The Dustbowl and the Ukrainian Famine (or an excuse to print my favourite Soviet Joke)

A ranking politburo member is touring the farmlands in the country and in order to inspect that year's potato crop on the collective farms. He approaches a farmer and asks him, "Comrade farmer, how large will the potato harvest be this year?"
The farmer replies, "Excellent comrade! Why this year's potato harvest is so good that were you to pile them up, they'd tickle the feet of God himself!"
The politburo member nods and says "That's excellent comrade farmer, but I must remind you that there is no God in the Soviet Union"
The farmer smiles and responds "that's okay Comrade Inspector, there's aren't any potatoes either!"

My old Soviet History prof used to begin every class with a joke, either about some aspect of soviet history or Michael Jackson. I distinctly remember the one he told above (and why not? It's hilarious), and it came to mind as I was reading about the US drought a few days back.

It seems to me that the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and the American Dustbowl of the same era share a lot of commonality - I think both can be seen as the result of their respective country's economic systems taken to their (il)logical extremes. Both events occurred because the governments presiding over them simply could not imagine acting in anything other than a doctrinaire fashion.

If you'll remember, right in the middle of the Great Depression, drought took hold in the American west. A region that saw little rainfall in good years saw that meagre total vanish at the very moment that industrial work was disappearing in the east.  Farming in this part of the country was always a risky proposition, the land simply wasn't made for large scale farming - it was only after the Columbia River was brought under control and rerouted in the 19th century that irrigation became feasible. Even then, homesteaders had to hope for better than average rainfalls in order to eke out a living in this environment. [Anybody who has ever visited the region surely has noticed the complete lack of suburbs - there is city, then country. This is because of the limits caused by water scarcity]. The result was predictable, farmers who were already struggling to make ends meet found it impossible to survive successive years of crop failure. Heavily mortgaged farms were forclosed on by the banks. Whole families were forced from the land that had been in their families for generations. Many ended up working as fruit pickers in California (which had far better irrigation), anyone who has read any Steinbeck (especially The Grapes of Wrath) should be familiar with the story of the Okies and itinerant labour in the 1930s.

What turned drought to dust however had very little to do with natural factors beyond the control of man. Instead it was a strict adherence to capitalist principles that turned a disaster into a tragedy.  The banks who had repossessed these farms were now faced with an equally perplexing problem - they now owned huge tracts of land that no one wanted to buy but cost money to own.  Rather than letting these farms lie fallow, the banks instead planted fast-growing (and nutrient sapping) crops like wheat and paid a few recently foreclosed farmers to harvest the yields. These crops were simply not suited to the land on which they were grown. They eroded the soil of nutrients and turned the delicate grassland into a veritable desert in a few short years. The banks though, had little concern for long-term implications of their actions. They needed money right away (remember, this was during the Depression when American banks were closing regularly) and these fast growing crops would maximize whatever profits they could wrest from the land. In other words, the banks were acting completely in accordance with capitalist principles - they had to, or else they themselves would go under.

How does all of this lead to the Dustbowl? Where 50 ft high walls of dust swept across the country, burying houses in a fine silt, even leaving a coating on Boston? The drought and windstorms certainly played a part, but it was the factory farming employed by the banks that caused the Dustbowl. The land in the southern plains had been so overfarmed that by the time the winds started to blow, the soil was now dust. Completely sapped of both nutrients and the native grassland roots that would keep it in place, the wind simply picked up the dust and when the wind stopped the entire region was barren. At the very moment when agriculture could save the displaced industrial workers, farmers themselves were displaced.

Meanwhile, over in the USSR, farming was causing equally as many problems for the ruling ideology of the day. Under Joseph Stalin, the country had begun the first of successive "five year plans", which was a completely insane attempt to modernize an overwhelmingly agrarian society in a short period of time to meet the standards set by the western democracies. Farming under Lenin and Stalin had a troubled history. Initially it was thought that under the command economy, farmers would feed the urban workers and the surplus would be sold by the government on the international markets who would then use the money that created to further build their socialist utopia. There were obvious and numerous problems with this (relatively simple) plan, not the least of which was that the rural peasantry didn't really care too much for Bolshevism and found little reason to farm over and above what they needed for subsistence (as it was just going to be taken from them anyway). It was unsurprising then that in the early years of the Soviet Union, crop yields were far below what was needed to keep the system afloat. Lenin's compromise, the New Economic Policy (NEP), allowed for low level capitalism for farmers (they could sell a certain percentage of their yields at local markets) solved many of their agricultural problems, but just as farm yields were rising, the Great Depression was setting in, and the sale of wheat brought in far less money than was anticipated/needed.

Which brings us to Ukraine and Stalin. There were two factors over and above everything else that led to the famine of 1932-1933. The first was collectivization of the farms and the second was the level of distrust between Moscow and the republics. Even mores than Lenin, Stalin traded heavily on the rhetoric of "class enemies". While that worked fairly well in the cities (where the rich were easy to spot), it was far more problematic in the countryside (where serfdom only ended in 1863!). Stalin argued that poor crop yields were obviously caused by enemies of the state - upper class farmers (kulaks) who were resistant to the revolution. Lenin had called them "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers who batten on famine.”. The solution then was to send the kulaks to forced labour camps, nationalize their farmland, and collectivize the farms across the republics. Collective farming was, bluntly, a disaster, farmers still had little incentive to farm beyond subsistence levels as any surplus would be taken from them, and Party officials were deeply suspicious that the farms were not working at top capacity. As the crop yields dipped lower and lower, the Party Officials in Moscow demanded a greater portion of their yields - leaving the Ukrainian farmers with not enough to eat. Pleas of starvation fell on deaf ears and in early 1933 "corpses lined the roads, whole families disappeared, and instances of cannibalism were reported". The total number of deaths is debated but the most accepted number seems to be around 5 million Ukrainians.

So where does this leave us? Well obviously, the Ukrainian Famine is FAR worse an episode in world history. A country not only let its people starve to death, but called them liars when they said they were starving. That's not to deny that the Dust Bowl finally exposed some of the fatal flaws in free market capitalism that had been ignored in North America - that government intervention is not only to be tolerated but is necessary.

Watching the footage of the prairie drought of 2012 gives me the sneaking feeling that we've forgotten what we learned in the 1930s

Important Anniversaries, Overton Windows and The Art of the Possible

    In the months I left this little blog dormant a couple very important anniversaries passed by very quietly and with little fanfare but were both crucial events in helping to shape this country into the one I'm proud of (more often than not ;).

     July 14th marked the 35th anniversary of the final abolition of the death penalty in Canada and July 9th marked the 218th anniversary of the passing of the Act Against Slavery in Upper Canada- the first anti-slavery legislation passed in the British Empire. These two pieces of legislation, passed some 180 years apart are absolutely something to take pride in as Canadians. I also think that both of these events also highlight a critical aspect of governance that seems to be overlooked in recent debates - change does not come all at once in a democratic system. Rather change occurs slowly over time, with compromise and accommodation.

     The Act Against Slavery really was a landmark piece of legislation in a sleepy little outpost of the British Empire. In 1793 Upper Canada was almost entirely unpopulated and was rightfully considered the ugly stepsister to the older, and far more prosperous, Lower Canada. Regardless, the newly appointed Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe took to the new colony with a zeal that most aristocratic Englishmen wouldn't. He was also an ardent abolitionist who believed that slavery was a crime against God. One of his first acts as Lieutenant-Governor was to introduce anti-slavery legislation in his new colony. What should not be forgotten though is that the Act did not ban slavery outright. In order to get his Act passed through the Legislative Council, many of whom were slaveowners themselves, a compromise had to be reached. So the Act stated that while all existed slaves in the colony would remain so until death, no new slaves could be brought into the colony and any child born of slaves were to become free at the age of 25. As it happened, any remaining slaves were granted their outright freedom in 1833 when the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act.

    Similarly, the end of capital punishment in Canada did not happen all at once. It also happened in fits and starts culminating in that historic vote in 1976. Here's how CBC radio reported it as it happened. (By the way, if you have a few hours to kill, I strongly recommend poking around the CBC archives - it's fantastic). Between 1954 and 1963 Private Members Bills calling for the abolition of capital punishment were introduced in Parliament annually and while they were never passed, other important distinctions were. In 1961 murder was divided into two categories - capital and non-capital. Only capital murders - those deemed deliberate, or having occurred during violent crimes, or the murder of police officers and prison guards - carried the penalty of death. In 1967, under then Minister of Justice Pierre Trudeau, a 5 year moratorium was placed on the death penalty (except of course in the case of police officers and prison guards). The final vote that we celebrate, in 1976 was actually the final removal of the police officer/prison guard stipulation (military executions - in cases of treason for example - remained on the books, but never used until 1988). Even after all this incrementalism, the vote was exceptionally close - 130-124. Had an outright ban on capital punishment been introduced in Parliament a decade earlier, it would've been extremely unlikely to pass.

   Thinking about these two pieces of legislation got me thinking about the concept of the Overton Window. The Overton Window is a political theory which holds that politicians can only enact legislation on policies that fit within a window that the public finds acceptable. It is the duty of the reformer to push what is deemed publicly acceptable over to their side and the duty of the opposing politician to convince the public that such a shift is unacceptable.

Here's a diagram of the Overton Window.


     In other words, politics is all about making a new idea which is first thought of as unthinkable into a desired idea that is considered sensible.

   I think the two examples I gave are excellent ones to show how an idea which initially seemed beyond the pale eventually became seen as almost common sense. The trick to me seems that in order to convince people that your position is correct, you first need to introduce a lesser piece of legislation from which you can build upon. As the public gets used to your watered down position, building upon that initial legislation becomes easier and easier.*

*I think a crucial distinction should be made, that it is far more likely for you to convince the public of a policy option that is in keeping with the broadly liberalizing trend of the latter 20th/early 21st Centuries. One reason why anti-gay marriage initiatives from 2004 haven't been built upon is that they are, for lack of a better term, on the wrong side of history.

     A classic American example of this is the Social Security Act  introduced in FDR's New Deal. What is now seen as a central plank in the social safety net (to mangle metaphors) initially applied to a very limited group of people. As Paul Begala noted:

"It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security."

It had to be, even with the sweeping reforms FDR instituted, he still had to get it through Congress - who were not going to give him everything he wanted. However, in time, Social Security became a cornerstone of American public life, and even with a strengthened mandate in 2004, George W Bush was unable to make even minor headway in his plan to privatize it.

    The point is (at long last :) that politics is all about the Art of the Possible. It is about compromise with those you may (probably) do not agree with/find yourself diametrically opposed. There seems to be a line of thinking in contemporary politics that if you don't get everything that you want right away, then you've somehow lost the battle, and capitulated to your enemy. That taking a watered down version of your bill that can nonetheless be built upon is a sign of weakness or failure. I personally think nothing can be further from the truth. These two Canadian and one American examples should show that actual change comes in increments, and as long as your end goal falls within an Overton Window that the public will eventually accept, then you'll reach your goal.

It just takes some time is all.

Bon Jack

     There's a line in an old Tragically Hip song that goes "Where the walls are lined all yellow gray and sinister / Hung with pictures of our parent's prime ministers". I've always liked that line - it brings to mind a time when people really did put up pictures of their favourite politicians. I remember as a little boy there almost invariably being a picture of Trudeau in your friend's basement/laundry room/garage looking over you as you played. Trudeau's face (or sometimes the Charter of Rights...would my students believe me if I told them that people used to frame the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and hang it on their wall? Doesn't that seem crazy?) would serve as almost a religious icon...or at least he did in the homes of my more religious friends where he seemed, to me at least, to be held in equal regard as the Virgin Mary or Joseph. I'm sure that someone ten years older than me would remember Pearson watching over him as he played cars, and Diefenbaker or King for someone even older...

It's a look that Douglas Coupland got exactly right in his photo-essay Souvenir of Canada.

I don't think we do that anymore, and for the most part I think that's a very good thing. I think as a polity we have become a lot more aware of the fact that our politicians are not supermen - that they are probably just as deeply flawed and prone to mistakes as we ourselves are. I daresay you'd be hard-pressed to find an 8 x 10 picture of Chretien or Mulroney or Harper in too many workrooms. We support our politicians, we don't revere them.

I think that if anybody deserves to be treated in such a fashion, surely it was Jack Layton.

I've been thinking a lot about Jack since yesterday morning when I had heard he died. I've been somewhat confused by my response. I find myself getting choked up every time I read a eulogy or an obituary. This isn't someone I personally knew, he was a man that I saw only twice in my life - once outside the Free Times Cafe on College street. My only reaction? That he was shorter than I had thought. The second time was at the Bell Centre store in Montreal before a Habs game - he was trying on a jersey and I debated whether to ask him for a picture, me and Jack in our retro Habs jerseys. I balked.

I wish I had that picture now.

Jack never pretended to be anything he wasn't. He was a consummate politician, and never ever seemed to be "off". Even in the two brief instances I saw him, he was exactly how you'd expect him to be - like "Jack". He was also a little corny - or as the girl I overheard in the JCR on campus put it "he's like your friend's dorky dad who comes downstairs to tell you bad jokes and offer you PC brand root beer". In the end, Jack was Jack - and maybe that's why I've been so oddly moved by his death...even though I didn't "know" him, with Jack you always got the feeling that kinda, sorta, did.

Jack wasn't a superman, but he also was more genuine than any politician I can remember, and for that, he should be hanging above someone's washing machine.

"Canada's Obama"

First off, I'd like to apologise for the unbelievably long break between posts. First Christmas kept me busy, and then I came down with one hellacious cold that kept me off-kilter for most of January. The last month or so I've been kept quite busy with a teaching placement that runs through March. Between teaching, grading, and lesson planning I've found myself pretty drained and frankly couldn't think of anything interesting to write. But I'm back and I'm going to try and post regularly again.

One thing I've found challenging about teaching history to (mostly) first and second generation Canadian teenagers is how to make it relevant to their lives. Most of the things I'm talking about happened almost a hundred years ago in a Canada that looks drastically different from today. So in casting about for a way to explain why Wilfrid Laurier was such a transformational figure in Canadian history, and not just the dude on the $5 bill, I hit upon the idea of Laurier as Canada's Obama. Upon further reflection, I think that it's a fairly good way to explain both Laurier and major cleavages in Canadian history.

Like Obama, Laurier was an exceptionally sauve and debonair politician. He was a natural charmer who sought to elevate the tone of discussion - while Obama urged Americans to "be the Change you want to see", Laurier eschewed "stormy confrontations" in favour of "the sunny ways" of compromise.

[Laurier's "sunny ways" comes from the fable about the Wind and the Sun, who get into an argument over who is more powerful. They see a man walking down a path and they decide that whomever can get the man to remove his coat will be the strongest. The wind goes first and he blows as strong as he can, hoping that it will blow the coat off the man. Instead it only makes the man pull his coat tighter against himself. The sun's turn is next and he simply decides to smile on the man. As he smiles broader and broader it gets warmer and warmer and soon enough, the man takes his coat off. The wind had to concede that for all his bluster, he was unable to get the man to do what the sun did by being pleasant.]

Laurier also had the knack of being all things to all people. This no doubt was due to times in which he lived. Media not being what it is today, he could be the ardent defender of French Canada when speaking in Quebec while being the voice of reasonable accommodation to English Canada. Canada really was a nation of "two solitudes" at the turn of the 20th Century - the English and French were deeply suspicious of each other, a suspicion that was born of ignorance for the most part.

During the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary I read an article in the Globe and Mail (one that I cannot find online alas) arguing that the success of Obama and Clinton prove that the United States is actually much more progressive than Canada as all the major Canadian parties were led by white men. I felt then that it was a pretty unfair article, not only because women have led two federal parties in the last 20 years (Campbell, McLaughlin and McDonagh) and that visible minorities have made exceptional strides in Canadian elections since 1960 - when immigration from non-caucasian countries began in earnest, but because it completely ignored the historical differences between Canada and the United States.

Having an African American win the Presidency is a big deal not by the simple fact that he is African American. It's a big deal because of that country's history with racial tension. I'd argue that an African Canadian Prime Minister would be far less transformational - Canada's history simply doesn't have the same level of racial acrimony. Slavery was never much of an issue and there certainly has never been anything akin to Jim Crow in Canada. (Now an Aboriginal Prime Minister...that would be something)

Instead of race, the major social cleavages in Canada were language and religion. In both these instances, Laurier was on the wrong side of the equation. Being a French Canadian Catholic in 1900 very much meant that the odds for electoral success were stacked against you. Remember that this was a time when the Orange Order held considerable (and very public) influence. That Laurier was able to thread the needle and convince English Canada that he was not a Papist conspirator who would be beholden to Rome over Canada was entirely due to his skills as an orator and politician. Winning four consecutive majorities in this environment is astounding.

No wonder he's on the five dollar bill.

Justin Trudeau's pitch-perfect pratfall

For those that can't understand French - Justin tells how his father taught him how to take a tumble on purpose...just for giggles. The fun starts at 1:50 or so.

I think it's pretty great that a man with such lofty expectations placed upon him seems to be able to laugh at himself (I mean, just look at that Zorro/d'Artagnan moustache he's sporting for Movember!). Also, he sure seems to be able to speak a pretty decent joual - which is pretty unexpected.

Who knows if he'll ever fulfill those expectations placed on him, but I get the sense that if he doesn't he'll be just fine.

History of USSR for children

All history should be taught via stop-motion Lego animation.
"[Brezhnev] also had his moustaches. But growing above his eyes."


h/t Andrew Sullivan

"Structuralism v.Technological Determinism" or "How My Historiography Is Changing with the Times"

  I recently finished reading John Ralston Saul's biography of Baldwin and Lafontaine (another in the Extraordinary Canadians series - honestly, I cannot stress how amazing these books are. I fully intend on having a shelf full of them in the very near future). One small, almost throwaway point, has stuck with me. In his introduction Saul argues that the 1849 burning of Parliament in Montreal by Protestants angry with the Rebellion Losses Bill was Canada's equivalent to the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe. He offhandedly mentions that it was the advent of the telegraph that helped fuel the revolutions as they spread across the Continent. It was the brand new communication technology and it allowed local newspapers to report on the events in other countries almost instantaneously. While he doesn't come out and say that the telegraph was the 19th Century version of the Internet, he certainly implies it. Like the Internet (and the railroad), the telegraph effectively shrunk the distances between places and peoples. It's not something I had ever really thought of, the telegraph usually ranks pretty low on the list of revolutionary inventions of the 19th Century after the steam engine, the railroad, the breach loading rifle, the Gatling gun, mechanization, industrial uses for rubber and photographic film.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I think I'm becoming a bit of a technological determinist.

  Generally speaking, I've always been sympathetic to the structuralist interpretation of history. That is, the way a society was structured, and which social structures were present, goes a long way to explaining why a society (or nation) developed as it did. (the theory gets more complex - far more complex for me to understand. I stick with this very simplified version, it's treated me well). This is why I look towards the New England town meetings and the Virginian House of Burgesses to explain why the American colonies sought independence from Great Britain in the 18th Century and Canada didn't - America had far more experience with local (and active) governance than Canada.

     If you think this sounds vaguely Marxist, you're right. Structuralism (or how I interpret it) is heavily influenced by the Marxist historians of the early 20th Century (although for them the defining structures naturally revolved around labour and production).

   Lately though, like I said, I'm finding much to agree with Thorstein Veblen about. Technology isn't just something that affects our daily lives, it is in a very real sense the prime mover of history.  This is why I look to the printing press and the explosion of the written word to explain why the Protestant Reformation spread as quickly as it did, and why I look at the ungodly military buildup in the late 19th/early 20th Century to explain why the First World War was inevitable (instead of the alliance system story we keep telling our high school students). I don't mean to imply that technological explanations of history haven't been present before, they absolutely have - the two examples I just gave are well known theories. What I mean to say is that when all things are considered equal, I tend to defer to the technological explanation.

     I suspect this personal shift is part of a larger narrative - the reason why structuralism has become less compelling as an historiographical lens and technological determinism has become moreso is that in contemporary, developed societies, social structures just don't have the same influence that they used to and technology has come to define every aspect of life at the beginning of the 21st Century.  Unions simply do not wield the influence they once did, and the days of Tammany Hall and the Orange Order deciding elections are a distant memory. On the other hand, one only needs to look at how significantly social media has influenced the election campaigns of Obama and Rob Ford (to a lesser extent) to see how technology is becoming the driving force in society.

   Put another way, I suspect that my historiography is being influenced by the times in which I live. This of course is not all that strange - the times in which a historian lives have a dramatic influence over his/her historical analyses (not that I'm a "historian" in any stretch of the imagination). What I think is interesting is how rapidly it is changing. Structuralism made more sense in a world where Communist and Fascist governments actually existed and really did structure their societies  along strict organizational lines (Mussolini called it "corporatism").  Perhaps it is here where I can concede that the Fukuyaman end-of-history thesis has some validity (I can't believe I just wrote that - I might have to shower :).  It hasn't taken very long to move away from binary worldview and towards a more amorphous one. Likewise, technological determinism is far less rigid a historiography than structuralism is.

    Anyways, this is what I've been thinking about for the last little while. Thoughts?