Beach Haven

​Bibliography
Rumsfeld, Donald. 2018. When the Center Held: Gerald Ford and the Rescue of the American Presidency. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, New Delhi: Free Press.

Review by Michael Beach

As one might surmise by the title, this book is Donald Rumsfeld’s homage to Gerald Ford. When I first saw the title, being this was likely a political book, I assumed ‘the center’ was a reference to a centrist political position. That was an incorrect assumption. Gerald Ford played college football in Michigan in his younger days. His position was that of the center. This player hikes the ball to the quarterback, then holds the line of large opponents attempting to get past him to tackle the quarterback.

Rumsfeld recounts Ford’s lifetime of service in the military and in politics. He describes his calm demeaner and plain speaking that some took as weakness, but for Rumsfeld, political players in Ford’s day mistakenly underestimated him.

The culmination of the book, and Gerald Ford’s political career, was about his service as vice-president to Richard Nixon. Ford was not the first vice-president to Nixon. He replaced a scandal-ridden Spiro Agnew. This meant that Gerald Ford was not elected to the position. Nixon also made it clear to Ford that he was not his first pick to replace Agnew. After taking office, the Watergate scandal became widely known and led to Nixon’s resignation. Ford found himself moving from an unelected vice-president, to an unelected president.

One of his first acts was to pardon President Nixon. Rumsfeld recounts the Ford administration policies and the historical fallout. Then he reviews the election where Ford actually ran but lost to Jimmy Carter. Rumsfeld recounts likely reasons for Carter’s win. His obvious assumption is that Ford suffered from guilt by his association with Nixon.

Like any political history work, one should consider the perspective of the author who was a Ford administration insider. He also later served with President George W. Bush.  Despite some reflexive influence on the part of Rumsfeld, for those of us who remember the period, the book rings true. 

Bibliography
Rohde, Joy. 2013. Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.
 
In this work, Joy Rohde begins discussing a relatively new tool in the military arsenal called the Human Terrain System (HTS). Essentially, HTS includes social scientists who are familiar with local social factors in war zones who advise in-field troops and commanders. Rohde begins discussing it’s use in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Another example of HTS researchers Rohde discusses are those “behind the front lines in the War on Terror” (Rohde 2013, 1). She notes how one of the goals of HTS participants is to encourage soldiers to “see the world through the eyes of the people affected” so perhaps they could somewhat “demilitarize the military” (Ibid.). As it turns out, many critics of HTS argue the opposite. This approach, some social scientists point out, is militarizing the researchers instead.

The military funded much of this research through the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) created by the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare. After setting up this tension and noting some of the major participants, Rohde goes on to offer a historical view of the roots of psychological warfare research dating back to the 1950s and 1960s during the height of the Cold War between the United States and Western allies in conflict with the Soviet Union and it’s sphere of influence.

Among other conclusions, Joy Rohde asserts that “much of the critical focus on contracting for the post-9/11 environment focuses on the dangers of privatization, not on those of militarization” (Rohde 2013, 155). Perhaps the same could be said about the military itself. Rohde notes that if it’s true that Americans are “devoted to their image of the nation as a global superpower” (Rohde 2013, 156), then militarization of social research will “last as long as Americans continue to measure their national greatness by their global might” (Ibid.).
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Bibliography
​Ottinger, Gwen. 2013. Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges. New York. London: New York University Press.

Review by Michael Beach
 
In one way, Gwen Ottinger could be thought to be writing a form of exposé about how emissions from an oil refinery in Louisiana exposed a community to hazardous fumes and the (likely? potential?) harmful health effects. She shares that story in this work. As important as that story is, the book has a larger point. Ottinger reviews how what started as a public relations failure shifted. As refinery ownership changed, so too did the communications strategy. The refinery began to involve local citizens through a series of meetings, placing gas detection monitors around the town, and making some operational concessions. Over time, residents began to accept engineering data and explanations, even when accidental over-emission events happened.

Gwen Ottinger explores the idea of identity and influence. She looks at how experts at first relied on that identity to make definitive statements and expect people to trust them. As the messaging began to include technical information and logic in lay terms, residents could follow the thinking and were more accepting. Residents also began to change identity from antagonistic victims to informed supporters. The refining companies also financed improvements in the town itself. To Ottinger’s point, this shift in identity by both refinery personnel and local citizen advocates did not mean there were no negative health effects or risks. She argues that a shift in identity created a new form of discourse. Shifting narratives helped shift identifying self-definitions by the actors involved. For example, over time the refinery became a ‘moral company’ at least in the perception of those involved. As residents became more participating and more accepting of information their diminishing challenges transformed them into ‘good citizens’ living in ‘nice communities’. Granted, there were some actual changes to how the plant was operated, but how much change was enacted really?

For Gwen Ottinger, one can question motives linked to narratives. For example, did the company change because it became moral? Did the challenges by citizens cause introspection on the part of refinery leaders? Were resident attitude changes justified by more participation or information, or did their attitudes change unjustifiably? The links among language, narrative, discourse, identity and power are co-productive. All affect and are affected by social interaction. This case-study sheds light on one way that technical knowledge in particular helps shape these relationships.
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Bibliography
​Stark, Peter. 2018. Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America's Founding Father. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

Review by Michael Beach

Like so many who interest themselves in the Revolutionary War period of United States history, I find biographies on the ‘founding fathers’ fascinating. Washington may be considered the quintessential example. In this work, Peter Stark takes the reader through George Washington’s immediate ancestry and his own childhood. The work then transitions through his colonial experiences, his love interests, and his decision to embark on a military career.

In his early military experiences, Stark makes an argument for Washington’s role in reigniting war between England and France. In what is called either The Seven Years War or The French and Indian War, Washington does learn some harsh lessons and is directly involved in a number of battles. Aside from his hardening as a wartime leader, Washington is keenly interested in becoming an officer in the regular British army. Time and again he is snubbed, along with all American militia. When the war ended, he resigned in frustration and begins his career as a plantation owner. This snubbing comes back to haunt the British years later when the future General Washington directly confronts some of his previous peers and superiors as part of the revolution. This particular work does not take us beyond his resignation and settling into Mount Vernon.

Stark shares excerpts of correspondences to, from, and about Washington that give insight into his early mistakes and how he begins to mature. Stark also shares his romantic interest in a married member of the Fairfax family. Eventually he realizes the pointlessness of the pursuit and his relationship with Martha comes into play. Peter Stark makes it clear that it is not so clear about George’s romantic inclinations toward Martha. His motivation may have been as much financial and cultural as romantic. In either case, the two become an early ‘power couple’.

Peter Stark writes this history in an engaging format that keeps the story moving along. I personally take all histories with a grain of salt, but Stark includes a significant number of contemporary sources, including Washington’s own writings. The content rings true and is probably as close to reality as is possible. 
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Bibliography
​Schwartz, A. B. (2015). Broadcast Histeria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News. New York: Hill and Wang.
 
In the broadcast industry, the events during the radio broadcast led by Orson Welles is the stuff of legend. It was said that as people believed they were hearing real news interruptions into otherwise normal programming, they went crazy collectively. The broadcast warned up front it was a fictitious portrayal. Several times during the program similar messages were shared. Yet, people often tuned in during times that did not include the caveats. Supposedly, people ran out into the street screaming. Others packed up the family car and headed for the proverbial hills. A few are said to have committed suicide. In this work, Schwartz examines many of these myths and debunks them. He does share some examples where a relatively small number of people did think the program real and started fleeing, but these documented examples are few.
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What Schwartz does document is a somewhat skeptical public. Newsrooms and police station phones rang off the hook. People were looking for some sort of official confirmation to what they were hearing. Was there really a Martian invasion in progress? Were people dying by alien death rays?

In the chapter titled ‘Journalism and Showmanship’ the author examines how the news covered a real story of the same time period, specifically the Lindberg baby kidnapping. Sensationalism in reporting inspired people to flood the Lindberg estate. Charles Lindberg was a celebrity in his day. He was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. “Within half an hour, newsrooms in three states had gotten word of the crime and begun frantically revising their front pages” (Schwartz, 2015, p. 13). Much of the Welles fictional story had the same trappings of what people experienced during the immediate aftermath of the Lindberg kidnapping story. The storytellers were acting in a believable manner. In other words, they were good at their writing and acting craft.

Schwartz wonders if things are all that different today. Whether one calls it fake news, misinformation, disinformation, or whatever the newest terms will become, there are people who purposefully copy realism fictitiously. Welles was in it for entertainment, and perhaps that the same goal of some modern-day trolls. It seems clear to me that some of this effort is not just for a joke, but with specific outcomes intended. Motives may be political, social, or criminal, but each looks to sway some portion of the population into a preference action or inaction. Schwartz shares several examples such as ‘the Veracruz Twitter panic’ in the popular resort of Veracruz, Mexico. A few residents of the city started reporting crimes and violence throughout the city that were not actually happening. The reports were forwarded by others, then picked up by some websites that “capitalized on this by writing fake news stories with provocative headlines” noting how such headlines “can generate a small fortune in ad revenue by exploiting gullibility” (Schwartz, 2015, p. 223).

In the same page, Schwartz does note that “the same technology that spread that false report also made it possible to verify the story in almost no time at all” (Ibid.). He argues that Americans were skeptical of the original Martian attack story but seem to be more inclined to accept the stories about the hysteria that ensued. He suggests we apply skepticism in both stories and meta-stories we hear. Perhaps we should be less inclined to accept those stories that seem to fit a narrative we already accept.

Bibliography
Ramsdell, Mike. 2006. A Train to Potevka: An American Spy in Russia. Layton: Zhivago Press.

Review by Michael Beach
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This book is an autobiographical sketch of some experiences of a CIA operative working in Russia in the waning years of the Soviet Union. Mike Ramsdell speaks of his early training days in the agency and how his unit was betrayed by another trainee with whom Ramsdell had a friendship. He tells of his bringing up in northern Utah, his marriage and divorce brought on in part by how much he was away on assignments.

The main story of the book is how his unit in Russia was attempting to turn an official into an asset for the CIA. It goes wrong and his unit is told to bug out. That is, the others in his unit are sent to the relative safety of Moscow. Ramsdell is left alone to finish sanitizing the various locations the group of American spies were using. He is eventually ordered to take a train to a safe house in the far away village of Potevka. Before he can make his get away, Ramsdell is attacked by local thugs. He escapes the assassination attempt, but barely. He is beaten and seriously injured. In this rough condition he gets on the train in a lot of pain. It’s the slow train that stops often with the lowest class ticket. He ruminates about his life and what seems to him like abandonment by the agency. As he slept, another passenger steels what little food he had, leaving him to travel for days hungry and bloodied.

Eventually he arrives only to find the safe house empty and with no food. Eventually villagers help him, but not at first. He speaks of how the local people have little for themselves because of the bad policies of the Soviet government. Several times he is stalked by wolves that at one point keep him from walking from the house to the outhouse to relieve himself. After a long stay in the bitter cold and deprivation that included Christmas, he eventually makes his way to rescue and a return to the United States.

Throughout the ordeal, Ramsdell was sustained by his memory of his relationship with his son and a coworker who later becomes his girlfriend and future wife. He wrote to them and imagined future times together. He also considered his own perspective about God and his faith. The humbling experiences at first caused him to question, but then he was drawn closer to God and found his faith growing.

The story is an interesting mix of spy thriller, introspection, and social commentary with a religious connection. Since I lived part of my life in northern Utah, I was familiar with the places he describes. I also made two work-related trips to far eastern Siberia, but after the fall of the Soviet Union. I can see his perspective offering praise and sympathy to the Russian people while questioning their government as well as our own.
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​Bibliography
Aiken, Katherine G. 2019. "The Environmental Coneqences Were Calamitous: Smelter Smoke Controversies in Progressive Era America, 1899-1918." Technology and Culture, The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology (Johns Hopkins University Press) 60 (1): 132-164.

Review by Michael Beach
 
In this article, Katherine Aiken looks at legal battles between smelter operation companies and community organizations that sued for damage created by toxic smoke. Most of these organizations represented farmers, but the author includes the “four-way interaction among farmers, industrialists, government, and technology” (Aiken 2019, 134). Aiken speaks to claims and settlements, but since this journal is about technology, as one could guess, the primary focus is on technological ways smelter owners approached reducing particulate output. Her intention with the article is to “survey major smelter smoke battles with an emphasis on the intersection of industrial growth, engineering solutions to challenges, and the role of farmers and the government” (Aiken 2019, 135).

The specific systems developed included baghouses, large buildings filled with filtering bags that captured much of the particulate matter. A weakness to this approach is it was expensive and did not stop gasses. Two related solutions were to extend the location of smoke exhaust. In one version, large underground tunnels would be used to move the smoke away from locations with people and farms to less concerning (more remote) locations. The other was to build ever taller smokestacks so the particulates were spread more widely, having less affect in any one location.

Perhaps the most exotic approach was something called ‘electrostatic precipitation’ in which emissions were passed through an electric field that caused some of the gases to break into other compounds that had other uses. This was costly in terms of electricity generation, but some of the cost was offset by revenues created from sale of the chemical byproducts.

Social and financial forces were at odds with each other. They were also connected to each other. For example, Aiken shows how farmers’ claims were argued by the smelter companies to be exaggerated. Experts on both sides made their cases. Both groups had financial motivation. The technology was developed to lower the financial impact claims of farmers while minimizing cost to smelter operators. 
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Bibliography
​Good, Katie Day. 2019. "SIght-Seeing in School: Visual Technology, Virtual Experience, and World Citizenship in American Education, 1900-1930." Technology and Culture: The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology 98-131.

​Review by Michael Beach
 
The focus of this article by Katie Day Good is the language and arguments used to extend the use of audio/visual media in the early part of the 20th century from the homes of those who could afford it into the schools as a form of education enhancement. In 1928 Anna V. Dorris, then the president of the National Education Association (NEA), urged teachers to reject “formal and bookish” instruction and “explore the pedagogical potentials of newly available audio and visual devices” (Good 2019, 99). This idea seems to inspire the play on words of the article title. Instead of site-seeing, as in going to a site to see it, the media bring the sight of a site to the classroom, hence the idea of 'sight-seeing'. One is not seeing the site, rather an edited and controlled image of the site.

After WWI the United States “began forging a rhetorical link – what cultural studies scholars call an articulation” (Good 2019, 101). The idea of forming an articulation between school instruction and “an emerging ideal of ‘world citizenship’" (Ibid.) can be linked to a push for the organization of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, that was forming around the same time. Isolationism as opposed to world entanglements had been a debate from the very founding of the United States. Here, NEA leaders, federal government, and manufacturers of media devices chimed together using similar rhetoric, if not similar motivations. The tension over how much international involvement should our country take on is still in headlines today. The idea of using educational media to help students understand other cultures through virtual tours in the classroom also continues, even it the technology has changed. Good points out that, “The historical association between classroom media use and the acquisition of worldly experience warrants attention in the digital and globalization age” (Good 2019, 103). She argues that such “discourses of global citizenship education, international connectivity, and the democratization of communication have helped smooth the way” of Internet deregulation and commercialization (Ibid.). She may have a point on commercialization, but one of the major attractions of the Internet is the considerable lack of regulation existing from its inception. Nonetheless, she essentially takes for granted the benefits pushed in the language she is critiquing and focuses on the way language is used to make the various cases with a resulting growth in classroom use of media for instruction.

One caution Katie Good does share is the potential of media to reinforce a Western world view and “reproduce colonial relationships through inequalities of representation and access” (Good 2019, 104). For example, through the ‘value of virtual travel’ depictions may be used to either encourage or reinforce “desirable behaviors in hygiene, health, and morality through stories and dramatizations” (Good 2019, 105). Desirable to who? Good shares some of the language used at the time. She quotes X. Theodore Barber as saying, the “heightened sense of culture and refinement surrounding [these] exhibitions attracted the ‘better classes’ as well as those who wished to be identified with them” (Good 2019, 107). The colonialism angle refers to using images as a “means of appropriating some distant place through an image” (Good 2019, 113). Just as in the physical ‘appropriation’ of some other people or place, the use of images helps form ideas about these ‘others’ through the lens of Western thought and interpretation, one of the hazards of ethnologists. These researchers do all they can to avoid ‘reflexivity’, but it’s safe to say the rest of us are not so aware of the issue or have tools to adjust our perspective under our own cultural view. Consider one of Good’s closing statements, “Consistent in the promotional rhetoric for all manner of instructional media was a dual emphasis on its ability to unify and uplift Americans around a common set of civic values while turning their attention to the rapidly changing world beyond their shores” (Good 2019, 124). As an author, Good is questioning if both of these stated goals can truly be accomplished together. Essentially, by espousing the first creators of media help color the second.
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Bibliography
Ferreira da Silva, Alvaro, and M. Luisa Sousa. 2019. "The "Script" of a New Urban Layout: Mobility, Environment, and Embellishment in Lisbon's Streets (1850-1910)." Technology and Culture: The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology 60 (1): 65-97.

Review by Michael Beach

The authors of this article look at city planning from the perspective of ‘scripting’ in the form of planning documents, and ‘scribes’ comparing public and private efforts both in tension and compliment. During the specified time-period, Lisbon was like many other European cities with haphazard growth and poor technology. As a result, there was a fair amount of health and safety concerns for city residents.

Ferreira da Silva and Sousa show planning maps as issued by the city council during the 60-year window. With each plat the street layout and utilities change, but not as previous plats had imagined. The plat design is a form of ‘scripting’ and city planners are a form of ‘scribe’. At the same time, private interests had their own designs in mind. Developers would purchase tracts of land in and on the outskirts of town, then construct private streets and buildings, often ignoring city codes and plans. Private funds were available more quickly, and construction could be carried out for less cost when not allowing for street amenities such as sidewalks, pavement, lighting, maintenance and sewers. “Opening private streets was a refuge to avoid more coercive municipal bylaws and escape the slower street construction and infrastructure by the municipality” (87).

As one might guess, compromise became common. “Sooner or later, they moved in the public domain and the city council found itself saddled with streets poorly sized and cared for” (Ibid.). In one example, a promoter named Bairro Andrade “signed a deed with the city council… giving the terrains of the five recently opened streets in the public domain” (Ibid.). In compensation, the city council agreed to “plumb, pave, and illuminate them” (Ibid.). By this point, Andrade would have already cashed in on private sale of any of the property not deeded to the city, as well as he would continue to collect rents.

I doubt these sorts of fits and starts of city planning and development were any different in other countries, or in other times. Even today one hears of shady developers and negative aftermaths of unchecked building projects. At the same time, growth under strict government control tends to slow. Weighing this tension between safety and quality as opposed to quick financial returns are social factors that have a direct impact on technological decisions. That seems to be the main point of the article.
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​Bibliography
Fairhead, James. 2015. The Captain and "The Cannibal": An Epic Story of Exploration, Kidnapping, and the Broadway Stage. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Review by Michael Beach

This is a true story. It is one of self-interested exploitation and failure. Captain Benjamin Morrell was contracted by a number of financial backers to conduct profitable sea travels to the South Pacific. He failed at each, and where he did manage to bring back cargo of any value, he absconded with it for himself. The only ‘prize’ he seemed to have any success with were two natives who were captured from separate islands in skirmishes with local people. Though neither were actually cannibals. They both spoke different languages from each other. He eventually brought them back to the United States and took them on tour in costumes that had nothing to do with their native apparel. They played as dangerous headhunters.

One named Dako learned English and became more like extended family, though never free to leave on his own. Morrell eventually returned him to his own people on a later voyage which also didn’t yield profit. The other native died while on the stage tour, and he never showed any ability with English and little is documented about him. On the other hand, Fairhead is able to share a great deal about the life and thoughts of Dako. The stories floated by Captain Morrell at the time drew a lot of attention, including that of the author Herman Melville. Dako become Melville’s inspiration for Queequeg in his novel Moby Dick.

James Fairhead captures interlacing narratives of sea adventure, scoundrel character, and the clash of western colonialism with indigenous people. Settings of a professional sailing vessel, the South Pacific, London, New York and New England offer varied cultures and social norms that clash in every way possible. The work is well documented and makes for a read that pulls one in. This is one of those case where truth is stranger than fiction.
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