Industrial Revolution

President Biden and former President Trump have both thrown their hats in the ring for the 2024 Presidential election. Before the campaigns gets into full swing, I would like to reprise some earlier posts on what I believe should be the major issues even though I know that the personalities of the two candidates will probably crowd out issues. Below is a post written four years ago on the Industrial Revolution, a phenomenon widely mis-understood especially by progressives.

 My high school granddaughter asked me to help her with a recent assignment about the Industrial Revolution. It brought to mind my college teaching experience of over fifty years ago when I taught a unit on the Industrial Revolution as part of a basic course in Western Civilization. I thought then and still believe today that the Industrial Revolution was one of the most significant developments in the history of the world.

Try to imagine a world today without the following:

Electricity

Clean water delivered by pipeline to your home

Modern sewers and waste removal systems

Automobiles

Home heating without firewood

Computers

Televisions

Air Conditioning in homes and cars

Trains, Planes, and Buses

Indoor Plumbing—before the IR there was no such thing.

Elevators

Washing Machines for clothes and dishes

Hospitals with their incredible technology

Cell Phones—most important of all!

It is hard to believe but our ancestors before the Industrial Revolution had none of these essential elements of modern life. Actually, many parts of the world today still live in the pre-industrial age without many of the items listed above. 

Industrial Revolution is the term given to the transformation of manufacturing from homes and shops to factories employing hundreds or even thousands. The transformation began in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and eventually spread all over the world. However, before there could be an industrial revolution, there had to be three other revolutionary developments. 

First, there was a Demographic Revolution involving a substantial increase in population. This increase happened not so much because of a rise in the birth rate but because of a decline in the death or mortality rate due to a dramatic drop in infant mortality, a drop caused by advances in diet and sanitation. For example, in Italy in 1860, 232 of every 1000 infants died in the first two years of life but 60 years later only 127 of 1000 infants died during the same period. 

An Agricultural Revolution accompanied the Demographic Revolution. Human ingenuity devised new methods of farming, land management, and animal husbandry to feed the growing population. While doomsayers like the British clergyman Thomas Malthus were predicting mass starvation, they could not predict that the profit motive and human resourcefulness would provide for the needs of an ever increasing population. 

A Transportation Revolution also accompanied the Industrial Revolution. The nineteenth century was the great age of canal and railroad building. At the same time, steam power replaced wind power as a safer and more reliable source of energy. The revolution in means of transportation allowed mass migrations of people from rural areas to the urban centers of manufacturing and commerce. It also allowed goods and services to be delivered faster and at less cost. 

From the beginning the tremendous social, economic, and political changes caused by these revolutions had both good and bad consequences. Rural areas lost population and industrial cities became overcrowded. Writers and social commentators were quick to point out the terrible working conditions in the factories, and the deplorable living conditions in the slums surrounding the factories. 

Moreover, critics objected, as they do today, to the incredible disparities in wealth and income between the factory owners and financiers (capitalists) who profited and the workers who toiled. The misery of the urban poor could not be overlooked. Nevertheless, in countries that did not industrialize, like Ireland or southern Italy, the poor were even worse off and literally starved to death either from actual food shortages or malnutrition. Why else would millions from Ireland and Italy leave their beautiful countries to live in the overcrowded cities of the New World?

I suspect that the Industrial Revolution still has a bad name today. Capitalist is a term of opprobrium and even capitalists shun to describe themselves as such. Even union members whose pensions are invested throughout the American industrial sector do not realize that they are capitalists. Of course, Progressives are outspoken in decrying the terrible effects of corporate greed and inequality.

It’s true that few of us will have the income or assets of CEOs, politicians, Rock stars, TV personalities, or professional athletes. But more than anywhere else in the world, we do have the opportunity to acquire and keep property. We can even buy and sell shares in the companies we work for. You may call it Capitalism but I prefer to call it a free-enterprise system. Whatever you call it, it has worked to raise the standard of living in this country to the highest level that has ever been seen in the world. 

My granddaughter’s class was asked to evaluate the relative merits of Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. All three systems were responses to the Industrial Revolution. You can judge for yourself which of the three systems did the best job of providing the necessities of life listed at the beginning of this essay. Before the Industrial Revolution, as one seventeenth century commentator noted, life was “nasty, brutish, and short.”

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Humphey Bogart: High Sierra

 

 

No actor, male or female, has ever appeared in more top rank films than Humphrey Bogart. Most of these films are as watchable today as they were when they first appeared in the 1940s and 50s. Most were made during Hollywood’s Golden Age when the Studio system brought together under one roof outstanding directors, writers, cinematographers, and a whole host of other craftsmen and women to produce true works of art. The actors and actresses were of prime importance, none more so than Humphrey Bogart. 

He first hit the spotlight in 1935 when he recreated his stage role as gangster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. The stars were Leslie Howard, also recreating his leading man performance in Robert Sherwood’s play, and a young Bette Davis. Bogart turned in an unforgettable performance which unfortunately hurt his career since he would become typecast as a villain in popular gangster films.

It took five years for Bogart to  break out of the mold in the ground-breaking 1941 film, High Sierra. Directed by Raoul Walsh, and written by John Huston, Bogart’s close friend, High Sierra marked the end of the traditional gangster film in that it attempted to humanize the criminal. It was Bogart’s first leading man role although he only got second billing to co-star Ida Lupino. Bogart plays Roy Earle, a notorious 1930s gangster who is pardoned after serving eight years in prison. The pardon had been arranged by his old gang boss who needs him to pull off one last big heist. 

In the opening scene we see Bogart leaving the prison and basking in his freedom. He directs the driver sent to pick him up to stop at a nearby park so he can see if trees and grass still exist. He sits on a bench and enjoys the antics of little children playing ball. Our hearts go out to him. Only in the next scene when he picks up his assignment to drive to California and lead a robbery of a wealthy resort hotel do we see his tough guy demeanor emerge. He slaps around the corrupt cop who gives him his orders.

On the drive west he stops at the old Earle family farm in Indiana which has been taken over by bankers during the depression. His nostalgic love of the farm of his childhood is evident. He even directs a young boy to a favorite fishing spot. The criminal’s yearning for the idyllic countryside of childhood would be repeated in many films to come including John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle.

 Arriving in California, he accidentally makes the acquaintance of an elderly couple who have lost their Ohio farm and have travelled west to stay with their daughter. They are traveling with their pretty teen-age grand-daughter, played by the lovely Joan Leslie, who unfortunately has a club foot. In another sign of his humanity, Roy Earle shows real concern for the plight of the girl, and eventually falls for her. He arranges for an underworld doctor to perform an operation on the girl’s foot. In those days, it was apparently easy and inexpensive but when the girl is healed, she reveals that she is in love with another man. Earle is too old.

This rejection is just another sign among many that after eight years in prison, Roy Earle is out of touch in the world of 1940. The world that he knew has passed him by. Even modern hoodlums are not up to his standards. When he finally meets up with the two other members of the hold-up team, they are obviously young and inexperienced, and certainly lacking in toughness. They are even shacking up with an unfortunate ex-dime-a-dance girl played by Ida Lupino. Tough-guy Earle claims that women are poison in a heist, and orders them to get rid of her. But when she tells him her story, she appeals to his sympathies and he relents. He is a human being, flaws and all. He is a tough and capable criminal but with a soft spot in his heart. He even develops an affection for a mongrel dog at the camp, one of the great dogs in film history.  Eventually, they pull off the heist but as usual in these films, things go wrong. ***

High Sierra marked Bogart’s first role as a sympathetic leading man, and established his persona as a tough guy with a hard exterior cloaking a soft, caring inside, a persona immediately evident in two subsequent iconic films, The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Casablanca(1942), that made him a huge star. Roy Earle, Sam Spade, and Rick Blaine were roles that it is now hard to imagine anyone playing but Humphrey Bogart. 

 

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*** Note. A four minute video on Youtube shows a couple of typical scenes from High Sierra. Click on the link or view the video below.

Trump Interview

 

Former President Donald Trump appeared on the Tucker Carlson prime-time cable news program the other night. Actually, Carlson devoted his whole show to playing segments of an interview he had conducted with President Trump at his Florida home, Mar a Lago. I know there are many people who cannot stand to listen to Trump or Fox News, but for those who claim that would like to see a kinder, gentler Trump, it would be good for them to watch this interview. Excerpts can be seen on YouTube. *

 

I am not a regular viewer of any cable news channel but did tune in to see what the former President had to say. It was refreshing that Carlson generally let Trump speak without interruption, or the back and forth that often characterizes such interviews. Carlson realized that Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, and that his audience wanted to hear him. I did not take notes but here are a few items that struck me while listening. 

 

Trump looked and sounded remarkably fit for a man his age. Is remarks demonstrated both intelligence, and considerable experience. He sounded Presidential. There was little rancor or recrimination. When asked his opinion of President Biden, there was sadness in his voice. It was almost with pity that he noted that you just have to look at the President, or hear him speak, to realize that there is something wrong with him. He said that it was not a question of age, for he knew people even at age 95 who were still sharp as a tack. There was no bitterness in these remarks, just sadness that we have a leader that no one respects, especially abroad. Foreign leaders will not even take his calls.

 

He went on to say that the Democratic party will have a real problem if Biden is not able, physically or mentally, to be the candidate in 2024. They will be stuck with under-performing Vice-President Kamela Harris. If Democrats try to discard Harris in favor of a white male like California Governor Gavin Newsome, they will lose millions of supporters who will be furious at the rejection of a woman of color. 

 

At another point in the interview Trump contrasted his administration with Biden’s. He pointed out the obvious facts that there was no war in the Ukraine during his administration, and that China did not threaten to invade Taiwan. Instead, he claimed that he had opened the doors of diplomacy and communication with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and even North Korea, and that the leaders of these countries respected him. 

 

It is interesting that most of the interview was concerned with global security issues. Trump repeated his assertion, voiced when he first ran for President, that the greatest threat to our planet is not global warming but “nuclear warming.” He pointed out that nuclear weapons today are 500 times more powerful than the ones that levelled Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost 80 years ago. He revealed that our nuclear arsenal was equal to Russia’s, and that China lagged behind but would be our equal in five or six years. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is a thing of the past, and many nations are striving to join the nuclear club. He claimed that while there is  incessant talk and fear about global warming, no one seems to be concerned with the much more imminent and catastrophic threat of nuclear war.

 

He also discussed his indictment by a New York prosecutor. He was calm and matter of fact and did not think the prosecution would amount to anything. Even the police who arraigned him were apologetic and tearful during the process. He did not think this political prosecution or persecution would hurt his election prospects. He said that his recent rallies were the largest and most enthusiastic he had ever seen, and that a recent poll showed him nine points ahead of Biden.

 

As I said above, if you want a kinder, gentler Trump, look at this interview. Trump came across as Presidential, and electable.

 

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* Note. Some of these excerpts contain disparaging, misleading captions and interruptions. I would also like to note that a routine google search for an image of Donald Trump rarely turns up a flattering one. It is just the opposite doing an image search for President Biden.

Cultural Inoculation

 

One of the results of the Covid pandemic is that by now practically everyone has some knowledge of how the human immune system works to attack and destroy foreign invaders into our bodies. The microscopic warfare is almost immediate, and by now we are all familiar with the symptoms. 

A few months ago an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal indicated that we also have a political or cultural immune system that works to repel foreign ideas. A lawyer with a 44 year career with a prestigious law firm attended a conference call called by the firm to discuss the implications of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. When she dared to assert that many legal scholars agreed with the Court that abortion should be left to the States, the response of her colleagues was immediate and visceral. Some even claimed that they could not breathe.

Many recent reports indicate that this visceral reaction to unwelcome ideas is prevalent today throughout our country, and most especially on college campuses where unwelcome speakers are harassed or shouted down before they can utter a word.  It is obvious that most of the protestors are very left of center. They call themselves Progressives but they are actually Regressives harking back to the days of Socialism and Communism.  

For most people Socialism is a political and economic system but it is also, and always has been, a cultural phenomenon. Years ago I read practically all the novels and historical works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian author of the twentieth century, whose writings contributed enormously to the downfall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). 

More recently, I found a tattered copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward at a library sale. It is a novel about the inmates and staff of a cancer facility in the Soviet Union of 1954. It is semi-auto biographical since the author himself had been treated for cancer after years in USSR prison camps. The story of the novel grips the reader from the start but it also turns a spotlight on the cultural revolution that resulted from the triumph of Socialism after the Revolution of 1917.* 

One of the patients in the ward is Dyoma, a young man who is suffering from a deadly tumor in his leg. Here is Solzhenitsyn’s account of a significant aspect of Dyoma’s early education. 

Ever since he had been in the first class, before he could read or write, Dyoma had been taught, knew for certain and fully understood that religion is a drug, a three-times reactionary dogma, of benefit only to swindlers. Because of it the working people in some places had been unable to free themselves from exploitation. But as soon as they got rid of religion they would take up arms and free themselves. And Aunt Styofa with her funny calendar, with the word ‘God’ always on her lips, with her carefree smile even in the gloomy clinic, and her pasty, was obviously a thoroughly reactionary figure. (138)

The fruits of this cultural revolution could be seen in 1954 in the plight of young Russian women like the attractive nurse Zoya in a world without religion.

Did this mean that marriage was the only alternative, that that was where happiness lay? The young men she met all danced and went for walks with the same aim in mind: to warm themselves up a bit, have their fun and then clear out. They used to say among themselves, ‘I could get married, but it never takes me more than an evening or two to find a new “friend”, so why should I bother?’ 

Indeed, why marry when women were so easy to get? If a great load of tomatoes suddenly arrived in the market, you couldn’t just triple the price of yours, they’d go rotten. How could you be inaccessible when everyone around you was ready to surrender?

A registry office wedding didn’t help either. Zoya had learnt this from the experience of Maria, a Ukrainian nurse she did alternate shifts with. Maria had relied on the registry office, but a week after the marriage her husband left her, went away and completely disappeared. For seven years, she brought up her child on her own, and on top of it all, she was trapped by her marriage. (172)

Solzhenitsyn wrote Cancer Ward almost seventy years ago but the fruits of the Socialist cultural revolution are very evident today in the massive problem that Russia has with orphans or just plain unwanted children. 

A couple of years ago former President Trump vowed that America would never be a Socialist country, but there is no doubt that the Socialist cultural revolution has already come. Its tenets have been taught in American schools for years, and the results are more and more obvious. 

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*Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cancer Ward, 1968. Penguin book edition 1971.