five New Yorkers

I've become interested in four men who participated in the 1848 Revolutions in Germany and Austria and who later, in New York, became associates of my great-grandfather, Louis Windmuller. Windmuller and the four were reformers, philanthropists, and promoters of cultural advancement. Acting in various combinations with each other and with other German-Americans, their efforts were, all in all, more successful than not.

The four were Carl Schurz, Oswald Ottendorfer, Henry Villard, and Abraham Jacobi.[1] They and Windmuller had much in common. Four of them had been born in Germany and one in Austria, all had been involved in the 1848 Revolutions, and all had migrated to the U.S. They had achieved different levels of education, but all were given the best education their parents could afford and none suffered in later life from effects of an inadequate education.

They were articulate in both speech and writing. They had contacts within the publishing community and a couple of them were publishers or editors as well as authors. Though they were all, in varying degrees, rebels before they emigrated, they had faith in American democracy and, as American citizens, did not advocate force as a means to achieve political reform.

None were prigs. They mixed with compatriots in beer halls and singing clubs, they attended banquets, and were members of clubs where they dined and socialized as well as participating in committees formed to pursue civic improvements.

Four of the five were proud to be political independents. They were Mugwumps and refused to align themselves with a single political party. Windmuller was the only merchant among them, but they all were associated with enterprises, such as banks and insurance companies, that aimed to benefit the public as well as return profits. Most of their efforts, whether commercial, philanthropic, or a combination of the two, began as German-American concerns and evolved into organizations which served all comers.

They all supported improvement in the lot of women and all but Windmuller had wives who became well known in their own right, not as their husbands' adjuncts.

Carl Shurz was an Army general in the U.S. Civil War, an accomplished journalist and editor, a popular politician and the first German-born American elected to the United States Senate. Henry Villard was a journalist who covered battles in the Civil War and later owned and published the New York Evening Post newspaper; he was also a financier and an early president of the Northern Pacific Railway. Schurz was a reporter and editor of Villard's Evening Post for a few years in the 1880s. Abraham Jacobi was a scientist and pioneer of pediatrics, opening the first children's clinic in the United States; he became and remains the only foreign born president of the American Medical Association. Oswald Ottendorfer was editor and publisher of a widely-read German-language daily, the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. I've written frequently about Windmuller. He was a commission-merchant, both founder and officer of banks, insurance companies, and other businesses, and treasurer of non-profits as diverse as the Reform Club and the Legal Aid Society. He spoke out and wrote about issues that concerned him, particularly corruption in government, national policies affecting the economy, and aid to those in need.

Here's a smattering of articles in which some of the five appear together.

• "With Carl Schurz, Oswald Ottendorfer, Henry Villard and G. H. Schwab [Windmuller] formed, in 1892, the German American Cleveland Union, which proved itself a powerful element in the Presidential Campaign. Mr. Windmuller acted as treasurer, and contributed a pamphlet showing how the prosperity of the country had suffered under the Republican administration. It was published in German and English by the National Democratic Committee, and had a large circulation." -- The University Magazine p. 547.
• AN APPEAL TO GERMAN CITIZENS; STRONG REASONS WHY THEY SHOULD SUPPORT GROVER CLEVELAND, New York Times, August 22, 1892. First paragraph: "The following important address, signed by some of the most prominent German-Americans in the United States, has been issued through the German-American Cleveland Union, and is being circulated among the German voters or the country. Signed: CARL SCHURZ, OSWALD OTTENDORFER, WILLIAM STEINWAY, HENRY VILLARD, LOUIS WINDMULLER, GUSTAV H. SCHWAB."
• The Reform Club: The officers for 1892 were — President, E. Ellery Anderson; Vice-Presidents, Oswald Ottendorfer, Charles S. Fairchild, Carl Schurz, Anson Phelps Stokes, Everett P. Wheeler, George Tucker Harrison, George Foster Peabody, Horace E. Deining, Henry B. B. Stapler; Secretary, Henry de Forest Baldwin; Treasurer, Louis Windmuller. -- Club men of New York: their occupations, and business and home addresses: sketches of each of the organizations: college alumni associations (Republic Press, 1893)
• FOR A GOETHE MONUMENT, article by Louis Windmuller in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 24, 1909: "The time seems opportune for the initiative of a similar movement in New York, where sculptor and poet have numerous friends, who are well known as patrons of art and literature. I refer to men like Jacob H. Schiff, Dr. A. Jacobi, Carl Schurz, Oswald Ottendorfer, and A. P. Fitch. I mention these few on account of their well-known influence and public spirit. The hosts who admire a genius who as poet ranks with Homer, as thinker with Voltaire, as playwright with Shakespeare, are numberless."
• TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF MARRIED LIFE, New York Times, November 24, 1884: First paragraph: "Mr. and Mrs. Louis Windmuller celebrated their silver wedding last evening at their residence, No. 19 West Forty-sixth-street. Among the guests were Mr. Carl Schurz, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Guidet, Mr. Bernard Roelker, Mr. William A. Hardt, the Misses Hardt..."

Carl Schurz was widely known in his own time and somewhat less today. Windmuller and the other three were not so widely known when living and quite a bit less today. The relative levels of interest in the five can be seen in hits on their names in some specialized search engines. For example, JSTOR, the journal archive and search engine gives 2,870 hits for Carl Schurz from the nineteenth century up to this year, while Henry Villard receives 654, Abraham Jacobi 242, Oswald Ottendorfer 53, and Louis Windmuller 20.[2] That levels of interest have fallen off in recent times can be seen in JSTOR hits for the period from 1990 to date. For those three decades, Carl Schurz receives 236 hits, while Henry Villard receives 90, Abraham Jacobi 37, Oswald Ottendorfer 4, and Louis Windmuller 1.

Searching the New York Times archive (via ProQuest) gives similar results. In the list that follows the first quantity is the number of hits from the mid-19th century to today and the one following gives hits from 1990 forward.[3]

Schurz, 14,296 all-time hits and 1,028 since 1990
Villard, 955 all-time hits and 13 since 1990
Ottendorfer 640 all-time hits and 1 since 1990
Jacobi, 360 all-time hits and 0 since 1990
Windmuller, 338, all-time hits and 0 since 1990

The following Ngrams from the Google Books database convey the same general results. The top one shows relative instances in which the names appear in the Ngram data set between 1850 and 2000. The bottom one shows the same from 1950 to 2000.[4]





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Some sources:

Beiträge von Literaten und Künstlern zum Deutschen Hospital Bazaar

Banquet to the Honorable Carl Schurz

Tammany Hall vs. the People's Municipal League by Carl Schurz

Banquet to the Honorable Carl Schurz, Speech of Doctor A. Jacobi

History of German immigration in the United States and successful German-Americans and their descendants, Georg von Skal, 1908

Abraham Jacobi in wikipedia

Dr. Abram Jacobi toast by Carl Schurz, 1900

Geschichte des deutschthums von New York von 1848 bis auf die gegenwart By Theodor Lemke

Schurz, Carl 1829 - 1906 in the Dictionary of Wisconsin History

CARL SCHURZ, PILOT by Mark Twain, in Harper's Weekly, May 26, 1906.

Memoirs of Henry Villard (2 vols., Boston, 1904): Vol. 1, Vol. 2

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica: Villard, Henry

The New International Encyclopædia: Villard, Henry

The Encyclopedia Americana (1920): Villard, Henry

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921): Villard, Henry

Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Villard, Henry

Henry Villard Is Dead—Capitalist and promoter expires at his country home, New York Times, November 13, 1900


Valentin Oswald Ottendorfer

The New International Encyclopædia: Ottendorfer, Oswald

The Encyclopedia Americana (1920): Ottendorfer, Oswald

Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography: Ottendorfer, Oswald

Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography: Jacobi, Abraham

FELLOW-PHYSICIANS HONOR DR. JACOBI, Banquet to Mark Seventieth Anniversary of His Birth

Jacobi, Abraham in Men of 1914: An Accurate Biographical Record of Prominent Men in All Walks of Life Who Have Achieved Success in Their Chosen Vocations in the Various Civil, Industrial, and Commercial Lines of Activity (Chicago, American Publishers' Association, 1915)

Great sound money parade in New York edited by Edward A. Drake (Republic Press, 1897)


The German element in the United States by Albert Bernhardt Faust, Vol. 1 (New York, Houghton Mifflin company, 1909)

The German element in the United States by Albert Bernhardt Faust, Vol. 2 (New York, Houghton Mifflin company, 1909)

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Notes:

[1] My recent blog post, Secondat: forty-eighters tells of their experiences during the 1848 Revolutions and gives some portraits.

[2] JSTOR's coverage is more oriented toward high-brow journals than popular magazines. The articles that turn up via its searches are both about the five men and by them. It's important to remember that a search like "Carl Schurz" will not all be about the man and his works; some, for example, concern the park that bears his name. The names of the five are unique to them, so far as I know, so there is likely no "noise" introduced by false hits on other people having their names. The names were not always spelled the same way however. So, for example, the hits on "Abraham Jacobi" do not include hits on the variant, "Abraham Jacoby."

[3] Note number 2 applies with respect to NYT searches as well as JSTOR ones.

[4] For information on Ngrams, see Books Ngram Viewer. Culturomics says "The browser is designed to enable you to examine the frequency of words (banana) or phrases ('United States of America') in books over time. You'll be searching through over 5.2 million books: ~4% of all books ever published!"

Robert A. Van Wyck

Here's what probably will be the final entry in my gallery of disreputable relatives. A distant member of the family, Robert A. Van Wyck, was elected Mayor of New York in 1898. As it happened, that made him the first Mayor of Greater New York since the five boroughs had only just come together under a single administration. It's partly to due to his leadership that the transition from five to one was successful. It also happened that work was begun on the New York subway system while he was in office. If these are two major occurrences to his credit, there, is, unfortunately, quite a bit more to be debited from his account in the tally of good and ill for which he was responsible. Caroline Hague's smuggling was a crime, but one of very small proportion when compared to Van Wyck's. She paid a fine for hers and got on with her business while he, publicly condemned but not judicially convicted, retired to live a life of leisure in Paris on the ill-gotten wealth he acquired while in office.

Robert A. Van Wyck was a descendant of Cornelius Barentse Van Wyck who had come to New Amsterdam from Holland in the middle of the seventeenth century. The Van Wycks are an old Rhenish family, tracing themselves back to the Chevalier Hendrick Van Wyck, who lived in fifteenth century Utrecht. After settling on Long Island, Cornelius Barentse had a son, Theodorus, who is the common ancestor of Mayor Van Wyck and myself: Altje, daughter of Theordorus, married a member of the Thorne family of Long Island and they are progenitors of the branch of the family in which I reside, and Barent, son of Theodorus, produced the ancestral line in which Robert A. Van Wyck can be found. You can see here what the descendancy looks like.

Van Wyck was a well-educated and apparently intelligent New York lawyer who had become a judge before entering electoral politics. He was also an ambitious and opportunistic member of the powerful local Democratic political machine called Tammany. The infamous leader of that organization had been Boss Tweed, a man of superlative greed and corruption whose misdeeds resulted in a prison term during the decade preceding the election which brought Van Wyck to office. Although an outcome of this Tammany defeat had been the election of a reform mayor in 1896, the organization had bounced back under the leadership of Richard Croker as Tammany managed to put Van Wyck in the Mayor's chair for a term. There, his actions so outraged the electorate that a second reform administration immediately followed. It's a bit comforting to find that my great-grandfather, Louis Windmuller, fought strenuously against the corrupt politics of Tammany, Croker, and Van Wyck.* Louis Windmuller may not have known he was a distant cousin of Van Wyck's; if he did, he did not admit it. It was Windmuller's wife, Annie Lefman, whose mother, Sarah Lenington Thorne, was a direct descendant of Theodorus Van Wyck.

Van Wyck hated speech making and didn't bother to court the voters during what passed for his electoral campaign. He merely carried out what boss Croker asked of him as a pliant, cooperative, unenthusiastic, colorless party tool.

His biggest offense against the law and human decency was to use his position to permit a business called the American Ice Company to create an iron-clad monopoly in the five boroughs. Refrigeration had not yet been introduced and New Yorkers had become dependent on cheap ice from states farther north to keep cold their food and beverages. When American Ice doubled the price to consumers, the impact was very serious. Van Wyck's reward for making sure that the company was able to do this with impunity was a gift of 5,000 shares of its stock. Allowing for inflation, the value of those shares would be considerably more than $12 million these days.

After his death in 1918, the New York Times summed up his corrupt actions in a short article. I quote here the whole thing. Note the links I've included to explain some of the details (well-known to readers of the time, not necessarily so today).

WHEN VAN WYCK WAS MAYOR

In the days of Robert A. Van Wyck, the first Mayor of Greater New York, now dead in Paris, this city had had neither a partisan nor a non-partisan government. Politics, as we understand the word today, had nothing to do with it. The city was swag, divided on the exact principles upon which Fagin used to divide the swag which the Artful Dodger and his pals brought home. Tammany had once been a political party, and now again has some resemblance to one, but in Van Wyck's day — that is, Richard Croker's day — it was simply a gang.

When, in 1897, Tammany won back the city, Croker and his associates went off to Lakewood, where they spent the next six weeks apportioning the spoil of victory. Some of it had been already apportioned. Croker had selected Van Wyck for the Mayorality, for instance, not permitting his name to come before the public until the day the so-called convention met. Van Wyck was thus appointed to the Mayoralty as Devery was later appointed Chief of Police and as other members of the gang received their several appointments. In no case was the appointment regarded by the recipient as one in which to perform a duty. He accepted it in a military spirit, as one pirate might have been told off by Blackbeard to watch the prisoners, another to run up the Jolly Roger, another to command a landing. Croker, had he chosen, might have appointed Devery to the Mayorality and Van Wyck to the Police Chieftainship. Each would have obeyed like a soldier.

Then began the partition of the city on a scale never seen before. It was scientifically mapped and surveyed. There bad been much spoil when Croker had control before, but except in the Police Department it was unscientific. Besides, Croker had not had full control. Now It almost seemed as if he had spent the three years of his retirement in devising a scientific plan for the making of fortunes out of every nook and corner.

In Tweed's time fortunes bad been made by the vulgar and easily detectable method of robbing the city treasury. The method under Croker was that of "assessments" levied upon individuals and corporations, and the city government was not used for robbery, but for the purpose of greasing the wheels of various schemes for which these contributions were collected. Never, under Tweed or anybody else, had the city been so systematically "worked." It was done almost openly, the gang apparently figuring that four years would be enough, and that at the end of that time it did not matter what the people would do. The people turned them out of office, of course, and Croker retired to Ireland and Van Wyck to Paris, each, doubtless, with a chuckle.

Van Wyck never for a moment regarded himself as Mayor of New York, but solely as the member selected by the chief to hold a certain post for the purpose of facilitating the work of the gang. He rendered faithful service and was liberally rewarded, especially in stock of the Ice Trust. New York had never seen such a Government as it had during the four years of his nominal Mayoralty. Although an educated man, and coming from good stock, his manners were coarse and his temper violent, and there was nothing to choose between his way of receiving a deputation or clergymen and an east side Police Captain's way of receiving a derelict at the station. His vulgarity was apparently acquired rather than natural. He kept constantly in mind the fact that he was in the City Hall to perform certain duties marked out for him by his superiors in Tammany Hall. It cannot be denied that he was staunchly faithful to such superiors as he acknowledged; if he had not been staunchly faithful be would not have been so richly rewarded.

-- WHEN VAN WYCK WAS MAYOR. New York Times, Nov 16, 1918, p. 12

Van Wyck's obituary in the New York Times fleshes out this colorful condemnation. Some extracts:

As Mayor, Mr. Van Wyck became involved in probably more administrative scandals than any other Mayor in the city's history.... The election campaign is still remembered because of the utter absence of any oratorical effort on the part of the Tammany candidate....Van Wyck weathered the Ice Trust scandal but the same year became involved in the so-called Rampo water steal. The Ramapo Water Company, a dummy concern,...was given a contract for $5,000,000 a year [and] the contract aroused public indignation to such an extent that the matter was taken before the State Legislature and the special privileges given to the company were revoked.... There was a big police scandal during the Van Wyck administration. "Big Bill" Devery was Chief of Police, and it was openly charged that under him the police were in league with vice and crime.... [Although the subway was begun in his administration,] Mayor Van Wyck was charged with trying to prevent progress on the enterprise [and was able to hold up work eighteen months]. Nearly every department head under the Mayor came in for public condemnation. It was charged of the Mayor that he was irascible and vituperative, and that he ignored demands for the removal of incompetent or guilty heads of departments....
-- ROBERT A. VAN WYCK DIES IN PARIS HOME; First Mayor of Greater New York Had Lived Abroad for 12 Years. HE WAS CROKER'S "CHOICE" His Administration Marked by SoCalled Ice Trust, Ramapo WaterSteal, and Police Scandals. In Administrative Scandals. Police Department Accused. Effort Made to Remove Him. New York Times, Nov 16, 1918, Saturday, Page 13

Robert A. Van Wyck

{source: wikipedia}

Boss Tweed

{Boss Tweed by Thomas Nast; source: aft586.wordpress}

Richard Croker

{Richard Croker; source: flickr}

Further reading:

Robert Anderson Van Wyck in wikipedia

The Van Wyck Question in The New Yorker by Nick Paumgarten on how to pronounce the name

Bangor men testified against ice monopoly on American Ice freezing out the state of Maine

One Hundred Per Cent. Rise in Ice; New York's Big Trust Limits Harves and Controls Distribution. Big Dividends and Market Manipulation the Cause. American Company Has a Monopoly and Squeezes Rich and Poor Alike. New York Times, Sunday, May 6, 1900, p. 18

The Case of the American Ice Company, The Nation, Nov. 29, 1900

Tammany Hall and Rapid Transit. New York Times, Sunday, November 3, 1901, p. 15

Mayor on the Stand, Van Wyck Admits That He Owns Stock In American Ice Company. How He Got Into The Trust. Van Wyck Says He Didn't Realize His Veto of Bills Would Personally Benefit Him. Brooklyn Daily Eable, Saturday, June 9, 1900, p. 1

Declines to Oust Van Wyck. Roosevelt's Decision in the Ice Trust Matter. No Proof Produced. Utica Herald-Dispatch, Saturday, November 24, 1900, p. 1. Governor Theodore Roosevelt determines that he cannot remove Van Wyck from office.

The Ghosts of Gracie Mansion: Robert Anderson Van Wyck by James Caldwell

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Some previous posts on famile stories like this one:

• at Madame's
• the shame of Madame Thurn
• Caroline Hague
• a quiet man
• Iwo Jima, 65 years ago
• a courageous act of defiance
• evil practices unto the disturbance of Christian order and peace
• Whigs & Tories, associators & refusers, patriots & loyalists
• Kissams
• William, Cornelius, John, and Benny
• love, peace and liberty condemn hatred, war and bondage
• genealogy
• Louis Windmüller
• living high
• Woodside, Queens, New York
• Windmuller, Heine, and Lorelei
• Miss Sarah Thorne, Her Book
• Sarah Thorn and the cult of domesticity
• Beauties of the mind
• 'My Heart and Lute,' Sarah Thorn

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Note

* My grandfather fought for clean government in his writings and in his participation as officer in the Reform Club and the German-American Reform Union. See, for example:

1. FOR BETTER CITY GOVERNMENT; THE GERMAN-AMERICAN REFORM UNION ORGANIZED. Ready to Take an Active Part in the Movement to Improve the Conduct of Municipal Affairs -- An EnthusIastic Meeting at Which Many Well-known Citizens Were Present -- Thorough Organization to be Effected -- Mr. Windmuller's Figures. New York Times, December 10, 1893, Wednesday, Page 5. "A goodly number of American citizens of German birth or descent met at the rooms of the Reform Club yesterday afternoon to arrange for the organization of the German-American Reform Union as a local political body. The object of the organization is to take an active part in the attempt to secure reform in the conduct of municipal affairs."

2. FOR GOOD CITY GOVERNMENT; CHAMBER OF COMMERCE TO APPEAL TO THE LEGISLATURE. Resolutions Adopted Calling for Laws That Will Invite Capital to the City -- To Ask for a Single-Headed Police Department -- Mr. Windmuller Urges Separating Municipal form National Elections -- Col. Erhardt Against the Non-Partisan Police Bill. New York Times, January 26, 1894, Wednesday, Page 3

3. TALK OF A GREATER CITY; SUBJECT DISCUSSED BEFORE THE REFORM CLUB. Theodore Roosevelt Gives His Police Views and Favors a Single-Headed Commission -- Edward M. Shepard and Others Also Speak. New York Times, December 10, 1896, Wednesday, Page 8. "Greater New York was the subject of discussion last night at the dinner of the Committee of the Reform Club on Municipal Administration."

whom do you trust?

I've been interested in the expansion of commerce in 17th-century England; particularly interested in the importance of credit, and, with regard to credit, particularly interested in the importance of trust. Partly for that reason I recently read Jane Jacobs's Systems of Survival which sets out to explain a pair of competing moral systems: the guardian syndrome and the commerce syndrome. She derives these syndromes from the behaviors two occupational groups: the one evolved from aristocratic moral structures and the other from the moral structures of businessmen. It's a good read. The guardians are those who govern, who run the bureaucracy, and who dispense justice. They trust only their own kind and strictly by the rules of honor (which give plenty of latitude for deception). In contrast, commercial people treasure honesty, not for its own sake but because trading requires trust.

Jacobs isn't saying these moral codes are observed by everyone all the time, but that each group has ways to enforce its own precepts. They both try to minimize deviation from their own specific norms. She also isn't saying that these two competing syndromes comprise all the rules that people strive to follow in their attempts to lead good lives. These are simply the ones that separate the one group from the other. I've put a table showing the two lists at bottom.

Jacobs points out that guardian group must step in when the morals of the commerce group break down. That is to say governments regulate commerce for the good of citizens. Though there are ideologies that regret this intervention, almost everyone regards it as necessary. She also says governments can't actually perform the functions of the commercial group -- government run business operations rarely succeed. (She says they never do). That's because the moral structures are inimicable. It's an interesting way of looking at things; basically an update on a position that Plato has Socrates take. There's a quick summary in this pdf document.

So now we're seeing government debate what to do to correct the mess created by the big New York banks (and others). You can look at the arguments from a Systems-of-Survival point of view.

But I'm more interested in one aspect: the betrayal of trust. Steven Pearlstein writes about the subject today. In an article called The Words Left Unspoken in the Bailout Debate he says:

Political systems, communities, markets all share one common characteristic -- at their core, they all require a level of trust among the participants if they are going to work. In recent years, we have allowed that trust to erode to the point that our political system is paralyzed by partisan bickering and communities are fractured into enclaves of race and class. Now markets are collapsing because investors realize they have been misled by corporate executives, investment banks, ratings agencies and regulators. As a country, there is an urgent need to rebuild that trust. In different ways, that is what both the McCain and Obama campaigns are all about. And it is the same challenge that now faces us in this financial crisis.

Where Pearlstein writes about the trust we should be able to place in large financial institutions, an academic blogger writes, indirectly, about the trust we should be able to place in our military. In a post called Counterinsurgency Comes Home, he writes about an Iraq-seasoned infantry brigade being deployed to "help the people at home" through sophisticated military action to counter civil unrest. The blogger has first-hand knowledge since he's currently serving in the Army in Kuwait. (He writes for Cliopatria, a group blog, and is a historian in graduate school at UCLA.) If you read the whole article from which he quotes, the unit sound more helpful than threatening (Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1). But, in light of the misplaced trust that has produced so many horrors in recent years, including the current financial crisis, you have to wonder. Why do we need Army specialists to do the job the National Guard is tasked to perform? There used to be fears of large standing armies which might subvert the rights of citizens. As James Madison put it in Anti-Federalist Papers No. 10 of 24 January 1788,

The liberties of a people are in danger from a large standing army, not only because the rulers may employ them for the purposes of supporting themselves in any usurpations of power, which they may see proper to exercise, but there is great hazard, that an army will subvert the forms of the government, under whose authority, they are raised, and establish one, according to the pleasure of their leader.

We no longer have quite that fear, but with the drastic undermining of civil liberties in the current war on terror and the embracing of torture as a judicial tool, and all else that increases the power of the state to coerce its citizens, there is very good reason to withhold trust when the Army says its deploying a seasoned combat-ready force on our own territory for our own good.

Here are Jacobs's two syndromes:

Guardian Syndrome's Moral Precepts	Commerce Syndrome's Moral Precepts
Shun trading Exert prowess Be obedient and disciplined Adhere to tradition Respect hierarchy Be loyal Take vengeance Deceive for the sake of the task Make rich use of leisure Be ostentatious Dispense largesse Be exclusive Show fortitude Be fatalistic Treasure honor	Shun force Compete Be efficient Be open to inventiveness and novelty Use initiative and enterprise Come to voluntary agreements Respect contracts Dissent for the sake of the task Be industrious Be thrifty Invest for productive purposes Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens Promote comfort and convenience Be optimistic Be honest

the transformational power of abundance

This is a brief follow-up to yesterday's post.

The betrayal of public trust which is a main topic of that post seems ordinarily to lead to re-establishment of public trust via government regulation. This happened in the case of the South Sea Bubble, the Crash of '29, and the abuses of which G.B.S. wrote. It's happening as government agencies work to mitigate the damage of the sub-prime loans crisis and it's happening in an outfall of that crisis: the near collapse of the two largest US mortgage organizations, Freddie and Fannie.

Steven Paulson, author of the piece on pin-stripe immorality I wrote about yesterday, has today a good summary of the F&F takeover. Notice that he makes connection to the New Deal policies of FDR. (There's an indirect connection here with the founding of the Greenbelt community in Maryland, part of the context of yesterday's post.) Notice also that he tells us market regulation is not only necessary to correct problems created by the workings of the market, but also that regulation is needed to prevent future crises of a like nature.

In Crisis, Paulson's Stunning Use of Federal Power
By Steven Pearlstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 8, 2008; Page A01

Extracts:

Fannie and then Freddie began promising Wall Street double-digit earnings growth, which required them to grow their balance sheets well beyond what was necessary to assure liquidity in the mortgage market. Instead of just buying mortgages, insuring them and selling them in packages to investors, they bought more of them for their own portfolios, using ever-increasing amounts of borrowed money. Buying their own securities was profitable, but it left them highly exposed if anything went really wrong with the housing market, which is exactly what has happened.

Not since the early days of the Roosevelt administration, at the depth of the Great Depression, has the government taken such a direct role in the workings of the financial system.

Paulson only implicitly notices something that's the subject of another post that caught my attention this morning: people do not generally respond well when some resource that has been scarce suddenly becomes abundant. In the case of the South Sea Bubble, the industrial expansion of he late 19th-century, the stock market expansion that ended in 1929, and other economic excesses, governments stepped in to correct abuses and restore order.

In the following blog post Chris Anderson writes about other sorts of over-abundance and their consequences:

The Long Tail; Clay Shirky on the weird things that happen when things suddenly become abundant.

Extracts:

It takes a generation or two to figure out how to properly use some resource that used to be scarce but is now abundant. [For example the resource of] time, which we got more of in the prosperous decades after the Second World War. For the first few generations, we chose to fill that time with television. Only now are we learning to fill it more productively, and to greater satisfaction. To use Clay's term, it took fifty years for us to learn how to tap the cognitive surplus that came after the five-day work week.

[Chris quotes Clay: Another example is the 18th-century rush of agricultural populations to cities. In that case] "the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

"And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of things we like—didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset."

[Chris says:] This is the same phenomena that I described earlier, using a computer science analogy rather than an economic one, as the "awesome power of spare cycles."

A commenter adds: "Now consider this from the perspective of the developing world and especially China/India. What happens when the majority of the population shifts from spending 24 hours a day just surviving to having spare cycles to do something else?"

I find this very perceptive. We're seeing the consequences of that abundance with increasing frequency: huge increases in energy consumption, corresponding huge increases in pressure on the environment, acceleration of global warming, an agricultural crisis partly spawned by changes in the daily diet of Asians,.... And probably also an eventual shift in cultural dominance accompanying the shift in economic and political dominance from West to East.

Secret Service narrative on the Nixon taping program

beSpacific, the excellent legal affairs blog of Sabrina I. Pacifici, has a link to a chronological account of Nixon's secret taping system. The tapes of Nixon and his confidants ended up in the possession of the congressional committee that investigated the Watergate fiasco in the early 1970s. Here's the link: Report on the US Secret Service and the White House taping system during the Nixon Administration. Pacifici credits governmentattic.org with the find.

Here's what I found most interesting in skimming through it:

1. There's a chronological narrative by a Secret Service Intelligence specialist, A.D. Kelley, beginning on page 20 of the pdf file and running through to the end (p. 60). Entitled "Secret Service Participation in Tapings," the report is contemporaneous -- it's dated July 2, 1974, only a few months after the incidents and actions it describes -- and it's authoritative both in the sense that it comes from operatives who were themselves participants in the events described and in the sense that it comes from an organization that wished to preserve its integrity and reputation for rectitude.

2. It details the installation of taping equipment in the White House, Exec Office Building, and Camp David; and it explains how the equipment worked, how the tapes were stored, how transcribed, and who had access.

3. There's extensive coverage of Secret Service involvement, including a statement of its reservations about getting involved in the taping program in the first place.

4. Kelley gives a first-person account of the notorious 18-minute gap in one tape and how it resulted from a process of erasure and forgery by Nioxon's personal secretary. This episode, Kelley says, produced a temporary embarrassment in the Secret Service until it was learned, he says, that their agents were not involved (initials on the control documents were forged to make it appear that they had control when they actually did not).

There's a lot more of course, along with a great deal of redaction.

Reading it brings to mind the turmoil of that time, and how damaging it was to my own view of the integrity of government -- coming as it did on top of many other damaging revelations (the trumped up Gulf of Tonkin incident, to take one random example).

At that time I had a friend who worked as a staffer on the congressional committee conducting the impeachment investigation. She actually sat all day listening to the tapes, transcribing them, and comparing notes with other staffers and the committee counsel on their significance to the impeachment. Quite exciting.

{image sources: Time Magazine cover, Dec 14, 1973; Newsweek cover, July 30, 1973; page from Newsweek in 1973}