Holiday Inn (Film)

Holiday Inn. Writ. Claude Binyon and Elmer Rice. Dir. Mark Sandrich. With Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Paramount, 1942.

Holiday Inn is one of my favorite movies. It has great music by Irving Berlin. It has performance by Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire; they only appeared together in one other movie. It’s a good romantic comedy, too. The film works in each of these areas.

Berlin originally conceived it as a showcase for his music, with a song for every holiday. He wrote the song “White Christmas” for the film and it went on to become one of the most popular songs ever. All the songs are solid and some are nearly as good as “White Christmas.” I think the song for Washington’s Birthday is the weakest, especially in comparison to the great tune for Lincoln’s Birthday, but in light of where it fits in the movie I feel like cutting it a little slack. I’m especially fond of “You’re Easy to Dance With.”

Crosby and Astaire provide good acting performance, but audiences rightly expect them to sing and dance and they deliver. Two of Astaire’s dance numbers are worth particular mention; the first is supposedly drunk and the other involves firecrackers. These two dances themselves are enough to make the movie worth seeing.

It’s a fair romantic comedy. There is a lot of chemistry between Crosby and Astaire, who deliver clever lines with snap. There is also good chemistry between them and their leading ladies, Virginia Dale and Marjorie Reynolds. The basic plot is boy meets girl, they fall in love, girl is ambivalent about ambitions, conniving friend takes advantage and sweeps away girl, repeat.

The film is an interesting look into race relations at the start of World War II. The film only has three black characters, a female house servant (played by Louise Beavers) and her two children. As if the role of cook-maid isn’t stereotypical enough, she is even called Mamie. The film plainly shows how things would have been done at the time, but seems to have slight moments of reticence about it. Here is an example.



On Lincoln’s Birthday, the white server-performers at Holiday Inn have darkened skin. The actual black people stay in the kitchen, out of sight of the guests. The song for the holiday focuses on Lincoln’s role in ending slavery. The original plan is to play it straight, but at the last minute Crosby’s character decides to change it to a blackface number to hide the identity of a starlet, his love interest, from his rivals. Even in a celebration of the end of slavery, the segregation is so complete that the white guests come no closer to interacting with black people than the make-up darkened skin of white performers.

Even so, the film isn’t about race. It’s a fun love story. It has great music and singing. It has wonderful dance numbers. It’s worth seeing, especially around Christmas or New Year’s Eve.

Histories and Fallacies by Carl R. Trueman

Trueman, Carl R. Histories and Fallacies: Problems Face in the Writing of History. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010.

Historian Carl R. Trueman reflects on the art of his discipline in Histories and Fallacies. The book is not an exhaustive guide to the techniques used by historians. It is a set of linked essays based on Trueman’s reflections on what is done right and wrong in his own work and that of others.

The opening chapter deals the value of history. Can one historical narrative be thought of as truer, or more reflective of what actually happened, than another? Can a historian, or anyone else, evaluate the merits of differing views of what happened and what they mean? Trueman argues that you can. Reflective people can weigh the evidence, with its strengths and weakness, and make reasonable decisions about it, even if the come to with strong points of view. As an example this, he looks at the work of holocaust deniers, who maximize niggling weaknesses in holocaust accounts, minimize the overall preponderance of evidence, and are careful to dress their work for the appearance of scholarliness.

Historians can also fall into the trap of making the evidence fit the theory rather than having a flexible theory that adapts to the evidence. As an example, Trueman points to Marxism. He acknowledges that Marxists brings to the fore the real effects of economics and class that may be overlooked by other historians. The problem is that Marxism excludes other historical causes, it’s all about class struggle, and has mechanisms to explain away contradictory evidence. Any over-commitment to a ridge explanatory system can lead a historian to drastic mental gymnastics and conclusions that are contrary to plain evidence and good sense.

A chapter is devoted to the pitfall of anachronism. A modern person can bring many notions to a historical document that didn’t exist in the mind of the writer or any of his contemporaries. Trueman illustrates this by comparing Reformation-era writing against Jews to twentieth century, particularly Nazi, anti-Semitic writings. The earlier writers had no modern notion of race Judaism was a matter of religion and belief, and therefore malleable. To the more modern anti-Semites, it is a matter of race, to them a concept of biology, and therefore unalterable.

Other fallacies and bad practices can trip up a historian. Some of them are summarized on one of the later chapters of the book.

Trueman is a historian of ideas who teaches church history. His examples generally come from these areas, though he touches on a great breadth of historical era, theories and techniques.


If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
Maus by Art Spiegelman
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen

Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Dawson, George, and Richard Glaubman. Life is So Good. New York: Penguin, 2000.

George Dawson was in his nineties when he learned to read. He was a centenarian when he and coauthor Richard Glaubman wrote his biography, Life is So Good. I think Dawson’s life was good, and not just because it has been so long.

Even a good life is sometimes hard. Most of Dawson’s life was hard. Black and poor were not auspicious beginnings for a boy in Texas at the beginning of the 20th Century. In the opening chapter, Dawson tells of how, as a boy, he witnessed the lynching of a young black man falsely accused of raping a young white woman. Dawson was ready to become bitter and withdraw from all contact with white people, but his father would not allow him to even consider it.

Dawson presents his parents and wise and pragmatic, making things better for themselves bit by bit. He picks it up and does the same thing in his own life, especially once he settled down to start his own family.

He had some wandering to do first. His early life of travel and adventure makes for interesting reading. He road trains all over North America, sometimes as a ticketholder and sometimes joining the hobos. He was able to find work wherever he went, mainly because there was no job so hard or unpleasant he was unwilling to try it.

Traveling opened his eyes, especially to race relations in the U.S. Growing up in the South, he thought the discrimination and oppression he was accustomed to be the way things were. In Mexico and Canada, even in parts of the U.S., he was treated like anyone else, regardless of color. Mexican villagers welcomed him like family and delighted in the novelty of someone so tall. Canadian lumbermen were curious about his home and happily directed him to the snow he had never seen before—it almost killed him. In his early days, he found it strange to be in places where no one cared which train car he was in or the restaurant at which he ate.



Things changed a lot in Dawson’s more than 100 years of life, though racism hasn’t disappeared. (I grew up in a town that was 99 percent white and I’m barely 40 years old. In the same county were villages that were almost entirely black.) Even in the face of difficulties, Dawson persisted and bit by bit made life better for himself and his family. When retirement came it wasn’t time to rest from his labors, it was time to pick up the education he had been denied as a boy because he had to work.

Dawson’s life story is worth reading simply because he is a witness to history who tells his story in an interesting and accessible manner. It’s worth reading because, without trying, it has a message too: don’t worry. Dawson recommends that people not worry if they want a good life. I think it’s very good advice. Arguably, though, he was working too hard most of his life to have time for worries, even though he had cause for them.

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The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

The technology that has the potential for a breakthrough that could revolutionize life in the next few decades is not one many might think of. It’s the battery. The next generation of battery could make affordable, long-range electric vehicles available to the masses. They could make variable energy sources like wind and solar more viable competitors to traditional, fuel-burning energy.

Though it is not widely publicized, major companies, start-ups and even government agencies are involved in a race to bring the next generation battery to the market. The company that creates it and the nation that can establish the manufacturing base for it will be in a position to make a lot of money. It’s a dramatic story, which Steve Levine relates in The Powerhouse.

Levine provides some background on the development of the lithium ion battery and improvements to it. His focus, however, is Argonne National Laboratory.

Argonne, located near Chicago, started as a lab to research nuclear energy and weaponry. It traces its history back to the Manhattan Project and the University of Chicago lab where Enrico Fermi started a manmade, self-sustained nuclear chain reaction. At the close of the book, Argonne was taking the lead of a hub of battery technology development aimed particularly at creating the battery that will put electric cars in millions of garages.

Argonne is not the only player in the field. Levine also reports on some of the companies, large and small, and countries that are staking out their places in the field. Automakers, particularly General Motors, are particularly interested in these devices that might radically change their industry.

The chemistry of these batteries, particularly the cathodes, is discussed in the book, but not deeply. It is not a textbook on electrochemistry. It is instead a book on the business and politics of an uncertain technological development that has the potential to alter the economic and environmental condition of the world.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Levine, Steve. The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World. New York: Viking, 2015.

Paperboy by Henry Petroski

Petroski, Henry. Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Henry Petroski is an engineering professor who is well known for his books on engineering and technology. Paperboy is a memoir of his boyhood.

This memoir is a reflection of the times, the 1950s, as well as the author’s life. It shows a microcosm of a nation recovering from World War II and gearing up for the space race. The paperboys of New York weren’t interested in reading the newspapers they delivered, so they weren’t consciously aware of the social forces at work around them. (Even so, Petroski uses headlines from the Long Island Press to show what was going on at the time.) A boy with Petroski’s talents might have gone into any number of things, but with Sputnik overhead, government policy and watchful teachers nudged him into engineering. It was a good fit.

Petroski doesn’t leave technology completely out of the picture. As a paperboy, he had to master the art of folding and flipping papers. He assembled and maintained his own bicycle. He watched his orderly uncle, an accountant, put together exactly what he needed to build an attic closet with no waist.

Young Petroski had many traits that would have made engineering attractive to him: curiosity about how things work, mechanical aptitude, facility with mathematics, some perfectionism, more pragmatism, ability to think both concretely and abstractly, appreciate that things are made and making involves choosing. I have known and worked with many engineers in my career in that profession and nearly all of them share at least a few of these traits with Petroski.

A particular part of Petroski’s school experience stands out to me because it illustrates how real life is different from a story. His high school algebra teacher, Mr. Duncan, took an immediate dislike to him, apparently because it picked up on algebra so easily. Duncan began to call Petroski “Herman Peterson,” provoked him and sent him out into the hall. The budding engineer sat in the hall, following the lessons through the door, and remaining the leading student in the class. This hardship continued until Petroski advanced into upper-class math courses. A story probably would have had some satisfying resolution, but real life experience involved just moving on.

In one section of his memoir, Petroski discusses newspaper titles. It’s the kind of list-making thing many engineers are prone to do. The weekly paper in my hometown was the Bloomfield Vindicator. I have never heard a name for newspaper that was cooler than Vindicator. I’m reminded by it of those show that were popular in the 1980s about a nameless stranger who comes into town to bring justice to oppressors of the downtrodden like The Equalizer, Stingray, and The Pretender (which may have been from the 1990s). A syndicate combined the Vindicator with another publication and given it the unimaginative title of North Stoddard Countian.


If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck
Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel
The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson
The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

The Mississippi River is powerful. I’ve seen it. I grew up in the northern tip of the river’s delta and now live near one of its major tributaries. John M. Barry’s history of the 1927 flood of the Mississippi, Rising Tide, is only partly about the power of the river. It is more about the power of men, particularly the political power of the men who have tried to exert control over the river.

The first political battle related to the river took place in the 19^th Century. It was a conflict between the nation’s military engineering establishment and their increasingly influential civilian counterparts over who would control Mississippi River policy. The principal actors and figureheads for the two sides were Andrew A. Humphreys, chief of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, and James B. Eads, St. Louis-based civil engineer. The Corp largely won this battle, maintaining a controlling voice in river policy, but the resulting agency, the Mississippi River Commission, adopted a theory of practice that neither Humphreys or Eads supported. It would lead to floods on the river becoming increasingly bad.

That conflict doesn’t completely disappear, but it is overtaken by the greater flow of money, politics, society, and race, mostly centered in New Orleans, Mississippi’s Yazoo Valley, and Washington, DC. It is hard to give each player his due in a brief review of Barry’s book. Barry focuses on Leroy Percy, who had great influence on river policy before, during and after the flood. He was a planter in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta and, briefly, a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. He was also a relative of Walker Percy, one of my favorite authors.

The flood made political careers and had lasting effects. President Calvin Coolidge appointed his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, to lead relief efforts after the flood. The publicity and public goodwill that accrued to Hoover during this period helped to usher him into the White House as Coolidge’s successor. Hoover’s lack of follow-through on promises to black leaders created a crack between in the relationship between African-American’s and the Republican Party that led to a serious split.

Huey P. Long also owed some of his success to the flood and its aftermath. New Orleans business leaders promised to provide relief to neighbors who would be flooded by the dynamiting of levees to protect the city. Afterward, these men did everything they could to minimize their liability and did not even pay one-tenth of the cost of damages caused by the flooding. Long rode a wave of resentment against New Orleans aristocrats into the Louisiana governor’s office. Once there, he used his position to strip the New Orleans elite of as much power as he could. As the city elites became more insular and focused on protecting what they had, rather than growing their businesses and community, New Orleans lost its position as the leading city of the South as other more welcoming cities grew.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Elixir by Brian Fagan

Life's Matrix by Philip Ball

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Barry, James M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Ed Wood Double Feature

Ed Wood is famous as one of the worst filmmakers of all time. That is an overstatement. Wood made some decent films (for the time, budget and type of films he was making) and some find even his bad movies to be entertaining. A couple of my favorite Wood films are illustrative.

I think Bride of the Monster (1956) is the first Ed Wood film I saw. I recall it showing on the Creature Feature, a late night film show broadcast out of Cape Girardeau and hosted by Misty Brew. Bride is not a bad movie. It’s about as good as a lot of low budget, sci-fi horror films from the 1950s.



In Bride, Bela Legosi plays an outcast scientist who intends to create a “race of atomic supermen” that will usher in a new age of his making, under his rule. His human experiments have not been successful and keeping ahead of the law and spies from his homeland led him to a remote American swamp. His animal experiments have been more successful, and his gigantic creation proves to be a useful way to dispose of the corpses of his unwilling human subjects. Mad science, nosy reporters, police, and spies crash in an atomic explosion of mayhem.

By contract, Night of the Ghouls (1958) has everything in it that is the worst of Wood. To start with, it seems to be a sequel to Bride, except that any continuity is accidental. Many of the actors are the same, but only two of the characters could are the same, Lobo (Tor Johnson) and Kelton the Cop (Paul Marco). There are constant reference to setting of the story and that strange things happened there once before, enough for me to think it’s referring to Bride, but they don’t exactly make sense and certainly aren’t necessary. I don’t know if issues with rights prevented Wood from making an outright sequel. I suspect his write-fast, film-fast style didn’t leave room for the careful checking of continuity a real sequel would require.



Another Woodism is the overuse of voiceover. The film begins and ends with soliloquies delivered from a coffin by newspaper psychic Criswell, which is entertaining in its goofy bombast. Criswell’s narrative continues through the film, though it is largely unnecessary. Wood is good enough to tell the story without the voiceover, but bad enough to use it anyway. Criswell delivers the lines with gusto, and possibly with thanks, for their better than most of the dialogue the other actors have to deal with.

Criswell narrates a section built on stock footage, which was a staple of low-budget and exploitation films and frequently used by Wood. The bad, and oddly entertaining, thing about this section is that it has practically nothing to do with the rest of the film. It’s an exploitation-style harangue on juvenile delinquency that depicts many young people dancing to rock and roll, racing cars and committing mostly petty crimes.

In Night, at least, Wood is not a good storyteller. He remains a great plotter though. A fake psychic set up shop to con wealthy clients who disparately desire to reach diseased spouses. It turns out he is actually very powerful medium who is unwittingly raising the dead from a nearby cemetery. These ghouls can’t stay in the realm of the living for long and they’re not going back to their graves alone. That could be an awesome horror story, but in Wood’s hand it doesn’t quite make it.

By the way, the malevolent medium of Night is named Dr. Acula. That is right, Wood straight up names a character Dr. Acula.

If you like old sci-fi horror films, you may like Bride of the Monster, which is typical of its low-budget ilk. If you want to see a bad movie that entertains in spite of, or possibly because of, its myriad flaws, look at Night of the Ghouls.



If your interested in these films, you may also be interested in
Bedlam
Isle of the Dead

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Back Bay, 2007.

We make a great number of snap judgments regarding very complex issues and often these decisions are better than we might have made with much analysis. Gladwell is interested in how this counterintuitive situation could be.

The key is what Gladwell calls thin-slicing. We can make good decisions with very little information because our unconscious mind has a knack for identifying and using the information that make a difference. Too much information may even be a detriment to good decision-making because it obscures the important details.

Blinks are often good decisions, yet they can fail. There are times when the unconscious can make bad decisions. Often this is because the unconscious is biased with misinformation; Gladwell discusses a test for hidden racial bias in which even he, with a Jamaican mother, showed preference for whites. This test and others show that stress and lack of time can reduce the unconscious’ ability to make good decisions; it’s fast but not instant. The unconscious also isn’t so good at decisions where there are relatively few factors to consider and the stakes are low; conscious analysis does better then.

Understanding snap judgments and how they work, even if the details are hidden from our conscious minds, allows us to improve our decision making. First, we can recognize areas where our snap judgments are weak or strong and arrange to use the most appropriate type of thinking. Second, we can inform our unconscious minds. We can train ourselves to make better snap judgments. Gladwell demonstrates this through the informed, but quick and largely unconscious, judgments of experts.


In the afterward to the 2007 edition of the book, Gladwell calls for action, or at least reflection, base on the concept of the blink. One area was the disparity of conviction and imprisonment of blacks and whites. He tells the story of how screens that block musicians from judges resulted in more women breaking into major orchestras. People couldn’t hear the important evidence of a performer’s musical skill and talent once they had seen she was a woman and unconscious bias tainted their judgment. Likewise, programs that attack conscious prejudice may have little impact on unconscious racial bias, and to hide the race of defendants from juries might actually help them make better decisions by eliminating information that is less relevant.

Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi

For some, the promise of technology for easy access to information that was supposed to make us more free has devolved into constant distraction that can feel like enslavement to a cell phone. Even people who have less extreme views might still feel that it is too easy to get lost in games and social media, browsing online instead of being present, procrastinating instead of getting things done.

 I’m in that camp. I’m not an obsessive user of my phone, but I have found it easy to reach for it in quiet times when I have nothing pressing. That used to be time I spent staring into space. That could be very relaxing time. More importantly, I came up with some of my best ideas in those times or shortly afterward. My brain was hard at work behind by vacant visage, but now it is hard at work scrolling Facebook or watching YouTube videos.

 Manoush Zomorodi took this problem to the listeners of her WNYC podcast, Note to Self, and challenged them to be more aware of their use of technology and wean themselves from it to some degree. That experience, with some refinements, is described in Bored and Brilliant, and Zomorodi hopes it will extend the challenge to a wider audience.

 I expected Zomorodi to focus on how technology has captured our attention and eroded our ability to concentrate. She touches on this. However, the theme of her book is that we need boredom for deeper cognition and creativity. In order to reach their most creative states, our brains need a break from stimulation—we need to get bored.

 The benefit of boredom, in addition to training us to handle tedious tasks, is that it put our mind into its “default state.” In this condition, our minds wander. We daydream. We can imagine things and make connections that would not be available to us if we were concentrating on something or stimulating our brains.

 The default state isn’t universally good. We can fall into ruminating on problems and failures, berating ourselves. That is not useful.

 However, for most of us daydreaming is positive. The lives we dream up for ourselves in such moments, Zomorodi refers to it as “autobiographical planning,” can help us identify what we want, solve problems and see ourselves as more capable.

 Zomorodi presents seven challenges to her readers. The idea is that readers would do one challenge a day for a week. Some of the challenges are adaptable for continued or periodically repeated practices. She describes how several Note to Self listeners responded to the challenges and made them their own.

 Bored and Brilliant is not about abandoning technology by a long shot. It is about making space in your life to think in different ways, especially for the daydreaming that arises in the dull, unstimulating moments in life.

 Zomorodi writes in a journalistic style. The book is not loaded with notes, or even a bibliography, like a more scientific text. However, she sites research, interviews with specialist and other books within the text. The benefits of boredom are documented. If you want to research the subject deeply, you might skim this book for other sources. If you want to loosen your ties to you cell phone or tablet, get out of the mental rat race and give your brain space for a deep breath, try the challenges in this book; it is a good place to start.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara A. Oakley

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Quiet by Susan Cain

 Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Books That Made a Difference to Me

I’m not a regular reader of O: The Oprah Magazine, but when I come across one, I turn to the “reading room” segment. In each issue, they have a celebrity, author or other notable person comment on a few books that they find notable. I enjoy reading and I’m curious about what other people enjoy reading, even if I don’t share their tastes. What follows are books that made a difference to me roughly in the style of the O feature.

The Holy Bible

As a believer in Christ, this book is a touchstone for me. The Bible is one of the ways God reveals himself, and it is the most explicit, specific, definitive and accessible special revelation. Jesus compared the word of God to a mirror, and said those who didn’t do it were like someone walking away from a mirror and forgetting what they looked like. Within its pages, the metaphor of a sword is applied to God’s word. One the great uses of this sword is to, in indelicate terms, cut through the crap.

Simple Pictures are Best
By Nancy Willard
Illustrations by Tomie De Paola

This is a children’s book and I first read it as a boy. It has so influenced me that I sometimes use the phrase “simple pictures are best” in conversation. The moral of this parable is to keep it simple, don’t create unnecessary complications. I’m not immune to mission creep and function overload. However, this book helped me develop an early appreciation for focus, setting priorities and enjoying those things that do one thing very well.

Spider-Man Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

I could carry on for some time about all that is great about Spider-Man. The essence of it is this: the core of Peter Parker and his story is ethics. Behind the mask, he is just a man and he is just as concerned with his family, friends and job as with battling supervillains. Like us, Peter faces the costly rewards of doing what is right and the painful price of choosing what is wrong in a complex world he doesn’t fully understand. What makes him a hero isn’t his power, it is his character.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race By Edwin Black

The atrocities of the Nazis were justified, in their minds, as a science-based policy for managing society. The science was eugenics; it originated in American. I was amazed that not only did it start here, but also one of its largest proponents and popularizers worked in my home state, Missouri. Black thoroughly traces eugenics from it roots in an America, both as a science and a policy, to its leap to other nations, its ultimate expression as policy in Nazi Germany and its aftermath, which continues to linger in science and politics. Today, calls for science-based policy are often in the news, but it is important that both policy and science be informed by ethics. (Edwin Black also wrote IBM and the Holocaust.)

The Road to Serfdom
By F. A. Hayek

Hayek devoted this book “to socialists of all parties.” His particular audience was the British intelligentsia (Hayek was an economics professor at the University of London and familiar with German intellectual life from his years in his native Austria). His message was a warning: socialism leads to totalitarianism. Socialism was a popular movement in the time Hayek wrote this book (first published in 1944). Even the United States looked to the communist, fascist and national socialist governments of the world as models to emulate (until we entered World War II and many of these governments became our enemies). Today, socialist ideas and policies are widely espoused, though few would put the socialist label on them, and their proponents seem to imagine, some may be convinced and some may pretend, that a planned society can still be a free one. Hayek demonstrates that socialist government and individual freedom cannot coexist for long.

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Swift, Earl.  The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

The American interstate system is often thought to be a product of the Eisenhower administration.  It’s named for him.  However, the nearly 47,000 miles of interstate were conceived largely before Eisenhower’s presidency.  Even as he observed the Army’s 62-day, cross-country convoy of 1919, engineers were laying the political and technical foundations of national highways.  Earl Swift tells this longer history of the interstates in The Big Roads.

When Americans began calling for better roads, the typical road was mud.  The loudest calls for better roads at the beginning of the 20^th Century were cyclists, especially the colorful Carl Fisher.  Fisher’s most famous work is the Indianapolis Speedway, where a popular 500-mile race continues to be run.  His promotion of the Lincoln Highway, the first coast-to-coast highway (at least on paper), provided an important antecedent to the interstates.

The Lincoln Highway Association operated on a system that informed later highway development.  Rather than build a huge new highway, it selected existing roads for improvement, joining them together in a highway.  New roads were built only if necessary.  The association, a private organization that raised private funds for road improvement and route promotion, was a model for later systems in another way.  The Lincoln Highway was built and improved in pieces by a number of local and state agencies.  The association provided a route, coordination, promotion, encouragement, and sometimes funding, but the road improvements were mostly local works.

Thomas MacDonald, an Iowa highway engineer, was using a similar model as he worked for that state.  He worked with city and county road departments to coordinate improvements leading to a statewide system of decent roads.  When he became director of the Office of Public Roads, he brought this model to the federal highway program, institutionalizing it in the Federal Aid system that began in 1916.

Of course, the U.S. highways that developed under this system were not like modern interstates.  They were open to anyone along them.  In rural areas, they might have been and often still are long ribbons of pavement crossed by the occasional farm road.  In cities, they became crowded with business, especially restaurants and gas stations, that slowed traffic to a crawl.  This problems gave rise to the concept of a limited-access highway, first proposed by Benton MacKaye, the conservationist who conceived the Appalachian Trail.

MacDonald and his engineers began working the concept.  His office produced a report, authored primarily by Hubert Sinclair Fairbanks, that laid out most of the current interstate system in 1938.  Fairbanks supported that idea that better roads might solve problems related to slums and blight in cities.  The recommendations of this report and a follow-up commission were largely implemented in law in 1944, when the term “interstate” first appeared in legislation.

The plans for an interstate system languished during World War II and the years immediately following.  Eisenhower comes into the picture at this time because he strongly supported funding for the interstate system.

Highway engineers saw themselves as providing a good and giving the people what they wanted.  Along the way, as Fairbanks suggested, they could clean up the cities.  As they began to implement their plans in earnest, opposition arose.

Swift gives particular attention to two interstate opponents.  Critic Lewis Mumford provided the intellectual and philosophical foundation for the Freeway Revolt.  Joe Wiles, a black professional and veteran, organized opposition to Interstate 70 in Baltimore which resulted in changes to the plan and help unite the white and black communities in that city.  The federal and state governments began to take seriously the possibility that interstates could have a negative impact on the communities near them

The intestate system, finally completed in the 1990s, is the largest public works project in history.  Now that it is built, it needs to be maintained.  It will be expensive: $225 billion a year for the next 50 years to keep it in good shape.  That is more than twice what we’re spending.  In addition, improved fuel efficiency and reduced driving prompted by the economic downturn has reduced gas tax revenues for the Highway Trust Fund.  In the near future, we may need to find new ways to pay for maintaining our transportation marvel.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

On the Mainlines by William B. Claycomb

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Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner look into the unexpected relationships between aspects of our society in their book Freakonomics. They not particularly interested in the things you might expect economists to write about such as business, markets or investment. Instead, they look at cheating, crime, expertise and parenting.

There is no particular theme of the book, except possibly that common explanations and expectations are often off the mark. Levitt and Dubner are skeptical of conventional wisdom and expertise. They are interested in data and what questions can properly be put to that data.

They sometimes come to conclusions that some might find disturbing or troubling. For instance, they trace the drop in crime rates in the 1990s to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. Many of the women who had abortions in the wake of Roe vs. Wade were poor, had low education, or very young. All of these traits in the parents tend to produce worse outcomes for children, including a higher likelihood of committing crime. As the first post-Roe cohort of children reached their teen years in the 1990s, there were fewer who had been raised in those conditions that may have pushed them into crime, and therefore fewer budding criminals and a decline in crime rates.

Reading this made me think of the arguments of eugenicists. They believed that a host of social ills, including crime, could be mitigated by keeping the unfit people from reproducing. To the eugenicists, unfit was essentially equivalent to nonwhite, though it also extended to the feebleminded (a disease a eugenically-minded psychiatrist or psychologist might have found in any poor, uneducated person). The eugenicists saw intelligence, criminality, poverty and host of other features as fixed and hereditary. Limiting the reproduction of the unfit through abortion or sterilization would reduce and eventually eliminate poverty and crime.

Of course, Levitt and Dubner are not eugenicists. Nor do they propose abortion as means to reduce crime. Crime does not have its roots in race or intelligence. It is strongly tied to poverty and low education. Charles Dickens chilling portrayed Ignorance and Want in A Christmas Carol, and they are still a threat to all of us.

Each chapter reveals an interesting twist on some subject, though few are as potentially charged as that on crime. In another chapter, the authors show that crime does not pay, except for those at the top, on unlike in a corporation. In spite of faddish thoughts on the issue, parents matter, though maybe not in the ways we’d like to think.

My previous reading has inclined me to focus on the darkest part of the book, but the overall tone is conversational and light, though the authors are not flippant about serous subjects. They are not technical either. Their use of statistics is straightforward. They do not delve deep into theory, though they focus much on the central theory of economics that people respond to incentives.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

How We Got Here by Andy Kessler

The Numbers Game by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot

The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter & Raymond Hull

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Levitt, Steven D., & Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: William Morrow, 2005.

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

Though the edition I picked up didn’t look like a children’s book, William Bynum’s A Little History of Science is written for children. I’m in my forth decade and I enjoyed it anyway.

The title suggests the subject, but hardly the breadth. Bynum starts with the first, unnamed people to observe and think about the world around them. He ends with current science such as computer science and gene mapping.

It wouldn’t be write to say that depth suffers because of the breadth. Admittedly, each chapter covers a subject that could in itself provide enough material for a book. However, Bynum’s purpose is to provide an introduction to a lot of areas of science and to show how scientific knowledge grows and improves over time. It covers all the major branches of science including physics, chemistry, and biology. He does this very well.

For someone who wants a place to get started, especially a youngster interested in history or science, this is a good book. Though Bynum does not include a bibliography, he drops a lot of names. Almost every notable name in scientific history, and a few lesser known, is mentioned, so someone could be equipped with a list of names when the hit the card catalog to find the next book that might interest them.

I do not know if Bynum subscribes to the “big men” notion of history. As much as he mentions the major figures and the leaps some of them made, he emphasizes the incremental, even iterative, nature of science. Even so, learning history through biography can be interesting because history is the cumulative action of people, even if a single person can’t truly turn the tide, and some people are interesting, especially the cranky ones (like Isaac Newton). Bynum adds enough biographical touches to his history to add this kind of spice.

If you’re interested in these books, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont (fiction)

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel

Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison 

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

How to Build and Android by David F. Dufty

Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race By Edwin Black

Bynum, William. A Little History of Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.