by Richard Subber | Nov 30, 2020 | American history, Democracy, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality
“ . . . the Money Power of the country…”
Are these words scary, and familiar?
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching
that unnerves me
and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country . . .
corporations have been enthroned,
an era of corruption in High Places will follow,
and the Money Power of the country
will endeavor to prolong its reign
by working upon the prejudices of the People,
until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands,
and the Republic destroyed.”
Wait a minute! The thing is, this terrible forecast is 158 years old, and, sadly, no less prophetic now than it was during the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln wrote these words to friend on November 21, 1864.
The industrial revolution was booming then in America, and the economic and corporate foundations were being laid for the predations of the so-called Robber Barons and the captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie and the Gilded Age’s wolves of Wall Street like J. P. Morgan.
You can guess that Old Abe must have been looking into a dark space when he had that vision.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
from the agile mind
of Arthur Conan Doyle
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Sep 22, 2020 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics
…the last battle never comes…
Book review:
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway
New York: Random House, 1992
412 pages
Like Moore and Galloway, I salute the brave American and North Vietnamese soldiers who fought and died in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965 in the first major combat action of the War in Vietnam.
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young is a bloody testament to the grinding horror of war. It’s too much to read all at once. It has too much death.
A North Vietnamese commander who was on the ground in the valley recalled, many years after the war, that his guiding principle had been “win the first battle.”
You and I know that he forgot to mention that no one knows how to win the last battle and end all of it.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
A Farewell to Arms (book review)
classic Ernest Hemingway
with relentlessly realistic dialogue…
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Sep 13, 2020 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Revolutionary War
Book review:
An Empire on the Edge:
How Britain Came to Fight America
by Nick Bunker
Here’s the short version of Nick Bunker’s thesis:
King George and his government
let the North American colonies slip from their grasp.
A newcomer to the history of the American Revolution might think that this book is a cockeyed way to learn about the “shot heard ‘round the world” and the consequences of the shooting at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
An informed student of the Revolutionary War probably will find much new material in Bunker’s relentlessly detailed An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America.
On our side of the pond, we don’t have much opportunity to consider the war or the revolution from the British point of view.
Bunker offers devastating detail about the ill-informed, patronizing, self-serving, doctrinaire, and sometimes feckless actions of Lord North and the British government in the years that led to the sanguinary clash of British regulars and American farmers-militiamen on the road from Concord, through Lexington, to Boston on “that famous day and year.”
An Empire on the Edge offers extensive documentation confirming that the British leaders were largely ignorant of the scope and depth of colonial antipathy toward the various punitive measures that Britain sought to impose in North America, as early as 1765 (the Stamp Act) and continuing to the final, ill-fated steps to chastise the city of Boston after the notorious Tea Party in late 1773.
Bunker describes the half-cocked military moves by Lord North and his ministers in the years leading up to the disastrous outing to Lexington-Concord. The king and his government were not prepared to wage war successfully in North America, partly because they waited too long to believe that the colonists actually would fight, and partly because they disdained the colonials’ fighting capacity, and partly because they put higher priority on their Caribbean sugar colonies, and partly because they were pre-occupied with the military threat posed by France and various European intrigues.
Bunker doesn’t speculate on a question that occurs to me: after that first shot was fired at Lexington, did the British really commit themselves to winning the war?
The king and his government made the commitment to fight. They did not, however, at any time before or during the war, commit all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to the military campaign to regain dominion in North America. As the fighting began, a British victory was not immediately feasible. Perhaps it did not become feasible.
Bunker’s analysis of the planning and wrangling in Lord North’s war room suggests that the British wanted to win, but never pushed the right strategic buttons to bring victory within their grasp.
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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Book review: An Empire Divided
King George and his ministers
wanted the Caribbean sugar islands
more than they wanted the 13 colonies…
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
by Richard Subber | Jun 29, 2020 | American history, History, Tidbits
“The Six Grandfathers”
It’s generally believed that Mt. Rushmore was an unremarkable pile of rock before the famous sculptures of presidents were done.
Gutzon Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, did the work starting in 1927, and it was completed in 1941. The Borglums and their crews blasted more than 400,000 tons of stone off the face of the mountain in the Black Hills in Keystone, SD.
Here’s the unfamiliar back story: It wasn’t always called Mt. Rushmore (The granite bluff was named after Charles Rushmore, a wealthy New York lawyer, in 1885).
The Lakota Sioux name for the mountain had been “The Six Grandfathers” (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe).
It’s too bad the federal government didn’t authorize carving their likenesses into the face of the bluff.
N.B. The image is of Mt. Rushmore in 1905.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Snow Goose
…sensual drama, it’s eminently poetic…
by Paul Gallico
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Apr 10, 2020 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Revolutionary War
…and those hairy, smelly foreigners
Book review:
Red, White, and Black:
The Peoples of Early North America
by Gary B. Nash (b1933)
American historian
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, copyright 1974, 4th ed. 2000
362 pages
Red, White, and Black offers many partial answers to the question: in the 16th and 17th centuries, what did the First Americans think about the hairy, smelly people from Europe who invaded their country?
Nash offers a scholarly, fully informed, insightful account of the lifestyles and world views of the estimated 60-70 million indigenous people who had a variety of highly developed civilizations.
Some European promoters and some uninformed explorers and colonists reported that the “New World” was a “virgin wilderness,” but the first colonists were happy to steal the Native Americans’ food and delighted to be able to use their cultivated lands.
The misnamed Indians valiantly tried to maintain their way of life, but European diseases and European guns and steel tipped the balance for the much outnumbered invaders.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Fire in the Lake (book review)
really, you should have read it in 1972…
by Frances FitzGerald
–
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jan 10, 2020 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, World history
American leadership never was
what we thought it was…
Book review:
Fire in the Lake:
The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
by Frances FitzGerald (b1940), a Pulitzer Prize winner
Boston: An Atlantic Monthly Press Book, Little Brown and Company, 1972
491 pages
I don’t know how much of an audience there was for Fire in the Lake in 1972. I feel confident in guessing there wasn’t enough.
The American war in Vietnam was far from over in 1972 when FitzGerald wrote this densely researched journalistic review of U. S. policies and actions and ignorance in Southeast Asia. She makes it easier to understand why the American war effort was doomed from its earliest phase.
You should read Fire in the Lake to get the whole story as it was knowable in 1972. Be prepared to acknowledge that much of what you previously believed—and thought you knew—was wrong.
The American commitment to “containing Communism” was prominent, and tragically uninformed.
South Vietnam was the wrong place to try to “contain Communism,” no matter what that might mean.
There are more than 58,000 names on the walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Some of them are the names of my friends.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Joseph Brant and His World
“Brant was fully a Mohawk…”
by James Paxton
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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