Steve Golin—The Fragile Bridge

Steve Golin
The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913
(1988)

[18] Paterson manufacturers suffered the cost of hiring experienced, skilled help, with all its attendant labor problems, because they had no good alternative. As the advertisement of a bankrupt manufacturer put it tactfully in 1913, "While this labor is more or less of an agitative character and at times unruly, yet this is due to the fact of its skilled character." ...the cost of training unskilled workers to weave even the plainer silks was very high because damage to the material was both frequent and expensive.

John Wertheimer—Mutual Film Reviewed

John Wertheimer
" Mutual Film Reviewed: The Movies, Censorship, and Free Speech in Progressive America"
(1993)

[160] the nation's highest tribunal brushed aside the Mutual's claim to freedom of speech and of the press on the grounds that films did not qualify for such protection: "It cannot be put out of view," Justice McKenna wrote, "that the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit." As such, movies were "not to be regarded, nor [were they] intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country." The bald fact that most newspapers, books, and other "part[s] of the press of the country" were also "originated and conducted for profit" seemed not to matter to the judges. ...

At the time, the Court's decision in the Mutual Film case met with general if not universal approval from the legal community. ...[e.g.] The Central Law Journal, which also endorsed the Court's decision, pointed out that because moving pictures appealed to "the other senses than the intellectual sense," they had no legitimate claim to freedom of the press.

But as the years passed, and as American opinion makers grew increasingly fond of both films and the First Amendment, support for the Mutual Film decision dried up and gave way to criticism.

...

[161] In English law, from which American law derived, advance censorship of theaters and shows was both widely practiced and widely accepted for centuries prior to 1915. The history of the censorship of public amusements in England extends at least as far back as the sixteenth century. ...

[162] One may wonder at the widespread acquiescence of the English people in this state of affairs more easily than one may doubt it. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Sir William Blackstone and others condemned prior restraints on the press as unacceptable infringements on English liberties, neither Blackstone nor any other notable English commentator applied similar logic to works of the theater. Owing perhaps to the popular belief that the stage possessed an extraordinary power to influence morals, "nearly everyone" in England accepted as legitimate the system of advance censorship established by statute in 1737. ...

It remains possible, however, that the United States, with its written constitutions, its Bills of Rights, and its free-speech traditions walked a freer path than did England... The lawyers for the Mutual Film Corporation certainly thought so. ... A glance at the past, however, reveals that although the stage may have been freer in America than it was in contemporary England or Europe, the Mutual's lawyers' faith in the American heritage of liberty was blind. The American past was replete with prior restraints on theatrical expression. Moreover, and just as significantly, prior to the Mutual Film Corporation's lawyers themselves, scarcely anyone in America had thought to argue that the governmental control of public amusements raised constitutional free-speech issues.

...

[163] Although theatrical bans passed through cycles of passage, expiration or repeal, and reinstatement, and although enforcement of such measures was inconsistent, the fact remains that prior constraints on theatrical exhibitions had long roots in American soil.

...

Some level of official control over the content of theatrical amusements persisted through the nineteenth centure and into the twentieth. A few states continued the colonial practice of banning all theatrical performances outright. ... More common than complete proscription, however, were two-tiered regulation mechanisms in which some sorts of shows were banned entirely while all other sorts had to be licensed in advance.

...

[165] Did these nineteenth-century laws licensing and prohibiting theatrical shows in advance violate American constitutional speech and press guarantees? More important than any answer is the observation that this was a question that nobody at the time thought to ask...

[emailed to self, 26 March 2021]

Representativeness Heuristics and Fallacies

Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type
(1965)

[xvi] I am much less interested, in short, in praising or condemning the new radicalism than in understanding where it came from. Even the effort to understand where it came from, unfortunately, will strike some readers as an insidious attempt to discredit the ideas of radicals and reformers by "psychologizing" them away. For some people, it is enough to say the reformers were moved by the spectacle of human injustice; to say anything more is to deny the fact of injustice. I am unable to understand this argument, nor do I know quite how to meet it (since I cannot understand it), except to say that the reformers themselves did not share this reluctance of their admirers to examine their own motives. They wrote about their motives with all the enthusiasm, and all the honesty, with which they wrote about social injustice, and I have relied very heavily on what they wrote.

If only the artists could be lucky enough to have their utterances taken seriously rather than psychologized away.

Of course it would be possible to ignore what they wrote about themselves, and to write instead
[xvii]
about the evils of capitalism.

It would also be possible, later, to dismiss what they wrote about themselves and to tortuously/torturously explicate the psychological grounds for this dismissal. Of the artists, that is.

But that is not the book I have chosen to write. I have written instead about some of the critics of capitalism, in the hope that their history would tell something, if not specifically about capitalism, about the peculiarly fragmented character of modern society, and beyond that, about what it means to pursue the life of reason in a world in which the irrational has come to appear not the exception but the rule.

Not only the scope and design of this study but its method needs a word of explanation. I have chosen to approach the new radicalism chiefly by means of a series of biographical essays, although I know that for a social historian to proceed in this way is almost to invite misunderstanding. The connection between biography and history is never altogether clear, and it is especially obscure in the case of social history. The political historian can justify the study of notable men by reference to their influence on events, the literary historian by reference to the intrinsic value of their works. For the social historian such considerations are ruled out from the start.

Well, the social does, in a sense, trump everything else, formal literature and politics included; hence these other historians are not so free as the author here supposes, or not unless they are laser-focused on the parochial, internal dealings of their fields.

His subject is the social structure, the people he writes about are often anonymous, and if he ventures on biography at all, it must be—so it would seem—with the excuse that his subjects are "representative men." By taking this position, however, he lays himself open to the objection that a representative man is a contradiction in terms; for is not a human being, by reason of all that makes him human, something unique?

Well, yes! Another rejoinder duly noted.

Obliquely, the larger point is this: representative conclusions are answers only to very particular questions. The more broadly representative the pretensions, the less interesting and more tenuous such theses tend to become.

And, the point of this point is not simply to dine out on the intractable complexity of contemporary societies or the ultimate uniqueness of individuals. It is, rather, that the kind and quantity of information that a person can make profitable use of is not nearly so variable or complex a question as is psychology or sociology writ large. As complex as people are, we have not changed nearly as much as has "society," most especially in its now-infamous tendency to generate more information than anyone can use.

The subjects of this book were chosen in deliberate violation of the notion that a social historian ought to write about people "typical of their times." One of them was a hunchbacked dwarf, another an extremely neurotic woman with an irregular emotional history, another a counselor to Presidents. All of them were extremely articulate people—a fact which further sets
[xviii]
them off from the run of humankind. But it is this very fact, though it further distinguishes them, which makes up their value to the study of the history of American society. They articulated experiences which, whether or not they were representative experiences in the sense of being widely shared by others, were nevertheless representative in another sense: they could only have happened at a particular place at a particular time. Some experiences are archetypal: men undergo them simply because they are human, the experiences are inherent in the human condition. But others are closely rooted in a social context, and by listening carefully to what people say about them, one can sometimes learn more about a given society than by more formal sociological analysis.

Compare to W. Stephenson's contention that, even within the realm of formal sociological analysis, he could learn mo-betta from in-depth study of a few subjects rather than relying on the brute force of sample size.

(On which point, from Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism...

[34] Psychoanalysis best clarifies the connection between society and the individual, culture and personality, precisely when it confines itself to careful examination of individuals. It tells us most about society when it is least determined to do so. Freud's extrapolation of psychoanalytic principles into anthropology, history, and biography can be safely ignored by the student of society, but his clinical investigations constitute a storehouse of indispensable ideas, once it is understood that the unconscious mind represents the modification of nature by culture, the imposition of civilization on instinct.

...

[35, footnote] "On...its home ground," Adorno added, psychoanalysis carries specific conviction; the further it removes itself from that sphere, the more its theses are threatened alternately with shallowness or wild over-systematiztion. If someone makes a slip of the tongue and a sexually loaded word comes out, if someone suffers from agoraphobia or if a girl walks in her sleep, psychoanalysis not merely has its best chances of therapeutic success but also its proper province, the relatively autonomous, monadological individual as arena of the unconscious conflict between instinctual drive and prohobition. The further it departs from this area, the more tyrannically it has to proceed and the more it has to drag what belongs to the dimension of outer reality into the shades of psychic immanence. Its delusion in doing so is not dissimilar from that 'omnipotence of thought' which it itself criticized as infantile."

)

Incidentally, the elder Freudian Lasch can fairly be said to have dispensed, at one time or another, with all of the caveats raised by his younger self here, to where the weaknesses of The Minimal Self are pointed up rather starkly by the passages above despite bearing the same author's name. If nothing else, this itself points up a further limit of the "psychologizing" turn, of the proffering of psychology as the missing link in the epistemological chain between biography and history: people are complicated and, one might dare say, protean.

Lasch—Circs Not Likely To Be Repeated

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[154]
The more the grand structure of Marx's theory has to be modified to allow for "exceptions," the less it explains. The entire history of capital-
[155]
ism in the West now has to be seen not as a stage in a rigid sequence of developmental stages—as it was seen not only by Marx but by the nineteenth-century sociologists as well—but as the product of a particular history, a unique conjunction of circumstances unprecedented elsewhere in the world and not likely to be repeated. A growing awareness that modern capitalism rests on a "particular history of political victories and defeats," in the words of Roberto Unger, and that these victories and defeats can no longer be dismissed as the mere enactment of a preestablished design," has generated growing dissatisfaction with "deep-structure social theories" in general, as Unger calls them, including not only Marxism but classical sociology and its twentieth-century offshoots. The "deeply entrenched necessitarian habits of thought" associated with the sociological tradition have by no means disappeared, as Charles Sabel reminds us; but they have become increasingly hard to defend.

One of the many difficulties that confront structural theories of history is the achievement of "modernization" under conservative direction—for example, in twentieth-century Japan, in later-nineteenth-century Germany under Bismarck, even to some extent in nineteenth-century England under Disraeli. Industrialism, it appears, can take place without a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and political power. Social theorists in the nineteenth century almost all shared the belief, stated in its classic form in Tocqueville's study of American democracy, that the "irresistable" growth of equality had "all the chief characteristics" of a "providential fact," since it was "universal" and "durable" and "eluded all human interference." They argued about whether equality was consistent with order and freedom, but most of them agreed with Tocqueville that "the revolution . . . in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men" was giving rise to a new order in which "great wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to increase; desires and gratifications are multiplied, but extraordinary prosperity and irremediable penury are alike unknown"—in short, to a condition of "universal uniformity."

[155]
Here again, history has not lived up to expectations. Even if we ignore the persistence of inequality in the United States and Western Europe, the coexistence of industrial development with many features of "traditional" social organization, in a fully-developed country like Japan or in many of the developing countries elsewhere in the world, tends to undermine the assumption that industrialization and democracy go hand in hand. Forced to admit that economic development can take place under reactionary regimes, "without a popular revolutionary upheaval," Barrington Moore and other neo-Marxists have argued that a unilinear model of development has to give way to a more complex and flexible model. In opposition to "simplified versions of Marxism," they have called attention to the "Prussian road" as an alternative to the road followed by England, France, and the United States. "Conservative modernization" nevertheless remains an aberrant pattern, in their view. The lingering influence of structuralist habits of thought betrays itself in this formulation, since a deviant pattern of development implies a normal pattern—a revolutionary seizure of power by groups formerly dispossessed, as opposed to a "revolution from above." It was because Germany and Japan never enjoyed the advantages of a bourgeois revolution, according to Moore, that they had to modernize under autocractic regimes and eventually developed into full-blown military dictatorships. The moral is clear: instead of deploring revolutions in developing nations, instead of siding with the forces of order, Americans should support revolutionary movements as the only alternative to the repressive pattern of development sponsored by the right-wing regimes. "For a western scholar to say a good word on behalf of revolutionary radicalism," Moore writes
[157]
with a good deal of exaggeration, " . . . runs counter to deeply grooved mental reflexes"; but an understanding of the "characteristic patterns of modernization" forces us to conclude that revolution is the better way.

That this conclusion rests on a tortured reading of history should be obvious at a glance. Early modern revolutions encouraged the growth of democracy, but the same cannot be said of the twentieth-century revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, and other developing nations. The more we learn about these matters, the less we are likely to believe in "characteristic patterns of modernization." If there is such a pattern. it is surely western Europe whose history deviates from the norm. The Bolsheviks thought of themselves as modern-day Jacobins, but their revolution did not reenact the revolution in France. It was no more democratic than the autocratic programs of development instituted in Germany and Japan. Theirs too was a "revolution from above," as was Mao's revolution in China and Castro's in Cuba. If we consider the history of economic development as a whole, we might well conclude that it has everywhere been imposed from above. Even in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, it was seldom greeted with enormous popular acclaim. On the contrary, it was greeted with enormous popular suspicion and often with open resistance.

Nor was this resistance—usually dismissed as mindless opposition to progress—necessarily misconceived. The subsequent history of industrial societies does not justify complacency about their capacity to assure an equitable distribution of the fruits of increased productivity. The relationship between industrialism and democracy looks more and more tenuous and problematical. If we insist on a law of historical development, we might be justified in concluding that "societies based on large-unit production have a verifiable historical tendency to become increasingly . . . hierarchical over time," in the words of Lawrence Goodwyn. "Supporting evidence is so pervasive," Goodwyn adds, "that this may now be taken as law"—a "direct counter-premise to the idea of progress."

...

[162]
The concept of modernization no longer dominates the study of economic development in the non-Western world; but the conceptually seductive images with which it is associated still color the West's view of its own history. ...

"Modernization theory, the critics say, ignores the independent role of
[163]
the state in social change. It treats the state merely as a product of underlying social forces, ignoring its capacity for autonomous initiative. The theory underestimates the importance of political conflicts in determining the course of historical events. It puts too much emphasis on internal forces in developing countries and overlooks the extent to which the early advantages seized by the West rested on the exploitation of colonial possessions. Military conquest underlay economic expansion in the sixteenth century, and the discipline required by large-scale industrial organizations was first worked out in military establishments and only later applied to the factory. The modern state's dependence on military power may help to explain the continuing influence exercised by the nobility, allegedly displaced by the rise of commerce and industry. Those who adhere to the modernization model have no way of accounting either for the persistence of traditional elites or for the resilience of traditional institutions like the extended family. The coexistence of traditional and modern elements undermines the claim that modernization is a "systematic" process. It now appears to be a highly selective process; and this discovery parallels the growing recognition that progress in technology, say, does not necessarily entail progress in morals or politics.

Nancy Isenberg—Liberty and Freedom Meant Different Things

Nancy Isenberg
White Trash: The 400-Year Old Untold History
of Class in America (2016)

p. 75 -- "Franklin certainly never endorsed social mobility as we think of it today, despite his own experience."

pp. 81-82 -- "Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees."

p. 85 -- "[Jefferson] called the new western domain an "empire for liberty," by which he meant something other than a free-market economy or a guarantee of social mobility."

Ostensibly, then, the broader objective throughout this part of the book is to restore to various figures, documents, and events the historical context which ensuing centuries of reductionism and ideology have gradually eroded. I must confess, though, that even (or especially) after a second pass, I really need her to say more about each of these interpretations. (Start with the fact that that's what they are.) And if it is as simple as three colonial-era ivory tower dwellers "reveling in rhetorical obfuscation" (p. 86 re: Jefferson specifically, though frankly I wonder if this isn't an apt criticism in all three cases), then this needs to be made more clear.

I would say as well that the laying bare of, variously, Franklin's hypocrisy, Paine's charlatanism, and Jefferson's rhetorical obfuscation is an exercise which, notwithstanding any visceral satisfaction it might provide for cynics (among which I proudly count myself here), is inherently more biographical than historical. Did these conceptions have legs? What countervailing position(s) emerged? And how and to what extent were these various positions, as Erich Fromm might have asked, "socially patterned?" This is a tall order of course, but without its fulfillment I'm left with a vague aftertaste of Great Man Theory. As "elites," perhaps these were, in the long run, influential thinkers; but given the topic of the book, one must wonder as well how representative they truly were.

The story of Oglethorpe and Georgia was new to me, and perhaps only because it was new did I come away from that chapter with fewer concerns about the overall narrative being spun. But by the end of Chapter 4 it certainly has become clear that this is a series of case studies more than a comprehensive account. I'm not oblivious to the many factors which tend to push an author in that direction; I've just evolved into an all-or-nothing reader, hence I would have been game for an exhaustive study.

[from a Goodreads post, 2017]