Tourism of the past and present has served as a way to define oneself. As time went on experience instead of material goods became the way of establishing status. Tourism provided that experience for many Americans. According to Rothman, through tourism, people acquire intangibles, making it the successor to industrial capitalism because material goods no longer fulfilled or created status.[3] During the period of 1880 to 1940, promoters touted tourism as a patriotic duty in which Americans reaffirmed their American-ness by following the footsteps of history first-hand.[4] Tourism was a form of commercial patriotism in the early 20th century. During World War I, promoters advertised domestic tourism as a way to support the American economy.[5] Shaffer’s stated thesis is that the production of tourist landscape and consumption of the tourist experience was central in developing national culture.[6] According to Shaffer, tourism reshaped and redefined the built and natural environment and influenced the way people defined and identified themselves as Americans.[7]

Dilworth points out that many tourists’ motivation at the turn of the 20th century was to seek “Columbian” moments in which they could discover something.[8] Dilworth calls tourism during this period “imperialist nostalgia,” a sense of longing for what one is complicit in altering or destroying.[9] As the 1963 Leopold report suggested, Americans see national parks, then and now, as “vignettes of primitive America.” The same can be said of Native Americans after the turn of the century, as Dilworth describes in her chapter about the Fred Harvey Company. The company showcased Indians in a controlled environment, such as the Native American building in Albuquerque. Tourists were always the centerpieces in Fred Harvey operations, while Indians represented a “commodity to be consumed visually.”[10] During that same time, national park promoters touted the reserves, in essence, as a scenic commodity — a place where visitors could allegedly see America as it looked before white settlement. Barringer explains time and time again that the NPS and its concessionaires presented their product to fit the perceptions of the natural setting prominent at the time. The parks and their concessions did whatever necessary to attract visitors, answering more to capitalistic demands than preservation mandates. Dilworth argues that the representations made by the Fred Harvey Company embodied imperialism and nostalgia by erasing and preserving at the same time.[11] National parks employed much the same method. According to Dilworth, tourism helped to turn nature and culture into a “commodified landscape of scenic goods.”[12]

Railroads spared no effort in selling Western national parks to Eastern tourists seeking a nostalgic connection to nature and the frontier past. Dilworth explains how railroad executives, such as the Great Northern Railroad’s Louis Hill, who heavily promoted travel to Montana’s Glacier National Park, pitched parks as refuges from the ills of modern society, such as immigration and labor unrest. Stephen Mather, the first director of the NPS, said national parks helped “break down sectional prejudice by bringing tourists from all sections of the country together.”[13] Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane called national parks “the public laboratories of nature study for the nation.”[14] These early national park promoters were biased towards their product and clearly did not realize that national park tourism depended on the same urban industrial infrastructure that visitors were trying to escape.[15] Ironically, Robert Sterling Yard, early NPS head of education and staunch park promoter, celebrated the national parks’ educational value, calling them dramatic landscapes raised above the crass commercialism and cheap amusements of common tourist attractions.[16] Yard’s assessment proved completely false.

As Barringer explains thoroughly in his volume, capitalism is at the heart of national park tourism, shaping them into idyllic forms of nature. Early Yellowstone concessionaires created an idyllic form of nature that would appeal to tourists, even to the point of falsely raising expectations.[17] Such imperialistic forces rendered national parks, and other tourist destinations, inauthentic. The “vignettes of primitive America” the Leopold report described are nonsense. In order for national parks to be authentically primitive, they cannot include roads, trails, lodges or commercial establishments. All five volumes resoundingly agree that one of the distinguishing factors of tourism is its lack of authenticity.

The Fred Harvey Company, as Dilworth describes it, is a prime example of the inauthentic side of tourism. The company claimed visitors were seeing American Indians in their natural environment, when in reality each venue was a “scripted space” that placed Indians where they could entertain tourists. Hannigan heavily highlights tourism’s inauthentic nature throughout his volume. He argues that places he calls Urban Entertainment Developments (UEDs) greatly lack authenticity. For example, Sea World, one well-known UED, is not accurate but a “carefully crafted version of the marine world which is meant both to humanize dolphins and other sea creatures and to make concern for them a badge of bourgeois status.[18] Rothman agrees that tourist towns and resorts are scripted spaces trying to lure visitors through an attractive theme or image.[19]

Commercialism compromises national parks’ authenticity. As Rothman explains, Carlsbad Caverns National Monument was not tuned to the reverential notions of the meaning of nature, but to convenience and methods of attracting more tourists.[20] For example, a tour of the Carlsbad before 1944 included the darkening of the caves largest room and the playing of the tune “Rock of Ages.” ceremony was a popular part Carlsbad until 1944. Until 1969, Yosemite visitors saw the Firefall, embers from a large campfire, plummet off of Glacier Point, which was a gimmick to attract tourists.

Non-governmental natural attractions’ commercialism is more blatant than national parks. Desoto Caverns in Alabama showcases a large cave with some of the largest stalactites and stalagmites in the world. On the same vain as the Rock of Ages ceremony, the cave also includes a laser light, sound and water show. As if the cave itself is not a sufficient draw, the park’s owners placed tawdry attractions near the cave entrance, including the “Lost Trail Maze,” “Wacky Water Golf,” and “Pedal Go-Karts.” A bona fide cave would not be attractive to a run-of-the-mill tourist because it would not include lights, handrails or paved trails. On the other hand, such a cavern would be a spelunker’s dream. Tennessee’s Lost Sea, reportedly the largest underground lake on earth, features “authentic” 19th century cabins, which house a trading post, country store and ice cream shop. In actuality those cabins are reconstructions. In order for such structures to be truly genuine, they must not have been relocated or refurbished in any way.

According to Dilworth, tourism constructs authenticity in such a way that it is never attainable; the very presence of the observer spells the end of the authenticity of the observed.[21] Commercialism, as illustrated by the natural attractions’ examples, further diminishes authenticity. Hannigan explains that the premise of authentic can only be observed in working-class job settings, such as steel mills, housing, such as tenements or cultural activities, such as bingo, bowling and bars, whereas the rest is an example of “false consciousness.”[22] Both natural attractions and UEDs have become scripted spaces. Hannigan explains that these “McDonaldized” developments exude efficiency, calculability, predictability and control.[23] These “McDonaldized” locations, such as Disneyland, strive for the routine and predictability.[24]

Just as the volumes agree on tourism’s lack of authenticity, they also concur that propaganda is at the heart of the industry. Shaffer explains through a national publicity campaign, early 20th century promoters touted national parks as “quintessentially American landscapes that objectified the American character and embodied the essence of the nation.”[25] Commenting on a boy scout trip, John Patton, president of the Far Western Traveler’s Association said “We want them to see America because it will help them grow up to be better Americans.”[26] Later on, Shaffer suggests that car travel was “an extension of America’s heroic past,” arguing that through the process of touring, tourist could become better Americans.[27]

Throughout his volume Barringer illustrates the key role advertisements and presentations, either by the concessionaires or the NPS, had in shaping public opinion. These efforts tried to mold the perceptions of their audiences into thinking the products presented were ideal. Through its “interpretation” – campfire programs and ranger-led activities – the NPS hoped to increase public support and thus appropriations.[28]

According to Rothman, every town in the West sought to show its attributes were special.[29] For example, Winslow, Arizona boasts of its distinct “Standin’ on the Corner,” park, a downtown landmark that pays homage to a famous line in the Eagles’ first hit song, “Take it Easy.” Towns try to boast about anything that might set them apart. Thousands of tourism websites brag about their destination communities, saying the location has a “rich history,” a “small-town feel,” or that the place “has it all.” The websites, however, fail to mention all of what. Without evidential backing, their claims are hollow.

Tourism promoted as a means of generating patriotism also proved hollow because consumption is at the very core of the industry. Rothman explains that one of tourism’s drawbacks is its reputation as a panacea. Tourism often functions as a replacement for declining industries and causes a diminishing sense of pride in work.[30] Furthermore, lost factory job wages far outpaced income earned from tourism.  Rothman argues that when communities succeed in attracting so many people, those people’s presence destroys the cultural and environmental amenities that made the place special.[31] Tourism causes a diminishing sense of pride in work; locals find that selling themselves is much harder than selling a product.[32] Hannigan argues that so-called UEDs are isolated from surrounding neighborhoods physically, economically and culturally.[33] Many UEDs promote themselves as a method of revitalizing economically waning neighborhoods, but in reality have little or no redeeming effect. Case in point is Atlantic City, where Hannigan states a “glittering strip of casino-hotels along the Boardwalk stand in stark juxtaposition to a declining local community.”[34] In Schaffer’s last chapter, she frames tourism primarily in terms of consumption in order to stress how it consistently drew Americans away from civic consciousness.[35] In short, tourism teaches Americans how to be consumers, not builders.

Though tourism helped shape American ethos and can allegedly generate patriotism, as Shaffer contends, it also fosters a consumptive culture, lacks authenticity and is centered in propaganda. Popular tourist sites, not only in the United States but also around the world, have become hotbeds for hucksters. For instance, visitors to the Roman Coliseum, one of the premiere tourist attractions in Europe, will see an architectural marvel. Unfortunately, they will also see street vendors coming at them on all sides trying to sell them shoddy souvenirs. As if that is not annoying enough, they will also view men sporting imitation Roman soldier costumes hoping to get their picture taken with each guest. As the tourists will notice, most of these hawkers are not even native Italians and the majority of them are not making a good living selling their wares.

Motivated by wanting “to get away from it all,” tourists, in actuality, are not getting away from anything they already see at home. Capitalistic forces are as pronounced at tourist attractions as they are anywhere else. Tourists may find the nostalgia they seek at their destinations, but they most likely will not find anything completely genuine. As Hannigan suggests, tourists will have to tour a factory, visit a slum, go to a bar or go bowling if they seek real authenticity. If they want to truly escape capitalism, they will have to take an excursion into the backcountry.

• Barringer, Mark D. Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and the Construction of Nature.
• Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. 238 pp.
• Dilworth, Leah. Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive
• Past. Washington D.C. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. 274 pp.
• Hannigan, John. Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis.
• London: Routledge, 1998. 239 pp.
• Rothman, Hal K. Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West.
• Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. 434 pp.
• Shaffer, Marguerite S. See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940.
• Washington D.C. Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. 429 pp.

• [1] Shaffer, 3
• [2] Rothman, 166-67
• [3] Rothman, 19
• [4] Shaffer, 4
• [5] Ibid, 101
• [6] Ibid, 6
• [7] Ibid
• [8] Dilworth, 105
• [9] Ibid, 79
• [10] Schaffer, 109
• [11] Ibid, 104
• [12] Dilworth, 272
• [13] Ibid, 119
• [14] Ibid, 104
• [15] Chiang, Connie. Book Review of See America First. Environmental History. Vol. 8, Issue 4
• [16] Shaffer, 106
• [17] Barringer, 7
• [18] Hannigan, 8
• [19] Rothman, 12, 17
• [20] Rothman, 160
• [21] Dilworth, 121
• [22] Ibid
• [23] Hannigan, 81
• [24] Ibid, 82-83
• [25] Shaffer, 114-115
• [26] Shaffer, 116
• [27] Ibid, 142
• [28] Barringer, 133
• [29] Rothman, 145
• [30] Rothman, 26
• [31] Ibid, 27
• [32] Ibid
• [33] Hannigan, 4
• [34] Ibid
• [35] Schulten, Susan. Book Review of See America First. American Historical Review. April 2002. 561-562.

Related:

• American Indians in National Parks
• The History of American Capitalism
• History of Public Relations
• The Early History of Hypnotism

Unfortunately, the perception of public relations has not always been positive. In the 1800s, P.T. Barnum became a master publicist by generating article after article for his traveling circus. His “public be damned” philosophy and the use of exploitative publicity methods, however; have contributed to criticism of the profession.

Another significant component to the profession’s development came from the Creel Committee during World War I. A member of the committee, Edward L. Bernays, later considered by many to be the father of public relations, was part of a massive verbal and written communications effort to gain support of the war. According to Bernays, “this was the first time in our history that information was used as a weapon of war.”

There were other key people and events, which were very influential in promoting the growth of the public relations industry such as:

• “Public be informed era”, Ivy Lee – “father of PR”
• WWII – the Office of War Information
• “Counseling era” – Edward Bernays taught the first PR course at NYU in 1923
• Bernays wife, Doris Fleischman, was influential in paving the way for women in the industry. Together, they created Edward L. Bernays, Counsel on Public Relations, which became a top agency.

Some of the top PR practitioners in the 20th Century, according to PRWeek, are Harold Burson, Edward Bernays, Arthur Page, Larry Foster and Ivy Lee.

Major Practices of Public Relations

One thing that is not commonly known about the Public Relations industry is that it is a very complex business that involves many different elements and areas of expertise. Counseling, Research, Media Relations, Publicity, Employee/Member Relations, Community Relations, Public Affairs, Government Affairs, Issues Management, Financial Relations, Industry Relations, Development/Fund Raising, Minority Relations/Multicultural Affairs, Crisis Management, Special Events and Public Participation and Marketing Communications are all elements of Public Relations according to the PRSA Foundation.

Media Relations deals with communicating the organization’s messages to selected reporters and editors and then, following up to see if the message is reported accurately. Evaluation is an important and often overlooked part of this process. Public Affairs has to deal with developing effective involvement in public policy and helping an organization adapt to public expectations. Also, it is also a term used by military services and some governmental agencies to describe their public relations activities. Issues Management is identifying and addressing issues of public concern in which an organization is, or should be, concerned. Industry Relations is dealing with other firms in the industry of an organization, and with the trade associations related with that organization. Marketing Communications is a combination of activities designed to sell a product, service or idea, including advertising, collateral material, publicity, promotion, packaging, point-of-sale display, trade shows and special events.

An organization of today cannot operate in a vacuum. Many audiences are listening and watching. When something negative happens, there are groups that will use it to attack the organization. The best crisis plan is PREVENTIVE, not reactive. Identifying the possible things that could go wrong that would have a negative impact on the organization is a key step in the crisis management process. Prioritize them as to likelihood and degree of negative impact. Then address each by asking “what are we doing now to prevent this from happening?” A Crisis Plan should include responses to the list of possible problems and who’s responsible, what to say and what NOT to say during a crisis.

Maintaining a favorable relationship with the communities in which the organization has an interest is also crucial. Community Relations is continuing, planned and active participation with and within a community. Before beginning a Public Relations plan, the client must be made aware of how they stand in the eyes of their publics. The best way to do this is to run a Communication Audit. Communication Audits are strategic, research-based processes of evaluating an organization’s communications (and sometimes, marketing) program by using interviews of key audiences, focus groups, surveys, evaluations of an organization’s communications vehicles. The end result is a report that includes the research as well as recommendations on how the organization can improve its communications.

On top of the different major practices of Public Relations, there are also different areas of expertise. Corporate PR, Entertainment PR, Government PR, Technology PR, Finance PR, Health PR and Sports PR are all different areas of the business. Each of these areas is self-explanatory, but are not limited to only practicing in one area. For example, if you work for a famous athlete, one would need to exercise Sports PR and Entertainment PR. Consequently, there are many different areas of Public Relations in which to apply all the major practice areas. One of these areas is Media Relations.

Media Relations

Media relations personnel have many responsibilities as public relations practitioners in the various fields that make up the profession. They are the direct link between the media and the organization, whether it is a sports team, a corporation or a non-profit. Media kits, press releases, setting up interviews and releasing their organizations information are all responsibilities of media relations personnel. Journalists and media outlets receive the vast majority of their information about organizations for news stories through the work of media relations personnel. They are the gatekeepers of information about the organization they work for. An example of these responsibilities can be explained by exploring the duties of a sports information director (SID), otherwise known as the media relations person, for a college athletic department.

In the off-season, the sports information director is responsible for updating the team roster, preparing the team media guide, which includes player/coach profiles, player/team statistics, and team history such as titles won, awards, etc. During the season the SID is responsible for updating player and team statistics after every game so they are readily available to be dispersed to the media and to the coaching staff. This information is also prepared in order to be uploaded to the team website so that the information is easily accessible. The SID is also in charge of making sure the media have parking passes and media passes reserved so that they have access to the game events. The sports information director also attends team practices to set up interviews with coaches and players for the media. The SID also does this on game days. Game day activities also include making media guides, statistics, team schedules, lineups, and any other relevant information accessible to the media. During the game, the SID records the statistics and must be sure to give the media updated statistics that change during the coarse of the game. The SID must also issue the final box score to the media at the end of the game. Post game responsibilities include faxing the final box scores and statistics to all the local newspapers and television stations. Because the University of Texas is covered extensively throughout the nation, these statistics and box scores must also be faxed to ESPN, Sportsticker, and the Associated Press. After the game, the SID is also in charge of writing the press release and sending it to the Associated Press. All of this must be done in a timely fashion because of deadlines for journalists.

Meeting deadlines is just one of the guidelines a media relations person must remember to do when assisting reporters. A media relations person must also remember to always be available to the media, to be truthful, to treat every reporter as equal as the next, to be accurate when issuing out information, and to politely correct mistakes made by journalists. These are all important qualities for a media relations professional to uphold.

Media relations is an important part of any organization. An organization that has a strong media relations department has a significant advantage over an organization without productive media relations personnel. Media relations personnel are the link to the media, which decides whether to cover a story on an organization or not. This is why a strong media relations department can be such an asset to an organization; the media relations department can be the determinant as to whether their organization’s news gets coverage. The more positive news coverage an organization receives, the more the public is aware of the organization overall. Keeping an organization in the eye of the public and being viewed in a positive light is what makes media relations such a necessity in an era where news is so easily accessible by the general population.

Ethics in Public Relations

Ethics has various meanings as it is applied to public relations and the individuals working within that field. In the past, terms such as “cover-up” and “spin” have given public relations a negative image because they imply that PR work is somewhat unethical or underhanded. Today, many corporations are covering up their dealings with others, using deception and half-truths that shake the credibility of the institution. However, positive qualities such as honesty and sharing news with the public also have some companies stressing the need for ethical dealings in the marketplace. Ethics and credibility are slowly re-emerging in the field of public relations, pressuring an attitude change.

Despite preconceived and stereotypical notions about the practice of public relations, it is crucial that people in the industry set high ethical standards. In fact, the public relations worker should be the ethical voice within the corporation. This position of responsibility requires public relations professionals to advise their clients in ethical decision making, advising them towards the truth and away from deception.

Leadership is a quality that should resonate in all active public relations professionals, especially when implementing ethical practices. Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has developed a code of ethics to help its members develop leadership qualities. The six core values of PRSA suggest ideal behavior for public relations practitioners. Advocacy, honesty, expertise, independence, loyalty, and fairness comprise attributes of the Public Relations Society of America’s ethical code.

An organization’s social responsibility also relates to the code of ethics of an organization. The social organization is responsible for establishing norms that control and define the actions and mistakes of its members. Being socially responsible includes every department of an organization. Examples of social responsibility categories are: marketing practices, corporate philanthropy, environmental activities, external relations, employment diversity in retaining and promoting minorities and women. Today, social responsibility is integrated into most departments of an organization.

Corporate codes of conduct are another aspect of corporate social responsibility, ensuring that every person within the company implements ethics. After Enron’s scandal, many codes of conduct have been implemented, but the companies do not all share the same motivation for using the codes. Corporate codes of conduct help improve internal operations, respond to transgressions, increase public confidence, and stem the tide of outside regulation. The most important form of conduct that all corporations should follow is to always tell the truth.

The public relations industry is at a turning point that depends on how public relations practitioners react ethically to situations. Credibility is essential for ensuring continued value of the public relations profession. Most importantly, ethical practices are crucial to demonstrate that corporations can be honest. Such ethical practices will require constant dedication by public relations professionals to project the image of the public relations field as one of credibility and truth.

Public Relations Firms

Ruder Finn

Mission:
To create impactful visual communications for clients through branding, collateral and information design. Our mission is to ensure that both the strategy and messaging are as elegant as the visual execution. Our design staff is as global as our largest clients, so that we can provide solutions that cross borders and audiences with ease and grace.

Practices:
Healthcare, Technology, Corporate, Consumer, Arts/Culture, Public Affairs/Global Issues, and Travel/Tourism.

Porter Novelli

Mission:
Porter Novelli’s agency partners and employees encompass the research, experience, expertise and fresh thinking that demonstrate the agency’s breadth and depth of intellectual capital in a variety of fields. Using white papers, research studies and PN IQ – Insights Quarterly – the agency’s own journal of key learnings and best practices, Porter Novelli has created vehicles for continuous improvement in our key practice areas and in disciplines important to our clients.

Practices:
Consumer, Public Affairs, Corporate Affairs, Healthcare and Technology

Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide

Mission:
Our clients all live in competitive worlds. To compete successfully, they need access to high quality information, strategic advice and specialist communications skills. With leading practitioners in all key marketing disciplines, WPP companies are happy to work as single suppliers or in partnership with each other.

Practices:
Advertising, Media Investment Management, Information, Consulting, Public Affairs, Branding, Healthcare, and Specialized Communications.

Cohn and Wolfe began in Georgia in 1970. Today the company has several female leaders. Of the 11 managing directors, nine are women. The leader of Cohn and Wolfe worldwide is another woman, Donna Imperato. Cohn and Wolfe is best known for its connection to the Olympics. In 1980, Coke put C&W in charge of all their Olympic public relations activities. C&W has been involved in every Olympics since then, with a variety of products. For example, in the 1996 summer games in hot and stifling Atlanta, C&W worked for York air conditioners to make their contributions of cool air known at the games. Currently C&W is headquartered out of London. IN 1984 they were bought by Y&R. Then when Y&R was bought by WPP in 2000, C&W became part of the WPP family. Locally, they just acquired Springbock Tech. – Texas’s largest PR firm specializing in technology PR.

Manning, Selvage and Lee is an international PR firm based out of London. They have 28 owned offices and 70 affiliates. Their key areas of work are consumer marketing, corporate communications and finance/ investor relations. Some of their exciting clients include GMAC Financial Services, Proctor and Gamble and X-Box. They are also award winners. In 2003 they were voted a Holmes Report Agency of the Year. In 2004 they won a PRSA Silver Anvil award for the Heart of Diabetes Campaign.

Edelman is a large firm. They have 1800 employees in 40 offices. This makes Edelman one of the largest remaining independents. Their mission is to provide public relations counsel and strategic communications services that enable their clients to build strong relationships and to influence attitudes and behaviors in a complex world. Worldwide, they have a broad international network but they struggle with poor leadership in Europe. In Asia, Edelman has watched steady growth, up by 20 percent last year.

Edelman’s main practices include corporate, crisis management, financial relations, entertainment, food, government, marketing, public affairs, sports, travel and design. To accomplish all this, Edelman is made up of four specialty firms. Blue is the advertising firm, First and 42^nd is a management consulting firm, StrategyOne is their research firm and BioScience Communications works with medical education and publishing.

As part of the Interpublic Group, Golin Harris has a wide reach throughout the world. Their reach extends to 27000 employees in 100 countries. They have a variety of key areas of expertise. They work in corporate communications and utilize CrossMedia which works to produce broadcast PR. They also work with investors and have a capable Investor Relations department. They also work in the areas of marketing and branding. As the world of technology expands Golin Harris continues to be a leader in technology related public relations.

Corporate Public Relations

In the wake of corporate scandals and rocky economic pitfalls large corporations have taken into special consideration the importance of their organization’s image. Thus, the growth and development of the PR department has begun to play a pivotal role in the corporate world. By examining the structure of PR departments and its role, we hope to grasp a basic knowledge PR in the corporate world.

The majority of PR professionals are employed by the corporate world rather than in agencies. It’s also helpful to note that many corporations are now referring their PR departments as Corporate Communications or Public Affairs. Yet, just because a corporation has its own PR department does not rule out the option of using an agency, or multiple agencies for that matter, to gain specialization or outside help for the corporation. It is common for corporations to seek the expertise of an agency to aid them in crisis management, host a special event or for a fresh perspective. Another outside However, the PR department within the corporation has the unique advantage of knowing the inner atmosphere of the company.

Each corporation will vary in the structure of its PR department depending on the industry and needs of the company. The department can range from one person to many hundreds within the corporation. For example, Exxon Mobil has a substantially sized department with international offices and countless staff members. While there is no one set way to organize a PR department, the most successful ones are those who have direct access to top-level executives. Direct interaction with the CEO is important to know exactly what to communicate, what publics need attention, and any important issues that may affect the company.

One of the primary functions of the PR department include ensuring that relations with stakeholders such as employees, investors, and the public are in check by keeping open communication. To ensure good employee relations departments must ensure that the staff are readily informed with what is happening within the company. Internal publications, memos, pamphlets or intranet access are often used as a clear channel to communicate with employees. Often times for investors and stockholders, the PR department will inform them with company updates via newsletters or special events.

When it’s time for a new product or service rollout, it’s the PR department that organizes the press conference, which may include writing speeches for the CEO and putting together press kits. A press kit is a foundation for what the press needs to know about why there is a press conference in the first place. It will include bios of the CEO or other main people involved with the event, pictures, background information, contact information, a press release, and maybe even a CD-ROM. One of the most important communications the PR department provides is organizing the company’s annual report, which includes a financial overview, a letter from the CEO, salary changes, etc. It basically touches on the ins and outs of the company. A company, for instance McDonald’s, will often put its annual report on the internet which is a great tool the PR department uses to give up-to-date information on the company.

The Public Relations department is also responsible for ensuring the company’s image by promoting good relations with the community in which the company and its subsidiaries are located. Philanthropy is important to that image and by organizing or sponsoring events that provide services to the community, or nationally, to support things such as education and diversity. In addition, the opinions of the various publics a company has is very important to know how best to communicate and formulate the company’s image. Research is vital to doing so and can be done by the PR department by gathering the information themselves or going through a research company.

Overall, Corporate Public Relations does everything an agency does, except with a few more “in-housecleaning” demands. The department has more knowledge of the internal organization of the company. The only difference may be bias due to the fact that the PR department is a part of the internal politics of the company. Nevertheless, Corporate Public Relations is a strong arm in the PR Industry and will continue to be so.

Non-Profit Organizations

The structure of a non-profit organization is easily simplified. The organization will base its communication efforts on their mission, objective, and goals. The mission is the basic purpose of the organization including what it is trying to accomplish. For example, “The mission of Mothers Against Drunk Driving is to stop drunk driving, support the victims of this violent crime, and prevent underage drinking.”-MADD

Objectives simply communicate the general direction the organization is taking, and goals form the specific actions—such as time, budget,etc.—needed to accomplish the mission. Goals are specific and measurable so the organization has the opportunity to evaluate its progress. After determining its goals, publics, competition, and so forth, the organization can form a marketing strategy. The organization can then implement and eventually evaluate its communication efforts.

Three examples of organizations using very different marketing techniques are MADD, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and Austin Lyric Opera (ALO). MADD is an organization benefiting society. It is one of the most successful grass roots campaigns in history.

MADD utilizes its members by sending them as speakers to schools, and legislation. Hearing a mother’s first hand account at the slow death of her daughter has an enormous impact of her audience. The Lance Armstrong Foundation does well with media coverage. Their news coverage and article placements have made their name well known. They began the rubber wristband craze and use Lance Armstrong as a celebrity spokesperson.

Austin Lyric Opera deals with several different types of public relations. There is a community relation with the company’s patrons and for the children and parents attending the ALO music school. There are also investor relations with season ticket holders and people who regularly give large donations. This usually includes large special events and fundraisers throughout the year. ALO also combines several techniques including PSAs, commercials, brochures, direct mail, fundraising, and special events. Despite all the different missions of non-profit organizations, they are all similar in their structures and limited resources. By using small public relations departments to do several functions, they have been able to experience a wide range of communication tools.

Public Relations Organizations

Professional PR Organizations

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), chartered in 1947 is the world’s largest organization for public relations professionals. PRSA’s vision is to unify, strengthen, and advance the profession of public relations. It has established itself as the organization, which builds value, demand, and global understanding for public relations.

PRSA has nearly 20,000 members, in 114 chapters, the world’s largest organization for public relations professionals. These members represent a variety of categories such as technology, government, associations, and nonprofit organizations, to name a few.

According to the PRSA website, “their primary objectives are to advance the standards of the public relations profession and to provide members with professional development opportunities through continuing education programs, information exchange forums, and research projects conducted on the national and local levels.”

The three core areas of focus are 1) advancing the profession, 2) strengthening the society, and 3) establishing global leadership.

Membership in PRSA is on an individual, not organizational basis. There are two categories of membership: member and Associate member. Each category has specific eligibility requirements. One specific requirement for all members however is adherence to the PRSA Code of Ethics.

The PRSA Code of Ethics is an important document to the Public Relations Industry and focuses on 6 specific areas, advocacy, honesty, fairness, expertise, independence, and loyalty. This code was last updated in October 2000. Two quotes from the preamble illustrate how strongly the PRSA Board of Directors feels about the ethical conduct of its members. It begins with “The Code of Ethics is designed to be a guide for members as they carry our their ethical responsibilities” and concludes with the following statement “Ethical practice is the most important obligation of a PRSA member.”

As a member of PRSA, a person has access to many resources for personal and professional development. The Professional Resource Center provides access to award-winning public relations campaign profiles, timely information on industry trends, and helpful campaign development resources. A member is eligible to secure low group cost insurance for members and their employees. PRSA members are also eligible for online product discounts with Office Depot, free subscriptions to Public Relations Tactics and The Strategist, as well as discounts on other publications through the PRSA store.

One other very important resource for members and non-members is the PRSA website, which is user friendly and provides a great amount of information. Here you can find job opportunities, access a calendar for PRSA events, and find out information about the various awards, including The Silver Anvil Award. There are also directories and publications listed. These are useful resources to locate other PRSA members or use as reference materials to keep up with current trends in the industry.

The Texas Public Relations Association (TPRA) began in 1953 in San Antonio and has since expanded into a statewide organization that serves PR practitioners all over Texas. It established a “Code of Ethics” that sets the standard for the Texas PR industry. The Code focuses on high expectations of honesty, integrity, fairness, respect, accuracy, truth and many other characteristics. Members are encouraged to abide by these Codes for the betterment of the public and the PR industry.

There are many benefits in having a membership in TPRA. TPRA holds conferences and seminars throughout the year to further the education of PR practitioners. Practitioners gather to discuss emerging trends and issues, successes and problems, and the new skills needed to survive in this rapidly evolving industry. Guest speakers are brought in to offer help and advice on how to respond to the ever changing demands of the typical PR job.

TPRA members also have a chance at winning statewide recognition at the only Texas PR awards program. The Best of Texas Awards honor the best in specific public relations activities, and the Silver Spur Awards recognize outstanding public relations programs. Individuals who contribute to TPRA and the profession can also receive the Golden Spur, Outstanding PR Practitioner, Rising Star, and New Member Achievement awards.

TPRA members are given valuable networking tools, such as being listed in the “Who’s Who in Texas Public Relations” directory and building relationships with peers across the state. The directory is also a source of information to public relations agencies and executive research and media firms.

The TPRA website also posts job and internship opportunities for those PR professionals looking for new experiences or work. The website also features reference sources, news sources, and professional sites involving the PR industry.

TPRA and its foundation, the Public Relations Foundation of Texas (PRFT), sponsor student awards programs and provide multiple resources to help further the education of future PR practitioners.

TPRA has recently been promoting their group membership fees. Now, the Group Membership Plan allows for registration fees and dues to be reduced when four or more people from the same employer join. This allows companies to sponsor more memberships for their employees and for TPRA to continue its growth.

Though once dominated by white men, the field of Public Relations is becoming more diverse.

PR Publications and Job Opportunities

Public Relations Publications

In the Public Relations arena, there are many different but important publications that serve to inform professionals, individual clients and businesses. Most of these are of the “trade publication” genre, containing industry information for differing publics. For the purposes of this report, the publications will be differentiated by whether they are produced and sponsored by PRSA or individually.

PRSA distributes two major publications, Public Relations Tactics, the monthly tabloid, and The Strategist, the quarterly magazine for the leaders in the industry. There catch phrase is that they continue to provide members with timely sources of what’s new and what’s news in public relations, and by way of trade publications they are two of the most successful for the public relations industry. Public Relations Tactics and The Strategist are generally included in a PRSA membership for some small additional fee and according to PRSA’s Website; they have the highest value rankings for all benefits offered to the PRSA membership. Tactics is an easier-to-read tabloid full of practical how-to articles with information and practices for professionals to put into action immediately. The Strategist addresses executive-level public relations practitioners with debates and commentary concerning PR issues of today and is mailed quarterly.

Independent publications include PRWeek, O’Dwyer’s, PR Watch, Buzz Magazine, PR Newswire and an online magazine called PR & Marketing. All of these publications have Websites which offer fairly extensive information regarding their services freely to the public. With the exception of Buzz Magazine, which is specifically a career-based magazine for PR professionals looking for job advances in the field, these magazines all consider themselves a resource for individuals at all stages of their PR careers and serve the public with supplemental education on the industry to help increase knowledge and love for the field.

PR Job Opportunities

A simple bachelor’s degree in public relations is no longer enough to acquire a job. To enter the world of public relations, one must have hands on experience in the field. To get this experience, the first step in a public relations career is an internship. An internship is essential for someone wanting to enter the field through an agency. After an internship, an entry-level position within an agency is account coordinator. A non-agency entry-level public relations position may be public relations coordinator or communications coordinator. These positions often require one to two years of work experience and a bachelor’s degree. The average pay for such positions is $30K a year. After about two to three years of experience, one can become an account executive or a public relations specialist. This position on average pays $38K a year. After this stage in a typical public relations career path, the next position up is an account manager, a public relations manager, or a public relations director. These jobs usually require an advanced degree and at least five years of work experience. The median salary for this stage is $54.5K a year. Beyond this level, a public relations professional might grow to be an executive of the corporation (VP Public Relations), or start his or her own public relations firm. At this point, the salary can be well into the six figures.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2000 and 2010, wage and salary jobs in the management and public relations services industry are expected to grow by 42 percent. This figure is nearly triple the 16 percent growth anticipated for all other industries together, making public relations amid the most rapidly growing industries. Due to the growth of the public relations field, public relations practitioners tend to be well paid, although the range of compensation tends to be broad. Wages depend on such aspects as the individuals’ qualifications and experience, responsibilities of the position, financial strength of the organization, and the general state of the economy. Recent college graduates who are members of the Public Relations Student Society of America and have had some experience can expect a higher than average salary.

Public relations professionals do not have typical days at work. Every day is different and filled with a work schedule that is irregular and often interrupted. Thus, the nine-to-five schedules of other professions do not apply here. A public relations office is normally under high pressure conditions because everyone is working hard to meet the tight deadlines. With their busy days, a public relations practitioner is not tied down to his or her own desk. They are busy doing things like searching for details for a press release, community functions, briefing their management, among many other tasks.

To find such a job, a recent college graduate has many choices when it comes to beginning their job hunt. The Communication Career Services is a good place to start. Also, if he or she is a member of PRSA, their job bank has excellent resources. Other notable places to search for a job are the Council of Public Relations Firms (prfirms.org) and AboutPublicRelations.net. These job services provide a good way to find a job in the public relations field. But just remember, when it comes to landing that first real job, experience is everything.

Future of Public Relations

The practice of public relations is continually evolving and re-formatting itself to include a broad array of functions. Though once viewed with a traditionally print-oriented emphasis, PR has now shifted to that of a multi-faceted marketing discipline. The future of PR proves itself to be limitless. As technology advances, so do the requirements of the public relations practitioner.

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web has created a new and valuable resource for PR professionals. As the nation’s most used resource for information, the Internet connects and provides communication to millions of American consumers every day. This provides for a simple and low cost medium for PR practitioners to convey their desired message to the public. By creating and implementing a comprehensive online campaign, companies can save time and money on distribution costs and materials such as paper, yet still successfully get their message out to their desired publics via the Internet. Advances in technology have also allowed for specially designed software to be created for the use of PR departments and agencies. Software like Bacon’s Media Map can be purchased by PR professionals to provide immediate and updated contact information for reporters and editorial contacts worldwide. Information about each publication, such as distribution size and preferred ways of contact, are included.

Along with advanced software, the Internet has also supplied practitioners with a new insight into public opinion. The emergence of blogs, or online web journals, enable PR departments to immediately retrieve information on public opinion that may have otherwise been unknown or inaccessible to them. Many political websites in particular use online blogs to communicate to and receive immediate comments from their constituents.

Another topic to consider when examining the future of public relations is professional billing. Instead of the traditional hourly billing used among most public relations firms to date, many UK public relations firms are now beginning to implement a one-time pay scale, due to the recent inflated need for PR. Instead of billing a client per hour, the client is now presented with a price upfront, and can separate payments to pay for various functions. For example, a client may be billed $200 dollars for a press release, $500 for a press conference, or $1,000 for an hour-long consultation. This system is slowly beginning to emerge in many newly formed US PR firms, and may soon replace the traditional form of billing.

Along with implementing financial changes, many are now also fighting for the practice of licensing PR professionals. One famous PR practitioner in particular, who felt strongly on the issue, was Edward Bernays. His definition of a Public Relations council was that it is “an applied social scientist who advises a client on the social attitudes and actions he or she must take in order to appeal to the public on which it is dependent. The practitioner ascertains, through research, the adjustment or maladjustment of the client with the public, then advises what changes in attitude and action are demanded to reach the highest point of adjustment to meet social goals.” Bernays understood that anyone one could call themselves a PR professional regardless of the amount of education they had on the subject. Before he died, Bernays wrote bills to address this issue. Although none were passed, the controversy over licensing PR professionals still exists.

The realization by many corporations that PR is a necessity in the business world has created a new role for PR – in the global marketplace. More than ever, PR professionals will be called upon to support world wide relations and campaigns, on issues such as prescription drugs, healthcare, and US military initiatives. An example of this is found in the rapid financial expansion of China and India. Within a few years, both could possibly be leaders in global health care. China’s economy for example is growing at an annual rate of 9 percent (the US economy growth is currently 3 percent). India’s economy is also high with an annual growth of 6 percent. In these fast growing countries, PR campaigns can be used “to map out ways to reach audiences with segmented health messages, develop strategies to communicate with patients and caregivers about disease conditions and benefits of therapies, and enhance or protect companies’ reputations.” With the rapid speed of communications, PR departments worldwide will be put in charge of maintaining both national and global communications in the years to come.

Public relations will continue to evolve as technology and the world at large continues to evolve. Corporations are currently realizing the importance of public relations within their business practices, and that importance will only increase as the field itself continues to incorporate itself into the business arena as a necessary management tool.

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That memoir contains useful insights that show how different Warner was, recounting the circumstances to which Warner became victim. “I always will believe that my life might have been different if it hadn’t been for something that happened to me one summer night when I was between fourteen and fifteen years old” (Warner 7). In a squabble with another boy his age over a girl they both liked, Warner beat the boy’s head in with a scantling from a fence and thought he had killed the lad, so he left town in a hurry thinking the law was after him and afterwards he fell into shady company with those who were on the wrong side of the law. He said later that when he found out he hadn’t killed the boy after all that he thought life had played a big trick on him. “[Life] shoved me out on the bandit trail for a murder never committed and that didn’t happen. When I found out I wasn’t a murderer, it was too late; life had already made an outlaw out of me” (Warner 18). Warner was an example of what former President Theodore Roosevelt described when he said:

“Often [outlaws] are people who in certain stages of civilization do, or have done, good work, but who, when these stages have passed, find themselves surrounded by conditions which accentuate their worst qualities and make their best qualities useless” (MP 203).

Like his cohort in the Wild Bunch gang, Butch Cassidy, Warner was a gentlemanly outlaw. He lived the Robin Hood persona by sometimes taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Of one such incident while in Brown’s Park, he wrote in his memoir, “Suddenly their poverty wrung our hearts. We was [sic] convinced the only right and manly thing to do was give these goods to the poor and lowly of Brown’s Park” (Warner 20). Most outlaws, like Billy the Kid, are perceived as killers – men desensitized who don’t think twice about pulling the trigger. Warner said that killing, for outlaws, “becomes an appetite and has to be fed like hunger or thirst” (Warner 15). Warner admitted he didn’t like being associated with killers (Warner 86). Warner shot only in self-defense, and in one case he said he shot “to scare him and not to kill him” (Warner 87).

Most outlaws became desensitized to and in some cases craved violence and lawlessness, but not Warner. He had a conscience. He knew he was paying a price by living the way he did and he realized he wanted to get out of it. “Your whole outlaw past is just one big trap, just one big spider’s web, that has purty [sic] near a death grip on you, and you have one hell of a time breaking out,” he said (Warner 99). One experience Warner endured helped cure him of the outlaw life. On what was going through his mind while fording the Columbia River in flood stage trying to escape a posse and nearly drowning, he wrote, “as I am struggling I am promising this Judgment and Death thing that if I can only have life back I will do the right thing. I will never rob or gun fight again. I will prove myself” (Warner 97). After fording the Columbia he did leave the outlaw life, eventually.

Another reason Warner left his life of banditry was because of the love he had for his family. Since most outlaws were always running from the law, many of them never felt like they could settle down, get married, and raise children. Butch Cassidy was one example of this. He never married. Warner was different, however. He had a wife, Rose, and a daughter, Hayda. When pregnant with their second child, Rose was stricken with cancer and died soon after delivering a son. Matt attended the funeral as a prisoner, and the episode became the source of some of his greatest regret:

“I guess a man never went through more agony and lived than I did when they took me handcuffed between two guards to see my dead wife lying their in the coffin and that weak, puny, shriveled, half-dead baby in the arms of its accusing grandmother. That was all my past, all my responsibility rising up all together and handing me a knockout right on the chin” (Warner 124).

When that son, Rex, was adopted by one of Matt’s friends, Frank Taylor, of Salina, Utah, Rex didn’t even know Matt was his father. On this occasion Matt’s conscience and his love for his family displayed itself as he wrote, “This is the price I had to pay for my outlaw life. It is the biggest price a man can pay for anything” (Warner 125). When Warner was released from prison, he married again and had two more children from that marriage.

It may sound like nothing, but another aspect of Matt Warner’s life that sets him apart from the rest is he left behind a first-hand narrative, something most other outlaws never did. Because of this, the facts on Warner’s life are not in doubt like his famous cohort Butch Cassidy. Cassidy’s life is shrouded in legend. No one knows where or when he died or even what holdups he was committed. The general consensus portrays his death as coming in a shootout with Bolivian troops in 1908 after he had fled to South America when things got a little too “hot” in the United States. However, other evidence suggests he survived that showdown and returned to his old haunts under an alias and died of stomach cancer in 1937. His sister, Lula Betenson, claimed he was present at a family gathering in 1925 and other reports say he died as late as 1941. Another thesis indicates there could have been multiple Butch Cassidys because other members of his family were outlaws (Pointer x-xi). This may explain why controversy abounds over which robberies he did or didn’t commit. No mysteries cloud the fate of Matt Warner though. Thanks to his narrative, all facts of his life are set in stone and there is no chance of deviation.

Most outlaws Warner associated with had no “civilian” life after they finished their banditry. Many, like Wild Bunch members Harvey Logan, George Curry and Ben Kilpatrick, were killed in an act of robbery. Unlike so many bandits before him, Warner had a “civilian” life when he “went straight” after serving time in the Utah State Penitentiary for manslaughter, killing a man in self-defense.

During his post-outlaw career, unlike during his time as an outlaw, Matt was well respected. “Matt succeeded in his dedication to life as a free and honest man, earning the respect from the same men who wished to see him behind bars for the remainder of his life, just years before” (Warner 157). Warner became so honest that he made a complete turnaround to the other side of the law. Once a notorious bandit, Warner became a justice of the peace in Price, Utah near the end of his life. As a law-enforcer, his reputation as a law-breaker proceeded him, but in a positive way. “It is said that never in one of these collections did [Warner] resort to force of any kind or display his gun. He did not have to. All that was necessary were a few mild hints or wisecracks from Matt Warner” (Warner 6).

Most outlaws went to their graves in the midst of carrying out dastardly deeds, but Matt Warner recognized his folly and repented. He was a model outlaw who only turned to a life of crime because of an unfortunate turn of events when he was a teenager. No other outlaw, save Butch Cassidy and Elza Lay, came close to being the man of character that Warner was. The James Gang and Billy the Kid, two of the more famous outlaw names, thrived on violence, but not Warner. He did not want anything to do with it if he did not have to. Unlike Cassidy and most other members of the Wild Bunch, Warner had a family that he loved dearly. Warner’s narrative will live on as a tangible, unadulterated story of an outlaw gone good.

“Butch Cassidy was a good-natured outlaw. Like me, he turned to the wrong side of the law because of an event that happened when he was a child. At 18, he thought the deputies in his hometown of Circleville was out to get him for thieving a horse, so he skipped town and fell with the likes of cattle rustlers. Though he was a dead-shot, Butch didn’t like pulling the trigger. Any accounts saying he was a madman are bull honky. He was revered even among lawmen. He was a smart cuss. If he would have put his mind to it, he could have been and done anything.”

From research and the testimony of his sister, Lula Betenson, historians have been able to surmise that Butch Cassidy was indeed a gentlemanly outlaw. He never killed a man during his career in the United States. The only time he ever killed any one was during his supposed last stand in Bolivia. Betenson said Cassidy was kind-hearted and intelligent, but it would have been extremely valuable to hear it not from one who was related to Cassidy, but from one of his partners in crime.

Works Cited

Milner, Clyde, et al. Major Problems in the History of the American West. Boston, Massachussetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Pointer, Larry. In Search of Butch Cassidy. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977.

Warner, Matt, et al. The Last of the Bandit Riders . . . Revisited. Salt Lake City: Big Moon Traders, 2000.

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With no real direction and already in her fifth year at the school, she decided to drop out and took a working-class job as a clerk at a corporate-owned grocery store in the area. While Judi had been somewhat of a peace activist in college, her leadership qualities as an activist began to shape up in the early 1970s at the grocery store, as she worked to organize the workers’ union.

During this time, Judi studied karate for self-defense purposes and achieved a black belt, the highest level of mastery in the martial art.

A few years later, she broke gender barriers by passing a civil service test requiring her to lift and shoulder a 70 pound mail bag for carrying. She then got a job as a bulk-mail handler at a mail center near Washington, D.C. and continued her organizing and activism in labor unions. She published the employee newsletter and put to use some of what she had learned in her five aimless years in college, namely graphic design principles. At this job, she also led a successful union strike to demand better working conditions.

After meeting her husband, Mike Sweeney, she left the East coast and moved to Sonoma County, California where she and Mike were married and had two children, Lisa and Jessica. Around the time of the move, since Judi was no longer working, the focus of her activism shifted from labor unions to a political group called Pledge of Resistance, which stood in opposition of the United States governmental support of repressive regimes throughout Central America. She and Mike divorced several years later and shared custody of the two children.

Judi’s most important and most noted work began in 1988, when she became the contact person for an organization called Earth First! in Mendocino County, California. The group aimed to tackle environmental issues and work for the protection of the environment through direct, nonviolent action and protest. Judi says she was inspired to pay more attention to environmental issues while working as a carpenter, building a home for a wealthy business executive. She noticed the beauty and quality of the boards she was working with and began to ask questions, only to find out that the wood had come from ancient Redwood trees. Judi was enraged to find out that such a part of our natural heritage was being exploited this way. She was first attracted to Earth First!, she said, because they were the only ones willing to sacrifice themselves, and put themselves in front of chainsaws and bulldozers in order to save the giant trees. She was also greatly drawn to the organizations philosophy of biocentrism, the idea that Earth is not here purely for human consumption, and that as a part of the whole, human beings need to learn to live in balance with nature rather than attempting to mold nature to suit their lifestyles.

Most of her work aimed at organizing demonstrations and protests to stop timber companies from logging and exploiting the forests, and to speak out against the way the companies were operating.

Her first campaign was a blockade of logging on public land near Cahto Park in California. She and the other protesters helped to save several thousand acres of forest, which in turn was added by the state to the protected Cahto Wilderness Area. She was also a prime organizer of efforts to save the famous Headwaters Forest in Humbolt County, California, which I’ll talk more about later.

Also in 1988, Judi was introduced to Darryl Cherney after a mutual friend suggested that she help him with the graphic design of the brochure he was making to support his run for Congress. The two quickly became a couple, and a team, and worked together on everything.

Judi was also a feminist, and is credited with feminizing the Earth First! organization. According to Mendocino Environmental Center Coordinator Betty Ball, Judi’s influence allowed many more women to become involved in ways that they could have more of an influence on the organization than ever before. She also said that Judi understood the importance of activism being a community activity, and understood the level of organizing required to make this happen. Judi is credited, in turn, with helping to make Earth First! a community campaign, moving it away from the nomadic way it used to be, as a few people bouncing from place to place and demonstrating. “When Greg King and I were organizing demonstrations, dozens and maybe hundreds of people came, but when Judi got involved, thousands of people came,” said Cherney, in regards to her prowess as an organizer.

Judi continued other types of activism throughout her environmentalist action. In 1988, she defended an abortion clinic from an anti-abortion demonstration. In 1989, she returned to her work as a labor union activist and fought for the workers of the timber industries that she so opposed. She saw the corporations as an enemy to humanity, the environment, and their own workers, and worked to convince the workers of this. In 1990, she and many timber industry workers organized and convinced the county to take back 300,000 acres of forest from the Louisiana-Pacific timber company and operate them according to public interests, so that they would not be destroyed.

In all of her activism, two things that Judi regarded as powerful were nonviolence and music. She wrote music and was almost never at a demonstration without her violin, which she had learned to play in high school and used as a unifying tool at demonstrations, and as a weapon against what was being demonstrated against by singing her the charged songs that she wrote. Likewise, she taught and practiced nonviolent direct action, leading demonstrations that aimed to show the timber workers through peaceful action that Earth First! was not a threat to their jobs, and that the corporations they worked for were the real enemy.

Her ability to organize workers against their own employers gave her the inside edge in the so-called Timber War. Her power to unite and build alliances between timber industry employees and the massive following of environmentalists she had as followers scared the corporations and made Judi a target. She was first targeted in 1989, when her car was rammed by a logging truck, hospitalizing her and six others, four of which were children. Although Judi was able to show through photographs that the truck that had hit her was the same truck which Earth First! activists had stopped in a blockade less than 24 hours prior, authorities refused to treat it as anything more than a traffic accident.

In 1990, California state senate had proposed that Preposition 130, the Forests Forever Initiative would appear on their fall ballot. The Initiative, if passed would create preventative measures against the over-cutting of Redwood forests, and would slow logging by the giant timber corporations. Of course, the companies opposed the Initiative greatly. Judi and Darryl stepped into action once again and began to organize one of their largest projects yet, the Redwood Summer project. They drew inspiration from the Mississippi Summer Civil Rights Campaign, in which students were recruited by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to demonstrate and fight for civil rights. The project’s plan was to protect the forests with manpower to ensure that they weren’t all chopped down before the initiative could actually be passed. So, Judi and Darryl set off, touring colleges to recruit fighters for their cause. Timber companies began to launch campaigns against Earth First!, trying to discredit their name by labeling them eco-terrorists, despite the fact that the group practiced only nonviolent action. The company tried to label the initiative as the eco-terrorists’ work, to sway public opinion in their favor. Judi and other activists also began receiving death threats by mail, telephone, and even left hanging on the door of the Earth First! offices at the Mendocino Environmental Center. Attached to the last threat was a picture of Judi’s face with a target drawn on it, as well as a yellow ribbon—the symbol of the corporate-sponsored support groups of the timber companies. Judi reported the threat to the county sheriff, only to be told, “When you turn up dead, then we’ll investigate.”

On May 24, 1990, while Judi and Darryl were driving through Oakland, a car bomb exploded underneath her driver’s seat. The explosion shattered Judi’s pelvis and tailbone, and caused extensive tissue and nerve damage. Judi was left paralyzed and in pain for the rest of her life.

The Oakland Police Department and FBI terrorist squad came to the scene and began investigating. Within hours, while Judi and Darryl were both hospitalized, they were arrested for knowingly transporting the bomb, and bail was set at $100,000. The authorities said that the pair had intended to use the bomb in their fight with the timber companies, and it had accidentally exploded.  Though the pair maintained that they had nothing to do with the bomb, the FBI and police kept giving interviews to the media claiming that they did, and that there was evidence to show that Judi had built the bomb. As attention to the story built to a national scale, the public was hearing all over that Judi and Darryl were to blame. However, after two months, no evidence had turned up. The District Attorney refused to press charges due to the lack of evidence, and substantial evidence that showed the FBI had fabricated the whole investigation in the first place. No other suspects have ever been identified or even looked for, and the two were still considered to be suspects by the FBI, even though agents would later testify in court that no evidence had ever existed to incriminate Judi or Darryl in the first place.

Many saw the bombing as a final attempt to take Judi out and discredit Earth First!, trying to further label them as violent extremists and stop the Redwood Summer project from proceeding, as well as Preposition 130 from passing. Ironically, the FBI Special Agent in charge of the area at the time was Richard Held, who had headed COINTELPRO in the 1960s and ‘70s. COINTELPRO’s objectives were to disrupt the Black Panther and American Indian Movements. Held’s work led to the arrests of Geronimo Pratt and Leonard Peltier, both widely considered political prisoners, held for crimes that they did not commit. Consequently, Held resigned once Judi filed suit and presented evidence that the FBI’s investigation was a fraud.

Judi and Darryl brought suit against the Oakland Police and FBI for falsely arresting them on the grounds of an illegal, politically-charged and falsified investigation by the FBI.

Though paralyzed, Judi continued her activism, fighting for many different causes. She also remained an organizer for Earth First! “They blew up the wrong end of me,” Bari said, referring to the fact that the blast caught her legs but not her head. On September 15, 1995, Judi was the first of hundreds to be peacefully arrested at Headwaters Forest, bringing the situation to national attention. One year later, Bari was the keynote speaker at a similar demonstration at a similar spot, where over 1000 nonviolent activists were arrested for peacefully crossing onto timber company land.

Judi died on March 2, 1997 of sudden, severe breast cancer.

In 2002, the suit that she and Darryl had brought on the FBI and Oakland police department finally ended. A jury awarded Judi and Darryl $4.4 million for the violation of their first amendment right to free speech, by way of arguing that the attempt to frame them and discredit their voice limited their free speech.

Even though she’s passed, the same thing is still happening. Judi’s friend Kelpie Wilson says that Kate Coleman’s so-called biography The Secret Wars of Judi Bari is a blatant attempt at character assassination, disguised as a biography. She says that Coleman never met Judi, and didn’t bother interviewing any of her close friends or associates. Instead, her major sources are four of Judi’s opponents from the Timber War.

It is indeed a strong voice that attempts at character and actual assassination can’t kill. Judi’s legacy lives on in her 1994 book, Timber Wars, as well as through the many articles and songs she wrote during her time as an activist, and the many fighters out there who were inspired by her and still fight the struggles that she created.

“She was a wonderful inspiration to all of us and a steadfast champion of our natural heritage,” said California Senator Tom Hayden. “She was instrumental in bringing the plight of the ancient redwood forests to national attention. We will sorely miss the energy she provided, particularly in the negotiating fog that envelopes the Headwaters forest today, but she has left a legacy of dedicated activists who will carry her banner flying high.”

Wilson, Nicholas. Judi Bari Dies But Her Spirit Lives On. Judi Bari Website of the Redwood Summer Justice Project. Dec. 3, 2002.

Wilson, Nicholas. Jury Awards $4.4 Million Damages to Bari and Cherney. Monitor Publishing. June 11, 2002.

Wilson, Kelpie. Judi Bari Survives Character Assassination. t r u t h o u t. Jan. 19, 2005.

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With Berlin still smouldering and the War in the Pacific raging, Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April of 1945 signified an end to four decades of American ‘isolationism’ in world affairs. There would be no return to the period of ‘normalcy’ which Warren Harding pledged after the First World War, nor would America be able to ignore the economic responsibilities to her allies across the Atlantic: desperate for money which would help rebuild five years of death and destruction. The technologies which had been produced at an astounding rate during the war, and the advancement of these in almost every scientific field, culminated in America’s development of the atomic bomb. One man now possessed the power to kill not thousands but hundreds of thousands in a single military order: the President of the United States. In 1945, this man was Harry S. Truman.

A former haberdasher from Missouri, Truman felt very much out of depth in his role as President and Commander-in-Chief. His first priority was to end the war in the Pacific, where American troops were fighting a brutal campaign against the Japanese. Two weeks after assuming office, Truman was informed by Secretary of War Stimson that the atom bomb was in its final stages of completion and would be ready for deployment within four months: information even in his capacity as Vice President he had not possessed. With pressure from the military to test their new toy and the American public to see victory in the Pacific, Truman ordered the release of the first and only nuclear devices in history. Hiroshima was flattened on August 6, 1945; Nagasaki followed suit three days later. The dropping of the atomic bombs precipitated three crucial factors which irrevocably shaped the Twentieth Century: a Cold War with the Soviet Union; the creation of a vast military-industrial complex conjoined by a national security state; and, most directly, the power of the Presidency.

As the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a forty year Cold War, the office of the Presidency became the first and last line of defence for the Western hemisphere. A direct consequence of the burgeoning power of the executive branch is subsumed below:

“The emerging rules of the Cold War, in part conditioned by the developing technology and speed of military action in the jet age, meant that the president had to take a lead in responding to any emerging crisis. Congress and the Constitution would have to follow in his wake” (Bennett; 2000; p. 46).

The relationship between the Executive Branch and Congress formed one of the principal duels of the century as an increasing number of presidents saw foreign affairs as their private domain. Domestic policy was of little interest to the new Presidency, international affairs were where an incumbent could make his historical mark. As Robert Harrison notes, a curious phenomenon was taking place in American politics:

“Each president is expected to define a project for his Administration, if he is to be remembered by posterity, and is judged in accordance with his success in achieving it” (Harrison; 1997; p. 320).

The electorate now placed their faith in an individual to change not only their own quality of life, but that of those who looked to America for guidance, financial support and ‘salvation.’ In short, citizens no longer remained faithful to any one party but elected their Congressmen, Senators and Presidents based on personality rather than substance. In a large part, television and the media influenced American choices, habits and popular thought which changed their perception of a powerful leader. FDR would likely not have been voted into office, nor enjoyed the luxury of a four-term office, had Americans been relentlessly subjected to the image of a President confined to a wheelchair. The personal became political within the sphere of the Oval Office during the Twentieth Century: visual images; television debates; individual excesses and scandals could make or break a President. Indeed, the last President of the Twentieth Century, William Clinton, will ‘be remembered by posterity’ more for his sexual dalliances than any professional merits of his Presidency. One President would endure a half-century battle with the media-both in being elected to office and being wrenched from it. Among the troops steaming home from the Pacific in 1945 was a thirty-two year old Lieutenant Commander who in the following year would begin his dubious rise to political fame, ending three decades later in disaster both for himself-the first President to avoid impeachment by resigning, and the country: this was none other than Richard Milhous Nixon.

One of the most complex, brilliant and flawed men ever to become President of the United States, Richard Nixon was a fascinating character of Shakespearian proportions. Achieving notoriety extremely early in his career, he was the principal protagonist behind the Alger Hiss case during the early fifties and became Vice-President to Dwight Eisenhower at the age of thirty-nine. In 1960, he narrowly lost the Presidential election to John F. Kennedy, a moment which scarred Nixon for the rest of his life and indirectly led to his infamous downfall. Two years later, after having lost the California Governorship, he announced his retirement from politics, declaring: “…this will be my last press conference.” Six years later, Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey and made an unbelievable comeback in becoming the thirty-seventh President of the Unites States. His presidency was shaped by an America divided by the Vietnam War on the one hand, and a president who revolutionised East-West relations on the other. For most, however, Nixon brings to mind only one word: Watergate.

The Watergate scandal which engulfed the Nixon Presidency and brought that Administration to its knees has had a lasting impact on American politics. Mistrust of government and holders of high office resulted most recently in less than half of registered voters turning up to the polls in the last Presidential election. The acts of illegality and subterfuge which Nixon engaged in throughout his career are still being assessed as new evidence constantly comes to light. One principal reason for this is the fact that only a third of the Nixon White House tapes have been documented. In addition, a horde of classified documents have yet to be studied. However, Anthony Summers’ monumental work on Nixon, The Arrogance of Power, has unearthed many damning pieces of previously restricted files which incriminate Nixon far further than the Watergate burglary. Indeed, every point of Nixon’s personal and political career has come under scrutiny in this study, and his case is well documented. Though the book suffers in part by what Christopher Hitchens identifies as “…the weasel word ‘reportedly’” (Hitchens; 2001; p. 136), Summers main attacks on Nixon are substantiated with strong evidence. Among the notable indictments of Nixon’s legacy are questions about the legitimacy of every office Nixon held in public service; a scathing attack on his mental health; involvement with the mafia and extremely dubious business enterprises; abuse and incompetence in his Presidential administration; and unequivocal proof that Nixon ‘stole’ the 1968 Presidential election.

This dissertation will examine these new findings in depth and place them within a pattern of systematic contempt for the basic principles of decency and law which Nixon consistently flaunted. Focusing on the 1968 election, I will propose that the heaviest indictment of Nixon comes not from the Watergate controversy but with his machinations during the 1968 campaign in which he meddled with what a number of historical commentators have labelled the ‘most important diplomatic negotiations in American History.’ By doing so, not only did Nixon secure office by the most illegal and un-Constitutional methods, but needlessly sacrificed a further 20,000 American lives while heightening the domestic turmoil America experienced in this era. This paper is divided into three parts: the first will concentrate on Nixon’s background and electoral practices prior to 1968. In this way I will establish a pattern of illegality and paranoia which was evident in Nixon’s career as early as his University days. This part will include a section on the 1960 election and the dramatic effect this had on Nixon’s psyche. The second part of this paper will focus on the 1968 election and will include a speculative consideration of what America could have expected from a Humphrey administration. The third section will examine the Administrative mood of the Nixon White House and the planned break-in of the Brookings institution to secure incriminating documents relating to the 1968 election. I will conclude by examining the lasting impact of Nixon’s Presidency on American politics and electoral habits.

Chapter 1: ‘Kicking Nixon Around’

“The old adage, ‘character is destiny’, decidedly applies to Richard Nixon. He created a presidency, staffed his White House, and conducted his relations with Congress all in such a way that made Watergate inevitable. Nixon got into the Watergate mess because he was Nixon” (Kurz; 1998; p. 273).

Yorba Linda, California is a desolate and lonely rural pocket governed predominately by old the fashioned values of the Quaker tradition. Born into a strict and, according to Nixon, poor family ^[1], Richard grew up with the stern authority of both his father’s belt and his mother’s doctrinaire lectures. By the age of eighteen, Nixon had begun a lifelong passion for eavesdropping when: “In Arizona, (his brother) Harold figured out a method of intercepting a girlfriend’s phone conversations with a rival suitor, which was probably Richard’s first experience of wiretapping” (Summers; 2000; p. 11). By the age of eighteen, Nixon endured the setback which would begin a life-long resentment. Having won a scholarship to Harvard, he was informed by his parents that they had neither the money to fund his expenses nor the ability to lose his labour. He would not go east to college, what he describes as a ‘dream’ in his memoirs:

“Once that dream ended, and for the rest of his life, he indulged an obsession about entitlement and social class” (Summers; 2000; p. 15).

Nixon went to Whittier College, where two factors would foreshadow events to come in his political career. Angered by the ostentatious presence of the social elite, named the Franklins, who wore expensive clothes and hosted exclusive dinners, Nixon formed a rival club named the Orthogonians. Representing the ‘everyman’, Nixon was elected president of the student body, having campaigned on an issue which he had no interest in whatsoever: being allowed to dance on campus. This was a pattern repeated in virtually every political position Nixon attempted. From the ‘little man’ rallying for the common good against the evil of internal Communism to calling on the ‘silent majority’ in 1968, Nixon presented himself to the electorate in strictly Manichean terms. In addition, Nixon displayed little or no concern for the issues at hand, as in 1968 when he took the most important political factor of that decade- ending the war in Vietnam, and proceeded to use it to gain the Presidency.

While attending Whittier an incident occurred which displayed another emerging pattern in the Nixon psyche. At the end of his second year, Nixon and two contemporaries broke into the Dean’s office in an apparent bid to get an advance look at their grades. The penalty for such an offence would obviously have been expulsion, if not criminal charges. Yet, the grades were to be released imminently; they had merely been delayed in being sent. Nixon and his accomplices had thus taken a massive risk in attaining results which could not have been altered: this was to be a mistake repeated by Nixon so callously that the Watergate scandal seemed almost inevitable. Decades before, however, Nixon was engaging in a series of ‘dirty tricks’ which would set the tone of his 1968 Presidential campaign.

Electoral Practices Prior to 1960

“During the early years, Nixon was the man to beat. He was the best politician of his time, articulating more ably than anyone the nervous mood of post-World War II America” (Matthews; 1996; p. 15).

Nixon began his political career in 1946 when he ran for Congress against Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis. A dedicated New Dealer, Voorhis had faced no serious challenge to his position since 1937. With the war over, however, the GOP began a counter-attack on the Democratic hegemony it had enjoyed since the Great Depression. Though the fear of subversion by Socialist and Communist forces had been a prevalent force in the American psyche since the revolution of 1917, it was not until the United States began an all-out Cold War with the Soviet Union that anti-Communism reached epidemic proportions. Nixon tapped into this hysteria, along with a great number of GOP hopefuls, during the 1946 Congressional campaign. Influenced heavily by Churchill’s speech in March of that year in Fulton, Missouri where the latter announced that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent” (quoted in Ambrose; 1971; p. 70), Nixon took up the anti-Communist call with ferocity. Every victim in his political legacy has been plagued primarily through the only common theme in Nixon’s campaigns, red-baiting: from the claim that Voorhis was funded by the Communist Political Action Committee; to the assertion that Helen Douglas was ‘pink down to her underwear’; and finally in his 1968 campaign that Humphrey was a ‘sincere, dedicated radical.’

The 1946 campaign against Voorhis was, by all accounts, “brutal and vicious” (Kurz; 1998; p. 46). It was at this time that Nixon met the man who would coordinate the ‘dirty tricks’ of his career: Murray Chotiner. Nixon would later claim as a defence that he engaged in illegal methods of obtaining office only in response to those rallied against him. This line of argument forms the central tenet of Nixon loyalists, who argue that any criticism of Nixon’s actions come under the ‘politics-as-usual’ heading. Yet, as Kenneth Kurz makes clear: “‘Politics as usual’ is not a license for abetting criminals and committing crimes” (Kurz; 1998; p. 274). Nixon saw politics as a game, one where the there were no rules save that of ‘survival of the fittest.’ Nixon apologists state that Nixon’s only crime was getting caught, yet the standard he set in the initial Congressional campaign against Voorhis and his subsequent Senatorial campaign against Helen Douglas suggest otherwise. A number of the common tactics applied by politicians today: massive financial contributions, media ‘spin’ and the infiltration of an opposition camp, were used heavily in Nixon’s early years. In 1946, Chotiner planted Nixon supporters at Voorhis’ rallies, courted big business and arranged for the Los Angeles Times to run favourable headline coverage of the campaign sympathetic to Nixon. In addition, voters were beleaguered by calls which informed the recipient: “I think you should know Jerry Voorhis is a Communist.” Recent evidence cited by Summers indicates that it was Chotiner who arranged those calls. Nixon’s camp spent an estimated $30,000^[2]; Voorhis a paltry $2,000. In the 2000 gubernatorial campaign, all but one of the contenders who spent the more money ‘won’ their elective office.

The 1950 Senatorial campaign against Helen Douglas was a near re-rerun of the Voorhis episode. This time, however, Nixon became nastier. Again using the red-baiting tactic as the main prong of his attack, Chotiner assembled a massive one to two million dollar fund ^[3]. So much money, in fact, that Nixon was able to donate a portion to other GOP candidates. Hecklers were positioned, as before, at Douglas’ speaking engagements and this time callers were subjected to racial slurs which asked “Did you know?” followed by an allusion to Douglas’ Jewish husband. On more than one occasion Nixon referred to Douglas as Hesselberg ^[4], a clearly anti-Semitic attack. The press, too, were employed by Chotiner to project pro-Nixon sentiment: “Of twelve papers in the state, nine backed Nixon” (Summers; 2000; p. 83). Nixon labelled Douglas ‘pink down to her underwear’, a remark which resonated all the more now that China had entered the Korean War. With anti-Communist sentiment at its peak, and with a little help from Chotiner, Nixon won with a resounding majority: 2,183, 454 votes to Douglas’s 1, 502, 507 ^[5].

Nixon’s early political bids showed that he was not immune to using coercive methods in order to obtain votes. Many of the themes evident in his 1968 Presidential candidacy were apparent by 1952: the distortion of a central issue to further his advancement; massive campaign contributions; and the abuse of the media in changing voter perception. Public opinion of the Senator from California soon began to sway:

“To many, Nixon seemed to be a man on the make, a hustler peddling falsehoods, an obvious dealer in illusions” (Bennett; 2000; p. 127).

The term first coined by Helen Douglas, ‘Tricky Dick’, was beginning to stick. This was no more heightened by what Nixon describes in Six Crises as: “…the most scarring personal crisis of my life” (Nixon; 1962; p. 74). Allegations that the Vice-Presidential hopeful had solicited money from California’s big business for personal use were beginning to cast doubts on the integrity of the Republican Party’s brightest hope for victory in 1960. In what was to be the first in a series of public evaluations, Nixon went on camera to defend the charges levelled against him. In what can only be described as pathetic, Nixon used the now familiar rhetoric of the ‘common man’ to appeal to the sentiment of the American public. Ending this diatribe with the assertion that no matter what would transpire when all was said and done, the family dog Checkers ^[6] would remain. A potential disaster was averted, the general public admired what they perceived as Nixon’s candour and he was once again welcomed back into the bosom of the Republican Party.

The fund scandal, although a public relations success, had two long-lasting effects on Nixon. It began his passionate hatred for the media and provided the first conclusive evidence that Nixon was liable to emotional outbursts under pressure. As Nixon saw it, the press had jumped on him for an act of which many other politicians, including Adlai Stevenson, could easily have been indicted. In addition, Nixon’s emotional fragility meant that he took what the press said and their actions personally: “I had not reckoned with the determination and skilful planning of our opponents” (Nixon; 1962; p. 83). As it became clear that Nixon had dodged the fund crisis, serious cracks were beginning to show in his ability to stand up to the pressures of high office:

“From then on Nixon surrendered to tears: tears after making his Checkers speech, tears on board his plane in front of embarrassed reporters when Eisenhower came on board to say ‘you’re my boy,’ and the famous tears on Senator William Knowland’s shoulder ^[7]…” (Summers; 2000; p. 138).

In 1968, however, there were to be no tears: only victory. Nixon’s commitment to winning the Presidency, and the methods employed to gain it, were hardened by the most defining moment of his political career: 1960.

Kennedy and the 1960 Presidential Election

In 1960, two conjoined resentments Nixon had developed-against both the ‘liberal eastern establishment’ and the media-came to fruition. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for President, encapsulated everything Nixon wasn’t: privileged, wealthy and exceedingly handsome. Kennedy launched his platform on a campaign to ‘get this country moving again’ while Nixon resorted to the tried and tested anti-Communist line which had to date served him in good stead. Interestingly, Nixon and Kennedy had known each other well in the post-war period as both their political careers appeared to mirror each other: in the Senate they had even kept offices opposite one another. In 1960, however, any effort to rekindle the once friendly rivalry had abated: for Nixon this was all out war.

Nixon was far more experienced than Kennedy in political campaigning and world affairs. Yet, the Kennedy clan were able to use Nixon’s tricks against him. JFK argued that Eisenhower had been soft on Communism: he cited a purported ‘missile gap’ and, more importantly, the loss of ‘Cuba’ to the enemy. The most defining moment of the election came in a revolutionary medium which marked the fundamental sway of American politics from those of party loyalty or concrete issues to personality: television debates. The first ever such debate, on September 26, has gone down as somewhat of a political legend. Kennedy looked like ‘a young Adonis’ while his counterpart looked exactly as he was: a man straight out of hospital. Having bumped his knee weeks earlier, Nixon had to be hospitalised as the wound became infected. While in hospital, Nixon recalls a moment which tells much about his obsession with politics:

“The physical pain I suffered those next few weeks was bad enough…But the mental suffering was infinitely worse” (Nixon; 1962; p. 336).

Presumably, his mental anguish emanated from his failure to be out on the campaign trail. By stating that his emotional faculties were more inhibited than those of a potentially life-altering injury ^[8], Nixon implicates by default the inner workings of an incredibly flawed psyche. Before the first television debate, Nixon bumped the injured knee before arriving at the studio. Watching footage of the debate, it is clear that he is in a considerable amount of discomfort as his knee shakes sporadically. In addition, he refused make-up. Emaciated, pale and visibly ‘shaken’, Nixon looked positively haggard in comparison to the tanned and lean figure of JFK. Nixon had underestimated the power of the media and was duly punished. A series of miscalculations had led to a public relations disaster: Nixon’s refusal to prepare for the event; the decision not to wear make-up; and his underestimation of Kennedy’s debating skills. Though Nixon sounded the better politician-he won far more acclaim via radio than television- Kennedy looked ‘presidential.’ This was a defining moment in American political history: JFK gave the image of a president. From that point on, politicians became fully aware of the power of the media over the electorate. Nixon never grasped this idea, and as such maintained until Watergate that the media, in collusion with the Liberal establishment, were out to get him: “I was prepared to do combat with the media…I did not believe this combat would be between equals” (Nixon; 1978; p. 355). It was not that they were necessarily out to get ‘him’, but that he refused to accept the importance of sustaining a symbiotic relationship with the media. In addition, Nixon displayed a contempt for the very people who put him in office: in Six Crises he refers to “unsophisticated voters” and unsophisticated televiewers” (Nixon; 1962; pp. 38-39) in almost the same breath. The defining blow, however, came on Election Day: Nixon lost out to Kennedy by a little over 100,000 votes. Once more, Nixon’s emotional fragility presented itself:

“I had seen many people in tears the night before as they heard the returns, but for the first time I was confronted with the same problem” (Nixon; 1962; p. 393).

Tears quickly turned to suspicion, as the reports from Chicago and Texas indicated voting fraud. In later years, Nixon developed a wild and paranoiac interpretation of the election:

“Nixon clung to the absurd conspiracy theory that the agency (CIA) had conspired to make him lose the 1960 presidential election to Kennedy” (Andrew; 1995; p. 350).

No evidence has yet come to light that the CIA prevented Nixon’s victory, yet there is substantial proof that the Democratic campaign management had bought or forced voters into casting a Kennedy ballot. Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot contains the most recent analysis of an election which to his mind was decidedly Nixon’s. Depressed at his loss, angry at the electorate and fermenting vast conspiracy theories which centred around the media, Nixon was forced to endure the ultimate humiliation. Asked to come by Kennedy for what he thought was a genuine effort at reconciliation, Nixon met the president elect in Florida. There, under the auspices of having a meaningful and productive conversation on how to conduct Presidential policy ^[9], Kennedy delivered the fatal blow:

“…Kennedy was now having his way with his rival, listening obligingly to Nixon’s advice for the sole purpose of getting Nixon’s television picture paying court to him as the president-elect” (Matthews; 1996; p.186).

The election of 1960 proved to be cataclysmic for Nixon’s psyche. He returned to politics in 1962, losing the California governorship by another slim majority. Afterwards, Nixon informed reporters: “…you won’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” Physically and emotionally shattered, Nixon poured the last three years of scorn onto the public eye. In private, there are unsubstantiated claims that he physically beat up his wife Pat. Whatever the truth of those allegations, one thing is certain: Nixon would not lose again. The governor-hopeful transformed his experiences of sixteen years in public service into a ruthless comeback for the 1968 election. In it, Nixon would deploy a combination of dirty tricks he had learned in previous campaigns with a new self-determined confidence -born of two emotionally crushing losses- to devastating effect in his bid for President of the United States.

“Politics was not merely another occupation; it was his whole life, and he could not sit out the presidential race” (Unger and Unger; 1988; p. 451).

Chapter 2: 1968

“Because so little light showed between Nixon and Humphrey on Viet Nam (sic), it is unlikely that the war played a large part in the presidential vote…The bombing suspension and the prospect of more significant negotiations may well have helped Humphrey’s momentum in the campaign’s last days.”

- Time; November 15th, 1968 (Vol. 92, No. 20); p. 19

The 1968 Presidential election was one of the most significant in American History. In four years, Johnson’s dream of a Great Society had been displaced by the Vietnam War: “Instead of friend of the poor and the oppressed, he was now presented as an evil, tyrannical monster, an ogre, a bringer of death and destruction” (Harrison; 1997; p. 303). LBJ was by no accounts the most articulate or humble of men: he demanded a ‘kiss my ass at high noon and tell me it smells like roses’ type of loyalty and was frequently given to vulgar outbursts. In a notable tirade, Johnson moaned about a future president and then Congressman: “Ford’s economics is the worst thing that’s happened to this country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking” (quoted in Doyle; 1999; p. 144). Johnson was the President directly responsible for escalating the conflict in Vietnam, yet it is impossible to argue that Kennedy-had he enjoyed a probable second term of office- would have been better equipped to defuse the situation. In 1968, both the Vietnam War and the turmoil in America had reached epidemic proportions: between 1964-8 there were over 400 racial disturbances alone in major urban centres. In South-East Asia, the Vietcong’s Tet offensive at the end of January 1968 destroyed the Johnson Administration’s claims that an end to the quagmire was in sight. Faced with no solutions to either the war abroad or at home, Johnson announced his decision not to seek re-election in 1968. For Doris Kearns, a Johnson aide who would later help write his memoirs, the decision was made because: “Johnson’s candidacy would have caused an explosion, fragmenting, perhaps irrevocably, the Democratic Party” (Kearns; 1976; p. 351).

The election was dominated by two inter-related issues: Vietnam and civil unrest. In addition, a third party candidate-George Wallace- campaigned for racial segregation, thus enlarging and clouding the answer to civil unrest. Wallace, like all third party candidates in American History, had no chance of winning: his platform, however, drew dismayed Republican voters in from the cold that deemed Nixon too moderate. The lessons of 1960 had been learnt: Nixon transformed his image to secure victory in ’68. Frank Meyer had noted by August in the National Review that:

“This was a very different Nixon from the always cautious, often trimming, Nixon of 1960. If the rest of the campaign is conducted on this level, conservatives can support the Republican ticket with confidence” (National Review; August 27th 1968; Vol. 20, No. 34; p. 859).

Nixon believed the most effective strategy for success would be adopting a ‘centrist’ line: he promised ‘peace with honour’ and maintained that he had a ‘secret plan’ to end the war. In one example of Nixon’s pathological lying, he alleges: “I never said I had a ‘plan’, much less a ‘secret plan’, to end the war; I was deliberately straightforward about the difficulty of finding a solution” (Nixon; 1978; p. 298). Domestically, Nixon appealed to ‘the silent majority’-those who he named as the ‘true Americans’ not responsible for the endemic violence in the country- to place their trust in him. According to Bennett: “Rebuilding the trust between presidency and people was the key task for any incoming president in 1968″ (Bennett; 2000; p.128). Nixon tapped into the popular fears of the nation-as in previous campaigns- promising all things to all people. The Democrats, meanwhile, had been experiencing a severe power struggle. Johnson’s Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was first choice for nominee until Bobby Kennedy entered the arena. For a moment, Nixon was paralysed with déjà vu from 1960. These fears abated in early June when Kennedy was assassinated by a Jordanian nationalist seconds after accepting nomination. Nixon campaigned diligently on a ‘peace with honour’ line while Humphrey attempted to patch up the divisions in his party. As Nixon states: “I knew, of course, that the impact of Humphrey’s nomination would now be seriously undermined. He would have to spend his entire campaign trying to patch up the divisions in his party” (Nixon; 1978; p. 317). Humphrey’s acceptance speech for nomination reflects Nixon’s analysis:

“There are differences, of course, serious differences within our party on this vexing and painful issue of Vietnam…Put aside recrimination and dissension. Believe-believe in what America can do, and believe in what America can be…” (in Engelmayer and Wagman; 1978; p. 296).

In the run-up to the penultimate week of the election, Nixon was well clear of Humphrey in the polls. At this point, it seemed that Nixon would receive the landslide majority he had consistently yearned for. Orthodox interpretations of the 1968 election indicate that Nixon won because of a ‘conservative backlash’ which had begun in the New Deal era and had now reacted to eight years of liberalism. Among them, Michael Heale:

“Richard Nixon’s election was made possible by the crumbling of the New Deal Order, by disillusion with New Frontier and Great Society Liberalism, and by the sorry Johnson record in Vietnam. His re-election represented a repudiation of street politics” (Heale; 2001; p. 107).

This interpretation is justified in the sense that America had lost faith in the ‘politics of hope’ imbued in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Every segment of American society seemed to have validated criticisms of the preceding eight years: from blacks and whites who were still economically marginalised; middle-class America who wanted stability; and the young who yearned for peace. The electorate-it is argued- looked to the Republican Party to reverse the trend of liberalism which had so degraded American economic, social and military strength. Nixon was voted to bring an end to the domestic and international crises which-it was perceived- had their roots in the Democratic Party. For Doris Kearns “…what changed between 1964 and 1968 was not people’s attitudes towards the policies which Johnson espoused…but their level of trust in Johnson’s capacity to cope with domestic and international problems” (Kearns; 1976; p. 337). There are two problems with this interpretation: Nixon-however much he had changed his image- was still heavily mistrusted:

“Many Americans had voted for Richard Nixon for high office: senator, governor, vice-president, president, but few had loved him. He inspired little affection because he seemed so incapable of love. Pain, anger, resentment, self-pity, hatred- but not love” (Unger and Unger; 1988; p. 451).

Nixon’s past had not erased in the minds of many the red-baiting Congressman who had vilified Alger Hiss in a nation-wide HUAC case. Conversely, Nixon was visibly attempting to shed this image in an attempt to garner trust among the electorate. Theodore White even went as far as to comment “…I came to believe that one must respect this man: there was about all he said a conviction and sincerity” (White; 1969; p. 148).  James Jackson Kilpatrick, however, noted a somewhat different phenomenon:

“Nixon took a new tack at Cincinnati on October 21. ‘We’re gonna sock it to ‘em,’ he cried. Instantly, the shade of Mrs Douglas appeared upon the scene: the Ole Debbil Nixon had returned, blue beard and all” (National Review; December 3, 1968; Vol. 20, No. 34).

The ‘Ole Debbil Nixon’ certainly had returned. New evidence has now proven a long known ‘secret’ about the 1968 Presidential campaign: that Richard Nixon engaged in clandestine negotiations with the South Vietnamese promising them a ‘better deal’ if a Republican Administration were elected. In doing so, Nixon may well have prolonged the war for a further four years and enjoyed a two-term Presidency which was never his. The deception of all involved- Johnson, the troops, the American people and the South Vietnamese- sheds new light on the traditional ‘conservative backlash’ argument while suggesting that Nixon was capable of far more than the ordering of a break-in at the Watergate.

On October 1st- a week before the election- Johnson announced a full bombing halt of North Vietnam, to be followed by peace talks in Paris. He assured the public this was a non-partisan move designed solely in the interests of securing an end to the war. The move obviously came under criticism as a political ploy to aid the trailing Humphrey, yet as long as the peace talks began, Johnson could enjoy being heralded as the man who ended the war. Humphrey’s gap did indeed diminish – as the electorate saw an end to the Vietnam War- to give him a slight lead in the polls. On November 2nd, South Vietnam announced that they would not be attending the Peace Talks, and Johnson’s claim that the bombing halt was an apolitical move seemed unsubstantiated. As Ambrose succinctly puts it:

“After having gone seven months without comment on Vietnam, using the excuse that he did not want to undercut the President, Nixon decided to undercut the President” (Ambrose; 1989; p. 209).

As a result of Nixon’s ‘intervention’ in the peace talks, it is entirely likely that enough votes were swung to bring him victory. About a year before the 1968 elections, a meeting had been arranged between Nixon and Anna Chennault, an Asian affairs expert with long-standing ties to the Republican Party. ^[10] In it, she agreed to act as an adviser to Nixon on Vietnam. Within a year, her role had changed dramatically: by November of 1968 Nixon was using Chennault as a conduit- via Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem- to President Thieu. When Johnson received word that Thieu was backing out of the peace initiative, information gathered from wiretaps and phone intercepts of the South Vietnamese embassy became clear. Convinced that Nixon was involved, Johnson ordered a full physical and electronic surveillance of both the embassy and Chennault. From that surveillance came two previously classified FBI documents which incriminate Nixon. In the first, Chennault:

“…contacted Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem, and advised him that she had received a message from her boss, which her boss wanted her to give personally to the Ambassador. She said the message was ‘Hold on, we are gonna win…”

(Summers; 2000; p. 302).

The evidence here is circumspect. On its own the conclusion can be drawn that the message is from an unnamed ‘boss’ in the Republican Party urging Thieu to resist pressure from the Johnson Administration to attend the peace talks. The indication that ‘we’re gonna win’ is a reminder that the South Vietnamese would fair better with Nixon in the White House. Taken in conjunction with a second FBI phone intercept, however, the identity of the ‘boss’ becomes virtually undisputable:

“The person she had mentioned to Diem who might be thinking about ‘The Trip’ went on vacation this afternoon and will be returning Monday morning…”

(Summers; 2000; p. 305).

Nixon had left for Florida to relax after winning the election, and Chennault was recorded mentioning that she had been ‘talking to Florida’ (Summers; 2000; p. 304). Given this new evidence and the fact that Chennault has always maintained that Nixon was her ‘boss’ ^[11], it is now clear that the President-elect had won office using the most morally repugnant methods. In doing so, Nixon displays a truly evil characteristic which goes far beyond the ‘politics-as-usual’ defence. His machinations bring an entirely new interpretation to the 1968 election and the motives of a president who was voted into office on the understanding that he would end the war.

Johnson, crude as he was, took great pains in sacrificing American lives overseas. In the dying hours of his presidency, he had genuinely wanted to bring an end to the conflict which had so far claimed about 30,000 lives:

“The desire to leave something permanent behind as evidence of the work of a lifetime had been with him from the days of his youth, but never had it been so prevalent a force as it was in the Spring of 1968″ (Kearns; 1976; p. 344).

From March 31st- when he had called for a unilateral partial bombing halt of North Vietnam- until November, Johnson was desperately seeking resolve to the Vietnam crisis. His decision to bring a full halt in October cannot thus be seen as a last minute ditch attempt at peace. It was the culmination of months of intense work on the part of the Johnson Administration to ensure all parties concerned could begin negotiating. Dr. Kissinger, on the other hand, disagrees:

“It was one of the most fateful presidential decisions of the postwar (sic) period. Had Johnson not made this dramatic renunciation, he could have contested the election on the issue of Vietnam and secured a popular mandate one way or another” (Kissinger; 1994; p. 672).

Given the divisions in the Democratic Party, the domestic situation and the opposition to the Vietnam War from all sides, I find this analysis unlikely. More probable is the speculation that the peace talks of 1968- had the South Vietnamese attended- could well have ended the war significantly sooner than Nixon was able to. Nixon maintains that “Thieu’s reaction was totally predictable…” (Nixon; 1978; p. 328) yet Time magazine reported on November 8th that: “Thieu dispatched a three man advance party to Paris to arrange quarters and communications for an official South Vietnamese delegation to the peace talks” (Time; November 8th, 1968; Vol. 92, No. 19; p. 25). Stephen Ambrose places little importance to Nixon’s culpability:

“Nixon knew that Thieu would not go to Paris, with or without that rather silly woman whispering in his ear the promises John Mitchell was passing along from Richard Nixon. Being Nixon, he worried, and could not keep himself from trying to influence Thieu through Chennault, so he was guilty in his motives and his actions, but he was not decisive. It was not Nixon who prevented an outbreak of peace in November 1968. He merely exploited a situation he did not create”

(Ambrose; 1989; p. 217).

This argument rests heavily on the assumption that Thieu did not anticipate attending the Peace Talks. Yet, anyone who had received the ‘Johnson Treatment’ knew that ‘no’ was not a viable answer. It would be difficult to contend that Johnson would not have used all his powers to force the South Vietnamese to the negotiating table. In addition, Thieu had indicated he was seriously considering attending the talks when he sent a forward delegation to Paris. Humphrey, however, was not producing what Thieu wanted to hear:

“As President, I would stop the bombing of North Vietnam…I would move, in other words, toward de-Americanization of the war” (quoted in Engelmayer and Wagman; 1978; p. 297).

This was sure to have the South Vietnamese President more than a little concerned as to the fate of his country. Yet, the United States possessed far more bargaining power in 1968 against the North Vietnamese-before the incursions into Laos and Cambodia-than in January 1973. In addition, Johnson could easily have argued that the Democratic line would change as soon as Humphrey was elected. Given that Thieu believed Nixon’s claims to do the same, this rationale is not unsubstantiated. In retrospect, the settlements for the final Peace Treaty proved no different than those proposed in 1968: this suggests that Nixon is significantly responsible for prolonging the conflict to his own end. Summers concludes:

“The fact that Nixon covertly intervened…deliberately flouting the efforts of the American authorities, was indefensible. The way in which he involved himself remains to this day undefended” (Summers; 2000; p. 306).

Stephen Ambrose, on the other hand, suggests that the entire 1968 campaign was flawed, thus reverting to the defence Nixon would employ later in the Watergate proceedings that his actions were ‘politics-as-usual’:

“In 1968, American politics had sunk to depths not reached since the Civil War and Reconstruction. America’s political leaders, Johnson and Humphrey, Nixon and Agnew, and most of the others, were just playing with people…if it even ever occurred to the them to strive to provide the conditions that would allow the American people to pursue happiness, they managed to ignore it all in their single-minded pursuit of personal victory at any cost” (Ambrose; 1989; p. 217).

‘Dirty tricks’, however wrong, are part of the political landscape of America. Johnson had all the candidates bugged; Nixon did the same in regard to Humphrey. Republican hecklers were a prominent feature at Humphrey speeches, while in Miami- at the Republican Convention- a heavily pregnant black woman stood outside wearing a ‘Nixon’s the One’ badge. The 1968 election was the most heavily charged, passionate and tragic of the Twentieth Century. The cohesion of American society and the lives of a potential 500,000 troops hung in the balance of whose vote the election went for. In addition, Nixon used the collective aspirations of the electorate to secure votes: “We know, of course, that once begun, negotiations would drag on for almost five years. But no one could foresee such an outcome in late October 1968, and it was hopefully believed that peace talks meant peace, not just talks” (Unger and Unger; 1988; p. 528). The treachery, deceit and Machiavellian tactic employed by Nixon vis-à-vis his sabotaging of Johnson’s peace initiative went far beyond the rubric of ‘everybody does it.’ Everybody didn’t do it, and for this reason Nixon’s actions can be considered wholly treacherous to American citizens, troops and the sanctity of the Constitution: Nixon stole the election. Having assumed power under such scrupulous methods, however, Nixon now had to retain his tenuous rise to office: the stain of 1968 would weigh heavily on his actions as President.

Chapter 3: The Stain of 1968

“When Nixon opened the president’s private safe on his first morning in the White House, he found that Johnson had left only one document behind: the Vietnam intelligence summary for the previous day…Nixon put the intelligence report back in the safe. He did not remove it until the war was over”

(Andrew; 1995; p. 359).

Johnson harboured a strong suspicion that Nixon had jettisoned his peace initiative. Having relayed this suspicion to Humphrey, the Democrats were trapped with the information gathered from the FBI surveillance: to release it would have looked like a political move and would indirectly show that Johnson had been involved in domestic surveillance. Time magazine reported in January that “After the inaugural spectacle faded from the U.S. television screens last week, some of its images remained…Hubert Humphrey in the inaugural stand, jaw grimly set as he watched the man who defeated him so narrowly take the oath of office” (Time; January 31st, 1969; Vol. 93, No. 5; p. 13). Humphrey knew as well as Johnson that Nixon had betrayed the American people: they had much to fear as Nixon was sworn in as president. When Nixon opened the Presidential safe, he too was reminded by Johnson that his secret was not entirely safe. Added to his hatred of the press, the electorate and the ‘Liberal Establishment’, Nixon now had to contend with the possibility that Johnson would unravel the evidence of a ‘stolen’ presidency. For the time being, however, Nixon’s priorities were elsewhere:

“If Richard Nixon was in no undue haste to construct his Administration; he was clearly eager to make the most of his four-year lease on America’s most elegant and adaptable mansion” (Time; January 31st, 1969; Vol. 93, No.5; p. 13).

In the early days of his presidency, Nixon devoted his time to savouring in the grandeur he had for so long aspired to. Military planes were sent to Italy for expensive silk and to France for furniture: a complete re-decoration of the White House was put into operation. In addition, fully operative and secure residences were adapted for presidential use in California and Florida: “A former Budget Bureau official would calculate that, by four years into his presidency, Nixon’s household expenses had added up to a hundred million dollars” (Summers; 2000; p. 325). The ‘imperial presidency’ was beginning to take shape. Nixon’s perception of the excesses he truly believed were acceptable offer an intimate view into why his presidency crumbled. Nixon’s views on presidential power and the limits of that power are a defining factor in the acts of illegality he would pursue well in advance of Watergate. In delegating so much time, effort and expense to the pomp and show of being a president, Nixon was unable to act as a President.

A vast amount of White House memorandum attaches more importance to subservient concerns than those of national importance. One three page memo from Haldeman to Colonel Hughes discusses the choice and availability of films at Camp David. In another, the President requests of Haldeman:

“Would you please have the Bordeaux years checked? I know that ’59 is an excellent year…I would like to see, from a wine expert, what they consider to be the best years for French Bordeaux, starting with ’59, which most consider to be the best year in the last 25″ (Odes; 1989; p. 109).

Far more sinister than the quality of films or wine, however, was the level of medication now controlling the President. Exacerbated by his addition to the drug Dilantin ^[12] and his heavy drinking, Nixon’s resentment of the media and the liberal press had developed into full blown paranoia. On three documented cases, Nixon’s mental instability led to the president ordering the deployment of nuclear weapons for extremely small crises. The sacred chain-of-command which governs the use of nuclear weapons was broken when Kissinger decided that all such decisions must be approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is in clear violation of the power of the president: the fact that it was necessary to preserve international security is a further indictment of Nixon’s character and responsibility while in the White House. In an allusion to the ‘enemies list’ compiled by John Dean, Kenneth Kurz notes that:

“The White House engaged in dirty tricks throughout Nixon’s first term, not just at election time. His politics-as-usual argument could not vitiate the fact that Nixon and his men spent an inordinate amount of time thinking up and implementing plans to screw their opponents” (Kurz; 1998; p. 279).

One such plan provides further evidence of Nixon’s involvement in the 1968 peace talks and suggests that he was willing to sanction the murder of innocent people to protect his presidency. In 1968, the release of the Pentagon papers had incensed both Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. The author of the Pentagon Papers –Daniel Ellsberg- had already been subjected to a smear campaign by the Nixon Administration when the office of his psychiatrist had been broken into. Now there were strong reports that Ellsberg had added a section to the Pentagon Papers on the ‘bombing halt episode’ which directly incriminated Nixon. This additional file had been kept in the Brookings Institution, a liberal think-tank about five blocks from the White House. In 1971, Nixon ordered the break-in of Brookings to secure the files. Although the plan was never completely executed ^[13], the fact that Nixon had ordered and approved the break-in displayed his utter contempt for the law and his responsibilities as President. In a series of taped conversations released in 1996, the President is clearly ordering acts of illegality. On June 30th:

“‘The way I want it handled, Bob (Haldeman) is…I want Brookings…just break in, break in and take it out…’” (Summers; 2000; p. 386).

The next day, a more determined Nixon:

“‘We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy, they’re using any means…I want the Brookings safe cleaned out…’” (Summers; 2000; p. 386).

Nixon’s insistence that the files be stolen further compounds the argument that he feared a revelation from the contents of Ellsberg’s investigation which would reveal his secret dealings in the 1968 peace talks. Furthermore, one plan which was conceived to enter the Brookings Institution reveals the extent to which Nixon feared those revelations. The plan to break into Brookings involved fire-bombing the building, then sending in White House employees-disguised as firemen- to retrieve the files. By the time the genuine emergency services arrived, the culprits would have had time to escape in a specially camouflaged ‘fire truck.’ The plan and funding for the enterprise all originated in the White House. Both John Dean and John Ehrlichman corroborate this claim in their memoirs:

“Once before, when Nixon was in such a mood, Colson had planned to firebomb the Brookings Institution to get at its cache of secret documents” (Ehrlichman; 1982; p. 403).

“I stared out the window and wondered if the President’s mind was as cluttered as mine when he stared out his window. Garbage and tension, I thought. I knew I had to get out of this thing. It was out and out street crime. I saw fat burglars wearing stocking masks slipping behind firemen and felt a rush of revulsion” (Dean; 1976; p. 46).

The firebombing plan had originated with Nixon’s co-conspirator Chuck Colson. As of this moment, no evidence has proved that Nixon approved or ordered the fire, yet the ferocity with which he demands the break-in suggests that any means necessary were to be employed. Even Nixon concedes:

“In the aftershock of the Pentagon Papers leak…my interest in the bombing halt file was rekindled. When I was told that it was still at Brookings, I was furious and frustrated … I saw no reason for that file to be at Brookings, and I said I wanted it back right now, even if it meant having to get it back surreptitiously” (Nixon; 1978; p. 512).

Given the amount of evidence which continues to surface regarding the Nixon Presidency, it will probably only be a matter of time before the ex-President becomes directly linked to the planned firebombing of the Brookings Institution. The plan preceded and anticipated the Watergate affair, which was a comparatively innocent endeavour in light of both the 1968 election and the Brookings affair. In addition, the latter two events were intrinsically linked: Nixon needed the files in order to avoid detection of the tactics he employed to gain the Presidency. Even given the defence that the Brookings Institute was never infiltrated- by fire or any other method- the fact that Nixon even flirted with the idea is criminal in itself. The Watergate Special Prosecution Service had neither the time nor the resources to investigate his election campaign or the Brookings affair. Had they been able to, there is no doubt that such findings would have damaged American politics far more than Nixon’s legacy already has. In addition, the disgraced President would have been totally unable to procure the reconciliation with the American public undertaken in the last twenty years of his life.

Conclusion: The Impact of 1968

“Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself”

1. Richard Nixon, Remarks on the Departure from the White House (quoted in Bochin; 1990; p. 170)

At Richard Nixon’s funeral in April 1994, then President Clinton called on Americans to ‘judge Richard Nixon on no less than his entire life.’ Ironically, as this paper has attempted to argue, Clinton was indirectly incriminating the ex-president on far more than the legacy of Watergate. That scandal alone has left a lingering imprint on American politics as the electorate has attempted to renew its faith in its elected leaders: voter participation has consistently depreciated since 1972. This suggests that the Watergate fiasco has dramatically altered voting practices and, more importantly, the vital trust needed for a president to successfully initiate his intended programs. Further damage can be found in the fact that every single president post-Nixon (save Ford) has campaigned on a platform of being an ‘outsider’ to Washington politics. By maintaining immunity to the perceived corruption inherent in Washington, presidential-hopefuls have tapped into a damaging seam. The structural components of American federalism rely on an experienced and powerful President to initiate both domestic and foreign proposals. Ignorance of the Congressional and Senatorial system is in fact not a blessing but a burden: without an intimate knowledge of Washington politics a president is semi-impotent. In addition, concentrated efforts by Congress to reign in presidential power have further limited the productive gains a president can enforce.

Oliver Stone’s 1995 film, Nixon, was attacked by Nixon apologists for its depiction of the president’s personal qualities: specifically, his penchant for alcohol; his mental instability; and the Freudian allusions to his mother. What Nixon loyalists failed to detect was that Stone was quite clearly in their camp. The general impression of the film is clearly within the traditional interpretation of the ‘politics-as-usual’ strain: Stone consistently negates every immoral or illegal act with the argument that Nixon was a brilliant foreign affairs specialist who was destroyed by his own paranoia and the hypocritical ethics of the media. In regards to foreign affairs alone, Nixon failed spectacularly:

“The final reckoning is that Nixon and Kissinger failed to reach their major foreign policy goals. They did not extract the United States from Vietnam without losing Vietnam to the Communists; they could not solve the problem of Formosa and thus establish full diplomatic relations with the Chinese; they could not establish a lasting détente; they did not put any controls on the arms race; they did not bring peace to the Middle East. Judged by their own standards, they came up short” (Ambrose; 1971; p. 270).

In addition, Christopher Hitchens latest work, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, argues that Nixon and his National Security Adviser were guilty of a number of international war crimes which wilfully ignored the basic principles of the Geneva Convention. A thorough investigation of Nixon’s foreign policy misdeeds will continue to have an impact on how Americans view their president’s role while further displacing Nixon’s credibility in this field. Had Nixon not stolen the 1968 election, however, any attacks on his Presidency are cursory.

This thesis has argued that Richard Nixon’s involvement in the 1968 peace talks forms the most damning indictment of his enduringly destructive legacy on American politics. His decision to impinge on a diplomatic negotiation which could have saved 50, 000 American and approximately 600,000 (combined) Vietnamese lives for the sake of winning an election was completely malevolent in nature and deed. The roots of this act have their origin in Nixon’s early political career, where he employed ruthless and illegal tactics to gain office. Nixon’s inability to deal with defeat became manifest in the 1960 presidential and 1962 gubernatorial campaigns, from which came the defence that the ‘liberal establishment’ and the media were on a mission to destroy him: ultimately, this led to the fatal decision to steal the 1968 election. The acts of illegality which marred Nixon’s pre-1968 campaign in themselves set precedents which are still evident in contemporary American politics. Corruption, media manipulation and a disdain for the electorate were evident as recently as the 2000 presidential election, where George Bush and Albert Gore decided to circumvent the Supreme Court in favour of local courts to decide the outcome of that election. Once in the White House, Nixon displayed how presidential power can be abused: both in his ostentatious perception of a presidency and the ordered break-in of the Brookings Institution.

The most worrying factor, however, to emerge from a study of Richard Nixon is his inability to tell right from wrong: a basic requirement for alleging temporary insanity in a criminal law court. Nixon’s memoirs, White House tapes and biographies make no display of contrition regarding any of the several illegal methods he employed either to gain or remain in office. One suggestion to avoid repeating a Nixon presidency is articulated by Milton Plessur: “Candidates might be required to have a health check up, and findings likely to affect their performance be made public…the public could then better judge whether a man’s health problems prior to his assuming office would be of any consequence while he is in office” (Tugwell and Cronin; 1974; p. 202).

Richard Nixon’s political legacy continues to have a significant impact on American politics. He provided incontrovertible evidence that the Constitution and American federalism can be abused to an individuals own end. In doing so, it is clear that drastic measures must be imposed to ensure electoral and presidential responsibility in the future. The setting up of a Presidential Supervisory Committee, under the auspices of a non-partisan Congressional body, could help to regulate presidential campaigns and oversee that the separation of powers is adhered to the highest possible standards. In the final analysis, the American electorate must come to terms with Richard Nixon’s ‘entire life’, in an effort to reverse voter apathy and renew the trust in their beloved Constitution.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

1. Dean, John; Blind Ambition; Simon and Schuster; 1976.
2. Ehrlichman, John; Witness To Power; Simon and Schuster; 1982.
3. National Review magazine.
4. Nixon, Richard: Memoirs; Sidgwick and Jackson; 1978.
5. Nixon, Richard; Six Crises; W.H. Allen; 1962.
6. Oudes, Bruce (Edited); Richard Nixon’s Secret Files; Harper and Row; 1989.
7. Time magazine.
8. White, Theodore; The Making of the President 1968; Jonathan Cape; 1969.

Secondary Sources

1. Ambrose, Stephen; Nixon (Volume Two): The Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972; Simon and Schuster; 1989.
2. Ambrose; Stephen; Rise to Globalism; Penguin; 1971.
3. Andrew, Christopher; For the President’s Eyes Only; Harper Collins; 1995.
4. Bennett, G; The American Presidency: Illusions of Grandeur; Sutton; 2000.
5. Bochin, Hal; Rhetorical Strategist; Greenwood; 1990.
6. Doyle, William; Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes From FDR to Clinton; Kodansha; 1999.
7. Engelmayer, Sheldon and Wagman, Robert; Hubert Humphrey; The Man and His Dream; Metheun; 1978.
8. Greene, John; The Limits of Power; Indiana University; 1992.
9. Harrison, Robert; State and Society in Twentieth Century America; Longman; 1997.
10. Heale, M; The Sixties in America; Edinburgh University; 2001.
11. Hitchens, Christopher; The Trial of Henry Kissinger; Verso; 2001.
12. Kissinger, Henry; Diplomacy; Touchstone; 1994.
13. Kurz, Kenneth; Nixon’s Enemies; Lowell House; 1998.
14. Kearns, Doris; Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; Harper; 1976.
15. Matthews, Christopher; Kennedy and Nixon; Touchstone; 1996.
16. Plessur, Milton; The Health of Presidents in Tugwell, Rexford (Edited); The Presidency Reappraised; Praeger; 1974.
17. Summers, Anthony; The Arrogance of Power; Victor Gollancz; 2000.
18. Unger, Debi and Unger, Irwin; Turning Point 1968; Macmillan; 1988.

[1] Accounts vary enormously. Nixon painted a desolate and harsh upbringing during most of his life, yet at times admitted ‘we always had enough to eat’ (Summers; 2000; p. 6). The Nixon’s were certainly not destitute, yet they were not exactly ‘comfortable.’ A fair judgment would put their relative economic standard in Yorba Linda-where most were extremely poor-at the middle-income bracket.

[2] In 1946 terms.

[3] It is difficult to estimate exactly how much money was spent. Nevertheless, the approximate sums were an astronomical amount for that time.

[4] Douglas’s husband had been born Hesselberg. His father had been Jewish.

[5] From Kurz; 1998; p. 128.

[6] Checkers had been a gift from a campaign donator. Nixon claimed that the dog was the only plausible root of improper conduct involved in the entire scandal.

[7] After having been informed he would stay on as Eisenhower’s running mate.

[8] Doctors who treated the Vice-President had warned there was a possibility that the infection would lead to the amputation of his leg.

[9] Kennedy also wanted to make absolutely sure that Nixon would not contest the results of the election.

[10] Widow of the famous Second World War ace pilot Claire Chennault, Mrs. Anna Chennault was in 1968 vice-chairman of the Republican National Finance Committee and co-chairman of the Women for Nixon-Agnew.

[11] Most recently in a BBC documentary, The Secret World of Richard Nixon (2000), Chennault stated ‘my boss was Richard Nixon.’

[12] In 1968 Jack Dreyfus, a Nixon contributor, suggested he try Dilantin to counter depression. Dilantin is an anti-epileptic drug not designed to alleviate the symptoms of depression. If mixed with alcohol, the drug can produce serious side effects such as disorientation, mental confusion and slurred speech. In addition to taking un-prescribed doses of Dilantin-Dreyfus gave the president ‘several’ bottles of the drug, each containing 1000 tablets- Nixon was ingesting large doses of sleeping pills.

[13] Men employed by Charles Colson attempted on several occasions to gain access to the Brookings vault but each was unsuccessful.

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Providian Financial is a credit card company that sells credit to subprime customers. A subprime customer is a consumer who is considered risky. The chances of a subprime customer paying their bill are less likely than that of a prime customer. Due to the increased risk of lending to subprime customers, many credit card companies hesitate to approve them as customers. Providian saw this hesitation as an ideal target market. Providian’s instant success proved other skeptics wrong. In the short run, lending to subprime customers can be profitable. Yet, in the end, it will not be as successful as lending to prime customers. There are a limited number of subprime borrowers, who the credit company can allot credit and still make money.

Providian wanted to attract the ideal subprime customer. In their opinion, the perfect subprime customer cared more about low minimum monthly payments than high interest rates. These were consumers who would pile up debt but would rarely default. In the words of a former executive, “We found the best of the bad.”

Providian first attracted their customers by sending them checks. If the customer cashed the check, they automatically signed up for Providian’s services. Customers were charged an application fee, an annual fee, and an interest rate up to 24%. This was done for a credit limit starting at $300 and going up to $500. These are only a few of the unethical behaviors practiced by Providian. When Providian tried to run promotions, such as ‘No Annual Fee’, they still received money from their customers (i.e. charging a $156 protection fee). Simply, Providian was the only credit card company willing to sell credit to subprime customers, and were able to take advantage of their clients. In the eyes of Providian’s CEO, Shailesh Mehta, Providian was providing a valuable service in offering credit to customers whom other banks refused to serve.

When Providian began to serve subprime customers, there was very little competition. Between 1997 and 2001, the number of active subprime credit card accounts surged 215%, to 26.8 million. Wall Street quickly noticed the growth of this one-time small credit lender. Providian continued to grow for the next couple of years. Stock price paralleled growth of the company. Within two years, between 1997 and 1999, Providian reported an increase of earning by 187%. Wall Street and Providian forgot to question the subprime market. Rather than asking how long subprime customers will keep paying, Providian and Wall Street simply searched for increased growth.

Until mid-1999, Providian grew and experienced an increase in profit. In 1999, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency opened an investigation on Providian. They accused Providian of using misleading, unfair, and deceptive practices to increase profits. It seems as if most other companies have developed a style of deceptive accounting; why shouldn’t Providian? In June of the following year, the O.C.C. ordered Providian to cease a portion of their marketing campaigns such as the ‘No Annual Fee’ promotion.

Since the annual fee was a large portion of Providian’s income, Mehta had to either confess to the critics on Wall Street that the growth would be slowing or find an alternative road of making money. Being a wise and greedy CEO, Mehta claimed that Providian could keep the earnings growing. To bring in more revenue, and compensate for recently lost income, Providian signed up any risky borrower who desired credit. This plan would have worked if all customers paid their balances. Due to the fact that not all subprime customers pay along with falling economy, Providian started to experience loses. Due to the falling economy, the subprime consumers were the first to feel its effects. At this time, the number of personal bankruptcies rose as quickly as Providian was falling.

Mehta insisted that growth was possible. Providian was on target to hit their long-term earnings-per-share goal of 25%. The reality as to how Providian accomplished this was reported to the public later. Providian made a change to its credit-loss accounting practices that effectively deferred about $30 million in credit losses into another quarter. This was great strategic planning, until it was the next quarter and there was $30 million dollars worth of debt. While doing this, Providian failed to inform their supports on Wall Street. Once again, as in most corporate downfall stories, the top executives of Providian started to sell their stock shares. Mehta himself netted nearly $3.7 million.

One day Wall Street finally caught on to Providian. Stocks in the company began to sell, and prices began to drop. Still on the verge of corporate bankruptcy, Mehta denied any problems. On the day of October 18^th, Providian Financial announced that the third quarter earnings had fallen 72% over the years. This happened because Providian lost revenue from fees, as well as a higher-than-expected loan loss. On this day, Mehta also made public his decision to step-down as CEO and chairman of Providian. One week later, the stock price plummeted to $5 a share. Shortly after, the stock hit an all time low, lawsuits were filed against Providian, and its executives. These suits accused Providian and its executives of fraudulently misleading investors and using inside information for personal gain.

Joseph Saunders recently took over as CEO for Providian. His main goal is set on the survival of the company, and not growth. Providian has since moved out of the subprime market into the middle-market. Most credit card companies followed Providian’s lead out of this market, very similar to how they followed Providian into the market. Personally, I feel this is another example of human greed. The top executives of this company were capable of pulling off unethical moves to gain personal wealth and exercised their capabilities. I would get more satisfaction out of running a smooth, profitable company than I would by stealing money from people. These executives not only tarnished the names of their families, but the name Providian Financial as well. Providian is not the only culprit in this story. Wall Street is the greediest player in this game. The government should step in and try to take control from the money-loving players on Wall Street. It’s easy to say what should have been done, considering we are sitting in Annville, Pennsylvania. I would question my own judgment if I were in the same position as Mehta. Hearing how so many business executives get filthy-rich these days almost makes it seem more ethical to be unethical.

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The Human Rights Movement is constantly evolving, and universal respect for human rights has improved dramatically in the past century. Although the international community has progressed in it’s recognition and attempt to protect individual human rights,  it has been widely unsuccessful in it’s ability to prevent the violation of grave human rights, or to intervene and stop them when they do occur. At the same time, however, the international community has been successful in it’s actions to bring justice to those responsible for the violations, both in terms of state and individual responsibility. Three examples of the international community’s actions regarding the violation of grave human rights include those involving genocide, ethnic cleansing and starvation.

The gravest violation of human rights is genocide. In 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations passed the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or the Genocide Convention. It took effect in 1951,and  provided a legal definition of genocide and established genocide as a crime under international law. According to the Genocide Convention, any of the following actions, when committed with the intent to eliminate a particular national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, constitutes genocide:  killing members of the group,  causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,  deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to kill, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and  forcibly transferring children out of a group (powers, 57).

The most dramatic case of genocide was the Holocaust of WW II, in which the Nazi regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews and 5 million other “undesirables” (powers, 47). The Allies had abundant intelligence of Hitler’s Final Solution, yet almost no intervention was attempted to stop it. The policy of non-intervention was fueled by several issues, most importantly, the refusal to violate the sovereign power of the German state. Government officials and journalists also played down the intelligence, claiming they were not substantiated, and exaggerated. Allied leaders were also convinced that the most efficient way to stop the murder of civilians was by the military defeat of Germany. Most significantly, however, the vast majority of the population simply did not – or could not – believe the reports. It was almost impossible for a rational human mind to accept that it was possible for such revolting, inhuman and evil atrocities to be carried out against an entire race of people (powers, 32-45).

With the end of the war, and liberation of the concentration camps, the international community was forced to fully accept the carnage that had occurred. They demanded justice for the 11 million dead, as well as the survivors. An International Military Tribunal was established  in Nuremberg, Germany, to try leading the Nazi Party officials who were responsible for the planning and design of the Final Solution (powers, 48).

The term “genocide” wasn’t yet fully accepted by world leaders and the first indictments the Tribunal placed against the defendants were crimes against humanity, including crimes against peace, for starting an aggressive war (powers, 49).

The Tribunal was significant because it not only was holding individuals accountable for violating human rights, but also because it was the first time that government officials were held accountable and faced punishment, for crimes committed against their own citizens. The notion of state sovereignty was still highly valued, though, and the charges focused  on the crimes against peace, and prosecuted only those crimes that had been committed after Germany had initiated an aggressive war with the invasion of another sovereign nation (powers, 49).

The term “genocide” was included in the 3rd count. The defendants were accused of “…genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian population of certain occupied territories” (powers, 50).

Determined to prevent such a horrendous event from occurring again, . In 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations passed the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (powers, 57). That same year, The United Nations took the next dramatic step in 1948, when it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It wasn’t adopted as a treaty – but rather it was meant to “proclaim a ‘common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” (burns, 25).

Despite the passing of the Genocide Convention, and the determination to never allow genocide to occur again, it did, and surprisingly, the international community once again stood by and let it occur. In 1994, Rwanda suffered a 100 day massacre of Tutsi’s by the Hutu’s, which left more then 800,000 dead (powers, 334).   Although Belgian UN peacekeepers were stationed in Rwanda, they were ordered to not intervene, and all foreign diplomats, etc. were evacuated. The world sat by and refused to intervene (powers, 364-385). After the genocide had stopped, and the true horrors could not be ignored, President Clinton decided to go to Rwanda to appease his nation’s guilt, explaining that the international community “did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror” (powers, 386). It can therefore be assumed that the international community didn’t fully appreciate the terror of the Holocaust, or what the promise of “never again” encompassed.

The United Nations did, however, make a substantial effort to bring the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide to trial. It passed a resolution to establish a Tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide, modeled on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague (powers, 484). Unlike the ICTFY, however, the process has been slow, few convictions have been made, and the success is still unsure (forsythe, 101-02).

Ethnic Cleansing is a strong example of a grave violation of human rights. The term was introduced in 2001 to identify and categorize the violations of human rights carried out by the Serbian military during the wars in former Yugoslavia.  The actions of ethnic cleansing include torture, murder, arbitrary arrest and detention, extra-judicial executions, rape and sexual assault, confinement if civilians in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilians, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property” (powers, 483). The United Nations Commission for the former Yugoslavia further defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area wholly homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups” (powers, 483).

The ethnic cleansing taking place in Bosnia, and later Kosovo, wasn’t a secret. In “A Problem From Hell“, Samantha Powers claims that “no other atrocity campaign in the 20th century was better monitored or understood by the U.S. government” (powers, 264). They had intelligence reports, photographs, even satellite imagery. Despite overwhelming evidence however, the U.S. Government, led by President George Bush, decided not to intervene militarily (powers, 264).

Pressure began to build however, as the reports and vivid images were widely introduced to the public. President Bush was finally compelled to make a public commitment to document Serbian aggression, and develop a plan to stop it (powers, 266). a UN-EU peace conference was scheduled, and the United States pledged humanitarian aid (powers, 281). In August of 1992, the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to insure the delivery of the humanitarian aid (powers, 281). However, the International Community was still not prepared to intervene militarily. A small UN contingent of approximately 6,000 peace keepers were deployed. Ironically, several United Nations sanctions in place in the former Yugoslavia were actually aiding the Serbian forces in their campaign of violence. An arms embargo was in place, and this prevented the Muslim civilians in Bosnia to obtain weapons to defend themselves.

The United States decision of non-intervention was fueled by several factors. First, the belief was that the situation in Bosnia was a civil war, not a war of aggression. Government officials also felt that measures like lifting the arms embargo would actually cause more harm then good. Government leaders also did not want to risk the lives of American soldiers, and finally, the cost of intervention would be steep (powers, chapters  9 and 11).

By November 1995, the Clinton Administration was in the White House and domestic and Foreign pressure finally forced the U.S. government to take action. They supported NATO air strikes, and the Clinton administration brokered a peace accord in Dayton Ohio, the Dayton Accords. By this point, however, 200,000 people had already been killed and one out of every 2 people had lost homes (powers, 440).

Although the war in Bosnia was over, intense violence soon sprung up in Kosovo, which had long been a location of intense Serb – Kosovo Albanian hostility. NATO was quicker this time to launch a bombing campaign in Kosovo, hoping to force the Serbian violence to ease, as had happened in Bosnia. Yet this time, the Serbian military retaliated by severely stepping up it’s brutality against the citizens of Kosovo (powers, 450).

If the International community had failed to stop the ethnic cleansing from occurring, it succeeded in redeeming itself in the aftermath, with the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague (powers, 483). The Tribunal focused on individual responsibility, including holding Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on charges of crimes against humanity (powers, 458). Defendants from Military leaders to prison guards are being indicted at The Hague, and are being forced to take personal responsibility for their horrendous actions.

An example of a grave violation of human rights which receives less attention is starvation. In the 1930′s, Stalin and his Marxist regime in the Soviet Union were determined to crush resistance in the Ukraine. They decided that the most effective strategy was “mass terror throughout the body of the nation” (chalk and jonassohn, 291)., the body being the peasantry – and  they initiated a program of terror-famine in 1932 (chalk and jonassohn, 291).

The Soviet leaders began by demanding an increased percentage of the Ukrainian wheat harvest, even though the harvest had been low. Next, a decree was passed that all collective farm property including cattle and grain were considered state property and therefore “sacred and inviolable” (chalk and jonassohn, 293). The punishment for disobedience to this decree was execution. Searches were conducted and usually all food, livestock and valuables were confiscated (chalk and jonassohn, 293). The formal searched became routine, and those who did not appear to be starving found themselves under suspicion.

The famine intensified through the winter, when Stalin issued a new decree that all distribution of grain would be held from the peasants until the grain quotas he had demanded were delivered. Desperation accompanied the starvation, and high rates of suicide, murder and even cannibalism emerged (chalk and jonassohn, 295). Within only a short period, millions were dead – approximately one quarter of the rural population(chalk and jonassohn, 291)..

Intervention by the International community was not forthcoming. Although knowledge of the forced famine existed in western Europe and the United Sates, only slight pressure was placed on the Soviet regime – pressure which was ignored (chalk and jonassohn, 298). There has never been an official investigation of the mass forced starvation that occurred in the Ukraine in the early 1930′s (chalk and jonassohn, 298)..

Although the international community has progressed in it’s recognition and attempt to protect individual human rights,  flaws still exist in its to prevent the violation of grave human rights, or to intervene and stop them when they do occur. However, the international community has been successful in it’s actions to bring justice to those responsible for the violations, both in terms of state and individual responsibility. Examples of the international communities’ efforts, or non efforts, can be seen in the violation of the grave human rights of genocide, ethnic cleansing and starvation.

Works Cited

Burns, Weston. “Human Rights”. International Human Rights Overviews. Claude-Weston.
page 25

Chalk, Frank and Jonassohn, Kurt. The History and Sociology of Genocide. U.S.A. Yale University Press: 1990. pages 291, 293, 295, 298

Forsythe, David P. Human Rights in International Relations. Cambridge, United Kingdom. Cambridge University Press: 2000. pages 101-102

Powers, Samantha. A Problem From Hell. New York. Basic Books: 2002.
pages 32-45, 47-50, 57264, 266, 281, 334,  440, 450, 458, 483-4, 392-440, 248-327

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These major volumes cover nearly the whole gamut of situations in the paradoxical relationship between American Indians and national parks. Each demonstrates how Native Americans faced differing circumstances as a consequence of their ancestral land becoming a national park. Native Americans and National Parks, Dispossessing the Wilderness, and Indian Country, God’s Country all detail what might be considered the classic example of natives’ relationship with the NPS – forced off their homeland and onto a reservation through deceitful land seizures. The example of the Blackfeet, who thought they were selling only the rocks of what became the eastern portion of Glacier National Park, mirrors the method utilized by the U.S. government in taking over Indian land throughout the history of the nation. The Blackfeet ceded the land to the government, only after being falsely assured that the tribe would retain its hunting rights. To the contrary, all Blackfeet rights to the land ceased with the setting apart of Glacier National Park. Dispossessing the Wilderness relates a completely different situation in NPS-Indian relations, that of the Yosemite Indians being allowed to stay after the park’s designation. Inhabited Wilderness arguably presents the greatest anomaly of natives’ relationship with national parks. In nine out of 10 Alaska national parks the NPS allowed the natives to stay and hunt on park lands.

Catton, a historical researcher at HRA Gray and Pape LLC , explains clearly that national parks are not untouched and uninhabited. Instead, they are the homes and work places of native peoples.  He details how Alaska national parks’ acceptance of subsistence use forced a critical evaluation of two long-standing national park tenets – forced Indian removal and parks as bastions of uninhabited wilderness. Unlike national parks in the continental 48 states, the NPS did not mandate Alaska’s natives to cede their lands and move to reservations. The native Alaskans lost their original land title, but maintained subsistence use of public lands.

Alaska national parks demonstrate the evolution and continuing adaptation of the NPS by its recognition of the rights of occupation and use by natives. Catton’s narrative suggests Alaska national parks provide a glimmer of hope that the NPS is slowly coming to its senses concerning the importance of ecological management. For example, the Park Service realizes that prohibiting hunting in Alaska preserves would disturb the natural conditions the national parks are intended to preserve. To the managers of Alaska’s parks, native hunters are simply another predator in the food chain that has existed for centuries.

Though the Park Service has allowed Alaskan natives to remain on park lands, the relationship between the two parties is not completely promising, Catton explains. For instance, the NPS and the Nunamiuts, natives of Gates of the Artic National Park, were supposed to be co-managers of the land, but the Park Service, firmly entrenched in traditional mandates, has treated the tribe as intruders in its own homeland. The NPS drafted regulations of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) without even consulting the Nunamiuts. Both sides now live in fear and suspicion of one another.

In contrast to the tolerated relationship between the NPS and Alaskan natives Inhabited Wilderness portrays, Keller and Turek, in American Indians and National Parks, explain how early national park leaders felt pressure to conform to popular ideals of nature. These ideals excluded Native Americans. Expelling natives from national parks fell decidedly against the notion that parks were for the use and enjoyment of all Americans. National parks, though claiming to be created for every American, shunned the first Americans.

According to Keller and Turek, the National Park Service, throughout most of its history, has treated American Indians as museum pieces suspended in time – colorful, nostalgic versions of environmentalists. In books about national parks, even as late as 1989, Native Americans were seen as artifacts and scenery more than people. NPS interpretation included sparse references to Indians. For example, Mesa Verde National Park’s programs exclude Ute history, largely because of ongoing disputes with the tribe over land issues. Early park directors and superintendents knew little about natives. Today’s rangers say little about contemporary Indians in their interpretive presentations to visitors.  National parks’ landscapes include Native American names, but many of their meanings are mute to visitors. Gratefully, in the past decade the NPS has increased its awareness and sensitivity towards American Indians, but bitterness still prevails as past wounds slowly heal. Keller and Turek clearly see their work as a step to correct the oversight of missing information about Indians, showing that natives are important both historically and culturally, and that their presence in national parks should not be treated lightly.

Dispossessing the Wilderness contains much of the same information as American Indians and National Parks in telling the story of the National Park Service removing American Indians so that the landscape in each park could be more “natural” and fit the common perceptions of nature. Spence contends that the conception of wilderness without natives was so powerful that early preservationists dismissed or ignored evidence of native use and habitation. For instance, Yellowstone National Park management of the 1870s and 1880s felt that the Native American threatened game even when government surveys revealed game numbers were on the rise.

Most national parks expelled Indians early in their history. Yosemite, in distinction, allowed its natives remain. Spence chronicles the tale of the Yosemite Indians, who are an abnormality in early NPS-tribal relations. Unlike their counterparts in Yellowstone and Glacier, the Yosemite stayed long after establishment of the park. Early park management felt Yosemite Indians had a moral right to stay. Tourists expected and enjoyed viewing Indians in their “natural” state. For nearly 20 years the park gloried in its Indian past by hosting an “Indian Field Days” festival. The Indians made a living from tourists by selling their wares and working for the NPS and its concessionaires.

After relative peace with the Park Service for over 50 years, the Yosemite Indians became a victim of the growing sentiment that creating a “natural” setting in national parks meant excluding natives. Yosemite management effectively forced the natives to vacate their ancestral village site and move to small cabins. At the new residential area, the NPS exercised near dictatorial control. When each family left, its cabin was destroyed to prevent another family from laying claim to it. In effect, relocating the Indians to the cabins was a long term-plan to wield more control over the Indians and slowly expel them in a way that would not raise commotion among Indian advocates. The plan succeeded when the last Indian families vacated the cabins in the 1960s. Fortunately, Spence notes, the Yosemite Indians still have a presence in the park, in the form of an Indian cultural center on the site of the former cabins.

Hal Rothman chronicles the plight of a group of Native Americans seeking identity and a tribal homeland in a park that historically gave them little thought. The NPS, just like in Yosemite, allowed Death Valley National Park’s Timbisha Shoshone to remain in the park when Congress created it, first as a national monument, in 1933.  For nearly 70 years, however, the Timbisha lived in obscurity, without any tribal land and in a tenuous legal position.  The NPS reneged on its original promise to supply the Timbisha with 40 acres within the park, hating to see any of its land taken away, even a miniscule portion. Park management restricted their hunting rights and curtailed their livelihood of raising and selling horses and burrows. The NPS did built a village for the Shoshone, but not in the location the tribe wanted. Park management charged rent and utility fees, which was an insult to the tribe, who felt they should not have to pay for something that was rightfully theirs and submit to park policies. In the 1950s Death Valley management instituted a plan similar to that of Yosemite. If a Timbisha family could not pay the rent or vacated the dwelling, as they often did in the summer, the NPS destroyed their house.

The Timbisha’s only recourse was to remain on the land, no matter the circumstances, and hope for good tidings in the future. Good tidings finally did come in 1983 when they received legal tribal status. Then, in 2000, the tribe received nearly 8,000 acres of their own land, but only after organizing themselves and mounting a campaign to bring their plight to public attention. Rothman’s account brings to light yet another tribe mistreated by the Park Service, but thankfully he chronicles positive strides made in American Indian-NPS relations that the other volumes hardly discuss.

In Indian Country, God’s Country Burnham details how tribes still present in national parks endure a blighted existence. Native Americans, he argues, are usually considered an embarrassment in national parks – embarrassing because they are poor. They suffer low economic status because in most cases they have been ostracized by the National Park Service, stripped of their land and livelihood and relegated into menial labor. NPS policy has led to deep resentment among Native Americans, which continues today. The story of American Indians’ relationship with national parks, depending on which side taken, can be summed up as a costly triumph of the public interest or a bitter betrayal of America’s native people, Burnham contends.

Burnham explains how the NPS sometimes forgets that today’s natives are nothing like the Indian warriors of the past. Instead, natives have assimilated into society. Unlike their predecessors, contemporary natives use modern technology and are as passionate about football as anyone. Park visitors want to hear about the idealistic natives of the past, not their contemporaries, most of whom live in poverty. For example, the Blackfeet look across the border to Glacier National Park and see affluence – jobs that they do not have themselves. They feel they deserve NPS employment. In the past tribal members did hold jobs in the park in the capacity of performers, dancers, greeters, and drivers. Today’s Blackfeet look back at those times with resentment, feeling their employers, usually the railroads, exploited them. In Blackfeet-NPS relations, Burnham recounts one of the many ironies of NPS history. The Blackfeet demand jobs, but disdained the tribe’s past employment. Currently, the Park Service lauds its “progress” in Mesa Verde by employing more American Indians than any other park. Unfortunately, natives fill only lower-rung NPS jobs with no administrative authority. The Park Service seems determined not to empower natives with stewardship over their ancestral lands again.

In his essay “The Trouble With Wilderness” found in Uncommon Ground, William Cronon writes how the myth of the wilderness as virgin, uninhabited land has always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who once called that land home.  Indians were forced to move elsewhere, so tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in its pristine, original state. The original inhabitants were forced out and their earlier uses of the land were redefined as inappropriate or illegal. The removal of Indians created “uninhabited wilderness,” but uninhabited like it never was before. Leaving the land to its truly natural state, would have actually included Native Americans. Richard White’s essay “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes” in the Fall 2004 edition of The Historian explains that books such as Inhabited Wilderness and Dispossessing the Wilderness emphasize how cultural views of nature vary with class and locale. “Who gets to define nature is an issue of power with consequences for the lives of working people, Indian people, and residents of areas defined as wild,” he concludes. Unfortunately for Native Americans, in most instances the NPS defined nature under flawed, idyllic and popular constructs.

American Indians as they were before white settlement would have been “natural”, but once Indians became part of the white economy, that “naturalness” faded. Every volume mentions that the NPS at times forgot contemporary natives were not as they were in the 19th century. The NPS even had the gall to say it would allow natives to hunt in park lands, but only if they used the methods common before the white man’s arrival.  This was, of course, absurd as Native Americans had adopted modern technology and saw no reason to revert to more primitive, less-effective methods. Every piece of scholarship on the subject matter expounds on a myriad of examples of American Indians surrendering to modernity and losing their cultural identity in the process, as Rothman’s essay clearly demonstrates.

Inhabited Wilderness provides a look at parks that fully include Native Americans, which is refreshing considering that most literature in the field details the consequences of Indians being expelled. Catton’s narrative also varies with the other scholarship by explaining NPS-Indian relations in parks other than the “crown jewels” such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier on which there is an abundance of information. Volumes containing the history of lesser-known parks are a welcome addition to the scholarship in the field.

In historical context, American Indians and National Parks, Dispossessing the Wilderness, and Indian Country, God’s Country tell essentially the same story in various parks, that of Native Americans being exploited and excluded at the hands of American ideology, bureaucracy and capitalism. Elliot West’s bibliographical essay “Thinking West” claims that the work of historians such as Catton, Keller, Turek, Spence, and Burnham is redefining conquest by questioning the dream of wilderness as savage land brought under human dominion. West points out that Indians lost their independence in the imposition of a national fantasy, that of uninhabited wilderness. Native Americans, in West’s mind, had the bad luck of living in an “imagined Eden” and like Adam and Eve, were expelled when it was decided they had no business there.

Dispossessing the Wilderness is particularly strong in the visual aid department. Mingled with the narrative are excellent photos, illustrations and maps with thorough explanations in their captions. One such illustration fully demonstrates the bad blood that existed between the Blackfeet and Glacier National Park administrators by depicting then NPS director Horace Albright kneeling within the boundaries of the park with sharp claws extended trying to grasp the Blackfeet reservation. The book’s scope is narrow. It only covers Indian-white relations in Yellowstone, Glacier and Yosemite national parks. Spence’s epilogue does contain a brief summary of Indian situations in Grand Canyon National Park, Death Valley National Park, and a few parks in Alaska.

In his introduction, Burnham acknowledges Keller and Turek’s, Spence’s and Catton’s scholarship in the field then explains that his volume focuses on government policy towards each tribe. Burnham has a Ph.D. in American Studies, but writes the book in a more journalistic style. He enriches his narrative with his travelogue, which provides fascinating anecdotal information. Relying heavily on primary documents and interviews with natives, Indian Country, God’s Country provides a colorful account that depicts the human side of the issues more than the three previous volumes on the subject. Overall Burnham paints a near-tangible picture of how Indian tribes in close proximity to national parks live and how they feel about the bureau administering the land. Of the four major volumes on native relationships with the NPS, Indian Country, God’s Country is the book non-academics would most enjoy.

The recent flurry of work dealing with Native Americans and the National Park Service can be attributed in part to the New Western History. With formerly taboo subject areas such as gender and sexuality coming to the forefront in the last decade, the time has been ripe for critical inspections of lesser known and more controversial historical events and issues. As Keller and Turek attest in their preface, before these four volumes, scholarship on NPS-Indian relations was sparse. The eradication of former inhibitions and a lack of detailed work in the field provided motivation for scholars passionate about national parks and natives to delve into research and produce groundbreaking narratives. Keller and Turek are clearly enthusiastic about their subject matter, even to the point of encouraging any reader with the desire to add to the body of work on the natives’ relationship with the NPS in their preface. Clearly, these four volumes will not be the last on the topic.

The body of work on the subject is not without shortcomings. Most literature on NPS-Indian relations details few positive strides the Park Service has achieved towards better relations with Native Americans. Historians undertaking further research on the subject might want to focus on the more recent past by showing resolutions to NPS oversights towards natives and the strengthening of relationships between park management and tribal leaders, as Rothman does in his chapter about the Timbisha Shoshone.

Leo McAvoy issues a call to scholars to learn more about modern American Indians and their issues and values in his article “American Indians, Place Meanings and the Old/New West” in the Winter 2002 issue of Journal of Leisure Research. Many tribes are now exercising their sovereignty status and asking that they be considered as co-managers for recreation lands on and near reservations. Indian gaming has improved the economic status of some tribes, helping them become more relevant to the political, social and geographic realities of the New West, McAvoy argues. A recent essay by David Rich Lewis, editor of the Western Historical Quarterly, corroborates McAvoy’s assertions. In the past, tribes near national parks have lived in obscurity, as detailed in Burnham’s and Rothman’s accounts. Now many tribes are turning the corner to greater significance, like the Timbisha Shoshone. This is one of the many reasons oral histories of today’s Native Americans should be a vital part of future scholarship. Rothman’s addition of quotes from Pauline Esteves, a Timbisha tribal member, provides needed perspective from the Indian point of view. A better understanding of contemporary natives could help historians and park administrators alike and possibly assist in forging compromises between tribes and NPS management.

Hopefully Burnham and Rothman have constructed the first few miles of the trail in the direction the scholarship will go. For a more objective and fascinating story, information gleaned from interviews with Native Americans, NPS administrators and even residents and business owners in national park gateway communities should be included in the text of books and articles of the future. This would lead to a more interesting, objective story and better understanding of contemporary Native Americans and their continued dealings with the National Park Service.

Works Cited

Burnham, Philip. Indian County, God’s Country: Native Americans and the National Parks. Island Press: Washington, D.C. 2000. xvi, 383 pp.

Catton, Theodore. Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos and National Parks in Alaska. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. xxi, 287 pp. 

Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; of, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1995: 69-90 (479-482).

Keller, Robert, and Micheal Turek. American Indians and National Parks. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. 319 pp.

Lewis, David Rich. “Still Native: The Significance of Native Americans in the History of the Twentieth-Century West,” in Clyde Milner II, ed., A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. vii, 318 pp.

McAvoy, Leo. “American Indians, Place Meanings and the Old/New West.” Journal of Leisure Research Vol. 34, No. 4 (2002): 383-396

Rothman, Hal. Death Valley Administrative History 

Spence, Mark D. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. viii, 190 pp. 

West, Elliot. “Thinking West,” in William Deverell, ed., The Blackwell Companion to the American West. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2004: 25-50.

White, Richard. “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History.” The Historian Vol. 66, No. 3 (2004): 557-564.

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The four major owners of the Central Pacific Railroad (CP), Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker, created “perhaps the nation’s choicest example of a complete and sustained monopoly,” by controlling most of the economic resources of one sixth of the nation’s area.(Lewis, 365) Despite their contributions to the West’s economic history, no formal biography of any of the partners existed until 1938 when Lewis decided to place their stories in an all-inclusive volume, entitled The Big Four. Lewis’ goal was to write a balanced account of the CP directors. Lewis felt everything written about the CP before his book was extremely biased. Some books supported the railroad while others vehemently opposed it. For the most part, Lewis presents an unbiased look at the making of the Pacific railway, emphasizing the roles of the CP directors and providing thoughtful insight into each of their characters.

The preface of Griswold’s book, A Work of Giants, written in 1961, explains that the Southern Pacific (formerly the CP) and the Union Pacific (UP), at the time of writing, were well respected, prosperous and efficient. However, Griswold later contends that their “ancestors often represented the antithesis of those qualities.”(Griswold, xi) Throughout his narrative Griswold illustrates time and time again that those ‘ancestors’ had their minds and hearts set on one thing: turning a quick and bounteous profit. Unyielding self-confidence and indefatigable determination assisted the early directors of both railroads in achieving the goal of immense wealth, despite perilous financial straits early on and continued opposition from critics in government and media.

Lewis and Griswold’s books view the history of the first transcontinental railroad in terms of the top executives who managed the two competing railroads. In contrast, Athearn’s Union Pacific Country, completed in 1971, traces the story from the view of the ordinary people whose concerns and opinions are voiced in contemporary newspapers. Athearn adds another layer to the saga, largely omitted in previous scholarship, by explaining the public’s perceptions of the railroad while also detailing everyday life at the UP’s railhead in Omaha and the dangers of early train travel in the frontier West.

In 1999 David Haward Bain wrote Empire Express, which is easily the most detailed account of the first transcontinental railroad’s history. His research is exhaustive. With 711 pages, delving through the entire volume is no small feat, even for one who is extremely interested in the subject. One of Bain’s strengths is his broad use of personal narratives, which add depth as well as glimpses into the character of the key railroad players. Another strength is Bain’s interjection of humor, which lightens up his narrative.

Lewis’ account is organized into sections describing the life, contributions and character of Theodore Judah, a young engineer whose vision was the impetus for the CP, as well as short biographies of the Big Four and a later investor, David Colton. The final two sections describe what travel was like in the railroad’s early years and explain how the four built their monopoly. Knowing that the volume was written nearly 65 years ago may discourage some modern readers, but Lewis’ style presents the story in an understandable and descriptive format.

The author begins by tracing the career of Theodore Judah, the optimistic young engineer who surveyed a route for the transcontinental line through the Sierra Nevadas while the Big Four were still modest shopkeepers in Sacramento. At first, many thought Judah was a madman and many would-be stockholders resisted his appeals to purchase shares in the fledgling enterprise. After failing to generate interest in San Francisco, whose business community considered ships and not trains as its main vehicle of commerce, Judah headed to Sacramento where he convinced local capitalists that the railroad would be their panacea. Lewis argues that the Central Pacific Railroad emanated from the Big Four’s desire to make a large and quick return on their investment.

In the book’s first section, Lewis portrays Judah as a hero who did not receive the credit he so sorely deserved. The Big Four presents Judah as a man determined to safeguard his project from the shortsighted actions of money-hungry tyrants. After butting heads with the Big Four on numerous occasions, Judah retired as chief engineer and planned a takeover of the CP using the wealth of Cornelius Vanderbilt and other capitalists. Judah, however, died of yellow fever in Panama on his way to court these investors in Boston and New York. Unfortunately, no one credited Judah when the Golden Spike was driven in Promontory at the May 10, 1869 ceremony.

The Big Four’s obsession with cutting costs wherever possible led them to ignore Judah’s sound recommendations and make construction decisions without him. They appointed themselves as sole contractors and “moved” the base of the Sierra Nevadas 25 miles west by justifying to the government that a different type of soil marked the beginning of the mountain range, where the government subsidies doubled.

Competition to beat the Union Pacific to Nevada’s silver mines resulted in hasty, shoddy construction. A friend of Crocker’s concluded that had speed not been a factor, the costs of building could have been reduced by 70 percent.(Lewis, 85) Construction might have been faster and cheaper if it had ceased during the winter, when the line only gained inches per day. In addition, there would have been fewer worker casualties. After the Union Pacific and Central Pacific met at Promontory, building crews stayed on the payroll to complete repairs on the track already laid – repairs needed due to the hastiness of construction.(Lewis, 104)

The CP’s rapid and shoddy construction is well known, but Griswold and Athearn fail to present the UP side of the matter. “In the name of speed” Grenville Dodge, UP chief engineer, had to lay track on steep grades of 116 feet to the mile, the maximum allowable by law, and avoid expensive and time-consuming rock cutting wherever possible.(Bain, 376) Dodge, depicted as a main of integrity in scholarship before Bain’s volume, vehemently opposed this decision but adhered to it because he had to choose other battles to fight. One of those battles was with Iowa constituents he represented as congressman, a post he never desired but to which he was elected because of his popularity. Dodge excused himself from meetings in Washington by saying he had to go to the Rocky Mountains to recover from a war wound. This attitude exhibits a departure from the upstanding man portrayed in earlier volumes.

Dodge was one UP director who lauded the CP’s use of Chinese labor. Lewis’ book recognizes the vital role the Chinese played in the railroad’s construction. Crocker, the CP’s construction manager, respected the Chinese because of the superior service rendered by his servant Ah Ling and was instrumental in convincing his three partners to use Chinese labor, despite the opposition of racists and white unions. Dodge complimented the “docile industry” of the Chinese laborers and disparaged his own ex-soldiers for distinguishing themselves in “qualities far removed from docility.”(Lewis, 93) However Lewis, through his rhetoric, shows he views the Chinese as inferior when he describes relations between the Chinese and their white counterparts, remarking, “The superiority of the Caucasian was undiminished, his dignity enhanced.”(Lewis, 72)

Griswold also mentions the disharmony that abounded following the “Big Four’s” decision to utilize Chinese laborers as the principle workforce on the groundbreaking transportation enterprise. Leland Stanford, former California governor and long-standing CP president, like the print media of the day, was an outspoken critic of the Chinese before the resolution to employ them. Anti-Chinese sentiment soared in both the press and among California’s voting public. Stanford changed his stance on the issue, as did many other detractors, once he saw how dependable the workers from the Far East were compared to their white or Irish counterparts. Chinese laborers proved themselves in diligence and teachability. In addition, they avoided whiskey, fights and unionization.(Griswold, 121) Griswold compliments the Chinese workforce. Though they were subordinates to Irish foremen, he notes that they were even respected the one time they went on strike. Charley Crocker, CP director and construction supervisor, later said that in a strike white laborers would have been prone to murder and drunkenness, but the Chinese, in contrast, stayed in their camps and instigated no violence.(Ibid, 197)

Bain describes the Chinese as “ant-like.” He takes a humorous approach to the subject, explaining the CP saw good reason to hire “Chinamen” as masons, remarking, “Didn’t they build the wall?”(Bain, 221) According to Bain, the Chinese worked for other railroads previous to their contributions to the CP, a fact that prior volumes omit. Lewis and Griswold give the impression that the Big Four hatched the idea of utilizing Far East labor.

In general, Lewis considers the Big Four as ruthless tyrants bent on fattening coffers regardless of the consequences. The book portrays Mark Hopkins as the anomaly of the group, explaining, “the role of capitalist made him faintly uncomfortable.”(Lewis, 127) Hopkins was the most conservative of all. Indeed, his growing wealth hardly changed his habits. Due to his lifelong hatred of waste, Hopkins lived in a rented cottage while Stanford and Crocker built extravagant mansions. Only later did Hopkins build a similar dwelling and only then to please his social-conscious wife. Fittingly, Hopkins never lived in the mansion because he died before its completion. News accounts of his death described him as the most likable of the associates, with none of the vanity and little of the ruthlessness exhibited by his partners.

Lewis depicts Huntington as the ruthless genius behind the operation. He set prices not by what an article cost him, but by how badly his customer wanted it.(Ibid, 221) One writer called him “scrupulously dishonest.”(Ibid, 211) He was anything but a philanthropist. Under his control, the traveling public was not pampered.(Ibid, 218) Early on, while the Union Pacific adopted Pullmans, then the most state-of-the-art, comfortable railroad car, the CP retained the sub-standard “Silver Palace” models, whose brand name was the only good thing about them.(Ibid, 339) Huntington’s egoism and greed was obvious when he said the quality he most admired about himself was his ability to make an investment turn a profit.(Ibid, 220)

Making a profit was Stanford’s obsession. According to Lewis, he loved making money almost as much as he did spending it. At Stanford’s death, the university erected in the memory of his son almost folded because of his reckless expenditures. As president of the company the first 28 years and as governor of California, Stanford was largely a figurehead who enjoyed the spotlight but was easily outmaneuvered. He served more or less as the public relations representative of the railroad. According to Lewis, Crocker was also a subordinate, a man best suited for taking orders. Crocker supervised the actual construction and sold his stock two years after 1869 because he did not want to be confined to an office. The volume casts Huntington as the dominating figure of the eventual monopolistic “octopus” that tightened its grip on California and much of the 1870s West while Hopkins contented himself with keeping the accounts.(Lewis, 167)

Griswold discusses how pre-CP companies feared the nascent railroad would ruin monopolies they had already established. For example, the Sacramento Valley Railroad (SVRR) unabashedly spread scandalous lies about its impending competitor.(Griswold, 30) Later, the SVRR spread a rumor that CP directors only planned to build as far as Dutch Flat, a town 70 miles east of Sacramento. The gossip delayed bonds from San Francisco, but fortunately for Huntington and his CP counterparts, the libelous material did not dissuade other sources of much-needed financial help. Upon the railroad’s completion, the more robust version of the CP did destroy prior monopolies and formed its own monopoly that went unrivaled for more than fifty years.

Like the CP, monetary help came slowly for the UP directors, who had only laid a mile and a half of track until brothers Oakes and Oliver Ames provided unmarred credibility, and most importantly, indispensable financial backing for the struggling corporation. The UP desperately needed a good reputation because it was in the incapable hands of Thomas C. Durant, a former doctor turned speculator who Griswold depicts as all show and no substance. Durant’s shaky leadership was obvious as he tried to hire Dodge as chief engineer before the UP was even a corporation, assured potential UP investors the enterprise had money when it did not, and unnecessarily lengthened the distance of the railroad to grab more government subsidies, among other ills. Durant constantly bickered with other UP management. For instance, he delighted in making appearances that other directors despised. However, in one instance his showmanship proved beneficial. Durant’s extravagant celebration held when the UP reached the 100^th meridian, 247 miles west of its terminus in Omaha, generated favorable publicity and facilitated the sale of more company bonds.(Griswold, 185) Despite this lone positive outcome of a Durant idea, Griswold portrays the UP director as a railroad villain, an unmatched example of unscrupulousness. Durant’s sole aim, according to Griswold, was to earn a huge profit in building the railroad then sell out when it was completed and let someone else experience the repercussions of his mismanagement.

Empire Express portrays Durant as a scoundrel also. The volume strongly emphasizes the infighting in the UP boardroom, usually caused by Durant. Bain draws further attention to Durant’s sketchy dealings by detailing lawsuits Durant filed that impeded construction and ill-advised high-interest loans he endorsed. Durant enjoyed “poisoning” reputations for his personal gain and made scenes at directors’ meetings when he did not get what he wanted. With a touch of hilarity, Bain illustrates how UP workers felt about Durant. When laying out the streets of Cheyenne, Wyoming, UP surveyors, under Dodge’s supervision, named a street after nearly every director, except Durant.(Bain, 373)

In contrast to the UP, A Work of Giants generally depicts the CP directors’ relationship as harmonious, mainly because they were so anxious to succeed.(Griswold, 88) The CP backers all had specific jobs and little “comradely” feeling toward on another, but they had a mutual trust, which proved necessary since during most of their early tenure Huntington remained in New York ordering necessary supplies and constantly lobbying for Eastern financial backers. Though the book’s tone is generally favorable towards the CP, it does touch on the firm’s more underhanded dealings, such as bribing newspaper reporters for favorable press by giving them CP stock and charging it to the construction account.

While other volumes are weak in explaining the two competing railroads’ bribery and espionage, Empire Express is not. It mentions Huntington’s attempts to plant spies around UP directors, such as in the form one of the competing line’s attorneys, dangling a gift of $20,000 worth of CP stock.(Bain, 393) Bain also offers a more detailed account the UP’s bribery of many influential senators and congressional representatives, which later led to the Credit Mobilier Scandal.

While Athearn is relatively mute on corruption in the two railroad companies, he adds important details in other aspects of first transcontinental line’s construction. For instance, he details the widespread popular misunderstandings regarding the route’s geography. Many Americans thought the Intermountain West and high plains was an uninhabitable desert. Skeptics argued that only the government could build such an unprofitable road. “This now-pessimistic, now optimistic view of the Great Plains that so sharply underscored the American public’s suspicion and ignorance of the country,” Athearn noted, “deeply concerned supporters of the Union Pacific project.”(Athearn, 33) According the author, the barriers perceived by potential investors were purely psychological and caused by an idealistic view of the land the UP would later develop.

Fortunately for UP directors, pessimism turned to optimism. As the UP ventured deeper into Nebraska, misconceptions about the land subsided and the general public eagerly anticipated how the iron horse would transform their lives. Bayard Taylor, a well-known traveler, author and lecturer of the day, predicted the influence of the road in promoting settlement would be more appreciated as it approached completion.(Ibid, 43) Taylor’s prophecy held true. As the UP advanced west of Omaha, the nation increasingly recognized the benefits of locomotive travel, foreseeing cheaper shipping costs of all necessary goods and a means to visit relatives in the East. Soon the nation took a nationalistic view of the railroad, perceiving it as a public necessity that would bind the nation together. By 1869, to criticize or oppose the enterprise was almost unpatriotic.(Athearn, 56)

Omaha newspapers touted the railroad as a “pinnacle of fortune” that would expand the West’s population and be the “almoner of prosperity.”(Ibid, 38) One job advertisement in an Omaha newspaper boasted “good wages will be given,” an attraction many could not pass up, an attraction that made Omaha similar to any “terminopolis” whose population suddenly exploded.(Ibid, 39) Later terminus towns like Laramie and Cheyenne, Wyoming, experience lawlessness and debauchery that gave them the nickname “hell on wheels.” Prostitution and shootings commonly occurred in towns such as North Platte, Nebraska and Julesburg, Colorado. Although permanent settlers and UP laborers brawled regularly, violence did not dominate the scene. The UP encouraged political organization in the towns it spawned, Athearn attests. For example, UP surveyors laid out Cheyenne in July, 1867. Citizens of the future capital of Wyoming elected a mayor and councilmen by August. Mormons were especially disgusted by the wickedness that railroad workmen brought, but were relieved that such corruption dissipated once the tracks were completely laid.

Athearn ably covers the Mormon viewpoint on the railroad’s construction. Earlier volumes largely ignore how the enterprise influenced Utahns. Athearn traces how the national prejudice against the Mormons convinced many Gentiles that the Saints would resist the project. Responding to such negativity, the Deseret News, the Salt Lake newspaper, felt it needed to continuously assure the Utah population that the railroad would be a benefit the territory. Later, while building the Utah Central Railroad, a connector to the transcontinental line, Mormons fully realized the advantages of rails and felt they were building the railroad “for the kingdom.”(Athearn, 266) Of course, the railroad was a boon to Utah. It softened preconceived notions about Mormonism as travelers from the East were more easily able to reach the largest settlement between Omaha and San Francisco and see that it was in good order.(Ibid, 83) Brigham Young, president of the Mormon Church, viewed grading contracts awarded to his people by the UP as a godsend to the territory’s economy.(Ibid, 91) Athearn even attributes the birth of Utah’s important department store, the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution, to financial encouragement from the railroad.(Ibid, 79)

Sections of Leonard Arrington’s book Great Basin Kingdom explain the Mormon viewpoint in greater detail than the four other volumes. Arrington indicates that, contrary to the popular belief of the time, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints advocated the building of the transcontinental railroad. The Utah Territorial Legislature sent a memo to Congress asking consideration for a railroad to the Pacific Coast in 1852.(Arrington, 236) Brigham Young, president of the church, said that Mormonism would be a poor religion if it could not stand one railroad.(Ibid, 237) Few statements from church leaders or Utah media expressed downright displeasure against the project. The church welcomed the trains, but deplored some of their consequences, such as riffraff workers and the effects upon Utah’s economy.

One reason the church looked favorably upon the railroad was its cheaper, faster and easier means of bringing converts to the Utah oasis. The iron horse also provided positive public relations for the once-isolated Mormon enclave, which much of the nation viewed in a negative light before the railroad’s emergence. Grading contracts, some argued, would show that LDS members were patriotic and interested in “consummating this great national good.”(Ibid, 262) Arrington notes that Brigham Young hailed the railroad grading contracts as a godsend that pumped vital cash into the Utah economy, though he feared its other economic consequences. Mormon leaders tried to engage in a moral sanction against the importation of “wasteful commodities” such as liquor, tobacco, fashionable clothing and elegant furniture.(Arrington, 240) The church hierarchy also feared that cheap imports would destroy local industry, take away money from Mormons, put more specie in the pockets of non-Mormon merchants, and promote local unemployment. For example, Young feared that cheaper food from the Midwest would undersell Utah-produced fare because the Midwestern victuals did not carry the added expense of irrigation.

Arrington adds further depth to the Mormon perception of the railroad by chronicling the efforts of the School of the Prophets, whose activities are not often mentioned in other scholarship detailing the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. The School acted as a Ku Klux Klan-like organization that policed the virtue of the territorial population. The group sought to minimize the influx of those who might threaten community morals. Such attempts to protect inhabitants’ values led to the signing of the grading contracts, a measure the School hoped would eliminate the importation of more raucous laborers.(Ibid, 246) The School also sought to discourage Gentile settlers by undervaluing Utah’s mineral wealth and criticizing Mormon suppliers who refused to patronize local enterprises. To avoid this problem, the church tried to channel all vital imports through its own wholesale trader, ZCMI, and boycotted Gentile businesses and trading establishments.(Ibid, 248)

All five books present valuable insights into the building of the first transcontinental railroad. However, each volume has weakness. Lewis, because the book was written in 1938, bows to the sensational, yellow-journalistic information by devoting too much space to the trivial matters surrounding the four partners’ private lives, which bare little on railroad matters. Perhaps also he is too swept away by the anti-business sentiment of New Deal America, which blamed Wall Street and corporate greed for The Great Depression. Whatever the case, Lewis’ book is overwritten and too detailed. A shorter volume would have been even more effective. Nevertheless, Lewis’ account is highly critical, even to the point of suggesting the role of railroad builders was one that none of them deserved. On the other hand, Lewis balances his portrayal by crediting the Big Four with having “accomplished the most momentous engineering and financial feat of their generation.”(Lewis, 283)

Financial stimulation is where Union Pacific Country proves monolithic. Throughout his narrative, Athearn views the railroad as the sole harbinger of economic progress in the West. It was a major contributor, but not the only contributor. The book is also monolithic in that it hardly mentions the role of the Central Pacific.

One might also fault Athearn’s statement that the nation “gladly” turned its attention to the building of the transcontinental railroad after the Civil War.(Athearn, 16) This declaration contradicts his later emphasis on the pessimism with which Americans viewed the project and the Union Pacific’s difficulty in convincing potential investors to purchase its stock. The UP looked doomed after it had only laid a mile and a half of track and was only bailed out of financial crisis by the Ames brothers, Oakes and Oliver, famous shovel manufacturers from Boston, who, along with other Boston elite, invested nearly $5 million in the struggling railroad. But, even this money quickly ran out. Athearn again contradicts himself only four pages later when he asserts that, “The ensuing reluctance of investors to participate in the great national enterprise probably came as no surprise to those who went west by wagon in 1862.”(Ibid, 21) Athearn would have been better off had he omitted such a statement and let his narrative tell the reader that attitudes toward the railroad grew more positive as construction progressed.

Many readers might roll their eyes after reading the introduction’s claim that the book strives for “as much objectivity as possible.”(Ibid, 17) Athearn demonstrates his failure to learn the first rule of feature newspaper reporting: show, don’t tell. By emphasizing his objectivity, Athearn makes many readers skeptical from the beginning and take his narrative lightly. Instead he should display his objectivity with detailed, well-balanced text. Still, however, Union Pacific Country is balanced history of the railroad directors, their workers and other people and industries the railroad affected.

While Griswold emphasizes the valuable contributions of Chinese workers, he largely eliminates the viewpoint of railroad workers. The volume is written too much from the perspective of management. Griswold’s book should have included more of the commoners’ standpoint. The absence of such a point of view, however, cannot be blamed entirely on Griswold, but on the lack of source material. Many laborers were illiterate and most of literate employees probably did not keep a diary. In addition, during that time period, workers’ opinions were not highly respected. Not until the emergence of oral history in the latter 20^th century were inferiors’ opinions reported and even considered significant. Griswold’s prose, and any history before the end of the 1900s, would be more informative and less biased if tape recorders would have been available.

Despite this weakness, A Work of Giants is enlightening and suitable for any booklover. It fully describes the building of the first transcontinental railroad and includes anecdotal stories that contribute a more humanistic dimension to the narrative. Interestingly, Griswold was not a professional historian. He was an editor for Popular Science magazine who became obsessed with the story of the first transcontinental railroad. His findings contribute to further scholarship on the subject. In particular, Griswold’s entertaining and informative volume correctly credits capitalism with being the driving force behind this engineering marvel and the development of the nation.

Arrington’s position as director of Brigham Young University’s prestigious Charles Redd Center has both advantages and disadvantages. With his access to church sources, Arrington provides greater detail about how the transcontinental railroad influenced Utah than previous works. However, his membership in the church also makes him view the events with an uncommonly positive bias. After reading this section, one might think Mormons can do little wrong and that any trial that comes their way is not their fault, but the fault of outside forces. Nonetheless, Great Basin Kingdom provides much needed insight on the inner-workings of the early Latter-day Saint economy not seen in other volumes.

Bain’s descriptions of railroad finances are cryptic, even for the most fiscal savvy readers. He concentrates too much text on the boardroom and not enough on the grader or tracklayer. The text is choppy, at times reaching a climax on one event then inserting a section break to move onto another. For example, on page 428 Bain mentions the CP needed to hire an assistant superintendent as a “trainmaster,” but never tells whom the directorate hired. The next paragraph talks about how heavy snowfall stopped progression of the work in the Sierra Nevadas. In short, Bain adds too much detail to his narrative. Much of the material he includes is not seen in other scholarship, but for good reason. Most of it is purely anecdotal and has little bearing on railroad matters.

Unlike many important aspects of American history such as slavery, Progressivism, and Populism, the historiography of the first transcontinental railroad derived from these five volumes differs little in interpretation. Most differences from one book to another are simply in the authors’ decisions of what to include and what to omit. However, the volumes do differ in the way they see the character of the major players in the railroad’s construction. For instance, some authors laud Dodge as impeccable, while others show readers he was just as dishonest as the next manager, if he chose to be. All volumes agree Durant was the most ignoble and Hopkins the most affable. Griswold’s account is the most enjoyable and succinctly presents the story. Of the books described A Work of Giants should be the first choice of readers newly interested in the capitalistic venture that forever bound the nation together.

Bibliography

Arrington, Leonard J. Great Basin Kingdom: Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints1830-1900. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. 1966. 534 Pp.

Athearn, Robert G. Union Pacific Country. New York: Rand McNally. 1971. 480 Pp.

Bain, David H. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Penguin. 1999. 797 Pp.

Griswold, Wesley S. A Work of Giants: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1962. 367 Pp.

Lewis, Oscar. The Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins and Crocker and the Building of the Central Pacific. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1938.

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Various labels have been attached to the ‘events’ of May 68: a ‘revolution’, a ‘student uprising’, a national strike of which the Western world had never previously witnessed, an ‘episode’ that transformed French society and intellectual thought. Personally, I believe the most appropriate and generic definition of these events is the term ‘explosion’, found in Phillipe Beneton and Jean Touchard’s seminal piece The Interpretations of the Crisis of May/June 1968. Certainly, the events were explosive in the various catalytic factors that ground France to a halt for nearly a month. Yet, there is evidence that the events were implosive in that they were a product of French national consciousness and characteristic of the youth movement of the Sixties. This eventually provided no veritable ‘fallout’ or conclusive reforms in the aftermath of De Gaulle’s resounding electoral victory of June 1968. In order to examine this argument I will focus on two areas of analysis that could be further developed in an extended piece while offering a conclusion that will aim to place these two ideas into the broader context of a historical evaluation of the events of May 1968.

Baby Boom and Bust

The Sixties saw an unprecedented amount of attention being given to the position of youth within society. Concerns relating to juvenile delinquency became manifest in the moral, social and sexual freedoms that adolescents so passionately demanded. This was an era where the young physically disowned any Victorian notions of being ‘seen and not heard.’ They were being heard, across the globe, with enormous consternation and increasing importance by 1968. In 1970, President Nixon callously refereed to the students of America as ‘bums, blowin’ up the campuses.’ David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, published nearly a decade earlier, offers a more coherent thesis:

“…the link between character and society…is to be found in the way in which society ensures some degree of conformity from the individuals who make it up. In each society, such a mode of conformity is built into the child, and then either encouraged or frustrated in later adult experience.” (David Riesman; The Lonely Crowd; p. 5; Yale University; 1961).

Riesman’s argument is relevant to a discussion of the Paris events if we interpret the movement as led by a misguided youth forced into conformity. The French baby-boom generation were misunderstood by their elders who saw that the young had ‘never had it so good.’ Yet, students were consistently marginalised and forced into an educational and social conformity which, through oppression, urged an explosion. Raymond Aron notes that “The young people accepted and amplified anti-Americanism, and found a meaning of life in the outlook of the guerrilla, in the mob passion of the third world, in pure violence and anarchist Utopia- not in a ‘certain idea of France’, an idea which belonged to their grandparents” (Aron; The Elusive Revolution; p. 141; Pall Mall Press; 1969). Aron touches a raw nerve: disgruntled French students were acting in a youthful outburst of somatic impetus. There were clearly definite reforms that students yearned for: yet after the initial explosion of events the May ‘revolution’ took on the tone of a carnival. Subsequently, there was an immediate implosion as students across France were unable to reconcile and direct their action with those of the workers, trade unions et al. This loss of direction is epitomised in a May 20^th (1968) interview between Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Paul Sartre (Herve Bourges; The Student Revolt; p.107; Jonathan Cape; 1968):

Cohn-Bendit: …something has begun and must necessarily keep going (Italics added).

Cohn-Bendit’s remark is reminiscent of Nicolas Ray’s depiction of youth in his 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. As two young men are about to engage in a game of ‘chicken run’, where stolen cars are driven off a cliff and the first man to leap from the vehicle is a ‘chicken’, the protagonist, Jim Stork, turns to his opponent and asks ‘why do we do it?’ The reply: ‘We gotta do something.’ The events of France 1968 clearly demonstrate this image of ‘youth’ bursting with an unbridled energy that can find no direction: from Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the desire to acquire something becomes the emotive force of protest and discontent. However, this was an implosive force which could not provide the radical social and political change that some at the time envisaged was possible.

‘France is Bored’

‘Le Monde’ journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponte’s editorial that appeared on the 15 March 1968 was not only ironically prophetic of the events to come but a damning indictment of the French national consciousness:

“The French are bored…Youth is bored…And so nothing disturbs the calm (Quoted in: Roger Absalom; France: The May Events 1968; p. 22; Longman; 1971).

For a nation that had enjoyed over twenty years of relative political and economic security, the explosion of May 1968 can be seen as an implosion of the French sense of insecurity and joie de vivre. The revolutionary spirit that captured the imagination of the French people was more a celebration of stability and a reaction to government complacency than it was an attempt to radically embrace a new national ideology: “May 1968 was a carnivalesque inversion of all rules and norms imposed by society…” (Robert Gildea; France Since 1945; p.152; OUP; 1996). This is not to play down the significance of the May explosion, but to relate the events in terms no more fundamentally different than those sweeping the globe. In essence, this event was a very French expression of ‘revolution’: mixing national pride with Gallic notions exalting the ‘spirit of youth’ and revolution. Raymond Aron sums up this consciousness:

“…France is a country which is afraid of modernity, and whose aspirations to the impossible are condemning it to a form of underdevelopment, and whose revolutionary spirit- still verbal, but potentially (italics added) perhaps effective- has become its spiritual point of honour” (Aron; The Elusive Revolution; p.141).

However, the French nation did also have genuine concerns that encompassed those of the students: they were dissatisfied with the modus operandi of government bureaucracy. This was certainly a legitimate concern, yet it did not form the basis of a national urge to overthrow the current regime, merely to iron out the creases of an extremely ‘young’ Fifth Republic. Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville elaborate:

“…it (the events) was a revolt against ruling bureaucracies, administrative machines, professional apparatuses. It found expression in an urge to run one’s own affairs…This aspect of the disturbance was specifically French- because French professional life is more hidebound than most …what happened in May…was compared to the Utopian rebellions against the first Industrial Revolution” (Seale and McConville; French Revolution 1968; p. 226; Penguin; 1968).

The most active echelons of society in the explosion, notably the workers, were not nearly as enthused as the students in taking the Gaullists to the guillotine. Indeed, many were unenthusiastic to strike until urged to by the CGT and CFDT. Many of the older generation of workers regarded the students as ‘les agitateurs-fils a papa’ (agitators with rich daddies). Younger workers, though interested in what the students who greeted them at the gates of French industries had to say, did not take up a call to arms. In the words of Seale and McConville, “…it was just a good old-fashioned strike for bigger take-home earnings and a shorter working week” (French Revolution, p. 227).

On the night of 29th June, 1968 De Gaulle delivered a spectacular speech which successfully reminded the adult population that enough was enough: the carnival was over. For the majority of France, they too agreed it was time to return the status quo and responded to his call with overwhelming electoral support. Tyler Stovall notes that: “While many French people were obviously dissatisfied with the normal order of things, they did not want a Communist Revolution. Moreover, by this time ordinary citizens were simply getting tired of disorder, of long lines at gas stations and mountains of uncollected trash” (Tyler Stovall; France Since the Second World War; p. 75; Longman; 2002). The explosive fervour that had rocked both the nation and the world for nearly a month had now imploded into a desire to return to ‘normalcy.’

Conclusion

This paper has examined the conceptual framework for an argument of the events of May 1968 based upon the theory of implosion. Specifically, this includes an examination of the relationship between the mores and milieu of French society with the broader theme of youth vis-à-vis the ‘Sixties.’

Below are some major points of consideration in order to achieve this:

• The use of primary material to support these analyses. There is a wealth of information that could support my argument: opinion polls of the time, editorials, written and oral statements to name a few.
• An extensive consideration of the literary, historical and social thought of the sixties. This would apply more, yet not exclusively, to the concept of ‘youth’ rather than French national consciousness.
• A thorough conclusion as to the aftermath of the events of May 1968.
• A detailed explanation of the theory of ‘explosion’ versus ‘implosion’.
• A broad perspective of French History and its implications on May 1968.

With these in mind I believe it would be possible to use my points of analysis and transform them into a fresh dialectical interpretation of the events of May 1968 in France. Furthermore, with speculative History becoming an increasingly legitimate discipline, there is an imperative to relate the events of May 1968 and the Sixties as a whole to our society. With Afghanistan and the ‘war on terrorism’ having replaced Vietnam, anti-American sentiment a prevalent force and the ever-increasing issue of University and infrastructure funding plaguing Great Britain, the ‘explosion’ of May 1968 has re-emerged as a topical subject of analysis.

The world spins around us
We search for a balance
The secrets lie in darkness and light
Our lives are like treasures
Unveiled as perfection
A gift to us from spirits on high
Equator. Divider. Equate us. Combine us.
To seek the answers beyond our sight…

Spirits, Gil Scott-Heron

Bibliography

1. Absalom, Roger; France: The May Events 1968; Longman; 1971.
2. Aron, Raymond (trans. Gordon Clough); The Elusive Revolution; Pall Mall Press; 1969.
3. Bourges, Herve (trans. B.R. Brewster); The Student Revolt, The Activists Speak; Jonathan Cape; 1968.
4. Gildea, Robert; France Since 1945; OUP; 1996.
5. Reader, Keith A.; The May 1968 Events in France; Macmillan; 1993.
6. Riesman, David; The Lonely Crowd; Yale U.P.; 1961.
7. Scott-Heron, Gil; Now and Then, The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron; Payback Press; 2000.
8. Seale, Patrick and McConville, Maureen; French Revolution 1968; Penguin; 1968.
9. Stovall, Tyler; France since the Second World War; Longman; 2002.

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One group of people that came around during the same era and helped to usher in many of the changes that came with Progressivism were journalists nicknamed muckrakers by Teddy Roosevelt, notorious for their ability to arouse the interest of the public and indirectly mobilize them to fight for change. One area that muckrakers influenced significant change to be made was the business world, at the time ripe with a lack of labor rights, and bustling companies that were achieving trust/monopoly status completely dominating whatever industries they were a part of.

The work of the muckrakers began around the turn of the century, but arousing awareness and interest in matters of social concern was not an unprecedented thing. In the second half of the 1800s, the first magazines had been formed that targeted the general public, and newspapers started writing in a “dumbed-down” style and using cartoons and vivid headlines, more accessible by the average American of the day than the more intellectual style of writing that had previously dominated. These moves were being made with the intention that the common man would become interested in political and social issues and take up a side in the debate (Filler, 29-31).

Major newspaper publishers of the time were E.W. Scripps, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the three listed largely regarded as more liberal and “yellow” than the one before him. Their newspapers stirred controversy among the public, but really took a backseat to magazines in terms of impact because newspapers were published and read locally, and therefore only really stirred local controversy (Filler, 29-30).

At a standard price of 35 cents, magazines of the time (late 1800s) were largely un-affordable by struggling commoners that rarely had the spare change to pick one up. That is, until the Irish-born S. S. McClure, plagued with low sales and finally able to afford to publish a cheap magazine thanks to new technologies, decided to create a magazine for the average American and set his price at 15 cents. His major competitors, John Walker’s Cosmopolitan and Frank Munsey’s Munsey’s Magazine lowered their prices to 12 and 10 cents, respectively, in response. Munsey’s never went on to any real muckraking notoriety, as the owner was more interested in making money than educating the public, but McClure’s and Cosmopolitan both became home to radically-thinking, talented writers the likes of Ida Tarbell and Jack London. In the wake of the success of these “popular magazines,” other publishers and titles arose, and it became clear that these forerunners to the real muckraking era were here to stay (Filler, 35-40)

Muckrakers had a major impact on the public’s attitude toward big business very early on, and some suggest that they were almost inspired in a way by Theodore Roosevelt’s early 1900s trust-busting activities, which were covered by most popular magazines and newspapers. The first muckraker to stir huge controversy with regard to American business was Ida Tarbell, with her series on the history of the Standard Oil Company (published by McClure’s). It is important to note that Tarbell was not necessarily the first muckraker-that title is up for debate, she was undeniably the first to stir such controversy about big business (Filler, 43-55).

Tarbell made a huge impact with her articles, which were intended to teach Americans about the inner-workings of big business. Tarbell was known for her objectivity in her writing. She was born in the Pennsylvania oil region that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was operated from and her father had lost his own oil field when the corporation found him (like many others) in the way of it’s consolidation of the industry. Still, she strove to cover all sides of the story, including that of Standard Oil higher-up H. H. Rogers. She told a story of the company’s seemingly good intentions-efficiency and organization and even talked about how their consolidation of the industry had helped to eliminate waste and lower costs, however she did not leave out any of the shady business practices it had been involved in, including bribery, fraud, and violence against labor and other business owners (Filler 104-106).

With Standard Oil being such a huge part of America, the story was impossible to ignore, and made huge waves in the American public, even without Tarbell calling anyone to any action whatsoever. The exposure of this trust and impact of it being brought to public light led to scores of other trusts being exposed before the end of the muckraking period, including Carnegie Steel, also exposed by McClure’s by another muckraker named James Howard Bridge. The result of Tarbell’s article was not then the immediate dissolving of the trust that Standard Oil had acquired, but the inspiration of many progressive-minded people to get up and fight against it (and trusts like it) as lawyers, politicians, business men with a mind for reform, and of course, as muckrakers (Filler, 107-109). As we know from history, eventually the trusts and monopolies of early industrial America were broken up, and while we can’t credit the muckrakers entirely with this, it is obvious that without the rise of popular magazines, progressive-minded publishers and public, and talented dirt-digging journalists, the changes may not have come for a long time, if at all.

Aside from stirring up trust-busting mentality, muckraking affected American business and the government’s regulation of it in other ways, including calling horrors of the food and drug industries to the public’s attention and urging government regulation of the products that businesses were selling to an uneducated public. Magazines were late on picking up the fight for pure food and drugs in America, despite the struggle of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley to get the public to take some kind of notice as to the harmful things they were being sold, such as drugs containing high levels of alcohol, cocaine and morphine. Finally, the struggle was picked up by Edward Bok, editor of Ladies’ Home Journal (Filler, 144-148).

Bok published a series of articles on the dangers of patent medicines using information dug up by a young lawman named Mark Sullivan. Bok’s articles ran in his own magazine, while he sent a more legally-charged article by Sullivan to Collier’s, who ran the article as part of a series of anti-patent medicine articles and cartoons. The Pure Food and Drug Act was being introduced to Congress as both magazines continued to publish articles urging public support and Congress’ passage of the bill. However, drug lobbyists were working hard to make sure the bill would not get through the Congress.

The bill was helped to be passed when Upton Sinclair published his famous book about the meat-packing industry, The Jungle, in 1904. Sinclair, a socialist, had spent time with meat-packers, studying the industry and the way it operated, as well as its treatment of employees. He had hoped with his book to call attention to the poor treatment of meat workers, but instead people focused on the horrors he described considering the sanitary aspects of the industry. The Jungle, along with many magazine articles on the same topic made people jump up and write letters to the president and congress, urging the passage of a Pure Foods bill and along with it, the drug bill as well. Though not a complete success in terms of medicine, medicine-producing companies were now required to list all of their ingredients and appropriate uses for the medicine in plain sight on the packaging, definitely progress from being allowed to do whatever they wanted (Filler, 162-170). For this progress, of course, we have the muckrakers and Upton Sinclair to thank, for shocking the American public with the truth, and forcing change.

One of the most important areas that muckrakers helped create public awareness in and influence changes to be made in the business world was labor. In the early 1900s, men, women and children were all working in unsafe conditions for ridiculously long hours and being paid low wages to do so. Something needed to be done.

One article that had great influence on turning around unsafe working conditions in American factories was William Hard’s “Making Steel and Killing Men,” published by Everybody’s Magazine. The article told of men dying in accidents caused by blast furnaces, and the general unsafe nature of working in a typical steel factory. It also illustrated management’s lack of care for their employees and emphasis on the bottom line-making money (Weinberg, 340).

The article and articles that came after it pointing out unsafe conditions in specific factories sparked the rise of safety committees within factories, safety rules being created, and inspectors being delegated by the government to make sure workplaces were fit for working in. Within 10 years, 40 states had adopted workmen’s comp laws to assist men and women injured on the job, even in conditions deemed safe (Weinberg, 341).

Child labor had existed forever, but had become a menace with the rise of industrialization because of the hard work and unsafe conditions children were subjected to in crude factories and mines. Articles by Edwin Markham and William Hard called public attention to the growing problem of heinous working conditions and exploitation that child laborers were being subjected to. Cosmopolitan, which had published Markham’s article (a glimpse into the life of a child laborer) urged people to join the Child Labor Federation, which had been attempting to convince lawmakers to pass laws protecting the children (Weinberg, 359-360).

By this time, muckraking had clearly become an effective catalyst for change, and the public responded. Soon, protective legislation was passed with regards to children in 2/3 of the country. Laws were passed restricting trade by companies that used child labor (an attempt to keep them from doing it), however these laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Muckraking had basically fizzled out by the time child labor was completely eradicated, but the influence of the muckrakers with regards to the issue is clear to see (Weinberg, 360).

Muckrakers exercised their influence over the mobilization of the progressive public in areas other than business regulation, and even in other areas within the scope of business, however these are some of their most important. When researching individual muckrakers, one could easily come up with scores and scores of articles relating to business practices in some way, and if the writer had significant distribution and a knack for arousing interest, there would no doubt be a reaction to the issue to be found somewhere within the progressive society of the day. However, I’m pretty bored with talking about the early-1900s and am now going to shift into something that affects us today, that being the lack of mainstream revolutionaries, modern-muckrakers, and progressivism as an accepted and mainstream way of thought in the modern day.

The implications of the progressives and the muckrakers went hand in hand, and were a huge phenomenon, specific to a certain time frame within the first 30 years or less of the 20^th century. Today more than ever, there is undoubtedly corruption in the business world, and huge corporations finding ways around rules and engaging in shady practices and no doubt doing damage (whether we notice it or not) to our country by outsourcing jobs, artificially inflating prices, etc. It could even be argued that though there are now minimum wage laws in effect, the minimum wage is still not one that a person can easily get by on. White-collar criminals undoubtedly exist all over the country, and though their crimes deal in much larger monetary numbers than a TV that your average criminal lifted through a broken shop or home window, the latter will probably be prosecuted much harder.

Why are things allowed to go on like this in our country? Why does society stand for it? In my humble opinion, it’s not necessarily that these things are being covered up by anyone or deliberately hidden from us. Mainstream media, thanks to technology and money, now has the power to get its message to more people than ever before, and through more mediums than ever seen before. Regardless, Americans are often uneducated and left in the dark on stories that could directly affect the way they live, while being pumped full of stories about whether or not Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are dating, who won American Idol and Survivor, and how ugly Britney Spears is with no makeup on.

Why does our society function this way? We have become almost programmed to expect nothing more from our media than entertainment, be it from the funny pages or the latest episode of The Amazing Race. We have grown so accustomed to the fact that the mainstream media is now just as much a part of the money hungry corporations that the muckrakers used to expose that we don’t question what they tell us or ask for anything more than a couple murder stories a night and coverage of our favorite sport teams and celebrities.

Long gone are the days of the muckrakers as the voices of the people, and in their place we basically have to find our own news through underground media, or trust that we are getting all the information we need from a news organization that is somehow supposed to remain objective while probably run by a multi-national corporation that also owns theme parks, sports teams, record labels, movie and television production studios, and multiple television, radio, and publishing companies all of which rely heavily on advertisers to keep their pockets fat. Might there be a conflict of interest there that is beyond the publics reach and likely not looking out for them?

Yeah, a far cry from the muckrakers.

Works Cited/Additional Reading

Filler, Louis. The Muckrakers: Crusaders for American Liberalism. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.

Goode, Steven. “Muckrakers Made Mounds of Trouble.” Insight on the News. July 7, 1997. Highbeam Research. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-19571601.html

Miller, Mark C. “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” Global Issues. Dubuque: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin. 2005. pgs. 115-117

Weinberg, Arthur and Lila. The Muckrakers: The Era in Journalism That Moved America To Reform. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.

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Currently women in journalism are still working to earn equal rights, and eventually they will (Business line). Still, the early women of journalism paved the way for the young female journalist of today by showing men that women can be just as effective as males in the field of journalism. Even though women currently have more rights than they did fifty years ago; in the field of journalism they still have a long distance to go to reach equal rights.

Journalism was said to be a “man’s job” due to the fact that the people in the late 1800s and early 1900s thought that it would be too dangerous a job for a female (Nellie Bly Biography). They were afraid that women would be put into situations where they wouldn’t know how to react. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) women’s rights group says that many of the men, “Looked at women as frail little mothers whose soul purpose in life is to cook, clean, and take care of the children. Some women had a different look at things, however. These women were the women’s rights activists of journalism. They sought out to find and conquer anyone that tried to prevent them from writing.” (IFJ Women’s rights: Female Journalists).

One women who tried to work in the journalism field in a time when women were not allowed was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, also known as Nellie Bly. She became a great leader in the world of journalism because of her daring courageous efforts to show the men of the business that she could handle a man’s job.

Nellie was a female reporter desperately trying to get a job in the newspaper industry. Everywhere she went looking for a job, she was laughed out of the building because she was female. The men told her to, “Go back to the kitchen where you belong,” (Nellie Bly Biography). Nellie became angered by the way she was being treated so she decided to take matters into her own hands to prove the men wrong. She tried to prove to them that she wasn’t a frail little housewife and that she was just as brave and willing to go out and find a story as they were.

One example of her courageous efforts is when she had herself committed to a mental institution for ten days so that she could know firsthand how the mentally ill were being treated. She actually found that they were not being treated very well at all. They were treated like animals and once she released herself she wrote quite a story explaining to people what exactly goes on in a mental institution. After she wrote her story about the mental institution she was named by the New York Journal as the “Best Reporter in America,” (National Women’s Hall of Fame). Still, that wasn’t even her best work.

After hearing about the book, Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, Nellie decided to challenge Verne’s daring character, Phineas Fogg by getting around the world in fewer than 80 days. This story became this biggest topic in America. She started out on the East Coast of America and set out heading east and she returned home in seventy-two days, six hours and eleven minutes. When she returned she was honored with a line of clothing in her name, songs written about her, dances named for her, and even parades held in her honor. Nellie retired a year after her husband died and right after becoming the first woman to cover the Eastern Front in the First World War (Nellie Bly Biography). All of this recognition because she was a woman who fought for what she believed in and didn’t let anyone stand the way of her dreams. Nellie was a fighter for women’s rights in her time.

In the late 1880s and 1890s, after all of her traveling adventures, she showed the men of the business how valuable she was. She became a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World newspaper. This made her one of the first female investigative reporters. She set an example for women in journalism everywhere. With this she tried to show men that the women could do just as well as they could.

So, overall, the life of Nellie Bly shows that even though men still considered journalism a strictly male occupation, some women had the power and motivation overcome and succeed in a male dominated world. Nellie’s story was just a basic female problem of the males not seeing the females as hard news writers.

Another problem some women had concerning journalism was that of racism. So, what if there were to be a black woman journalist? Most people in the mid-1900s would call that preposterous. Yet somehow, Alice Allison Dunnigan managed to make it work. Alice would travel on behalf of President John F. Kennedy’s Committee of Equal Employment Opportunity. On her travels she encountered much harassment due to her color. Not only was she a woman trying to do a man’s job, she was a black women trying to do a man’s job.

An example of her unfair treatment is when she was looking for a hotel room and everywhere she went she was told, “No vacancies,” so she spent the night sitting up at the bus station. Since she was black many people either didn’t take her seriously or they didn’t care about a black woman. Many employers wouldn’t even consider hiring a white woman and they never even thought to hire a black one. Alice got harassed anywhere she went as a reporter. Since no one took her talent seriously she often felt like giving up her dreams of being a journalist (Women in Kentucky).

Alice had been writing small, one sentence items for the Owensboro Enterprise newspaper since she was thirteen (Women in Kentucky). She went on to go to what is now Kentucky State University, then went on to teach Kentucky history for the Todd County School System. While working there, she noticed that many of her students were not aware of the contributions of African Americans to the health and welfare of the Commonwealth. Alice then wrote what she called her “Kentucky Fact Sheets.” She gave them to all her students as required text for her class. By 1939 the articles were collected into a manuscript, however there wasn’t a publisher to publish them.

Miraculously, in 1982 the Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Tradition was finally published. She then moved to Washington, D.C during World War II and there she became the first African American female correspondent to receive White House credentials. She did what no one in that time figured a black woman could do. She became the pacesetter for African-American female news reporters as she chronicled the progress of civil rights in America.

What Alice Dunnigan did for African American women of America could be compared to what Nellie Bly did for all women. Alice stood up for what she believed in, African American civil rights. She stood up for the equality of blacks and, in the end, it paid off for black women journalists everywhere. She was finally taken seriously by not only women in the journalism field, but by the men as well. This is something that was once considered impossible. (Women in Journalism) Even through the hardship she had to deal with by being black she still stood up for what she believed in and paved a way for the black journalists of today.

There became an expansion in the field of writing among female writers during World War II while all the men were away at war. People still wanted to read what was going on and since there were no men to write about it they had no choice but to let women take some control. This also was a good opportunity for women to show that they were actually capable of writing more than just cooking recipes and home and garden tips. This gave them the opportunity to write about some hard news stories with hard news facts. This meant that they actually had to get out and do something that most people would consider being a “guys job” (IFJ Women’s rights: Female Journalists). This was a big step for women’s rights. Too many men were afraid that if their wives learned how to get “real jobs” they would end up leaving them. Many men were afraid of this so they protested against letting the women work by holding up big signs ordering the women to go back to their kitchens where they belonged. This just made the women even more stronger. They saw what impact it had on the males and so the females wrote of the male riots against females in journalism. This story, of course, made front-page news. Once the men came back after the war many of the women lost their spots as journalists and many women no longer even wanted to be journalists. They decided that the men were right and that they needed to go back to the kitchen and raise a family. But, that still left those determined women that weren’t stepping down. It took those few women, that stayed in the field of journalism, to show the returning war men just exactly what had gone on while they were away. It was just a small piece of the women’s rights movement but it had quite an impact for female writers expressing their facts and opinions.

Another famous lady in journalism was Eleanor Roosevelt. When she became the First Lady she began to hold weekly press conferences. In these press conferences she spoke only to women journalists about women’s issues (Gale Group). In 1935 she started writing a column called, “My Day.” “My Day” focused on the concerns of women. By 1939, however, Roosevelt was addressing general political topics in her column. The “My Day” article ran from 1935 to 1962. During those years the article ran six days a week, the only interruption being when her husband died. The issues of her articles were on key events such as Pearl Harbor, Hollywood and HUAC, television, Cold War, and space. She also wrote on race segregation. Examples of this were the Civil Rights bill, desegregation, Brown vs. The board of education, Jews in Europe, and the invasion of Poland. Another big issue was that of women’s issues. There were articles like women in war, housewives, women and employment, and women and work. Since she was the first lady she seemed to have a kind of power over her husband president. So, she made sure African Americans were receiving relief from New Deal programs. She used her articles to persuade readers into believing her views on society. She also helped found the National Youth Administration in 1939. This organization gave thousands of high school and college students part-time work.

The stories of Nellie Bly, Alice Allison Dunnigan, and Eleanor Roosevelt are just three of the thousands of stories of women and their struggles to make it in the cruel and hectic world of journalism. Currently journalism can be a man or a woman’s job. However, this opportunity to be a female journalist is not accepted in many countries. Some countries continue to feel that women should not be allowed to be reporters. In the developed countries, the percentage of women journalists ranges from 30%-40% (Women in Journalism). The number of female journalists in Asia differs considerably between the countries in South Asia and South East Asia. While the Nepal Working Journalist Association only has 65 female members out of a total of 452 members total. Today there are more women journalists than men working in Philippine television (Journalism & Mass Media). In Africa, women represent less than twenty percent of workers in media organizations. The numbers range from fewer than 10% in Mozambique to 30% in Zimbabwe or Tunisia (Women in Journalism). But the number of women in journalism has increased over the last few years. In Tunisia they reported to have had a 37% increase in female journalists since 1998. Every year more and more countries are letting women become journalists, but this slow process takes time for the other countries to get used to (IFJ Women’s Rights: Female Journalists). This just goes to show that America has improved greatly since the early 1900s. Many countries still haven’t caught on to women’s rights. Americas strengths on women’s rights shows other countries that women can do a great job in the journalism field if they are given the opportunity. Many countries still don’t trust that but many are switching over to follow America’s example.

The trend towards more women in journalism is confirmed by the number of female journalism students worldwide. A study carried out in 26 countries in 1993 found that women in some cases account for up to 70% of the journalism students (Journalism & Mass Media). Most were in the United States, Mexico, and Bulgaria. The average percent of female students is about 40% and this higher than the female percentage of working journalists (IFJ Women’s Rights: Female Journalists). These statistics indicate two things: One, that women are coming up and stepping into the journalism field and two, that since more women go into journalism than come out they are changing their minds about this occupation while in school. There is nothing to show exactly what the different reasons are that many females decide that journalism is not the correct occupation for them. Surveys have been conducted asking women journalists about the problems that they have faced. Some problems have been stereotypes, lack of equal pay, sexual harassment, and conflicting family and career demands (IFJ Women’s Right’s: Female Journalists).

A problem that women journalists have encountered is being able to balance between family responsibilities and career demands. Job segregation results in women getting assignments considered being less important, which in turn makes it harder for them to get a name for themselves in the profession. Instead the woman winds up becoming a secretary for the local newspaper. Even those women who are keen on becoming managing editor are often passed over in favor of male colleagues with fewer qualifications for the job (IFJ Women’s Rights: Female Journalists). While quite a few publishers and broadcasters are interested in hiring young female journalists, employment practices in a lot of media organizations result in discrimination of women. One example of that is the issue of equal pay. The right to equal pay is enshrined in national legislation or collective agreements in most countries of the world but still in most cases women journalists still earn less money than their male colleagues (IFJ Women’s Rights: Female Journalists). A man and a woman can have the same job in a media organization but the man will have an extra title, personal benefits which mean that in the end of the day he takes more money home than his female colleague (IFJ Women’s Rights: Female Journalists).

Much progress has been made in recent years and a number of media organizations have adopted programs to help facilitate equal rights between men and women in the work place (Broncianno). These organizations are trying to get rid of these non-equal rights and make the more qualified person get more money. But the representation and participation of women in journalism organizations is still too low to make as big of a difference as they would like. Even though they often represent around 30% of the membership, only few women are members of the women’s union governing bodies (IFJ Women’s Rights: Female Journalists). And even fewer organizations have women presidents. There is a women’s committee called the Syndicate National de la Presse Marocaine (SNPM), and it clauses on maternity leave and promotion procedures, which were included in the collective agreement negotiated between the SNPM and the Moroccan publishers. If female journalists want to improve their employment situation, it is essential that their concerns be taken up in negotiations between journalist’s unions and media employers to ensure equal opportunities are enshrined in national collective agreements. This would give female journalists equal pay for equal work, equal access to training, fair and transparent promotion procedures, reconciliation between work and family responsibilities, and action against sexual harassment (IFJ Women’s Rights: Female Journalists).

The problems and resolutions women have encountered over time have helped shape America not only in journalism but in life as well. Many people, even women, still think that males can always do a better job in the work environment. People such as Nellie Bly and Alice Allison Dunnigan have proven that women can survive in a male dominated world. Women still have to face a lot of the issues that the women back in the early 1900s had to face. It just makes the women stronger and more willing to push for what they believe in. If they want the right to write then let them. Let them show off what skills they may have and if they are better than some of their male colleagues then why should that be any different than if two guys were comparing each others writing. Even though many changes have been made since the days of Nellie Bly there is still many more that the people need to do for equality between the sexes.

Bibliography

American Experience, My Day. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eleanor/sfeature/myday.html. PBS Publishing, Online. 1999.

Brancaccio, Lou. Press Talk: What’s up in the World of Journalism., Vancouver, Wa. 2001.

Business Line. Journalists on a journey of self-discovery. Online. http://www.indiaserver.com. June 2000.

Cook, Clanche Weisen. Eleanor Roosevelt, Viking, 1992.

Folkerts, Jean. Journalism and Mass Communication. P.34-57 New York, NY. 1989.

Franklin, Jon. Modern Journalism. pp. 12-25. Chicago, Illinois. 1998.

Gale Group. Eleanor Roosevelt. http://www.galegroup.com/freresrc/womenhst/bio/rooseve.htm .Online. Gale Group Inc. 2001.

IFJ Women’s Rights: Female Journalists. www.ifi.org/working/issues/women/background.html. Online. 1998.

Journalism & Mass Media. Journalists. http://www.netsrq.com/~dbois/journ.html. Online. 1998.

National Women’s Hall of Fame. Nellie Bly 1864-1922. http://www.greatwomen.org/bly.htm. Online. 1998.

Nellie Bly Biography. http://www.az.essortment.com/nellyblybiogra_rsls.htm. Online. 2001.

Women in Journalism. http://npc.press.org/wpforal/ohhome.htm. Online. Washington. Press Club Foundation. Washington, DC. 1996.

Women in Kentucky. Alice Allison Dunnigan. Online. http://www.womeninkentucky.com/site/journalism/dunnigan.html. 1998.

Vercelli, Jane Anderson. Eleanor Roosevelt, Chelsea House, Chicago.1995.

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At the time in which the Cold War began many Americans were in a state of flux, after pitching in to help their country during WWII many people didn’t know what to think of life in post war America. This time would prove to be ultimately important because with the economy beginning to take a downturn and soldiers continuing to come home from duty overseas, the government was scrambling to figure out where to put all the men. Then came the answer, in 1944 the Montgomery G.I. Bill was introduced providing financial assistance for veterans to seek education. This was very important to the military and is still in place today to provide assistance and is ultimately the main reason why young men enter the U.S. military today. The G.I. Bill would serve it’s purpose providing education to millions and helping right the U.S.’ struggling economy.

As soldiers returned home and began to get an education, and marriage and birth rates went up as well. The term “Baby Boom” was coined as young couples began having kids at a rate faster than any time in American history (Bailey et. al 864). This time was very important historically because the Baby Boom and the children of that time now known as “Baby Boomers” still largely impact American politics today.

The man who would be president during this tumultuous time in American history was Harry Truman. Truman was an average American with a lack of education and some people thought wits. He would prove them wrong and his shyness developed into almost a cockiness which many historians believe lead to the beginning of the stand off between America and the U.S.S.R. that would become The Cold War. However before Truman was the man who many saw responsible for ending the war, President Roosevelt. Roosevelt along with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had begun to be known as “The Big Three” during wartime and were thought to be the catalysts in post WWII relations. The big three hammered out a historical agreement at their final conference in Yalta in February 1945. This conference had huge historical significance as Stalin agreed that Poland should be a free country and that the United Nations should be formed. Stalin quickly reigned on the Poland promise but the United Nations is now vital to present time international relations.

At the same conference at Yalta the big three also agreed that Russia would help end the war in Japan, and in return would get many concessions. All sides agreed but Russian help would not be needed as the Americans ended Japan’s reign by dropping the world’s atomic bombs. It was shortly after this time that tensions would rise between the U.S.S.R. and the United States. It seemed the rift between the two mighty nations began when each nations leader had a different idea for a post war world. Stalin had his country and his country alone in his mind when he revealed ideals for a post war world. The U.S. on the other hand wanted to prevent the spread of communism, the premier political ideal in the USSR at the time. This was so important because at the root of almost every American war has been it’s disdain for communism, and during this time it’s prime ally in rebuilding the world was a communist nation.

As American lead the way in international relations after WWII working closely with many nations the Soviets declined to participate in almost all of the world talks. Roosevelt was determined to avoid the mistakes made by President Woodrow Wilson after WWI. Not even Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945 would slow the process as the first United Nations conference was held April 25, 1945 (Bailey et al. 498). The United Nations meeting brought leaders from over fifty nations and began an organization would be vital the future of the post WWII world. This historic meeting would shape not only the world after the war, but the world’s relations from 1945 until present time.

It was shortly after The United Nations was formed that the most important disagreement between blossoming enemies the U.S. and Soviets would take place. The issue was over what to do with the newfound technology of the atom. All the world saw the damage the atom bombs had done in Japan, and all nations agreed that something must be done to regulate it. The U.S. was in favor of turning all power of atomic energy, weapons and future atomic research to an independent U.N. council. The Soviets disagreed strongly on this point and felt that no nation should be allowed to control nuclear weapons. Neither plan was never approved and began an arms race and nuclear standoff between the American’s and the Soviets that would shape the face of The Cold War for nearly 50 years. This disagreement was perhaps one of the biggest historical events in terms of world history. This issue would put the world’s two biggest powers at extreme odds for many years. However the bickering between the countries would not stop there. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were then at odds over what to do with post war Germany.

Stalin who was denied aid from the U.S. needed money to rebuild his shattered country, and was quick to remember how Germany was the cause of his countries current state. He sought reparations from the Germans and this would quickly lead into the separation of East and West Germany. West Germany become and independent state with ties close the Americans. East Germany on the other hand was under the close communist watch of the U.S.S.R.

Many other historically important events happened shortly after the start of the Cold War. Americans began to fight against communism on a global scale. In the late 1950′s Europe’s fate was at a somewhat stable standstill even though the Americans and Soviets were still at odds the continent was essentially stable. Eastern Asia on the other hand was not as lucky. In Indochina the French were beginning to lose their stronghold as communism began to take over. The U.S. had promised to help let the Vietnamese secure freedom, but as the leaders in Vietnam became more and more communist, anti-communist sediment in the U.S. continued to rise.

Tensions in Vietnam soon came to a boiling point. Guerilla fighters in Northern Vietnam soon overthrew the under powered French. The U.S. strongly deliberated helping the French, but eventually decided that financial assistance would be all they could provide. This of course would not be enough. Vietnam was soon divided into two countries, the north communist, the south democratic. This division proved to be ultimately important because leaders in the North were promised that elections would be held in the South, something that never happened and lead to disdain towards the Americans who made this promise. This would ultimately lead to anti-American sediment and the start of the Vietnam War.

The North Vietnamese sat back and resting on their laurels for the next few years, waiting for Americans to come through on their promises. This did not happen and many South Vietnamese also grew tired of the Pro-American appointed government and were anxious to have elections of their own. Wanting to nip the problem in the bud then President John F. Kennedy ordered a larger U.S. military presence in Vietnam. These orders were historically important because they lead to the influx of U.S. troops on the ground in the unstable South Vietnam.

Kennedy would continue to order troops to be sent to Vietnam and eventually the U.S. organized a coup against the very leaders they appointed. Vietnam was now in a total unstable mess. This time would foster a war that would lead to the death of over 60,000 American troops. Tensions continued to rise in Vietnam and a full fledged war erupted shortly there after. The United States fell out of favor with many of it’s world allies and were believed to have ulterior motives in Vietnam other than just the stop of communism.

The start of the Cold War and the start of the Vietnam War were both important events, but which one will be reflected upon as more important in the terms of American History? The answer is The Cold War. A war that resulted in no direct military casualties, but lasted half a century and resulted in a world change. The events that followed WWII and resulted in the beginning of The Cold War will forever mark the face of American history books. Vietnam is still viewed today as a mistake and an important military lesson, but no lesson is greater than the one that was learned the day The Cold War ended. (1531)

Works Cited

Bailey, Thomas A., Lizabeth Cohen, David M. Kennedy. The American Pageant Volume II.
Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.

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The most significant force that contributed to the shaping of human rights and their violations was the Holocaust of WWII. Although there had been an awareness of atrocities being committed, it wasn’t until the end of the war and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps that the true horror was exposed. An estimated 6 million Jews and 5 million other “undesirables” had been exterminated (powers, 47).

The horrors of the Holocaust brought new strength to the issue of human rights. In the past, foreign policies were very protective of the notion of state sovereignty. A sovereign nation reserved the right to handle situations within their own borders, as they saw fit. Outside intervention from foreign powers was not welcome, and universally discouraged. This strict adherence had contributed greatly to the devastation of the Nazi’s Final Solution – foreign governments, including the United Sates, wanted to avoid violating Germany’s sovereignty by intervening to stop the mass extermination. After the Allied victory and the liberation of the camps, however, world opinion on non-intervention shifted. As the flood of information – personal accounts, documents, photographs – reached the population, an almost universal agreement was made that these heinous acts could not be ignored, and justice must be served.

The Allied victors of the war established an International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, in order to try leading Nazi Party officials who were responsible for the planning and design of the Final Solution (powers, 48).

Although it had been introduced, the term “genocide” was not yet official terminology, and the first indictments the Tribunal placed against the defendants were crimes against humanity, including crimes against peace, for starting an aggressive war (powers, 49).

The Tribunal was significant not just in that it was the first time that the International Community held individuals accountable for violating human rights, but also because it was the first time that government officials were held accountable and faced punishment, for crimes committed against their own citizens (powers, 48). The Tribunal was cautious though, as the notion of sovereignty was still highly valued. They focused the charges on the crimes against peace, and prosecuted only those crimes that had been committed after Germany had initiated an aggressive war with the invasion of another sovereign nation (powers, 49).

Although the term “genocide” was not used in the initial indictments, it was included in the 3rd count. The defendants were accused of “…genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian population of certain occupied territories” (powers, 50). Nuremberg contributed greatly to setting the framework for official human rights.

The United Nations took the next dramatic step in 1948, when it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It wasn’t adopted as a treaty – but rather it was meant to “proclaim a ‘common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” (burns, 25). Additionally in 1948, the United Nations passed an act called the International Convention on the Prevention of and Punishment for the Crime of Genocide (powers, 57).

The collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 was extremely significant on a global scale, with the most dramatic effects being seen in Eastern Europe. With the fall of a number of oppressive regimes, newly independent states emerged, and with them, a tremendous rise in nationalism and self-determination. New governments were established, new borders were drawn. The feelings of nationalism were extremely intense and a variety of movement sprung up, primarily along ethnic lines (Evans, 19). Especially notable were the strength of these movements in the former Yugoslavia.

The Serbians developed severely intense nationalistic ideology and a determination for dominance. Prior to the Soviet collapse, Yugoslavia has consisted of 6 Republics – Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia. Slovenia successfully seceded first, and Croatia attempted to follow soon after. With a large Serbian minority in Croatia, the Serbian government was unwilling to allow the succession. A seven month war broke out, leaving 10,000 dead (powers, 247). Next was Bosnia, whose situation was even more unstable then Croatia. The Bosnian republic was the most ethnically heterogeneous of the Yugoslavian republics, and either way it ended – remaining with Serbia or breaking off, one or more of it’s significantly large ethnic groups would suffer oppression. In 1992 Bosnia declared its independence, and in the brutal war that followed, the world was introduced to a new set of human rights violations and atrocities, as well as witness to a new genocide (powers, 248).

According to Samantha Powers, in her book”A Problem From Hell”, the United Sates government were well aware that genocide was underway in Bosnia, yet they hesitated to step in and stop it (powers, 264). Finally, NATO initiated a bombing campaign and troop deployment to restore peace.

Soon after, intense violence sprung up in Kosovo, which had long been a location of intense Serb vs. Kosovo Albanian hostility. NATO launched a bombing campaign in Kosovo, hoping to force the Serbian violence to ease, yet instead, the Serbian military retaliated by stepping up it’s brutality against the citizens of Kosovo (powers, 450).

Finally in 1999, Serbian military units decide they had had enough. “They did not want to die for Kosovo and they certainly did not want to die for Milosevic” (powers, 59). Milosevic surrendered on June 3, 1999. The war in the Balkans was finally over – yet a new battle was beginning for the Serbian President and the military leaders who had carried out his orders and program of brutality against civilians – some of the greatest human rights abuses since World War II.

In May 1999, the United Nations had begun development of a War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (powers, 483). This Tribunal was very significant to the Human Rights Movement, as it set a number of precedents and further shaped the articulation of human rights.

When Slobodan Milosevic was brought to trial to face charge of war crimes, it was a milestone in the Human Rights Movement. He had actually been originally charged before his surrender, and he was the first head of state to be charged during an armed conflict with violations of International Law. His original indictment was for crimes against humanity during the war in Kosovo; however the indictment was later increased to include the charge of genocide for the atrocities committed in Bosnia (powers, 458).

General Kristic of the Serbian Army was also charged with genocide. Kristic defense argued that he was not guilty of genocide, because while every Muslim male of fighting age had been targeted for execution, the majority of the women and children were only deported. Therefore, they claimed, genocide had not occurred (powers, 478). The verdict for Kristic and the decision of the court made a substantial move in articulating further the crime of genocide, which had previously been vague.

The Tribunals goal, in addition to criminal prosecution of those responsible for the atrocities was to further define and articulate human rights – particularly in regards to mass extermination. The Genocide Convention they felt was too broad, and the atrocities committed were undoubtedly crimes against humanity, and therefore, should be included in the Convention. They termed the phrase “ethnic cleansing”, which they defined as “rendering an area wholly homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of a given group”. This had been carried out by a variety of violent means, including forced removal displacement / deportation, murder, torture and rape and sexual assault (powers, 483).

The revised, more detailed dimensions of genocide were validated in the August 2001, when General Kristic was found guilty of genocide, based on his agreement to, and promotion of, ethnic cleansing. By early 1999, the ICTFY had convicted more then 80 people for crimes against humanity (forsythe, 100).

The horrendous violence and atrocities in the Balkans were not the only events that shocked the world in the 1990s. The massacres of approximately 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda by the Hutu militants stunned the world – the reports of systematic butchering of civilians were savage (powers, 334). If there was any question regarding Bosnia, there was no question in Rwanda – this was unmistakable genocide.

In 1994, Rwanda hung in a tentative cease fire of an intense civil war. The ruling Hutu had been battling the Tutsi minority, particularly the rebels who composed the Rwandan Patriotic Front. A cease fire was in effect, and attempt at a power sharing agreement (powers, 336). The fragile peace collapsed, however, on April 6, 1994, when the Rwandan President’s plane was shot down. Almost immediately, the civil war erupted again (powers, 333). By the following day, a massive attack was underway by the Hutu army and militias, with the goal of completely annihilate the Rwandan Tutsi’s. In the subsequent 100 days, more then 800,000 Tutsi (and their Hutu sympathizers) would be massacred – a machete being the weapon of choice. Although Belgian UN peacekeepers were stationed in Rwanda, they were ordered to not intervene (powers, 350).

The genocide finally halted, and in following with the aftermath of Yugoslavia and the creation of the Hague Tribunal, the United Nations passed a resolution to establish a Tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide (powers, 484).

While there was little doubt that genocide against the Tutsi had occurred, the prosecution was determined to take a further step on articulating crimes against humanity, by including systematic rape. It was argued that rape could result in a group being destroyed – “debilitation of a group to such an extent that the remaining members could no longer contribute in a meaningful way to society” (powers, 485). The Tribunal accepted the argument, and in September 1998, found Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of genocide due to his attempt to destroy the Tutsi by raping the women (powers, 486). With this verdict, mass or systematic rape became an official violation of human rights.

While the forces of the Holocaust, the United Nations adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Balkans wars and the Rwanda massacres helped shape the articulation of human rights in the twentieth century, they also, ironically, intensified their violation.

The Nazi’s were not the first to attempt to systematically remove or get rid of an entire group of people. The Turkish government has attempted it during World War I, against the Armenians. They weren’t held responsible on an International legal level for the mass murder or for violation of human rights. With the Nuremberg Tribunal, precedent was set for the International community to hold the perpetrators responsible. Therefore, with the Nuremberg Tribunal, the basics of human rights were officially established. With that, the violations against these rights were also established. As a result, actual violations against these rights could occur. If and when it happened again in the future, the repercussion would be much more intense, as official violations of International law would be occurring. Further more, the perpetrators would be held accountable by the global community. This transition was further intensified by the United Nation’s adoption of the Declaration of Universal Human Rights.

The Hague trials not only articulated the actual human rights, but it made the actions involved in ethnic cleansing an actual International crime, which violators could be brought to trial for. The crime of mass rape, established at the Rwanda Tribunal, had the same effect.

The twentieth century has witnessed several intense events of true horror and devastation against humankind. However, the forces of the Holocaust, the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Rwanda genocide contributed greatly to the articulation of human rights, and at the same time, intensified their violation.

Works Cited

Burns, Weston. “Human Rights”. International Human Rights Overviews. Claude-Weston.
page 25

Evans, Tony. Human Rights fifty years on: a reappraisal. New York. Manchester University Press : 1998.
page 19

Forsythe, David P. Human Rights in International Relations. Cambridge, United Kingdom. Cambridge University Press: 2000.
page 100

Powers, Samantha. A Problem From Hell. New York. Basic Books: 2002.
pages 47-50, 57, 59, 247-48, 264, 333-4, 336, 350, 450, 458, 478, 483-86

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Although many credit the origin of hypnosis to Anton Mesmer in the 18^th century, this is not correct according to research and historical references. (Cunningham, 67) At least 2,000 years before Mesmer’s introduction to hypnosis, ancient Egyptian priests were using techniques of induction. Approximately 1550 A.D., there is evidence of Egyptian priest performing death and rebirth rituals, in what they called “Temples of Sleep”, using drugs and psychedelics to assist in the undergoing. More often than not, these rituals were fatal. Those that lived through the experience were said to “have experienced other levels of reality while being out of the physical body” (Cunningham, 67). Reports say the initiate began with a feeling of terror, followed by uncertainly, and wandering through the darkness. Although there is no real proof, this is believed to be the first account of hypnosis ever recorded.

In Greece, sleep temples were created and dedicated to the god of healing, Asclepios. These temples were constructed by the Greeks in the forth and fifth centuries B.C. The temple was considered a sacred place where a sick person would enter a state of sleep. At the height of cults, there were 420 temples, spread across the ancient Greek empire. Healing would take place while the person being cured was in a trance-like deep sleep. Priest used chanting and magical spells to put the patient into a trance, also known as incubation. A person would be kept in this state for up to three days. During this time, the priest would use suggestions that would help the person, through their dreams to make contact with Asclepios, thus helping them cure their illness. (hypothera.com)

Also, in India, yogis and rishis utilized self-hypnosis during meditation to still their minds. In India, the word hypnosis is referred to as sammohan. Sammohan has been practiced in India since the Vedic times, 1500-500 B.C. And also, in 2,000 B.C. Wond Tai, also known as the father of Chinese Medicine, wrote about a technique involving chanting and “the passing of hands” over the body. (hypnotherapy.com)

The modern history of hypnosis began in the year 1774 with a priest from Klosters, Switzerland. His name was Father Johann Gassnar. Father Gassnar used hypnotic methods to perform exorcisms. Franz Anton Mesmer was said to have watched a number of these performances in the early 1770′s. (whonamedit.com) Possibly because this was the Enlightenment Period, Mesmer had a hard time believing that Gassner’s patients were possessed by demons. Mesmer believed that Gassner’s patients were hypnotized by the metal crucifix held by the Father. (FSU.edu)

In 1777, Mesmer was able to reproduce Gassner’s cures, but he said it was through “animal magnetism” and not through exorcism. Mesmer applied magnets to his patient’s bodies and produced remarkable results. One notable case involved a woman who was suffering from hysteria that he cured using animal magnetism. Mesmer first used magnets, electrodes, and other devices when performing on his patients but later moved to using just his hands. Franz Anton Mesmer coined the term “mesmerize” after himself, of course.

As time went on, hypnotism was accepted by the medical community as being a legitimate medical practice. Many other famous psychologists played a role in helping hypnotism become widely recognized. Freud, James Braid, and Charot all played vital roles. Today, hypnotism is used for many things: smoking, self-esteem boosting, weight control, and the list goes on. Thanks to these men, we now have a essential tool that is used the world across.

Works Cited

Cunningham, Janet. “Ancient Egyptian Mythology: A Model for Consciousness”. December, 1998. http://www.janetcunnningham.com/article_egypt.html

Etymonline.com. Logo Design; McCormack, Dan. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hypnosis

FSU.edu. Florida State University. “The Phoenix Club.” http://www.fsu.edu/~trama/v6i4/vi4a6.html

Hypnotherapy.com. “The History of Hypnosis.” http://www.hypnotherapy.freeserver.co.uk/History%20of%20hypnosis.htm

Lifepositive.com. Lifepositive Inc. http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/psychology/hypno-therapy/hypnotism.asp

Simons, David. Ahahynotherapy.org. http://www.ahaynotherapy,org/history_hypnosis.htm.

Successfulhypnotherapy.com. Parsons, Richard. www.successfulhypnotherapy.com.

http://www.hypnoanalysis.com/history-of-hypnosis.html

Whonamedit.com. Enersen, Ole Daniel. 5 pages.1994-2001. http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/313.html

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Ironically, the change received with the greatest enthusiasm actually only benefited a small minority; the systematic effort to educate the masses and raise the pitifully low level of literacy. In short order, the Tsar and General Dmitri Milyutin changed many facets of the military, such as reducing the length of service and enforcing universal conscription. Since Russia remained a police state, the Tsar’s efforts to westernize the court system by encouraging an independent judiciary and introducing jury trials, were only partially successful.

Despite Alexander’s attempts to abolish the ethnic constraints, intolerance of Jews and other racial minorities in Russia remained. The reign of Alexander also was one of tremendous self-expression in Russia for great writers who were allowed to return from exile. Russian literature and journalism became more unrestricted and honest because the Tsar relaxed the censorship that was especially prevalent under his repressive father, Tsar Nicolas I.

Alexander II had grand changes that he, with the help of many important people around him, tried to force upon the people. On the other hand, the unappreciative citizens were malcontented, either because the Tsar did not carry the reforms far enough or because they wanted different changes. Throughout his reign, Alexander II survived many assassination attempts by various revolutionary groups, all with different aspirations for Russia, ultimately to be killed by the radical People’s Will in 1881.

Alexander’s predecessor, his father, Tsar Nicolas I, died toward the end of the Crimean War, leaving his son a country in cultural bondage and economic despair. One of Alexander’s first orders of business as Tsar was to end the conflict with the Ottoman Empire, France, England, and Sardinia by signing the Treaty of Paris in 1856. Alexander was not as devoted to military fighting and international politics as was his father; he concentrated more on domestic problems. The new Tsar accepted the loss in the war, which was essential because Alexander could not begin instituting his reforms until the fighting ceased. The defeat also forced Alexander to acknowledge that Russia could and must industrialize and change its policies to catch up with the western powers that had defeated them. Alexander recognized “The western wind which was blowing…against the institution of slavery.”1 The rest of the continent had already abandoned slavery, and serfdom in Russia had to be abolished if Russia was to continue being economically competitive.

On March 3, 1861, Tsar Alexander II and an executive committee established the Emancipation Act to abolish serfdom. This achievement ended years of debating, but it was not satisfying to the landowners or the serfs. The dissolution of serfdom in Russia was first proposed by Catherine II, then initiated by Alexander I, and was the top priority of Alexander II after the Crimean War.2 Since he was a child, Alexander believed that the ownership of serfs was contrary to the teachings of the Bible, and spoke of this idea to his father.3 Alexander faced the same problem that his father did; he could not simply eliminate serfdom by an imperial decree because of the numerous opposing interests in Russia, especially the landowners.

On top of the pressure to westernize his country, Alexander II fretted for the Russian people that “‘If we do not liberate the slaves, self-liberation will set in from below,”4 or through a revolt by the serfs. Compounding the problem was the fact that shortly before all of the forced workers were freed, there had been tremendous industrial developments in Russia, which caused the obrok system to become widespread. Under this system, many serfs worked in factories and on railroads, earning a little money for themselves, but also paying such large annual tributes to their owners that the owners were getting rich off of their serfs, instead of their land.5 Including their families, four-fifths of Russia’s population were freed by the Emancipation Act of 1861, which went into effect March 17 of that year. That is 48 million serfs, half of them privately owned, and the other half state owned, obtaining their freedom unaccompanied by free land.6 The day the Act became effective, hundreds of thousands of landowners were forced to surrender their serfs with no compensation, and at least one-third of their land for only meager compensation, in the form of money and bonds from the government.7

Just after the emancipation in 1861, The New York Times8 For the serfs, the emancipation did not seem like a great change because their traditional life was not transformed overnight. For the most part, they lived in the same shacks, in the same villages, farmed with the same primitive methods, and still worked to pay off debts, which were now owed to the government, instead of their masters.9 Most peasants were illiterate, uneducated, and could not understand the terms of the Emancipation Act and what was required of them in order to pay off their debts on the land. Village communities called mirs, which were run by local elders, assisted the government by collecting the large installment payments that the peasants were forced to pay for the land on which they lived. These payments were very difficult for the peasants to make, and most of them fell behind on their debts, and did not become owners of their land outright until either they had fully paid for it or, in 1906, when the Russian government reluctantly cancelled their debts. Still they obtained from the Emancipation Act their rights as citizens, equal protection under the law, the right to education, the right to buy and sell property, the opportunity to marry without interference by a landlord, and most importantly, it brought an end to human property in Russia. After this extraordinary accomplishment, Tsar Alexander II came to be referred to as “liberator of the people,”10 which Dostoevsky acknowledges in his epic novel The Brothers Karamazov. The Russians realized, as did the rest of the world, that the Emancipation Act “prompts and necessitates other changes”11 to the country. commented, “The Nobles loudly protest that they will suffer greatly by the change, and that the indemnity they receive cannot possibly make up for the loss.”

Predictably, more changes followed. In 1864, the first important development came to Russia after the emancipation; Alexander established zemstvos, or local self-governing councils that gave nobility more power. Similar committees were already in place, but their decisions were not authoritative and their jurisdiction was vague. The zemstvos, whose effectiveness varied from district to district, had clear responsibilities such as maintenance of infrastructure, fighting fires, suppressing revolutionary attacks against the Tsar, assisting the military and civil administration.12 The zemstvos also worked with Alexander II to spread popular education. The majority of Russians agreed with the writer Leo Tolstoy who declared, “‘Progress in Russia…must be based on popular education.’”13 The main goals of the Tsar and zemstvos were to raise the literacy level of the peasants to make them smart enough to be better soldiers and to vote responsibly. Together, they opened schools and encouraged people of all social classes to become educated. In spite of their efforts, however, only a small number of lower class people took advantage of the opportunity, and the majority of Russians remained uneducated and illiterate.14 Reforms in the military, which were carried out by the Tsar and General Dmitri Milyutin, also promoted education. For example, under Alexander II, the length of service in the military was reduced from 25 years to six years of active duty, nine in the reserves, and six with the colors for those soldiers with no formal education. Duty with the colors was progressively reduced with a soldier’s educational qualifications such that a university-educated man could enlist for only six months.15 The first of many other successful reforms in the military that went into effect under Tsar Alexander II was ridding the army of humiliating corporal punishment such as forcing a soldier to run the gauntlet until he fell dead of exhaustion, improving medical services, and instituting universal conscription that made all men, including those in the upper-class, liable for service at the age of 20.16

Alexander’s plans to westernize and improve Russia went beyond the zemstvos, popular education, and the military. The Tsar also attempted to westernize the court system. In 1862, a plan was submitted to Alexander outlining improvements that he wanted to make to the legal system that would benefit former serfs, such as impartiality of judges and equality of all citizens under the law. In 1866, courts were opened under these new reforms. Lifetime judicial appointments were made so judges did not have to worry about repercussions for their rulings. Also, all cases were heard publicly and trials by jury were conducted in the most important cases.17 In spite of Alexander’s efforts toward these improvements, the Tsar remained above the law, and Russia continued to be a police state such that the new courts were often bypassed to evade consequences for illegal actions by the aristocracy and nobility.18

Alexander II did more to help the Jews and various other racial minorities than any other Tsar before or after him, but anti-Semitism was still prevalent in Russia and many disabilities remained. He allowed Jews to attend universities and permitted for the appointment of the first Jewish professor. With increased participation of Jews in commerce and the industrialization of Russia, the Tsar was prepared for the emergence of a Jewish aristocracy of intellectualism and wealth, but he was not ready to eradicate all incapacities against them.19 Because of the disabilities Alexander abolished, Jews were able to live in Russian towns, but were still barred from owning land except through trade and from residing in central and eastern Russia.20

Also during Alexander’s reign, censorship of works by journalists and authors was relaxed. The term of Tsar Nicolas I was “called the ‘Censor’s Reign of Terror’”21 because of the strict control exercised over the writers’ works under penalty of being sent, as was Fyodor Dostoevsky, to Siberian prison camps. The period of Alexander’s rule was that of the greatest self-expression in Russia because authors returned from Siberia and others, like Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenief, wrote their most famous works.22 Russian newspapers were allowed to discuss international and domestic politics, including the serf problem, but some subjects that Alexander II believed could be dangerous to the country were still banned.23 After an assassination attempt in 1866, Alexander became more rigid about the content of the press.

The diverse people of Russia did not realize how much Tsar Alexander II had changed the country, and they wanted more changes that would benefit their selfish needs. Even after Alexander excused Dostoevsky from prison in Siberia and loosened censorship, the writer was not grateful and told editor and publisher A.S. Suvorin that he would not make any effort to save the life of Alexander, even if he had a clear opportunity to do so.24

Alexander Herzen, an exiled revolutionary who published the influential newspaper Kolokol (The Bell) that was banned in Russia, made three principal demands of Alexander II; emancipation of the serfs, abolition of corporal punishment, and relaxation of censorship. The Tsar made these three reforms, but Herzen, like most Russians, remained unsympathetic and unappreciative of the Alexander’s efforts.25 From Alexander’s reign of great self-expression, destructive and extreme forces such as Slavophiles, Nihilists, and Marxists were able to emerge and pose threats to the Tsar’s life. After numerous assassination attempts on the Tsar’s life, Alexander II was killed on March 14, 1881 by an explosion set off by the revolutionary group The People’s Will. Reportedly, in his pocket was a draft of a constitution on which he had been working and had hoped to implement within a month.26 The People’s Will was a radical group that wanted popular representation in government and the freed serfs to own their land and not be forced to pay for it in installments. This terrorist band and many others like it believed that the Tsar was not pushing his reforms far enough.

Tsar Alexander II made substantial reforms in Russia that affected all her people, but he could not please everyone. The Tsar’s efforts were designed to catch up with the West, but the reforms were only partially successful relative to what Alexander intended. The people were not satisfied by the Emancipation Act, which the government had been working on for almost 100 years, and was finally passed by Alexander II trying to rid his country of the immoral institution that was illegal in most European countries. Russians also did not embrace the Tsar’s attempt to legitimize the judiciary system and abolish disabilities of minorities and Jews partially for the reason that Alexander did not fully commit to those reforms. Alexander II was successful in accomplishing his goals for the military and instilling an effective local self-government, but Russians did not take advantage of the opportunities that Alexander provided for popular education. The writers of the day did not even care for the Tsar, though he had relaxed censorship instilled during the strict reign of Nicolas I. Tsar Alexander II did attempt material and necessary reforms upon Russia and made tremendous improvements upon the backward nation that lost the Crimean War. On the other hand, the people were not prepared to accept them, thus his reforms either were not appreciated or not at all what the people thought they needed.

Endnotes

1Stephen Graham, Tsar of Freedom (New York: Archon Books, 1968) 26.

2″Emancipation of the Russian Serfs,” New York Times 3 April. 1861: 4.

3Graham 3.

4Graham 34.

5Graham 35.

6Edward Crankshaw, The Shadow of the Winter Palace (New York: The Viking Press, 1976) 168.

7Crankshaw 169.

8Emancipation of the Russian Serfs,” New York Times 3 April. 1861: 4.

9Crankshaw 169.

10Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 52, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc., 1952) 125.

11″Emancipation of the Russian Serfs,” New York Times 3 April. 1861: 4.

12Graham 115.

13Graham 112.

14Graham 113.

15Crankshaw 186.

16Crankshaw 185.

17Graham 119-120.

18Leonard Bertram Schapiro, Russian Studies (New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books Viking Penguin Inc., 1987) 41-42.

19Schapiro 267.

20Graham 123.

21Graham 52.

22Graham 51.

23Graham 121.

24W. Bruce Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow (New York: The Dial Press, 1983) 255.

25Graham 53.

26Graham 309.

Bibliography

Crankshaw, Edward. The Shadow of the Winter Palace. New York: The Viking Press, 1976.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Constance Garnett. In Great Books of the Western World. Vol. 52. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc., 1952.

Graham, Stephen. Tsar of Freedom. New York: Archon Books, 1968.

Lincoln, W. Bruce. In War’s Dark Shadow. New York: The Dial Press, 1983.

Schapiro, Leonard Bertram. Russian Studies. New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books Viking Penguin Inc., 1987.

Tessendorf, K. C. Kill the Tsar. New York: Atheneum, 1986.

“Emancipation of the Russian Serfs.” New York Times 26 March. 1861: 5.

“Emancipation in Russia.” New York Times 3 April. 1861: 4.

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