Free High School Essays

Chemical Engineering Insights Essay #2: High Performance Outdoor Clothing Material

2014-02-18T22:44:00.000-05:00

The Cover Story for the October 5, 2009 publication of Chemical & Engineering News was an article entitled, Materials for Adventure. It deals with the manufacture of high-performance materials for the outdoors apparel. This type of apparel has created a very specialized niche in the market, where brand names that the customers associate with are not necessarily the clothing line itself, but rather the material that went into its production. The textile market is an ever-changing and highly competitive place, where breakthroughs in technology are continuously used to create the newest sportswear.

The article begins by retelling a hiking story of Todd Rutledge, a mountain guide in Alaska, where he decided to take a dangerous route that took 18 hours. This was to set the stage and show just how necessary it is to have high-performance materials in the clothing. These pieces of clothing are much more complex than they have ever been before. They have to be able to keep the person warm while wicking away sweat, they also have to be light and resistant to wear. The search for these materials is what drives the market.

Unlike the apparel market, which is often based on its appearance, and not its functionality, the active wear market hasn’t been affected by the recession much. The $9 billion a year industry is fueled by customers who are always looking for the next best thing. The brand names of the materials are part of the reason the clothing sells, and it takes innovation to gain a spot in the supply chain of the major clothing lines. One such company that the article talks about is Invista, whose main products are Coolmax® and Thermolite®, both made of polyester and are the base layer closest to the skin. The properties of these materials have been engineered for comfort. Modeled after the insulating hairs of many mammals, Thermolite has a hollow core to keep the warmth in, where Coolmax is a fast-wicking fiber with a cross section designed for air permeability and fast evaporation of moisture due to sweat.

The article then goes on to explain Invista’s stronger, more durable fiber called Cordura which prevents the clothing or gear from falling apart during extreme use. Cordura is made by extruding and texturing polyester or nylon in a proprietary manner. This fiber is then shipped to a fabric mill to be woven, and then to a facility that will cut and sew it into the desired piece, then all the materials must be sent to yet another facility which will assemble them into the final product. Even though Invista is far down the supply chain and several steps removed from the final product, it is still the name recognized on the tag of the coat or whatever it may be.

There is a need for all these new materials and the continuous research. The military is very large customer of these companies and it has very strict guidelines. The current polyester shirts that, when subjected to an explosion, can cause third degree burns when the heat generated is greater than its melting point. Invista’s answer was a lightweight nylon and cotton shirt that wouldn’t melt, is quick-drying and has undergone a silver based treatment that would prevent odors.

The breadth of specialization that the materials have is astounding, some clothes for athletes have sun protection properties on the outside, while wick away sweat and allow for air diffusion on the inside. New material such as active fibers and phase change materials will make a huge impact on the thermal properties of clothing and the outer durability of it as well. The phase change material uses capsules of paraffin wax or some other material that has a melting point between 5°C and 30°C so that when the body starts to cool down the material solidifies and releases heat, alternately, when the body heats up beyond a point, the material melts and absorbs that heat. This should keep the body at an comfortable temperature at all times. The future of the active wear clothing is in the PCM’s and nanomaterial that can change its physical or electrical properties whenever the time arises. Clothing made with shear-thickening fluid can harden on impact which might have military use, would be unnecessarily heavy for the hiker.

The article then goes on to talk about Jeff Nash, the director for materials development and testing for North Face, and how he also has strict guidelines for any new material. North face has its own testing grounds and will extensively test a new material before implementing it into its clothing line. Many materials that worked great in a lab setting fail when it comes to real life testing. Such is the case for PCM’s and most active fiber materials out there today, mainly with the material not adapting well to periods of high activity and then sudden rest times. Once these problems are fixed it could provide near perfect thermal control.

The next challenge for the industry is to make their production more “green”, eco-products are gaining a lot of attention these days and by trying to be eco-friendly they will reduce costs significantly. The production of many of these specialized fibers and materials requires the use of highly toxic chemicals that sometimes remain in the environment for thousands of years. The production of “green” materials is a rapidly increasing business and the benefits greatly outweigh the cost in fixing facilities and improving the processes.

The active wear clothing market relies heavily upon the advances in chemistry and chemical engineering, for they are manipulating the structure and properties on a molecular level to achieve results which can do so many things. It is truly incredible just how much technology is in a high-end sports shirt. Multiple layers of complex materials, woven in a specific pattern, and treated with certain dyes or laminates that alter the way the shirt reacts with the environment all go into the production of a simple shirt. That simple shirt is now light, wicks-away sweat, protects from the sun’s UV rays, and has an antimicrobial property to keep it from stinking even after strenuous exercise while wearing it. It’s a pretty incredible step away from the simple wool, cotton or silk clothes being worn a couple hundred years ago.

It’s hard to say where the ideal is that the industry is striving for, each sector desires something different and special for that environment. The military needs those types of shirts for use in hot climates, but they can’t melt when exposed to an IED, but the military needs another, much more specialized type of clothing on top of that, body armor. Hikers need clothing and gear that’s light, insulating, waterproof, and moisture-wicking, and a multitude of other constraints. It’s these constraints which keeps the industry evolving, ever searching for a better material to solve all the problems and offer the customer the most comfortable and reliable piece of clothing.

Nature Valley Commercial Critique

2014-02-18T22:39:00.000-05:00

Commercials serve one purpose in today’s world, and that is to sell something to a target audience. Corporations spend millions of dollars trying to craft the perfect ad that will stick in the consumer’s head and maybe persuade them enough to buy the product. That product can be anything; it doesn't even have to be consumer goods, ideologies and agendas are sold just the same way through a visual argument presented to every eyeball glued to the T.V screen. The same can be said for General Mill’s ad promoting Nature Valley Oats N’ Honey granola bars. A fairly short ad that doesn't scream, “Buy our product!” but is effective in its use of location, actress and music. The subtle nuances of these elements are what make it a compelling visual argument without giving the viewer any information about the product itself. The question that needs to be asked is how honest is this advertisement about its product and the company that manufactures it, and what were the driving forces behind making an ad such as this.

The commercial starts out with a shot of a beautiful blond haired woman looking at the perfectly opened Nature Valley Bar with a contented smile on her face, wind gently blowing her hair and she takes a small bite, smiling while she chews. The golden sun shining on her perfect skin is the pinnacle of health, she is almost radiating health as she enjoys a “100% Natural” Oats N’ Honey bar. The camera then circles her face to show the evergreen trees and rugged mountains behind her as it finally gets over her shoulder and pulls back to show the beautiful Montana mountain range she’s gazing upon. As the camera pulls out further it the scene is shown to be embedded in a granola bar that is drawing its ingredients together and finally is wrapped up in its iconic green wrapper as the words “The energy bar nature intended” scrolls along the bottom. This quick and effective visual display of natural beauty was coupled with the soothing narration of a woman’s voice and the repeating electric guitar chords from the song Live Spark by Andrew Britton that gives the sense of accomplishment or possibly emphasizes the sex appeal of the model in the scene.

The main point of this ad is that eating a Nature Valley bar brings you closer to nature, because it uses 100% natural ingredients and that it’s a healthy choice. They are trying to appeal to the 20-30 something year olds who enjoy the outdoors or those who wish they could. By using the beautiful blonde model Nina Bergman they are trying to show that you can be as beautiful and healthy as she is by eating the bars. That is another point of disingenuous, there is no possible way that a nature valley bar can be eaten as portrayed, it would crumble and crunch, require a good deal of jaw movement and not many people can chew a crunchy brick-like bar such as these with a Mona Lisa smile on their face the entire time.

The nutritional value of the bar is clearly implied by the actress used, but the overall feeling of consuming a Nature Valley bar is given by the location used and words said by the narrator. It is marketed as the natural energy bar to be enjoyed while hiking mountains, biking through forests ect. By show the majestic mountains of Montana they are appealing to the aspirations of a generation of independent and environmentally conscious Americans. There is no logic or real reasoning behind the idea that Nature valley bars bring you closer to nature, only the ambiguous title of being “100% Natural” and the marriage between the images of nature and eating the granola bar. It is this vague sense of organic-ness that sells the bar. There are many granola bars on the market, all with varying levels of industrial production involved, but the name Nature Valley is clearly trying very hard to appear to be the most nutritional and environmental conscious choice. How natural or nutritious these bars are is the real question that should be going through the minds of anyone viewing this commercial.

As to whether or not these granola bars are bad for the consumer is fairly subjective, it depends on how thorough they want to be about all the ingredients and manufacturing processes that are involved with the bar. Compared to a regular candy bar, the Nature Valley bar is a healthy choice, with only 190 calories per package, but most consumers will be sitting around, not hiking the mountains, while eating the bars. Therefore it’s misleading to market these as health bars, as respites from the modern office grind as they do in other commercials, for any extra calories while being sedentary will lead to weight gain. It does not matter whether or not these are “100% Natural” calories or artificial calories, the body doesn't know the difference. There is a difference in the terms however, a very subtle but important difference.

As Monica Eng outlined in her article for the Chicago Tribune entitled, “Organic vs. Natural a source of confusion in food labeling”, the use of the term Natural to describe a food product is directly related to the company’s desire to cash in on the growth of the Organic market while simultaneously offering a slightly cheaper version that seems the same. In her article she describes the actions of dairy company Dean Farms, which chose to roll out a new line of “Natural” yogurt. The reason that this action is seen as regressive is because the company previously had a line of organic products but the Natural brand name was a cheaper solution that would bring in more profits while devaluing the farmers that have to struggle with all the FDA regulations concerning the label of Organic.

The owner and distributor of Nature Valley is of course General Mills, the sixth largest food company in the world which markets the bars as a better-for-you snack and as such has seen their sales of said bars increase by 15 percent in 2010. This is representative of the whole foods and whole grain health fad that has gripped the Baby Boomers and Millennial’s. Nature Valley Bars have been marketed as the healthier choice for people who want to be active since its inception, but it has really found a niche now that the organic market has increased to $46 billion by 2007, when this Nature Valley commercial came out. The term “natural” is largely defined by the producer themselves and not by the FDA. So the sources that the ingredients are derived from may be “natural” but their production still involved the use of tons of pesticides, herbicides, possibly GMO crops and other non-organic products.

Willer, Helga; Kilcher, Lukas (2009). the organic world homepage "The World of Organic Agriculture. Statistics and Emerging Trends". Bonn; FiBL, Frick; ITC, Geneva: IFOAM.

Society's Grand Challenges. A simple introductory freshman class assignment.

2014-02-18T22:34:00.001-05:00

The challenges facing society today are many in number and great in difficulty. We live in a world beset on all sides by the threats that climate change, pollution, disease, poverty and many more. In almost all cases it was humanity’s great strides in technology and knowledge that caused these problems and in the 21^st century it shall be our advances in such fields that solve these grand challenges. The role of the engineer will be paramount in each sector, and chemical engineers will be in a unique position. The most talked about and important challenge is of course climate change due to global warming and emission of CO₂, a problem that involves a fair amount of chemistry will need a chemical engineer to solve it. There is another situation that has both been one of humanity’s greatest achievements and, as current research now begins to show, one of the most polluting elements introduced to the Earth. That element is nitrogen. Without nitrogen the Green revolution never would have occurred, but its overuse has contributed to many of the grand challenges we face today.

The problem isn’t that nitrogen is overly toxic to life, it makes up 78% of the air we breathe, 3% of our own bodies and is essential to all legumes in the world; the problem is the way it’s been used so extensively and carelessly. Fritz Haber discovered the way to transform the abundant nitrogen gas in the atmosphere into ammonia in 1909 and 20 years later Carl Bosch developed the industrial scheme commonly known as the Haber-process, this transformed the agricultural landscape. Factories started churning out ton after ton of ammonia-based fertilizer and the global population skyrocketed from 1.6 billion to 6 billion in one century. One of the most significant advancements in public health has come with a high price as most of the reactant nitrogen that is made, both as fertilizer and from the combustion of fossil fuels does not make it into the food we eat. It runs off into the rivers and streams or into the atmosphere where it causes both ozone depletion and global warming. The algae blooms that are an everyday sight cause coastal dead zones as all the oxygen its absorbed, and new indications are pointing at nitrogen as a contributor to a higher incidence of deadly human diseases like malaria and Schistosomiasis.

The nitrogen cycle that is causing problems starts when the nitrogen produced during fossil fuel combustion combines with water in the atmosphere to form nitric acid rain. This then joins the nitrogen runoff from over fertilized farms and human/animal waste in streams and rivers which feeds microscopic plants. These plants consume oxygen as they decompose forming dead zones. The excess nitrogen is also limiting biodiversity. When its added to a plant, the plant grows, but when excess nitrogen is added to a plant that isn’t used to an environment so rich in nutrients, other plants grow faster, killing off the weaker one. A normal person might not care if a rare plant dies, but new research is showing that elevated nitrate concentrations in drinking water can cause cancer, multiple heart problems, Alzheimer’s and diabetes. In the atmosphere reactive nitrogen combines to form ground-level ozone as nitric oxide or nitrogen dioxide. These compounds are both a significant greenhouse gas and extremely damaging to plant tissues, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars in crops each year. When it forms N₂O it becomes the most powerful greenhouse gas, 300 times more so then a molecule of CO_2.Its concentrations in the atmosphere represent the equivalent to 10% of CO₂contribution.

The challenge in this case is just how essential reactive nitrogen has become in our society. Without fertilizers the world would never be able to support its current population, and nitrogen aerosols counteract global warming by reflecting incoming radiation. 400 billion pounds of reactive nitrogen is produced annually, twice the amount naturally produced by nitrogen-fixing bacteria and volcanoes. So what technological advances can limit the negative effects while boosting the positive?

The first step would be to eliminate the excess reactive nitrogen produced by the burning of fossil fuels. The use of NO_xscrubbers in smokestacks could reduce emissions greatly. A much more effective tool at removing nitrites and nitrates from waste water is through the use of biological synthesis and nitrification, ion exchange, air and steam stripping and chlorination. These processes make use of natural aerobic bacteria to decompose ammonia and other compounds found in waste water. This process is useful when dealing with animal and human wastes but the effects of over fertilization are harder to manage from a chemical engineering standpoint. Current research into much more effective fertilizers and the delivery system to the plants roots is the most promising in reducing the nitrogen pollution. Current views on fertilizer are more is better, but with the new methods of delivery, denoted the 4R’s; right source, time, rate and place, the need to use excessive amounts is diminishing.

Chemical engineering paved the way for the production of 400 billion pounds of reactive nitrogen each year and its usage has greatly improved the quality of life for billions of people, but its negative aspects must also be addressed by chemical engineering in the future. Advancements in fertilizers and farming techniques will go hand in hand to solving this problem. Along with new treatment facilities using nitrification, suspended growth systems and ion exchange systems can prevent the nitrogen compounds from entering municipal water supplies. Unlike the problem of CO₂emissions, we can’t just stop the usage of nitrogen. This is why it’s an even greater challenge for society to face because it is so essential to the survival of our current populations. One of the easiest ways chemical engineering could help solve this problem is to produce effective fertilizers cheaper, so that poor countries stricken by famine can feed their populations, while rich nations limit the use of fertilizers and instead make use of genetically engineered crops resistant to disease. Solving the grand challenges of air pollution, water pollution, global warming, poverty, and quality of life will require society to critically evaluate the current use of nitrogen if a sustainable use of the chemical in the future is possible.

References:

1) Adams, E Carl Jr. “Removing Nitrogen from Waste Water” Environ. Sci. Technol., 1973, 7 (8), pp 696–701

2) Howarth, Robert W., Townsend, Alan R. “Fixing the Global Nitrogen Problem”

Scientific American February 2010. 64-71

Introducing, College Essays!

2014-02-18T22:29:00.000-05:00

So I graduated from college, got a degree in Chemical Engineering and I'm fucking bored. So I might as well start dumping some of my college essays on this blog. Maybe I'll make a new blog for the more sciencey ones. Oh well, hope someone gets some use out of this!

Rise Of Totalitarian Governments

2012-01-12T17:59:00.001-05:00

Rise of Totalitarianism

No other war was as devastating and world altering as WWI; it changed the face of Europe forever as four empires disappeared, Germany, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and the Russian. This war left Europe burned to the ground, and out of these ashes rose new forms of Totalitarian governments, Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany . The rise of these states are marked by profound differences to each other but they share many similarities as well, namely that their existence owes itself entirely to WWI and the actions taken by the victorious allies particularly the Peace Treaties.

The Italian Government was faced with many problems after the war. The first was with Italian dissatisfaction with the territorial settlements at the Paris Peace Conference. The Italians were expecting big land gains when they had entered the war and according to the Treaty of London, released to the public by the Bolsheviks as a way of showing the corruption of Western governments, they were promised Trentino, Trieste, Southern Tyrol, Istria, Dalmatia, the coastal districts of Albania, a share in the division of the Ottoman Empire and of the German colonies in Africa. Even though the Italians had fought bravely in the war loosing 600,000 men, the territories ceded to Italy in the Paris Peace Conference only included Trentino, Trieste, Tyrol and Istria, but she did not get any former German colonies nor any land in Asia Minor, Albania and Dalmatia.# There was much resentment against the weak and unsuccessful foreign policy of the Italian government. In September 1919, a band of alien patriots, under Gabriele D'Annunzio, took Fiume, a port on the Dalmatian coast, by force in defiance of the decision of the

Paris Peace Conference. But the Italians could not enjoy their victory for long because in November 1920 the Italian government had signed the treaty of Rapallo with Yugoslavia, by which Fiume became a free city under the League of Nations and Italy renounced Dalmatia as her sphere of influence.# In January 1921, the Italian troops drove D'Annunzio and his followers from Fiume. Many Italians were deeply disappointed with their government which seemed be too weak in its foreign policy.

Another problem that Italy faced was economic failure. Italy was a poor nation. She could only support her war effort by obtaining foreign loans. Immediately after the war, as Europe was exhausted by the war, the Italian tourist trade and export trade came to a standstill and there was large-scale unemployment throughout the country. The problem of unemployment was aggravated by the return of millions of ex-soldiers to Italy and a new immigration law of the U.S. government which restricted entry of immigrants. Moreover, runaway inflation added to the sufferings of the Italians. The lira had only one-fifth of its pre-war value.# Encouraged by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the unemployed workers and peasants stirred up riots and strikes throughout the country.

With the current government losing popularity, many citizens turned to the Socialist parties and in the elections of 1919 the Socialist Party won more than one-third of all votes and became the largest single party in the Chamber of Deputies. They were followed at a distance by the Popular Party which won one-fifth of all votes on a platform of social reform. The ruling parties (the Liberals and Democrats) lost heavily. Encouraged by this success, the General Confederation of labor called for strikes in September 1920.

During the strike, workers took over more than six hundred factories and established soviets on the Russian model to rule a number of industrial towns in northern Italy.#

This set the stage for Benito Mussolini to gain power. A former socialist himself, he came emerged from the war with 40 pieces of shrapnel and a realization that the idea of socialism is a failure. On March 23, 1919, Mussolini reformed the Milan fascio as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Squad), consisting of 200 members.# The party platform was based on universal suffrage, the abolition of the Senate, land for the peasants, improvement of workers' conditions and a strong foreign policy. It seemed that Mussolini had not completely discarded his early socialist thought. The property class did not like his radical party program. In the elections of November 1919 for the Chamber of Deputies, Mussolini and one of his close associates failed to win a seat for themselves.#

Several key factors lead to Mussolini’s rise to power, one of those factors was D’Annunzio and his followers were driven from Fiume by the end of 1920. This caused the many Italian nationalists to see Mussolini as their leader, for he advocated a strong foreign policy and the annexation of Fiume and Dalmatia. Another factor was that the socialist government from 1919-1920 failed to solve the nation’s most urgent problems, those of economic despair and civil unrest. The most important factor was that after the General Strike of 1920, the wealthy industrialists and landowners feared a communist revolution and desired a strong central government to return law and order. With the support of the property class, Mussolini and his National Fascist Party were able to gain 35 seats out of 355 in 1921, a tremendous gain compared to their pathetic loss 18 months ago.# From 1921-22 the Communists and Mussolini’s Blackshirts fought bitter street

battles which the government did little to prevent. The culmination of this was another strike by the Communists and Socialists in August 1922, but this one was ill-prepared and put down by government troops with Mussolini’s help.

On October 26, of that same year, Mussolini threatened a “March on Rome” if he was not accepted into the cabinet. Bands of armed supporters from all over the country marched to Rome, which caused genuine alarm in the politicians of Rome who failed to deal with the emergency. The liberal Prime Minister, Luigi Facta, stepped down quickly on October 28 when he didn’t receive any support from King Victor Emmanuel III. The King then handed power over to Mussolini who created a new coalition government of Fascists, nationalists, liberals and even two Catholic ministers from the Popular Party.#

Mussolini then started to slowly build up his totalitarian state, from 1922-23 he put loyal Fascists in key political positions, integrated the Blackshirts into the Italian Military, thus securing the army under his control. Also in 1923 he sent Italian forces to invade Corfu in what is known as the “Corfu Incident” which proved that the League of Nations was powerless and the Treaties of Paris could be defied without repercussions.#

He introduced strict censorship and altered the methods of election so that in 1925-1926 he was able to assume dictatorial powers and dissolve all other political parties. Skillfully using his absolute control over the press, he gradually built up the legend of the "Duce, a man who was always right and could solve all the problems of politics and economics.”# Italy was soon a police state. With those who tried to resist him, for example the Socialist Giacomo Matteotti, he showed himself utterly ruthless. But Mussolini's skill in propaganda was such that he had surprisingly little opposition.

Mussolini personally took over the ministries of the interior, of foreign affairs, of the colonies, of the corporations, of the army and the other armed services, and of public works. Sometimes he held as many as seven departments simultaneously, as well as the premiership.

Most of his time was spent on propaganda, whether at home or abroad, and here his training as a journalist was invaluable. Press, radio, education, films--all were carefully supervised to manufacture the illusion that fascism was "the doctrine of the 20th century that was replacing liberalism and democracy.”# The principles of this doctrine were laid down in the article on fascism, reputedly written by himself, that appeared in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana. ‘...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone.…”.# In 1929 a concordat called the Lateran Agreements, was signed with the Vatican by which the Italian state was at last recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.# All teachers in schools and universities had to swear an oath to defend the Fascist regime. Newspaper editors were all personally chosen by Mussolini himself, and no one could practice journalism who did not possess a certificate of approval from the Fascist party.# The trade unions were also deprived of any independence and were integrated into what was called the “corporative system”. The aim (never completely achieved) was to place all Italians in various professional organizations or “corporations” , all of them under governmental control.

In order to combat the disastrous economy, Mussolini launched many public

works projects, the most famous of which was his “Battle of Wheat” in which 5000 new farms were created and marshes were reclaimed in order to make more farmland. This was ultimately unsuccessful in creating a self-sufficient Italy because the land that was used for the production of wheat took away from the production of valuable crops like olives and grapes.

In foreign policy, he proved to be an aggressive nationalist, starting with his invasion of Corfu and the setting up of a puppet state in Albania. In 1936 Italy conquered Ethiopia in the second Italo-Abyssinian War.# From 1936 to 1939, Mussolini gave unlimited support to Francisco Franco and the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. His support of Franco officially ended all relations with France and Britain, but gained him an ally in Adolf Hitler. When Mussolini decided to ally with Germany officially in the “Pact of Steel” of 1939, and unofficially since 1936, he became the subordinate, agreeing to Germany’s annexation of Austria and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.#

In the years following the German revolution of 1919 Hitler was employed by the Army’s Political Department as a V-man, someone who investigated all the political organizations that seemed to have communist ties. It was at this time that he attended a meeting of the small Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party, abbreviated DAP) on September 12, 1919.# During the meeting Hitler joined in and severely criticized a man in the audience who suggested that Bavaria should be independent of Germany and join Austria. Hitler’s oratory skill impressed the DAP leaders who invited him to join the party. Hitler decided to join the party because it was poorly organized and he therefore could be more influential in it. In the early 1920’s Hitler’s party began to gain attention

and they added National Socialist to the party’s name forming the NSDAP, it was at this time that Hitler began giving speeches regarding Jews, the Treaty of Versailles and political phenomenon. He also created a detachment group called the SA, much like Mussolini’s Blackshirts, these were ex-soldiers who would be the enforcers at NSDAP meetings.

Inspired by Mussolini’s “March on Rome” Hitler decided a coup d’etat would be the only way to secure power, so in November 1923, Hitler led the Beer Hall Putsch which failed and Hitler was put on trial for treason. The trial was in fact a way that Hitler could put the Weimar government on trial in front of a national audience. He was sentenced to five years but was paroled after eight months in which time he wrote Mein Kamf where he put down on paper all his ideas and prejudices.

After his release in 1924, he decided that the best way to achieve power was through democratic means within the Weimar Republic. For five years the NSDAP struggled to gain seats in the Reichstag despite the Brownshirts best efforts. Street violence increased as the SA members attacked the Rotfront during Hitler’s campaign for presidency. He lost to the monumentaly popular Hindenburg, but by the end of July, the Nazi party had secured 230 seats in the Riechstag and Hitler asked to be made Chancellor.# The current Chancellor, Franz Von Papen offered him the position of Vice Chancellor, but Hitler refused. After Chancellor Papen left office in 1933 he told Hitler he could sway Hindenburg to make him Chancellor only if Papen was made Vice Chancellor, to this Hitler agreed and on January 30, 1934, Hitler was made Chancellor of a coalition government of the NSDAP-DNVP-Centre Party.# SS and SA members held

torchlight parades throughout Berlin. After the death of Hindenburg on 2 August 1934, Hitler called a referendum to approve his assumption of full power as Führer and Chancellor of Germany. In a speech given by Rudolf Hess a few days before the referendum, he called upon the German people to vote yes, and 90% did indeed. “As I said when I began, I cannot explain why Hitler, and only he, can be the Führer.”#

The question still remains as to why a person like Hitler or Mussolini was able to gain support and eventualy institute their totalitarian governments. The answer to this question lies in the treaties signed by the victorious allies in Paris after the war and the war itself. The effects that the war had on the populations of Germany and Italy set the scene for unrest afterward, thousands of returning soldiers were out of work and disillusioned with the liberal governments that had failed them. The harsh punishment leveied on Germany by the Versailles Treaty was scene as an unforgivable insult against the German people. Had the leaders been able to put aside their animosity and political aims, the situation in Europe might have been less inviting to an ultranationalist like Mussolini and Hitler.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, in it was laid out the conditions of which Germany had no choice but to comply. One of the most important and controversial required Germany to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and, under the terms of articles 231-248 (later known as the War Guilt clauses), to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers.# The result of the sometimes conflicting goals among the allied victors, notably Loyd George, Clemenceau, and Wilson would leave no party

happy, Germany was not pacified nor permanently weakened

France came into the negotiations of the treaty seeking revenge and protection from any other German threat. This was understandable because most of the fighting had taken place on French land and she had lost over 1.5 million military personel and 600,000 civilians.# President Woodrow Wilson came in to the talks with high ideals and soaring ambition, and represented this with his 14 points. His plan called for the establishment of a Leauge of Nations to prevent any future conflicts from spiraling out of control and self-determination of nations. England and Loyd George were in the middle between, he supported reperations, but to a lesser extent than France, and was cautious of Wilson’s idea of self-determination for he wanted to keep Britians empire intact. In the end the treaty laid out the following restrictions on Germany: Article 231 (the "War Guilt Clause") lays sole responsibility for the war on Germany, which would be accountable for all the damage done to civilian population of the allies. The Rhineland will become a demilitarized zone administered by Great Britain and France jointly. German armed forces will number no more than 100,000 troops, and conscription will be abolished.

Enlisted men will be retained for at least 12 years; officers to be retained for at least 25 years. German naval forces will be limited to 15,000 men, 6 battleships (no more than 10,000 tons displacement each), 6 cruisers (no more than 6,000 tons displacement each), 6 destroyers (no more than 800 tons displacement each) and 12 torpedo boats (no more than 200 tons displacement each). No submarines are to be included. The manufacture, import, and export of weapons and poison gas is prohibited. Armed aircraft, tanks and armored cars are prohibited. Blockades on ships are prohibited. Other articles of the treaty

dealt with the transference of territory, particulary Germany’s colonies were divided up and Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France.#

A major cause for outrage among the German people in reponse to the treaty was the fact that no fighting had actually taken place on German soil. The returning soldiers were greeted as victorious heroes, not defeated and broken boys. The general feeling was that the German High Command had stabbed the army in the back, Hitler capitalized upon this and used it as propaganda in his caimpagn against the Jews.# The treaty was seen as unacceptable on both the left and right side of politics. Since Germany after WWI was engulfed by inflation, partially stemming from the $56,500,000,000 France and Britain wanted in reparations, the German economy floundered. At the end of the war, the mark was worth about 25 cents; by November 1923, the value of the mark had shrunk a billion times.# Workers in Essen took their pay home in barrels, and three hundred paper factories and one hundred and fifty printing establishments were unable to turn out notes fast enough to keep the economy off a barter basis. Eventually, Hjalmar Schacht, later Hitler’s Minister of Economy, introduced the Rentenmark, based, theoretically on a mortgage of all Germany. This device created a new currency but did not salvage the ruined and embittered middle class. John Maynard Keynes wrote about the failings of the Versialles Treaty in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, “The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe, - nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of economic solidarity amongst the Allies themselves; no arrangement was reached at Paris

for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.”#

The treaty proved to be a failure in its design to keep Germany in check. Violations were committed by Germany, Italy and Britain at various times leading up to WWII. When the Weimar government failed to pay the reparations, France occupied the Ruhr valley where it took control of the coal and heavy industry, but this only further antagonized the population as German workers called for a “passive resistance” in which they refused to work for French factories. Many nationalists gave their support to Hitler at this time because he was so vehemently against the Treaty.

As stated before, Italy was dissatisfied with the treaty because it denied her the acquisition of Fiume, which it had been promised. The Italian PM Vittorio Orlando left the negotiations after his claims were rejected, but returned in June to sign.# Although Italy did gain a lot from the treaties it signed, the people and especially the fascists saw it as a “mutilated victory”. The combination of economic hardship in converting an inflated war industry back to civilian production and the large amount of crippled ex-soldiers led to social unrest.

WWI ended with an armistice and a feeling that war was over for good. It was the War to End All Wars, and the leaders who met at the Palace of Versailles attempted to make sure of it. Unfortunately the treaties that were drawn up in Paris did little to prevent future war and allowed for the rise of totalitarian governments promising an end to the economic hardships the war and Peace Treaties forced upon them. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power through the use of violence that so many former soldiers were accustomed

to, charisma, and sheer greed for power. The environments were ripe in postwar Italy and Germany for fanatics like these to find a sympathetic audience and a weak central government. Had the victorious allies focused more on returning all of Europe to normalcy rather than revenge and punishment , there might not have been an interwar period at all, for the governments responsible for WWII would never have come to fruition.

Politics Through film essay, Dr Strangelove and Nuclear War

2012-01-12T17:58:00.001-05:00

A.E. Politics through Film. 2/22/2011

Hollywood loves war. It’s been a recurrent theme in the film industry for the since the first films came out during WWI. The success of the war movie is no surprise as Ernest Giglio points out in his book, Here’s Looking At You, because it “fulfills the audience’s heroic fantasies while celebrating patriotism” He goes on to say that “it explores the dualities of the human condition; individual decency and courage versus brutality of the enemy; individual loyalty and duty versus self-interest and survival; and self-sacrifice versus the collective good.” These topics are readily seen in traditional war movies where a mission has to be accomplished by a band of soldiers the audience can easily relate to and watch as they sacrifice themselves to save others. Nuclear war movies are not always clear-cut like that. These films deal with non-conventional weapons whose power to destroy is almost God-like, which inspires awe, fear and demands an incredible amount of responsibility from those few in charge of their use. Tensions in a nuclear war film are built out of the unknown fear as the world teeters on the edge of obliteration.

Some of the most awarded films in history have been about war. From the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, to the 2008 film The Hurt Locker, the story of war and the struggle by those involved has captivated audiences. War is a time of extremes, when raw human emotion and nature come to the surface to reveal something true about all people. Sometimes these truths are the romanticized versions of self-sacrifice and honor, and at other times it’s the truth that all people are brutish, savage animals that can do unspeakable things in the name of a made-up concept like territory or government. Hollywood tries to show the duality of human nature in these cases but tends to portray Americans as the more noble people who overcome evil in the name of good.

WWII is the most romanticized of the American wars, mainly due to the fact that during the war the OWI was very influential in making propaganda films that sought to inspire and garner support for the troops. The war was seen as a good war because the Allies were fighting to stop the totalitarian Nazi regime from taking over the world and subjugating millions of people, a noble cause that is easily supportable. Hollywood has done its part to memorialize the war with films like Patton; Battle of the Bulge, and Saving Private Ryan, each film glorified the actions of American soldiers in battle as they overcame the evil Nazi forces. The financial success of WWII films in the few years after the war solidified the genre as a dependable mold.

The messages behind these movies spoke to the audience in a way that inspired them to support the government in times of need when there was something greater at work than their own lives. This is reflected in the movie Casablanca where the love that Humphrey Bogart has for Ingrid Bergman is put aside so that the head of the Resistance can escape and continue the “Good Fight”. This form of sacrificing one’s own life for the collective good is constantly reiterated throughout most war movies, but not most nuclear war movies.

Since the end of the Second World War there has been a leveling force in the realm of warfare that Hollywood has used extensively. Nuclear war is a whole different kind of game. In nuclear war there are no large armies facing off with each other, down in the trenches. Instead these wars are fought in the offices and war rooms of country leaders, like in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Here the tone was set by the looming threat of total annihilation because of a mechanical malfunction.

There are five categories of nuclear film that Ernest Giglio describes and they are the following: science fiction/horror film, nuclear war/attack, nuclear accident/ disaster, nuclear survival, nuclear terrorist films. Each film deals with the extreme cost of nuclear war in its own way but a main theme throughout all of them is the idea that man has created a great and terrible technology that changes the landscape of war forever. In the 1964 black comedy film Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick has shown how ridiculous the nuclear scare was during the Cold War. It also shows how technological advances can also be our downfall when they are trusted too much.

These types of accident/ technological breakdown films have a lot to do with the fact that man has come to rely on our own inventions too much, and often we are hoisted with our own petards. Great men of science gave the world this knowledge, but its creation was befouled by its own existence. Hollywood has made many movies in which the unintended consequences of atomic use are disastrous and in most cases, monstrous. From the 1955 film, Tarantula to the 2008 Incredible Hulk, experiments gone wrong serve to teach man one thing, he is not ready or responsible enough to control this amount of power.

This is a far cry from traditional war movies in which the power comes from the men themselves, the sheer cooperative force of destruction that is one army bent on killing another is also awe-inspiring. This can be seen in movies like Saving Private Ryan, where the 30 minute opening sequence of the Normandy Invasion shows the audience the terror of war up close, where thousands of men sacrifice themselves for a few miles of beach. It’s easier for the audience to put themselves in the boots of those men and imagine what it was like to fight that day than it is for them to imagine the blinding light of a nuclear blast.

Another way traditional war movies differ from their nuclear war counterparts is the way they have been used in history. During WWII Hollywood was very involved in the war effort by making hundreds of movies for the US government and for the American people so that they can relax after a hard week of working in the factories. This was a country united and Hollywood put out propaganda films along with inspiring films to keep the country united, or just to profit on the extreme amount of patriotism and a little bit of racism. The Battle of Midway was shot on the decks of the ships involved and was some of the best war footage ever shot, and it occurred at a key time when the US Navy started to turn the tide of battle in the Pacific. At this time the films started to change from being inspiring underdog stories of perseverance to glory-filled films of conquering the Japanese and winning the war.

Nuclear war movies don’t come with this same sense of inspiring virtue. In most cases they are cautionary tales with the threat of doom always apparent. There can’t be movies made in which the use of nuclear weapons is an honorable action it is always something that must be avoided at all costs. This is where the brave characters are those who are able to convince the politicians not to use the bomb, as was the case in the Michael Bay film, The Sum of All Fears, where Ben Affleck’s character is able to convince the Russian president to stand down and avoid total thermonuclear war after a terrorist group detonated a device in a football stadium.

The glory days of Hollywood nuclear war movies seem to be in the past, along with the cold war, but it may in fact turn out that these movies are more relevant in today’s world filled with terrorist groups, unstable third world countries acquiring the technology and a crumbling Soviet Union defense system. The ironic part is that traditional war movies are almost extinct do to the fact that America has been engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq for the last decade trying to win the hearts and minds of the people instead of trying to take a position. The modern war story is that of the struggle of individuals dealing with extraordinary circumstances where there is no clear-cut enemy and the reasons behind the fighting are vague and/or controversial. If this is the case than the intangible fear of the unknown is much more in line with a nuclear war film for the future, where decisions are made by rash men and women in high government that the country is trusting less and less. Hopefully in the end these new films will do for the modern country what they did for it in the forties, unify it in belief that there is something greater than the individual, but that it is each individual life, instead of the government’s sovereignty.

Nature Valley Commercial/Food Inc essay

2012-01-12T17:53:00.001-05:00

Commercials serve one purpose in today’s world, and that is to sell something to a target audience. Corporations spend millions of dollars trying to craft the perfect ad that will stick in the consumer’s head and maybe persuade them enough to buy the product. That product can be anything; it doesn’t even have to be consumer goods, ideologies and agendas are sold just the same way through a visual argument presented to every eyeball glued to the T.V screen. The same can be said for General Mill’s ad promoting Nature Valley Oats N’ Honey granola bars. A fairly short ad that doesn’t scream, “Buy our product!” but is effective in its use of location, actress and music. The subtle nuances of these elements are what make it a compelling visual argument without giving the viewer any information about the product itself. The question that needs to be asked is how honest is this advertisement about its product and the company that manufactures it, and what were the driving forces behind making an ad such as this.

The commercial starts out with a shot of a beautiful blond haired woman looking at the perfectly opened Nature Valley Bar with a contented smile on her face, wind gently blowing her hair and she takes a small bite, smiling while she chews. The golden sun shining on her perfect skin is the pinnacle of health, she is almost radiating health as she enjoys a “100% Natural” Oats N’ Honey bar. The camera then circles her face to show the evergreen trees and rugged mountains behind her as it finally gets over her shoulder and pulls back to show the beautiful Montana mountain range she’s gazing upon. As the camera pulls out further it the scene is shown to be imbedded in a granola bar that is drawing its ingredients together and finally is wrapped up in its iconic green wrapper as the words “The energy bar nature intended” scrolls along the bottom. This quick and effective visual display of natural beauty was coupled with the soothing narration of a woman’s voice and the repeating electric guitar chords from the song Live Spark by Andrew Britton that gives the sense of accomplishment or possibly emphasizes the sex appeal of the model in the scene.

The main point of this ad is that eating a Nature Valley bar brings you closer to nature, because it uses 100% natural ingredients and that it’s a healthy choice. They are trying to appeal to the 20-30 something year olds who enjoy the outdoors or those who wish they could. By using the beautiful blonde model Nina Bergman they are trying to show that you can be as beautiful and healthy as she is by eating the bars. That is another point of disingenuousness, there is no possible way that a nature valley bar can be eaten as portrayed, it would crumble and crunch, require a good deal of jaw movement and not many people can chew a crunchy brick-like bar such as these with a Mona Lisa smile on their face the entire time.

The nutritional value of the bar is clearly implied by the actress used, but the overall feeling of consuming a Nature Valley bar is given by the location used and words said by the narrator. Nature Valley has undergone a shift in its ad campaign. It is now marketed as the natural energy bar to be enjoyed while hiking mountains, biking through forests ect. By show the majestic mountains of Montana they are appealing to the aspirations of a generation of independent and environmentally conscious Americans. There is no logic or real reasoning behind the idea that Nature valley bars bring you closer to nature, only the ambiguous title of being “100% Natural” and the marriage between the images of nature and eating the granola bar. It is this vague sense of organic-ness that sells the bar. There are many granola bars on the market, all with varying levels of industrial production involved, but the name Nature Valley is clearly trying very hard to appear to be the most nutritional and environmental conscious choice. How natural or nutritious these bars are is the real question that should be going through the minds of anyone viewing this commercial.

As to whether or not these granola bars are bad for the consumer is fairly subjective, it depends on how thorough they want to be about all the ingredients and manufacturing processes that are involved with the bar. Compared to a regular candy bar, the Nature Valley bar is a healthy choice, with only 190 calories per package, but most consumers will be sitting around, not hiking the mountains, while eating the bars. Therefore its misleading to market these as health bars, as respites from the modern office grind as they do in other commercials, for any extra calories while being sedentary will lead to weight gain. It does not matter whether or not these are “100% Natural” calories or artificial calories, the body doesn’t know the difference. There is a difference in the terms however, a very subtle but important difference.

The owner and distributer of Nature Valley is of course General Mills, the sixth largest food company in the world which markets the bars as a better-for-you snack and as such has seen their sales of said bars increase by 15 percent in 2010. This is representative of the whole foods and whole grain health fad that has gripped the Baby Boomers and Millennial’s. Nature Valley Bars have been marketed as the healthier choice for people who want to be active since its inception, but it has really found a niche now that the organic market has increased to $46 billion by 2007, when this Nature Valley commercial came out. The term natural is largely defined by the producer themselves and not by the FDA. So the sources that the ingredients are derived from may be “natural” but their production still involved the use of tons of pesticides, herbicides, possibly GMO crops and other non-organic products.

Willer, Helga; Kilcher, Lukas (2009). the organic world homepage "The World of Organic Agriculture. Statistics and Emerging Trends". Bonn; FiBL, Frick; ITC, Geneva: IFOAM.

Mortimer Adler-Read Between the Lines

2009-04-24T13:17:00.001-04:00

Students are often told to read between the lines to get the meaning of a novel, but it’s writing between the lines which truly allows the student to fully understand what they’re reading. This is why students must be given personal copies of assigned novels. Usually the child is given a copy that must be returned in pristine condition, and if the book is a little bit worn or written in; the student must pay for the book. A philosopher and educator once gave a speech in 1940 supporting this same idea, his name is Dr. Mortimer Adler.
Dr. Adler was a proponent of marking books. He agreed that buying the book was the first step toward ownership of the novel, and did not advocate writing in borrowed copies of the book, for that is vandalism. Once the book is paid for it becomes the property of the reader and writing in it is acceptable. This is one of the ways one can spot a true book owner. Dr. Adler described three types of people, the first owns a lot of books all in perfect condition, but this person doesn’t truly own any of them. The second owns a good number of the classical books and some have been read. This person owns as if they were almost a status symbol, but again, he doesn’t truly own them. The third person owns a few books, all old and worn, with writing throughout it, this person does own them. He has read them over and over and has many notes in them and has made the book a close friend.
Writing and making notes in a book isn’t just an act of vandalism, it’s active engagement in the novel. The reader can write down questions that a passage brought up, and this keeps the reader thinking and wide awake, not just letting the words go right through him. Students can have a conversation with the author by marking a book. They can argue and right down any thoughts that come to their mind while reading. When the student begins reading where they left off it’s like picking up the conversation because your ideas have been recorded.
In order for a student to comprehend an assigned novel he can’t merely read it. The student must participate in the novel. The student must write between the lines and along the margin, make notes about what’s going on because the act of writing engraves the meaning of the book in the student’s mind. This is why students must be given personal copies of novels, so that they can make the novel there own. As the noted philosopher Dr. Adler once said, a few close friends are better than a thousand acquaintances.

Machiavelli-Bismark on The Prince

2009-04-24T13:15:00.000-04:00

Machiavelli is the real politician. I may be accredited with perpetuating the ideas of Realpolitik, but it is he who has shown me the way. In all my years of manipulating my friends and foes I have looked to Machiavelli for guidance every time. The Prince, or Il Principe, has shown me a glimpse into the past so that I may look to the future, my future, Prussia’s future. The disunity of Italy during the time of Machiavelli is very similar to the disunity of the many German states of our time. I found his advice about how to control regions that were acquired through military force most useful during my many campaigns. The Prince is a handbook that I have taken very dear to my heart, it has shown me through tough times and proved itself most useful, I am proud to say that I am a Machiavellian and that I sleep with a copy of the prince by my bed at all times.
Machiavelli’s ideas make so much sense. Politics is like a game of chess, you can’t win by being noble or honest, you must feign your actions, deceive your opponent and use their moves against them. That is how I was able to beat the Austrians in the Austro-Prussian War. I knew that Prussia had to completely control the Northern part of the German Confederation, and this meant removing the Austrians from German affairs once and for all.
Austria played right into my hands when they brought the Diet in to decide the Scheswig-Holstein issue. I told the Diet that by doing so, the Austrians had violated the Gastein Convention, The Austrians grew so infuriated that they declared war, this made it much easier to ally with the surrounding states such as Oldenburg and Brunswick, but most important to the whole plan was the alliance with Italy. The leaders of the Austrian Empire should have read The Prince, because then they would have known the dangers of controlling a part of Italy that had always been Italian. Italian unification proved to be a most useful tool in defeating the Austrians. Machaivelli would have been proud to see me deceive Napoleon III when I told him he might receive land around the Rhine. Unfortunately for Austria, Russia would not come to their aid. That is due to the fact that I am good friends with Alexander II and supported his repression of the Poles in 1863.
Another important lesson that I gleaned from The Prince was who to choose to surround me. I didn’t choose flatterers, or sloths, I chose men who could do their jobs well. Men like my War Minister Albrecht Graf von Roon and Chief of the General Staff Helmuth Graf von Moltke. Roon had been reforming the army under my direction for years and it was then that the Prussian army was able to match the might of any foe.
“A prince must have no other objective, no other thought, nor take up any profession but that of war.” This is true, and it is what I tried to follow. During the buildup to the war with Austria I had been getting Prussia ready. The army was reorganized under Roon and railways were built, supplies hoarded, and new weaponry made ready.
The war with Austria ended quickly when their troops were split between the Italian front and the northern front. After the historic battle at Sadowa we presented a very generous peace treaty in which the only lands taken away from Austria were Holstein. This was to prevent any further hostilities, lest we should need them later. If Germany had been oppressive and demanded large amounts of land or tribute, then Austria would remain resentful towards us, as told by Machiavelli. This war had accomplished exactly what it was supposed to, get Austria out of German affairs and expand Prussia. The German Confederation was dissolved in favor of the new North German Confederation. The key to this new Confederation was in the constitution that was written with The Prince in mind. Machiavelli’s ideas about how to control conquered lands were right, in the new constitution it allowed for the continuation of the local governments for each state but the King of Prussia would become the President and I the Chancellor. We, as the federal government, controlled the army and the foreign affairs and therefore we had the ultimate power. For as Machiavelli wrote, “the presence of sound military forces indicates the presence of sound laws.”
The Prince has provided me with an invaluable source of knowledge about the true nature of man. Man is generally selfish, but his loyalty for others can be won or lost. He is trustworthy during times of peace and prosperity, but will quickly turn to greed, deceit, and cunning during times of hardship and adversity. Most men admire courage, honor, and generosity in others but rarely show any of it themselves. It is these ideas about human nature that Machiavelli put forth to better educate those who will come to power and have a need for knowing the true soul of a man. I have believed the truths written in The Prince about military actions and the nature of man and they have served me well. It takes a prince, a man in control of the situation, to rule over other men. A prince who will take action and not be delayed by morals or vices, but who will seek a means to an ends. For the great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and resolutions, but by blood and iron.

Critical Lens Essay

2009-04-24T13:14:00.000-04:00

Logan Pearsall Smith was right when he said, ”It is not what an author says, but what he or she whispers that is important.” This is true for almost all pieces of literature, all the great ones that is. A story without an underlying message is just ink on a page, an empty volume of letters. The written story is not that important, what is important is the message that the reader is able to get from reading that story. Two pieces of literature that display this whisper quality are George Orwell’s 1984 and Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. These two stories deal with the issue of communism although it is never actually stated in the text. The message about communism each story is trying to get across comes to the reader as an afterthought or a feeling gathered from the tone, theme and setting.
George Orwell’s novel 1984 was written in 1949 when the majority of the west saw communism as a moral experiment and not something altogether bad. Orwell had seen the atrocities that totalitarian governments wrought. The setting of the novel is as mentioned in the title and it is a very bleak future. The London that the main character now lives in is in a state of urban decay, a rundown city in which buildings are crumbling, conveniences such as elevators never work, and necessities such as electricity and plumbing are extremely unreliable. Though Orwell never discusses the theme openly, it is clear that the shoddy disintegration of London, just like the widespread hunger and poverty of its inhabitants, is due to the Party’s mismanagement and incompetence. One of the themes of 1984, inspired by the history of twentieth-century communism, is that totalitarian regimes are viciously effective at enhancing their own power and miserably incompetent at providing for their citizens. The grimy urban decay in London is an important visual reminder of this idea, and offers insight into the Party’s priorities through its contrast to the immense technology the Party develops to spy on its citizens.
Arthur Miller’s play takes place in an entirely different time. The play centers around the Salem witch trials of the 1600’s. the majority of the play surrounds a group of girls who become “bewitched” and go about accusing members of the community who they didn’t like. Miller wrote The Crucible right about the same time as the McCarthy hearings. The widespread paranoia of those hearings is directly paralleled in The Crucible. Communism is never mentioned in the play but if one had any knowledge of Cold War history than the overwhelming image of the McCarthy Red Scare would come to mind.
It is the message that an author is trying to convey that is important, not always the story that it is carried in. The Crucible and 1984 both carried messages about topics important to the authors and the general public. The context that the piece of literature was written in is usually needed to be understood in order for the meaning to have an affect on the reader. What is a story without the author’s whispers behind the words? An unnecessary waste of paper and ink.

Book Review,Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.

2009-04-24T13:13:00.000-04:00

Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, is an historical fiction novel based around a family of Lithuanian emigrants in Chicago. This controversial book shows the despicable working and living conditions that most newcomers faced. Sinclair was an ardent socialist and it comes across clearly in his writing. He uses simplistic language and relatively flat characters to point out that capitalism is the root of all evil and it destroys even the strongest of men. Although the novel was an attempt to convert many to socialism, it accomplished much more in the field of sanitation reform. After the book was published people became disgusted, not at the way the working class lives, but at the condition of the meat they put in their bellies. Sinclair once said about the novel, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”(Dickstein vi). The bias towards capitalism is basically the main point of the novel and Sinclair may have unfairly stereotyped some aspects in the novel in an attempt to mar the image of capitalism even more. Through the eyes of the idealistic Jurgis Rudkus the reader sees the horrors capitalism can create.
The novel starts out with the veselja, (wedding ceremony), of little Ona Lukoszaite and Jurgis (pronounced yoorghis) Rudkus in a bar in an area of Chicago called Packingtown. The two and their relatives had come to America from Lithuania in search of the American Dream, unfortunately Packingtown is a dirty, dangerous place full of predators looking to part them with their money. Jurgis’ answer to this is, “I will work harder.” (Sinclair 19).
The young and strong Jurgis easily finds a job in one of the slaughterhouses pushing all the blood into grates in the floor. Ona’s cousin, Marija also finds work painting cans. Ona’s stepmother, Teta Elzbieta agrees to purchase a small home with everyone chipping in, but the house turns out to be a swindle and soon hidden costs are found and paying for the house takes all the family’s effort. So Jonas, Teta’s brother, also finds work, even Teta’s oldest son Stanislovas who’s 14 and Ona have to find work. The jobs in Packingtown are back-breaking and often hazardous to the worker’s health. Jurgis’ father dies because of the horrible conditions he was forced to work in.
For a little while things seemed to be going alright for the family and it apearered as if they could survive in the unforgiving land, until winter rolled in. Winter is a terrible season for all and it soon becomes clear that social Darwinism is in affect as the weak are weeded out. The rush season was over and factories started to lay off workers. Marija lost her job at the canning factory and Jurgis suffers a reduction in hours at his job and so all the wage earners of the family joined unions. Here Jurgis learned first hand of the corruption that runs the city when he takes part in a vote-buying scheme. He learned about all the graft and greed that infests the factories, how they sell the diseased meat in sausages and all the tidbits go in the cans and get fancy names like “deviled ham”.
Marija regains her job in springtime only to lose it soon after when she vocalizes her discontent with the management. She finds a job as a beef trimmer a month later. Ona soon gave birth to a son who they named Antanas after Jurgis’ father. Unfortunately Ona has to go back to work only a week after giving birth so the baby is fed the bluish milk from the corner store.
In chapter 11 Sinclair describes how the workers are forced to work at an even faster pace and received numerous pay cuts. One day on her way to work Marija sees a large crowd at the bank where she recently deposited her money, learning that it was a rush at the bank she forced her way to the front only to discover she didn’t have her bank statement. So she had to walk home, retrieve it and return to the line. By the time she arrived back at the bank the police had made everyone get in line and Marija had no choice but to join the back. She finally made it to a teller who gave her money in silver dollars. With her confidence restored, she attempted to redeposit it but the bank wouldn’t let anyone who had partaken in the rush do that. Sinclair than makes her plight symbolic by having her sew the coins into her clothes until she can deposit them in another bank, but she is afraid she will sink down in the mud with the money weighing her down.
The family then suffers a horrible tragedy when Jurgis sprains an ankle dodging an injured steer in the slaughterhouse. The bad ankle puts him out of work for months in which time the only thing Jurgis could do was watch his new born son and beat Stanislovas out the door to go to work. Jonas becomes fed up with the misery of home and abandons the family, basically just disappearing. The family sort of suffers another loss when Teta’s youngest son dies from eating a poisoned sausage. It’s only a little tragedy to them because he was handicapped and could never be a producer. Jurgis finally recovers but finds his old job taken so he has to search for a new one. The only job he can find is at the fertilizer factory, the most horrendous smelling place in Packingtown. Jurgis drowns his sorrows with alcohol for a while until Teta convinces him to stop for the sake of Antanas.
Ona again becomes pregnant and one day doesn’t return home all night. Jurgis questions her and finally gets her to admit that her boss Phil Connors raped her and has forced her to become his mistress lest she wants her entire family to be blacklisted. Jurgis becomes infuriated beyond sanity and attacks Phil, he grabs his throat and almost rips it off. It takes half a dozen men to pry Jurgis off Phil. He’s arrested and after an unfair trial is sentenced to a month in prison. While in prison he befriends his cell-mate Jack Duane who helps him later on. Upon Jurgis’ release he finds his family has been evicted form their house after failing to pay the mortgage and they went back to live in the run down boarding house they had first lived in.
When he arrives at the boarding house he finds Ona prematurely in labor. He goes out and finds a midwife for her but there’d not much that could be done and She and the baby both die. After her death Jurgis goes out on a drinking binge.
Again the thought of his son forces him to search for a job, and a wealthy woman soon approaches him and offers him a job in a new steel mill. The mill is located far away from his home so he is forced to stay there and only returns home on Sundays. Life seemed to be looking up for Jurgis and Antanas was beginning to speak, but he returned from work one day only to discover a freak accident had occurred in which Antanas had drowned in the mud.
Jurgis is completely devastated by the death of his son and wanders off to the country side in despair. Here he finds some kind farmers who give him work and sell him food but when winter comes around again he returns to Chicago. When he gets hurt digging a tunnel he’s unable to find replacement work and becomes a beggar. Here he meets Freddie Jones who gives him a 100 dollar bill and a feast at his house. This odd scene is used to show the difference in the two classes of people, the rich and the proletariats. Jurgis then goes out and tries to get change for the bill but gets cheated by a bartender who Jurgis then beats up.
He gets arrested and meets Jack Duane again who hooks him up with the corrupt leaders and criminal jobs. He becomes a scab and a strikebreaker, and one day sees Phil Connors at a strike and proceeds to beat him, unfortunalty Phil was one of Jurgis’ boss’s cronies and so Jurgis had to get out of the town fast and does so by moving to the other side of the city. He decides to reconnect with his family and searches for Marija and Teta and learns that Marija has become a morphine-addicted prostitute to support Teta and the family.
Jurgis goes about looking for another job even though he’s completely fed up with the whole situation, by chance he walks into a socialist rally and hears what he’s been wanting to hear the entire time. He finds comrades here and gets a job as a porter for a hotel. The last to chapters of the book are mainly just socialist propaganda, the characters become flatter and nearly hollow and are just symbols for entire classes of people. The novel ends with a socialist speech that concludes with “Chicago will be ours”.(Sinclair 346).
The historical accuracy of the novel has been greatly debated. It caused such a shock when it was first published that it caused the foreign sale of American meat to be cut in half. Teddy Roosevelt was so upset by the novel that he called in a formal investigation of the stockyards. He sent Charles P. Neill and James B. Reynolds to check the sanitation of the factories. Sinclair was disappointed by the tunnel-sighted investigation because it didn’t address the wage and working conditions of the people that actually worked there. Even though the factory owners had ample time to clean up before the two men arrived, the conditions were described as being “revolting”.
In the novel The Jungle Sinclair tries to make the argument that socialism is the cure for capitalism, that capitalism is an evil, greedy, and unfair system that needs to be abolished. The only way for it to be abolished is if everything supports socialism and the only way for that to happen is if everyone realizes the plight the workers go through. On page 315 Sinclair wrote, “To Jurgis the packers had been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people.” This shows that Jurgis’ mind is changing to adopt socialism and as a result the reader is supposed to realize this too and see socialism as answer to all problems.
The bias of Sinclair can be seen on almost every page when he describes the factories or living conditions of the workers. He uses nauseating descriptions to evoke sympathy from the reader like on page134 and 135 where he describes the meat that made into sausages. Just line after line of disgusting information like, “…but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of dried dung of rats.”
Upton Sinclair was a socialist journalist, not a novelist, and his writing can for the most part confirm this. He rights with a very clear diction and doesn’t use to much sophisticated language, mainly because he was trying to appeal to a very large crowd. The simple language can be seen on any page really but one example is found on page 212, “Finally he got up and walked on again. It was about sunset, and he went on and on until it was dark,…”.
Sinclair’s sources for this novel were his own observations when he visited Chicago and the stockyards and a Lithuanian family he met there. He conducted many interviews with workers and got his beginning from visited a veselja on his first day in the city. There is a bibliography in the Bantam Classic version. It has a list of works by Upton Sinclair, other fiction by him, nonfiction and it says he wrote two autobiographies. There was a lack of multimedia in the book, but it wasn’t needed
It’s interesting to judge the success of this novel. He first tried to publish it five times before he finally did it himself and then it became an instant must-read. The novel struck a chord in everyone who read it but it may not have been the one Sinclair was going for. His intention for the novel was to cause a social reform in America and have everyone sympathize with the poor workers, then they would over-power the rich leaders and create a socialist utopian society. Proof for this can be found in the last few pages during the speeches, especially with the last line, “ CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” So was Sinclair successful, no, not in his mind, but in the eyes of the nation and world and the changes it brought about like the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Meat Inspection Act which significantly rose the standard of food in the U.S.
Upton Sinclair set out to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Labor Movement by writing a novel that anyone could read which exposed capitalism as the evil cause of all hardships. He proposed that capitalism can and will destroy all that is held dear to the American people like family values, honesty, integrity, and kindness. He set out to disprove all aspects of capitalism like social Darwinism and laissai-faire economics. What the novel did accomplish though was bring about reforms that saved countless lives and led to a better standard of living for all. Upton Sinclair has left a big footprint in the field of muckraking and The Jungle goes down in history as one of the most important pieces of socialist propaganda the United States has ever embraced.

Spam?

2009-04-24T12:03:00.000-04:00

So for some reason this blog was labeled as spam. I'm pretty sure its not, so I hope it gets cleared up soon.
yeah and right now I probably should be writing yet another essay, this time on the German homefront during WWI. Depending on the grade I get on it, I might post it later.

Book Review, Donald Barr Chidsey, The Great Conspiracy.

2009-04-24T11:41:00.000-04:00

Donald Chidsey’s historical novel about the notorious Aaron Burr is a well written synopsis of the events that surrounded Burr after his famous duel and up to his treason trial and concludes with his last few years spent in Europe and New York. There was quite a bit of mystery about the man and rumors spread like wildfire. Many historians have tried to discover the true identity of this fascinating man but have been largely influenced by the rumors his enemies spread. Not Chidsey, he explores the nature and motives of the quiet, well-mannered, man of honor, with a significantly different view of him. The author comes off as almost defending the suspected traitor and cites many other publications and references to support his facts. One can get a sense of the mystery surrounding the great conspiracy by reading what other respected historians have to say about Aaron Burr. In discussing the events of the duel, The American Pageant, (Kennedy, Cohen, Baily,) says this “Hamilton deplored the practice of dueling, by that date illegal in several states, but felt his honor was at stake. He met Burr’s challenge at the appointed hour but refused to fire. Burr killed Hamilton with one shot.” This is a much different story than the one told by Chidsey, but no one is certain as to what actually happened. The main argument presented by Donald Chidsey’s novel is that Aaron Burr didn’t present any threat to the United States government or the Mexican government he was just looking for adventure.
The starts out with an introduction to the Louisiana Purchase and describes the debate about the land west of the Appalachians. This is an important part of the book because it’s this debate and subsequent decisions that had a lot to do with the shaping of that part of the nation. The Louisiana Purchase being such an enormous amount of land that the government had virtually no control over. It opened the door to opportunity and to all those enterprising minded people, like Aaron Burr.
The story then puts the reader on the shores of the north river in New Jersey, following Burr as he awaits Hamilton. The two highest paid lawyers in New York were there because of a dispute about slanderous words being printed in a paper. Chidsey writes this part very carefully and thoughtfully. When it came to the actual duel, he paints the picture of two willing gentlemen calmly taking their pistols and following all the preset rules. Hamilton won the right to say “present” at which time both men would fire. Both men fired, but Hamilton’s shot went high about six feet and to the right about four feet. Chidsey makes a note as to this passage and writes later that “no sides would taken here in the dispute that raged for years, and may still be raging in remote corners of libraries, as to whether Hamilton or Burr shot first” (Chidsey 146).
After this duel Burr became quite notorious and a warrant was issued for his arrest in the state of New York and later New Jersey. This being the case Burr thought it necessary to take a vacation. He ordered a floating home to be sailed down the Ohio. He more or less drifted down the river at around seven knots, stopping where he liked. It was on this first adventure to the west that the theories start to arise about his doings. It was also on this first adventure he meets several people and uses his famous charm and wit and befriends them all. Most notably he meets Mrs. Blennerhassett on the island of the same name, and stays there several days. He then sails down to Louisville and meets Andrew Jackson. Then it was on to Fort Massac to meet an old acquaintance, General James Wilkinson. The general was a queer man who was always dressed in a pompous uniform, and a man fond of food and drink. After four days of secret discussions Burr departed for the town which would become his favorite, New Orleans.
After being greeted like a hero in the sultry and flamboyant city he was informed that the country of Mexico was ready for a revolution and all it needed was a leader and money. Burr was never to good with money, he was good at extracting it but it slipped out of his hands as easy as water. Thus began Burr’s great quest to raise as much money as possible, buy months worth of supplies and recruit men willing to make a new life for themselves in a great adventure.
The great conspiracy arises when Burr starts to do some strange things. He begins to meet with the rich, and famous heroes of the past and he starts having friends recruit for him. The strangest of all his doings was with the General, the Washington of the West, James Wilkinson. He and Burr had been corresponding for many years using a cipher and early in August Wilkinson simply wrote I am ready.
Burr went back to Blennerhassett island and some of the recruits started to follow suit. He had to leave though and traveled many places just in time actually. Rumors started to surface saying that he had thousand of troops ready to start a war that would separate east from west. The county militia raided the island expecting to find hard fighting rugged mercenaries, but only found a handful of young men of good family who were just looking for adventure.
Burr was almost arrested for trying to separate the Union and start a war with Mexico, but his lawyer, Henry Clay, helped him beat the rap. Around this same time General Wilkinson decided to turn on his old friend. Wilkinson was recently appointed to the governorship of Louisiana and was not well liked in the Senate. The reason he turned on him is simple. Wilkinson was going to be superseded as the commanding officer of the entire army and he needed a reason for the senate to keep him in his position. After receiving a letter from Burr he waited two weeks before sending word to the president that there was trouble in New Orleans and that their might be a revolt. He then asked for martial law to be enacted and for a pay raise.
After Wilkinson had spread so much panic throughout the country, President Jefferson issued a proclamation saying what the general had been shouting. Burr was completely unaware of these goings on and continued with the plan to bring his 60-100 men from Cumberland island to meet up with the men from Blennerhassett island and continue on to New Orleans. On January 10 1807, Burr met up with his friend judge Peter Bruin who showed him the presidents proclamation and the warrant for his arrest. The game was up.
Burr was arrested and tried for treason at the supreme court in Richmond Va. The chief justice that was to preside over the trial was chief justice John Marshall. The prosecution had an all-star team of orators to convict him but Burr also had his own team of supporters which included John Wickham, Edmund Randolph, Benjamin Botts, and Charles Lee.
The trial itself came to be the foundation for the definition of treason. For over a hundred years it would serve as the example. For the most part that is what the trial consisted of, attorneys debating whether or not what he did, if anything , could be construed as treason. These debates lasted hours and were supplemented by an occasional witness with a shaky story. After several weeks the defense asked for a motion, if the only real evidence the prosecution had of treason were the copies of letters that had been tampered/supplied by Wilkinson, and testimonies of witnesses who thought they saw suspicious activity, then all of that was collateral and there was no case.
After nine more days of the Great Debate, Justice Marshal read his decision, the longest in American history. Marshall asked the prosecution if they had anything else, and having none, the case went to the jury. They returned twenty minutes later with a verdict of not guilty.
After the trial Burr was still not very well liked in the country and traveled to Europe under a false name. he tried to seduce people over there to pour their money into his schemes just like before but was met with less than success. He returned to the states in May 1812. He tried to get in contact with his beloved daughter Theodosia, and his grandson Aaron Burr Alston. This was probably the one reason he came back to the states . Unfortunately Theodosia and young Aaron died when the ship they were traveling on sunk into the icy Atlantic.
In the 1830’s he was able to keep a good living by being a lawyer and was a regular sight taking long walks. When news of the revolt in Texas reached him he was delighted, “There, you see? I was right!” he cried. “I was only thirty years too soon! What was treason thirty years ago is patriotism now!”
The adventurous Aaron Burr was thrust into an adventure that was of his own making that helped define the American way of doing things. The idea of manifest destiny demanded that the west be settled is observable in Burr’s moves and the dirty politics of some people in high positions didn’t go away with Wilkinson. Donald Chidsey tried to show Aaron Burr in a new light so that he may be better understood by later generations. Chidsey did a very good job at humanizing this mysterious character. After reading so many authors who paint him as a horrible traitor, it’s refreshing to read a different opinion. Upon finishing the novel one comes away with a great respect and almost pity for the man.
One example of the author trying to show the reader that Burr was in reality a harmless dreamer can be found on page 31, “…he was looking for a future, and being the sort of man he was, he would hardly be satisfied with something small, something dim.”
Donald Chidsey was very bias when he wrote this story, he had to be for it to support his thesis. He was sympathetic towards Burr and always described him as a charming, witty, and likable. Many pages can attest for this statement, one such page is 138, “He was a kindly man, if devious, and he cold not bear to hear a child cry.”
The author’s diction is plain English with relatively easy comprehensibility. He varied his sentence lengths and keeps the writing exciting. He alternates between long sentences with several commas and short sentences that make a dramatic statement. This can be seen on page 118, “The general showed the jury what he said was the self-same letter that Samuel Swartwout had delivered to him in the camp at Natchitoches, but he was obliged to confess that he had tampered with it, scratching out a word here and there and substituting other words, erasing the entire first sentence.”
“These jurors would have indicted the General as well as Aaron Burr.”
The author included an extensive bibliography in the back of the book. The sources he used were varied from memoirs of John Adams an Thomas Jefferson, to biographies that have Wilkinson and corruption in the title. Some examples are as follows: Jefferson, Thomas. The writings of Thomas Jefferson, collected and edited by Paul Leicester Ford. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897.
Shereve, Royal Ornan. The Finished Scoundrel: General James Wilkinson. Indianapolis: The Bobs-Merrill Company, 1933
Donald Chidsey has given a great contribution to the study of Aaron Burr. By writing an easy to understand and engaging historical novel he was able to bring to life the mysteries surrounding this perplexing man. He wrote this book for any person who wants to learn the history of the killer of Hamilton. The purpose of the book was to show a new view of a notorious killer that had so many rumors around him. Aaron Burr was just an enterprising man with a grand imagination, he was able to charm many people and acquired many friends. His unfortunate flaw was that he had terrible luck with money. Any money that went into his pocket was sure to find a hole. After all the nasty rumors that followed him wherever he went, he ended up being a kind old man with a smile always on his face. The quiet and reserved Aaron Burr, who liked be mysterious, was dogged by tragedy and had all his schemes fail. He lost the presidency by only one vote, he lost his prestige with one shot, he lost his only daughter and grandson to a shipwreck, and lost any hope of crowning himself emperor of Mexico and splitting the Union in two. As Donald Chidsey put it, “But Aaron Burr never seemed to mind. He kept smiling. He had a wonderful time.”

Chinua Achebe and Heart of Darkness

2009-04-24T11:38:00.000-04:00

Chinua Achebe’s essay on racism in Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness is highly critical of the author and describes him as a “thoroughgoing racist.” Achebe’s argument for this lies in Conrad’s lack of description for the natives, his use of the word nigger, and the emphasis on darkness. At the time this essay was composed, the world was going through turbulent times concerning racism. It could be that Achebe, like Conrad, was just a man of the times, at that time. Conrad wrote his novel during a time of imperialization, where newly colonized peoples weren’t considered as human as the colonizers. In some cases Conrad may have even been mocking the prejudice of the time. Achebe on the other hand, wrote his essay at a time when emotions were high and racism was a part of everyday life. In his essay, which is full of contradictions and misinterpretations, he damns the novel and suggests that it should be banned, while later on says that it’s a masterful work of fiction. Chinua Achebe, when asked later about his essay, says that “its not in his nature to talk about banning books.” No, Achebe missed the meaning behind Conrad’s words, Heart of Darkness shows the hypocrisy of the European monarchs who plundered Africa for resources under the pretenses of civilization, more specifically King Leopold II.
Achebe starts his argument by criticizing the relationship between the River Thames and the River Congo. He asserts that Conrad describes the Congo as the antithesis of Europe. His proof is that Conrad writes about the tranquility and civility of the Thames and how the Congo is a dark and barbaric world, more like the earth’s ancestral past. This theory about the Congo being a glimpse into the untouched, Edenic, world was common of the day. Many people also believed in the measuring of skulls to determine intelligence. Conrad’s depiction of the dark and mysterious Congo have more to do with the metaphor of darkness in itself, then him calling the natives barbarian heathens.
Achebe then gets to the heart of the matter, mind the pun, with blatantly stating that Conrad is a racist. He quickly skims over the part that every other critic of the novel has come to the conclusion that Conrad is indeed telling the truth about the atrocities that were occurring in the Congo under King Leopold. Achebe has a problem with Conrad’s use of the word nigger. To modern day people this is understandable, but one must understand that back then no one was politically correct, there was no NAACP and people called Africans what they had been called for many years.
Joseph Conrad was not a racist. The terms he used to describe the Africans, and the lack of development of any black character, only show that he was a man of his times and he was using them as a backdrop for the philosophical and existential struggles Marlow goes through. The purpose of this novel was to bring to light the hypocrisy of the European Imperialism. King Leopold II started his colony in the Congo under the pretense of philanthropy and civility. All the characters Marlow meets serve to reiterate this.
Kurtz is the most obvious of foils. He has gone to the jungle as a humanitarian but these ideals turn out to be just as decrepit as the man himself. Kurtz is the darkness that resides in the guiding light of civilization which King Leopold thrust upon the Congo. Marlow’s ascent upriver cuts through the fog and darkness until it reaches the Inner Station. Here he meets the Russian who babbles on until finally Kurtz himself appears. Marlow’s preconceived vision of Kurtz turns out to be wrong. Kurtz is described as being tall, even though his name means short in German, as he puts it, “the name was as true as everything else in life-and death.” Kurtz was sick and feeble, his body was failing him because it did not belong in the jungle but back in Europe as Marlow put it. The striking thing about Kurtz’s condition is that his voice was “profound and vibrating”, this could represent the European monarchy again.
Heart of Darkness is a tale that brings the reader along, up the snaking river to the heart of the jungle and the personification of human nature. Kurtz is a man that all of Europe helped in creating, he is their ideals about morality and civility. Marlow discovers that these are mere films over man’s true barbarity. Chinua Achebe misinterpreted the language used by Conrad, who was, in many cases, showing that the Africans were more civilized then their European counterparts. This can be seen during the attack on the boat when the “cannibals” were perfectly calm while the pilgrims were shooting about blindly, and it is only when this man picks up the rifle and shoots wildly that he gets killed by a “barbaric weapon. Joseph Conrad was not a racist, he was a masterful writer who integrated many layers of symbols in his story to bring to light the true evil or darkness that resided in the hearts of supposedly civilized men.

Parallel Developments in American History Prohibition Vs. the War on Drugs

2009-04-24T11:33:00.000-04:00

The United States has gone through two periods of great social reform that have largely been a complete failure. One of these periods is the Prohibition of the 1920’s, a time when alcohol was banned from America. The other is the great War on Drugs started by Richard Nixon in the 70’s and furthered by subsequent presidents like Reagan and Bush. While noble in its origin, the legislature that was passed was doomed to failure in America. It was doomed to fail because no amount of governmental interference in such a profitable product, with such a high demand could succeed in a free nation built on the ideas of civil liberties and capitalism. The economic problems that arise when dealing with the laws are astronomical in size, and the bureaucracy that developed around both issues is one of the main faults. In both cases it was an experiment noble in cause to alleviate perceived societal flaws.
The idea of prohibiting the liquor started to gain support in the 1880’s with groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and its star, Carry Nation. The angry little woman would wield a hatchet, breaking up saloons and bars, frightening the innocent patrons enjoying a drink. She was never arrested because she would break up saloons in Kansas, which had a prohibition law. There was no way an officer could arrest her for damaging property that wasn’t supposed to be there. (Barry 4)
The WCTU gained more support and soon more organized groups came about such as the Prohibition Party. But it was in 1895 that the most powerful political force to support temperance was formed, the Anti-Saloon league. The league was deeply connected with the protestant church and wielded great lobbying powers. (Barry 7)
The many problems that alcoholism brought about, and the horrible image of the saloon started to change the minds of many Americans in the early 20th century, and by 1919 the tactics of the Anti-Saloon league were able to win the states approval of the 18th amendment which forbade the manufacture, transportation, or sale of intoxicating liquor. There was only one problem, many Americans were still determined to drink. So speakeasies sprouted up all across the country, with rumrunners and moonshiners providing the liquor. Who was it that sold this now illegal and much sought after drink, gangs.
With so many people willing to break the law it wasn’t long for some entrepreneurial types to catch on to the fact that there was millions to be made. These previously small time gangs who only dabbled in gambling and prostitution, now had a very lucrative new business. Gangs sprang up all over the country and started thousands of speakeasies in order to please the public. As many as 30000 speakeasies were in operation in New York City and as many as 100000 in Chicago. The most infamous of these gangs was John Torrio and Al Capone’s gang in Chicago.
Capone and Torrio raked in millions of dollars during the twenties, an estimated $30 million by Capone himself each year. The corruption in Chicago was so widespread that most gang members were only fined, never truly arrested. Torrio once boldly exclaimed, “I own the police.” (Barry 36) . This was largely true. Capone and his gang were above the law for a while. Gangs in Chicago paid the police little attention and would drive down busy streets shooting at each other. In one case an assassination attempt on Capone was made when he was finishing lunch at the Hawthorn Restaurant in Cicero. On that day September 20th 1926, a black touring car roared down the street past the restaurant with a man firing a tommy gun out of the window. Following that car there was a dummy police car with sirens and lights. Everyone in the restaurant jumped to their feet to see what was going on and Capone almost joined them, but his quick thinking bodyguard pulled him under the table. Then a convoy of ten cars slowly went by the restaurant and each on sprayed the building with their tommy guns. After the tenth car went by, a man got out , went to the entrance and sprayed the inside with a ten second burst from his tommy gun. (Barry 46)
The amazing thing about this scene was that not one person was killed and the only injury was a woman who got a piece of shattered glass in her eye. Capone generously paid for her expensive surgery and for the repair of all the buildings damaged in the raid. While killings in Chicago had become almost commonplace there was one event that changed the romantic view the public had of the gangster, and that event was the St. Valentines Day Massacre.
Bugsy Moran and his gang had been working with Capone distributing the Old Log Cabin brand whiskey for a little while until Moran thought he was being overcharged. At this point he told Capone that he was switching to a cheaper brand. Unfortunately for Moran, his customers preferred the Log Cabin brand. So Moran asked Capone if he could sell his brand again but Al told him he had already been replaced. Soon shipments of Old Log Cabin whiskey began to be hijacked and somehow Bugsy was ably to offer the old brand again. Capone and his associates, the Purple Gang of Detroit, had no misconceptions as to what was going on. They put a double agent in contact with Moran and told him that he had some shipments of the Purple Gang’s whiskey to sell. Bugsy and the O’Banion gang took the bait. For a while Moran thought he was buying whiskey that had been stolen from Capone, but in actuality he was playing right in to his hand. Then one day the double agent told Bugsy that he had a particularly large shipment coming in, well, he couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this. So Bugsy told him to deliver the shipment to his garage on North Clark Street where his entire staff would be waiting.(Barry 59)
The date set for the delivery was February 14th 1929, a cold and windy St. Valentines Day. In the morning a police car pulled up to the Moran garage and out stepped two men in police uniform and three in plain clothes. They walked in and ordered the men to stand facing the wall, the men complied thinking that it was an ordinary raid and that they would be out of jail shortly. Unfortunately the men weren’t cops, the two in uniform were hired guns from St. Louis and the other three were Capone gangsters. The impersonators then opened up with .45 caliber Thompson sub-machine guns and nearly cut them in half. They were then blasted with shotguns just to make sure. (Barry 59).
Bugsy was a lucky man. He was not among the seven victims, although a young optometrist who resembled him was, Dr R. H. Schwimmer. The good doctor liked to pal around with gangsters. Moran and another were walking towards the garage when they saw the uniformed men, thinking it was a legitimate raid, they casually ran away.
The St. Valentines Day Massacre marks a significant turning point in the public opinion of gangsters. What had once been a Romantic view of the gangster became one of utter disgust. More and more Americans started to feel that prohibition had done more harm than good. It crowded prisons, corrupted officials and paved the way for the horrible acts of inhumanity perpetrated by gangs.
The increased criminalization of drugs led to the same problems that Chicago had seen in the twenties with alcohol. Stepping up enforcement and cracking down on supplies didn’t always work to rid the streets of dangerous criminals, instead it bred many more desperate and cunning minds than before. Men such as Frank Lucas who were able to amass unimaginable fortunes selling heroin on the streets of New York. Lucas was involved in the infamous cadaver connection, where bricks of pure heroin were stashed inside the coffins of fallen servicemen. He was able to make $1 million dollars a day selling he “Blue Magic” on 116th street in Harlem. (Frank Lucas bio)
Lucas was able to keep his Country Boys rich throughout the early seventies by buying the smack at 100% purity and then reselling it at 10% pure, creating a profit margin astronomical in size. His reign as top gangster in Harlem came crashing down in 1975 when he was arrested and later sentenced to 70 years in prison. Lucas cut a deal and gave up the names of 100 corrupt police officers which led to the indictment of 52 members of the Special Investigation unit of the NYPD. He was released after five years but sent right back for seven more after breaking parole.
The spirit of the twenties can be characterized as a time of great change. It was the first time in American history that the amount of people living in cities outnumbered the rural population. It was in the cities that the image of the flapper and the defiance of prohibition laws took place. The generally dry agrarian population of the U.S. was loosing its influence as the Jazz age took over. (Barry 21)
This time of consumerism and opulence gave rise to the richest middle-class in all the world. The pursuit of the great American Dream was the common goal of the era. Many young middle-class men and women sought to imitate the truly rich by doing what they thought the truly rich did, and that was drink. The poorer working class couldn’t afford the higher priced hard liquors and missed their cheap beer, but the middle-class was looking to break with traditions. This great American dream is best characterized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby is a fictional novel set in Long Island during the Jazz Age. The main character is Nick Caraway who travels from the Midwest out to the city after WWI. There he rents a house next to the extraordinarily wealthy Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is known to throw lavish parties that last all night but his true intentions for throwing the parties is to reconnect with his lost sweetheart, Daisy Buchanan. On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a fictionalized area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.
Another noble experiment began in the late sixties involving drugs and the culture they spawned. Again Americans began to see the dregs of society, the criminals, as otherwise good people who just have an addiction to a horrible substance. They thought that the removal of the substance would solve the problems. Unfortunately the mere act of criminalizing the substances wasn’t the solution, no, it would take billions and billions of dollars to make it seem like the War on Drugs was working, but even then it has just led to many of the same problems the prohibition of alcohol led to. Problems such as gang warfare, more deadly substances, decreased democracy, and the wasteful spending of tax dollars. (White)
The War on Drugs started to gain momentum as LBJ was loosing popularity. His “great society” hadn’t alleviated many problems and seemed like a big waste of money to many Americans. His greatest mistake was seemingly being lax on crime. The overall discontent with the war in Vietnam had spawned many protests, and with this counterculture grew the proliferation of drug use especially marijuana and hallucinogens. But the drug that was the cause for concern during this time was heroin.
Heroin was seen as an inner city problem that mainly affected the blacks. This is how the stereotypical black junkie came to be what people visualized when they thought of crime. The crimes usually attributed to junkies were muggings, murder and petty theft. It was true that a large amount of crimes were committed by junkies and the study by Robert DuPont concluded that 44% of inmates tested positive for heroin when they entered the D.C jail in 1969. (Baum 19).
With the new data in and polls telling government that most white males were fed up with the civil rights movement, republicans saw an opportunity to take over the White house. Richard Nixon took office in January of 1969 and set about making many reforms. He coined the phrase “War on Drugs” in 1972 to describe the increased enforcement of the prohibition on drugs. He also started the Drug Enforcement Agency by consolidating all of the previous departments like the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), and others into one. The DEA is given the task of dealing with drug smuggling and use within the US. (Baum 68)
After Nixon resigned from office Gerald Ford took over. Much of Ford’s drug policy was uneventful compared to Nixon’s. But the overall feeling was that of a truce. All the old proponents had fallen with Nixon and the old ideas of “root causes” were coming back. Most surprisingly under Ford there was serious thought given to the legalization of marijuana as suggested by his Federal Drug Strategy. (Baum 150
During the early days of Carter‘s presidency drug enforcement was not a big problem. Vietnam was over, addicts were getting treatment(mainly from Nixon’s Methadone treatment plan), crime wasn’t in the public eye, and there wasn’t anything to be gained from making an issue out of the war on drugs. Carter’s drug czar, Peter Bourne, suggested that the reform of marijuana punishment should take place. Carter supported this and instituted civil fines for marijuana possession instead of jail time which was only effective at crowding prisons and ruining lives. (Baum110)
What Carter did not anticipate was that his harm-reduction policies towards drugs ran counter to the enormous amount of propaganda and rhetoric that had been previously put forth. In the public eye pot was addictive and led to heroin, and they would make themselves know with groups such as the Nosy Parents group and other anti-drug groups.( Baum 89)
Another drug also started to come to light in the late seventies and that drug was cocaine. Cocaine was starting to gain popularity among the upper middle-class and rich during the late seventies and throughout the eighties. The horrible path that cocaine would cut through American society was unknown to Bourne and would come back to haunt him. (White)
The time of the “esoteric debate” was coming to an end as Dick Williams put it, “ Let’s declare drug abuse wrong and get on with it.” That they did and in 1981 Ronald Reagan took office, so began the greatest increase in drug enforcement since the “War” had been declared in 1972. Reagan’s conservative nature looked to cut government spending in any area, so what got cut, the methadone treatment slots program that had been in affect for over a decade. Large grants were going to replace the costly treatment instead. Other programs that got cut at this time were child nutrition (down 34%), urban development action grants (down 35%), education block grants (down 38%), school milk programs (down 78%) and energy conservation ( down 83%). The only programs that didn’t get cut were the “ hard” side of enforcement such as the Coast Guard which enjoyed a 44% increase in its budget. (Baum 145)
On June 24, 1982, Reagan declared his new War on Drugs.
“ ‘I was not present at the Battle of Verdun in World War I,’ he said. ‘But from that battle I learned of that horrendous time of an old French soldier who said something we could all heed. He said, ‘There are no impossible situations. There are only people who think they’re impossible.’’(Baum 165)
“ ‘We can put this drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement,’ he said. ‘We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We’re running up a battle flag.’” (Baum 166).
The Verdun reference was quite strange: the battle is known for the loss of half a million men on both sides and accomplished very little.
Reagan then began to really bring the war to the War on Drugs. In on of his first legislative victories, Reagan revised the 103-year-old law that kept the military out of civilian affairs. The Posse Comitatus Act had made it illegal for the military to act as police on US territory or waters, but the Reagan administration wanted a clearly defined role for the military’s active role in the War on Drugs. The navy would assist the Coast guard in spotting smugglers and the air force was a valuable ally watching the skies. This all came with a price of course and the Pentagon saw it’s funding go from $1 million dollars to $196 million dollars.
Technology played a huge role in both the Roaring Twenties and the 80’s. The twenties were a time of modernization and mass production which led to cheaper goods for people. The 80’s went through a very similar time of consumerism marked by advancements in science and technology. One advancement that had an enormous impact on life in the twenties, and prohibition especially was the automobile. (Barry 44)
The automobile was invented in Europe during the late 1800’s and was never much of a success, mainly because the vehicles were expensive and unreliable. But after WWI had modernized American factories and set the stage for mass production, autos would become cheap and very popular.
Ford’s Model t was the most popular auto of the time. He sold over 15 million units by 1927. The new consumers of this product were in fact gangsters. They quickly realized the importance of the car and adopted it to suit their means. Some cars were modified to benefit the gangsters by installing thick bulletproof glass or armor on the doors. Gangs soon created strategies reminiscent of an army’s cavalry by moving in quick, striking fast with machine guns and then screeching away.
The 1980’s saw many scientific and technological advancements that helped and greatly hurt society. One such advancement was in the production of “crack cocaine”. This new potent product was made by mixing powdered cocaine with baking soda and water and then heating it. The oil that was extracted was then cooled into a hydrate and smoked out of a pipe. The vapor was quickly absorbed by the lungs and caused the user to feel a very quick and intense high, but was left with an insatiable appetite for more soon after. (White)
The crack epidemic is said by the DEA to have started in 1984 and ended in 1990, in which time it caused enormous amounts of damage to users, communities, and the prison system. By taking extreme measures against crack, president Reagan is partially to blame for the over-crowded prison systems that do much more harm than good. Today the United States has the highest percentage of its population locked up, over 2.2 million inmates.
One novel that explored the drug culture and the end of the hippie generation was Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book deals with the end of the counterculture of the 60’s and the cynicism that followed. The novel is a somewhat autobiographical account of events that happened to Thompson on a trip to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400. The two men are given $300 and use the majority of it to purchase ludicrous amounts of drugs. What followed was a descent into the reasons of drug culture and the delusion of the American dream.
The thirteen years of prohibition that America went through is very similar to the more recent War on Drugs. Both time periods saw remarkable change both socially and politically. The causes of these restricting times were deeply rooted in a national sense of disgust with crime and the want for a return to normal times, good times. Unfortunately such radical reform laws are nearly unworkable in American society. This is mainly due to the fact that the true American dream is to have the freedom to earn money. When the government took away some of it’s citizens’ freedoms, the citizens disobeyed the law. When the government indirectly made disobeying the law so profitable to anyone willing to grasp at the opportunity, it set the stage for a never ending battle. For sometimes it is the forbidden fruit that tastes sweeter than all else.