What I Learned from The Conquering Tide by Ian Toll

The easiest way to tell who was going to win the war in the Pacific was to look at a map. Japan a tiny island with few natural resources. The United States of America, one of the largest countries in the world with what, at the time, seemed like an endless supply of industrial resources. There were only two possible ways Japan had a chance: the first was to maintain, throughout the entire war, their hold on resource-rich conquered territory and the logistics to transport those resources great distances through contested waters, and the second was to deal the United States some kind of early defeat that would convince them to avoid war all together. And so the fundamental idea of Pearl Harbor was that the attack would so psychologically devastating the Americans that they would sign a treaty right away. When the US didn't, the war was essentially over.

That said, there were points in the war, especially early on, where Japan might have been able to create a stronger position for themselves at the negotiating table. A different outcome at Midway for example, or a series of strategic or tactical successes that slowed island-hopping. Or even establishing a strong enough final defense line to discourage an assault on Japan itself. (Of course, that strategy would be rendered obsolete.) Since the U.S was far from perfect in its execution of the war and Japan did enjoy early, and sometimes overwhelming success, why were they unable to create this stronger position? According to The Conquering Tide, the second volume in Ian Toll's definitive history of the war in the Pacific, a key factor was racism.

Those who favored a war with the United States believed that Americans were too soft to handle war. We were too decadent, too rich, and too lazy. We wouldn't put in the effort and we couldn't handle the hardship of war. We were fat. We were weak. We could not withstand the Japanese fighting spirit. The most definitive demonstration of just how ingrained this belief was and how destructive it was to the Japanese war effort was their response to U.S. submarine warfare.

They didn't have one. Despite relying on supplies from overseas territories, the Japanese never developed any kind of anti-submarine tactics or technologies besides depth charges. For a while, U.S. submarine technology, especially the torpedoes, were ineffective, but once those mechanical problems were solved, submarines crippled Japanese shipping, greatly limiting Japan's ability to wage war. Oil tanker after oil tanker was sunk and yet Japan did nothing. Why? They simply didn't believe Americans had the fortitude to endure the privations of submarine warfare.

Nor did the Japanese believe Americans were brave enough to withstand an aggressive frontal assault, no matter how entrenched their defenses were. They assumed, Americans would run from charging Japanese warriors. So in battle after battle, the Japanese wasted thousands of lives on frontal assaults on entrenched defensive positions. They could never seem to learn that Americans with machine guns in trenches and bunkers don't flee. No soldiers with machine guns in trenches and bunkers flee.

What made Pacific Crucible, the first volume in Toll's trilogy, so brilliant was Toll's ability to move back and forth from the most powerful to the least powerful actors. He could tell the story of an enlisted soldier, with as much respect and dignity as he told the story of Roosevelt and Churchill. He was able to give the board rooms and intelligence offices the same weight as the battlefield and the aircraft carrier. He was able to show how the old ways of thinking about war changed or didn't in response to the new technologies of war.

But the story in the Pacific changed after Midway. If the war wasn't over at Pearl Harbor it was certainly over after Midway and it was just a matter of the United States rolling through the rest of the Pacific, like a, well, I guess you'd say like a “conquering tide.” Sometimes this can give the book a plodding, almost punching-the-clock tone and pace. Pick an island, bomb the every-loving fuck out of it, send in the Marines, ease and navigate inter-branch conflict and rivalry, rinse and repeat. But Toll is an historian, not a novelist, and so it feels plodding because it was plodding. But there was always something in that rinse and repeat, always risk and conflict, always death and suffering, and so, as we're punching the clock, Toll never lets us forget we are punching the clock in war.

In some ways, works of history shouldn't have a lot of suspense. I mean, we know how the war in the Pacific ends. But knowing the war ends doesn't mean agreeing on everything about the war. I have long believed the use of nuclear weapons on Japan was unnecessary, that it was far less about achieving victory over Japan as it was waving our dick at Russia. But I'm a lefty-commie-pinko-hippy whatever. But, given how lopsided the victories for the U.S. were after Midway and especially after Guadalacanal, and given how depleted Japanese military resources were, and how clear Toll is in this volume about the state of Japan's ability to wage war, I can't imagine Toll coming to anything other than the same conclusion. It's one thing to read this idea in Howard Zinn, who intentionally set out to offer a different perspective on American history but to see it in a definitive history, especially as so many politicians rabidly cling to the idea of American exceptionalism. would be significant. I was going to read the third volume regardless, because Toll is a fantastic historian, but this odd sense of political suspense makes me downright impatient.

Empathy and Error: What I Learned from 1493

1491 by Charles Mann is an eye-opening work of history. Using relatively recent archaeological data and written from the perspective that maybe contemporary European conquerors wouldn't have the most subjective opinion, it argues that there was a lot more civilization in the Western Hemisphere before Europeans arrived than we've always believed. The essential point is that European viruses traveled through native civilizations faster than European observes, and so, often, what the Europeans encountered were not typical native cities and villages, but societies on the brink of collapse from epidemics. 1493 looks forward from the moment of contact, again with the goal of telling the stories neglected by previous histories. Much like the work of Howard Zinn, Mann writes with the understanding that all history is written from a perspective, and that, in order to approach the truth of history, different perspectives must be considered. Here are a few of the things I learned from 1493.

Chili in it's natural state.

Weeds Are Plants We Don't Know How to Use: One of the first assumptions Europeans made when they first landed in the Western Hemisphere was that the land was uncultivated and the inhabitants were hunter gathers. From that assumption a whole bunch of others followed drawn from strict definitions and evaluations of “civilization.” That assumption, though, was based on a lack of information. Quite often, the fields and forests Europeans thought were wild, were just differently cultivated. A quick example is the “three sisters;” maize, beans, and squash. In a traditional field, the beans would grow up the maize stalks and the squash would grow along the ground amongst the rows. To Europeans used to clean rows of wheat and grain, a “three sisters” field would have looked, at best, like a badly weeded garden, and more likely, a wild field. In other words, even though they crossed an ocean and entered an entirely different climate, they held on to their definitions of cultivation. When what they saw did not match those definitions, they assumed what they saw was not cultivated. “Except for defensive palisades, Powhatan farmers had no fences around their fields...The English, by contrast, regarded well-tended fences as hallmarks of civilization...The lack of physical property demarcation signified to the English that Indians truly didn't occupy the land—it was, so to speak, unimproved.” (p61)


Of course, this myopia extends far beyond agriculture. European Christians couldn't fathom Indians had good reasons to reject Christianity and so they had to develop theories that explained why some Indians refused to assimilate. Racial inferiority is one of them. They couldn't grasp why their African slaves wouldn't want to work as hard as possible for them, so they needed a theory to explain slow downs, sabotage, and escapes. They decided Africans were lazy and treacherous. Perhaps the most radical display of this myopia is European attitudes towards the cities and colonies of escaped slaves that surrounded all the slave owning societies; many more in the Amazon and South America, fewer in North America and the United States. The point is not that there was constant conflict between the maroon cities or quilombos and Europeans, but that, at least as quoted and presented by Mann, the Europeans seemed to have no awareness of their role in the existence of maroons in the first place. Somehow, from the European perspective, maroons were an independent problem, only incidentally connected to African slavery.

Humans evolved a self-centered myopia because for most of human history we only saw ourselves and our societal extensions. We never needed to understand the experience of distant others in order to survive and so we never evolved the skill. Furthermore, for most of our history, all “others” were either food (edible animals), not-food (docile but inedible animals) or threats (dangerous animals and competing humans). As societies grew, more people encountered more “others.” Sometimes our evolved myopia dominated the interactions and sometimes humanity took a step towards a more diverse and empathic perspective. In some ways, the conflict at the heart of human progress has been against that myopia, not just directly, but in all of its invisible tendrils throughout our culture and mindsets. Another way to describe the bend toward justice the arc of history is supposedly taking, is as the step by step, culture by culture, group by group, person by person, extension of human empathy; not just our extension of knowledge, but an extension of the awareness that weeds are just plants we don't know how to use.

The “Scientific Method” is a Fancy Name for “Trial and Error Plus Writing the Trials and Errors Down:” Few problem solving techniques are as effective as hundred of years of trial and error. From that you get the Wacho or furrowed technique of growing potatoes in the Andes, which had its own expression in Ireland as the “lazy-bed” technique. Refined over thousands and hundreds of years, this technique had benefits beyond the observation of contemporary science, so contemporary science assumed it had no benefits. The result of scientific attempts to improve these techniques were disastrous.

The big mistake we made in humanity's scientific revolution is not realizing that we had always used the scientific method of trial and error. Every time we tried a new seed, a new technique, a new plot of land, a new couple of animals, we experimented just as we do today. The only difference was the lack of formal structure and recording technology made the pace of advancement much slower. But advance we did. The Enlightenment Mistake was to reject the data of lived technique. In a way, it goes back to the issue of myopia. Because the generations that preceded them did not have the same perspective on the physical world, Enlightenment thinkers assumed all of the previous ways were to be discarded.


Of course, the “Enlightenment Mistake” isn't limited to the historical Enlightenment. We saw the exact same thing happen in the early to mid 20th century in America. By the 1900s, Americans had been farming on this land for hundreds of years and had developed techniques for handling pests and managing soil and irrigation. Furthermore, because the techniques had developed over time, they were relatively incorporated into and with the landscape, and so had reached a relative balance with the environment. But once chemical pesticides and fertilizers were invented, it was assumed that none of the older techniques had any value. The result is the massively destructive industrial agricultural complex that we have today. (Oh, and the Dust Bowl that contributed to the Great Depression.) We knew how to grow food in America, and the addition of new substances and new techniques to that stable of knowledge could have certainly increased yield, but discarding the old techniques as worthless and replacing them en masse with new techniques that had not gone through hundreds of years of experimentation lead to ecological disaster.


And that, I think is the key to the “Enlightenment Mistake;” it's that not the old ways shouldn't be changed or improved, but that we should assume some value in those old ways, even if we do not understand what those specific values are, and introduce changes to those ways, rather than suddenly replacing them. Whether it was the introduction of a new technique or a new species, sudden change resulted in disaster; sometimes the disaster hit right away, as with the planting of maize in China and sometimes the disaster was displaced to, well, about now.

This is why you shouldn't complain about winter.

The Most Important Beings in Human Society Are Invisible: Absolutely everything would have been different if malaria could live in Europe.

Samurai in Mexico: Visual Approximation

There Were Samurai in Mexico: I don't have any thoughts about this except: “Fucking Awesome! Wait, someone call Quentin Tarantino. No, wait, that'd be derivative of himself. Call the Cohen Brothers!” I know, I know. Citation. “The Spaniards made an exception for samurai, allowing them to wield their katanas and tantos to protect their silver shipments against the escaped-slaves-turned-highwaymen in the hills.” (p414) Original source: Slack, E.R. 2009 “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image.” JWH 20:35-67.

Not Only Genius: Lessons from the Panama Canal

There's a reason why people buy David McCullough's books in bunches. Like all the best historians, he knows how to adjust the perspective of his work to move back and forth between the big, grand, abstract events that interest us and the mundane but tangible details that give those events meaning we can actually wrap our heads around. He also finds a nice balance between data and personality; the dates, numbers, documents, and figures, that are the substance of history and the characters that are the story of history.

A couple of weeks ago I had a hankering for a particular kind of book. Since my day job is satisfying such hankerings, it's pretty rare for me to struggle with one for any length of time. Usually I know what I want to read and have a stack of galleys that fit it. (New bookseller term “galleylag: reading the galley of a book after it's come out in paperback. Use it in a sentence today.) For reasons lost in the mysteries of consciousness, I wanted to read a big dense book of history that wasn't about war. You may or may not be surprised at how few books that really is. (Another book that would have worked, if I hadn't already read it would have been A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman). This hankering hung over me for a few days and its solution was met with an inordinate amount of relief. I would read Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 by David McCullough. Here's what I learned.

Just look at a world map. How could you not look at that tiny little sliver of land connecting the Americas and not imagine making just a little cut and joining the Atlantic and Pacific? Riding high off the completion of the Suez Canal Ferdinand de Lesseps did just that. De Lesspes might not have been the single most important person to the completion of Suez, but it certainly wouldn't have happened without him. De Lesseps wasn't an engineer or an architect. He was a diplomat, but his diplomatic skills played a very small part in the completion of the Suez Canal.

His genius was in promotion. De Lesseps, more than anyone else, convinced people, the French government, the French people, the Egyptian royalty that a canal could be built and would be built. He merely needed to show up at a stock holder's meeting or something and somehow everyone left believing not just that a sea level canal across the African isthmus was possible, but that it was only a matter of time. Money poured in. Morale stayed high. Personal conflicts were smoothed over in service to the greater goal. De Lesseps was able to convince everyone involved in the project that they were doing the great work of human progress, that nothing more important was happening anywhere on Earth, and that completion of the Suez Canal was a foregone conclusion.

In short, he was a genius at making people believe in him, and this skill is absolutely vital in accomplishing tasks believed impossible. But there are tasks that are actually impossible. And when faced with such tasks, genius like that of de Lesseps leads to utter disaster. Which is what happened when the French tried to build a seal-level canal in Panama.

If there were someone else leading the effort, really anyone besides de Lesseps, it is very likely that a lock canal would have been built in Nicaragua. But because de Lesseps believed in the sea level canal at Panama and because de Lesseps could convince everyone to believe in him, and through him, in the idea he represented, the French attempted an impossible canal, millions of French citizens lost billions of dollars, careers were destroyed, reputations tarnished, corruption flourished, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, the emblem of modern humanity, the hero of the French people, died in disgrace. For the important tasks in humanity, genius is not enough; it has to be the right kind of genius for the right kind of task. Otherwise at best some mediocre result is reached and at worst thousands of people die of malaria and yellow fever with nothing to show for their sacrifice.

If there is one major difference between the French and American efforts to build the Panama canal is that the Americans had enough foresight or luck, to have the right kind of genius working on the problem at the right time. The first was John Stevens, the chief engineer from 1905-1907. Stevens was the first executive to realize that the primary challenge of Panama was not engineering but infrastructure. In order to dig a canal, you needed to move the dirt out of the way and keep enough workers healthy to do the digging. So he authorized one of the greatest health and sanitation efforts maybe the world has ever seen and turned his vast experience in building railroads, to building, well, railroads for dirt and debris. He solved problems of transportation, efficiency, and disease. Everything else that happened after his tenure rested on the structures he created. Work, any kind of work, could happen because of his systems.

The next and final chief engineer was a military man named George Washington Goethals. He did two things that allowed the completion of the Panama Canal; the first was that he followed the path set by Stevens and continued to manage the digging systems as much as the digging itself, adding in a level of military efficiency and commitment, and second, and most important, he understood that a task of this scale needed an entire society to complete it. Among other things a canal newspaper was founded under his watch and he set aside several hours every Sunday to hear and redress the grievances of anybody involved in the canal. He incentivized marriage. A director of women's clubs was hired. Essentially, he created a community whose identity was based in the completion of the canal and so each and every employee (or at least all the white American employees) was personally and completely invested in the project. And so when tragedy did strike, whether it was a landslide that undid months of effort or an accidental explosion that killed dozens of men, moral was unshaken. No matter what the condition, everyone got up for work the next day and gave it their all.

But who knows what would have happened if Americans had employed another de Lesseps. (In a way, we did, in Theodore Roosevelt, but he wasn't in charge of the actual building, so much as he was the force that ensured building would happen.) The work could have continued for decades and still ended in failure. Of course, John Stevens had been in charge at Suez, there probably would have been a railroad instead of a canal. Genius has its limitations and the wrong genius can sometimes be more disastrous than incompetence. Which leads to a strange, almost paradoxical conclusion. Perhaps the most vital genius in any great project, is the genius of knowing which genius to put in charge of what aspect at what time.

What Went Wrong in American Food?

In some ways this essay is a little out of date. Over the past few years, American food culture (at least in some places) has slowly been drifting away from the steak, potatoes, and processed convenience food full of sodium, high fructose corn syrup, and chemistry sets of preservatives, that was contributing to our national epidemic of obesity, while having the added bonus of greatly contributing to climate change. CSAs and farm shares are becoming more accessible. Non-profit organizations are finding ways to bring fresh food to the poor, who too often have to eat the cheapest of the cheap. More restaurants are committing to seasonal sustainable menus. Foodieism has trickled down an increased focus on what and how we eat. But obesity is still on the rise, so, even though obesity has many sources, our food problems are far from solved.

And all of this is recovery from an unhealthy, unsustainable, practically joyless food culture that prized convenience over flavor, cost over quality, and predictability over passion. We became a nation of reheaters. My question has always been, what went wrong? We had the two fundamental sources of a great cooking culture; diversity and poverty, and though “America” is an extremely young culture, especially in terms of food, we had already developed some fantastic new foods, from barbeque to potato chips. But then, well, here's what I think happened.

Compulsory Education: For most human history, people (women usually) learned to cook by watching their mother cook, who learned by watching her mother cook. Recipes weren't passed down in books, but through apprenticeship. Techniques weren't taught, they were absorbed. But with the modern education system, mom cooked alone, because the kids were at school. Many recipes, techniques, and traditions were lost because there wasn't anybody in the kitchen to watch them enacted. So, when those children grew up, got houses, and found themselves in the kitchen, they didn't really know what to do. It's not hard to see the appeal of “heat and serve.”

Better Living Through Science: When the American dream included a car in every driveway, we didn't know our car culture would eventually wreck the environment. It is impossible to predict all the consequences of our actions. The convenience foods we eventually developed had the best of intentions; to give women a little spare time. And who could blame them for finally taking the opportunity to read every now and again. We didn't know then, the effects the amounts of sodium and high fructose corn syrup and other chemicals needed to make shelf-stable foods taste like something would come with such dire consequences for our nation's health.

The Great Depression (but not for why you think): A lot of people got out of the Great Depression determined to never eat poor people food again. Americans had the money to buy pretty much whatever cuts of meat they wanted and so they bought the best cuts. If they were going to eat chicken they were going to eat chicken breasts. If pork, chops or loins. If beef, steaks or roasts. The market responded and now we have chickens that are essentially engorged breasts on legs and cows pumped with more hormones than East German Olympic swimmers (speaking of out of date statements). As dire as the environmental consequences are from the shift to choice cuts, a lot of cooking was lost. The source of the world's great food traditions are disgusting looking potential foods made palatable through technique. Oxtail doesn't look too tasty when it's just sitting there, but for most of human history it was either eat what was there or don't eat anything at all. And now we have oxtail soup. Oh man. Oxtail soup. Because we stopped eating poor people food, a lot of great recipes and techniques fell out of general knowledge.

The Unequal Distribution of Domestic Duties: Social movements are funny things, especially when they succeed. Women joined the workforce, but, for the most part, men didn't really increase their domestic workload. One result of the womens movement is that many, many women got home from work and still had to make dinner, and when they did, they had much less time and much less energy to do so. Furthermore, no one was around to tend to the all day dishes or bake bread or make pasta, or do any of the other time or labor intensive cooking that used to define daily domestic life.

What might be most instructive about our transition to a convenience food culture is how little all of these changes had to do with food. For the most part, a more general structure of society changed, and how we made food changed in response. Furthermore, all of these societal changes were, at least in terms of their intentions, for the best. The plague of advertising and the corn-centric agricultural subsidies have done their part of course, but food scientists in the 50s didn't rub their hands together in malicious glee and declare “Ha, this will contribute to an epidemic of diabetes by the start of the next millennium.” Compulsory education wasn't a conspiracy of the burgeoning microwave industry, and the organizers and activists of the feminist movement didn't conclude their meetings by saying, “And just think of it, one day we'll have the fattest kids on the planet.” Our destructive food culture was a result of people trying to make the world a better place.

As I said at the beginning of the essay, our food culture is changing for the better, but unfortunately, the changes are almost all from the top down. It's people with enough money to dine at sustainable restaurants and shop for fresh, sustainable food, with the time to consistently make it. Unfortunately, truly changing our food culture for everyone, will require more general and more drastic socio-economic changes. However, I do think, there's one food based change we can make that would quickly and greatly improve our food culture. Teach cooking in school again.

An hour or so, every month, through middle and high school would provide students with many of the basic skills needed to cook healthy food for themselves. Maybe some schools could offer an elective as well for those students who might be interested in working in the food industry. It won't replace the lifetime apprenticeship we used to learn to cook through, but it will mean all American men and women will be able to cook for themselves. Furthermore, the kids would eat what they cooked, providing a stigma-free, free meal to many hungry students.

Our food culture is improving, but there are a lot of forces, spread out through our society supporting our sodium and syrup rich convenience food culture. The physical state of kitchens in low income housing. The corn-centric farm subsidy system. Massive agri-business. The advertising assault on our consciousness. There are big picture changes that can be made, like a redistribution of agricultural subsidies, but the most effective way to improve the country's food culture starts quite a bit closer to home. The problem is not the existence of heat and serve dinners and fast food restaurants, but how much we use them. There's nothing wrong with throwing something in the microwave when you've got tickets to a game and don't have time to make anything. There's nothing wrong with getting fast food while you're on the highway. But there is something wrong with always heating and serving and getting fast food once a week. All that is really needed to revolutionize our food culture is a rational relationship with convenience foods. And, for everyone to start making their own vegetable stock. But that's another essay.

Leadership Lag in George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm

One of the best non-fiction books I read last year was George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm by Miranda Carter. It is a history of the reigns of Tsar Nicholas in Russia, King George III in England, and Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany. As if there needed to be more evidence, Carter's book explores one of the fundamental flaw of monarchies of any variety; the entire society is threatened when the ruler isn't up to the task.

None of the three rulers in the book were equipped with the intellectual, emotional, or character resources needed to rule effectively, let alone to cope with the massive technological, economic, and social changes happening in the countries they tried to rule, and their inadequacies were a significant part of the road to WWI. One of the triumphs of this book is that Carter doesn't use their inadequacies to turn them into villains. Not even Wilhelm, who of the three acted most like the despot he was accused of being, is denied the complexities of human character. Even though they were powerful people, they were still people. To continue with Wilhelm, Carter showed how childhood emotional traumas shaped his worldview and how that worldview shaped his rule. For George, she suggests he might have been a very successful boarding school dean. Nicholas was just one of those people, we all know some, who just didn't have a mind for the details of well, paying utility bills on time or keeping track of intramural registration deadlines, let alone the details of statecraft.

Carter doesn't psycho-analyze them into innocence either. She strikes a remarkable balance, showing us the complexities involved in all their decisions, without absolving them of the responsibility for those decisions. But, of course, the grand consequence of all of these decisions, the ultimate result of all these flaws, the looming event in history is WWI.

WWI is the problem war in the Western world in the 20th century. WWII is, of course, defined as a conflict against radically destructive nations. Every other armed conflict until the first Gulf War occurred in the context of the Cold War, and none of them, or any of the other subsequent Western conflicts in the Middle East, were anywhere near as destructive as WWI.

Read along with Barbara Tuchman's brilliant Guns of August, (one of the great works of non-fiction) you get the sense that one of the prime causes of WWI was leadership lag. The world was changing rapidly, in terms of economy, technology, and social structures. New ideas were changing the way people thought of the composition of government and the value of monarchs. And yet, there was a persistent idea that if somehow Europe's monarchs could all get together, without parliaments, dumas, or weimars muddling about, they could work out spheres of influence in the Balkans and balance power between France and Germany, and use their familial connections to maintain peace in Europe.

The thing was, though all three were cousins, the importance of those familial connections in European politics was rapidly diminishing. Essentially, the world changed rapidly and the leaders lagged behind. Even though everything was different, Nicholas, Wilhelm, and George ruled as if nothing had changed. Of course, the three kings weren't the only leaders lagging behind the world they lead. One of the motifs of The Guns of August, was the conviction among world leaders and diplomats that a war between France and Germany was bound to happen. Simply put, they assumed there would be a war between France and Germany, and so they made decisions based on these assumptions, decisions that, (you can see where this is going) contributed to the start of WWI.

The argument against monarchy, or anything that concentrates power in the hands of a single individual, has always been simple; monarchs are humans, and very few humans have the ability to see the grand swaths of history and society while maintaining an effective knowledge of the details, with a sense of one's own limitations and the wherewithal to delegate responsibilities to competent others, to effectively lead nations. (An argument against nations? I think so, but that's another essay.) What Miranda Carter does is tell us the stories of three human beings born into unique situations, and she does it in a way that includes those aforementioned great swaths. It's hard to say whether a direct lesson can really be drawn from George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm, (unless you previously assumed “archies” are viable) but Miranda Carter has told a compelling story of a time in history and the people in power, who were passed by it.