thenation--2020-10-06--America’s Unending Struggle Between Oligarchy and Democracy

The average person may be forgiven for thinking that the South actually won the Civil War .
Despite a brief experiment in interracial democracy during the Reconstruction years , for much of its history the region has upheld a regime of brutal racial subordination .
In the late 19th century , after the overthrow of Reconstruction , many of its state governments disenfranchised Black men , instituted racial segregation , condoned racial terrorism and violence , and kept a majority of Black and white Southerners economically bound through sharecropping , debt peonage , convict lease labor , and tenancy .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ called the South the nation ’ s No .
1 economic problem , resistant to unionization and social policies .
Even today it leads in indices for poverty and weak educational systems .
The Jim Crow South was upended by the civil rights revolution .
Yet even in defeat , its language of oligarchy and its opposition to progressive political and economic policies through an appeal to racism has been adopted by the modern Republican Party .
How the South Won the Civil War : Oligarchy , Democracy , and the Continuing Fight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the argument presented in Heather Cox Richardson ’ s new book , How the South Won the Civil War .
Throughout American history , she contends , the forces of oligarchy and democracy have been involved in a mortal struggle for the nation ’ s future , and she wants to show how the visions of oligarchy have often won out—how , in other words , we got from the era of emancipation and Confederate defeat to the presidency of Donald Trump .
A history professor at Boston College , Richardson has written @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Reconstruction as well as on the Republican Party , and she draws from her considerable scholarly oeuvre for this slim and accessible volume .
Known for her newsletter Letters From an American , which seeks to explain current political events through a historical lens , she deftly demonstrates her skill writing for a public audience in How the South Won the Civil War .
Arguing that the slaveholders ’ idea of an oligarchic America triumphed with the growth of the second American oligarchy in the latter half of the 20th century , Richardson @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as personified by Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign , came to embody this vision of an oligarchic America .
The new oligarchy ’ s triumph—one that combined economic domination with racial inequality—lay in a political alliance between the South and the West , Richardson argues , and in the Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon , Ronald Reagan , the Bushes , and finally Trump .
Her interpretive scheme is simple yet also compelling and clear .
The title of the book , of course , is not meant literally , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ South lost the Civil War , it eventually , in many respects , won the peace .
According to Richardson , the unending struggle between American democracy and oligarchy began with the birth of the nation .
Many historians of early America have argued that the ideology of the American Revolution was democratic republicanism , born during the English Civil War in the 17th century and then embraced by the colonies .
As the quintessential radical of the Age of Revolution , Thomas Paine , proclaimed , “ The cause of America is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mankind.
” But not all historians agree that this republicanism was the sole ideology then in circulation in North America .
As Edmund Morgan observes in American Slavery , American Freedom , the seeming paradox of American republicanism was the simultaneous emergence of slavery and freedom in the colonial world .
From the outset , the American idea of freedom was exclusive : It was for property-owning men only and was based on the enslavement of people of African descent .
The Virginian founding fathers solved the problem of inequality by simply enslaving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same time elevating the status of all white men , slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike .
For Richardson , the American paradox is a bit different : Slavery and democracy were opposing forces rather than constitutive of each other .
She traces the birth of oligarchy , democracy ’ s enemy , to the ship that brought about 20 enslaved Africans to the British North American mainland in 1619 .
From then until today , she argues , the history of the United States has been a history of the conflict between democracy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ democracy was based on slavery ; for Richardson , though she relies on Morgan ’ s book , American oligarchy has always rested on combining elite domination with racial and economic inequality .
Ever since the arrival of that ship , she maintains , the American republic has allowed its elites to conflate “ class and race , ” thereby giving them “ the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.
” At many points in American history , oligarchy—from the slaveholding elite to the robber barons of the Gilded Age—has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ordinary Americans , especially those who were disenfranchised , like women and African Americans , have pushed back , leading to the triumph of democracy with slavery ’ s abolition , women ’ s suffrage , and the enactment of the New Deal and civil rights legislation .
By offering an account of the forces of both democratic progress and oligarchic reaction , Richardson provides historical detail to Corey Robin ’ s argument in The Reactionary Mind , which traced the antidemocratic origins of American conservatism while offering insight into the democratic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ situates American conservatism in the longue durée of a Western reactionary philosophical tradition , Richardson locates it in a quintessentially Southern political tradition of oligarchy : anti-statism combined with virulent racism and misogyny .
For Robin , too , the proslavery ideology exemplified American conservatism .
But for Richardson , after the Civil War , the West and eventually the Republican Party helped reinvent the South ’ s language of oligarchy with an appeal to individualism that overlays a reactionary commitment to racial hierarchy and opposition to a welfare state .
Key to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ War .
For her , the struggle between the free North and the slaveholding South was essentially a struggle between people and property , as exemplified in the antislavery free labor ideology of the original Republican Party , which valorized workers over capitalists .
The egalitarian impulse that informed the party of Lincoln , she says , was countered by the elitism of the slaveholding oligarchy , as personified by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond in his “ Mudsill speech.
” Hammond advocated an alliance of Northern capitalists and Southern slaveholders—what abolitionists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lords of the loom , ” or the textile mill owners of New England , and “ the lords of the lash , ” the Southern slaveholding planters , against the working stiffs , or “ mudsills , ” of their respective societies .
Small wonder that electoral banners in the North would announce “ Small-fisted farmers , mudsills of society , greasy mechanics for A. Lincoln.
” When understood as a conflict between oligarchs and democrats , the Civil War , Emancipation , and Reconstruction represent the victory not just of democracy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the slaveholding oligarchy .
It also marked , as Richardson notes , a victory for big government .
As a result of the war , the federal government implemented a progressive income tax , land-grant colleges , the Homestead Act and money for railroads ( which came at the expense of Native populations ) , and federal protection for Black rights in the postwar South .
In response to this new egalitarian federal government , the opposition of Southern elites to Reconstruction was often couched—almost always disingenuously—in the language of local governance and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opposing African American citizenship invoked the image of a corrupt federal government usurping their rights to promote Black equality .
Racism became a way to protect the political and economic prerogatives of a Southern oligarchy no longer in control of the national government and , in many cases , state and local governments as well .
The language of race became a potent weapon wielded against efforts to address inequality , which would supposedly benefit people of color and dependent women at the cost of white men .
According to Richardson , this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a big boost with the conquest of the West and the subjugation of the Plains Indians .
As federal troops retreated from enforcing Black rights in the South , they let slip the dogs of war in the West , which held the key , she writes , to the national triumph of white supremacy .
John C. Calhoun , a proslavery senator from South Carolina , had long dreamed of a South-West alliance as the basis for national political dominance by a white elite , one that would marginalize the antislavery Northeast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , grounded in the notion of states ’ rights , to internal improvements ( the 19th century term for federal infrastructure projects ) in order to woo the West .
Richardson does not mention Calhoun ’ s dream of a South-West alliance , but she does describe a postwar settlement that strongly resembled it .
While feeding off federal largesse , land and water improvements , and the might of the US Army to displace and kill Native populations , the West became fertile ground for the myth of American individualism , represented @ @ @ @ @ @ @ frontier and its “ savage ” population .
The historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously viewed the Western frontier as a laboratory for American democracy .
The region , however , was built on Indian dispossession and slavery , Mexican peonage , Chinese exclusion , and the abuse of immigrant labor in extractive mining industries and in the construction of railroads , which led to spectacularly violent labor conflicts , such as those along Idaho ’ s Coeur d ’ Alene River in 1892 .
As Richardson writes , the Civil War and its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ society in which the oligarchic ideas of the defeated South would thrive.
” The West , Richardson contends , also used the myth of the cowboy to put a gloss on its own brutal and exploitative history .
In popular literature and culture , the cowboy captivated the American imagination .
But the actual history of the West aligned it closely with the Jim Crow South .
As Richardson writes , “ The resurrection of antebellum southern ideology through the rise of the western individualist rewrote American history.
” By the turn of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ white supremacy was complete , with Western politicians helping Southerners defeat federal bills against lynching and to ensure fair elections in the South .
The Vexed Meaning of Equality in Gilded Age America No one personified the myth of Western individualism and the realities of American imperialism better than Teddy Roosevelt , who gained fame as a Rough Rider in Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898 .
As president , he took on the plutocrats , but as Richardson shows , his Square Deal also favored white men at the cost of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and abroad , where his military adventurism was put to service in the acquisition of a formal American empire .
As Richardson notes , “ He kept America from turning into an oligarchy…but he did so in the same way the Founders had : by creating an ideological underclass.
” Roosevelt , however , was not just replicating the Virginian founders ’ contradictions .
A conservationist and a naturalist , he also supported women ’ s suffrage and drove Southern segregationists into fits of rage by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anything , Roosevelt represented the unique paradoxes of the Progressive Era : salutary democratic and economic reforms accompanied by nativism and imperialism .
It is difficult to square ( pun intended ) Roosevelt as the individualistic Western cowboy with the president who championed the government ’ s regulation of the economy .
His successor , Woodrow Wilson , the first Southern-born president since the Civil War , was also a vaunted progressive reformer .
Yet he introduced racial segregation to the nation ’ s capital , and in 1925 , one year after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Klux Klan would march triumphantly down the streets of Washington , D.C .
The suppression of dissent during the first Red Scare by his attorney general , A. Mitchell Palmer ( who gives William Barr a run for his money as the worst attorney general in US history ) , reveals the racial and political intolerance that defined Wilsonian liberalism .
Wilson ’ s allegedly liberal internationalism and commitment to democratic self-rule were also not meant for the colonies , as he made clear to nationalists from Asia and Africa after World War @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , American oligarchs have traditionally used the language of race to stymie the rise of a modern welfare state in the United States , then her book also reminds us that racism and racial inequality have proved central to many figures speaking in the name of democracy as well .
Roosevelt ’ s and especially Wilson ’ s strains of progressivism upheld white supremacy .
This remained partly true during the New Deal years , too .
In 1932 most African Americans who could vote became part of a massive partisan realignment , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and leaving the Republican Party to become more than ever the party of hidebound conservatism and big business .
But even Franklin Roosevelt ’ s New Deal ran up against the shoals of racism and obdurate Southern Democratic opposition to the extension of its benefits to most African American workers in the domestic , agricultural , and service industries .
The New Deal and World War II inaugurated the American Century .
After the fight against the Nazis and fascism , racism became unfashionable in academia and popular culture .
The federal government @ @ @ @ @ @ @ GI Bill to Social Security , and encouraged the unionization of the labor force , all of which created a prosperous middle class and economy .
But residential redlining and the racial stratification of the labor market , not to mention Jim Crow in the South , all persisted .
Even as the avatar of American liberalism and social democracy , FDR failed when it came to race , his record blemished by , among other things , the internment of Japanese Americans during the war .
Richardson ’ s book gathers steam @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the modern GOP , when the lines between democracy and oligarchy become clearer once again , with Republicans increasingly abandoning racial liberalism and Democrats beginning to disavow white supremacy .
Movement conservatism , from McCarthyism to the rise of the John Birch Society and William Buckley ’ s National Review , waged an unrelenting ideological campaign to undo the New Deal .
Die-hard Southern segregationists gained intellectual respectability , their defense of Jim Crow couched in the anti-big-government , anti-socialist , anti-tax rhetoric of conservatism .
Once at the fringes of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ established conservatives as well as the remnants of the Northern liberal Rockefeller Republicans to create a truly right-wing party .
This reactionary strain had long been present , but it became ascendant with the presidential candidacy of Goldwater , who represented a toxic mix of opposition to civil rights , women ’ s rights , and labor rights and an aggressive championing of American unilateralism in world affairs .
Most of these Republicans were opponents of democracy in the manner of proslavery ideologues like Hammond .
The new conservatism produced Goldwater , Nixon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the modern GOP ’ s Southern strategy .
As the Democratic Party became identified with civil rights for Black people and equal rights for women , Republicans swerved right , opposing all progressive social policies as government handouts and taxes on the rich as a secret scheme to redistribute wealth from hard-working white men to unworthy Blacks and women .
Reagan ’ s cowboy image—coupled with his decision to launch his presidential campaign in Philadelphia , Miss.
, where three civil rights activists had been viciously murdered—symbolized the fruition of the South-West alliance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Thanks to the American West , the ideology of the Confederacy had regained a foothold in national politics.
” Having grown up in India , I can vouch that thanks to Reagan ’ s misadventures in Grenada and Central America , his cowboy persona became a global symbol of blundering Yankee imperialism , an image of an American hubris that would even glibly take credit for Mikhail Gorbachev ’ s reformist policies in the Soviet Union after trying to reignite the Cold War .
In measured tones , Richardson documents the deep venality @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Party , including Newt Gingrich ’ s Contract With America , the stolen presidential election of 2000 , the dismantling of civil and voting rights , the culture wars attacking theexpansion of rights for disenfranchised groups , Mitch McConnell ’ s slash-and-burn tactics against Barack Obama ’ s administration , and finally Trump ’ s “ American carnage , ” a crucial theme in a dark inaugural speech that foretold the course of his grim presidency .
Like the Southern slaveholders of yore , who dreaded abolitionism , socialism , communism , feminism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , our modern oligarchs and their GOP enablers use the same bugbears and racist dog whistles to prevent the United States from developing a strong welfare state .
Richardson tells her story well , but while she delves into domestic politics with a sure hand , she strangely neglects the Cold War ( except in its use as a scare tactic for domestic purposes ) , US foreign policy , and the national security state .
What role does foreign affairs , surely an important part of the postwar story , play in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Eisenhower ’ s warning about the military-industrial complex ; the Vietnam War ; the covert and sometimes overt undermining of democracy in Latin America , Africa , and Asia ; and the imperialist adventurism in the Middle East are all missing from her account .
The violent policing and mass incarceration of African Americans—a topic of great urgency today—and the prison-industrial complex are also not discussed in any great depth .
Perhaps it is because these subjects , in her view , don ’ t fit neatly into the oligarchy-democracy binary .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and state violence has reinvigorated oligarchic tendencies in the United States to create a crisis of unchecked proportions .
The world today looks on aghast as the American republic , with a criminally incompetent and kleptocratic oligarchy hell-bent on undermining democracy , self-combusts in the midst of a global crisis .
Within the Democratic Party , attempts by the left to formulate a multiracial social democracy might yet realize the unfulfilled promises of the New Deal and the Great Society .
The forces demanding democratic change are also out on the streets , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while oligarchy rides high under Trump .
Even though Richardson ’ s book was completed before the pandemic and the mass protests sweeping the country , her study is a useful history of the deterioration of the party of Lincoln into a revanchist , right-wing , white supremacist political organization .
Richardson is fond of saying that although history doesn ’ t repeat itself , it rhymes .
The taking down of prominent Confederate statues and symbols in 2020 might mark the beginning of the end of the slaveholding South ’ s oligarchic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ republic .
If the current American oligarchy , with its commitment to antidemocratic values and economic elitism , reminds one of the South ’ s slaveholding aristocracy , it is about time that we consign it , like the Confederacy , to the dustbin of history .

This article appears in the October 19/26, 2020 issue.
The average person may be forgiven for thinking that the South actually won the Civil War. Despite a brief experiment in interracial democracy during the Reconstruction years, for much of its history the region has upheld a regime of brutal racial subordination. In the late 19th century, after the overthrow of Reconstruction, many of its state governments disenfranchised Black men, instituted racial segregation, condoned racial terrorism and violence, and kept a majority of Black and white Southerners economically bound through sharecropping, debt peonage, convict lease labor, and tenancy. By the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt called the South the nation’s No. 1 economic problem, resistant to unionization and social policies. Even today it leads in indices for poverty and weak educational systems. The Jim Crow South was upended by the civil rights revolution. Yet even in defeat, its language of oligarchy and its opposition to progressive political and economic policies through an appeal to racism has been adopted by the modern Republican Party. Books in Review How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America By Heather Cox Richardson Buy this book
This is the argument presented in Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, How the South Won the Civil War. Throughout American history, she contends, the forces of oligarchy and democracy have been involved in a mortal struggle for the nation’s future, and she wants to show how the visions of oligarchy have often won out—how, in other words, we got from the era of emancipation and Confederate defeat to the presidency of Donald Trump. A history professor at Boston College, Richardson has written numerous books on the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as on the Republican Party, and she draws from her considerable scholarly oeuvre for this slim and accessible volume. Known for her newsletter Letters From an American, which seeks to explain current political events through a historical lens, she deftly demonstrates her skill writing for a public audience in How the South Won the Civil War. Arguing that the slaveholders’ idea of an oligarchic America triumphed with the growth of the second American oligarchy in the latter half of the 20th century, Richardson shows how the rise of movement conservatism, as personified by Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign, came to embody this vision of an oligarchic America. The new oligarchy’s triumph—one that combined economic domination with racial inequality—lay in a political alliance between the South and the West, Richardson argues, and in the Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and finally Trump. Her interpretive scheme is simple yet also compelling and clear. The title of the book, of course, is not meant literally, but Richardson does show that while the South lost the Civil War, it eventually, in many respects, won the peace.
According to Richardson, the unending struggle between American democracy and oligarchy began with the birth of the nation. Many historians of early America have argued that the ideology of the American Revolution was democratic republicanism, born during the English Civil War in the 17th century and then embraced by the colonies. As the quintessential radical of the Age of Revolution, Thomas Paine, proclaimed, “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” But not all historians agree that this republicanism was the sole ideology then in circulation in North America. As Edmund Morgan observes in American Slavery, American Freedom, the seeming paradox of American republicanism was the simultaneous emergence of slavery and freedom in the colonial world. From the outset, the American idea of freedom was exclusive: It was for property-owning men only and was based on the enslavement of people of African descent. The Virginian founding fathers solved the problem of inequality by simply enslaving a racially outcast working poor and at the same time elevating the status of all white men, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
For Richardson, the American paradox is a bit different: Slavery and democracy were opposing forces rather than constitutive of each other. She traces the birth of oligarchy, democracy’s enemy, to the ship that brought about 20 enslaved Africans to the British North American mainland in 1619. From then until today, she argues, the history of the United States has been a history of the conflict between democracy and oligarchy. For Morgan, American democracy was based on slavery; for Richardson, though she relies on Morgan’s book, American oligarchy has always rested on combining elite domination with racial and economic inequality. Ever since the arrival of that ship, she maintains, the American republic has allowed its elites to conflate “class and race,” thereby giving them “the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.”
At many points in American history, oligarchy—from the slaveholding elite to the robber barons of the Gilded Age—has had the upper hand. But repeatedly, ordinary Americans, especially those who were disenfranchised, like women and African Americans, have pushed back, leading to the triumph of democracy with slavery’s abolition, women’s suffrage, and the enactment of the New Deal and civil rights legislation. By offering an account of the forces of both democratic progress and oligarchic reaction, Richardson provides historical detail to Corey Robin’s argument in The Reactionary Mind, which traced the antidemocratic origins of American conservatism while offering insight into the democratic forces that resisted it. While Robin situates American conservatism in the longue durée of a Western reactionary philosophical tradition, Richardson locates it in a quintessentially Southern political tradition of oligarchy: anti-statism combined with virulent racism and misogyny. For Robin, too, the proslavery ideology exemplified American conservatism. But for Richardson, after the Civil War, the West and eventually the Republican Party helped reinvent the South’s language of oligarchy with an appeal to individualism that overlays a reactionary commitment to racial hierarchy and opposition to a welfare state.
Key to Richardson’s argument is the Civil War. For her, the struggle between the free North and the slaveholding South was essentially a struggle between people and property, as exemplified in the antislavery free labor ideology of the original Republican Party, which valorized workers over capitalists. The egalitarian impulse that informed the party of Lincoln, she says, was countered by the elitism of the slaveholding oligarchy, as personified by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond in his “Mudsill speech.”
Hammond advocated an alliance of Northern capitalists and Southern slaveholders—what abolitionists called an unholy pact between “the lords of the loom,” or the textile mill owners of New England, and “the lords of the lash,” the Southern slaveholding planters, against the working stiffs, or “mudsills,” of their respective societies. Small wonder that electoral banners in the North would announce “Small-fisted farmers, mudsills of society, greasy mechanics for A. Lincoln.” Current Issue View our current issue
When understood as a conflict between oligarchs and democrats, the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction represent the victory not just of democracy but also of the working classes over the slaveholding oligarchy. It also marked, as Richardson notes, a victory for big government. As a result of the war, the federal government implemented a progressive income tax, land-grant colleges, the Homestead Act and money for railroads (which came at the expense of Native populations), and federal protection for Black rights in the postwar South. In response to this new egalitarian federal government, the opposition of Southern elites to Reconstruction was often couched—almost always disingenuously—in the language of local governance and opposition to corruption and taxation. Southerners opposing African American citizenship invoked the image of a corrupt federal government usurping their rights to promote Black equality. Racism became a way to protect the political and economic prerogatives of a Southern oligarchy no longer in control of the national government and, in many cases, state and local governments as well. The language of race became a potent weapon wielded against efforts to address inequality, which would supposedly benefit people of color and dependent women at the cost of white men.
According to Richardson, this political formula developed by Southern racists got a big boost with the conquest of the West and the subjugation of the Plains Indians. As federal troops retreated from enforcing Black rights in the South, they let slip the dogs of war in the West, which held the key, she writes, to the national triumph of white supremacy. John C. Calhoun, a proslavery senator from South Carolina, had long dreamed of a South-West alliance as the basis for national political dominance by a white elite, one that would marginalize the antislavery Northeast. Calhoun even put aside his objections, grounded in the notion of states’ rights, to internal improvements (the 19th century term for federal infrastructure projects) in order to woo the West. Richardson does not mention Calhoun’s dream of a South-West alliance, but she does describe a postwar settlement that strongly resembled it. While feeding off federal largesse, land and water improvements, and the might of the US Army to displace and kill Native populations, the West became fertile ground for the myth of American individualism, represented by the white cowboy single-handedly taming the frontier and its “savage” population.
The historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously viewed the Western frontier as a laboratory for American democracy. The region, however, was built on Indian dispossession and slavery, Mexican peonage, Chinese exclusion, and the abuse of immigrant labor in extractive mining industries and in the construction of railroads, which led to spectacularly violent labor conflicts, such as those along Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene River in 1892. As Richardson writes, the Civil War and its aftermath in the West “reinforced a society in which the oligarchic ideas of the defeated South would thrive.”
The West, Richardson contends, also used the myth of the cowboy to put a gloss on its own brutal and exploitative history. In popular literature and culture, the cowboy captivated the American imagination. But the actual history of the West aligned it closely with the Jim Crow South. As Richardson writes, “The resurrection of antebellum southern ideology through the rise of the western individualist rewrote American history.” By the turn of the century, the national victory of white supremacy was complete, with Western politicians helping Southerners defeat federal bills against lynching and to ensure fair elections in the South. The Vexed Meaning of Equality in Gilded Age America Eric Foner
No one personified the myth of Western individualism and the realities of American imperialism better than Teddy Roosevelt, who gained fame as a Rough Rider in Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898. As president, he took on the plutocrats, but as Richardson shows, his Square Deal also favored white men at the cost of nonwhite men and women both at home and abroad, where his military adventurism was put to service in the acquisition of a formal American empire. As Richardson notes, “He kept America from turning into an oligarchy…but he did so in the same way the Founders had: by creating an ideological underclass.”
Roosevelt, however, was not just replicating the Virginian founders’ contradictions. A conservationist and a naturalist, he also supported women’s suffrage and drove Southern segregationists into fits of rage by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with him in the White House. If anything, Roosevelt represented the unique paradoxes of the Progressive Era: salutary democratic and economic reforms accompanied by nativism and imperialism. It is difficult to square (pun intended) Roosevelt as the individualistic Western cowboy with the president who championed the government’s regulation of the economy.
His successor, Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since the Civil War, was also a vaunted progressive reformer. Yet he introduced racial segregation to the nation’s capital, and in 1925, one year after his death, a newly resurrected Ku Klux Klan would march triumphantly down the streets of Washington, D.C. The suppression of dissent during the first Red Scare by his attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (who gives William Barr a run for his money as the worst attorney general in US history), reveals the racial and political intolerance that defined Wilsonian liberalism. Wilson’s allegedly liberal internationalism and commitment to democratic self-rule were also not meant for the colonies, as he made clear to nationalists from Asia and Africa after World War I. If, as Richardson writes, American oligarchs have traditionally used the language of race to stymie the rise of a modern welfare state in the United States, then her book also reminds us that racism and racial inequality have proved central to many figures speaking in the name of democracy as well. Roosevelt’s and especially Wilson’s strains of progressivism upheld white supremacy.
This remained partly true during the New Deal years, too. In 1932 most African Americans who could vote became part of a massive partisan realignment, moving with liberals into the Democratic Party and leaving the Republican Party to become more than ever the party of hidebound conservatism and big business. But even Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ran up against the shoals of racism and obdurate Southern Democratic opposition to the extension of its benefits to most African American workers in the domestic, agricultural, and service industries.
The New Deal and World War II inaugurated the American Century. After the fight against the Nazis and fascism, racism became unfashionable in academia and popular culture. The federal government developed color-blind social policies, from the GI Bill to Social Security, and encouraged the unionization of the labor force, all of which created a prosperous middle class and economy. But residential redlining and the racial stratification of the labor market, not to mention Jim Crow in the South, all persisted. Even as the avatar of American liberalism and social democracy, FDR failed when it came to race, his record blemished by, among other things, the internment of Japanese Americans during the war.
Richardson’s book gathers steam in the postwar years with the rise of the modern GOP, when the lines between democracy and oligarchy become clearer once again, with Republicans increasingly abandoning racial liberalism and Democrats beginning to disavow white supremacy. Movement conservatism, from McCarthyism to the rise of the John Birch Society and William Buckley’s National Review, waged an unrelenting ideological campaign to undo the New Deal. Die-hard Southern segregationists gained intellectual respectability, their defense of Jim Crow couched in the anti-big-government, anti-socialist, anti-tax rhetoric of conservatism. Once at the fringes of the Republican Party, these men would replace established conservatives as well as the remnants of the Northern liberal Rockefeller Republicans to create a truly right-wing party. This reactionary strain had long been present, but it became ascendant with the presidential candidacy of Goldwater, who represented a toxic mix of opposition to civil rights, women’s rights, and labor rights and an aggressive championing of American unilateralism in world affairs.
Most of these Republicans were opponents of democracy in the manner of proslavery ideologues like Hammond. The new conservatism produced Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Pat Buchanan, and the modern GOP’s Southern strategy. As the Democratic Party became identified with civil rights for Black people and equal rights for women, Republicans swerved right, opposing all progressive social policies as government handouts and taxes on the rich as a secret scheme to redistribute wealth from hard-working white men to unworthy Blacks and women. Reagan’s cowboy image—coupled with his decision to launch his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights activists had been viciously murdered—symbolized the fruition of the South-West alliance. Or as Richardson writes, “Thanks to the American West, the ideology of the Confederacy had regained a foothold in national politics.” Having grown up in India, I can vouch that thanks to Reagan’s misadventures in Grenada and Central America, his cowboy persona became a global symbol of blundering Yankee imperialism, an image of an American hubris that would even glibly take credit for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist policies in the Soviet Union after trying to reignite the Cold War.
In measured tones, Richardson documents the deep venality and anti-democratic nature of the modern Republican Party, including Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, the stolen presidential election of 2000, the dismantling of civil and voting rights, the culture wars attacking theexpansion of rights for disenfranchised groups, Mitch McConnell’s slash-and-burn tactics against Barack Obama’s administration, and finally Trump’s “American carnage,” a crucial theme in a dark inaugural speech that foretold the course of his grim presidency. Like the Southern slaveholders of yore, who dreaded abolitionism, socialism, communism, feminism, and all the -isms of modernity, our modern oligarchs and their GOP enablers use the same bugbears and racist dog whistles to prevent the United States from developing a strong welfare state.
Richardson tells her story well, but while she delves into domestic politics with a sure hand, she strangely neglects the Cold War (except in its use as a scare tactic for domestic purposes), US foreign policy, and the national security state. What role does foreign affairs, surely an important part of the postwar story, play in the rise of the current oligarchy? Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex; the Vietnam War; the covert and sometimes overt undermining of democracy in Latin America, Africa, and Asia; and the imperialist adventurism in the Middle East are all missing from her account. The violent policing and mass incarceration of African Americans—a topic of great urgency today—and the prison-industrial complex are also not discussed in any great depth. Perhaps it is because these subjects, in her view, don’t fit neatly into the oligarchy-democracy binary.
The combination of American empire, racism, and state violence has reinvigorated oligarchic tendencies in the United States to create a crisis of unchecked proportions. The world today looks on aghast as the American republic, with a criminally incompetent and kleptocratic oligarchy hell-bent on undermining democracy, self-combusts in the midst of a global crisis. Within the Democratic Party, attempts by the left to formulate a multiracial social democracy might yet realize the unfulfilled promises of the New Deal and the Great Society. The forces demanding democratic change are also out on the streets, protesting against police brutality and racial inequality while oligarchy rides high under Trump. Even though Richardson’s book was completed before the pandemic and the mass protests sweeping the country, her study is a useful history of the deterioration of the party of Lincoln into a revanchist, right-wing, white supremacist political organization.
Richardson is fond of saying that although history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. The taking down of prominent Confederate statues and symbols in 2020 might mark the beginning of the end of the slaveholding South’s oligarchic vision for the future of the American republic. If the current American oligarchy, with its commitment to antidemocratic values and economic elitism, reminds one of the South’s slaveholding aristocracy, it is about time that we consign it, like the Confederacy, to the dustbin of history.


thenation--2020-10-06--Nicholson Baker’s Maddening Search for the Truth

Nicholson Baker lay awake at night again beside his slumbering wife and their dogs , his mind caught in the tunnel of his obsession .
As the novelist recounts in Baseless : My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act , he couldn ’ t stop thinking about the US government ’ s efforts to develop biological weapons during the early Cold War .
Baseless : My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act Baker harbored a suspicion : Maybe , when Korean and Chinese communists accused the United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ War some 70 years ago—a claim the US government vehemently denied and that generations of Americans have been taught was a lie—they were actually telling the truth .
Or , at least , maybe there was a kernel of truth mixed in with those clumsy fabrications and propaganda , and the US government has been covering up some long-ago battlefield use of taboo weaponry .
Some historians and researchers before Baker have also suspected that something about the accusations was true , notwithstanding the failure of hard evidence to come to light in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that concrete evidence may nevertheless exist , hidden away in the vaults of the National Archives ’ restricted files .
Certainly , the US government had a motive to heighten its attacks on the communist forces surging down the Korean Peninsula during the war , and there is reason to think it also had the means : As Baker describes , many documents about extensive American bioweapons research at Fort Detrick , Md.
, in the years following World War II have been declassified , showing that the US government invested heavily in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deliver germs that could wipe out vast areas of crops or kill the entire populations of cities and towns .
But motive and means , by themselves , are merely circumstantial evidence suggesting that it is possible the United States used some of those weapons , despite its denials—not proof that it did .
Baker has long been intrigued by the fact that the declassified versions of government documents concerning bioweapons from this era that are available still tend to be heavily censored .
The continued secrecy , for him , raises a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these documents contain that remains so sensitive after all this time that the US government continues to hide it from the American public and the rest of the world under these redactions ?
Baker—a pacifist who previously wrote Human Smoke , which controversially suggested that World War II was not worth fighting and portrayed Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as warmongers alongside Adolf Hitler—decided to immerse himself in this mystery , working meticulously through these blacked-out or whited-out passages to puzzle over what might lurk beneath the censor ’ s markings .
To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ use the Freedom of Information Act , or FOIA , which Congress passed in a burst of mid-1960s idealism for democratic self-government and significantly strengthened as its first major post-Watergate reform in the 1970s , overriding President Gerald Ford ’ s veto just a few months after Richard Nixon resigned .
Baker earnestly filed FOIA request after FOIA request seeking to finally pry out the truth of what happened or didn ’ t happen all those decades ago on the Korean Peninsula .
Godot-like , the definitive answers he sought never came .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ unanswered for years before they were denied , if they were acknowledged at all .
Just to receive letters saying a few of his requests were assigned tracking numbers became a victory of sorts .
Only on rare occasions did he obtain documents that had not been available to the like-minded researchers who came before him .
Maddeningly , these glimpses of information tended to raise new questions .
Eventually , Baker gave up on learning the truth .
Rather than shelve his research project as a failure , he reconceptualized it so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ became part of the story .
Structured as a series of diary entries in which he tells us what he knows for sure about American bioweapons efforts in that era , Baseless allows Baker to highlight that the government is still actively hiding things all these years later and to speculate about what they may be .
At the same time , he tries to capture the frustration of growing older as the government runs out the clock on disclosing its secrets while they might still matter to anyone living .
“ This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency and other places , ” he writes .
“ It ’ s about my own not entirely successful efforts to squeeze germs of truth from the sanitized documentary record of the U.S. government .
It ’ s about the exquisite pain of whited-out or blacked-out sentences and paragraphs—always the ones you want most to see—and the costs to national self-understanding of delayed disclosure.
” Primarily known for novels like The Mezzanine and The Anthologist as well as for occasional nonfiction like Human Smoke and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of older books and newspapers by libraries as they microfilm or digitize their collections ) , Baker has given his new book a title that appears to play on several meanings .
“ Baseless ” echoes the oft-repeated claim by the US government and its defenders that the communist accusations of bioweapons use during the Korean War had no basis .
But more concretely , “ baseless ” is also a reference to something that I did not know before reading this book : In October 1950—a few months after the Soviet-backed North @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United States intervened to defend it—a senior Air Force general named Nathan Twining issued a top-secret order to his deputies to initiate action that would make the United States “ capable of employing toxic chemical and biological agents and of defending against enemy use of these agents.
” For Baker , this memo might be a clue to what happened during the Korean War .
Twining had commanded the planes that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki , and as the world war against German and Japanese fascism transitioned into the early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ became a proponent of developing other types of weapons of mass destruction at a particularly important moment .
His memo ’ s mandate included integrating Air Force capabilities and requirements for biological warfare into war plans and developing tactics to deliver such agents from the air .
This directive , Baker reports , citing military files in the National Archives , was initially known by the code name Project Baseless , although the next year it was changed to Project Respondent .
( The order was rescinded shortly after the cessation of hostilities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Korean and Chinese government officials began accusing the United States of having used biological weapons to spread disease on the peninsula in late 1950 and early 1951 .
A year later , backed as well by the Soviet Union , communist officials escalated their accusations—which the United States denied , with help from the fact that much of the physical evidence its adversaries put forward , as Baker acknowledges , was dubious .
He also notes that the Air Force did not seem to have moved logistical support into the war theater that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the industrial-scale use of bioweapons it was being accused of .
There were , he writes , “ no teams of trained Air Force germ handlers , no stockpiles of mass-produced weaponry , no large refrigerated lockers to hold perishable agents.
” Nevertheless , as Baker goes through the documents he can access , he develops a theory that something did happen , that America ’ s communist accusers were not simply making it all up .
And he is right that Twining ’ s Project Baseless memo—showing , as it does , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bombs just months before the accusations began—is certainly curious .
Baker ’ s discussion of this memo is just one of many such suggestive curiosities he shakes out of his proverbial research notebook to fill this nearly 400-page book .
Most diary entries open with a word about what he says he was doing on that particular day—usually something gentle , like lying in bed , having dinner with his wife , attending a Quaker meeting , or walking through nature with their dogs .
Then it pivots swiftly into a deep dive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the documentary evidence that has been made available .
Baker mixes in sketches of various creepy scientists who devoted their talents to weaponizing diseases , as well as to potential delivery devices , such as bombs stuffed with infected insects or feathers .
As such , Baseless is less a narrative with a beginning , middle , and end than a mosaic that forms a picture as individual tiles are added here and there , gradually accumulating into a detailed history of the United States ’ bioweapons research shortly after World War II @ @ @ @ @ @ @ early Cold War American bioweapons research was not , of course , Baker ’ s original goal : He had set out to prove his hunch that the United States had secretly used some of those weapons on the battlefield , the proof for which he believes resides in the gaps in the documentary record—the files that are still kept locked away and the paragraphs that have been removed from those the government permits the public to see .
“ Redaction , ” Baker writes , is “ a form of psychological warfare @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wearing people down and making them go away.
” As a reporter for The New York Times , I have been a frequent user of the Freedom of Information Act .
With help from David McCraw , the newspaper ’ s lawyer , I have sued the federal government over and over—under administrations of both parties—in an attempt to force it to comply with FOIA and disclose information of public interest .
Often , the result has been disappointment : Judges ruled that the documents I sought fell within one of several enumerated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government to keep them secret .
But sometimes the litigation worked .
On certain occasions , after a case was filed and a Justice Department lawyer had to account for an agency ’ s recalcitrance before a judge , the government chose to turn over the records without further fuss to resolve the litigation , sometimes after a face-saving negotiation to narrow the request .
More rarely , a court ordered the federal government to disclose something over its continued objections .
Through this patient and slow boring of holes via the judicial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did , use FOIA to drag things into the public light—secret memos about the targeted killing of an American citizen deemed a terrorist , previously classified files illustrating how post-9/11 National Security Agency surveillance programs skirted legal limits , internal FBI reports demonstrating that the bureau quietly cleared its agents of wrongdoing in at least 150 consecutive intentional shooting incidents over nearly 20 years , and e-mails showing the military ’ s awkward wrestling with what should happen if an aging detainee at Guantánamo needed lifesaving medical care that the remote naval base @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other newsworthy subjects .
Through these experiences , I have learned a lesson that does not seem to occur to Baker , despite his years of frustrations : With very few exceptions , simply filing a FOIA request does not work .
If one has any hope of extracting a document in a timely fashion , it is necessary to follow up on the request by filing a lawsuit .
Without leveraging the legal system to force the government to comply with the law , FOIA is indeed , as Baker portrays it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ law says an information act request must be processed within 20 working days , a backlog of requests clogs the queue , and there are not enough officials assigned to process them .
Often the most interesting documents require a review and sign-off by multiple agencies , creating additional opportunities for bureaucratic slow-rolling .
Absent litigation , it is routine for years to pass , and the government , if pressed , will claim that a given request has not yet reached the top of the queue .
But a lawsuit changes everything @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and , at least in theory , can overrule a bureaucrat who claims things must remain secret without an adequate basis , thereby deterring unjustified delay and overclassification .
But , despite passionately pursuing his research for years and despite deciding to make lemonade out of his sour experience by transforming his failure to get answers into a book that is partly about the shortcomings of FOIA , Baker does not seem to have seriously considered trying litigation .
The closest he comes in the book to filing a lawsuit is a passing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had been waiting for seven years for a particular document that still did not come : “ So what should I do ?
Write more letters ?
Sue the Air Force ?
Sue the National Archives ?
Give up ?
Do these particular Pentagon memos even matter , when there are many thousands of declassified Korean War–era documents readily available to historians ?
I did the simplest thing .
I sent another email.
” And so reading this book , much of which consists of creative extrapolations about what American officials might have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ myself wondering at this failure of imagination about what he could do .
Why didn ’ t Baker reach out to one of the public interest organizations that provide free legal services to journalists and researchers with a righteous FOIA request and see if they would be interested in taking on his case ?
How can he publish a book that laments FOIA ’ s deficiencies—its subtitle is My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act—without doing what is necessary , if not always sufficient , to make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if he bought a car and then complained that it would not run without ever putting gas in its tank .
That said , it should not require litigation to successfully use a tool that an earlier generation of lawmakers created with the intent of enabling Americans broadly to bring to light information about what their government has been up to .
And even with a lawsuit , my experience has shown that it is exceedingly difficult to get a judge to second-guess the government ’ s claim that a document is properly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one thing : FOIA is broken .
Is Baker also right about bioweapons during the Korean War ?
The dispute over whether the US government really deployed weaponized germs in the conflict has been much argued over for generations , and Baker ’ s book relies heavily on the research of those who came before him—in particular , two Canadian historians , Stephen L. Endicott and Edward Hagerman , whose 1998 book The United States and Biological Warfare : Secrets From the Early Cold War and Korea argues that the communist allegations were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ New York Times , Ed Regis , the author of another book on America ’ s germ warfare efforts , criticized Endicott and Hagerman for failing to grapple with the strongest argument against their case : the findings that much of the evidence put forward by the communist regimes was fabricated .
Baker interviewed the two Canadian scholars in 2008 and eventually acquired boxes of their research files—including a military history of the Air Force ’ s biological weapons program from 1944 to 1951 that contained discussion of the Baseless directive , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was still fighting to finally get processed as late as 2012 .
Baker contends that they did not deserve the damage to their reputations caused by Regis ’ s review and by similar reactions from other historians who criticized their efforts .
Without going as far as they do in their assertions , Baker clearly sees his efforts as a way to perhaps help vindicate them .
He has some advantages , building on their research with additional documents that have become available in the intervening years .
He is aided as well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of its old archives online , under pressure from a FOIA lawsuit , which removed major practical impediments to searching through masses of previously declassified historical files .
But Baker is also more careful in letting his readers know about facts that pose a challenge to his theory .
He forthrightly acknowledges , for example , the lack of large-scale deployed capabilities and the fabrications of evidence .
“ The Russians , the North Koreans , and the Chinese all , at times , lied about what they ’ d found in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fact , ” he writes , citing a 1953 memo by Russia ’ s secret police chief about simulating “ two false regions of infection ” for the purpose of “ accusing the Americans of using bacteriological weapons in Korea and China.
” Against that backdrop , Baker ’ s hypothesis is more modest than those of some of the researchers who came before him .
Specifically , he thinks that while the Air Force never operationalized a biological weapons program , there may have been “ a small-scale , plausibly deniable ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little so far on paper , but about which we have immense detail , very peculiar detail—perhaps too peculiar to be invented—from the Communists.
” He speculates that “ the CIA had tried out several germ-warfare experiments in a war zone , first late in 1950 , and then in January and February 1952 , and the Communists had discovered them almost immediately , launching in response a huge , coordinated propaganda campaign—a campaign that included some faked evidence.
” To that end , Baker also dedicates a considerable part of his book @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and other reckless actions the CIA engaged in during the early Cold War that were unrelated to biological warfare but are marked by a recurring pattern : US officials shamelessly lied about them at the time , but the truth came out eventually .
His point in delving into that largely tangential material seems to be that it would be naive to take at face value the indignant denials by US officials of the era that none of those bioweapons were ever used .
Baker also argues that the reason some of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was that it was simultaneously fake and real .
To discredit the bioweapons charges and demoralize the enemy , he speculates , the CIA may have arranged to drop what appeared to be carriers of disease , such as insects and voles , on North Korea and China—except that they were not infected with any biological agents and were instead a psychological warfare operation intended to deceive .
“ The North Koreans and the Chinese were telling the truth when they reported the bombs and the insects , it seems to me , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that show they were also making these claims internally , “ but the Communists didn ’ t understand that it was primarily a terror weapon they were dealing with , and they exerted themselves to find the taint of disease where it wasn ’ t. ” In other words , Baker thinks that after the United States carried out a few limited but real tests of germ warfare , it followed that act by dropping inert materials that created the appearance of a more widespread campaign .
That prompted an extensive search for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ failing to turn up hard proof , led them to fabricate evidence .
Reading this theory , I was reminded of the tangle that emerged from the notorious O.J .
Simpson murder investigation and trial .
One way to make sense of the clashing narratives and evidence was that it could be simultaneously true that Simpson murdered his ex-wife and her friend and that a police detective planted false evidence in a misguided and corrupt bid to ensure that a righteous case would hold up in court—in essence , framing a guilty man @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and Baker is usually careful not to go too far in putting it forward , leavening his analysis with regular signs that he doesn ’ t really know whether there is anything to this , such as a sentence that begins “ I think maybe.
” But in some places , he undercuts the persuasiveness of his analytical judgment by revealing that he is prone to see conspiracies all over the place , such as when he casually asserts at one point that “ rabbit fever , Q fever , bird flu @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , African swine fever , and hog cholera all look , to my nonscientist ’ s eye , like unnatural epidemics that owe their outbreaks to the laboratory ” rather than to nature .
( He speculates that these diseases generally got out of labs by accident , not that they were deliberate attacks . )
Despite such occasional lapses of self-awareness , Baker the person , interesting and imperfect as are we all in our own ways , rises from the pages of Baseless with a generally firm understanding that he has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I lay in bed some of today reading more of this book , hating it , excited by it , embarrassed by it , ” he writes toward the end of Baseless , adding of his theory , “ You may not be convinced , but that ’ s okay .
My aim is to open the files , not necessarily to convince.
” That is the thought that fuses Baker ’ s original project , an intended exposé about what happened with germs and insects during the Korean War , to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it morphed into .
For Baker , ultimately what we need is far more transparency—a system that better enables Americans to drag information about their government into the light .
After recounting how Hagerman lost a protracted battle to get censored passages restored to a certain perhaps ( or perhaps not ) key document , he describes how he renewed Hagerman ’ s request but heard nothing back after two years .
“ What happened , I think , ” Baker writes , “ was that the redacteur whited out any paragraph @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Far East with the Air Force ’ s development program for biological warfare .
I could be completely wrong .
The only way to prove me wrong is by declassifying the entire document .
”

This article appears in the October 19/26, 2020 issue.
Nicholson Baker lay awake at night again beside his slumbering wife and their dogs, his mind caught in the tunnel of his obsession. As the novelist recounts in Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, he couldn’t stop thinking about the US government’s efforts to develop biological weapons during the early Cold War. Books in Review Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act By Nicholson Baker Buy this book
Baker harbored a suspicion: Maybe, when Korean and Chinese communists accused the United States of dropping plague bombs during the Korean War some 70 years ago—a claim the US government vehemently denied and that generations of Americans have been taught was a lie—they were actually telling the truth. Or, at least, maybe there was a kernel of truth mixed in with those clumsy fabrications and propaganda, and the US government has been covering up some long-ago battlefield use of taboo weaponry.
Some historians and researchers before Baker have also suspected that something about the accusations was true, notwithstanding the failure of hard evidence to come to light in the intervening decades. But Baker believed that concrete evidence may nevertheless exist, hidden away in the vaults of the National Archives’ restricted files. Certainly, the US government had a motive to heighten its attacks on the communist forces surging down the Korean Peninsula during the war, and there is reason to think it also had the means: As Baker describes, many documents about extensive American bioweapons research at Fort Detrick, Md., in the years following World War II have been declassified, showing that the US government invested heavily in ghastly research on how to weaponize and deliver germs that could wipe out vast areas of crops or kill the entire populations of cities and towns. But motive and means, by themselves, are merely circumstantial evidence suggesting that it is possible the United States used some of those weapons, despite its denials—not proof that it did.
Baker has long been intrigued by the fact that the declassified versions of government documents concerning bioweapons from this era that are available still tend to be heavily censored. The continued secrecy, for him, raises a striking question: What other information do these documents contain that remains so sensitive after all this time that the US government continues to hide it from the American public and the rest of the world under these redactions?
Baker—a pacifist who previously wrote Human Smoke, which controversially suggested that World War II was not worth fighting and portrayed Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as warmongers alongside Adolf Hitler—decided to immerse himself in this mystery, working meticulously through these blacked-out or whited-out passages to puzzle over what might lurk beneath the censor’s markings.
To liberate that information, Baker attempted to use the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, which Congress passed in a burst of mid-1960s idealism for democratic self-government and significantly strengthened as its first major post-Watergate reform in the 1970s, overriding President Gerald Ford’s veto just a few months after Richard Nixon resigned. Baker earnestly filed FOIA request after FOIA request seeking to finally pry out the truth of what happened or didn’t happen all those decades ago on the Korean Peninsula. Godot-like, the definitive answers he sought never came. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Baker’s FOIA requests largely went unanswered for years before they were denied, if they were acknowledged at all. Just to receive letters saying a few of his requests were assigned tracking numbers became a victory of sorts. Only on rare occasions did he obtain documents that had not been available to the like-minded researchers who came before him. Maddeningly, these glimpses of information tended to raise new questions. Current Issue View our current issue
Eventually, Baker gave up on learning the truth. Rather than shelve his research project as a failure, he reconceptualized it so that the impediments his efforts encountered themselves became part of the story. Structured as a series of diary entries in which he tells us what he knows for sure about American bioweapons efforts in that era, Baseless allows Baker to highlight that the government is still actively hiding things all these years later and to speculate about what they may be. At the same time, he tries to capture the frustration of growing older as the government runs out the clock on disclosing its secrets while they might still matter to anyone living.
“This is a book about waiting—waiting for responses from the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency and other places,” he writes. “It’s about my own not entirely successful efforts to squeeze germs of truth from the sanitized documentary record of the U.S. government. It’s about the exquisite pain of whited-out or blacked-out sentences and paragraphs—always the ones you want most to see—and the costs to national self-understanding of delayed disclosure.”
Primarily known for novels like The Mezzanine and The Anthologist as well as for occasional nonfiction like Human Smoke and Double Fold (which decries the destruction of older books and newspapers by libraries as they microfilm or digitize their collections), Baker has given his new book a title that appears to play on several meanings.
“Baseless” echoes the oft-repeated claim by the US government and its defenders that the communist accusations of bioweapons use during the Korean War had no basis. But more concretely, “baseless” is also a reference to something that I did not know before reading this book: In October 1950—a few months after the Soviet-backed North Korean military invaded South Korea and the United States intervened to defend it—a senior Air Force general named Nathan Twining issued a top-secret order to his deputies to initiate action that would make the United States “capable of employing toxic chemical and biological agents and of defending against enemy use of these agents.” Related Article In the Cold War’s Bloodlands Daniel Immerwahr
For Baker, this memo might be a clue to what happened during the Korean War. Twining had commanded the planes that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as the world war against German and Japanese fascism transitioned into the early Cold War against global communism, Twining became a proponent of developing other types of weapons of mass destruction at a particularly important moment. His memo’s mandate included integrating Air Force capabilities and requirements for biological warfare into war plans and developing tactics to deliver such agents from the air. This directive, Baker reports, citing military files in the National Archives, was initially known by the code name Project Baseless, although the next year it was changed to Project Respondent. (The order was rescinded shortly after the cessation of hostilities.)
The following spring, North Korean and Chinese government officials began accusing the United States of having used biological weapons to spread disease on the peninsula in late 1950 and early 1951. A year later, backed as well by the Soviet Union, communist officials escalated their accusations—which the United States denied, with help from the fact that much of the physical evidence its adversaries put forward, as Baker acknowledges, was dubious. He also notes that the Air Force did not seem to have moved logistical support into the war theater that would have enabled it to carry out the industrial-scale use of bioweapons it was being accused of. There were, he writes, “no teams of trained Air Force germ handlers, no stockpiles of mass-produced weaponry, no large refrigerated lockers to hold perishable agents.”
Nevertheless, as Baker goes through the documents he can access, he develops a theory that something did happen, that America’s communist accusers were not simply making it all up. And he is right that Twining’s Project Baseless memo—showing, as it does, active and high-level consideration of deploying germ bombs just months before the accusations began—is certainly curious.
Baker’s discussion of this memo is just one of many such suggestive curiosities he shakes out of his proverbial research notebook to fill this nearly 400-page book. Most diary entries open with a word about what he says he was doing on that particular day—usually something gentle, like lying in bed, having dinner with his wife, attending a Quaker meeting, or walking through nature with their dogs. Then it pivots swiftly into a deep dive on a particular memo or project from the documentary evidence that has been made available.
Baker mixes in sketches of various creepy scientists who devoted their talents to weaponizing diseases, as well as to potential delivery devices, such as bombs stuffed with infected insects or feathers. As such, Baseless is less a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end than a mosaic that forms a picture as individual tiles are added here and there, gradually accumulating into a detailed history of the United States’ bioweapons research shortly after World War II.
But simply recounting a history of early Cold War American bioweapons research was not, of course, Baker’s original goal: He had set out to prove his hunch that the United States had secretly used some of those weapons on the battlefield, the proof for which he believes resides in the gaps in the documentary record—the files that are still kept locked away and the paragraphs that have been removed from those the government permits the public to see. “Redaction,” Baker writes, is “a form of psychological warfare directed against historians, a way of wearing people down and making them go away.”
As a reporter for The New York Times, I have been a frequent user of the Freedom of Information Act. With help from David McCraw, the newspaper’s lawyer, I have sued the federal government over and over—under administrations of both parties—in an attempt to force it to comply with FOIA and disclose information of public interest. Often, the result has been disappointment: Judges ruled that the documents I sought fell within one of several enumerated exceptions to the law, permitting the government to keep them secret. But sometimes the litigation worked. On certain occasions, after a case was filed and a Justice Department lawyer had to account for an agency’s recalcitrance before a judge, the government chose to turn over the records without further fuss to resolve the litigation, sometimes after a face-saving negotiation to narrow the request. More rarely, a court ordered the federal government to disclose something over its continued objections.
Through this patient and slow boring of holes via the judicial system, one can, as we did, use FOIA to drag things into the public light—secret memos about the targeted killing of an American citizen deemed a terrorist, previously classified files illustrating how post-9/11 National Security Agency surveillance programs skirted legal limits, internal FBI reports demonstrating that the bureau quietly cleared its agents of wrongdoing in at least 150 consecutive intentional shooting incidents over nearly 20 years, and e-mails showing the military’s awkward wrestling with what should happen if an aging detainee at Guantánamo needed lifesaving medical care that the remote naval base couldn’t provide, among many other newsworthy subjects. Through these experiences, I have learned a lesson that does not seem to occur to Baker, despite his years of frustrations: With very few exceptions, simply filing a FOIA request does not work. If one has any hope of extracting a document in a timely fashion, it is necessary to follow up on the request by filing a lawsuit.
Without leveraging the legal system to force the government to comply with the law, FOIA is indeed, as Baker portrays it, useless and toothless. While the law says an information act request must be processed within 20 working days, a backlog of requests clogs the queue, and there are not enough officials assigned to process them. Often the most interesting documents require a review and sign-off by multiple agencies, creating additional opportunities for bureaucratic slow-rolling. Absent litigation, it is routine for years to pass, and the government, if pressed, will claim that a given request has not yet reached the top of the queue. But a lawsuit changes everything. A judge imposes deadlines to respond and, at least in theory, can overrule a bureaucrat who claims things must remain secret without an adequate basis, thereby deterring unjustified delay and overclassification.
But, despite passionately pursuing his research for years and despite deciding to make lemonade out of his sour experience by transforming his failure to get answers into a book that is partly about the shortcomings of FOIA, Baker does not seem to have seriously considered trying litigation. The closest he comes in the book to filing a lawsuit is a passing remark in a section about how he had been waiting for seven years for a particular document that still did not come: “So what should I do? Write more letters? Sue the Air Force? Sue the National Archives? Give up? Do these particular Pentagon memos even matter, when there are many thousands of declassified Korean War–era documents readily available to historians? I did the simplest thing. I sent another email.”
And so reading this book, much of which consists of creative extrapolations about what American officials might have done 70 years ago, I found myself wondering at this failure of imagination about what he could do. Why didn’t Baker reach out to one of the public interest organizations that provide free legal services to journalists and researchers with a righteous FOIA request and see if they would be interested in taking on his case? How can he publish a book that laments FOIA’s deficiencies—its subtitle is My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act—without doing what is necessary, if not always sufficient, to make that law work? It is as if he bought a car and then complained that it would not run without ever putting gas in its tank.
That said, it should not require litigation to successfully use a tool that an earlier generation of lawmakers created with the intent of enabling Americans broadly to bring to light information about what their government has been up to. And even with a lawsuit, my experience has shown that it is exceedingly difficult to get a judge to second-guess the government’s claim that a document is properly classified. Baker is certainly right about one thing: FOIA is broken.
Is Baker also right about bioweapons during the Korean War? The dispute over whether the US government really deployed weaponized germs in the conflict has been much argued over for generations, and Baker’s book relies heavily on the research of those who came before him—in particular, two Canadian historians, Stephen L. Endicott and Edward Hagerman, whose 1998 book The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets From the Early Cold War and Korea argues that the communist allegations were true. In a review in The New York Times, Ed Regis, the author of another book on America’s germ warfare efforts, criticized Endicott and Hagerman for failing to grapple with the strongest argument against their case: the findings that much of the evidence put forward by the communist regimes was fabricated.
Baker interviewed the two Canadian scholars in 2008 and eventually acquired boxes of their research files—including a military history of the Air Force’s biological weapons program from 1944 to 1951 that contained discussion of the Baseless directive, which Hagerman requested under FOIA in 1996 and was still fighting to finally get processed as late as 2012. Baker contends that they did not deserve the damage to their reputations caused by Regis’s review and by similar reactions from other historians who criticized their efforts. Without going as far as they do in their assertions, Baker clearly sees his efforts as a way to perhaps help vindicate them. He has some advantages, building on their research with additional documents that have become available in the intervening years. He is aided as well by the CIA’s subsequent posting of its old archives online, under pressure from a FOIA lawsuit, which removed major practical impediments to searching through masses of previously declassified historical files.
But Baker is also more careful in letting his readers know about facts that pose a challenge to his theory. He forthrightly acknowledges, for example, the lack of large-scale deployed capabilities and the fabrications of evidence. “The Russians, the North Koreans, and the Chinese all, at times, lied about what they’d found in the snow. That’s just a fact,” he writes, citing a 1953 memo by Russia’s secret police chief about simulating “two false regions of infection” for the purpose of “accusing the Americans of using bacteriological weapons in Korea and China.”
Against that backdrop, Baker’s hypothesis is more modest than those of some of the researchers who came before him. Specifically, he thinks that while the Air Force never operationalized a biological weapons program, there may have been “a small-scale, plausibly deniable” CIA operation “about which we have little so far on paper, but about which we have immense detail, very peculiar detail—perhaps too peculiar to be invented—from the Communists.” He speculates that “the CIA had tried out several germ-warfare experiments in a war zone, first late in 1950, and then in January and February 1952, and the Communists had discovered them almost immediately, launching in response a huge, coordinated propaganda campaign—a campaign that included some faked evidence.”
To that end, Baker also dedicates a considerable part of his book to recounting the various covert assassination attempts and other reckless actions the CIA engaged in during the early Cold War that were unrelated to biological warfare but are marked by a recurring pattern: US officials shamelessly lied about them at the time, but the truth came out eventually. His point in delving into that largely tangential material seems to be that it would be naive to take at face value the indignant denials by US officials of the era that none of those bioweapons were ever used.
Baker also argues that the reason some of the evidence the communists brought forward looked fake was that it was simultaneously fake and real. To discredit the bioweapons charges and demoralize the enemy, he speculates, the CIA may have arranged to drop what appeared to be carriers of disease, such as insects and voles, on North Korea and China—except that they were not infected with any biological agents and were instead a psychological warfare operation intended to deceive. “The North Koreans and the Chinese were telling the truth when they reported the bombs and the insects, it seems to me,” he writes, citing intercepted transmissions that show they were also making these claims internally, “but the Communists didn’t understand that it was primarily a terror weapon they were dealing with, and they exerted themselves to find the taint of disease where it wasn’t.”
In other words, Baker thinks that after the United States carried out a few limited but real tests of germ warfare, it followed that act by dropping inert materials that created the appearance of a more widespread campaign. That prompted an extensive search for bioweapons by communist forces—one that, after failing to turn up hard proof, led them to fabricate evidence. Reading this theory, I was reminded of the tangle that emerged from the notorious O.J. Simpson murder investigation and trial. One way to make sense of the clashing narratives and evidence was that it could be simultaneously true that Simpson murdered his ex-wife and her friend and that a police detective planted false evidence in a misguided and corrupt bid to ensure that a righteous case would hold up in court—in essence, framing a guilty man.
It’s an intriguing thesis, and Baker is usually careful not to go too far in putting it forward, leavening his analysis with regular signs that he doesn’t really know whether there is anything to this, such as a sentence that begins “I think maybe.” But in some places, he undercuts the persuasiveness of his analytical judgment by revealing that he is prone to see conspiracies all over the place, such as when he casually asserts at one point that “rabbit fever, Q fever, bird flu, Lyme disease, wheat stem rust, African swine fever, and hog cholera all look, to my nonscientist’s eye, like unnatural epidemics that owe their outbreaks to the laboratory” rather than to nature. (He speculates that these diseases generally got out of labs by accident, not that they were deliberate attacks.)
Despite such occasional lapses of self-awareness, Baker the person, interesting and imperfect as are we all in our own ways, rises from the pages of Baseless with a generally firm understanding that he has produced a very strange book. “I lay in bed some of today reading more of this book, hating it, excited by it, embarrassed by it,” he writes toward the end of Baseless, adding of his theory, “You may not be convinced, but that’s okay. My aim is to open the files, not necessarily to convince.”
That is the thought that fuses Baker’s original project, an intended exposé about what happened with germs and insects during the Korean War, to the lamentation about the frustrating shortcomings of FOIA that it morphed into. For Baker, ultimately what we need is far more transparency—a system that better enables Americans to drag information about their government into the light. After recounting how Hagerman lost a protracted battle to get censored passages restored to a certain perhaps (or perhaps not) key document, he describes how he renewed Hagerman’s request but heard nothing back after two years. “What happened, I think,” Baker writes, “was that the redacteur whited out any paragraph in the document that connected events in the Far East with the Air Force’s development program for biological warfare. I could be completely wrong. The only way to prove me wrong is by declassifying the entire document.”