Category: Reviews

On June 23, 2023, as the world watched with mouths collectively agape, longtime Vladimir Putin associate Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the notorious paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group, mounted a rebellion against the Russian military leadership over its fumbling prosecution of the war in Ukraine. Wagner mercenaries captured Rostov-on-Don almost unopposed and began a slow advance towards Moscow.  This was not only the most significant challenge to Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule, but the most consequential threat to the legitimacy of the post-Soviet state in the three decades since Boris Yeltsin used tanks to shutter the Duma to forestall his own impeachment. Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. Prigozhin called off the mutiny, and all criminal charges were dropped as he agreed to relocate Wagner forces to Belarus. Not long after, it was reported that Putin hosted Prigozhin at the Kremlin and fences were mended among the old allies, but few believed that would be the end of the story. So, on August 23^rd—exactly two months to the day since the rebellion launched—perhaps it came as a surprise only to Prigozhin when the business jet carrying him and his associates exploded north of Moscow.

So who was Yevgeny Prigozhin? What was his actual relationship with Vladimir Putin? What role did the Wagner Group play as an extension of Russian power, not only in Ukraine but in Africa and the Middle East?  And how could the thuggish ex-con paramilitary Prigozhin rise to such prominence to make international observers—albeit briefly—wonder aloud if he would be the instrument to topple the Putin regime? In a remarkable achievement, Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos [2025], international expert and Arizona State Professor of Practice Candace Rondeaux brilliantly addresses these questions and much more in an extremely well-written if dense account that is at once a kind of dual biography of Prigozhin and Putin as well as a nuanced history of post-Yeltsin Russia.

It turns out that the intersecting avenues of (pardon the inevitable alliteration) Prigozhin and Putin were to be found on the  streets of St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad. It was there that teenage petty thief Yevgeny Prigozhin grew up to be a volent gang member who spent nearly a decade in prison before he found himself selling hot dogs alongside his mother in an open air market. Both street savvy and entrepreneurial at a fortuitous moment when a fierce, nascent capitalism served as tsar of the new Russian state, Prigozhin turned burgeoning profits first into the grocery store business, then, along with a pair of new partners, expanded into a variety of other enterprises that included the city’s first casinos. The restaurant business was next. Here the duality that marked his character was most evident—he was at once markedly intelligent and adept in his every endeavor, as well as coarse and cruel when it suited him. He hired strippers to lure in diners before word got around that the menu was superlative. And he casually meted out violence to employees who failed to live up to his expectations. Prigozhin redefined upscale dining when he remodeled a rusting hulk into a floating restaurant known as New Island that became one of St. Petersburg’s most fashionable eateries. New Island hosted key state dinners for Vladimir Putin, French president Jacques Chirac, and US president George W. Bush. Prigozhin personally served Putin on more than one occasion, which earned him the playful sobriquet of “Putin’s Chef.”

Putin, the former KGB agent who later remade Russia into his own fiefdom while dismantling the nation’s fledgling democracy of all but its most superficial forms, could be said to be as much of a thug as Prigozhin on many levels, even if a more polished and articulate one. Both St. Petersburg natives who made good, Putin went to university and Prigozhin went to prison. You can at once envision Prigozhin with bloody knuckles and Putin filing a nail while ordering a rival tossed out a window. The end result is the same. The two men most likely first encountered one another when the ex-con was in his casino business phase and Putin—who had held a number of significant political positions in the city—was serving as chairman of the supervisory board for casino gambling. Over time, they grew to be close associates, and even friends of a sort, with Prigozhin growing fabulously wealthy off government contracts awarded to his catering business. As Putin evolved from president to autocrat, he came to govern Russia much like an organized crime family, with his oligarchs—whose fortunes depended upon his favor—acting as loyal capos. Corruption clung to every corridor of Russian government and society. It suited Prigozhin well: he became a jet-setter who owned his own jets, and he moved into a compound that sported both a basketball court and a helicopter pad. And he diversified: some of his riches were pumped into Prigozhin’s so-called “Internet Research Agency,” a Russian troll factory later infamous for US election interference as it promoted Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton’s candidacy through a web of social media bots.

But it was as head of the Wagner Group that Prigozhin cemented his stature as a key oligarch closely aligned with Putin. A private military group that offered Russia plausible deniability in covert actions abroad, Wagner operated ruthlessly in geographies as remote from the Kremlin as Africa and the Middle East. Many found it impossible to unsee the widely circulated 2017 video of Wagner mercenaries first torturing and then using a sledgehammer to beat to death a deserter from the Syrian army. The sledgehammer became an unofficial Wagner emblem. But long before Syria, Wagner filled the ranks of the so-called “little green men” of professional soldiers with no insignia who appeared suddenly in 2014 in Crimea and in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, euphemistically identified by Moscow as organic separatists eager to secede and join the Russian Federation.

Putin’s brand of neofascist irredentism drew heavily on Hitler’s playbook. The Austrian Anschluss was almost effortlessly replayed in Crimea. And the Donbas would be the new Sudetenland. Meanwhile, Prigozhin and his Wagner Group would be the poorly disguised blunt instruments on the ground—as well as on plenty of other grounds, where shadow wars were conducted on distant continents and Russian power could be unofficially and mercilessly enforced. But absorbing eastern Ukraine proved a stubborn objective. And the West responded with economic sanctions rather than appeasement. Perhaps Poland 1939 would make for a better model?

On February 24, 2022, tanks rolled in, an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II. But Russian ambitions turned out to be overoptimistic, to say the least. Putin expected to occupy Kyiv in a matter of days, but that was not to be. Ukraine held out. Joe Biden was president, not Donald Trump; Europe and NATO stood firm. But this spawned new opportunities for Prigozhin: he could rip off the mask, take Wagner out of the closet, and operate freely in Ukraine with his mercenaries as well as convicts recruited from Russia’s penal system. Yet, the war dragged on. Gains were few, Russian losses were magnified. Military effectiveness was handicapped by a culture of corruption not dissimilar to that which marked the rest of the state. Frustration fueled Prigozhin’s conviction that the stalemate might be broken if he was in charge, if only things could be done his way. He developed a heightened sense of self-importance. He clashed with high echelons of the military machine as well as with rival Russian nationalists. He made a lot of enemies. Still, Putin gave his old friend a lot of leash—until the day that Prigozhin came to believe his own bullshit. Putin’s chef proved to be the recipe for his own undoing.

Putin’s Sledgehammer is a magnificent book, but its inherent complexity and the level of detail it contains hardly makes for an easy read. I had the advantage of coming to it after previously poring through volumes by Peter Conradi on Russia, Thomas De Waal on the Caucuses, Serhii Plokhy on Ukraine, and Timothy Snyder on geopolitics. A talented writer whose work is based upon impeccable research, Candace Rondeaux ranks among those esteemed authors, but her work is not for beginners. Maps and a timeline would have been helpful. There’s also a dizzying array of characters, organizations, acronyms, etc. that are hard to keep track off, especially for those unfamiliar with Russian names and places. She does include a somewhat comprehensive table of principal players, but because these are arranged by association rather than alphabetically it is less helpful than it should be. Still, these are quibbles. This book will likely not only come to be considered the definitive biography of Yevgeny Prigozhin, but will certainly be counted as an extremely valuable contribution to the historiography in ongoing studies of the contemporary Russian state.

I have previously reviewed these other related books that are recommended reading:

Review of: Who Lost Russia?: How the World Entered a New Cold War, by Peter Conradi 

Review of: The Caucasus: An Introduction, by Thomas De Waal

Review of: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

Review of: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy

Review of: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder

Wednesday, June 17,1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 A.M. in order to reach station B at 11 P.M.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 P.M. Who is capable of loving longer, a man or a woman?

That is “Question 7,” excerpted from a little-known early short story by Anton Chekhov entitled “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician.” Of course, there can be no answer to such an absurd question.

At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay’s bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima and forty-three seconds later some “60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000” people (no one really knows) died. At that same moment, eighty miles to the south  of Ground Zero, Arch Flanagan—who had miraculously survived a stretch as slave laborer on the infamous Burma Death Railway—was “pushing carriages of rock up long dark tunnels” in a coal mine under the Inland Sea.

Now in his fourth year as a Japanese POW, physically and psychologically broken, the skeletal creature that still endured fully expected death to take him soon. He could hardly know then that the atomic bomb that killed 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 people that morning would mean that he would be spared. Nor could he have imagined that about sixteen years later a son would be born to him who would go on to become an internationally acclaimed author and who would win the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, inspired by Arch’s brutal experience on the Burma railway. There is much that is unknowable in life, but it is almost certain that if not for the bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” that would mean death for 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 Japanese souls, Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan would never have been born. Were the lives of Arch Flanagan (or Richard Flanagan, for that matter) or the hundreds of thousands of other Japanese and European and American and Australian survivors of the war worth the sacrifice of the 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 human beings who perished at Hiroshima on that day? Of course, there can be no answer to such an absurd question.

But that paradox clearly haunted the author, and it informs every single page of his own Question 7 [2023], a mesmerizing literary tour de force that is styled as a memoir but is in every way so very much more than that. One reviewer branded it “genre-bending,” and while I am ever reluctant to borrow from others when composing my own reviews, I surely cannot improve upon that. But then, as someone who has read every novel penned by Richard Flanagan can attest, genre-bending is what defines his art, from my first encounter with him in Gould’s Book of Fish [2001]—which I described elsewhere as “a stunningly original and brilliant blend of satire, heartache, love, cruelty, comedy, and existential tragedy, tossed with a superb use of magical realism … think William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and John Irving, all stirring the same pot with different shaped spoons”—to the more mainstream literary fiction of The Narrow Road to the Deep North [2013], a historical novel focused on extremes of brutality and endurance that turns out after all to be a love story that likewise manages to qualify as a magnificent achievement.

At this point, it’s only fair to issue a kind of spoiler alert, because it seems to me that it would be nearly impossible to do justice to Flanagan’s work here without giving much of the story away, which yet sounds a bit weird because this is mostly nonfiction that hardly suggests a cliffhanger at the end. I say “mostly nonfiction” because while this is essentially an autobiography, the author admits to a certain literary license here and there. And if I state that it is “essentially an autobiography” I must immediately contradict myself because in fact it steps far beyond memoir to history, literature, and nuclear physics, as well as speculative challenges to notions of both teleology and existentialism that somehow manages not to reinforce nihilism. And there we are back to genre-bending! By the way, Flanagan never once cites schools of philosophy, though his musings repeatedly compel the mind of the reader to go there. He also never refers to quantum mechanics, but as I turned the pages I could not help but think of quantum probabilities and the “many-worlds” theory that insists that anything that can occur actually does occur elsewhere in the multiverse but is hidden from us because by observing an event we manifest only our own reality and obscure all the others. In a different take on the familiar “butterfly effect,” I suppose, in at least one of those worlds there is and never has been a Richard Flanagan.

It would hardly be giving too much away to point out that Flanagan plucked the title for his book from that brain-bender in the Chekhov short story. That he would turn to a corner of literature so utterly obscure for this purpose only underscores the eclectic range of the author’s intellect. Nearly as unfamiliar to most is The World Set Free, a 1914 novel by polymath H. G. Wells that predicted the development of the atomic bomb as a weapon of war. As Flanagan tells it, this sci-fi flight of fancy was written in part during a period that saw Wells distracted by his infatuation with the decades-younger journalist Rebecca West. Hardly as successful as his prior bestsellers, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (if indeed more prescient!), The World Set Free was largely forgotten—except by atomic scientist Leó Szilárd, who, upon reading it in the early 1930s, became obsessed by the implications, which later sparked an epiphany that had him conceive the concept of a chain reaction that could lead to nuclear detonation! As it turned out, Szilárd became part of the group that was to persuade FDR to launch a race to develop the bomb before Hitler could do so, as well as a key figure in the Manhattan Project that was to result in the creation of “Little Boy” and the deaths of 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 men, women, and children in Hiroshima in August, 1945—but also spare the life of Arch Flanagan, and thus make possible the birth of Richard Flanagan some years later.

Talk about the butterfly effect!

Despite the spoilers, there is a good deal more to Question 7, and it will definitely make you think. Like Gould’s Book of Fish—which I reread immediately after I turned the final page—I will likely read this one again at some point. There really is so much to ponder in what is after all a rather short book, given its dramatic scope. I especially enjoyed his treatment of the steamy relationship that arose between Wells and West, literary license and all, which reminded me a bit of his tortured portrait of Charles Dickens in Flanagan’s Wanting [2008], another outstanding effort. He also revisits the genocide that led to the almost complete extermination of aborigines by white settlers in what was then the convict colony of Van Diemen’s Land, a topic that runs through many of his books, the climate change driven fires that have forever disfigured the Tasmania that he knew in his youth, and his own near-death experience in a drowning incident that would later beget the substance of his superlative first novel, Death of a River Guide [1994].

Much as in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, the universal themes that characterize Flanagan’s work frequently identify the prevalence of cruelty and evil in the world while ever holding out the hope—no matter how tiny—that love and compassion could ultimately prevail. In Question 7, there’s the compelling account of the all too real life encounters between the author and certain elderly Japanese men who had, many years before, once been the very sadistic camp guards who had cruelly victimized Arch Flanagan. They now seemed like such nice, older gentlemen. At the site of the mine where Arch once wasted away, local guides denied that slave labor ever existed, a potent reminder that history can not only be forgotten but intentionally scrubbed—a process sadly in progress across the United States today.

Arch Flanagan never fully recovered from his trauma as a prisoner of war, but he managed to live on to the ripe old age of ninety-eight, to hear his son relate back to him the stories of visits with other old men who had once viciously abused him. He passed away on the same day his now famous son confided that the final draft of The Narrow Road to the Deep North was complete. What does any of this actually mean? Of course, there can be no answer to such absurd questions—but we must nevertheless keep asking. At least, that’s my takeaway after closing the cover of Question 7.

I struggled to locate the text of “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician” [1882] on the web, and finally resorted to buying the collection, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-Three New Stories [1998], in order to read it. At less than two pages long, the story proved anticlimactic. But I did get to read all the other questions. The final one, “Question 8,” is my favorite: “My mother-in-law is 75, and my wife 42. What time is it?”

 

I reviewed other Richard Flanagan novels here:

Review of: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: Wanting, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: Death of a River Guide, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: First Person: A Novel, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: The Sound of One Hand Clapping, by Richard Flanagan

 

 

 

It has been said the United States is a nation of immigrants that despises immigrants. At first glance that seems counterintuitive and smacks of hyperbole, but simmering beneath the satire lies more than a single kernel of truth. Benjamin Franklin worried that German immigrants might alter the character of the Republic for the worse. In 1798, just a decade after the Constitution was ratified, the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed. A massive influx of the Irish fleeing starvation during the potato famine fueled a nativist panic in the 1850s that brought the Know Nothing Party to national prominence. The heinous Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. Twenty years later, Woodrow Wilson complained of the coming of “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland … as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.” Such sentiments were codified into law with the Immigration Act of 1924 that set strict national quotas not abolished until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Sixty years later, the news is dominated by ICE roundups across the country and detainment centers like Alligator Alcatraz, with the president even citing a statute from the Alien and Sedition Acts to justify his widescale crackdown on the undocumented.

I was long familiar with this history, but what was entirely new to me was that just a few years after Wilson was bemoaning the “meaner sorts” from certain parts of Europe flooding American shores to the east, on the west coast there was a full scale race riot in Bellingham, Washington, about ninety miles north of Seattle, that saw mobs violently physically assault and eventually expel hundreds of immigrants from India who had been working at lumber mills in the vicinity. Nor was I cognizant of the fact—although perhaps I should have guessed—that in this Jim Crow era citizenship was largely out of reach for South Asian emigres because white supremacy jealously guarded that privilege. I was also surprised to learn that the same University of California Berkeley that was the hotbed for student antiwar sentiment in the 1960s was in the early 1900s home to an increasingly radicalized community of Indian expatriates who, while struggling against discrimination in the US, became laser-focused upon overthrowing British rule back home on the subcontinent, spawning the revolutionary Ghadar Movement. And I was completely unaware that the machinations of Ghadar operatives came to jeopardize the neutrality enforced by now-President Wilson as World War I raged in Europe, while Germans and Brits competed to alternately court or persecute these insurgents abroad. Finally, I had no clue that the activities of these Indians became one of the key ingredients that drove passage of the lesser-known Immigration Act of 1917 that established an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” and banned so-called “undesirables” from entering the country.

That’s a lot to unpack, but Scott Miller proves more than up to the task in his latest work, Let My Country Awake: Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj [scheduled for publication in October2025], a well-researched, highly readable, and fast-moving account that manages—in less than three hundred pages—to brilliantly capture a long neglected if pivotal series of events that touched three continents with some consequence. Moreover, Miller’s critical eye for detail and talented prose masterfully reaches back more than a century to breathe life into colorful characters who walk the earth no longer. These include Indian activists Lala Har Dayal and Taraknath Das, the villainous Canadian immigration agent William Hopkinson, noted anarchist Emma Goldman, pioneering female jurist Annette Adams, assistant attorney general Charles Warren, and a whole host of British and German diplomats and spies. Likewise, episodes long forgotten or at least neglected elsewhere are skillfully slotted back into the historical narrative to fill in some highly significant blanks that speak to the recurring fever of rising nativism in North America, as well as a pre-Gandhi Indian nationalism that was fierce and transoceanic.

The prevailing wisdom has long been that British imperialism represented a kinder and gentler subjugation for its inhabitants than they might have suffered had they been conquered by the Belgians, French or Germans. Perhaps. But also perhaps not. Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan would remind you that British colonists directed the genocide that resulted in the near extermination of aborigines in what was then Van Dieman’s Land. British soldiers used machine guns to mow down thousands of Ndebele warriors in southern Africa in the 1890s. Nonwhite combatants clearly were not treated with the kind of “civilized restraint” that would have been afforded fellow Europeans during and after hostilities.

This was also true in India, occupied by England since the eighteenth century. In the process of putting down the Sepoy (AKA Indian) Rebellion of 1857, the British killed more than 800,000 Indians! Miller notes that a popular method of executing Indian rebels was a technique termed “blowing from a gun” that had the condemned strapped to the mouth of a cannon, which when fired created a grisly public spectacle as the body was blown to bits. In 1858, India was placed under direct crown rule, known as the British Raj, which endured until independence came in 1947. But these atrocities were never forgotten by the Indian people, nor its activists, at home or abroad.

Because we were allied with England back then, and remain favorably disposed to the UK today, it is easy to forget that despite our antipathy towards the wanton aggression and brutal conduct of Germany in World War I, taking sides was not such a clear cut process for the subjects of British colonial rule. Sir Roger Casement, a British diplomat famous for helping to expose the inhumanity that reigned over King Leopold’s Belgian Congo, was also an Irish nationalist who was stripped of his knighthood and then hanged for treason during the war. As we learn more about the routine oppression of Indians under the thumb of the Raj, it is not at all surprising that Ghadar conspirators would welcome collaboration with German agents in the US to help achieve their ends, while the British naturally would do everything they could to derail such efforts.

It is the unlikely confluence of people and events in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent as global war is breaking out that makes Let My Country Awake such a fascinating tale—especially since much of what Miller covers here is hardly familiar ground. Apparently, it was once just as obscure to the author himself: it turns out that a random headline reporting the Bellingham race riot unexpectedly spotted at a museum display planted the seeds for what evolved into this book. As such, I do attach some comfort to the fact that I am not the only student of American history wondering at my own ignorance in this regard. On the other hand, just like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, incidents such as these had a way of being overlooked in the textbooks assigned to me back in the day.

Miller, a former international correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and other outlets,  knows how to take a good story and run with it, as he did in The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century [2011], which also established his reputation chronicling history that meets the standards of academia while appealing to a much broader audience. In his latest effort, as a critic I struggled to find fault, but I could detect few flaws other than in the book’s title—plucked from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore—which while relevant strikes me as a somewhat dull designation for such a vibrant, exciting work! Spoiler alert: Ghadar does not succeed in toppling the Raj, but along the way the author treats us to plenty of action and intrigue marked by espionage, plots and counterplots, cloakroom diplomacy, courtroom drama, and assassinations.

The unstated irony in Let My Country Awake is that few residents of the United States—which had fought two wars for independence against Britain—found sympathy in the plight of the Indians chafing under the weight of British colonialism. Nor were they welcomed as refugees. Instead, as people of color with an alien culture and religion, they were mostly shunned and detested—or violently driven off as at Bellingham in 1907. In the course of the narrative, Miller relates the unsettling tale of Bhagat Singh Thind, a US Army veteran who skirted customary prohibitions against naturalization by arguing that as a Sikh high-caste Indian he was effectively white. Thind attempted to coopt white supremacy and at first he succeeded. Citizenship was granted, but then stripped away in a subsequent Supreme Court ruling that Thind was not really white and non-white immigrants were ineligible to be American citizens, which also resulted in retroactively revoking the naturalization of more than seventy other Indians.

There was a time when I believed that we were moving away from all that as a nation—Thind actually had his citizenship restored in 1935—but I no longer hold that view. Still, whether you choose to hang on to optimism or pessimism when it comes to such things, whether your glass is half-full or half-empty or simply shattered, the historical record matters. The more you know about the past, the better you can perceive the present, and the more it can inform your vision of what lies ahead, however you conceive it. To that end then, this is an important book that I would urge you to read, as simply a chapter of our past, or perhaps as a parable for our future.

NOTE: This review is based upon an uncorrected proof of this book issued prior to publication.

I reviewed a previous book by Scott Miller here: Review of the President and the Assassin, by Scott Miller

I have reviewed several novels by Richard Flanagan, including this one: Death of A River Guide, by Richard Flanagan

For more about Roger Casement, I recommend this book by Adam Hochschild, reviewed here: King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild

Some years ago, I published a journal article about the Know Nothings, which can be accessed here: Strange Bedfellows, by Stan Prager

 

 

 

 

Imagine a vast, deep, dense, forbidding swamp of tea-colored water and mud and patches of dry ground, blisteringly hot, thick with populations of alligators and panthers and poisonous snakes and legions of biting insects and all manner of various other perils. Now imagine you are an enslaved person, compelled to long hours of punishing labor, routinely beaten, likely scarred, maybe branded, perhaps raped, subject to helplessly watch your loved ones sold away from you forever, with no hope for any future except more of the same. Then imagine that swamp as your salvation. You don’t have to imagine any of it because at one time it was all very real.

It was the Great Dismal Swamp, a geography shared by Virginia and North Carolina that was in the antebellum about two thousand square miles—roughly the size of Delaware!—which indeed proved the salvation for thousands upon thousands of the enslaved, across many generations, because it represented freedom, a certain haven out of reach of the white slavecatchers armed with rifles and vicious bloodhounds who were in terror of entering the swamp and ever again emerging alive. Rather than an underground railroad to distant places where slavery did not exist, this was instead a kind of tunnel into a fantastical alien territory where slavery could not exist. The enslaved men, women, and children who chose this course or were driven to it were called maroons, and if they survived they would be forever free.

All but forgotten, echoes of their seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century stories, long lost to history, are gradually being recovered with twenty-first century methods, through archaeological excavations, scientific analysis, and historical scholarship. Much remains unknown, yet unexplored, but a fascinating chronicle of what we have learned or can at least surmise can be found between the covers of Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp [2022], by J. Brent Morris, an extremely well-written study of a place and its peoples most Americans probably never knew existed.

I had a peripheral awareness of marronage—the self-emancipation of the enslaved who fled to live in the wilds—elsewhere in the hemisphere, but no idea that the process was so prevalent in the American south, nor that the numbers were so large. Exact figures are impossible to ascertain, but it seems that many thousands of fugitives and their descendants lived in the Great Dismal Swamp. Some estimates run as high as fifty thousand! That kind of scale demands far more attention than traditional studies have granted, which is what makes this fine work by Morris so valuable to students of the antebellum.

But I might never have come to it at all had I not first attended a presentation by David Silkenat entitled “Slavery and the Environment in the American South” at the Civil War Institute (CWI) 2023 Summer Conference at Gettysburg College—a lecture I nearly skipped because I thought it might be dull.  I could not have been more wrong: Silkenat’s skills at the podium are equal to his talents as a historian, and I sat captivated by his exploration of how much better adapted the enslaved were to their respective environments than their brutal white masters could have conceived. This empowered them to supplement their often meager rations by hunting and foraging after hours—as well as flee to marronage if there were wild lands nearby. But the true epiphany for me was when he put focus on the intricate mechanisms of the societies that developed and endured in the wildest and most massive space to host maroon colonies in the south: the Great Dismal Swamp. When his talk concluded, I picked up a copy of his book—Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South—and started in on it right away.

Marronage only represents a small slice of Scars on the Land, but there’s a story in it that affected me deeply. Silkenat cites the memoir of the formerly enslaved Charles Ball, which relates the tragic tale of his encounter with a naked and filthy runaway named Paul who had fled a beating to a nearby swamp. Paul’s escape was handicapped by a heavy iron collar around his neck that was fastened with bells to help discourage escape, which Ball attempted to remove, without success. When Ball returned a week later to try to assist him further, he found only the decaying corpse of Paul, who had hanged himself from a tree limb, crows pecking at his eyes. For Paul, clearly, not only was swamp life preferable to enslavement, but so too was suicide. This episode serves as another stark reminder that slavery in the south, long misremembered as a benign or even benevolent institution, was for many thus subjected marked instead by a horrific lifeway of oppressive labor routinely punctuated by cruelty so severe that a dark and dangerous swamp was a welcome refuge. And for some, like Paul, if that course failed, death yet remained a better alternative than living in chains.

In Dismal Freedom, Morris, professor of history at South Carolina’s Clemson University, succeeds brilliantly in recreating for the reader both the environment of the Great Dismal Swamp in the antebellum and the desperation that drove the enslaved to inhabit it, at any and all costs, as well as offering educated imaginings of the complex, vibrant communities that once thrived at its edges and in its depths. To this effort, he brings to a series of tight, well-crafted chapters a multidisciplinary toolkit that relies on the historical record, oral tradition, archaeological evidence, ecological studies, and much more to collectively summarize what is known of marronage in the Dismal over several centuries before it went extinct in the years that followed the Civil War and emancipation. Still, it’s not all data: Morris has a keen eye for interpretative analysis that resurrects for a modern audience the nuances of long-dead populations. But as a careful historian, he never fails to distinguish fact from speculation. And along the way, material that might otherwise be tedious is enlivened by the author’s talented pen and his obvious passion for the subject.

There’s a lot of history here, plenty of it unfamiliar. How many know of George Washington’s founding role in the Dismal Swamp Company (DSC), a fantasy turned to failure that dreamed of draining the swamp for agricultural purposes? Or that this attempt ultimately enlarged the maroon population, as some of the enslaved put to grueling labor in this effort fled to the dark recesses of the swamp? And who knew that Nat Turner’s father Abraham was rumored to be a maroon denizen of the Dismal, a footnote to that famous rebellion that was to weigh heavily long afterwards upon terrified whites who saw portents of insurrection in every corridor?

Morris also puts marronage in context as a phenomenon by no means limited to this geography—wherever slavery existed adjacent to wild places, those bold enough to dare would attempt to seek haven there. And not only enslaved blacks became maroons: Native Americans and even whites who lived outside the law would also call the Dismal Swamp home. For all, swamp life was both challenging and dangerous, but it offered not only freedom in the literal sense—especially for the enslaved—but a genuine independence from authority of all kinds, as well. For many thousands, the payoff was well worth the risk.

Morris identifies three different types of maroons who peopled the Dismal. The first were the “deep swamp maroons” who secretly dwelled far into the interior, fully secluded from the outside world. Some constructed cabins on stilts amongst the reeds. But many more put down stakes in the hundreds of the Dismal’s habitable islands, large and small, of drier ground—called mesic islands—that hosted individuals, families, and larger settlements. It is believed that trade networks were established between villages, and, ever wary of outsiders, that generations of maroons thrived there in isolation. And it turns out that the at-first forbidding tea-colored water of the Dismal is actually pure and safe to drink; stained an amber color by tannic acids from decomposing bark, the tannins inhibit the growth of bacteria and act as a preservative, so maroons could always count on a reliable source of potable water in what was an otherwise hostile milieu.

Then there were the “fringe maroons” who existed at the edges of the swamp. Because of their proximity to plantations, their liberty was more precarious, but that was offset by their ability to clandestinely trade goods and resources with those who remained enslaved, especially family members. Some even produced products, like shingles, which were valuable beyond the boundaries of the swamp. There were also runaways who sought temporary refuge at the swamp’s margins as fringe maroons, who then—unlike the hapless Paul—might after a “time out” return to surrender to slavery and take their punishment. Some resorted to this practice more than once.

Later, notably after the completion of another of Washington’s early visions, the Dismal Swamp Canal—which ran twenty-two miles to connect the landlocked sounds of Virginia and North Carolina—corporate ventures brought lumber and shingle industries to the region, and a third type of maroon emerged. Known as “liminal maroons,” these wily sorts would habitually step in and out of marronage, maintaining their freedom but making a living off the white man’s world. Like their fringe maroon brethren, once familiar with the Dismal’s ecosystem and how to survive there, formerly enslaved blacks could easily slip in and out at will, while their white captors could only proceed so far in pursuit, retreating in terror at dangers real and imagined that might lurk within the dark interior.

This is not to say such attempts were ever abandoned, only that these went largely unsuccessful—which further incensed slaveowners, for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, of course, was that maroons represented thousands of dollars in human “property” drained from their pockets, lost and unrecoverable. Second, viable maroon communities served as an open invitation to other potential escapees. But there was something else that infuriated them far more than any financial injury incurred: that numbers of the formerly enslaved could endure free and out of their clutches was an abomination they could not abide, yet they frequently found themselves powerless to redress. Their rage was fueled further by the paranoia of slave insurrection that dominated the southern plantation mentality; the slender thread that may have connected Nat Turner to the Dismal via his runaway father was imagined by many as a kind of sturdy chain linking their ostensibly docile chattel slaves with a restive savage mass hiding in the swamp, ever ready to rise up in concert and murder their white masters in their sleep. It never happened, of course, but it did not stop them from believing that the threat was real.

In between the books by Silkenat and Morris, I read The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, by Matthew J. Clavin, a stirring account of a maroon colony that existed in a setting that was almost exactly the opposite of the hidden sanctuaries of the deep swamp maroons of the Dismal. This was what became known as the “Negro Fort,” a refuge for fugitive slaves recruited into service by the British in what was then the Spanish colony of East Florida during the War of 1812, who opted to remain behind after hostilities concluded in a military fortification heavily stocked with cannon and munitions that even had the audacity to continue to fly the Union Jack after the Brits decamped. This outraged General Andrew Jackson, who plotted to ultimately annihilate the fort, an act quietly countenanced by the American government. At the end of the day, the very existence of maroon communities represented a kind of thumbing their noses at white supremacy, something that simply could not be tolerated.

Fortunately, great numbers of maroons met happier outcomes in the Great Dismal Swamp, and while turning the pages of Dismal Freedom, the reader cannot help but cheer for all those who remained out of reach of those who would return them to cruel captivity. It’s also worth cheering for Morris, who has in one slender volume turned out a magnificent addition to the historiography that is also that rare work both suitable to a scholarly audience and accessible to the non-academic. As Morris well underscores here, recent studies have only barely scraped the surface of all that remains unknown about maroon communities, in the Dismal as well as elsewhere. But if you are as intrigued by this nearly forgotten history as I am, you’ll be in for a real treat when you dive into Dismal Freedom.

NOTE: I reviewed Silkenat’s book  here:  Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South, by David Silkenat

 NOTE: I reviewed  Clavin’s book here: The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, by Matthew J. Clavin

 

Every serious student of the American Civil War knows that its central cause was human chattel slavery. Southern slave economies, deeply destructive to their own natural environments, lusted after new lands for transplanting their “peculiar institution,” especially the vast western territories of the Mexican Cession and the Gadsden Purchase, spoils of war and treaty. When Lincoln’s election on a “Free Soil” platform foreclosed that prospect, the plantation elite led the charge to secession, pledging to establish a “proud slave Republic.” Thus, most histories of the antebellum tensions that would lead to separation begin in the aftermath of the Mexican War (1846-48). But after Fort Sumter, references to Mexico are reduced to occasional footnotes on the periphery of the struggle for Union.

Meanwhile, the Republic of Mexico—which had been stripped of more than fifty percent of its territory by its rapacious northern neighbor—was plunged into economic and political chaos so severe that less than fifteen years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war, it fell victim to foreign invaders who would impose the “Second Mexican Empire” upon it. So it was that north of the Rio Grande, as hundreds of thousands garbed in blue or gray lost their lives to muskets or measles, and with Washington far too preoccupied to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, French imperialists sent an Austrian emperor to rule over all of Mexico. How it happened and what was to follow makes for a fascinating story via the talented pen of Raymond Jonas in his brilliant addition to the historiography, Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire [2024].

In my decades of Civil War studies, only rarely have I paused to consider the conflict’s significance abroad, other than an awareness of the looming threat of European recognition of the Confederacy—Lincoln’s greatest fear. There was, of course, always a certain incongruity to the favor shown by Britain and France—who had each abolished slavery—to the breakaway CSA that championed human bondage. A large part of it was economic, of course, given the hunger for southern cotton. But another was driven by a real anxiety of what a United States that had nearly doubled its size with the spoils of Mexican soil could mean for a future balance of power in the Americas and elsewhere. As such, a house divided reassured them.

The first longer look I took was courtesy of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton [2014], which demonstrated the global impact of British demand for cotton, endangered overnight by a now tenuous supply chain from the American south, its most important vendor. The result was especially ruinous for India, where colonial exploitation through wide scale cotton cultivation condemned its population to poverty and famine. A decade later, in American Civil Wars [2024], Alan Taylor widened the lens, revealing how growing concerns for an emboldened United States—with its Union restored—sparked new fears overseas of an emerging American Empire, and much closer to home: fueling Canadian nationalism in a race to create a union of their own before its constituent parts could fall prey to what looked to be an unquenchable thirst for territorial expansion by its aggressive neighbor. And further south, a weakened, essentially bankrupt Mexico offered Europe an opportunity to check American power and gain another foothold on the continent.

It was Taylor’s book that inspired me to read Habsburgs on the Rio Grande, and I was not disappointed. Jonas, professor of history at the University of Washington, starts off by sketching out the pitiful status of the Second Republic following the Texas Revolution, the Mexican Cession, and the Gadsden Purchase. A rump state of sorts, although its remaining territory was still sizeable, the war and its aftermath left deep socio-economic scars that set it politically adrift with an uncertain future further burdened by crippling debt. Mexico was not only maimed; it was deeply disfigured.

Years ago, I recall reading a remark by a supercilious pundit who wondered aloud what the west might look like today absent the forces of manifest destiny. He pointed to the economic and political turmoil that marked contemporary Mexico, and imagined a similar negative outcome for what is now the western United States. Of course—much like passing judgment on twenty-first century sub-Saharan Africa without taking into account the devastating impact of European colonialism—conditions in modern Mexico are in a large part the legacy of American imperialism. Moreover, we can only guess at what the Mexican federation would be like in 2025 if its borders still contained Texas, California, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and those parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming that had been stripped from it by the war and other means. This point, minimized or even overlooked elsewhere, cannot be stressed too much.

Fallout from the Mexican-American War only exacerbated ongoing political instability. Within a few years, a coup put autocrat Santa Anna back at the helm, but he was then overthrown in Benito Juárez’s liberal revolution that saw widespread reforms to modernize the economy as well as separate church from state, which threatened both the power of large landowners and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church. This led to a conservative revolt and civil war. Meanwhile, the handful of European powers that held the notes attached to Mexico’s crushing indebtedness—distrustful of one another but yet aligned for mutual benefit—sensed an opening to collect what was due as well as well as set up shop in America’s backyard while Lincoln was too busy eying the movements of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to do anything about it.

This opportunity was handed to them on a silver platter when conservatives—defeated on the battlefield—reached out to France’s Napoleon III to request a monarch to rule over Mexico. What started out as an alliance of European nations given to intervention quickly fell apart over squabbling and a lack of will, but France stayed in the game. The French Army, at first stymied at the Battle of Puebla—a victory for Mexico still celebrated on “Cinco de Mayo”—later overwhelmed the forces of the Republic, sent Juárez’s government into internal exile, and placed the Austrian Habsburg Archduke Maximilian I on the throne as emperor of the newly established Second Mexican Empire.

This turns out to be an exciting tale Jonas recounts in a well-written narrative matched with an engaging style equally suitable to a popular or scholarly audience that serves as a welcome remedy to the all-too-common plague of book-length history presented as either dull or dumbed down. He’s at his very best with his detailed portrait of the hapless Maximilian: naive, idealistic, uncertain, self-absorbed, vacillating, easily influenced, and politically inept—in short, utterly unqualified to rule anywhere, but especially unsuitable for the chaotic powder keg that was 1860s Mexico. Furthermore, the Maximilian who emerges in these pages does not appear to have had a solid grip on the dangerous realities he was to encounter. Biographers have observed that Thomas Jefferson was capable of holding two opposing ideas in his head at the same time. The same perhaps could have been said of Maximilian, although unlike the shrewd Jefferson, he seemed entirely unaware of the contradictions.

For those intrigued by the intersecting lives of key figures in history, Maximilian’s family tree is worthy of attention. He was the younger brother of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I, ruler of Austro-Hungary until his death during the First World War. And he was married to the beautiful if mentally unstable Carlota, who was sister to none other than Belgium’s King Leopold II, later infamous for the horrific atrocities inflicted upon the inhabitants of the Congo Free State, his own personal fiefdom. Maximilian’s liberal ideals were not welcome at the court of Franz Joseph, but his pedigree— Habsburgs had once ruled the Viceroyalty of New Spain—lent him a legitimacy that suited both Mexican conservatives and European imperialists, each who pressed him to take on the dubious honor of becoming Emperor of Mexico. True to his characteristic indecisiveness, and ever vulnerable to persuasion, he at first declined but later accepted the role.

His reign was doomed from the start, not least because the new emperor never really understood his mission. Despite decades of political unrest and the schemes of conservative monarchists, Mexicans were mostly united in jealously guarding the hard-fought independence  won from Spain in 1821. Yet, Maximilian—a foreign ruler imposed by the French—expected nothing less than a joyous welcome as liberator by an adoring population. There was also an immediate conflict with his conservative patrons in Mexico, whose goal was to undue Juárez’s reforms by restoring the church and its large landholdings, and returning power to the wealthy elite. But Maximilian was a liberal who declared himself a champion of the indigenous and sought to further reform—the exact opposite brand of sovereign that reactionary collaborationists had hoped to import to do their will.

Spoiler alert: it did not end well. Maximilian and Carlota flailed about, playing at the frippery of royalty while deceived by their handlers—and their own imaginations—that they enjoyed a popular support conspicuous in its absence. Meanwhile to their north, the Union prevailed and shortly began to offer aid to the exiled Republic. Eventually France cut its losses and withdrew, but Maximilian—in a ludicrous underscore to his penchant for indulging his own illusions—remained behind, still confident that he was a welcome, beloved figure. That fantasy came to a predictable end in front of a firing squad, although it is likely the credulous Maximilian went to his death as dumbfounded as he had lived his life.

There’s far more to report about the events chronicled in this marvelous book, but no review could appropriately do that justice. All that I can add is that if you are interested in significant if relatively unfamiliar episodes of history that seldom receive their due, this volume deserves your attention as well as a permanent home on your bookshelves. You will not regret it.

 

My Review of:  Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert

My Review of: American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873, by Alan Taylor

“We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs—expansion of social security—broadened coverage in unemployment insurance —improved housing—and better health protection for all our people. We are determined that our government remain warmly responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people … That men are created equal needs no affirmation, but they must have equality of opportunity and protection of their civil rights under the law …”

Can you guess which American political party once championed these ideals? The Democrats? [Cue loud game show buzzer!] Wrong! Those are in fact excerpts from the Republican Party platform that saw Dwight David Eisenhower coast to reelection in 1956, the year before this Sputnik baby was born. Moreover, such was the prevailing consensus of the day that those identical planks could seamlessly have been dropped verbatim into the platform of Ike’s Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson. But that was then and this is now: today’s MAGA Republicans would denounce it all with a pejorative flair as Marxist, socialist, woke. How did we get here? In Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus [2001], published more than two decades ago, acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein [Nixonland] identifies with an eerie prescience the origin of many of the ingredients that manifest today’s alt-right MAGA while looking back to locate the first fractures in a bipartisan accord that now strikes as almost unimaginable.

Once upon a time, a handsome square-jawed tanned figure with chiseled features stepped out of the panorama of Frederick Jackson Turner’s mythical western frontier—in this case Arizona—to demonstrate to America how it should be done. He could sometimes be seen on horseback, sporting a Stetson, gripping the stock of a rifle. Or more often—to recast the romance in a modern era—flying his own plane, a passion borne of his service as a pilot in World War II. Part of his legend was that he had pulled himself up by his own cowboy bootstraps, but that was hardly accurate; in truth, he inherited and once managed his family-owned department store. He later entered Republican politics and eventually went to the Senate as an anti-New Deal crusader.

At one time identified as the nation’s leading conservative, he clung to a complicated, deeply nuanced ideology that blurred the lines between states’ rights, libertarianism, federalism, and social justice. A lifetime member of the NAACP, he denounced racism, desegregated his own business, and acted as prominent advocate for integration in professional, educational, and civic circles, yet became nationally identified as a fierce opponent of civil rights because he objected to federal enforcement. That, as well as his hawkish anti-communism and uncompromising fiscal conservatism placed him on the extreme right of the political spectrum. Yet, despite his distance from the mainstream he became the Republican nominee for president in 1964. A warm personality offstage that frequently wore the face of a curmudgeon in public life, he polarized twin audiences that viewed him alternately as a genuine American patriot or a dangerous demagogue. And he happily played to those strengths and weaknesses in his acceptance speech at the convention, proclaiming—against the counsel of virtually every advisor—that  “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”—words that went on to launch the campaign that led to a landslide loss for Barry Goldwater.

But Goldwater is not actually the star of Before the Storm. That role goes to Clif White, the otherwise anonymous character who was the genius in grassroots organization that brought conservatives both out of the woodwork and out of the wilderness, eventually driving the three year effort behind the Draft Goldwater Committee that won his man the nomination, only to be overlooked and cast out of the inner circle once the campaign was underway. And here it is that Perlstein truly shines, articulately revealing the behind-the-scenes slow dance that quietly yet oh-so-elegantly drew unlikely, even dissimilar, partners from various corners to the main floor, where steps, at first disjointed, were neatly choreographed to move in unison. The result was a  spectacular production unlike anything ever seen before in American politics. When the credits ran, Clif White’s name was conspicuously absent, but it was indeed his show.

It would be a disservice to the reader to overlook the fact that some parts of the tale Perlstein tells of this back-of-the-room maneuvering runs to tedium. I recall the minutiae contained in one particular chapter of small print that became almost too much for me: more than once, I closed the cover to mindlessly scroll my phone. But this is a rarity in what is after all a very thick volume, and Perlstein writes so well that I read hundreds of other pages with rapt attention. And it was much later that I grudgingly acknowledged that despite the temptation I was grateful that I actually read rather than skimmed that very chapter; as with the plot of a fine, intricately crafted novel, it turns out that everything Perlstein shares is critical info eminently essential to the larger narrative.

How challenging the landscape was for Goldwater and how accomplished was Clif White in boosting his candidate to the lead is made abundantly clear by the early front-runner he replaced, liberal Republican and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, his political opposite, although part of that was achieved with the unforced error that begat Rockefeller’s self-destruction when he divorced his wife to then wed a much younger woman, a misstep unforgivable in the eyes of the early 1960s electorate. Still, it was a long journey from Rockefeller’s politics to Goldwater’s, and White deserves extraordinary credit for coalition building out of the fragmented disaffected who comprised the edges of what truly became the conservative movement that flocked to Goldwater’s standard.

One significant element was a kind of rabid hyperbolic anticommunism that was the legacy of McCarthyism, but amplified by both the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, that manifested itself in a variety of conspiracy theories that tickled the tips of mainstream America’s very real paranoia in the grips of the existential threat of nuclear annihilation, while simultaneously fueling quite a number of lunatic fringes. What they all had in common was the unshakeable belief in the Machiavellian genius of Soviet leaders like Khruschev to clandestinely impose communism upon the United States so brilliantly and completely that the public would be unaware of the menace until it was already too late. (There are echoes of this in the 1956 sci-fi horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has friends and family duplicated by pod people.) The most visible on the fringes was the John Birch Society, which held that US sovereignty was secretly being usurped and replaced by a shadowy world government installed by an international communist intrigue enabled by the Council on Foreign Relations. Their own fellow traveler was Major General Edwin Walker, who attempted to indoctrinate American active duty troops along these lines. A satirical fictional persona of this stripe takes the form of the clearly unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, who also warned of the dire threat to our “precious bodily fluids” posed by fluoridated water—a stark reminder today that voices like those of now cabinet Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were once widely ridiculed by mass audiences.

This well pre-dated the presidency of John F. Kennedy—indeed conspiracy theorists insisted that not only key members of the Eisenhower Administration, but Ike himself, were covert communists. But JFK was to become the flashpoint as he became associated with the other burning issue igniting right-wing outrage: civil rights. A cautious moderate with finely honed political instincts, Kennedy had hoped to postpone taking a public stand on desegregation until after his re-election, which depended upon the support of the solid Democratic south, but he was dragged reluctantly into the moral crusade when he could no longer avert his eyes from the brutality southern cops inflicted upon peaceful protesters. His nationally televised call for the Civil Rights Act of 1963 was simply too much for segregationists and others on the right who already judged Kennedy soft on communism. Shoring up a now shaky base was part of what brought JFK to Dallas that November, where he was greeted by “Wanted for Treason” flyers created by an associate of General Walker. “We’re heading into nut country today,” he confided to Jackie on the last morning of his life.

In spite of Kennedy’s assassination, extremism remained an unwelcome fringe in American life. For his part, Goldwater mourned Kennedy, a good friend despite their policy differences, whom he’d looked forward to taking on in ‘64. And it was not like the Republican Party Clif White was retooling was openly welcoming the Birchers and die-hard segregationists into its ranks, but … but neither was it loudly denouncing them when they came calling either. More importantly, these angrier (if loonier) voices had tapped into a widespread twin populist discomfiture among an increasingly disenchanted portion of the electorate: perhaps, many wondered, Soviet communists were getting the better of us, after all; and, equally important, a deeply racist United States, south and north, was no more ready to embrace equal opportunity for black Americans in the 1960s than it had been in the 1860s. Then there were the old-school anti-New Deal conservatives, sent off to the back of the bleachers when a cleverly contrived rules change over seating delegates in the 1952 Republican National Convention marginalized their leader, Robert A. Taft, and brought Eisenhower the nomination and the White House. Finally, moderate Richard M. Nixon had lost the 1960 election only very narrowly; his disappointed supporters simply needed to be reminded of brand loyalty to keep them within the fold. Clif White had a keen eye for all these potential voters, and likewise recognized that many of them resided in states where the Republican Party had such little presence that it had never been in play as a political force. Then White went to work, assiduously cultivating a grassroots movement that neatly stitched all these elements together.

Of course, in the end it was all for naught, or at least it seemed at that moment. In a time when the threat of a nuclear Armageddon was a part of everyday kitchen table discourse, Goldwater’s own words at the convention and on the stump branded him as an extremist. “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right,” a rallying cry by Republicans, was wickedly mocked by opponents with the snarky riposte, “In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts.” Goldwater was hardly laughing when he was crushed at the polls. Prognosticators—prematurely of course—declared the Republican Party dead, at least as far as obtaining the presidency was concerned. After the long reign of FDR and Truman, perhaps the Eisenhower years were just an aberration. In any event, the lessons seemed clear: the fringe right managed to claw its way to the top and—predictably—went down in flames. The future for Republicans, if a future was even conceivable, was a return to the center. But while those fringes were roundly chastised by the button-down forces of reason seeking to reclaim the party, somehow—either by negligence or design—they were never effectively ostracized. Instead, neither welcomed nor exiled, they remained, lurking, quieter perhaps, but no less committed to their respective causes. They would, as we would find out, make alliance with others even more extreme and gravitate to the top once more.

Rick Perlstein is a progressive author and historian whose life’s work has been given to chronicling the rise of the right in modern American politics. Before the Storm is the first of a sequential chronology that to date includes Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland. But I started in the middle and have been mostly reading Perlstein backwards. When I mentioned that as an aside in my review of Nixonland, the author sent me a sarcastic email offering to send me an essay he wrote in middle school!

Perlstein’s a funny guy, but there’s nothing humorous about the account that unfolds in his several books describing the way the tentacles on the outer fringes of the right gradually crept towards the center of the Republican Party and began strangling the creatures within that once represented a rather broad diversity of thought, stripping them of legitimacy until the only rightful heir remaining was attached to a rigidly ideological brand of conservatism. It did not happen right away, there were reverses and retreats, but each of these steps back yet left an indelible mark, and the bits of debris that collected from carving those marks coalesced into building blocks, and those in turn became structural forms that took on so much weight that they cracked the foundation of the party of Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt and, yes, Dwight Eisenhower, finally demolishing the central pillars that had defined the GOP for decades upon decades and supplanting it with a brand new edifice constructed upon tenets of self-righteousness that was increasingly intolerant of dissent, disdainful of compromise, and driven by the pursuit of power for power’s sake. All of that is clear now, in retrospect, with the strangulation complete, as the forces of the alt-right have entirely subsumed the Republican Party, now transmogrified into today’s grievance-driven, anti-democratic, MAGA cult of personality for Donald Trump.

Pundits yet still scratching their collective heads in an attempt to analyze how the GOP got here should first be admonished that, given its history, the dystopia of Trumpworld is perhaps not the aberration all too many assume—and then they should be referred to Before the Storm. Perlstein had already lived through Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich when that book went to print at the turn of the millennium, so although well aware of the trends he could not have known for certain what really lay ahead. But, man, he sure was on to something.

 

I’ve reviewed other Rick Perlstein books here:

Nixonland

The Invisible Bridge

Reaganland

 

 

A listless, uninspired, passive young man. A brooding, unsatisfied, troubled young woman. Unrequited love. Jazz music. Cats. Occasional episodes of unremarkable lovemaking. Books. Unresolved plot strands. Magical realism. Moments of literary flourish that flirt with magnificence. Clocks. Fine writing. Insipid prose. Prolonged solitude. Mysterious circumstances. An earlobe fetish. Bizarre incidents unquestioned and unexplored. Beatles tunes. Ghosts. Quotidian monotony. Fantastical beasts. Technology, conspicuous in its absence. Imaginary OtherWorlds. Sophisticated metaphor. Anticlimactic endings.

If each of these descriptions was lettered on the twenty-five squares of a standard bingo card and you checked them all off, the result would be the elements that occur in all or most of the fiction of renowned Japanese author Haruki Murakami. I know this because I have, over the years, read them all. All the novels. All the short stories. For the afficionado like myself, Murakami has become something of an addiction that—like most addictions—begets both pleasure and pain. That is because, as every Murakami cult initiate is aware, the body of his work at once translates to genius and frustration, literature and pulp, the brilliant and the banal. And this is true too for his latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls [published in Japan 2023; English translation 2024], a well-written if meandering and ultimately unsatisfying tale.

For the most part, the Murakami catalog falls into two distinct categories: standard literary fiction, like Norwegian Wood—his breakout bestseller of nostalgia and loss—and  magical realism, such as Kafka on the Shore, an extraordinary fusion of reality and fantasy. Had the former been my first read, I might not have gone back for more, because despite its superb craftmanship, it just didn’t suit my vibe. Instead, a random recommendation from a chatty barista pointed me to Kafka. I bought it. I devoured it. I was hooked.

I have long had a love affair with magical realism, sparked initially by encounters with Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and nurtured in more recent times by Richard Flanagan (Gould’s Book of Fish). It’s a tricky genre, not easy to pull off elegantly. To my mind, its closest cousin is the objective correlative, a technique popularized by both Hemingway and Garcia Marquez, that has inanimate objects communicate mood and emotion. Magical realism takes a big step beyond that, typically inserting an episode of the fantastical, often teeming with irony and metaphor, into a narrative otherwise grounded in reality. At a certain point in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez has it persistently rain upon the fictional town of Macondo without respite for four years, eleven months, and two days. In Kafka on the Shore, the main character encounters a pair of youthful World War II era Imperial soldiers in the forest who are stuck in time, decades after Hiroshima.

Another manifestation of magical realism constructs an alternate world that has characters slip between dual realities, either or both subject to supernational ingredients that are usually taken for granted by its inhabitants. That is the literary structure for Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, which blends and blurs the timelines of a twenty-first century Tasmanian con-man and a nineteenth century convict in what was then Van Dieman’s Land. So too in Murakami’s 1Q84, where a female assassin stalks dual dimensions, one remarkable for an earth that hosts two moons.

The latter style forms the framework for The City and Its Uncertain Walls. (Spoiler alert ahead!) This time around, a seventeen year old listless, uninspired, passive young man whose only companion is his pet cat falls for a sixteen year old brooding, unsatisfied, troubled young woman. She describes for him an imaginary OtherWorld of a walled city with shifting boundaries dominated by a large clock with no hands, where people who cast no shadows cohabitate with fantastical beasts—in this case unicorns who perish at an alarming rate and are cremated in burn pits outside the city walls by a powerful figure, the “Gatekeeper.” Then the girl disappears from his life, and he pines for her. Through mysterious circumstances, one version of the protagonist somehow manages to cross over to the dreamscape of the walled city and is admitted by the Gatekeeper, who separates him from his shadow and damages his eyes in such a way that now he is capable of reading dreams stored at the city’s library, where he is installed as the “Dream Reader,” as the girl once predicted. The girl, who has not aged, also works at the library, but has no memory of him. Meanwhile, his other incarnation in the “real” world is so paralyzed by unrequited love that he can never free himself of longing for the girl, even as he turns to middle age in a life marked by prolonged solitude. He quits his job and moves far away to take a position as head librarian in a remote village where he manages a collection of books rather than dreams. Although set in contemporary times where cell phones and computers abound, in this particular library technology is conspicuous in its absence. But magical realism intrudes here too. Bizarre incidents go unquestioned and unexplored. Then it turns out that his predecessor, who frequents the library to offer anecdotes and advice, is actually a ghost, which upon discovery is treated as oddly unremarkable. Ultimately, the novel disappoints. What at first makes for a compelling narrative that promises to blaze a trail of fascinating possibilities within each of the dual worlds, instead wanders around interminably in successive chapters, fine writing punctuated by insipid prose, and finally narrows to multiple paths of unresolved plot strands and a frustrating anticlimax. Along the way, there is Beatles symbolism as well as a bizarre variation on the earlobe fetish. And that’s a BINGO!

For me, it was quite a letdown. The grand attempts at metaphor strike as forced, at times even cliché. Again and again, Murakami seems to try too hard. Early on, I began to compare the boy’s unresolved longing for the girl to the star-crossed lovers of Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. So I winced when the character Koyasu casually cites Love in the Time of Cholera in conversation, as if rubbing the reader’s nose in it. I then face-palmed when she defined “magical realism” for us. I wondered how Murakami could go so wrong.

A partial explanation can be found in the “Afterword,” where the author reveals that this book is a reworking of a novella he published in 1980 (but never permitted to be reprinted), and the mystical city is closely related to the one he fashioned in his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. He admits he was dissatisfied with the original story and had always hoped to expand it. To my mind, he should have known better. The writer of the novella was in his early thirties; the author of the novel in his early seventies. They are at once the same man but yet very different men, separated by four decades. Vanity projects often fail. Failure is too strong a word here, but this one certainly falls short.

It was Murakami’s first novel in six years, and I had long anticipated it, especially because I rather disliked his previous two, Killing Commendatore, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I was hoping instead for something along the lines of magnificence found between the covers of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart, 1Q84, or, of course, Kafka on the Shore. That was not to be. And yet … And yet, it is not a terrible novel. Despite the flaws—and these are manifold—this work remains thought-provoking and, certainly for Murakami fans, well worth the time. While I mourn the missteps and the unrealized potential, I do not regret reading it.

 

NOTE: I have reviewed other works by Murakami here:

Men Without Women

South of the Border, West of the Sun

Hear the Wind Sing & Pinball 1973

After the Quake

Sputnik Sweetheart

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Killing Commendatore

NOTE: For the uninitiated, a free taste of Murakami—his outstanding 2014 short story “Scheherazade” from Men Without Women—is available online at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/scheherazade-3

 

Prior to Civil War, the southern slave power fundamentally directed the destiny of the American Republic, facilitated at least in part by an unfair advantage in representation baked into the Constitution with the “three-fifths clause” that counted the unenfranchised enslaved as fractional, fictional citizens. But yet the nature of their peculiar institution ravaged the environment and left them ever hungering for new lands to spoil, especially the vast territories of the west that had been seized in the Mexican War. Lincoln’s 1860 election on a free-soil platform foreclosed that expansion and secession ensued. Lincoln, antislavery but hardly an abolitionist, prosecuted the war to preserve the Union; only later was emancipation added as a goal. The Confederacy was finally defeated on the battlefield, yet today many historians might argue that the south actually won the Civil War, as evidenced by the long reign of segregation, institutionalized racism, and the hundreds of monuments to white supremacy that still dot the landscape. But in the three decades that separated Appomattox and Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States embarked on a radical agenda to expand human rights that reached beyond outlawing human chattel slavery to extending the franchise and legislating equality. Although Reconstruction ultimately failed, its unfulfilled promises remain inextricably bound to the soul of our nation, reemerging in other centuries in unlikely places like the Edmund Pettus Bridge and sites of Black Lives Matter protests.

In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 [2024], an ambitious, encyclopedic, groundbreaking work of scholarship, noted historian Manisha Sinha takes a fresh look at sixty years of American history and erases the boundaries attached to dates and events enforced in traditional textbooks, while sketching in her own markers. Civil War studies are typically bookended by the Mexican Cession that accelerated the crises of the antebellum, and the “Compromise of 1877” that officially ended Reconstruction—an artificial construct that ignores the fact that significant elements of Reconstruction endured at least until Plessy, with a last gasp when North Carolina Rep. George Henry White’s term expired in 1901, the sole remaining black from the south elected to Congress in the nineteenth century. Sinha, who previously distinguished herself with her widely acclaimed history of abolition, The Slave’s Cause, goes much, much further. In her striking reinterpretation that challenges the conventional historiography, the election of 1860 marked the dawn of the “Second American Republic,” a new era that extended far further than the timeline usually given to Civil War and Reconstruction, and expands the theme of Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” from emancipation to a whole host of unfulfilled rights those then marginalized would claim for themselves. As such, wide arms are wrapped around such seemingly disparate topics as women’s suffrage, the fate of Native Americans, Gilded Age plutocracy, the suppression of labor, and even overseas imperialism.

An outline of the events of Reconstruction should be familiar to most Americans—but sadly that is not the case. When I was growing up, the story of the Civil War—as scripted by “Lost Cause” mythmakers and overlayed with the dramatic musical refrain from the film Gone with the Wind—was styled as a regional conflict of white men, a brother-against-brother struggle over states’ rights and tariffs. African Americans had bit parts, and slavery was almost beside the point. Then the “gallant” Lee surrendered, Lincoln was shot, the enslaved went free, and a national reconciliation occurred just about overnight. Reconstruction was treated superficially if at all, but once more to the tune of that same leitmotif that had poor downtrodden southerners preyed upon by rapacious northern “Carpetbaggers” in a harsh occupation. Then, in a flash, federal troops did the right thing and withdrew, white people north and south lived happily ever after, and blacks were essentially erased from history.

It remains astonishing that, until relatively recently, that is how most Americans understood the war and its aftermath. All too many still do. But the scholarly consensus has established that the central cause of the Civil War was human chattel slavery, that African Americans played a pivotal role in the Confederacy’s defeat, and that the postwar years in the south had far less to do with depredations by greedy northern plunderers than with the prevalence of violent bands of white supremacists who terrorized and murdered blacks attempting to claim civil rights newly won and enshrined in amendments to the Constitution.

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic opens at the dawn of Reconstruction. Lincoln left no definitive blueprint for how he would frame the postwar period, but broad hints seemed to point towards generous terms for the defeated, rapid reunification, and at least some guarantees for the welfare of the newly emancipated. What was clear was his conviction that the process was to be directed by the executive branch. Congress—then controlled by the “Radical Republicans”—disagreed. They advocated for some sort of punishment for the south after all the bloodshed, demanded stiff conditions for states that had seceded to rejoin the Union, and imagined vastly expanded civil rights for African Americans—all under the purview of the legislative branch.

Clashes between these competing visions were made moot by Lincoln’s murder, just five days after Appomattox. At first glance, his successor, wartime governor Andrew Johnson—a Jacksonian Democrat known to despise the plantation elite, who had preemptively freed the enslaved in occupied Tennessee—had seemed a likely ally for Congressional aims. But such hopes were dashed early on as it became clear that the insecure and deeply racist Johnson gloried at the prospect of earning the esteem of his old foes by offering blanket pardons, while blocking all efforts to wield federal authority to protect freedmen under threat by their erstwhile masters. Leading Confederates, who once feared retribution, were delighted by the unexpected turn of events.

But Congress fought back. Significant legislation was passed, Johnson’s many vetoes overridden, and the landmark 14th Amendment mandating equal rights for African Americans was enacted in 1866. Johnson barely survived impeachment, but his tenure had wrought much havoc. Legal statutes proved tenuous against militant leagues of white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan that would routinely intimidate and frequently murder blacks unwilling to be bullied into submission, as well as the whites who stood by them, particularly as the ranks of federal troops thinned with demobilization.

Next in the White House was the politically moderate Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln’s rightful heir, who both sought unity and sympathized with beleaguered blacks. But for all his good intentions, Grant turned out to be less adept and less effective as president than as general. And in many ways, it was already too late. There was no way to turn back the clock on the Johnson years. One by one, states formerly in rebellion that had rejoined the Union effectively overturned Reconstruction governments and claimed “Redemption” as ex-Confederate elites took power, and African Americans were even more heinously brutalized. Those who had once led the rebellion even took seats in Congress. Reconstruction formally sunsetted as occupying armies were withdrawn in a deal that settled the disputed election of 1876, but that was more ornamental than consequential. Reconstruction had been defeated; that was just a matter of pulling up stakes.

Efforts to realize the goals associated with Reconstruction persisted for the rest of the century, but these were generally marked by some small victories and many larger defeats. A number of blacks were elected to the House and Senate, even as equal protections guaranteed in the 14^th Amendment faded away in practice. Although the 15th Amendment that extended the franchise to African American males became law in 1870, it could not be enforced across the bulk of the old Confederacy. And thus, the old three-fifths clause, officially extinct, had come full circle. Blacks were no longer counted as fractions for the purpose of representation, but as whole numbers. Yet, just as before, they were effectively denied the right to vote. The old slave power, sans the enslaved, had taken back much of what had been lost by secession and war—and somehow gained even more political clout.

For those who have read Eric Foner or Douglas Egerton, there is not much new here, but Sinha succeeds brilliantly in adding much-needed nuance while contextualizing Reconstruction beyond the political to a complex, interrelated movement of social, economic, and cultural forces that coexisted with often competing dynamics of a postwar United States driven by a thirst for wealth and territorial domination, while desperate to bury the past and move forward.  As in her previous work on abolition, the author rightly refocuses the history on the ground to highlight African Americans who did the heavy lifting to advance Reconstruction, rather than their white allies who habitually receive credit in other accounts. And here again she excels, reminding us just how common it was for blacks to be arbitrarily targeted for violence and how many were left for dead. By citing numerous incidents, and attaching names (when possible) to the victims, she restores their humanity from the statistical anonymity of most studies.

But Sinha may be less successful when she leaves the struggle for African American civil rights behind to attach a Reconstruction zeitgeist to much wider arenas that encompass women’s suffrage, the Indian Wars, unbridled capitalism, strike-breaking, and imperialism. To be sure, Reconstruction was a truly radical attempt to remake society that carved deep grooves elsewhere, but there are limits. Certain ostensible correlations might be overstated. There is no doubt that the outcome of the Civil War resulted in a federal government capable of serving as a powerful agent for change, which warrants underscore. But even absent the conflict, it seems that given historical forces already present in the antebellum, such as the explosive growth of manufacturing in the north, an expanded labor pool fueled by immigration, innovations in communication and transportation, and westward expansion, subsequent developments such as the Second Industrial Revolution, an overheated economy, increasing inequality, and clashes between capital and labor were likely to occur regardless. As to overseas adventurism, so-called “filibusters” hankered for Cuba many decades before Theodore Roosevelt helped facilitate that “splendid little war.”

Sinha’s thesis finds its firmest ground in her treatment of the suffrage movement, as the long fight for women’s voting rights was first manifested in a series of alliances—of whites and blacks—that overlapped with causes favoring abolition and equal rights for African Americans. Many white women who had expended so much effort in this behalf were deeply embittered when black men seemed to leapfrog over them to earn the franchise. Some cloaked their disappointment, steadfast in the belief that their time would come. Others turned hostile. Sinha reveals the uncomfortable story of how, for a time, suffrage icons Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton betrayed black women by making common cause with Democrats openly inimical to civil rights in order to advance attempts to obtain the ballot. Other suffragists, loath to view expanding rights as a zero sum game, took a more honorable path. Sinha concludes The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920, which finally granted the right to vote to all adults, regardless of gender or color. Of course, for black women across the south, like their male counterparts, this was to be an empty promise until the late 1960s.

It is more difficult to connect the dots from Reconstruction to the displacement and near extermination Native Americans: brutally forced off their lands, driven to starvation, herded into reservations, hunted and killed by the cavalry, faced with extinction. Sinha emphasizes that many advocates for black equality witnessed these events unfold with horror and went on record in protest. But these figures represented the tiniest of minorities. The rest of America, north and south, was just as united after the war as in the antebellum in the pursuit of manifest destiny, and either wholly antagonistic or merely agnostic to the plight of the indigenous. Stephen Douglas’s cry for “popular sovereignty” that ended up fanning the flames of secession was deeply entangled with lobbying for a transcontinental railroad that would ride roughshod through domains Indians claimed as their own. Few whites objected then or later. In 1860, southern elites lusted for the western territories to recreate enslaved societies on the plains, while northern free-soilers yearned just as fervently for wide open spaces reserved for yeoman farmers. Neither vision included free blacks, and each excluded Native Americans. The end of the war simply translated into more resources that could be brought to bear upon Indian relocation or annihilation, accelerating a process long underway.

Like many historians, Sinha bemoans the fact that Lincoln’s party, which once cheered abolition and equality, mutated into a coldhearted pro-corporate entity indifferent to rights denied to large segments of its citizenry, and unfriendly to a labor force comprised principally of foreign nationals. Tragic indeed, but how surprising was that? The origin of the Republican Party, after all, was a coalition of former pro-business Whigs, disaffected Democrats, nativist “Know Nothings,” and racist, antislavery free-soilers—most whom despised the tiny minority of abolitionists who clung to the fringes. Antislavery and abolition rarely overlapped in those days. And in 1860, abolitionists were split over whether to endorse Lincoln. Even later, emancipation and civil rights were ideologically dominant in the party for only a very brief period. With the Union restored and slavery outlawed, Republicans cynically returned to their roots.

While impeccably researched and extremely well-written, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is also a long, dense read, which some readers may find intimidating. Scores upon scores of individuals populate the narrative, further complicated by references to numerous organizations thereafter rendered in acronym. It is, at times, hard to keep track, something that might have been mitigated in appendices by a “cast of characters” and a table or two. Still, I suppose this is a quibble, and should by no means overshadow Sinha’s achievement in turning out this outstanding work of history that is original, illuminating, and thought-provoking. If you have a Civil War era bookshelf, this volume belongs on it.

 

Note: I reviewed Egerton’s Reconstruction work here: Review of: The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, by Douglas R. Egerton

Try to imagine a one-megaton thermonuclear bomb striking Washington, D.C. You can’t. It’s way beyond your comprehension.

It begins with a flash of light that generates heat of one hundred eighty million degrees Fahrenheit, some five times hotter than temperatures at the center of the sun, producing a gigantic fireball that expands at millions of miles an hour and extends to a diameter more than a mile wide …

its light and heat so intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or evaporate, stone shatters, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon …

Not a single thing in the fireball remains.

Nothing.

Ground zero is zeroed.

Traveling at the speed of light, the radiating heat from the fireball ignites everything … several miles out in every direction … a great firestorm that begins to consume a 100-or-more-square-mile area that … was the beating heart of American governance and home to some 6 million people …Those incinerated are spared the unprecedented horror that begins to be inflicted on the 1 to 2 million more gravely injured people not yet dead in this first Bolt out of the Blue nuclear strike …

There is a baseball game going on two and a half miles due east at Nationals Park. The clothes on a majority of the 35,000 people watching the game catch on fire. Those who don’t quickly burn to death suffer intense third-degree burns. Their bodies get stripped of the outer layer of skin, exposing bloody dermis underneath …Within seconds, thermal radiation … has deeply burned the skin on roughly 1 million more people, 90 percent of whom will die. [p xvii-xix]

This excerpt from the opening pages of Nuclear War: A Scenario [2024], by Annie Jacobsen, serves as a sort of fitting sequel to Oppenheimer, restoring the gory details so conspicuously absent from that film that dramatically told us the truth of the bomb’s creation while elegantly omitting the consequences. Of course, it’s important to recall that Oppenheimer’s weapon was a somewhat primitive fission device that in 1945 was yet responsible for the deaths of more than a hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima. But, as terrible as that was, an atomic bomb like that is today relegated to a more or less junior role as the triggering mechanism that produces the high temperatures necessary for the complex fusion process that detonates a thermonuclear weapon with a potentially explosive force a thousand times more powerful than an A-bomb, capable of killing millions.

But that’s only a single hydrogen bomb. And in any nuclear conflict there would never be only one bomb. By best estimates, there currently are 12,119 total nuclear warheads in the world, spread among nine nations: the United States, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Of these, there are 3,880 active nuclear warheads. There are also hundreds and hundreds of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), many armed with Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs). Washington and Moscow, once more engaged in a tense relationship, each have something like 400 of these, capable of deploying 1,185 warheads to multiple targets, along with decoys to confuse the enemy. And this destructive potential is reinforced by their ever combat ready “nuclear triad” that can simultaneously launch thermonuclear attacks from land, sea, and air. Mutually assured destruction—MAD—has never simply been a theoretical construct.

Horror has long been a favored literary genre, and until very recently, my most frightening read was a toss-up between the original Dracula, by Bram Stoker, and Stephen King’s The Shining. But when it comes to sheer terror, these fictional attempts to breed fear are far outstripped by the fact-based content in this latest book by Jacobsen, an acclaimed if sometimes controversial investigative journalist. In a brilliant blend of science, military technology, geopolitics, and history, combined with an all too plausible apocalyptic vision, the author demonstrates both keen analytical skills and talent with a pen in a fast-paced narrative that is—so unusual for a nonfiction work—all but impossible to put down. It is also, to be quite honest, deeply depressing.

The ”scenario” of the title imagines what is termed a “Bolt out of the Blue” surprise nuclear strike on the Pentagon by a “mad king,” in this case the North Korean dictator. We are not told why. It hardly matters. What does matter is that such a thing could occur, at any time, without warning, by accident or design. If the plot is fiction, the premise of what would follow is based upon nothing less than scientific certainties. Once launched, this ICBM takes a mere 33 minutes to travel more than 6,800 miles to obliterate the nation’s capital and murder millions of people. And that’s just the beginning. The worst is yet to come. Jacobsen guides the reader minute-by-minute from the instant that early warning systems alert American officials that an ICBM is on the way to the moment of the blast and its aftermath. Spoiler alert: it does not end well.

Along the way, I learned that for someone who has spent his lifetime in the nuclear age, there’s an awful lot that I did not know. For instance, I had no idea that the president of the United States, keeper of the nuclear codes, has only six minutes after notification of a first strike in progress to decide whether to respond via the briefcase dubbed the “nuclear football” with a counterattack that will set forces in motion that will surely end civilization as we know it. Six minutes. And in this six minute window, the president must decide not only whether to strike back, but also to select targets and determine how many nuclear weapons to use. Only six minutes. It is said that most people on average devote about eight minutes to their daily shower routine. The president has less time than that to decide whether to destroy the world.

And what if he’s wrong? Because I also did not know how common nuclear false alarms are. The answer: all too common! In November 1979, believing that 1,400 nuclear missiles had been launched by the USSR, a retaliatory strike was about to get underway when it was discovered that the origin of the alleged Soviet attack was a training cassette carelessly left in the command computer system! In June 1980, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, informed that 2,200 Soviet missiles were headed our way, was reportedly one minute from making a phone call to President Jimmy Carter urging an immediate nuclear response when word came that it was a false alarm! In September 1983, a Soviet early warning system falsely signaled a small-scale impending attack by the US; nuclear war was in this case averted by quick-witted Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, the officer in charge that night, who doubted the alert and defied military protocol by not notifying Moscow! In October 1960, the NORAD nuclear command center reported a Soviet atomic attack in progress that turned out to be just the moon reflecting radar waves back at the monitoring station! There are many, many more such incidents. Especially relevant for Jacobsen’s scenario, as recently as January 2018 there was another false alert that this time assumed an attack from North Korea! (Note: every exclamation point in this paragraph is deliberate!)

I also did not know that despite all the discussions over many decades about continuity of government in the event of nuclear war, there is no bunker in Washington that would withstand nuclear attack, so wherever missiles might strike, if continuity is even remotely plausible it would have to take place elsewhere. And that means, assuming the president is in residence at the White House in a time of crisis, the bunker beneath the East Wing would not be suitable shelter. Which means that with all this going on, the president would have to be whisked away to some place like the Raven Rock Mountain Complex near Pennsylvania’s Blue Ridge Summit, a free standing city constructed within a massive, hollowed out mountain. Could he get there in time? In one piece?

What if the president is missing or incapacitated? And what if the vice-president cannot be located? Provisions have been made for a “designated survivor” in the event of a “decapitation strike” that takes out the top leadership, but in reality it seems like whoever is left standing would have to play it by ear. And who wants to make such plays? Who would want to survive, and what kind of survival would that amount to? And for how long?

The reason Soviet Lt. Col. Petrov gave for not passing that dubious alert of a small-scale attack on to Moscow that night in 1983 was that “when people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles.” That’s a good—if chilling—point. In the six minutes that the president has to decide how and to whom to respond to, he has to know that there are certainly more missiles on the way, or will be soon. Will he correctly identify the enemy? And if he does, when he launches a counterstrike, will other nuclear-armed nations like Russia realize that the retaliatory missiles targeting Pyongyang are not heading their way instead? Apparently, we learn from Jacobsen, when crisis calls are made from Washinton to Moscow, Moscow doesn’t always answer the phone. Things are hazy in the fog of war. And amid Armageddon.

Mistakes made by any party cannot be taken back. An ICBM is irrevocable; it cannot be recalled once initiated. Neither can a submarine-launched SLBM. The bomber leg of the triad is the only one with some flexibility; their pilots perhaps get to be the last ones to die. Also, it turns out that Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABMs) are, in practice, so unreliable as to be nearly worthless in such circumstances. Nuclear war game theory has demonstrated that nuclear weapons are only useful as deterrence. What if deterrence fails? The answer, in each and every simulation, is a colossal global loss of human life and the absolute end of civilization. Every simulation. Every time.

If hydrogen bombs aren’t bad enough, for the unlucky survivors there’s another gem in the enemy’s arsenal likely to be launched concomitantly: a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that knocks out all power and neutralizes all technology. There’s also the sudden solution to the problem of global warming that is an enduring nuclear winter. There is death. There are the burned and mangled. There is the slow death of radiation poisoning. There is disease. There is more death. Spoiler alert: civilization does not end well.

My earliest recollection of elemental fear as a child experiences such a thing dates back to October 1962, with the whispers and sometimes louder voices of grown-ups talking about how it could happen. I was only five, but I was already all too familiar with the concept of what might follow, probably more so than most in my age bracket because my grandmother, who raised me, often spoke to me as if I was an adult. She once casually noted that in nuclear war our bodies would disintegrate. Now, as the grim talking heads on our black and white TV preempted regular programming, even my beloved cartoons, it seemed all too real. “Grandma,” I asked as the panic took hold, “If I’m disintegrated, how will God know it is me so I can get into heaven?” Then I suddenly had to use the bathroom. After this episode, grade school “duck and cover” drills would seem quite unremarkable.

For a long time, I believed what they told me, which was that this event, the Cuban Missile Crisis, was likely the closest we came to nuclear war. But Jacobsen’s book is a sobering lesson that the prevailing wisdom is not always correct. That may have indeed been the closest we came to deliberate nuclear hostilities, but that is hardly reassuring. The number of accidental nuclear alarms are … well … far more alarming. And as tense as the days of the Cold War were, we can look back on them with almost a kind of nostalgia for Kennedy-Khrushchev given the instabilities of today’s world, with the Russo-Ukrainian War, the powder keg that is the Middle East, and the ongoing brinkmanship with North Korea. There are nuclear powers in each vicinity.

That Jacobsen’s scenario is focused on Pyongyang is not entirely fanciful. Whether or not he means business, Kim Jong Un certainly acts the belligerent villain, and while stockpiling nuclear weapons and delivery systems, he has constructed vast subterranean cities with an eye on survivability. When Donald Trump was president, he first taunted Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and then courted him by exchanging “love letters,” but in the end, if there really ever was a brief moment for détente, Trump’s bold if sophomoric approach at diplomacy achieved nothing. Catastrophe yet looms.

Nuclear war is a significant component to the metaphorical “Doomsday Clock” that was originally set to seven minutes before midnight in 1948. In 2024, it is now set at ninety seconds to midnight. Jacobsen’s clear frustration at the lack of real efforts to lower tensions, improve safety valves for nuclear triggers, and reduce the risks of atomic confrontation—accidental or deliberate—are palpable in the pages of her book. Unfortunately, there’s little room for optimism. Still, I would urge the leaders of every nuclear power to read this book, experience the horror that lies within, and look for ways, large and small, to mitigate the story it foretells from ever coming true. Every leader, that is, except Kim Jong Un … it might give him ideas.