Book Review

The Movement:

A History Of the American New Left 1959-1972

by Irwin Unger

     Ah yes, the 1960s...that was the big hinge in American society during the twentieth century. Despite all the social divisions of the time, it was also an era when the American public collectively entered puberty, lost its innocence, possibly lost its mind, and still came out of the experience being chronically naive and immature, a problem that afflicts us to this very day. Among the changes of that time was a political shift to the far left among some segments of the youth culture. Irwin Unger’s The Movement chronicles this change of direction in a way that is both sympathetic to the cause and critical at the same time.

As the book opens, we get a quick run-down of the history of left wing activism going back to the free love communes of the nineteenth century, the brief rise and decline of the American Communist Party, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, and the bland maintenance of the status quo by liberals throughout the same time. After white students from UC Berkeley went to the American South to support the Civil Rights activists, they came back to find the Free Speech Movement, led by Mario Savio, just beginning. Then the Students For a Democratic Society entered the scene. The SDS actually had its roots in the 1930s; traditionally anti-communist and anti-authoritarian, their vaguely stated objective was to increase citizen participation in the democratic process. They were hardly radical and in fact shunned the company of activists farther to the left of them. They were also a bit boring and unpopular. By the mid-1960s, their leaders saw that agitation against the war in Vietnam was becoming a trend, so they decided to latch onto that and came to be at the center of what was dubbed the New Left. Eventually they collaborated with the Black Panthers, but then split into three separate factions, one of which became the violent terrorist group known as the Weather Underground.

Unger’s book is effective because he takes a sociological approach in the beginning to examining the root causes of student rebellion. He properly identifies the demographic of white, middle-class teenagers and young adults as the as the core group of New Left activists. He questions why these people, presumably living in relative comfort would rebel so strongly against the system that sustains them and the answer he comes up with is a plain and simple one: boredom. Too much comfort without enough conflict leads to social anomie. Too little noise in a social system doesn’t lead to more efficiency, it leads to chronic agitation. Too many young people had seen their parents go to work for corporations, buy suburban houses and cars, then sit around doing nothing but watching TV in their spare time. The kids were hungry for life and excitement.

A lot of people have criticized the New Left and the counter cultures of the 1960s for being nothing but spoiled kids. Those critics fail to take something into account. Living a comfortable life does not mean that people who do so are required to check their humanity and morality at the door. Living comfortably does not mean you have to have an inhuman tolerance for racism or war. Nor does it mean you are obligated to slavishly accept the lifestyle the dominant society says that you have to accept. When we are told we live in a free society, we ought to be allowed to make choices about what we support and how we live our lives. If having enough money to live comfortably comes at the expense of our freedom of choice, we are nothing but a totalitarian society. The youth movements had every right to challenge American society and they were right to do so.

But anyhow, Unger goes on to examine the SDS and their relations with other groups like SNCC, CORE, the hippies, the Yippies, the feminists, the gay and lesbian liberation movement, and eventually the commune movements that continued on into the 1970s. What emerges is a portrait of the SDS as a group that had no real central purpose or direction, yet somehow they operated as a central motivational force that kept all the other leftists and counter-culturalists moving in the same direction. They weren’t channeling the New Left into any definite direction, but they were the momentum and catalyst that kept the fire burning for as long as it did. Unger rightly points out that their lack of true purpose caused their disastrous splits in the end, while also maintaining the government’s change in policies towards the war in Vietnam caused the anti-war movement to fizzle out. Then finally the violence of the Weather Underground, the Kent State Massacre, and the bombing of the Army Math Research Center in Wisconsin turned activists away from hardcore radicalism and back towards a more moderate and traditional liberal progressivism.

The Movement was written in the early 70s before the war had actually ended. Some historians say that a proper amount of time and distance are needed to write an accurate and effective history of a political or social movement like this. In Irwin Unger’s case, I have to disagree. His observations are sharp, realistic, and accurate. Being so close to the history he writes about gaves him a clear picture of what was happening around him. He was also detached enough as a writer to point out the flaws in the thinking and tactics of supporters of the New Left, even though he sympathizes with their plight. This may even be one of the most engaging accounts of this subject I have read so far.

The book ends on an interesting note. The author questions whether the uprisings of the 1960s would lead to any lasting change. His answer is that, as he saw it in his time, no, they didn’t. I have to disagree with him as it might not have been so obvious at the time. The 1960s initiated a series of social changes that are still being discussed today. The drug culture has become a mainstay of American society and the hedonism of the hippies eventually turned into things like disco. Issues of feminism, free speech, the rights of ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ people are still being discussed. The rebellion of hippies morphed into punk rock and other related things. Black Power resulted in hip hop culture and the influx of African-American people into the middles class. The Sexual Revolution has led to mass tolerance for most forms of sexual expression. And despite recent attempts at censorship from people on both the right and the left, there are no longer any taboos, given the proper time and place, on what we are allowed to discuss because of the leftist Free Speech Movement. The New Left may not have solved these problems directly within the time frame of their movement, but they laid the foundation for the America we live in today. The decade of the 1960s ended, but the forces it unleashed took on new dimensions, many of which benefited us immensely.       

 

Book Review

Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers

by Geoffrey Abbott

     What an amazing thing human ingenuity is. Well, maybe not. For every amazing accomplishment our species makes, there seems to be something awful that happens in its shadow. We’ve built skyscrapers, computers, airplanes, and cured diseases. But we’ve also created the nuclear bomb and the American government. And our penal codes have a long-standing tradition of using torture as a means of punishment or for the use of extracting confessions from suspects. Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers by Geoffrey Abbott is a cute little book that catalogs and details the devices and methods of torture, most of which were employed in the Middle Ages, yet the narrative does extend into the twentieth century at times. You may want to ask yourself why you would want to read this when there are so many other books to choose from.

Geoffrey Abbott writes popular history books, most of which are related to medieval England and the Tower of London. As a historian, he appears to be a hobbyist more than an academic. He lays out the scheme of the book according to categories like use of straps, weights, racks, water torture, amputations and mutilations, and there is even an entire chapter, my personal favorite, dedicated to whips and flogging. The final chapter is about the ultimate punishment, the death penalty, and the variety of sadistic ways that it has been carried out. If you haven’t read this, you can imagine what kinds of details are used to fill in each chapter. It’s all written with minimal commentary, presenting the bare facts alone, with occasional puns and jokes, none of which are funny.

While the myriad ways in which pain is inflicted can be somewhat interesting for the morbidly minded, it is the context of the torture that interested me the most. Everything in this book is something done by law enforcement either to punish criminals or force them to admit to crimes. Often the crimes they confessed to were not committed by them and sometimes they were forced to implicate innocent people while under conditions of extreme distress. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that a person being pierced with needles, crushed by stones, skinned with hot pincers, or having their limbs dislocated while being stretched on a rack will say anything the interrogator wants to hear in order to get the pain to stop. And yet these things are still going on in our supposedly more enlightened times; the Bush administration allowed for “enhanced interrogation techniques” to be used in the War on Terror including sleep deprivation, physically exhausting postures, solitary confinement, exposure to dangerous animals, and water boarding, the latter being a torture technique that was invented and frequently used in the dungeons of medieval Europe. So despite what they say on Fox News, it really is a form of torture. Of course, this book was written before the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the author would certainly have said something about that if he had written this at a later time or revised this edition. He does mention the use of torture in American prisons like Leavenworth, where the idiomatic phrase “being put on the spot” comes from, as well as methods of administering corporal punishment in America.

Another issue of note regarding the context of torture is how many people were imprisoned and tortured for the crime of heresy. About half of the methods described in this short book were inflicted for the purpose of disagreeing with church doctrine, practicing witchcraft, or simply being suspected of saying or doing something that ran counter to the religious principles of the day. The prosecution of religious heresies were largely in the hands of law enforcement. You have to wonder what is wrong with a society that allows the police to amputate a man’s tongue, cut off his nose, and gouge out his eye because he prefers to pray silently rather than aloud. In modern times, this would be considered a thought crime and it looks as though the worst criminals were employed by the police to punish such harmless transgressions and victimless crimes with the most sadistic cruelty imaginable. When the church could not control people’s minds, they turned them over to the government to control their bodies through extreme acts of cruelty.

Most of the other crimes that could get you tortured in the past were petty crimes like theft or public drunkenness. You could also be publicly disemboweled for insulting a member of the nobility. Of course, torture was a special punishment reserved for use against the lower classes, although admittedly there were some cases in which monarchs were beheaded due to political power struggles. Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, explained that the powerful classes need to express their power through acts of cruelty and violence, sometimes as a public spectacle, so the weaker members of society will receive a visual reminder of who has the most control. The practice of governing is inherently violent to its subjects and such cruelty needs to be displayed so we know what side of the fence we are on. Punishment is the right and the domain of the ruling class and those who take violence into their own hands are punished for crossing that line, not because of the pain and suffering they caused to others.

But Abbott didn’t intend this book to be a commentary on political theory, criminal justice, class conflict, or the irrationality of the human race. It is simply a book that describes torture in all its glorious forms. As such, for scholars, it works as a good source book, giving details of things that are often glossed over by historians covering more conventional themes in historical tomes. There might be times when reading medieval history where you wonder what is meant by thumbscrews or the strappado and the author doesn’t bother to explain because they are more concerned with the narrative at a macro level. I myself had never know what it means to be drawn and quartered until I read this book, despite having come across the term in dozens of other history books I have read.

As for why I read this book, I’ll simply have to say it was a matter of morbid curiosity. Aside from a handful of kinks that turn me on in the boudoir, and possibly the geeky delight I get from teaching syntax classes, I’m not especially inclined to inflicting pain on my fellow human beings, even when their stupidity disgusts me. But I remember going to a carnival funhouse when I was a kid. They had one room labeled the torture chamber with racks, whips, chains on the wall, and a swinging pendulum, made out of cardboard no less, right out of Edgar Allan Poe. A strobe light was flickering while they played a vinyl sound effects record of people moaning while iron chains clinked, wind blew, doors creaked, and cats screeched. The record was stuck and the carnies weren’t paying any attention so I laughed it all off and moved on. And here I am, decades later reading Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers.

 

Book Review

Serpico:

The Cop Who Defied the System

by Peter Maas

     

     Most Americans want to like the police. It’s just that so many of us have had bad experiences with them and that makes it difficult. If you grow up in a city, especially one with a moderate or high crime rate, you will learn not to trust the cops from a young age. For most of us, it starts in our teenage years. It’s even worse if you aren’t white or dress somewhat unconventionally. Yes we’ve all heard it said that not all police are bad and it’s unfair that a few bad ones tarnish the reputation of the whole institution. We all know that’s true. That line of reasoning doesn’t go so far when you get harassed, surveilled, and bullied on a weekly basis by the jerks in blue when you aren’t doing anything worse than walking to the corner grocery store or going to school. All that is just surface level annoyance though. There are deep problems with corruption in polic forces all across the country; NYPD is especially notorious for playing dirty, taking graft for allowing gambling, prostitution, drug dealing, and all kinds of crime. This isn’t something the media made up; any New Yorker will tell you it’s real and many of them know from experience.

Then a man like Frank Serpico comes along and tries to blow the whole rotten pustule open for all to see, but in his case, the little that got seen did nothing to stop the rot which was feeding on all levels of the law enforcement system. Peter Maas’s Serpico: The Cop Who Defied the System gives the full run down on this singularly courageous man who tried to fix what had gone wrong. Written like a novel, it is a compelling biography that succeeds because he makes the protagonist a character that is easy to relate to.

Frank Serpico, like so many other great Americans, was the son of immigrants. His family were hard-working Neapolitans who came over from Italy. As a boy he developed a precocious interest in guns and a fascination for police which was partly influenced by their heroic portrayals in the movies and television. He also loved reading and developed an intellectual side that is rare among people who seek employment as police officers, most of which tend to be blue collar with low levels of education.

When Serpico realized his dream of becoming a cop, he exceeded in his duty, courageously making arrests that other policemen were too lazy or scared to get involved with. He immediately became an outsider on the force, not only because of his desire to be the best, but also because he started to see all the corruption; his partners routinely accepted bribes and many of them found places to sleep when they should have been out patrolling the streets. Even worse, Serpico grew a beard and long hair and began looking a little too bohemian for the other cops who thought he was gay or else some kind of hippie radical.

After being transferred to different departments, the corruption got even worse. He realized that the NYPD were actively working with criminals and encouraging crime for the sake of taking bribes. Many of these cops even chose their jobs for that reason alone. This was nothing new; the number of men seeking employment as cops during the Prohibition era spiked for the exact same reason, for example. When Serpico tried to fight the corruption by taking his case to the highest levels of the police department, he was met with nothing but cold shoulders. He eventually took his story to the media and testified in court on the issue of police corruption, but very little was done to stop the problem. Then during a drug bust gone wrong, he got shot in the face. Although he survived, there were sympathy cards he received in the mail from members of the police force who said they wished he had died.

This is a very accessible and visually stimulating book. What really works though is the way the author makes you feel Serpico’s frustrations and disappointment. You know from the start that Serpico will lose but the writing style really brings you close to his emotions and states of mind. The downside of this descriptive writing is that at times Peter Maas veers into purple prose with excessive use of adjectives that becomes slightly annoying. And while the anecdotes about Serpico’s early years as a cop are true, Maas writes about him as if he is a superhero, larger than life and a little cartoonish as he fights for truth, justice, and the American way. It comes off as too good to be true, even though those stories are true. Fortunately, these weaker parts of the writing are at the beginning of the story and don’t continue all the way through.

Serpico is a great book. In fact it was so great that it got made into a classic movie starring Al Pacino around the peak of his career in the 1970s, which is one hell of a credential. The book is somewhat better because Peter Maas makes Serpico so easy to relate to. If you have ever had big dreams of doing something great and then getting disillusioned after you got there, this biography will strike a cord with you. You don’t have to be an honest police officer to relate to Frank Serpico. I myself have been a teacher for twenty years and my experiences with the educational system have been similar to what he went through. I reached a point where I no longer want to have anything to do with such a dirty business. Frank Serpico’s dream was to work for a police force in which the bad cops feared the good cops and what he found was something the opposite way around. He failed in his mission but that fact that he tried is enough to restore a dash of faith in humanity. At least there are some people out there who want things to be right. Frank Serpico was heroic and that is why his story deserves to be remembered. 

 

Book Review

The Spanish Inquisition

by Jean Plaidy

     Religious people often like to make the claim that without religion there would be no morality. Such a claim does not address the problem of why, if it is true, that there can be so many religious people who are immoral. Take the Spanish Inquisition, for example. As a bureaucratic arm of the Catholic Church, surviving a span of time from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic Wars, they engaged in such crimes and human rights violations as torture, mass murder, extortion, blackmail, ethnic cleansing, and sexual abuse. If they had truly been the moral arbiters of the Spanish Kingdom, they would not have so freely indulged in such atrocities that make your average organized crime family look like a gang of saints. In fact you wouldn’t be wrong to compare the Inquisition to the Nazis for a long list of reasons, rabid anti-Semitism being one of them. Jean Plaidy’s The Spanish Inquisition does a sufficient job of showing just how immoral that political organization really was while analyzing the mechanisms of their practices and motivations, further condemning them as yet another corrupt and vicious criminal element of human history.

This nicely bound impression is actually a facsimile edition of three different books written by Jean Plaidy, a woman who more famously found success as an author of historical romance novels under the pen name Victoria Holt. The first part examines the precursors, origins, and rise of the Spanish Inquisition. She begins with a spasm of righteous anger directed towards the sadists who ran this institution. From her own Christian point of view, she accuses them of ignoring their own religious doctrines for the sake of maintaining their own power and control over Spanish society. Plaidy further examines the first medieval Papal Inquisitions that took place across Europe. From there she details the practices and methods of the Inquisitors, how they used torture as a method of extracting false confessions from so-called heretics, then later to publicly humiliate them and burn them at the stake in public spectacles called autos de fe. They Inquisition dominated Spanish society, ruling them by fear, and enforcing strict conformity of thought, speech, and action. In its details and narrative, this fist section is the best and most informative part of this book.

The second section is of mixed value. On one hand, it gives a strong explanation of how King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella used the Inquisition to help them consolidate and solidify the Spanish Kingdom. Led by the bigoted and sadistic Primate Torquemada, they persecuted minority populations to ensure the uniformity of the Spanish populace. They first went after the most marginalized citizens, Jewish converts to Christianity, and punished them for allegedly practicing Judaism clandestinely after being baptized into the Catholic faith. Soon after, the Inquisition went after Jews who did not convert and the Islamic Moors who also insisted on maintaining their own traditions. Sadly, both groups of people were either forced to convert, chased out of the country, or executed en masse. Unfortunately for the Spanish Kingdom, these wars and ethnic cleansings resulted in an economic crash because all the farmers and merchants were quickly eliminated from society without being replaced. Conservatives of our day who support an anti-pluralistic agenda might want to look at a past example like this to see a possible consequence of such a political program. Cultural diversity often leads to more stable societies rather than the other way around.

On the other hand, this second section of the book goes into a lot of detail about the political intrigues and affairs of Ferdinand and Isabella and their sidekick Ximenes, the man who replaced Torquemada when he died. These passages are not poorly written or even uninteresting, but Plaidy strays too far away from the subject of the Spanish Inquisition to make them relevant to the overall subject matter of the book.

The third part is the weakest. There is a lot about the Spanish monarchy and the succession of kings and queens that came after Ferdinand and Isabella. Again, a lot of this is not directly relevant to the Inquisition. There are, however, a lot of anecdotal stories about the corruption and the wrongdoings of that most hated institution. There are some stories about the Inquisition’s weak attempts at spreading abroad and into the Spanish colonies too. But after a while, these passages read more like lists of terrible things the Inquisition did and less like an interesting engagement with history.

Jean Plaidy’s The Spanish Inquisition gets off to a very strong start but dwindles into chore-like writing by the end. Still, it is a strong and solid analytical work of history that serves as a good overview of this shameful but fascinating sector of Europe, bridging the medieval with the early modern world. By extension, it is easy to see how this piece fits into the puzzle of 20^th century atrocities, totalitarian regimes, the World Wars, nationalist movements, and the modernist revolt in favor of the individual’s liberation. And as for the religious question, you may be left wondering how religion could be the foundation of morality when it seems, rather, that it has so often been the cause of immorality, cruelty, and corruption more than anything else. The Spanish Inquisition is just one of a multitude of examples supporting the latter side of that ethical equation. If anything, the Spanish Inquisition demonstrates why the separation of church and state became such an important idea for the Founding Fathers of America and why history is needed to remind us of this.