Regarp Book Blog

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