Did the “Vietnam syndrome” affect how historians viewed the U.S. Civil War? Here’s an argument that it did.
But first, recognize that historians have mixed feelings about the present. On the one hand, today’s issues can shed light on the past because “each generation asks a different set of questions.”[1] On the other, they can lead to presentism—reshaping the past by imposing today’s viewpoints.
I’m always on the lookout for such interplays. And that may have happened with the post-Vietnam era. I just learned that in 2002 the prominent Civil War historian Brian Holden Reid argued that the Vietnam War reshaped historians’ understanding of the American Civil War. [2] Reid’s article appeared in the journal of a British military-security think tank.
Of course, thousands of pages—thousands of books, perhaps—have been written trying to explain why the North won and the South lost. A major trope used to be that the North initially failed to win because it lacked bold generals willing to take their troops into battle—until Ulysses S. Grant was appointed commanding general.
Can history help us understand today’s panic over global warming? I believe so.
I do think we are experiencing panic. While the Earth is warming and human activity is probably contributing to it, the overheated efforts to make people fear the long-term future suggest that this is more of a crusade than a rationally considered enterprise. Extreme fear of global warming is negatively affecting politics, the economy, the media, international relations, and education.
I will look at two disastrous periods that have some resemblance to today’s craze: witchcraft fears in the Middle Ages and the eugenics movement of the 1930s. I am not alone in making these comparisons to climate change alarm , as you will see. [1]
But first, bear with me as I report on some of the efforts to ignore or squelch criticism of the prevailing apocalyptic approach. These efforts are inappropriate, even unethical. Then I will discuss the two previous outsized eras. Continue reading “Climate Change and the “Madness of Crowds””
I’m skeptical. Not that they won’t find out what happened—they may well do that—but whether it makes any difference depends on politics. If the politics are with them they will have an impact; if not, they won’t.
I’m going to illustrate my point by sharing the history of a massive congressional investigation that took place 78 years ago. It was a whopper. The investigation went on for six and a half months and the testimony took up 39 volumes. So what happened? The majority party signed the report; the minority party dissented. Nothing much changed, except for the lives of some who were barred or discouraged from testifying and the cryptologist who bore the mental scars of trying to get the facts out for the rest of his life—and undoubtedly some others I don’t know about.
Today I’m going to summarize three articles on historical issues. One article critiques historians’ rankings of U. S. presidents; one looks at a 1752 essay by David Hume and sees insights into the Ukraine war; and the third explains why most of the theories of economic development since World War II have fallen into the dustbin of history (I wrote that last one).
Are Presidential Rankings Biased?
It is something of an event every few years when the C-Span TV network or the American Political Science Association (APSA) reports on a new assessment of American presidents. The C-Span version relies primarily on historians, the APSA on political scientists, but their evaluations are similar. To give you a flavor, the latest rankings by both organizations have the same top four presidents: Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. C-Span rates Eisenhower and Truman as no. 5 and 6; APSA chose Thomas Jefferson as no. 5 and Truman as no. 6.
Since I haven’t had many deep thoughts lately, I want to share with you some essays about history that have caught my attention. In this case, the history is pretty recent—it’s about the late Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001.
When I was an economics editor at Business Week in the 1980s, Jack Welch was becoming a legend. My editor-in-chief admired him, talked with him a lot, and featured him as a speaker at magazine functions. In 1999, Fortune called him the “manager of the century.” He was bold, smart, and unafraid.
But did he bring General Electric down?
General Electric was founded by Thomas Edison and J. P. Morgan in 1892. It developed a ubiquitous brand name and seemed to “own” the field of electric appliances.
By 1981, however, when Welch became CEO, it lacked vigor. It was a $12 billion company, but stodgy and bureaucratic. Welch attacked that bureaucracy, laid off workers, and started acquiring companies. When Welch left in 2001 the company was worth $600 billion and in terms of revenues was the fifth-largest company in the U.S.
