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A President’s Troubling Surprise: The Manhattan Project

Atom bomb

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”

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Why Didn’t the U.S. Free the Slaves the Way Britain Did?

West Indies

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.

But by 1838 all former slaves in the British possessions were free—without a widespread war. Continue reading “Why Didn’t the U.S. Free the Slaves the Way Britain Did?”

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The Southern Defense of Slavery Shifted. Civil War Followed.

Pro-slavery broadside

Recent “woke” campaigns have raised a legitimate question: How could the founders of our country espouse the ideals of freedom, especially in the Declaration of Independence, and still support slavery?

A related question (not so often asked by critical theorists) is: How did the country ultimately conduct a deadly war (with 600,000 combatants killed) to end slavery?

Two related essays shed light on both questions. One is by Jeffrey D. Grynaviski and Michael Munger, the other by Michael Munger and Daniel Klein.[1]

The argument reflected in these essays is that ideological, emotional, and political support for slavery changed over time. Southern founders such as Washington and Jefferson believed that slavery was a “necessary evil,” but a  temporary one. Beginning around 1830 (after most if not all the founders were dead) Southern elites argued instead that slavery was a “positive good.” The development of what Grynaviski and Munger call institutional racism was a “conscious project of ideological reconstruction.”[2]

Continue reading “The Southern Defense of Slavery Shifted. Civil War Followed.”

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Was Mikhail Gorbachev a Hero? Yes.

Reagan and Gorbachev

“The West likes him. The people of Russia, not so much.” That has been a theme in tributes to Mikhail Gorbachev,  the former head of the Soviet Union, who died yesterday, August 30.

You may know more about Gorbachev than I did a few years ago when I wrote a paper about him for a class about modern European history.  But perhaps sharing some of the history I learned will reveal why the West is grateful to him, even if the people of Russia  are not.

Gorbachev never intended to break up the Soviet Union. He simply didn’t know that perestroika (restructuring the USSR’s economy) and glasnost (openness of speech) would result in cataclysmic change. Continue reading “Was Mikhail Gorbachev a Hero? Yes.”

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The Secret Behind Our Legacy of Magnificent Music

Leopold Mozart family

In 1772, Joseph Haydn and his musicians were spending a long summer performing at the country retreat of Hungary’s Prince Esterhazy. The musicians were restless and wanted to go home, but Esterhazy expected them to stay there as long as he did.

To change the prince’s mind, Haydn wrote a symphony. In the finale, each player, one by one, ends his music, snuffs out his candle, and exits—until only two violinists are left (one being Haydn) to quietly end the piece. Now known as the Farewell Symphony, it persuaded Esterhazy to release the troupe. [1]

The prince’s failed effort to control the musicians was about as heavy-handed as European governments got with respect to music in those glorious days between, say, 1700 and 1820. (Think, from Vivaldi and Telemann to Mozart and Beethoven.) The results were magnificent.

Over that period musical performances were enriched and diversified on multiple dimensions. The piano replaced the harpsichord, the cello replaced the bass viola da gamba, Bach brought the organ’s sounds to new heights—to mention just a few changes. Ways to share music—orchestras, quartets, sonatas, concertos, oratorios, and operas—proliferated.  The styles we know as Baroque, Classical, and Romantic began to solidify, and the stunning masterpieces that we love today emerged.

It was not planned, it was not forced, it was not “orchestrated.” It was, as Friedrich Hayek said about the world-wide economy, a spontaneous order. Continue reading “The Secret Behind Our Legacy of Magnificent Music”