only changed our lives but created countless jobs. That, he says, helps explain why Americans’ incomes have grown so little since the 1970s. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but like the many people who have been talking about this book, I found it made me rethink my assumptions.

Cowen also makes a good argument that we benefitted in the last century by taking lots of smart, undereducated kids and pushing them through ramped up public school and higher education systems. But that untapped talent pool is depleted now.

Education also figures in Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast, which I’d characterized as a flurry of sharp jabs around a theme—there’s a surprising take on what’s wrong with the patent system. In another chapter, Tabarrok argues that pushing more kids into college has led to dumbing down and grade inflation in higher education—and to too many degree-bearing bellhops. Why not improve apprentice programs and other skills-oriented education, he asks, while cutting back subsidies to English and dance majors? The chapter is the perfect counterpoint to Kevin Carey’s splendid “College for All?” in our autumn issue.

Megan Buskey: In the latest project of the brainy powerhouse edge.org, editor John Brockman dangled a tantalizing question before 165 public intellectuals: What scientific concept would improve everyone’s cognitive toolkit? The answers, which come predominantly from scientists or social scientists, make for fascinating reading. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman thinks that we often fall prey to the “focusing illusion,” in which problems that we are thinking about seem more grave the more we think about them. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom says we need to adopt scientific reasoning in daily thinking. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen suggests that we often lose sight of the fact that most problems we face are so complex that they defy simple definition. All 165 responses are available online. For those of us who still prefer to consume their written fare the old-fashioned way, a book has recently been published.

Cullen Nutt: “The glorious spirit of abounding youth glows throughout this fascinating tale.” So wrote the New York Times about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise when it was published in 1920. The caveat: “The whole story is disconnected, more or less, but loses none of its charm on that account.” My recent reading, 92 years later, confirms both sentiments. A coming-of-age story of Princeton University student Amory Blaine, Paradise is hardly flawless, especially compared to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925). But Fitzgerald’s first novel—published at the tender age of 23 and largely autobiographical—is a gem in its own right. Heartily recommended.

Photo by Enrique Dans via flickr