Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  Many U.S. museums maintain public registries of artwork whose provenance has gaps during the Nazi era (1933-1945). In September, a searchable national registry of such work, the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal, will go live on the American Association of Museums' Web site. Several states are also in the process of enacting Holocaust exception legislation. The toughest of these is a California law that became effective in January 2003: It doesn't permit museums and other institutions to use the statute of limitations defense for any action commenced before the end of 2010.

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  The United States may have some of the toughest restitution and repatriation laws in the world, but we've done a lousy job of protecting our own cultural patrimony. Among our few cultural heritage laws, the gold standard is probably the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (known as NAGPRA). Enacted in 1991, it established guidelines for tribes to reclaim anything associated with a burial ground, such as funerary objects and human remains, as well as sacred and communally owned objects. It's one of the toughest such laws in the world, and its principles have helped influence legislation in other countries with indigenous native populations, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

  The End of History

  How e-mail is wrecking our national archive.

  By Fred Kaplan

  Posted Wednesday, June 4, 2003, at 4:22 AM PT

  When tomorrow's historians go to write the chronicles of decision-making that led to Gulf War II, they may be startled to find there's not much history to be written. The same is true of Clinton's war over Kosovo, Bush Sr.'s Desert Storm, and a host of other major episodes of U.S. national security policy. Many of the kinds of documents that historians of prior wars, and of the Cold War, have taken for granted—memoranda, minutes, and the routine back-and-forth among assistant secretaries of state and defense or among colonels and generals in the Joint Chiefs of Staff—simply no longer exist.

  The problem is not some deliberate plot to conceal or destroy evidence. The problem—and it may seem churlish to say so in an online publication—is the advent of e-mail.

  In the old days, before the mid-to-late 1980s, Cabinet officials and their assistants and deputy assistants wrote memos on paper, then handed them to a secretary in a typing pool. The secretary would type it on a sheet of paper backed by two or three carbon sheets, then file the carbons. Periodically, someone from the national archive would stop by with a cart and haul away the carbons for posterity.

  Nobody does this today. There are no typing pools to speak of. There are few written memos.

  Eduard Mark, a Cold War historian who has worked for 15 years in the U.S. Air Force historian's office, has launched a one-man crusade to highlight, and repair, this situation. He remembers an incident from the early '90s, when he was researching the official Air Force history of the Panama invasion, which had taken place only a few years earlier. "I went to the Air Force operations center," Mark says. "They had a little Mac computer on which they'd saved all the briefings. They were getting ready to dump the computer. I stopped them just in time, and printed out all the briefings. Those printouts I made are the only copies in existence."

  That was a decade ago, when computers were not yet pervasive in the Pentagon and many offices still printed important documents on paper. The situation now, Mark says, is much worse.

  Almost all Air Force documents today, for example, are presented as PowerPoint briefings. They are almost never printed and rarely stored. When they are saved, they are often unaccompanied by any text. As a result, in many cases, the briefings are incomprehensible.

  The new, paperless world has encouraged a general carelessness in official record-keeping. Mark says that J5, the planning department of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, does not, as a rule, save anything. When I talked with Mark on the phone Tuesday, he said he had before him an unclassified document, signed by the Air Force chief of staff and the secretary of the Air Force, ordering the creation of a senior steering group on "transformation" (the new buzzword for making military operations more agile and more inter-service in nature). The document was not dated.

  Mark has personal knowledge of the situation with the Air Force. However, officials and historians in other branches of the national-security bureaucracy say, on background, that the pattern is pretty much the same across the board.

  Certain high-level documents are usually (but, even then, not always) saved—memos that cross the desks of the president, Cabinet secretaries, and military chiefs (the Air Force and Army chiefs of staff, and the chief of naval operations). But beneath that level, it's hit and miss, more often miss.

  An enterprising historian writing about World Wars I or II can draw on the vast military records at the National Archive, as well as letters from Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, and others. (Who writes letters anymore?) Those chronicling the Cold War or the Vietnam War can plumb the presidential libraries of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Ford (less so of Nixon because it's a privately funded library), and find plenty of illuminating memos written to and from not just Cabinet officers, such as John Foster Dulles, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk, but the crucial sub-Cabinet officials and security advisers, such as Andrew Goodpaster, Walt Rostow, John McNaughton, McGeorge Bundy, and George Ball.

  Twenty years from now, if someone went looking for similar memos by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams on, say, the Bush administration's Middle East policies, not many memos would be found because they don't exist. Officials today e-mail their thoughts and proposals. Perhaps some individuals have been fastidious about printing and saving their e-mails, but there is no system in place for automatically doing so.

  Robert Caro, author of the revealingly massive and detailed biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, often advises aspiring historians, "Turn every page." What to do, though, if there aren't any pages to turn?

  America's Forgotten Empire

  How 50 years of imperialism in the Philippines changed the United States—and my family.

  By Mark Lewis

  Posted Friday, May 2, 2003, at 7:34 AM PT

  In these heady days of incipient empire, Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem "The White Man's Burden"—written as advice to Americans following our seizure of the Philippines—is enjoying an unlikely revival. In Empire, Niall Ferguson quotes from it at length while urging Americans to accept their long-prophesied destiny in Iraq and elsewhere. But in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Ferguson notes a problem with American empire: Too few Americans are willing to make imperialism a full-time career. "Send forth the best ye breed," wrote Kipling, "in patience to abide." That's how the Brits managed to run much of the world for more than a century. The Yanks? No staying power, says Ferguson.

  It's true: Americans today have little interest in running the world, except by remote control. But that may be because we've already learned our lesson. Speaking as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Americans who answered Kipling's original call, I'm obliged to point out that we've already tried the British Empire approach at least once before, in the Philippines—not for days or weeks but for half a century. Thousands of Yanks eagerly donned pith helmets and ventured east of Suez, hoping to remake the world and perhaps to make a buck or two in the process. Recalling the results of this grand experiment might give pause to some of today's empire enthusiasts.

  On May 1, 1898, my great-grandfather Charles "Bud" Tomlinson signed up with the 1st Montana Volunteer Infantry, eager to avenge the USS Maine and fight for Cuba libre. On the same day, Commodore George Dewey steamed into Manila Bay, annihilated a Spanish squadron, and established the United States as a world power, to the astonished delight of the folks back home. As a result, Bud never made it to Cuba; he was shipped off to Manila to help plant the Stars and Stripes in Asia. A brief but intense vogue for empire swept the nation: Congress annexed the Philippines, and Bud helped subjugate the Filipinos in a nasty but successful war.

  Bud soon
went home to Montana. But many ex-soldiers remained in the islands, hoping to strike it rich. They were joined by thousands of idealistic nation-builders from America who came out by the boatload to teach school, build roads, and preach the democracy-and-capitalism gospel. For the Filipinos the results were mixed, but the impact on both nations was considerable.

  The first U.S. governor-general was William Howard Taft, whose success in Manila diverted him from a judicial career and put him on the fast track to the White House. The governor-generalship was a high-profile job: Among Taft's successors were such political heavyweights as Leonard Wood and Henry Stimson. For the U.S. military, the Philippines functioned as a proving ground for the future commanders of World Wars I (John J. Pershing, Peyton March) and II (George Marshall, Chester Nimitz, and Douglas MacArthur, among many others).

  Our Philippines colony consciously emulated the British Empire, complete with sepoys (the Philippine Scouts), a Hill Station (at Baguio, laid out by no less than Daniel Burnham), and a tame maharajah (the Sultan of Sulu). For awhile, the American Raj stuff played well back home. Bud Tomlinson's daughter Thelma (my grandmother) was reared on stirring tales of his "Road to Mandalay" adventures. Decades later, she (along with her husband, Bryan Kerns, and their young daughter Karen) fled Depression-era America for the Philippines. Bryan found work as a mining company accountant, while Thelma happily took up the life of a pukka memsahib.

  Alas, by then America's enthusiasm for empire had faded. As it turned out, there was relatively little money to be made in the Philippines, and the Filipinos seemed less than entirely grateful for the decades of tutelage. So Congress voted to cut the islands loose, after a suitable period of transition. Full independence was scheduled for 1946. Still, my grandparents loved their life in the islands—so much so that they ignored the war clouds and were still there on Dec. 7, 1941. As a result, they and my mother spent the war in a very unpleasant internment camp, just like the one in Empire of the Sun.

  That was the biggest problem with America's Philippines empire: Its acquisition put us on a collision course with Japan that led directly to Pearl Harbor. Hawaii was merely raided; the Philippines were invaded and conquered, the worst defeat ever suffered by an American Army. The surrender of Bataan and Corregidor was a searing national humiliation. Then came the infamous Death March, and MacArthur's "I shall return" vow. In due course he waded ashore at Leyte, as pictured in the famous photograph. What followed was the biggest U.S. land campaign of the Pacific war. Thousands of GIs died to recapture an empire Congress already had decided to abandon.

  The surviving Bataan POWs were rescued in the commando raid celebrated by Hampton Sides in Ghost Soldiers. Less well-remembered are the thousands of U.S. civilian captives who were on the verge of starvation when they, too, were rescued by GIs, in a daring mission into the heart of occupied Manila. A photograph in the Time-Life book Return to the Philippines shows my grandfather among a crowd of liberated internees, all gazing adoringly at MacArthur.

  That was pretty much the end of America's grand colonial experiment. Manila was destroyed in the battle to retake it from the Japanese. There was little to stay for, so the Kernses and their fellow internees were shipped home to San Francisco on troop transports. They got a nice welcome but nothing spectacular. Ex-colonials were old news in 1945—especially in San Francisco, then getting ready to host the conference that would establish the United Nations, set up by the United States to lead the world into a post-colonial future. (Unilateralists in those days were almost as scarce as imperialists.) The Philippines got their independence right on schedule in 1946. We kept some military bases, but the notion of formal empire was abandoned, and the American Raj in the Philippines was dismantled. Then it was forgotten.

  When GIs returned to the islands last year to help chastise Muslim separatists, journalists dutifully filed dispatches from Zamboanga recalling the days of Pershing and MacArthur. These stories failed to ring the mystic chords of memory. America's original Philippines empire was an epic mistake, so we prefer not to remember it.

  Now, Kipling's 1899 message to America is being revived, minus the politically incorrect bits (e.g., "Your new-caught sullen peoples,/ half devil and half child"; click here for the full text of the poem and here for Christopher Hitchens' take on what Kipling really thought about imperialism). Ferguson and others invite us to go abroad and make the world a better place.

  Well, perhaps we will. Our problematic experience in the Philippines need not discourage us from taking on greater international responsibilities—or even from giving empire another shot, if necessary, to establish a beneficial Pax Americana. But before we embark on so ambitious a project, it might be useful to make a closer study of our earlier imperial adventure and its unintended consequences, some of which were quite severe.

  Some, in fact, are still with us. The still-festering Muslim separatist movement in the southern Philippines, for example, is a legacy of American empire. Before 1898, these Moros largely governed themselves. Then we came along and conquered the entire archipelago, creating a unified nation and establishing a putative democracy in which the Catholic majority would inevitably dominate the restive Muslim minority. Now in 2003 we're about to send GIs back to the Philippines yet again, to help deal with Moro issues that Pershing supposedly resolved almost a century ago. Just something to think about, as we set out to design a new, improved Iraq.

  Marching Orders

  Goose-stepping, the dance craze of tyrants.

  By Mark Scheffler

  Posted Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2003, at 11:34 AM PT

  Much of the TV footage used these days to shed light on the bizarre, hermetically sealed regime of North Korea features its massive army parading through the streets of Pyongyang in extremely tight-knit, highly synchronized marching formations. A prominent and chilling feature of these marches is the goose-step, in which thousands and thousands of troops kick their legs up like belligerent, robotic Rockettes. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il ("Dear Leader") is just the latest in a long line of vicious rulers whose soldiers have stepped the goose. Where and when did the goose-step originate, and why has it been so common among recent history's most sadistic tyrants?

  Norman Davies, author of Europe: A History, traces the origins of the march back to the Prussian army in the 17th century. The body language of goose-stepping, he wrote,

  transmitted a clear set of messages. To Prussia's generals, it said that the discipline and athleticism of their men would withstand all orders, no matter how painful or ludicrous. To Prussian civilians, it said that all insubordination would be ruthlessly crushed. To Prussia's enemies it said that the Prussian army was not made up just of lads in uniform, but regimented supermen. To the world at large, it announced that Prussia was not just strong, but arrogant.

  The marching mode proved so effective that it became a prime feature of German and Prussian parades well into the 20th century. It was also adopted by the Russian army and later, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, by the Red Army. Even after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, honor guards could still be seen goose-stepping around Lenin's tomb in Moscow. But for many people the step is most closely associated with the Nazis. Hitler believed that tighter bonds of solidarity could be achieved through gestures that demonstrated loyalty in a physical sense (the stiff-armed salute falls into this category, too).

  George Orwell, who knew totalitarianism when he saw it, succinctly articulated the menacing nature of the goose-step in his wartime essay "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (1941). Sitting in Britain, while "highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me," he wrote:

  One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. … The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down
on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is "Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me." … Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.

  North of the 38th parallel, Kim's vainglorious propaganda parades are clearly designed to evoke Hitler's gargantuan Nuremberg rallies of the 1920s and '30s. North Korea's sinister, macro-scaled, Vegas-on-acid shows—which involve incredibly choreographed mass games, acrobatic displays, and the aforementioned goose-stepping troops—top even the Nazis' efforts to visually convey the toxic grandeur of mass ideology.

  Goose-stepping is the ultimate tactical anachronism—yet another sign that Kim is stuck in the delusional global-domination schemes of yesteryear. Though he clearly intends his marches to be shows of prowess (and though he claims to have the nuclear weapons to back it up), the whole notion of conveying military might by way of a rigid march seems almost quaint in a world where smart weapons, special operations units, and state-of-the-art air forces are steadily supplanting large-scale ground forces.