It is a truism of American history: The farmland of the Midwest was so rich that when the railroad and mechanical farm equipment arrived the region became the breadbasket of the nation.
Yes, the “amazing fertility of the prairies” provides food for the entire country—and much of the world.[1]
However, it took more than railroads and the McCormick reaper.
In his book Nature’s Metropolis historian William Cronon hints at the problem facing a pioneering farmer in Missouri or Illinois in the early 19th century. “[The] flatness of the prairies subjected lowland areas to bad drainage and flooding.” An 1831 guide for newly-arrived farmers warned them to select their land carefully—flat land that looked good in the dry season could become a swamp when the rains came.[2]
In other words, what we romantically call wetlands (and often try to preserve) were the bane of the agricultural pioneer in the Midwest. “Farmers tried to settle far enough from floodplains and wet prairies to avoid bad drainage, but they also needed to be near enough to a stream course to obtain supplies of wood and water,” writes Cronon. [3]
As long as there was a lot of land for sale, farmers could cope—often it “was cheaper to buy a new farm than to drain the farm one already owned,” one historian wrote in 1909. [4]
When I began looking into the defeat of the Japanese in World War II, I was surprised to find so much written about the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviet Union was a major factor in the war against the Germans—it lost more soldiers than any other country in the war.
But how important was the USSR in the Pacific? Quite important, as it turns out. The Soviet Union, the atomic bomb, and the potential invasion of Japan all were tightly entwined in the decisions made in the last days of the war.
This is my third and final post on the American decision to use the atom bomb. I’m not trying to judge the decision. As an educated layperson looking freshly at history, I just want to understand it.
In my first post I pointed out that President Truman knew nothing about the bomb until Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. The bomb was used less than four months later. Thus, it had enormous momentum and would have been difficult to stop. (Given how ill Roosevelt was, it is strange that he did not inform his vice president of such a major event; one historian calls this failure “disgraceful.”)[1]
In the second post I discussed whether the U. S. demand for unconditional surrender kept the Japanese from surrendering. This remains a genuine question. Had the Americans assured the Japanese that the emperor could remain in his position, the “peace party” in Japan would have been even more eager to end the war.
However, the enormous resistance (and prominence) of the “war party”—even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed and the emperor had prepared a surrender statement—weakens this otherwise persuasive claim. A violent coup to stop the emperor’s surrender statement from being broadcast to the public was almost successful; a general was killed in cold blood and another committed ritual suicide. [2]
The bombing of civilians in Ukraine and talk of tactical nuclear weapons puts us in mind of the original atom bomb, dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.
This is the second of my three posts attempting to think freshly about the factors that led Harry Truman to choose to detonate that devastating weapon. My first post dealt with Truman’s unfamiliarity with a job held by his predecessor for 16 years and his ignorance of the Manhattan Project.
This post will look at the role, if any, played by “unconditional surrender.”
A country that surrenders unconditionally cannot expect any rights (other than those required by international conventions) or for its government to continue. The victor calls the shots. There is no negotiation.
Historians tend to write about the causes of events, not about whether those events should have happened. They don’t usually ask if the American colonists should have declared war against Britain or whether Robert E. Lee should have decided to lead the Confederate army.
But some subjects are so momentous that historians have difficulty avoiding moral questions. That is the case with Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, a decision that continues to be controversial.
According to Tsoyushi Hasegawa, there has long been a debate between orthodox historians and revisionists. The former argue that it was necessary in order to avoid the loss of thousands of lives in an invasion of Japan. The latter say it should not have been used because Japan was essentially defeated already and the actual purpose of the bombings was to send a message to Stalin.[1]
In this and two following posts I want to look afresh at some of the elements that fed into Truman’s decision. I do not attempt to decide whether Truman should have authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although I may help some readers think about it. Continue reading “A President’s Troubling Surprise: The Manhattan Project”
The United States went through a devastating civil war to end slavery—the deadliest war in American history. Have you ever thought about how the British ended slavery in their Caribbean possessions such as Barbados and Jamaica?
The answer is, in a word, “peacefully.” It happened fifteen years before our 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and 17 years before the end of our Civil War.
I don’t mean to gloss over the turmoil—there were major slave revolts in British territories before the Emancipation Act was adopted in 1833, and full emancipation did not arrive until 1838. From 1787, when the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was created (mostly by Quakers), protests against the slave trade in Britain were fierce, long-lasting, and initially futile.
