Revisionist Approaches to the Vietnam War - Moyar and Sorley

Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965.  Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Sorley, Lewis.  A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam.  Harcourt, 1999.

Of all American wars, only the cause of the Civil War approaches the radically divergent interpretations of America’s loss in Vietnam.  Almost as soon as the conflict ended in 1975 two schools of historical thought developed.  The “orthodox” school argued that the war was not winnable from the outset due to American misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict, and unjust in its prosecution and goals.  In contrast, the “revisionist” school contends that the war was “noble, but improperly executed” (Moyar, xi).  The conflict between these two competing interpretations of the Vietnam War extends beyond interpretation of the facts into arguments over which facts are valid and the political ideology of the adherents.  Mark Moyar and Lewis Sorley join the debate on the side of the revisionists.  Their works, Triumph Forsaken and A Better War examine different stages of the war, overlapping only when addressing President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 1965 decision to introduce ground troops in South Vietnam.

Even the labels of the competing schools are open to debate.  Historian John Prados argues that the revisionists should be called “neo-orthodox” because they argue that the United States threw away victory in Vietnam, focusing on issues of pacification and Vietnamization while ignoring Saigon political intrigues.  Both Moyar and Sorley fall into this category of revisionist, with Sorley the more prominent of the two due to his position on recommended reading lists for Army and Marine Corps officers.  General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of American forces in Afghanistan regularly refered to Sorley’s analysis of Creighton Abrams’ strategy and tactics in post-Tet Vietnam, and the text also appears in the Army’s Field Manual describing counterinsurgency operations.

Taken together these two books illustrate key revisionist arguments that span the length of the war.  Focusing on the period 1954-1965, Moyar contends that despite the negative portrayal of American journalists Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was a legitimate anticommunist leader.  Criticism of Diem came from Saigon’s intellectuals and political elites, French colonialists who preferred the leadership of Vietnam’s last emperor, Bao Dai, and John Paul Vann, the prominent American counterinsurgency expert.  Until deposed, Moyar argues, Diem successfully fought the nascent insurgency in South Vietnam.  Diem’s first anticommunist effort was as much political and propagandistic as military.  Moving into Viet Minh strongholds on Quang Ngai, Binh Dinh, and Camau Peninsula with government troops, Diem made personal visits by Jeep, provided medical supplies, had roads and bridges constructed, and eventually opened rural facilities to train soldiers and administrators.  Moyar argues that Diem expanded these measures to an internal security regime that destroyed Communist organizations at the village and hamlet level, securing the most troublesome areas of South Vietnam.

Through 1960, Moyar believes, Diem continued to strengthen South Vietnam’s government and his military forces while taking the battle to the North.  By the end of 1956, Diem began sending saboteurs through Laos into North Vietnam to instigate revolts.  However, South Vietnamese efforts to create an anticommunist insurgency in the North failed in both 1957 and 1959.  Diem’s guerrillas were unsuccessful, but along with a Hoa Hao campaign in 1956, forced the Communist government to divert resources from the South.  These efforts coincided with Diem’s work to strengthen the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  Along, with American Lt. General Samuel Williams, Diem worked to not only increase the number of regular troops available, but to make it into a legitimate fighting force.  Williams argued that ARVN needed to have light gear that enabled it to fight against guerrillas, but also to train to fight conventional forces in the same manner as the U.S. Army.  Militia, he contended should bear the primary responsibility for counterinsurgency work.  By 1959, Moyar argues, Diem eliminated the worst generals and officers, expanded, and improved the regular army.  Despite the presence of incompetent mid-grade officers remaining due to political ties, the force seemed ready to fight.  The same was not true of the militia expected to perform real counterinsurgency work – they were under trained, undermanned, and under equipped.

 Diem’s campaign to strengthen his government’s hold on the South included economic development and a propaganda campaign.  Starting in 1956, the “Denounce the Communists” campaign mobilized civilians and soldiers to repair roads and bridges.  Suspected communists were arrested and subjected to reeducation in the same manner that Communist cadres in the North used on non-Communists.  In addition to this campaign, Diem used American foreign aid to bolster South Vietnam’s economy.  Most of this money went into efforts to improve security, such as creating new settlements in the Central Highlands to act as a bulwark against Communist advances and building roads to facilitate the movement of troops.  Diem also embraced land reform, but in a more measured form than in the North.  Although his attempts to save the rural middle class reduced the number of landless peasants that gained new lands, it still left a plurality as renters, leaving them vulnerable to Communist propaganda.  Moyar asserts that the Diem government was able to significantly weaken the North’s cadres in the South using these techniques, leading to a Communist attempt to assassinate him.  Diem was unsuccessful in securing South Vietnam only because he lost the confidence of his American benefactors and due to the efforts of corrupt ARVN officers.  The corrupt and incompetent governments that followed Diem wasted ARVN’s strength by adopting ineffective tactics for fighting the Communists, forcing Lyndon Johnson to commit American troops to defend South Vietnam.

Sorley picks up where Moyar left off.  Briefly touching on the build-up of American forces after 1965, Sorley argues that when Creighton Abrams assumed command of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam in 1968 he achieved a military victory that Richard Nixon and his advisers squandered in order to appease the antiwar movement, the media, and diplomats with other foreign policy goals.  Abrams won his war by abandoning William Westmoreland’s unworkable strategy of attrition and instead focusing on pacification of the South Vietnamese countryside, interdiction of troops and supplies from the North, and by ensuring that South Vietnamese troops had the training and equipment to defend their nation.  He did this despite continuing troop withdrawals and reductions in the foreign aid Congress allocated to Southeast Asia.  Sorley contends that South Vietnam lost the war solely because Nixon, Ford, and Congress abandoned South Vietnam to its fate despite assurances of support if invaded.

Westmoreland’s strategy from 1965-1968 focused on conventional large-unit tactics and search-and-destroy missions that futilely sought Viet Cong Guerillas and North Vietnamese troop concentrations.  These missions, according to Sorley, conducted at the battalion level, were costly in money, equipment, and personnel, but gained little.  As soon as Americans left an area, their Communist foes returned.  Westmoreland’s boredom with pacification operations led him to neglect the very activities that might have won the war during his tenure in Vietnam.  Spreading dissent about the war and the apparent lack of progress illustrated by the Tet Offensive of 1968 led Lyndon Johnson to replace Westmoreland with Abrams, who implemented new strategies and tactics in an attempt to salvage the situation.

In contrast to Westmoreland’s focus on large operations and attrition of enemy numbers, Abrams used small units to secure South Vietnamese population and land.  Rather than sweeping through an area in an attempt to locate and kill the enemy, Abrams’ vision was for forces to enter a region, clear it, and then stay to provide security.  Part of the new strategy was to destroy the North Vietnamese support infrastructure in the South and to increase support for the Saigon government.  Key to this was the understanding of the North Vietnamese method of moving supplies and personnel into position before launching an operation.  By focusing American artillery and air assets on closing the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Abrams disrupted North Vietnam’s ability to conduct the war in South Vietnam.

Sorley believes that Abrams had won the war in 1972 by securing South Vietnam, repelling invasions, and destroying Communist safe havens in Cambodia and Laos.  South Vietnam eventually lost the war not because it was untenable or poorly led, but because the Nixon administration negotiated away all of the gains at the Paris Peace Conference.  By allowing large numbers of North Vietnamese Army troops to remain in place in South Vietnam when the United States withdrew, the United States gave an unearned advantage to the Communists.  This problem was exacerbated when the United States failed to assist South Vietnam when the North went on the offensive once more.  American withdrawal so demoralized South Vietnamese troops and leaders that they could not stand on their own against the onslaught.

Sorley’s work is a response to earlier works, which he contends focus almost exclusively on the early parts of the war.  Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History virtually ignores Abrams, and allocates only fifteen percent of its space to cover the last five years of the conflict.  Sorley contends that other academic works also ignore the main characters of A Better War; George Sorley’s work is a response to earlier works, which he contends focus almost exclusively on the early parts of the war.  Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History virtually ignores Abrams, and allocates only fifteen percent of its space to cover the last five years of the conflict.  Sorley contends that other academic works also ignore the main characters of A Better War; George Herring’s America’s Longest War and William Duiker’s Historical Dictionary of Vietnam also focus on the early stages of the war, giving short shrift to Creighton Abrams, Ellsworth Bunker, and William Colby.  The worst offender in Sorley’s estimation is Neil Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie, which follows the career of John Paul Vann.  Only sixty-eight of volumes’ seven hundred twenty-five pages cover the post-1968 period, despite Vann’s continued work in Vietnam until his death in 1972 (Sorley, xiv).

Where Sorley contends that he is merely adding to our knowledge of the second part of the war, Moyar sets himself firmly into the debate over the history of the war.  Self-consciously in what he calls the “revisionist” camp, Moyar excoriates orthodox histories of the war for being both ideologically driven and unwilling to engage with facts that do not fit into their analysis.  His ire here may be fueled in part by his inability to gain employment in a traditional academic setting, as illustrated by his 2007 lawsuit against Texas Tech, in which he claimed discrimination based on his conservative political beliefs.

Moyar only specifically mentions one of the so-called “orthodox” histories of the war that he finds so problematic directly – Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, which he argues overemphasizes the Saigon government’s problems, and illustrates David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan’s inaccurate reporting of military affairs.  Moyar contends that John Paul Vann used Sheehan and other reporters to promote his inaccurate and self-serving account of the Battle of Ap Bac that depicted South Vietnamese troops as cowardly and incompetent.  Moyar also argued A Bright Shining Lie demonstrated Sheehan’s ignorance of Vietnamese customs, overly relying on Buddhists and North Vietnamese agents for information. That Buddhists comprised approximately 90% of Vietnam’s population seems to have escaped Moyar’s notice.

Moyar treats his fellow revisionists more carefully, placing Triumph Forsaken in context with other works covering the same period.  He argues that H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty provides important insights into the policy process of the Johnson administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff during 1964 and 1965, and that C. Dalton Walton’s work challenges the orthodox view of American strategy during the early stages of the war.  It is informative that Moyar does not engage Sorley, who many identify as a revisionist, but who appears to accept the orthodox view of the Westmoreland-era in Vietnam – that the strategy of attrition was both ineffective and morally bankrupt.

Despite engaging writing styles and provocative arguments, both books suffer from significant problems in evidence and analysis.  Both works focus on atrocities committed by Communists while minimizing those committed by the Saigon government (Moyar) or American troops (Sorley).  Moyar and Sorley both gloss over the Johnson administration’s lack of clear goals or strategy in Vietnam, which represent a major portion of H.R. McMaster’s argument in his 1997 work Dereliction of Duty.

These problems represent only the tip of the iceberg.  Nick Turse writing in The Nation contends that while focusing on Creighton Abrams’ efforts at reducing civilian casualties by reducing indirect artillery fire, Sorley ignores Gen. Julian Ewell’s use of heavy artillery and air strikes in Operation Speedy Express (Dece.ber 1968 – May 1969), which may have killed five thousand civilians.  The continued use of indirect artillery on unobserved targets as reported by Newsweek’s Kevin Buckley in 1970, continued during Abrams’ tenure as commander of MACV with disastrous results.  By ignoring Operation Speedy Express, Sorley weakens his argument.  Its inclusion would allow him to present it as an example of the challenge of changing the Army’s tactics in Vietnam after Westmoreland’s tenure ended in June 1968.

Moyar’s work also suffers because it ignores of minimizes evidence that argues against his interpretation.  In Moyar’s opinion, Diem was a strong leader in the Vietnamese style, one unfamiliar and unpalatable to many Americans.  For this reason, Diem could not abide protests against his policies or regime.  Sweeping aside Buddhist complaints that Diem installed Catholics in the government and bulldozed pagodas in order to replace them with churches, Moyar places South Vietnam’s Buddhist majority into the same category with Communist subversives - enemies of the regime.  Anyone that protested Diem policies was cynical and the Saigon government was right in sweeping them and their concerns brusquely aside.  Moyar ignores evidence that these actions turned Buddhists against Diem and had a role in the development of the coup against him.

Pre-war Vietnamese history also gets a revision in Triumph Forsaken.  Not only does Moyar contend that internal conflict characterized Vietnam’s past, not a long tradition of resistance to outside domination by China and France, but he rejects the notion of any historical enmity between China and Vietnam.  This is a key component for his argument that American leaders not only believed in the domino theory’s threat of systematic Communist take-over in Asia, but that due to Soviet, Chinese, and Vietnamese cooperation was a legitimate concern.  Moyar also contends that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist first, and a nationalist second – ignoring William Duiker’s 2000 biography of Ho.

Ho Chi Minh’s status is another of the divisions between the orthodox and revisionist schools.  While many orthodox historians accept Duiker’s assertion that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist who turned to Communists because even French Socialists were uninterested in the colonial question, revisionists of Moyar’s ilk assert that since the Viet Minh drove out noncommunist nationalists after 1945 that Ho Chi Minh must have been solely a Communist. Moyar deploys Ho Chi Minh’s change of pseudonym from Nguyen Ai Quoc (“Nguyen the Patriot”) to Ho Chi Minh (“He Who Enlightens”) to show that Ho was trying to hide his Communist past from Americans.  However, Duiker’s massive biography demonstrates that Ho adopted his final pseudonym while traveling through China to avoid the Guomingdang as he tried to reach Vietnam to fight the Japanese occupation.  Duiker further traces Ho’s name changes over time, as he adopted various pseudonyms to hide his identity from French authorities, as was common for Vietnamese revolutionaries.

Flaws of evidence and argument notwithstanding, these works provide thought-provoking discussions of the conduct of both halves of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.  Of the two, Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken is perhaps the more controversial due its tone and contention that Diem had successfully managed to stabilize South Vietnam, and that only the turmoil following his assassination doomed the country.  Sorley and Moyar provide useful works to sustain a more nuanced conversation about the nature of the war and its course.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I celebration of the holiday, a collection of video, audio, and text speeches and letters from Martin Luther King's work in the Civil Rights Movement.

'A Time to Break the Silence'

Sermon delivered at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967.

'Our God is Marching On!'

Speech delivered on March 25, 1965, in Montgomery, Alabama, at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

Letter to Loretta, Written on July 18, 1952, to his future wife, Coretta Scott, in which King revealed some surprising thoughts on capitalism and communism.

I Have a Dream, 1963

"I’ve Been to the Mountaintop (aka I See the Promised Land)," Dr. Martin Luther King's Last Speech.

Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968

“The Drum Major Instinct," Dr. King's Final Sermon

April 4, 1967. New York, N.Y.

Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam

McHale, Shawn Frederick. Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam. University of Hawai’I Press, 2004.

McHale has multiple goals in Print and Power: to redefine the concept of the public sphere, to explore the development of the print culture of Vietnam through 1945, and to show how the three primary competing ideologies in Vietnam used the expansion of printing to further their own ends.  These three aspects of McHale’s argument combine to show Vietnam as having a much more complicated intellectual environment through the end of World War II than previously understood.  Rather than Communists having a coordinated, dominant role, McHale contends that the radicals and reformers created a diverse intellectual environment.

The key to this argument is McHale’s assertion that non-free societies can also develop a public sphere.  Earlier discussions of the development of the public sphere, defined as the place between the village and the state where the people come together to influence society using their reason, maintained that it was unique to democratizing societies awakened by the Enlightenment.  McHale believes that even states that are not yet “modernist” in orientation also develop this middle ground between village and state in which people interact to shape their futures. 

In Vietnam, a key to the twentieth century development of the public sphere was the development of print culture despite the censorship imposed by French and Japanese colonial domination.  Within the public sphere, Confucians, Buddhists, and Communists pursued divergent goals based on the needs of the group and its constituents.  These different approaches meant that each group produced different types and numbers of printed items.  The victory of Communists in Vietnam’s twentieth century wars has led to an assumption that the other two ideologies were not relevant to the modern world, an assumption deliberately enhanced by Communist historiography.

The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940

Zinoman, Peter. The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940. Pantheon Books, 2001.

The portrait Peter Zinoman paints of French colonial prisons in Vietnam conforms to the popular image of third world prisons as dirty, dangerous, and corrupt.  Prisoners accused or convicted of various types of crimes arrived at a prison, were shuffled in with other inmates willy-nilly, records were lost or incomplete, prisoners were punished capriciously, and prison life and regulations changed with each administrator.  None of these indictments of French administration are unexpected.  Zinoman, however, goes further to demonstrate that the mish-mash of French administration of the prisons in the disparate parts of Indochina led to the development of a Vietnamese national identity and the emergence of the Indochina Communist Party as the dominant anti-colonial force by the end of the 1930s.

The roots of this development lie in two key areas: the manner in which Indochina fell under French domination, and the origins of the prison system.  The main divisions of Vietnam were Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China.  Of these three areas, the French colonial government only directly administered Cochin China in the south.  Annam and Tonkin, in the central and northern parts of Vietnam, were designated protectorates, with Annam officially under the control of the Vietnamese imperial government.  This led to lack of direct control over courts and prisons throughout the region, meaning that French administrations could not establish standard rules and regulations governing prisons.  Lack of funding to adequately build, maintain and staff prisons also created an environment in which Indochinese prisons did not conform to nineteenth and twentieth century ideals of reform of prisoners, but adopted the older European standard of prison as punishment only.

The origins of the prison system itself contributed to the problem of prison as punishment since the system of colonial prisons was initially established to contain prisoners of war captured by French troops during their 1860s conquest of Cochin China.  Prisons designed to control and contain enemy soldiers  also eventually housed common criminals and political prisoners all in one loosely regulated environment.  The shared experience of brutality of French and Vietnamese jailors created a shared experience of hardship and bonding that united Indochinese across lines of ethnicity, geography, and social class.  Zinoman argues that this shared experience created the first pan-Vietnamese conception of national identity, an absolute requirement for a successful campaign to gain national independence in the twentieth century.

Increased anti-colonial agitation in Vietnam during the 1930s by nationalist, communist, and other radical groups resulted in a dramatic influx of political prisoners into Vietnamese prisons.  While all parties suffered casualties among leaders, all were incarcerated in the same prison environments.  Howver, Zinoman argues, the Leninist organizational and propagandizing orientation allowed it to expand and flourish in captivity, reaching deep into the community of common criminals that surrounded them.  Nationalists, on the other hand, had no such background of discipline and organization to draw upon, and their organizations withered in the prison environment.

The result, according to Zinoman, was the creation of a Vietnamese national identity based on the brutality of the prison experienced shared by thousands of inmates, documented in newspapers, and witnessed by friends and families of the incarcerated.  The ICP, and later the VCP, used the prison environment to extend its organization beyond intellectuals to embrace peasants and laborers.  Communists also later relied on prison memoirs as credentials to show their dedication and revolutionary past, enhancing their standing as opponents of the French.

oks, 2001.

Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s

Formisano, Ronald P. Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s. University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

When federal district court judge W. Arthur Garrity found the Boston School Committee guilty of deliberate and systemic segregation and ordered desegregation of Boston’s municipal schools, the working-class sections of the city erupted in demonstrations and violence. Working from a state plan to desegregate Boston’s schools, Garrity ordered students from the working class neighborhoods of South Boston and Charlestown bused to impoverished black neighborhoods in an effort to reduce the number of schools with a majority of non-white students. The result was mass protest, white flight from both schools and Boston’s city limits, and schools that were ultimately less integrated than they were before busing started.

While many studies of Boston’s virulent anti-busing response credit the combination of race and class, Robert Formisano’s Boston Against Busing moves beyond these arguments to add Boston’s unique history of antipathy between Irish Catholic inhabitants and African-Americans, local machine politics and civil service corruption, defended neighborhoods, and “reactionary populism” to the explanations for the white backlash against desegregation. The key to working class discontent was the long campaign against desegregation led by Louise Day Hicks and her allies starting in 1963. Hicks’ cynical manipulation of race and class to ensure her own electoral success ensured that when Garrity finally ordered busing in 1974, working class Bostonians reacted in anger.

The conflict over Boston’s schools began in 1963 when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked Hicks, in her role as chair of the Boston School Committee, to end the de facto segregation of Boston’s schools. The NAACP asked the committee to recognize segregation based on residential patterns, to train teachers to eliminate racial prejudice against African-Americans, to end discriminatory hiring practices, and to allocate funds to buy new materials for and repair schools in black neighborhoods. The politicians serving on the committee refused to acknowledge any form of segregation in Boston’s schools, and refused to meet with the NAACP over the issue.

Until the 1963 controversy erupted over the quality of schools in African-American neighborhoods, Hicks was a merely average member of the committee, which frequently served as a stepping-stone in Boston politics. She quickly rode the wave of the white backlash against the NAACP’s demands, which she claimed accused Bostonians of prejudice. The problem, Hicks argued, was in the pupils and their culture, not the schools. In the fall 1963 elections, Hicks garnered more than 80 percent of the votes from working class neighborhoods, while educational reformers lagged far behind. Latching on the issue of busing long before anyone suggested it, Hicks parleyed it into later terms on the Boston city council and the Unites States Congress.

Despite continued efforts to exert pressure on the school committee through 1964, the contest between integrationists and segregationists was not fully joined until Massachusetts Democrats pushed through the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965, which declared that districts with schools that were persistently more than 50 percent non-white could lose its state funding. Despite this, the law allowed parents to refuse busing for their children and gave local school committees a mechanism to ask for judicial review to prevent implementation of penalties. These clauses allowed the Boston School Committee to stave off desegregation for nine years after the law’s passage. The continued delays allowed Hicks and other anti-busing politicians to convince their supporters that busing would never come to Boston.

During the nine years between passage of the Racial Imbalance Act, and Judge Garrity’s ruling, the Boston School Committee consistently acted to maintain or increase segregation in Boston’s schools. Rather than locating new schools on the edges of neighborhoods to encourage integration, the committee persisted in locating them in the middle. Rather than send students from overcrowded white schools to under-utilized ones in black neighborhoods, the committee added portable classrooms to overcrowded schools. Old parochial schools were purchased rather than send black students to under-utilized schools in white areas. These and other tactics allowed integrationists to convince Judge Garrity that systemic and deliberate segregation existed in Boston’s schools, leading to his 1974 ruling.

Although the national media focused on the violent protests against busing in South Boston, other working and middle class neighborhoods displayed a variety of reactions. West Roxbury’s middle class residents relied on legal action and other largely peaceful forms of protest. East Boston residents threatened to block the tunnels to other parts of the city, but were also less violent in their opposition to Garrity’s busing orders. Formisano argues that the seeds of South Boston’s response lay in its conceptions of toughness and community. In contrast to the middle class whites’ and African Americans’ belief that education was inherently a source of mobility, South Boston’s working class viewed their neighborhood schools as a source of community identity and repository of community values. These beliefs combined with the economic threat posed by blacks led to South Boston’s relatively violent response to Garrity’s busing plans.

Formisano contends that South Boston’s particular culture and its animosity to outside influences made it a particularly problematic place to start busing to relieve racial imbalance in schools, particularly when paired with impoverished Roxbury. Residents of South Boston saw Garrity and other reformers as foreigners trying to breakup their neighborhood’s identity and, like other Bostonians, associated Roxbury with high crime rates, drug use, and sexual promiscuity that they wished to protect their children from. In relying on an integration created by the state rather than the Boston School Committee, which regularly stood in the way of proper planning efforts, Garrity unwittingly ran headlong into the area of the city most likely to see his action as punitive and to react violently in order to flout the court.

Despite detailed discussions of the activities of anti-busing groups such as Louise Day Hicks’ Restore Our Alienated Rights and the complex set of neighborhoods and antagonisms driving Bostonians’ anger at what they called “forced busing”, Formisano’s work has a few significant problems. The voices of African-Americans that engaged in both sides of the busing debate are generally missing. While spending large portions of the work depicting the trials of those he labels “moderates”, Formisano never clearly defines how he defines moderation. Many of Formisano’s moderates are simply people who believe that they need to keep their kids in school despite their opposition to busing, or who work to make a bad situation work despite threats to their lives. The broad range of activities and individuals Formisano labels “moderate” seems to negate its utility as an analytical tool. While providing many examples of blatant and explicit racism, Formisano seems to prefer to accept cynicism by ambitious politicians, issues of social class, and insularity of Boston’s neighborhoods as the primary causes of the city’s anti-busing violence.

While there are several extensive works dealing with the anti-busing movement, Formisano primarily sets himself against J. Brian Sheehan and Christine Rossell, who argue for a correlation between anti-busing sentiment and unemployment rates (16). Formisano also seeks to counter sociologists McKee J. McClendon and Bert Useem who argue for racism’s primary role in the conflict over busing (18). This leaves an array of scholarship that he fails to engage, including J. Anthony Lukas’ Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985), which follows three typical families through Boston’s anti-busing conflict. Despite the addition of a new Epilogue in 2004, Formisano ignores scholarship following his original work, including Steven J. L. Taylor’s Desegregation in Boston and Buffalo: The Influence of Local Leaders, which argues that the existence of locally elected black leaders positively affected the outcome of school integration in Buffalo. By bypassing Taylor’s work in the new Epilogue, Formisano misses an excellent opportunity to further illustrate the unique challenges Boston faced as the demagogues dominating its local politics.

Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History

Jacoby, Karl.  Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History. The Penguin Press, 2008.

At dawn on April 30, 1871, Tohono O’odhams crept into the camp of the Western Apache living in Aravaipa Canyon, and attacked them with clubs while they slept.  As those Apache not immediately slain attempted to escape by scrambling up the canyon walls, Mexican Americans and Anglo-Americans gunned them down.  Most of the one hundred forty-four victims were women, children, or elderly.  Another twenty-nine children became captives, and were adopted by Tohono O’odham families.  This event, called the Camp Grant Massacre by those few who remember it, provides the focus for Karl Jacoby’s ethnohistory of southern Arizona.

Although sporadic Apache raids continued after an 1872 peace agreement, the Camp Grant Massacre was the last great act of Arizona’s endemic violence dating to the years before Spanish arrival.  Its relative obscurity in American culture allows Jacoby to use it as the focus of his history of southern Arizona.  Rather than constructing a traditional narrative, in the first part of Shadows at Dawn Jacoby presents the Arizona history of all four groups of participants in the general order of their arrival on the scene.  The exceptions to this scheme are the Apache, who Jacoby addresses last in each of his major sections in an effort to recover “the perspective of the Western Apache” (pg. 5).  This allows him fully address the culture of each group, their conception of history, and their perception of relations with each other.  The resulting focus on the Tohono O’odham and the Spanish inhabitants of Arizona provides Jacoby the rationale to explore the period before the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, which set the final boundary between the United States and Mexico.

While the exact dates of their arrival in southern Arizona are unknown, the O’odham presence predates the arrival of the other groups participating in the Camp Grant Massacre.  Oral histories and O’odham calendar stick annals document a culture stretching back hundreds of years, including the droughts and floods that destroyed several large agricultural villages around 1400 C.E.  Warfare also appears in these sources, as does the arrival of Spanish trade goods and missionaries.  Jacoby argues that the O’odham reacted cautiously to both, having an on again, off again relationship with the missionaries as their healing techniques waxed and waned.  Despite conflicts created by the demands of missionaries for labor and the appearance that their rituals sometimes appeared to harm O’odham participants, they were driven together by a common enemy – the Apache.

Eventually the O’odham had direct conflicts with the Spanish over the behavior of missionaries and the later Spanish military occupation of Sonora.  Despite these episodes of revolt against Spanish rule, they reached an accommodation allowing a more or less peaceful coexistence by recognizing the suzerainty of the Spanish monarchy.  Due to their generally distributed organization, the O’odham saw the King as an alcalde, or captain, rather than a direct ruler.  This same sense of general loyalty to a leader informed their relationship to the Republic of Mexico during its short-lived control of what became the American Southwest.

The United States initially maintained relations with the O’odham that were functionally the same as those Mexico had cultivated.  American companies brought an economic boom to southern Arizona from their acquisition of the region from Mexico in 1848 through the beginning of the U.S. Civil War in 1861.  That conflict brought only minor disruption, as the O’odham continued to ally with Confederate or Union troops against the Apache, who continued to raid O’odham and Mexican Americans alike.  This cooperation eventually led to the fateful joint operation in Aravaipa Canyon.

The United States initially maintained relations with the O’odham that were functionally the same as those Mexico had cultivated.  American companies brought an economic boom to southern Arizona from their acquisition of the region from Mexico in 1848 through the beginning of the U.S. Civil War in 1861.  That conflict brought only minor disruption, as the O’odham continued to ally with Confederate or Union troops against the Apache, who continued to raid O’odham and Mexican Americans alike.  This cooperation eventually led to the fateful joint operation in Aravaipa Canyon.

Jacoby’s approach to Spanish, Mexican, and American sources and events is similarly longitudinal in method, but with the exception of Mexican folk songs from after the Camp Grant Massacre are traditional in nature.  Tracing the long history of Spanish and Mexican occupation of southern Arizona, Jacoby examines the role of missions and presidios in pacifying the region, the development of alliances with the O’odham against the Apache, and of temporary treaties with local bands of Apache.  He reveals the seeds of the animosity against the Western Apache that led to the Camp Grant Massacre in the endemic fighting that gripped the region for over a century of Spanish rule.  The American presence in southern Arizona after the 1854 Gadsden Purchase not only brought a temporary economic boom, which lasted until the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, but continued Mexican ruling methods.  The use of Mexican American militia to combat Apache raids created an environment in which civilians felt comfortable taking part in paramilitary maneuvers against the Apache.

The latter portions of Shadows at Dawn deal with the trial of the Mexican American and Anglo-American participants in the massacre, and subsequent developments in southern Arizona.  The judge’s jury instructions virtually guaranteed a non-guilty verdict despite negative newspaper coverage of the incident and the unreliability of defense witnesses, but Jacoby’s discussion of the trial is almost an afterthought.  Compared to the first and third parts of the work, this section seems under-developed.  More thorough discussion of the trial, its origins, the rationale behind the jury instructions, and the exclusion of the O’odham from the process would improve the work.

The aftermath of the massacre see the O’odham and southern Arizona’s Mexican American population displaced from their former levels of affluence and political prestige by the arrival of the railroad and large numbers of Anglo-Americans.  The Apache retained their relative economic position because they received supplies and cash from the Federal government after being forced on the reservations, leading O’odham to wonder if they should have followed the example of the Apache in fighting against European encroachment.

After Patricia Nelson Limerick’s extremely brief discussion of the Camp Grant Massacre in her 1988 work The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, serious scholarship about the massacre was limited to Chip Colwell-Chanthaponh’s 2007 work Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History.  Colwell-Chanthponh similarly attempts to incorporate multiple viewpoints, but restricts his efforts to Apache traditions, historical texts, government documents, and oral histories with Anglo-Americans.  While this provides ethnographic depth and nuance to the examination of the Camp Grant Massacre, it is less nuanced than Jacoby’s work.

Despite the paucity of sources for O’odham and Apache history, Shadow’s at Dawn represents a significant corrective to the limited modern scholarship about the Camp Grant Massacre.  Beyond this, he provides a promising methodology for ethnohistorical studies.  His careful use of non-traditional sources such as O’odham calendar sticks, legend, and oral history is innovative, and helps provide a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the environment allowing the Camp Grant Massacre to occur.  Jacoby also produces a significant advancement in out knowledge of the long process of European domination of the American Southwest.

The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism

Rome, Adam.  The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Efforts to promote American homeownership combined with the extreme post-war housing shortage led the homebuilding industry to adopt assembly-line production techniques to accommodate consumer demand.  Adam Rome argues that the resulting environmental impacts in the suburban middle ground between town and country led to the development modern environmental movement. The new environmental movement incorporated elements of the older tradition of conservation, but focused on quality of life issues for the inhabitants of urban and suburban areas, culminating in Richard Nixon’s call for a new land ethic that recognizing land as a resource, not a commodity.

Herbert Hoover set the stage for the post-war overhaul of the homebuilding industry as Secretary of Commerce during the 1920s.  Believing that homeowners were the solid core of society due to their work ethic, community involvement, and social stability, Hoover wanted to make it easier for more working Americans to purchase homes.  To achieve this goal, he argued that the homebuilding industry needed to increase its efficiency so that it could supply larger numbers of affordable houses.  A more efficient and productive construction industry would also be an engine of growth and prosperity, reducing the boom and bust nature of American capitalism.  Hoover’s initial efforts focused on waste reduction in construction by promoting the adoption of uniform building codes, but others soon focused on more direct action.  Reformer Edith Wood contended that the marketplace would never provide adequate housing for Americans, and the 1931 President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership called for both direct government action to assist workers to purchase houses and for the mass production of houses to meet the demand for shelter.  Rejecting the calls for “socialist” solutions, the editors of Fortune magazine described the housing industry as intellectually bankrupt and argued for it to adopt the principles of mass production.

Herbert Hoover set the stage for the post-war overhaul of the homebuilding industry as Secretary of Commerce during the 1920s.  Believing that homeowners were the solid core of society due to their work ethic, community involvement, and social stability, Hoover wanted to make it easier for more working Americans to purchase homes.  To achieve this goal, he argued that the homebuilding industry needed to increase its efficiency so that it could supply larger numbers of affordable houses.  A more efficient and productive construction industry would also be an engine of growth and prosperity, reducing the boom and bust nature of American capitalism.  Hoover’s initial efforts focused on waste reduction in construction by promoting the adoption of uniform building codes, but others soon focused on more direct action.  Reformer Edith Wood contended that the marketplace would never provide adequate housing for Americans, and the 1931 President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership called for both direct government action to assist workers to purchase houses and for the mass production of houses to meet the demand for shelter.  Rejecting the calls for “socialist” solutions, the editors of Fortune magazine described the housing industry as intellectually bankrupt and argued for it to adopt the principles of mass production.

Rome’s goal is to trace the development of the modern environmental movement in response to the quality of life issues facing Americans as a result of the suburbs, which he accomplishes through graphic descriptions of the result of mass production of housing and builders’ design choices.  Focusing on the main sources of citizen complaint – septic systems, landslides, loss of open space, and flooding – Rome illustrates how a loose coalition of suburbanites, scientists, and government workers combined to address problems created by unrestrained development.  In fits and starts, these groups secured regulations governing the installation of septic systems in large developments, development of steep hillsides, and protection of wetlands to reduce flooding and property damage.  Despite these apparent successes, when Richard Nixon and others argued that Americans needed to rethink their land ethic to recognize land as a interconnected resource that affected the public good, property rights advocates revolted against environmental regulations.  Reformers failed to account for the strong tradition embodied in Fifth Amendment protections against government land seizures that property owners had the inherent right to develop their land as they saw fit.  Farmers who wanted protection against water pollution wanted to retain the right to develop their land after retirement, and fought against restrictions on land use.

When the Nixon administration sought to encourage new regulation of land-use following the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970, Rome contends that the ultimate result was a backlash among property owners seeking to protect their traditional rights to dispose of their land as they saw fit.  The impetus for the backlash was two-fold.  Property rights advocates worried about the promotion of a new land ethic by critics of dangerous land use policies, and court decisions that held that protection of natural resources for the public good competed with the property owners rights to use land, and that land use might be restricted without compensation from the government.  Congressional Representative Steve Symms represented those worried about restrictions on land use when he called it a new type of Feudalism that reduced landowners to vassals of the state.

Despite success at depicting the development of the environmental movement and its failure to change Americans’ land ethic, Rome's most important contribution is his analysis of the economics of post-war homebuilding.  Large builders received governmental incentives in the form of FHA guarantees, which allowed them to finance building projects more cheaply.  Builders determined house design and features based on profitability rather than in response to consumer demands, explaining the installation of septic systems over sewers, the adoption of electric heat over gas or fuel oil, and the installation of air conditioning in homes.  These three builder choices had far-reaching consequences for homeowners and their communities.  Septic systems installed en masse to save the expense of installing sewers and sewage treatment plants overburdened the soil’s ability to absorb effluent and rainfall, spreading disease and causing flooding.  Elimination of regional housing adaptations to enhance cooling and heating in order to save money forced builders to install air conditioning, which then forced homeowners to pay higher electrical bills.  Builders also chose to install electric heat to maximize profits by getting reduced rates for wiring installation and appliances, despite the later increased cost to consumers.  This manipulation of the housing market, funded by the Federal government through various housing programs, created the environmental crises that mobilized mothers, land-use reformers, and Federal officials to create the modern environmental movement that Rome describes.

While presenting the political, economic, and intellectual ferment of the environmental movement and efforts against it, Rome leaves it isolated from the other conflicts of the post-war era.  Missing from his analysis is the relationship, if any, between mass building schemes and Cold War politics.  Did the Federal government see broad homeownership as a means to combat the specter of Communism?  While presenting one challenge to government regulation of land use as “feudal”, the expected critics decrying the programs as socialist are absent.  A question that goes unanswered is whether some of the property rights backlash of the early 1970s is related to a perception that environmentalists and antiwar protesters.  While Rome clearly places his work in the context of post-war economic expansion and the Baby Boom, he ignores the greater domestic political context.

The Bulldozer in the Countryside fills a historiographical niche in environmental history left by earlier scholarship.  While Hal Rothman, Stephen Fox, and Roderick Nash assert that the catalyst for American environmentalism occurred in 1950s efforts to save Echo Park, Rome argues for a more nuanced and lengthy developmental process that shows why Americans’ attitudes toward the environment changed after World War II.  Rome’s work fall more in line with that of Mark Harvey in arguing that the growth of suburbia increased Americans’ awareness of environmental issues, but rather than accepting the idea that environmentalism was the preserve of the upper-middle class, he presents it as a more general phenomenon.  Rome also builds on Samuel Hays’ work, by moving beyond the conservationist-environmentalist dichotomy to bring conservation into the urban context along with environmental concerns.