Quotulatiousness

January 25, 2020

Swedish K: The Carl Gustav m/45B and the Port Said

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jan 2020

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During the 1930s, Sweden acquired an assortment of different submachine guns, including Bergmanns, Thompsons, and Suomis. As World War Two progressed, they decided that they really needed to standardize on a single caliber and model of gun, and requested designs from both the Carl Gustav factory and Husqvarna. The Carl Gustav design won out, and was adopted as the m/45.

It was a very simple open-bolt, tube-receiver, fixed-firing-pin design chambered for 9x19mm Parabellum ammunition. The original guns were built around Finnish Suomi magazines, both 71-round drums and 50-round “coffin” mags. After the war these were replace by a new 36-round traditional box magazine, and magazine well adapters were fitted to the guns which precluded the use of the larger mags. The new magazines were much more convenient to carry, less expensive, and more reliable.

The name “Swedish K” comes form the full designation: Kulsprutepistol m/45. The guns were used by American special operations forces in Vietnam until the Swedish government stopped export sales to the US, at which point the Navy commissioned Smith & Wesson to produce the Model 76 submachine gun (essentially a copy of the m/45). The design was also licensed by Egypt, which also licensed the AG-42 Ljungman rifle at the same time. The Egyptian copy was called the Port Said, and shows the features fo the original Swedish m/45 pattern, where the guns in Swedish service were mostly updated to the m/45B pattern.

Photo of m/45C with bayonet from: http://www.gotavapen.se/index_eng2g.htm

Check them out for a ton of information on Swedish small arms!

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

Refuting the pessimism of Malthus

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Greece, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of Anton Howes’ Age of Invention newsletter, he looks at the predictions of that old gloomy Gus, Thomas Malthus:

The Malthusian trap. For Malthus, as population increases exponentially and food production only linearly, a point where food supply is inadequate will inevitably be reached.
Graph by Kravietz via Wikimedia Commons.

For economies before the Industrial Revolution, population growth was an important and ever-present brake on prosperity — an observation most famously articulated by the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, he warned against the promises of improvement. Whereas the optimists looked at the acceleration of innovation around them and claimed infinite horizons for increasing living standards, Malthus pessimistically argued that population would always catch up. Although a new agricultural technology might briefly increase the amount of available food, the inexorability of population growth meant that it would soon be eaten up by extra mouths to feed. The population would end up larger than it was before the new technology, but with that population eventually no richer than it had been to begin with. Economic historians call this the Malthusian regime, or the Malthusian Trap.

Thomas Malthus.
Portrait by John Linnell, 1834, via Wikimedia Commons

Fortunately, Malthus’s pessimism would prove unfounded. Economy after economy has managed to escape the trap. British output had already been outpacing its population for two centuries by the time he was writing — England’s agricultural output alone had increased 171% while its population had grown 113% (not even taking into account the fact that it also increasingly relied on imported food, paid for by its other industries). And in the decades and centuries that followed, England’s output continued to shoot ahead, widening the lead. Output per capita rose and rose, to the extent that Malthus’s worries about overpopulation are now usually applied to resources other than food.

But while Malthus is famous for the theory, he wasn’t its inventor. Well before Malthus, the people who actually lived in the trap seem to have recognised its effects. Concerns about overpopulation may have led to the Garland or Flower Wars of the Aztec Empire and its neighbours: after a series of famines in the 1450s, the local states reportedly began to engage in ritual battles, with the losers captured and sacrificed to the gods. Still earlier, in ancient Greece, the young men of a settlement might be formally conscripted to go forth and colonise other islands and coastlines. They were typically banned from returning home for several years, and in at least one case slingers were posted on the shore to kill any of the colonists who tried to make a break for home. In a whole host of pre-industrial societies, “surplus” infants were often simply exposed to the elements.

By the sixteenth century, with the rise of print culture, Malthusian rationales were being clearly articulated. Here’s Richard Hakluyt writing in 1584, over two hundred years before Malthus:

    Through our long peace and seldom sickness (two singular blessings of Almighty God) we are grown more populous than ever heretofore; so that now there are of every art and science so many, that they can hardly live one by another, nay rather they are ready to eat up one another.

It’s a direct statement of the Malthusian regime in action, expressed by one of England’s most influential Elizabethan intellectuals, and written specifically for the attention of the queen. Hakluyt thanked god for the recent and unusual lack of mass death, but now worried about overpopulation leading to low wages and unemployment. And he went on to list many other effects. Hakluyt argued that the misery would lead to unrest, thievery, begging, and “other lewdness”. The prisons filled up, where the poor either “pitifully pine away, or else at length are miserably hanged.”

Cursus honorum – Praetors

Filed under: Government, History, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historia Civilis
Published 19 Feb 2015

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HistoriaCivilis
Website: https://www.historiacivilis.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HistoriaCivilis

Music is “Sea” by Jahzzar (http://betterwithmusic.com)

January 24, 2020

How Left/Right Partisanship Starts a Civil War in Spain | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1936 Part 2 of 4

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 23 Jan 2020

Spain in the early 1930’s was practically Europe in Microcosm, with numerous political and ideological movements clashing in debate and open battles on the streets of Spain. All of this worsened in 1936 as Spain slowly descends into Civil War.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel and Naman Habtom
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kaminski

Colorizations by:
– Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
– CNT_Emblem Source Heralder
– Kutxa Photograph Library
– photo from Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundiko Kultura eta Euskara Departamentua

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Dawn Of Civilization” – Jo Wandrini
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “Deflection” – Reynard Seidel
– “Death And Glory 2” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan Eriksson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
1 day ago (edited)
Vote on what we’re doing after B2W! -> https://www.patreon.com/posts/33300161

We originally planned to just do one episode on the Spanish Civil War, but the more I researched it the more I realized how complicated everything was even before the real fighting even breaks out. To understand the battle-lines of the conflict you have to understand how they were drawn in the turbulent years of the Second Spanish Republic. In the space of just 5 years it sees numerous insurrections, revolutions, and a coup. In an era of political radicalism across the world, Spain really stands out as the most defined by it, and by 1936 is already in a state of quasi-civil war. This episode gives you a detailed insight into that. We’ll be covering the course of the war itself in a later episode.
Cheers, Francis.

From a Canadian perspective, “NORAD … is more important than NATO”

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, History, Military, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The American government has once again expressed a strong desire to update the 1957 North American Air Defence Commmand arrangement between the US and Canada for defence of the North American continent. It’s a Cold War relic to some (particularly some in the Prime Minister’s Office and cabinet), but it has a very real value to Canada, as Ted Campbell explains:

In 1957 Canada and the USA agreed to create the North American Air Defense Command. It is a “combined” command, American and Canadian people, civilian and military, work together, in combined headquarters, to conduct an active aerospace defence effort over the continent we share. Americans and Canadians work side-by-side managing the airspace, detecting intruders and identifying and intercepting them and so on.

NORAD, I would argue, is more important than NATO.

First, it is about defending our own homeland.

Second, it is about defending the US strategic deterrent, which has, arguably, done more to keep global peace than all the efforts of the United Nations, combined.

NORAD modernization and expansion should be at the top of Canada’s defence policy agenda. Specifically:

  • First, billions of dollars, likely tens of billions of dollars are going to be needed to upgrade the surveillance and warning system. We need new radars, terrestrial and space-based, and upgraded control systems to do the job properly;
  • Second, Canada needs to buy enough (85+ is just the very barest of bare minimums) of the right new fighter jet; and
  • Third, Canada needs to join the American ballistic missile defence system.

I believe that this issue: the shared defence of our, shared, continent and, therefore, the defence of the American heartland and of America’s strategic deterrent is a key, perhaps even the key element in our most important foreign relationship. […] The knowledge that Canada is doing a full and fair share of defending our shared continent, of defending America, is not lost on admirals and generals, diplomats and senior civil servants, representatives and senators in the US Congress, pundits and political leaders in waiting in the think-tanks and senior staff in the White House, even if Donald J Trump is not impressed … IF we are doing a full and fair share.

Right now, we are not.

An orbital analyst tracks the Kosmos 1402 spy satellite in orbit in the Space Defense Operations Computation Center, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) on 18 February, 1983.
NORAD photo by Master Sergeant Hiyashi via Wikimedia Commons.

“The Attack of the Dead Men” – Gas Warfare on the Eastern Front – Sabaton History 051 [Official]

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 23 Jan 2020

This episode is about the “Attack of the Dead Men”. During the third battle for Osowiec Fortress in July 1915 during the Great War, German artillery was bombarding the defending Russian soldiers with a new deadly weapon: Poison Gas. The fatal mixture of chlorine and bromine descended like a green fog over the Russian trenches. Without adequate gas-masks to protect themselves, the defenders were believed to all have died in agony. However, as the German infantry advanced, they did not only march right into a Russian counterattack but also encountered the dead, seemingly rising from their graves.

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory

Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

Sources:
– IWM: Q 78100, Q 86635
– The New York Public Library
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

“Sorry, Boomers. Just because you’ve been told your entire lives that you’re killing the planet, that doesn’t mean it’s true”

Filed under: History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Talk about a golden oldie! Does anyone else remember the portentious “Doomsday Clock”? It was devised shortly after WW2 as a handy visual and rhetorical prop for various unilateral disarmament, Soviet agitprop, and general anti-Western civilization groups to use. It’s apparently still being used to pretend we’re facing yet another potentially world-ending crisis:

Remember the Doomsday Clock? It’s a symbolic clock created by a group of scientists in the 1940s, supposedly indicating how close the human race is getting to Armageddon. Originally the clock was set to seven minutes to midnight, and when the clock strikes 12, we’re all dead. That’s the idea, anyway. This corny propaganda tool reached its pop-culture zenith in the ’80s, when everybody from Midnight Oil and Iron Maiden and Sting to DC Comics’ Watchmen were predicting catastrophe by referencing the Doomsday Clock. People love to be scared about the end of the world, and a lot of artists made a lot of money by exploiting that. Nobody ever lost a buck fearmongering.

But you’re reading this right now, which means we’re all still here. Doomsday hasn’t come. So of course, that must mean … it’s just that much closer!

[…]

And this means as much as it’s meant for the past 70-odd years: nothing. Real clocks are instruments of science; the Doomsday Clock is an instrument of the arbitrary whims of some scientists. It might as well be the Doomsday Dartboard. Do you really think we’re any closer to planetary doom than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the Chernobyl disaster, or the premiere of MTV’s The Real World? You’ve got all those brainiacs gathered in one place, and not one of them has read “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

We scoff at Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite and other doomsday cult leaders, but at least they had the courage of their convictions. If these scientists really believe we’re all doomed, why are they sticking around? If Al Gore actually believes all hope is lost, why is he still living in huge mansions and jetting off to Davos? As the great Glenn Reynolds says: “I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.”

The Arms and Armour of The English Civil War

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Royal Armouries
Published 21 Dec 2017

The Royal Armouries’ English Civil War collection boasts an array of infantry and cavalry arms and armour from the 1640s. Delve into this turbulent historical period with a look at some cavalry arms and armour.

Where to find us:

⚔Website: https://royalarmouries.org/home
⚔Blog: https://blog.royalarmouries.org/
⚔Twitter: https://twitter.com/Royal_Armouries

The Royal Armouries is the United Kingdom’s national collection of arms and armour. On this channel, discover what goes on behind the scenes at the museum and to see our collection come to life. From combat demonstrations to jousting coverage to behind the scenes tours with our curators, we’ve got it covered.

Have a question about arms and armour? Feel free to leave us a comment and we’ll do our best to answer it.

January 23, 2020

Vespasian: The Path To Power | Timeline

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Timeline – World History Documentaries
Published 9 Jun 2017

Check out our new website for more incredible history documentaries: HD and ad-free. http://bit.ly/2O6zUsK

Looks at the life of the Roman emperor Vespasian, from childhood to his death in 79 AD. Provides insight into the sophisticated workings of the Roman Empire.

Content licensed from Digital Rights Group (DRG).

Book Review – The Lee Enfield, by Ian Skennerton

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 May 2017

Available from Amazon: http://amzn.to/2qBntgB

Ian Skennerton is a leading authority on British rifles, having written extensively on Sniders, Martinis, Enfields, and more. This specific book, The Lee Enfield is the most recent iteration of his compendium of Lee-Enfield information, printed in 2007 (previous versions were The Lee Enfield Story of the 1980s and The British Service Lee of the 90s). It is an absolute wealth of information, including a large amount of original British military documents. Skennerton covers a huge array of developmental and experimental versions of the Enfield as well as the standard production models (including American, Canadian, Australian, and Indian production).

Strange WW1 modifications and accessories, grenade launchers, snipers, lightweight guns, carbines, long rifles, semiautomatic conversions, you name it — it’s all here. Unfortunately, the organization and editing leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion. It is a book that looks magnificent when idly flipped through, but can be frustrating to use to understand the history of a gun or guns. The text often jumps from one subject to another, forcing the reader to piece together elements from different sections to figure out a coherent story.

That said, it remains an indispensable book for the Enfield enthusiast, as it has a ton of information not found elsewhere. I hope that if a new revision or edition is ever produced, Mr. Skennerton will employ the services of a ruthless editor to help him form the raw information into a more navigable history.

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QotD: The “great” modern architects

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Europe, Germany, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The widely accepted narrative of modernism à la Gropius is that it was some kind of logical or ineluctable development from the Arts and Crafts movement. This seems to me utterly fantastic: it is like saying that Mickey Spillane is a logical or ineluctable outgrowth of Montesquieu. It is true that in the work of certain artists, for example Mondrian, one can see a gradual change which might be considered logical, starting from figurative landscapes and ending, via ever greater abstraction, to purely geometric shapes. But even where there is such a development, it is ultimately beside the point: it does not prove that what came later was better. Each artistic product has to be assessed aesthetically on its own merits (which in architecture includes its harmony with an existing townscape), and only someone who sees with an ideology rather than with eyes could conclude anything other than that modernism has been overwhelmingly a disaster.

Moreover, claiming respectable ancestors is somewhat at variance with equal claims to be starting from zero (as Gropius put it), but such a contradiction is hardly noticed by the grand narrative history of modernism that Professor Curl attacks and destroys.

He is not unable or unwilling to praise where it is due, though it is due rarely enough; and he is particularly effective in tracing the opportunistic ideological divagations of the modernists, whose one constant predilection was for absolute power over others. Mies, for example, was attracted to socialist totalitarianism, and his only objection to Nazism was that the Nazis eventually rejected his desire to have everything built according to his prescriptions. He left Nazi Germany because he feared his previous pro-leftism made him permanently suspect in its eyes, not because he was appalled by its brutality. If only they’d let him build! But contrary to apologists for Mies, and to a legend constantly repeated, it was not the Nazis who closed the Bauhaus but Mies himself, and he left Germany only four years after their assumption of power.

Finding refuge in America, Mies quickly perceived that the power of patronage of megalomaniac building lay with giant corporations rather than with fascists or communists and persuaded many of them to build his preternaturally inhuman and uninspired monstrosities. By a strange quirk of history, and because of mankind’s perpetual propensity to make logical errors, Mies was able to pose dishonestly as anti-totalitarian and even as a friend of freedom precisely because he had fled Nazi Germany where they hadn’t patronised him. He was fortunate that soon afterwards the United States had another totalitarian enemy, the Soviet Union. Mies and his allies were thus able to claim that his totalitarian modernism was actually a manifestation of western freedom. There are many such ironies pointed up in this book that would be delicious had they not had such appalling consequences.

Corbusier was a fascist in the most literal sense of the word, and early during the Occupation advocated the removal by force of the majority of Paris’ population because it had no business to be living there. Can one wonder that a man with thoughts like that built monstrosities?

Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.

January 22, 2020

Introduction to Military Flamethrowers with Charlie Hobson

Filed under: History, Military, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 May 2016

http://www.flamethrowerexpert.com

You can find Charlie Hobson’s book, US Portable Flamethrowers here:
http://amzn.to/1SP9yc5

Flamethrowers are a significant piece of military weapons history which are very widely misunderstood, as flamethrowers have never been the subject of nearly as much collector interest as other types of small arms. The US military removed its flamethrowers from inventory in 1985, and all other major national militaries have done the same. In the US, the lack of general interest led to most of the surplussed weapons being destroyed as scrap, and few survive in private collections. At the same time (and for the same reason) a great deal of the information on these weapons was also discarded and lost.

One of the people who has done a tremendous amount of work to recover practical information on historical military flamethrowers as well as restore, service, and operate them is Charlie Hobson. He has worked extensively with the US military museum system as well as the entertainment industry (if you have seen a movie of TV show using a real flamethrower, it was almost certainly done under his supervision).

Today I am discussing the basic of flamethrowers with Charlie. The goal is to provide a good baseline foundation so we can go on to look at a couple specific historical flamethrowers and understand them in context. So sit back, relax, and enjoy a chat with a man who is truly passionate about this underappreciated aspect of military history!

January 21, 2020

The Korean War – THE COLD WAR Turns Hot!

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

IT’S HISTORY
Published 23 May 2015

Not so long after World War 2, the Cold War had its first very hot conflict. After the separation of Korea into a communist north and a pro-western south, the stage was set for war. A war that escalated quickly and brought new innovations to the front that were only in a testing phase a few years earlier. The conflict cooled down into an armistice and created the DMZ that we still know today.

» SOURCES
Videos: British Pathé (https://www.youtube.com/user/britishp…)
Pictures: mainly Picture Alliance
Content:
Mulholland, Andrew: The Korean War: History in an Hour, William Collins, 2013
Malkasian, Carter: The Korean War, Osprey Publishing, 2014
Hastings, Max: The Korean War, Pan, 1987

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The United States Goes Dry – Alcohol Prohibition I THE GREAT WAR

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Law, Liberty, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 20 Jan 2020

In January 1920, after one year of preparation, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution went into effect. From now on alcohol prohibition was the law.

» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
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» SOURCES
Ehmer, K. and Hindermann, B. (2015). The School of Sophisticated Drinking. New York: Greystone Books.
Miron and Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition”. In the American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 242-247, (May 1991).
Darrow, Clarence, and John Haynes Holmes. Debate On Prohibition. Haldeman-Julius Co., 1924.
Iorizzo, Luciano J. Al Capone. Greenwood Press, 2003.
Nemtsov, Aleksandr. A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia. Stockholm, 2011.
Sullivan, Edward D. Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime. New York: The Vangaurd Press, 1929.
United States Government, “Codification of Internal Revenue Laws, … Published Pursuant to Section 1203(c) Revenue Act of 1926”.
18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ou…
United States Department of Agriculture. “Crop Production Historical Track Records, 2018”. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publication…
Kamieński, Łukasz: “Drugs”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2019-03-07
Blocker, Jack S Jr. “Did prohibition really work? Alcohol prohibition as a public health innovation.” American Journal of Public Health vol. 96,2 (2006): 233-43.

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Amity Shlaes’ Great Society: A New History

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, Edward Short reviews the latest American economic history book by Amity Shlaes:

In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes revisits the welfare programs of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to show not only how misguided they were but also what a warning they present to those who wish to resurrect and extend such programs. “The contest between capitalism and socialism is on again,” the author writes in her introduction. Despite the Trump administration’s thriving economy, or perhaps because of it, Democratic Party progressives are calling for new welfare programs even more radical than those advocated in the 1960s by the socialist architect of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Michael Harrington. In the new schemes for wealth redistribution, student debt relief, socialized medicine, and universal guaranteed income that make up the Democrats’ political platform in 2020, Shlaes rightly sees a recycling of Great Society hobby horses — and she worries that a good portion of the electorate may be taken in by them. “Once again many Americans rate socialism as the generous philosophy,” she observes, and she has written her admirable, sobering study to make sure that readers realize that the “results of our socialism were not generous.”

Reviewing how ungenerous makes for salutary reading. After all, socialism of any stripe, whether in Russia, South America, Europe, or America, has always been an inherently deceitful enterprise. Shales captures the essence of this imposture when she describes one of its manifestations as “Prettifying a political grab by dressing it up as an economic rescue.” In totting up these receipts for deceit, Shlaes has done a genuine public service. […]

On display here are all of Shlaes’s strengths as an author: her clear and unpretentious prose, sound critical judgment, readiness to enter into the thinking of her subjects with sympathy (even when she regards it as mistaken), and, perhaps most impressively, understanding how history can help us fathom what might otherwise be obscure in our own more immediate history.

Accordingly, she describes the influence that Roosevelt’s New Deal had on Johnson, who saw it as a model for maintaining and consolidating his Democratic majorities, as well as focusing his Cabinet’s talents. “The men around Johnson,” Shlaes points out, including Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Richard Goodwin, and Sargent Shriver, “felt the weight of his faith on them, and strove hard. Vietnam would be sorted out. There would be a Great Society. Poverty would be cured. Blacks of the South would win full citizenship. The Great Society would succeed.” Yet the president’s men could not help asking “by what measures” it would succeed.

Moynihan’s answer to this question is one that still mesmerizes social-engineering elites. The Great Society would be achieved by social science. “Progress begins on social problems when it becomes possible to measure them,” Moynihan declared. Improved quantitative analysis would give the centralized power of planners a new credibility.

Whether Johnson himself ever truly believed in such claims is questionable. When aides asked the exuberant Texan what he thought of the risks of going forward with his wildly ambitious program, his reply epitomized the hubris at the heart of his Great Society: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

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