Inevitable Historicity

If there is a single reason why the military dictatorship in Chile under Augusto Pinochet is viewed less negatively than contemporaneous authoritarian governments elsewhere in Latin America, it is the conventional wisdom of an “economic miracle” that took place in that country between 1973 and 1990. As is now well known, under the Pinochet régime, economists trained at the University of Chicago – the so-called Chicago boys – occupied key positions within Chile’s ministries of finance and the economy and implemented neoliberal reforms. These policies, it is claimed, reversed the negative outcomes brought about by the aggressive policies of nationalization implemented under Pinochet’s predecessor, the socialist Salvador Allende.

            In Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile, Juan Gabriel Valdés seeks to detail the complicated processes by which this cadre of Chicago-trained economists attained such extraordinary influence. The monograph, which served as Valdés’s doctoral dissertation in the Department of Politics at Princeton,^[1] offers a painstakingly detailed account of the origins of neoliberal economic thought following World War II, its consolidation at the University of Chicago, its transplantation to Chile during the 1950s and 1960s, and its emergence as the prime driver of economic policy under Pinochet.

            Valdés is a very deliberate and direct writer, and as such, his thesis is quite clearly enunciated in nine points that end the book’s second chapter. According to this thesis, the project of the Chicago boys under Pinochet was the culmination of a program begun in the 1950s under the United States government’s International Cooperation Administration, which in 1961 became the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). With the intention of fostering cooperation between U.S. universities and educational institutions in developing countries, contacts were established between Chicago’s Department of Economics and the Universidad Católica de Chile for the purpose of transplanting schools of economic thought to contend with the prevailing development theories championed by structuralists such as Raúl Prebisch. Implicitly, according to Valdés, it was a program designed to undermine economic policies in Chile perceived as socialist. Deployed to combat socialism was a resurgent school of classical economic thought, which sought to dislodge the Keynesian consensus in economics that had resulted from the previous two decades of economic depression and eventual recovery.

Since the Chicago School had already become a hotbed of neoliberal economists – Milton Friedman principal among them – the initial stage of the USAID program, which involved Chilean students earning advanced economics degrees at Chicago, resulted in young economists returning to Chile fully versed in the principles of classical economics and highly ideologically motivated to implement these principles. Valdes calls this program one of “ideological transfer,” by which “a series of regulatory proposals and several policy recommendations”^[2] that were commonly advocated for among Chicago economists became broadly supported among the Chicago trainees returning to Chile. Chief among these proposals and recommendations were privatization of nationally owned industries, removal of price controls, a purely monetarist approach to inflation (i.e., shrinking the money supply by restricting credit), and other strictly market-based policies. Over the course of more than a decade, a network of professors, students, and intellectuals committed to neoliberalism established control over the economics department at Universidad Católica, but its influence remained limited to academia until the convulsive effects of economic policies implemented not only under Allende but also under his predecessor, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei. Political polarization that began under Frei and that increased enormously under Allende culminated in the coup by the military in September 1973 that overthrew Allende’s government, which was supported by business and economic elites, as well as broad segments of the middle class. Once the military junta was firmly in control of the country, neoliberal reform of the economy and its institutions began, and Chile became a sort of laboratory in which these policies were implemented and their real-world consequences observed.

Beyond the phenomenon of ideological transfer, Valdés also examines the role played by Friedman’s Chicago School colleague Theodore Schultz and his contributions to the classical theory of human capital. According to Schultz, vitally important to the development of human resources and their role in the creation of wealth is the provision of education to potential trainees to obtain the future benefit of these trainees’ expertise. Schultz attributed much of the United States’ economic hegemony to a “return on investment” in education. Valdés’s assertion in his book is that the neoliberal economic school at Chicago experienced difficulty attracting the best graduate students in economics and found a solution through its contracts with USAID, which provided among the most talented students from Latin America. In this way, these students constituted a population to whom education could be provided as part of human capital development: “human capital was the banner under which the group of American economists undertook the experiment in Chile.”^[3] Over time, this approach to human capital management expanded as private foundations, such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, began to provide additional funding for ideological transfer, particularly in the 1960s under initiatives led by Chicago economics faculty member Arnold Harberger.

As noted, Valdés’s approach to this topic is deliberate and thorough, and his research is admirable. To piece together the story of how the Chicago boys were trained, returned to Chile, and acquired power, he undertook extensive work in the archives of the USAID, the Universidad Católica, and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. Moreover, he is circumspect in identifying or alleging any conspiracy by Chicago economists and the Chilean military in overthrowing the Allende government for the purpose of introducing neoliberalism. He notes disagreement among sources regarding CIA funding for the Chicago boys, concluding that collaboration by certain economists in drafting of the notorious pre-coup plan for post-Allende Chile (known as el ladrillo, i.e., “the Brick”) “did not require high financing: there were many previous studies that could have provided the basis for the program’s recommendations.”^[4]

If there is a major weakness of Pinochet’s Economists, it is that the study ends in 1973, in the immediate aftermath of Allende’s ouster. As a result, there is little in the study about the actual outcomes of the Chicago boys’ program of reform. That said, in so far as the goal of the monograph is the origin of the Chicago boys’ presence in Chile in 1973 and not their activities thereafter, the study is essential to establishing that history. In addition, Valdés is a bit too eager to heap blame on the Allende administration for the cleavages in Chilean society on the eve of the coup. In this regard, it is perhaps important to bear in mind that Valdés’s father, Gabriel Valdés, was minister of foreign relations in the Frei administration and later president of the Chilean senate. These points notwithstanding, as one of the first studies to examine in such detail the introduction of neoliberalism in Chile, this book sets a high bar.

---

^[1] Oddly, the Cambridge University Press edition of the monograph is copyrighted 1995, while the date of submission for the dissertation is November 1996. In addition, a Spanish-language work by Valdés, Le Escuela de Chicago: Operación Chile, which clearly covers the same topic and which is broadly cited in the literature on the Chicago boys, was published even earlier, in 1989.

^[2] Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995), 50.

^[3] Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists, 98.

^[4] Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists, 251.

            This week’s reading – Lara Putnam’s Radical Moves – offers a view of Caribbean society in transit during the first half of the 20^th century. Using the causes and effects of migration by these people, Putnam offers general observations about the development of both black nationalism and black internationalism. I found Putnam’s definition of these terms from the outset to be helpful in understanding what she is trying to do in this book. According to her, black nationalism emphasizes the importance of black people’s primary allegiance being to one another within the context of racist societies. Conversely, black internationalism examines the system of supranational racial oppression and, thus, across national boundaries.

            That said, Putnam’s definitions of these terms also raise questions for me. For instance, does black nationalism therefore posit the creation or emergence of a black nation? Immediately following her term definitions, Putnam uses a quotation from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities to point out that black Caribbean people were limited in their nationhood because they lacked sovereignty. However, it is not clear that lacking sovereignty is a sufficient condition for excluding these people from nationhood. Moreover, Putnam seems to confuse matters a bit when she immediately follows her analysis of Caribbean communities in the context of Anderson’s definition of a nation with the comment that the issue of sovereignty is one that black internationalists have debated, rather than black nationalists. In short, where I find myself becoming confused by this terminology is in the inability or unwillingness to identify Afro-Caribbean people as a nation in their own right, rather than a group of black people feeling solidarity with one another but stopping short of embracing status as a nation.

            Obviously, such processes are complicated, but in reading Radical Moves, I consistently thought of Albert Camus’s essay “The New Mediterranean Culture,” in which the Algerian-born French author posits that political unity among Mediterranean peoples (Spanish, Italian, Greek, Levantine, and North African) might be easier to achieve than political unity on the nation state model, particularly since the peoples of the regions bordering the Mediterranean share more in common culturally (cuisine, how they divide the workday, etc.) than people within many of the regional nation sates do. It is difficult to understand why such an argument could not just as strongly apply to Caribbean people, who have the additional benefit (as Putnam points out) of multilingualism.

Finally, a question that arose for me in reading this book was how this particular work fits within the largest course context of U.S. imperialism. While the historical context of enslavement is clear, it is also true that many of the Caribbean people Putnam describes were descendants of people enslaved by countries other than the U.S. In addition, so much of the transit of the people in Putnam’s book does not involve in the United States at all, even if Harlem and Chicago’s South Side constitute the northern limits of the Caribbean sphere that Putnam analyzes in her book. It’s clear that the United States plays a role in the processes that appear in Radical Moves; it just is not clear that the United States plays a decisive or even a prominent role in these processes.

Two of this week’s readings return us to the topic of the United States government’s imperial relationship with indigenous peoples in North America. Much like the case of Ned Blackhawk’s Violence Over the Land, Cathleen Cahill’s Federal Fathers and Mothers is interested in part in exploring how native people cooperated in this imperial relationship by taking positions in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its residential school system. The recent revelations in the news about the depredations upon native children committed in similar schools in Canada gives this reading a particularly sinister feel, adding upon the already questionable goal in these schools of saving the child but “killing the Indian.” Therefore, it is inherently difficult to reconcile native identity with the fundamentally anti-indigenous agenda of the BIA and its schools. Among the more interesting topics I thought Cahill broached was the emergence of intertribal identity among native people. One question this topic raises, however, is how people from different tribes overcame previous animosities between tribes to have this intertribal identity emerge.

The journal article by Julie Reed recalls Tiya Miles’s Ties That Bind (which is cited in Reed’s notes) in its long-term approach to a topic concerning the Cherokee people, including how racial identity intersected with tribal notions of belonging and the complex relationship between race and kinship in this regard. For instance, she makes the point that, despite segregation in other aspects of public life, the Teacher’s Institute trained teachers of mixed race or of formerly enslaved background, even though prejudice against black people remained a significant current in the feelings of many Cherokees. That said, Reed’s article does leave unanswered the longer-term effects of racial stratification among the Cherokees past the generation in which people were freed from slavery. Thus, a question that emerges here is whether this fraught relationship between Cherokees and black people continued into the 20^th century.

            The third and final reading, Daniel Rodriguez’s The Right to Live in Health, departs from the topic of native people and instead treats the topic of the development of the idea of a right to medical care among Cubans as they became independent from Spain and then negotiated their new imperial relationship with the United States in the early 20^th century. It is difficult to read Rodriguez’s work and not think both of the ongoing debate in our own country over health care and its extension on a universal level to more of the population beyond the poor and elderly and of the significant accomplishments of the Cuban healthcare system later in the 20^th century, as well as in this century. Although the excerpts assigned from Rodriguez do not include a connection drawn between the period that he treats and health care under the communist system, it’s hard to imagine that the two periods are not connected. It would be interesting to know whether, before 1959, when American influence over Cuba was conclusively ended, the U.S. view of health care as not a right but a privilege or responsibility permeated the Cuban system to any extent.

            Once again, this week’s readings, particularly Emily Rosenberg’s Financial Missionaries to the World, overlapped to some extent with the periods/topics I teach. In this case, I spent the last week teaching the topic of American populism to my students and so addressed to a great extent the rise of the progressive movement and the policy changes implemented under Presidents T. Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson in response to the Gilded Age’s income and wealth inequality. That the first years of Rosenberg’s book coincides with this period raised my first major question about her subject matter: What was the relationship between the progressive impulse under these three presidents and the introduction of dollar diplomacy? Rosenberg discusses anti-banker sentiment among populists (notably Bryan, whose “Cross of Gold” speech I include among my course readings) in the early pages of the book and includes Robert Lafollette’s opposition during the 1920s, but there is a lacuna in between.

            The two readings by William A. Williams were quite interesting from an historiographic perspective. In “Imperial Colonialism,” he makes a cogent argument for the role of the Open Door policy in American extracontinental expansion beginning in the 1890s. The material here dovetails nicely with Drew McCoy’s account in Elusive Republic of the role of continental expansion in republican stability for the new republic. Williams’s response to Turner in “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy” brought back my training in literary analysis. I first encountered Turner frontier hypothesis in a course on the American novel between 1900 and 1950 in graduate school. Later, in reading for my dissertation, I became one the rare contemporary readers of Brooks Adams’s Law of Civilization and Decay. Here, a question that arose for me is why Williams seems to omit any discussion of the “law” of which Adams’s title speaks, i.e., the tendency for the center of gravity for economic supremacy to move from east to west over the course of history. Williams acknowledges the theory (p. 94) but not the underlying reason for the movement of centers of culture, which Adams saw (if I correctly recall) as cultural disintegration. Perhaps Williams engages Adams’s theory at greater length beyond the excerpt including in our readings.

            Finally, Catherine LeGrand’s essay “Living in Macondo,” about United Fruit’s company town in Colombia challenges the “conventional wisdom” on U.S. corporate interference in Latin American affairs, including the version of this story told by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In short, LeGrand strikes a familiar chord for historians, which is that the actual record in Macondo was neither as terrible as we might have been led to believe nor as sanitary as United Fruit might have portrayed it to be. Here, while I imagine that it was beyond the scope of what LeGrand hoped to address in her article, I found myself desiring a comparative approach in contrasting the history of Macondo and Colombia generally with that in Guatemala, on which the established historical record is significantly worse, although the key player is the same. What were the factors that contributed to United Fruit’s enterprise in Guatemala resulting in an U.S.-backed coup in the 1950s, while it seems the mailed fist of American military strength remained in check in Colombia. Obviously, there is the matter of geography, but clearly political matters were also a factor. Colombia seems to have a lacked a figure like Jacobo Arbenz and/or a political movement like his to both challenge and be defeated by U.S. military intervention.

This book was of particular interest to me because my girlfriend’s father is Filipino, specifically from the former political elite of the islands. His maternal grandfather was the governor of Batangas from 1910 to 1916, his father was one of the first Filipinos to attend college and medical school in the United States, and his brother is a cardinal and the former Archbishop of Manila. He can remember vividly details of the Japanese occupation during World War II. Therefore, I was interested to learn the political conditions under which he and his family grew up.

            The area of greatest inquiry for me in reading this book was the matter of the citizenship/nationality of Filipinos while the territory was a U.S. colony. To begin with, I had not known that any colonial populations were afforded representation in the Spanish Cortes and was surprised to learn that most colonial populations were. That Filipinos were made an exception to this rule indicated the racial nature of this exclusion. The question that subsequently emerged for me was whether Filipinos living under U.S. colonial government were equivalent to stateless persons. On the one hand, the U.S. government clearly recognized that it was responsible for the people living in the Philippines; on the other hand, the inability of Filipinos to vote or to emigrate freely to the mainland indicated their exclusion for citizenship. I wondered what the status of such colonized people would be under international law – a question I would imagine would be no less pointed when considering, e.g., the Togolese under German rule. Since the so-called Nansen passport of the interwar period tended to be issued only to refugees, would Filipinos seeking to settle elsewhere in the world besides the United States travel under some other kind of document or the equivalent of the Nansen passport?

            I was also unaware of the extent to which Filipinos had been subjected to racial discrimination, although to be fair, it wasn’t exactly a surprise either. I had known about anti-Chinese violence in California and elsewhere on the West Coast, I knew about the Chinese Exclusion Act, and I of course knew about Japanese-American detention during World War II. The case of Filipinos coming to the United States during the colonial era would seem to fall somewhere in between: they were neither aliens like laborers arriving for China (Kramer notes that the 1930 Welch bill failed [p. 423], and that this bill would have actually defined Filipinos as aliens) nor citizens (often of multiple generations) like the Japanese-Americans interned in the 1940s. Interestingly, when I asked my girlfriend’s father about his citizenship at birth (he was born in 1938), he was uncertain, although his daughter told me he had to be naturalized in order to live permanently in the U.S. (he had initially come for medical school and had intended to return to the Philippines).

            The final issue that raised questions for me in reading Kramer’s book was the definition of non-Christian Filipinos as a separate class or population from the Catholic majority. Again, while this information was not surprising, it was interesting to encounter a “divide and conquer” strategy like this one being deployed by U.S. imperialists. Again, in discussing the Philippine war for independence with my girlfriend’s father, he noted (unsolicited, I should add) that Muslims were among the last fighters to surrender and that they were, in his opinion, far more dedicated in the struggle for independence than his fellow Catholics. He did not specifically mention religious or ethnic stratification as part of his experience living in the Philippines, although it is possible that these issues were de-emphasized once independence had been promised and finally established.

This book offers fascinating insights into two areas of inquiry — German imperialism in Africa and postbellum African-American education – by examining how these two fields intersected when the German imperial government hired instructors from Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute to train Togolese farmers how to most productively farm cotton in West Africa. I was particularly interested in this monograph because of my interest in 20th century European history. I know comparatively little about German colonialism before World War I, so I looked forward to learning something about the topic from this book.

 Zimmerman takes up a large proportion of this book providing background before discussing the actual Tuskegee mission to Togo and following up this discussion with the longer-term implications for colonialism and the racialization of the Global South. As a result, Zimmerman’s treatment of the mission seems decentered in the book overall; indeed, the book engages so many topics outside the mission that it’s difficult to say exactly what kind of history Zimmerman writes. Nevertheless, the book strikes me as an important contribution to the two historical fields that it addresses.

My questions about this book primarily concern things I learned about people and topics that Zimmerman addresses of which I was previously unaware. For instance, since I teach some of Max Weber’s work to undergraduates, I found Zimmerman’s treatment of him and his racist leanings particularly interesting. Whereas the material I teach from Weber, from Politics as Profession, concerns the basis of authority in the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence for the purpose of extracting resources from the population, Zimmerman’s treatment focuses on the slightly earlier Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and specifically draws a line from Weber’s experiences among Southern blacks in the United States and his assumptions about their work ethic to larger theorizing on Weber’s part about the ethnic basis of industriousness. It would be interesting to examine whether Weber considered the extent to which the principles he articulates in Politics as Profession would apply in a colonial context. For instance, given Weber’s emphasis on the role of bureaucracy in the exercising of political authority, where does the Tuskegee mission to Togo fit in this model, particularly given the overwhelmingly extractive nature of German’s colonialism in Togo?

Also, as I mentioned in an earlier class, there is an obvious parallel that is drawn between postemancipation labor coercion of African Americans and the postfeudal peasantry east of the Elbe River, particularly among ethnic Poles. As Zimmerman notes, in both situations, the coercion is racialized, and in both cases, coercion via labor is used at least in part to limit the social mobility of these newly emancipated peoples. However, although key to the underlying thesis in Alabama in Africa is the transplantation of sharecropping from the American South to Togo, less clear is why this form of labor coercion could not be similarly imposed on trans-Elbian Germany or, for that matter, any other agricultural economy employed an emancipated peasantry. In the case of Russia, for instance, I assume that the difference lies in the transfer of ownership of former estate land to the peasants, thus encumbering them with a debt and thus giving rise to coercion, whereas in the South and perhaps east of the Elbe, there were no corresponding land transfers or land reforms, therefore requiring a different from of coercion to emerge.

            This book was the most sheerly entertaining one I’ve read so far this term. Baumgartner is a wonderful writer with an engaging style, in addition to being a talented historian. Furthermore, I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book that provided as comprehensive an overview of the political histories of both Mexico and the United States over the period covered in the work. I learned more about the imperial period in Mexico and the Mexican-American War than I had ever before, but in a way, this is my primary criticism of the book. Although I appreciate that telling the story in South to Freedom required Baumgartner to provide the necessary historical context, I feel that her emphases on Mexican history and Mexican-U.S. relations overshadowed the narratives of escaped enslaved people that she (presumably) sought to foreground. In fairness, I don’t know that there was additional primary source material that Baumgartner might have used to write a longer study that emphasized the experience of black people more. Perhaps there was not. This issue would constitute my first major question about this book.

            In addition, there were a few details about the book that I found confusing. For instance, in discussing the power struggle between President Vicente Guerrero and his vice president and even successor Anastasio Bustamante, the detail of Guerrero’s race seems important. On the one hand, the hostility to Bustamante based on race is clear when Bustamante’s troops said, “Death to el negro Bustamante” (p. 70). On the other hand, their other rallying cry of “Long live centralism” would seem to incongruent with a desire to remove a black man from office, particularly when centralism would have (I think) been crucial to the abolition of slavery across all of Mexico’s states, as opposed to it remaining legal in some states, such as Tejas. I fully concede that there is often no logic to racist emotions, but I found the juxtaposition of these slogans baffling. Therefore, it seems to me that a primary question raised by the book overall is the extent to which a tension or dynamic of some kind existed between the tendency toward centralism and abolition and/or one between federalism and pro-slavery sentiment. For all of the coverage of Mexican political history in the book, this question was in my reading never fully addressed.

            That said, I found the book fascinating in general. Since most of my course work has been in European history, the topic of enslaved people escaping to Mexico is one of which I was totally unaware, having literally not taken an American history class since high school. Finally, then, I would have to ask why this particular page of history has been so under-reported in favor of the narrative favoring the Underground Railroad and escape to Canada. Was it a manifestation of a “white savior” narrative emphasizing the role of another white settler colonial state in the liberation of enslaved people? Was language a barrier in the communication of this story; i.e., were fewer narratives available to American audiences of liberation found in Mexico compared to that in Canada simply because Canada is English speaking rather than Spanish speaking? Is it a manifestation of anti-Latino prejudice that the stories of enslaved people finding liberation in Mexico have been less frequently encountered? These are the principal questions raised in my reading of South to Freedom.

I took particular interest in reading this book because it engages some of the material that I teach my students every year, i.e., the different visions of the United States’ economic future envisioned by some of the Founders. Usually, my own discussion focuses entirely on Jefferson’s vision of a nation of yeoman farmers with decentralized power vs. Hamilton’s cosmopolitanism and aspirations of free trade. However, since I focus greatly on the plantation economy of the south vs. the commercial economy of the north, I hadn’t considered in such detail the implications for western expansion and its importance to maintaining Jefferson’s ideals.

I think the most difficult thing I found about Elusive Republic was the extent to which slavery is not discussed as a factor in these considerations of Jefferson and his compatriots. Besides the comparatively lengthier discussion in the final pages of the book, there are only the note on page 119, which references American slavery only comparatively, and a reference a hundred pages later to the Federalists’ denunciation of slavery as a means of attacking Jefferson’s beliefs. In the three pages in which McCoy discusses slavery more than in passing, his argument that “slavery had never found a place in the Jeffersonian vision of a republican political economy” (p. 251) feels weak; moreover, when expressing Jefferson’s beliefs about the eventual eradication of slavery even as it was allowed to spread westward, McCoy seems downright credulous. That said, I do appreciate the possibility that the topic McCoy seeks to analyze might be unmanagably weighed down by the inclusion of slavery throughout his treatment. I nevertheless wonder the extent to which this book has been targeted by later historians and critics for insufficiently addressing the issue.

Another set of questions that arises for me have to do with the study’s context in intellectual history and particularly the Enlightenment tradition. Again returning to my own teaching, I tend to view Jefferson as seeing himself within the liberal political tradition that emerged from Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke; therefore, I found it odd that, in a book that clearly seeks to place Jefferson within a broader global (or at least European) intellectual context, Locke gets such short shrift. He is mentioned only once by McCoy (as having “regard[ed] the propertyless poor as less than fully human and hardly entitled to human rights” [p. 54]), but his enunciation of the labor theory of property, his belief in limited government, and even his defense of slavery – any of which might have been used to buttress Jefferson’s own positions and place them within a larger tradition – are missing. This strikes me as a missed opportunity on McCoy’s part, even as he spends some time weaving Jean-Jacques Rousseau into his analysis, whereas I would have imagined that much of Rousseau’s arguments about government would have left Jefferson cold.

Finally, while I have typically seen Locke’s liberalism as working hand in glove with Adam Smith’s laissez-faire capitalism, that view had not, it seems, taken sufficient notice either of Smith’s skepticism about the possible negative implications of the overextension of commercialization or of the obvious hostility with which Jefferson must have viewed even Smith’s relatively mild support for free trade. In McCoy’s telling, Jefferson falls into a kind of middle ground between Locke and Smith – supportive of Locke’s vision of ideal government but highly skeptical of Smith’s conclusions drawn from that same vision.

I haven’t posted here in a while, so I thought I’d provide a brief update. At this point, I’m halfway through with my courses for the M.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. I’ll begin my fifth course, entitled “American Empires,” in a few weeks. With luck, this course’s assignments will provide me with some new content to post here over the course of the fall semester.

From a research perspective, I’ll be turning my attention to the Romanian side of the 1907 election in Austrian Bukovina, beginning by investigating the figure of Gheorghe Grigorovici, the Social Democrat elected from the district of Czernowitz-West in 1907 and 1911. There is surprisingly little available information about him out there in English and German, so at some point, I’ll begin studying Romanian for reading knowledge to see what I can find in the Romanian-language sources about him. I hope to be able to provide at least another chapter of a Master’s thesis on this multiethnic election in 1907 and the people and ideologies that competed.

Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies

Since we began this blog 15 years ago, we’ve been fully aware that Holocaust deniers have individual motives. Certainly among these motives is antisemitism — it’s perhaps the one trait that the overwhelming majority of deniers share — but there are also motives like ego and grift.

With the rapid graying and dying of the American denier community, Michael A. Hoffman II, at 64 years old, is now among the elder statesmen of American deniers. One thing I’ve also found in my interactions with individual deniers is that he’s also among the most unpopular figures in that small circle. One confided in me that Hoffman was an acid casualty from the 1970s who emerged in the radical right-wing “movement” in the 1980s with an obvious mental illness (a point I’ve never been able to independently verify, let it be said). More recently, David Cole told me that Hoffman was known among deniers in particular for his openly genocidal rhetoric against Jews and non-whites generally. This was a problem for the denier movement then since the prevailing strategy was to present denial as a quasi-academic alternative to the “orthodox” history of the Holocaust.

What has marked Hoffman’s “career” most prominently, however, is his chameleon-like nature. The man has undergone a frequent process of reinvention over the course of the last 30 years or so. When I first encountered him in Usenet in the mid-1990s, he presented as a wannabe public intellectual, flaunting his “expertise” on Jewish legal texts. This, we now know, was his second act, since the first act relates to the materials we are presenting below. Hoffman’s third (and final?) act has been that of dissident Catholic, taking issue with post-Vatican II Catholicism and particularly its embrace of usury (he claims). He oddly calls Jews “Judaics,” but he now claims to be a critic of the Third Reich. Among his more recent books is Adolf Hitler: Enemy of the German People. A couple of months ago, in a blog post of his own, he responded to an ADL press release that called him a Holocaust denier using his Hitler book as a sort of defense. 

It is possible that Hoffman has undergone a genuine transformation. Perhaps his Hitler book is a sort of mea culpa. One thing is clear, however: Hoffman has never publicly renounced his earlier fascist stance. Lest it be thought that the word “fascist” is being thrown around here willy-nilly, we present two important pieces of evidence.

The first is Hoffman’s novel A Candidate for the Order, which he self-published in 1988. If you were looking for a Turner Diaries with a slightly elevated vocabulary, this is probably right up your alley. 

You can view a copy at the Internet Archive here: https://tinyurl.com/mah2novel1
I’ve also archived that link here: https://archive.is/Ldsot
Finally, you can download a PDF version directly here: https://tinyurl.com/mah2novelpdf

The following year, Hoffman participated with neo-Nazi Harold Covington and several major KKK figures, most notably Louis Beam — head of the Texas KKK and author of “Leaderless Resistance” — in a rally against the Martin Luther King holiday in Pulaski, Tennessee, where the Klan was originally founded. You can view Hoffman’s 13-minute speech here:

https://tinyurl.com/mah2vid1989

The “Hail Victory” that Hoffman yells out at the end is a nice touch.

A final note: I reached out directly to Hoffman before writing and publishing this post. I asked him whether he had ever renounced his previous positions. He did not respond.