Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Is drone war just?

On Monday, December 13, I attended a panel discussion on "Drones and Targeted Killings Abroad: What is Legal and Who Decides?" It was hosted by the Federalist Society, at the Cornell Club in Manhattan, and the panelists were Ben Wizner of the ACLU and Michael W. Lewis of Ohio Northern University Law School. The moderator was P. Kevin Castel, a U.S. district court judge.

I was led there by my having complained to my friend Wesley Yang that there has been alarmingly little debate in America about whether killing by remote-controlled drones is ethical—whether it's philosophically consistent with just-war doctrine. Wesley has been researching and writing about the high-stakes legal debates associated with the war on terror—see his recent profile in New York Magazine of Evan Kohlmann, the government's most prolific terrorism expert—and he invited me—challenged me?—to come along with him to the panel.

The debate took place in a mustard yellow conference room. The Federalist Society is well-known as a conservative, strict-constructionist legal group, so it wasn't too surprising to find a fair number of older white men in dark suits, flag pins in their lapels. While I was raiding the cheese-and-crackers table, one such attendee, observing a pile of knives and an absence of forks, volunteered that "The caterer must be a lefty." It transpired that the quiet man sitting beside me during the discussion was Michael Mukasey, George W. Bush's second attorney general; his identity was revealed to me at the end of the evening when people of the left and of the right converged to have their pictures taken with him.

Introduction by Judge Castel

Jane Mayer outlined the facts about America's drone program and raised important ethical questions about it in "The Predator War," published in The New Yorker on October 26, 2009. In his introductory remarks, Judge Castel seemed to draw on Mayer's article. He noted that the U.S. has two drone programs. The first, run by the military, augments the work of troops on the ground. Castel suggested that the drones were controlled remotely with joysticks and monitored on flat-screen televisions, as the New York Times has also reported. The second program, Castel continued, "is said—I don't know—to be run out of Langley, Virginia, by the C.I.A." (Castel was careful throughout the evening to specify that the information he was presenting was secondhand, acquired by him from journalistic reports only, and that any opinions he might voice were to be understood not as representations of his personal judgment but merely as provocations, potentially fictional, intended only to stir up debate. As it happens, in a recent Guardian article about the recall from Pakistan of the CIA's station chief, whose cover was blown last week by a Pakistani man angry over drone strikes that killed his father and brother, Declan Walsh reports that the CIA now manages its drones out of its Islamabad office rather than Langley.) Castel added that "It's been said that some of the personnel will wear flight suits" while operating the drones. (This may not be true, however; Charlie Savage has reported for the Times that CIA drone operators do not wear military uniforms, in apparent contravention of the Geneva conventions, an awkward state of affairs that not long ago obliged the Obama administration to rewrite its military commission rules at the last minute while negotiating a plea bargain with Omar Khadr, a former child soldier and Guantanamo Bay detainee, downgrading the charge against Khadr from war crime to a domestic law offense, in order "to avoid seeming to implicitly concede that the C.I.A. is committing war crimes.") Castel repeated the vignette that begins Mayer's New Yorker article—the story of the August 2009 remote killing of Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, while he was reclining on his roof receiving an intravenous drip. The United States and Pakistan are happy to have got rid of Mehsud, but Castel noted that the killing is thought by some to have taken place on the CIA's sixteenth attempt to strike Taliban leader. ("During this hunt," Mayer wrote, "between two hundred and seven and three hundred and twenty-one additional people were killed, depending on which news accounts you rely upon.") Given such a high rate of collateral damage, can the killing be considered a success?

Castel cited data provided to Mayer by the New America Foundation, according to which Obama in his first nine months ordered as many drone strikes as Bush had during his last three years. (More up-to-date statistics are available on the New America Foundation's website and in its February 2010 report on drone warfare; New America now claims that 45 drones strikes were ordered by the Bush administration and that the Obama administration, by contrast, ordered 51 strikes in 2009 and another 113 so far in 2010.)

Castel raised a number of questions: Do drone bombings reduce casualties of innocents by allowing operators to wait for certain identification of their target and a minimum number of bystanders? Are they a necessary means of war? Do they change the nature of war in an undesirable way, such that war no longer requires the virtues of courage and honor? (A June 2010 United Nations report warned that the U.S. drone program licensed a "'PlayStation' mentality to killing.") Are any laws broken if the individual targeted by a drone is a United States citizen? If judges have to sign warrants before the government can eavesdrop on U.S. citizens, why don't they have to vet the government's requests to assassinate them? Are any laws being broken when the drones kill people outside of Afghanistan—that is, outside the theater of war as conventionally understood? As a closing sally, Castel raised the prospect of "nanodrones"—remote-controlled killing devices small enough to slip into a window—which reminded me of Neil Stephenson's sci-fi novel The Diamond Age.

Castel then introduced Ben Wizner of the ACLU's National Security Project, who helped to represent Nasser al-Aulaqi in a recent lawsuit against the Obama administration, which in April 2010 listed as an approved target for killing al-Aulaqi's son, Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric with dual U.S. and Yemeni citizenship alleged to have incited terrorist attacks. The al-Aulaqi/al-Awlaki case was dismissed earlier this month, when federal district court judge John W. Bates declared that the father lacked sufficient legal standing to challenge the government's targeting of his son. Castel then proceeded to introduce Michael W. Lewis, a law professor at Ohio Northern University, who before taking up law served as a pilot for the U.S. Navy during the First Gulf War and the run-up to it.

Ben Wizner's remarks

"In what circumstances can Barack Obama order the death of U.S. citizens?" Wizner began. He noted that the ACLU chose to assist al-Awlaki's father in his lawsuit because the Obama administration had provided a legal opportunity by leaking to the media earlier this year its decision to target al-Awlaki for killing—a moment of transparency that the administration later backpedaled from in court, when it invoked the privilege of state secrecy in efforts to have the case dismissed. Wizner asserted that the recent dismissal of the case had been on standing rather than merits—that is, the judge ruled only that al-Awlaki's father did not have an interest in his son's welfare strong enough to give him the right to bring the matter to court; the judge did not say anything about the conditions that might give the U.S. government the right to kill one of its citizens. In fact, Wizner continued, the judge noted that the case raised "stark, and perplexing, questions," such as

Can the Executive order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization?

Torture, Wizner said, is always illegal, but targeted killing is sometimes legal. According to Wizner, the ACLU does not contend that the government needs to obtain warrants before conducting targeted killings, nor does the ACLU believe that courts should be involved in real-time decision-making. Their contention is merely that such killings are only lawful in a theater of war and against an imminent danger. The Obama administration hasn't disclosed its definition of lawful killings, but since it has placed individuals on its target list for months at a time, its standards must be more permissive than those proposed by the ACLU. Wizner observed that unsupervised powers are almost always abused in the long run, and that a policy of taking the government's word for the prudence and wisdom of its actions hasn't always worked out: the Bush administration claimed that it was only detaining dangerous terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, but the majority, it turns out, are far less scary than advertised.

Through the al-Awlaki lawsuit, the ACLU was asking the government to disclose its standards for remote killing. "Due process," Wizner said, "requires at a minimum that citizens be put on notice as to when they could be put to death." He noted that the Israeli government's targeted-killing program had been challenged in court by human rights groups there, and that the Israeli Supreme Court had ruled that lethal force could be used by the government against individuals, but not for retribution, not if arrest or another lesser intervention could solve the problem, and not merely on the basis of membership in a group. The Israeli Supreme Court required that every instance of targeted killing be followed by a post-hoc investigation.

Why, Wizner asked, can't the U.S. also make explicit its legal standards? The Obama administration has set no limits so far to its power to kill specific individuals, he maintained. The administration has not said whether the killings are permissible only when a threat is imminent, and if so, how imminent. Wizner suggested that the lack of clarity about the U.S. policy might help to legitimize targeted killings by other nations, whose ethical standards and target lists might not be palatable to Americans. In March 2010, Harold Koh, legal adviser to the State Department, defended the Obama administration's targeted-killing program as justifiable as a matter of national self-defense; Koh claimed that the killings by drone were being conducted in accordance with the just-war principles of distinction (that is, they target only military personnel and equipment, not civilian ones) and proportionality (that is, they don't kill more civilians incidentally than the military target is worth). Wizner granted that Koh's argument might hold in its broad outlines, but Wizner insisted that Koh had not revealed enough details to enable anyone outside the Obama administration's inner circle to judge whether the policy was in fact justifiable.

What limits, if any, can be put to the use of military force? Wizner asked. Can a U.S. citizen be killed in Yemen, with which the United States is not at war, as well as in Afghanistan, where the United States has acknowledged it is waging war? Is an organization like Al Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula (AQAP) covered by the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), the declaration of war passed by Congress a week after 11 September 2001, even though AQAP did not exist at the time and had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks? In closing, Wizner quoted the Israeli Supreme Court: "It is when the cannons roar that we especially need the laws" (a flip of the more familiar, much-abused Ciceronian tag).

Michael W. Lewis's remarks

Lewis began by differentiating what he called the "law enforcement standard" from the "law of armed conflict standard." In law enforcement, you're only allowed to kill someone who poses an imminent threat. In war, however, you're allowed to kill your enemies whether or not they pose an immediate threat. In the al-Awlaki lawsuit, Lewis averred, the ACLU was attempting to apply a law-enforcement standard to an armed-conflict situation. Furthermore, Lewis continued, the laws of war don't recognize geopolitical borders as limits to military endeavor, and the ACLU's advocated position would create sanctuaries behind international borders where none had originally existed.

The laws of war, Lewis summarized, distinguish civilians and combatants. Combatants are only recognized as such if they belong to an organization that enforces the laws of war; in the American army, for example, a soldier who gratuitously kills an Iraqi civilian may be tried by an American court martial and imprisoned. Balancing this liability is something called the combatant's privilege: so long as combatants do not violate the laws of war, they are immune from prosecution for arson, murder, or damage to private property.

Anyone not a combatant is a civilian, and according to the Geneva Conventions, civilians may never be targeted in a military operation. But civilians also may never take part in armed conflict; if they do, they become targetable. By directing the actions of Nidal Malik Hasan (the Fort Hood shooter) and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the attempted underwear bomber of Christmas 2009), al-Awlaki crossed the line, Lewis said, and rendered himself a legitimate target of lethal force.

What's more, Lewis continued, crossing borders in pursuit of an enemy has traditionally been an accepted practice during wartime. In pursuit of FARC, the Colombian military has crossed into Ecuador; in pursuit of Hezbollah, the Israeli military has crossed into Lebanon. Neither incursion is considered a violation of the laws of war. (Asked during the question-and-answer period later about the controversy over American forces moving into Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Lewis argued that the scandal was not on account of the border crossing, but because the facts of the war were being kept secret from the American public.)

If a neutral country finds itself the host of a person engaged in hostilities with the United States, Lewis maintained, the country need not grant the United States permission to enter its territories in pursuit of him. But if the country wishes to maintain its neutrality, it must deny that person harbor. Yemen, where al-Awlaki is thought to reside, has in fact chosen to act as an ally, Lewis noted—referring, with a smile, to a State Department cable recently released by Wikileaks, which reveals that Yemen's president promised the head of U.S. Central Command in January 2010 that he would keep his people in the dark about the American bombing missions against AQAP. ("We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," said Yemen's president.)

As a matter of strategy, Lewis argued, granting terrorists political sanctuary was tantamount to giving them the initiative—allowing them to choose the next battlefield. It was, he insisted, to turn international law upside-down. (Lewis has further elaborated his support of the Obama administration's targeted-killing policy in a paper posted on the Federalist Society's website.)

Discussion

In the questions and answers that followed, the discussants made further interesting points, but this post is already rather long, and perhaps I should limit myself to relating a few of them in the course of sorting through some of my own thoughts.

When in the past I have read about the Geneva Convention's definition of combatants, the emphasis has always seemed to be on the requirement that combatants wear an identifiable uniform—a requirement that has always seemed a little arbitrary to me, especially when used to justify the indefinite detention of people who were volunteer fighters from impoverished regions, where the purchase of a uniform may have been a relative luxury. I found more ethically convincing Lewis's emphasis on the requirement that combatants belong to an organization that enforces distinction and proportionality in the waging of war. That said, unless I'm missing something, I'm not sure the difference between a lawful and an unlawful combatant is pertinent here. Lewis is arguing for the government's right to kill combatants of either kind, and the legal point at issue seems to be whether the killings may take place in territory outside the theater of war. It doesn't seem relevant that someone like al-Awlaki, by failing to belong to an armed force that obeys the laws of war, may have forfeited his right to the protections afforded by the Geneva Convention to prisoners of war.

Toward the end of the debate, Lewis said, almost as an aside, "I don't see any difference, by the way, between a drone and a manned aircraft." To my surprise, Wizner nodded. (For the record, I don't know for certain whether he nodded in agreement or merely to express something like, 'I recognize that argument,' but it seemed to me that Wizner was signaling agreement.) I see now that Koh made a similar claim in his March 2010 remarks:

There is no prohibition under the laws of war on the use of technologically advanced weapons systems in armed conflict—such as pilotless aircraft or so-called smart bombs—so long as they are employed in conformity with applicable laws of war.

I see the force of the claim. It no doubt seemed unchivalric when swords were first superseded by gunpowder, but the point of war is to defeat the enemy while suffering as little injury oneself as possible. So the problem with drone killing isn't the cocoon of safety around the person holding the joystick. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem with drone killing, but it does mean that some of my horror over the technology may be a little sentimental.

I was also surprised, during the question-and-answer period, to hear Lewis concede that he was comfortable with the proposal of "some form of post-action review" of targeted killings. It surprised me even further when he said that "the guys in Langley bother me, because they're in Langley. Whether there's law-of-war training in the CIA, I don't know." In other words, Lewis was worrying whether the CIA's operators might themselves be unlawful combatants—a question that concerns me rather more than the question of whether al-Awlaki is one. When an American soldier goes rogue, he is court-martialed. What happens to a rogue CIA officer? No doubt it's something unpleasant, or so one hopes, but the secrecy of the organization may make it all but impossible to verify whether CIA killings are in compliance with the laws of war. Given the CIA's propensity in recent years for kidnapping and torture—of the innocent as well as the probably guilty—one isn't disposed to take their good behavior on trust.

Lewis welcomed post-action review and was concerned by the secrecy shrouding the CIA's involvement; Wizner did not object to targeted killings without prior judicial review. If the two of them were representative of informed political opinion, I found myself wondering, might it be possible for Congress to agree on some legislation? Surely the soldiers operating these devices would prefer to know for certain when they were and when they weren't committing war crimes.

On further consideration, this fantasy began to seem a little overoptimistic on my part. The trouble is the chasm between the law-enforcement model and the armed-conflict model. Should terrorists be treated as criminals or as enemy soldiers? The great difference between these paradigms may be related to my niggling sense that there is something wrong with drone killing, even if it's not the remoteness of the attack. Maybe killer drones upset the balance of power between individuals and governments by making it easier to kill a specific person—by making war microlocal. It is accepted that in war a certain number of innocent bystanders are killed. In law enforcement, however, any death of an innocent is an outrage. Why do we allow soldiers to kill the "wrong" people in relatively high numbers but not police officers? Perhaps it's because we distinguish between peace and war, and we understand war to be a temporary state marked by conflict and chaos, in which a government uses force to accomplish broad aims such as taking control of a region. Under such conditions, we are willing to accept that the use of force may be imprecise. We understand that being at war is different from being at peace. Lewis's concern about crossing borders is, I think, a red herring. If FARC's soldiers move into Ecuador, then I think we understand that in their retreat, FARC's soldiers trail the boundaries of the theater of war after them. The trouble is, what happens if a few of FARC's leaders abruptly surface in Madrid? If, in such a case, the Colombian military were to start blowing up the FARC leaders' apartments, it would be reasonable of Madrid's citizens to object.

One of the benefits that people expect from government is personal security from attacks by government itself. (And protection from other governments; Madrileños expect that Spain will not attack them and that Spain will protect them from Colombia if Colombia tries to—and from FARC, for that matter.) The social contract is understood, at least in some strains of political philosophy, to be a haven from the state of war. If an individual may be killed by his government on its say-so, without judicial review before or after his killing, there is no haven from the state of war. In fact, security from such attack is so fundamental to well-being that a person vulnerable to it might be thought of as lacking a government at all. It is no remedy if a government merely promises that it will only execute dangerous enemies to social order. Citizens need to be able to feel confident about the government's epistemology; they need to be able to challenge the government's identification of enemies before the fact, or (less reassuringly) they need to be able to punish after the fact government officials who turn out to have been in error. A case as celebrated as al-Awlaki's is not where the trouble is likely to lie; given the stir about him, the governments of the United States and Yemen have probably been obliged to think long and hard about the certitude of the evidence against him. (Still, to say a word for the criminal model: if Yemen's president is willing to wink while the U.S. bombs terrorists within Yemen's borders, can't he bring himself to extradite a single terrorist for us? Does his tenure in power really depend to that extent on duplicity?) The possibility for injustice, however, will increase the further down one goes on the government's target list. What if some individuals lower down are listed because the CIA has misidentified them, as it misidentified Khalid El-Masri, an innocent German citizen whom the CIA kidnapped and tortured in 2003 and 2004 because they mistook him for a terrorist with a similar name? What if the culpability of some individuals lower down on the list has been grossly exaggerated, as was the case with the Uighurs in Guantanamo Bay? Without the protections afforded to suspects under the criminal law model, such errors would never be redressed, and might not ever even be discovered.

I'm offering these thoughts with the caveat that I'm still thinking through these issues myself. I don't feel that I've gotten to the bottom of them.

Tea and antipathy in novels about mild-mannered clerics

If a thing is weighing on one's mind—a topic, say, like 18th-century tea smuggling or political paranoia—one tends to find it even when one isn't looking for it. While reading novels, for example.

Americans were far from being the only people in the eighteenth century who smuggled tea. In fact, the ratio between the tax on East India Company tea and its underlying price was so high that it eventually became a classic example in economics of the way that overburdensome regulation may encourage illegality, and awareness of the problem seems to have spilled over from economics into literature quite early on. While researching "Tea and Antipathy," I happened to read John Galt's Annals of the Parish (1821), a charming novel that Galt himself liked to think of as a "local theoretical history." The book is written in the voice of Reverend Micah Balwhidder, a Presbyterian minister, recently retired, who has decided to set down an account of his life in the Scottish parish of Dalmailing. Each year gets its own chapter, in which Reverend Balwhidder, with a guileless lack of self-awareness, summarizes the doings in Dalmailing, spiritual and nonspiritual. In 1761, the most remarkable thing in Dalmailing was the smuggling of tea and hard liquor:

It was in this year that the great smuggling trade corrupted all the west coast . . . . The tea was going like the chaff, the brandy like well-water, and the wastrie of all things was terrible. There was nothing minded but the riding of cadgers [sellers] by day, and excisemen by night—and battles between the smugglers and King's men, both by sea and land. . . . I did all that was in the power of nature to keep my people from the contagion; I preached sixteen times from the text, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. I visited and I exhorted; I warned and I prophesied; I told them, that, although the money came in like slate stones, it would go like the snow off the dyke. But for all I could do, the evil got in among us. . . .

Indeed, a year later, in 1762, the evil has made its way into Reverend Balwhidder's own home, in part on account of the charitable interest he takes in an indigent widow, Mrs. Malcolm, who has begun selling tea. "I lost some of my dislike to the tea," the minister admits.

It did no harm to the head of the drinkers, which was not always the case with the possets that were in fashion before . . . ; so, both for its temperance, and on account of Mrs Malcolm's sale, I refrained from the November in this year to preach against tea.

By 1778, when the rage for smuggling returns, Rev. Balwhidder is not above chuckling over the story of a woman who has hidden a stash of smuggled tea in her mattress ticking and lies on top of it, feigning to a customs officer that it's her deathbed. Loosened from strict virtue by time and his affections, the reverend even goes so far as to observe, "Of all the manifold ills in the train of smuggling, surely the excisemen are the worst."

Not long after, while reading Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), I unexpectedly came across some 18th-century political paranoia—in particular, the variety known as the 18th-century Commonwealthman tradition. In chapter 19, the Vicar, Dr. Primrose, is invited to dine at the home of Wilkinson, a man so interested in politics that he reads six newspapers, seventeen magazines, and two reviews. Wilkinson complains that George III hasn't let himself be managed the way a king ought to let himself be managed:

I don't think there has been a sufficient number of advisers: he should advise with every person willing to give him advice, and then we should have things done in anotherguess manner.

When the Vicar protests that such management would be meddling, a lady calls him "sordid" and indignantly apostrophizes "Liberty, that sacred gift of heaven!" Wilkinson, too, takes offense: "Can it be possible . . . that there should be any found at present advocates for slavery? Any who are for meanly giving up the privileges of Britons?"

This was the lingo of the 18th-century Commonwealthman, which Goldsmith disliked, and the Vicar—or Goldsmith, in the Vicar's voice—proceeds to dress Wilkinson down. The way he does so is rather interesting to an observer in 21st-century America, where income inequality is higher than it has ever been. The Vicar argues that the antimonarchical rhetoric of people like Wilkinson is obfuscatory piffle served up by rich oligarchs, who resent the king's power as an interference with theirs—as interference with the manipulation by the wealthy of the poor and the oppression by the wealthy of the middle class:

It is the interest of the great . . . to diminish kingly power as much as possible; because whatever they take from that is naturally restored to themselves; and all they have to do in the state, is to undermine the single tyrant, by which they resume their primaeval authority. Now, the state may be so circumstanced, or its laws may be so disposed, or its men of opulence so minded, as all to conspire in carrying on this business of undermining monarchy. For . . . if the circumstances of our state be such, as to favour the accumulation of wealth, and make the opulent still more rich, this will encrease their ambition. . . . Now the possessor of accumulated wealth, when furnished with the necessaries and pleasures of life, has no other method to employ the superfluity of his fortune but in purchasing power. That is, differently speaking, in making dependants, by purchasing the liberty of the needy or the venal . . . the rabble of mankind, whose souls and whose education are adapted to servitude. . . . But there must still be a large number of the people without the sphere of the opulent man's influence. . . . In this middle order of mankind are generally to be found all the arts, wisdom, and virtues of society. This order alone is known to be the true preserver of freedom, and may be called the People. Now it may happen that this middle order of mankind may lose all its influence in a state, and its voice be in a manner drowned in that of the rabble: . . . In such a state, . . . all that the middle order has left, is to preserve the prerogative and privileges of the one principal governor with the most sacred circumspection. For he divides the power of the rich, and calls off the great from falling with tenfold weight on the middle order placed beneath them.

A strong central government, the Vicar insists, is the middle class's safest ally. The rich demonize such a government as tyrannical, because no other force in society is capable of standing up to wealth. Should the rich succeed in fooling even the middle class into distrust of government, the result will be a country where "the laws govern the poor, and the rich govern the law."

The contradiction outrages Wilkinson. Before Wilkinson can throw the Vicar out of the house, though, Wilkinson's master and mistress come home: it turns out that Wilkinson is really no more than a butler.

Another cup or two

I'll be answering questions about "Tea and Antipathy," my New Yorker article about the role that smuggling merchants may have played in fomenting the American Revolution, during a "live chat" on the New Yorker website today (Wednesday, Dec. 15) at 3pm.

If you're looking for questions to ask me, check out "'The Revolution May Have Been Astroturfed'?", a post by J. L. Bell at his blog Boston 1775, in which he fills in some details of the Tea Party story that I didn't have room for in my New Yorker piece and raises some good questions about the hypothesis I entertain.

Update, Dec. 16: Thanks to all who participated in the live chat, which has now been precipitated into a transcript on the New Yorker website. Meanwhile, over at Boston 1775, J. L. Bell today adds a further supplement to my historiographic blog post by reviewing the scholarship of Oliver Morton Dickerson, who focused on the self-dealing of the British customs service in the American colonies.

Notebook: Tea and Antipathy

"Tea and Antipathy," my review-essay about the dark side of the American Revolution, is published in the December 20 & 27, 2010, issue of The New Yorker. As in the past, I'd like to offer a bibliographic supplement here on my blog. N.B.: This post is more likely to be comprehensible if you first read the article whose sources it describes.

My essay approaches the books under review at a bit of an angle. In As If an Enemy's Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution, Richard Archer tells the story of the British occupation of Boston between 1768 and 1770 in a fluently written, chronologically straightforward, somewhat old-fashioned style. He touches on such questions as the revolutionaries' motives and ideological consistency, but he aims mostly at a presentation of the evidence. In American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, by contrast, T. H. Breen has a thesis to prove. In a style somewhat more rarefied than Archer's, Breen argues that in 1774 and 1775, during the early stages of popular mobilization, America's revolutionaries were more uncouth than we're comfortable remembering today. In his interest in character, Breen is following in the footsteps of historians like Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby. Archer is aware of the historiographic trend that Breen is participating in, but Archer's is the sort of book that aims to keep to one side of such trends.

In my article, I was adding concerns of my own to Archer's presentation of the facts, and reading Breen's interpretation somewhat against the grain. Breen wants to lift the stigma attached in the modern mind to the insurgent character (though he does retain a few reservations) and is confident that "American insurgents provide no comfort to those in our own time who claim that a single cause or narrow agenda justifies armed violence against neighbors or the state." It isn't clear to me, however, that it's possible to draw that distinction. Insurgents who are confused, misinformed, and paranoid may well believe that they're acting for the sake of a common good—mistakenly—and people with such beliefs today may have more in common with the early revolutionaries than Breen allows. Another distinction between us: Breen believes that consumer culture helped to shape American character in a positive way—see his Marketplace of Revolution (Oxford, 2004)—and I found myself worrying that the corruptions of profit-seeking may have deformed America's political process at the nation's inception.

The third new book mentioned in my article, Defiance of the Patriots, by Benjamin Carp, did not reach me until after I had researched and written most of my essay, and unsurprisingly my essay is somewhat oblique to it as well. The classic and still definitive account of the Boston Tea Party is Benjamin Woods Labaree's The Boston Tea Party (Oxford, 1968). Carp has revisited the events described by Labaree, updating details and uncovering new sources. He is a methodical researcher, who has clearly done his time in the archives; he has found the earliest instance in print of the term "Boston Tea Party" yet known (in 1826, a newspaper quoted a Tea Party participant then living in Ohio as having used the phrase), and his list of participants is no doubt the most accurate yet compiled. Like Archer's, Carp's book is an account rather than an argument; like Breen, however, Carp writes in the contemporary historiographic mode, preferring contextual explanation and characterological description. One chapter places the events of 1773 in the context of the international trade in tea; another, in that of colonists' relations with native Americans; a third, in that of African American slavery. He's not much interested in double-guessing colonists' motives. Indeed, I sometimes felt that Carp was a bit partial to the radicals. 

Setting aside for a moment my differences of temperament and perspective from them, however, I should say that I'm indebted to Archer, Breen, and Carp for their many insights and discoveries, as well as for giving me the occasion to discover that I have opinions of my own about the topic. (If you would like to see how Breen himself relates his research to the contemporary Tea Party movement, please see his March 2010 op-ed for the Washington Post.)

The American Revolution is a puzzle unlike other historical puzzles, not least because very few, if any, of those who participated planned for it to happen. Once you start to question professed motives—that is, once you doubt the good faith of some actors and the accuracy of others' understanding of the situation they were in—the puzzle becomes even trickier. A person could spend a lifetime trying to solve it, and so it's with more than the usual trepidation that I offer my online bibliography this time around, conscious that I'll be revealing the limits of my research even more starkly than I usually do, and that the responsible thing for me to do is direct readers to, say, the twelve-page descriptive bibliography at the back of Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause and to the lavish guides to further research that David Hackett Fischer includes at the end of books like Paul Revere's Ride and Washington's Crossing. Now that I've directed you to them and my conscience is clear, here's to the limits within which journalists are obliged to work, and here we go . . .

The best account of Joyce, Junior, the mysterious figure who claimed to lead Boston's "Committee for Tarring and Feathering" between 1774 and 1777, is Albert Matthews, "Joyce, Jun.," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 8 (1903): 88-104. In a subsequent article, Matthews explained that the pseudonym was probably a reference to Cornet George Joyce, thought by some to have been the executioner of Charles I, though he probably wasn't; see Albert Matthews, "Joyce Jr. Once More," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 11 (1906-1907): 280-295. Among the literary critics who have linked Hawthorne's demonic figure to Joyce, Junior, are Roy Harvey Pearce, in "Hawthorne and the Sense of the Past, or, the Immortality of Major Molineux," ELH 21 (1954): 327-349, and Peter Shaw, in "Fathers, Sons, and the Ambiguities of Revolution in 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux,'" New England Quarterly 49 (1976): 559-76. As for the general history of tarring and feathering in America, the best account I found is Benjamin H. Irvin's "Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768-1776," New England Quarterly 76 (2003): 197-238, though an older article, R. S. Longley's "Mob Activities in Revolutionary Massachusetts," New England Quarterly 6 (1933): 98-130 was also useful. A disgusted Loyalist once described a lady "so complaisant as to throw her Pillows out of the Window, as the Mob passed," in order to furnish them with feathers. That disgusted Loyalist was Peter Oliver, chief justice of the Superior Court in Massachusetts, whose bitter, intemperate, and pretty funny history of the American Revolution was published in the twentieth century as Peter Oliver's Origin & Progress of the American Revolution: A Tory View, Douglass Adair & John A. Schutz, eds. (The Huntington Library, 1961) and is a sourcebook for patriot human rights violations. The tale of customs agent John Malcom, perhaps the only American to have been tarred and feathered more than once, is best told by his great-great-great-nephew Frank W. C. Hersey, in "Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom," Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 34 (1941): 429-73 (not digitized, to my knowledge).

A wonderful introduction to the historian and Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson is Bernard Bailyn's The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Harvard University Press, 1974); it reads like a tragic novel. In a 2004 lecture, Bailyn recalled how, when the book was first published, some critics "said that this biography of a law-and-order conservative who struggled against popular mobs and protestors could only be a disguised defense of Richard Nixon" ("Thomas Hutchinson in Context," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 114 [2006]: 281-300). Many of Hutchinson's writings are available online. His account of his debriefing by George III begins on page 157 of The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq., Peter Orlando Hutchinson, ed. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883). On page 67 of the same book Hutchinson explains that he suspects John Rowe and other merchant-smugglers of having masterminded the destruction of his house. Hutchinson narrates the destruction itself in the third volume of his history of Massachusetts, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774 (London: John Murray, 1828), beginning on page 122. When I mention that Hutchinson enjoyed debating political philosophy, I was thinking of his 1773 exchange with the Massachusetts legislature (including John Adams and James Bowdoin) over the nature of the British Parliament's legal authority over the colonies, which Bailyn suggests he indulged in for his own intellectual satisfaction and to his political detriment. The exchange is printed on pages 336 to 396 of Speeches of the Governors of Massachusetts, from 1765 to 1775; and the Answers of the House of Representatives, to the Same (Boston: Russell and Gardner, 1818) and also exists in a modern edition, Briefs of the American Revolution, edited by John Philip Reid (1981).

The destruction of Hutchinson's townhouse was further described by Francis Bernard, then the governor of the colony, in a letter to the earl of Halifax, quoted by Caleb H. Snow in A History of Boston (Boston: Able Bowen, 1825). Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan give an excellent modern account of this event and the 1760s generally in their classic work The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1953). Hawthorne rendered the scene in his children's history Grandfather's Chair:

The volumes of Hutchinson's library, so precious to a studious man, were torn out of their covers, and the leaves sent flying out of the windows. Manuscripts containing secrets of our country's history, which are now lost forever, were scattered to the wind.

In the same book, Hawthorne also reprinted a letter from Hutchinson describing the riot. You can read the young merchant Henry Bass's admission that his group the Loyal Nine preferred to keep their names hidden behind that of Ebenezer McIntosh in his letter to Samuel P. Savage, 19 December 1765, Savage Papers, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 44 (1910-1911): 688-689.

The thorny question of economics, smuggling, and corruption is not a new one. Some suspected a link even at the time. "The Plan of the People of Property," General Thomas Gage wrote to the British government in 1765, "has been to raise the lower Class to prevent the Execution of the Law." Writing under the name "Massachusettensis," Daniel Leonard wrote in 1775 that "A smuggler and a whig are cousin Germans, the offspring of two sisters, avarice and ambition. The smuggler received his protection from the Whig, and he in his turn received support from the smuggler." It was the Progressive historians of the early twentieth century who first gave a scholarly formulation to the idea that merchants, eager to protect their smuggling profits and to dodge tax burdens, manipulated popular discontent in the colonies and then lost control of the fire they had set. My starting place was Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr.'s The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, first published in 1918 and revised in 1939. (C. M. Andrews is said to have come up with the same thesis, independent of Schlesinger, and he published his version as "The Boston Merchants and the Non-Importation Movement," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 19.) Late in life Schlesinger offered a précis of his argument in "Political Mobs and the American Revolution, 1765-1776," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 99 (1955): 244-50.

Schlesinger's thesis has been regretted by a number of historians as reductive, which is, I suspect, in some quarters a more scholarly-sounding way of calling it unflattering to the American revolutionaries, but his painstaking and lucid book has not been discredited or for that matter surpassed, though in places it has been corrected. (David Ammerman, for example, showed in In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 [University Press of Virginia, 1974], his classic study of how the colonies' boycotts and protests birthed their self-governance, that Schlesinger was wrong to believe the Pennsylvanian Joseph Galloway's claim that the conservative faction at the First Continental Congress had at any point more than a snowball's chance in hell of dissuading that Congress from declaring a boycott of Great Britain.) Instead of contradicting Schlesinger's thesis, a later generation of historians—including J. G. A. Pocock, Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and the Morgans, a group who came to be called neo-Whigs—shifted the investigation of revolutionary motive from economics to a more philosophical plane and attempted to understand the mentality of the revolutionaries on their own terms. The neo-Whig historians identified a political ideology with a paranoid streak that they called the eighteenth-century Commonwealthman tradition. In Britain, the tradition was popular among those who were shut out of power during George III's rule and who hearkened back to the English revolutions of 1640 and 1688. Though confined to the radical fringe in Britain, the ideology had a powerful resonance in the American colonies. Why? Bailyn has suggested that it resonated because royally appointed governors had powers in America that kings had lost in Britain a century before. Wood has ingeniously suggested that paranoia was the natural result of combining the Enlightenment insistence that everything can be understood with a new complexity of sociopolitical governance:

At this very moment when the world was outrunning man's capacity to explain it in personal terms, in terms of the passions and schemes of individuals, the most enlightened of the age were priding themselves on their ability to do just that.

Wood surmises that instead of resigning themselves to bafflement over the causes of complex social events, the paranoid thinkers of the late eighteenth century preferred to believe that they had failed to understand because the crucial evidence had been withheld (see Gordon Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly 39 [1982]: 402-41).

The neo-Whig angle of vision discovered new riches in American revolutionary history by bringing to life the ideas in its pamphlets, letters, and diaries. The neo-Whig interpretive paradigm became the dominant one in American revolutionary history, and questions of pecuniary interest during the Revolution were set aside not as wrong but as intellectually vulgar. Among historians on the left, who might have been relied upon in other circumstances to doubt and carp, the old Progressive suspicion was not treated any more hospitably, because if Schlesinger and Andrews were right, then the working-class people who had thrown brickbats on behalf of freedom had to be demoted from heroes to pawns. In Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (Academic Press, 1977), for example, Dirk Hoerder defends the political integrity of lower-class rioters. "Their actions were spontaneous," Hoerder writes, though he admits that "leaders could accentuate issues." Hoerder sees a continuity between the American rioters who launched the Revolution and those who, in the century that led up to it, punished profiteers and adulterers in their communities and menaced religious outsiders who encroached. Hoerder believes that eighteenth-century rioters acted to preserve communal equity, resisting free-market liberalism in favor of a public good that was, alas, to become harder to identify in the next century's proliferation of conflicting private interests. Hoerder's book is a treasury of detail, sometimes overwhelmingly so. His sympathy for the commoner sometimes clouds his judgment—as evidence of Thomas Hutchinson's "arrogance," for example, he confusingly adduces Hutchinson's regret over the unhealthy conditions in a Boston jail—but he is an honest and indefatigable researcher who presents evidence supporting the Progressive thesis as well as that contradicting it. For example, noting that crowd actions against soldiers were conducted in a different manner and spirit during the British occupation of Boston than those against tea importers, Hoerder is willing to wonder if Whig merchants paid for the latter attacks: "The different patterns of action at a time when customary forms of crowd activity were maintained against soldiers suggest that the participants were different, too."

Marc Egnal and Joseph A. Ernst proposed a synthesis of the Progressive thesis and the neo-Whig perspective in their article "An Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972): 4-32. The evidence for the Progressive thesis was revisited, and the thesis reconsidered on its own terms, in 1986, when John W. Tyler published Smugglers & Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Northeastern U P, 1986). Tyler ended up confirming Schlesinger's work. In fact, Tyler's only significant revision to Schlesinger's storyline was to suggest that in 1774, when radicalism and violence began to frighten moderate merchants, the merchants did not unanimously turn Loyalist but instead split more or less evenly into patriot and loyalist sympathizers. Tyler tells the story of the corrupt customs official Benjamin Barons, whose humiliation, when caught in 1760 trying to suborn an informer, was suspected by Hutchinson to be the ultimate cause of the destruction of Hutchinson's townhouse in 1765. (Barons's tale is told in even greater detail by Maurice Smith in The Writs of Assistance Case [University of California, 1978].) But Tyler's ace card, as a scholar, was his ability to prove from insurance records that certain merchants were indeed smugglers, including such patriots as John Rowe, Solomon Davis, William Molineux, Edward Payne, and William Cooper. In an appendix, Tyler printed a list of Boston merchants, identifying their specialties and naming the known smugglers.

I was convinced by Tyler's book, but I was concerned to note a number of discrepancies in his data. Some of these seem due to sloppiness, though it's hard to know whether the problem was in compiling the data or presenting them. On page 11, for example, Tyler claims to have figured out the specialties of 392 out of 439 Boston merchants; but in Table 4, on page 246, the specialties of only 342 merchants are tallied; and in the appendix, on page 257, there is an analysis of 425 merchants. So how many merchants did Tyler study? On page 30, John Erving is identified as a major smuggler of Dutch goods, but he's not marked as a smuggler in the appendix, where he does appear. These are minor issues, but since Tyler is the only scholar to have dug so deep into the evidence for the Progressive thesis in nearly a century, they suggest to me that the source documents could bear further scrutiny. (Tyler, for his part, does correct an error by Labaree, or rather a misplaced emphasis. Labaree thought that American resistance to the Tea Act of 1773 was driven more by the principle of taxation without representation than by fears of a British monopoly. In fact, Tyler writes, the antimonopoly rhetoric was vital as "the articulation of a genuine fear of the merchants themselves . . . and a propaganda device to divert the consumers' attention from the reduced prices the Tea Act would bring"—an aspect of resistance rhetoric first noticed by Schlesinger.)

Alfred P. Young has supplemented Labaree's definitive account of the Boston Tea Party with The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Beacon Press, 1999), which tells the story of how Americans remembered it, or rather, how they declined to for nearly sixty years. Like Hoerder, Young is a person of the left; he considers the Tea Party a radical mass action that helped to change the character of its participants, such as the shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes, from deferential to self-respecting. Young's primary texts are two early biographies of Hewes, James Hawkes's A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party (S. Bliss, 1834) and Benjamin Bussey Thatcher's Traits of the Tea Party (Harper, 1835), both of which are available online, as is Francis S. Drake's 1884 compilation of primary source documents about the symbolic protest, Tea Leaves. Over at the blog Boston 1775, John L. Bell has looked into the quest to figure out who exactly took part in the Boston Tea Party and has hosted a guest blog-post by Charles Bahne investigating how much the destroyed tea was worth. On the website of the Massachusetts Historical Society , you can read entries in the diary of merchant and documented smuggler John Rowe, who played a highly ambiguous role in the years leading up to the revolution, including Rowe's cautious account of the Tea Party.

How much were the British taxing tea in 1773? The question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. More than a few historians claim that because Parliament in 1767 granted a tax refund of 12 pence a pound on tea imported to Britain if reshipped to America—the same year that the Townshend Acts imposed a new tax of 3 pence a pound—the price of East India Company tea in America actually fell by 9 pence a pound. It turns out that this is a gross simplification, but even at the time many people mistook this gross simplification for the truth, and it got into many history books. The correct, somewhat dizzyingly complex answer is given by Max Farrand in "The Taxation of Tea, 1767–1773," American Historical Review 3 (1898):266–69. The explanation is only three and a half pages long; I have discovered that if you read it out loud three times while taking notes, you eventually understand.

A major source for Breen and for many of the other historians listed here was American Archives, nine mammoth volumes of documentary material from the years 1774 through 1776, compiled and published by the editor Peter Force between 1837 and 1853. All the volumes have been digitized by Northern Illinois University and are searchable, making it easy for a casual reader to dive into the textual sources. (Relatively easy, that is; the search engine is buggy and there's no way to look up a citation if all you have is a volume and page number.) Here is Sam Adams calling the Coercive Acts worse than any tyranny of the Byzantine Empire. Here is the New York City lawyer Gouverneur Morris's satirical comments about Americans as sheep who are about to turn into serpents. Here's a selectman censured for selling a copy of the Continental Association for a pint of flip. Here's a letter that Virginia schoolteacher David Wardrobe wrote to a friend in Scotland about a hanging in effigy, here's his censure as an "enemy to America" for having written it, and here's his attempt at recantation. You may also read original documentation of the drover Jesse Dunbar being carted inside his ox's belly and of a Connecticut doctor named Beebe being tarred and feathered.

A few more scattered sources: The Englishwoman who saw her friends detained on the street in Wilmington, North Carolina, was named Janet Schaw, and her account of their harassment begins on page 191 of the Journal of a Lady of Quality, Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774 to 1776, Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews, eds. (Yale, 1921). The author of the pamphlet The Crisis is identified as William Moore by John Sainsbury in Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769-1782 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987), confirming a guess made by Paul Leicester Ford in his bibliographic study "The Crisis," The Bibliographer 1 (1902): 139-152. In an article published last year, the scholar Neil York also fingers Moore as the likeliest culprit but notes that in the pages of The Crisis itself "it was emphasized that it was a group effort" (Neil York, "George III, Tyrant: The Crisis as Critic of Empire, History 94 (2009): 434–60).

The image at the top of this post, "A New Method of Macarony Making, as practised at Boston in North America," a loose interpretation of John Malcom's fate, was published by Carington Bowles in London in 1774, and is reproduced from page 74 of R. T. H. Halsey's The Boston port bill as pictured by a contemporary London cartoonist (Grolier, 1904). You can see a higher-quality digitization of a smaller version of the same print at the British Museum website, which also owns a hand-colored version. (The British Museum also has a depiction of tarring and feathering by James Gillray, which doesn't actually have anything to do with America at all, but it's by James Gillray, so it's great and who cares.) The Gilder-Lehrman Institute has a colored engraving of the same event by Philip Dawe, with the Boston Tea Party in the background (via). The Massachusetts Historical Society's Coming of the American Revolution site offers a curated tour of a number of original documents from the years leading up to revolution. Please mouse over or click on the other images in this post to find their sources.

Privacy is history, 1888

In Silicon Valley Paris, the software coder Mark Zuckerberg the gossip reporter George Flack pitches his idea for a new kind of social-networking site society newspaper, where the targets will volunteer information about themselves instead of having it extracted from them by reporters, to a venture capitalist nubile young heiress:

There are ten thousand things to do that haven't been done, and I am going to do them. The society news of every quarter of the globe, furnished by the prominent members themselves (oh, they can be fixed—you'll see!) from day to day and from hour to hour and served up at every breakfast-table in the United States—that's what the American people want and that's what the American people are going to have. I wouldn't say it to every one, but I don't mind telling you, that I consider I have about as fine a sense as any one of what's going to be required in future over there. I'm going for the secrets, the chronique intime, as they say here; what the people want is just what isn't told, and I'm going to tell it. Oh, they're bound to have the plums! That's about played out, any way, the idea of sticking up a sign of "private" and thinking you can keep the place to yourself. You can't do it—you can't keep out the light of the Press. Now what I am going to do is to set up the biggest lamp yet made and to make it shine all over the place. We'll see who's private then! I'll make them crowd in themselves with the information, and as I tell you, Miss Francie, it's a job in which you can give me a lovely push.

Henry James, The Reverberator, 1888.

Park Slope Hailstorm

A few photos of the hail that landed on our stoop and in the street outside our apartment starting at about a quarter to nine tonight. The hail accumulated in only a few minutes.

Peter's culture diary

Peter has written a culture diary for the Paris Review blog. The first installment ran yesterday; part two is imminent.

In other news, an MP3 of "Melville's Secrets," the lecture I gave last week about Moby-Dick, sperm, and industrial capitalism, is now downloadable from SUNY Geneseo's website.

Melville's Secrets: The Walter Harding Lecture, 2010

Yesterday afternoon I gave the 2010 Walter Harding lecture at SUNY Geneseo. The lecture series is named after Walter Harding, who taught for decades in Geneseo and was the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Henry David Thoreau, and I felt it was a tremendous honor to have been asked. I talked about Melville's secrets—in particular, about a distorted Platonic myth that I suspect may be present in Moby-Dick. "Ishmael," I claimed, "might be considered a final, uninvited guest to Plato's banquet, and his tale a postscript to Diotima's."

SUNY Geneseo has already uploaded a video of my talk (perhaps also embedded below, if I've coaxed the html sufficiently); a downloadable audio is forthcoming. I'm not going to post a transcript, because I'm hoping to revise the talk into a scholarly paper in the not-too-distant future. To that end, if any of you who heard the talk yesterday or who listen to it online have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please get in touch.

I had a great time at SUNY Geneseo. Many thanks to Marjorie Harding, for the gift that made the lecture series possible; it was an honor to meet the Harding family. I'm very grateful to Geneseo's English department for their hospitality and great questions. I'm especially grateful to department chair Paul Schacht for his support and guidance, to associate professor Alice Rutkowski for a very kind introduction, and to the college president and English professor Christopher Dahl and his wife Ruth Rowse for a lovely dinner.

More evidence of sperm-squeezing

Looking again at "A Squeeze of the Hand," Melville's chapter about the practice of squeezing spermaceti, I noticed that Melville adds a telling bit of linguistic detail. Among the names that he gives for sperm whale detritus is slobgollion, "an appellation original with the whalemen." He defines it as "an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membrances of the case, coalescing."

It occurred to me that if sperm-squeezing was a real practice, then slobgollion must have been a real word, as well as an unusual one—and that with Google it's now very easy to gather information about unusual words. A quick consultation with the OED proved inconclusive—though I did win a round of OED bingo—that is, when I looked up slobgollion, I found no more than the Melville passage I was trying to verify. Somewhat more helpfully, William Clark Russell's 1883 Sailor's Dictionary defines the word as a "whaleman's term for an oozy, stringy substance found in sperm oil." Clark Russell's dictionary is so much later than Melville's, though, that it's possible he was just borrowing from Melville.

A more intriguing find was a report by Robert Clarke, "Open Boat Whaling in the Azores: The History and Present Methods of a Relic Industry," Discovery Reports Issued by the National Institute of Oceanography, vol. 26 (1954): 283-356. Clarke visited the Azores in the summer of 1949 to study the natives' continued practice of open-boat whaling. "The methods employed," Clarke writes, "are a survival of that old-time whaling generally believed to have quite vanished from the seas, . . . learned from American whalers in the nineteenth century" and including not only the chase but also "the 'cutting in' of the whales and . . . the 'trying out' of their blubber in iron pots on the shore."

Describing a heat purification system for oil and blubber at Negrito, on the isle of Terceira, Clarke writes:

The try-house stands nearby on somewhat higher ground, before a cemented space where two stone blubber tanks are excavated. Within the try-house there is a battery of four pots which are used for blubber only. The spermaceti from the case and junk is boiled out separately in an adjoining open-air try-works whose two pots are made not from cast iron but from riveted sheets of wrought iron. Spermaceti needs a lower temperature for trying out than blubber, and I have been told, rather obscurely, that this explains the use of sheet iron pots. At several Azores stations the case and junk are tried out indiscriminately with the blubber, so that the cooked spermaceti or 'head oil' is not kept separate. But where this separation is carried out, I understand that it is still customary, as in the whaleship days, to 'squeeze sperm' before putting the head matter into the pots. Squeezing sperm means plunging the hands into a tub of the semi-liquid spermaceti and there squeezing them together, so as to remove 'slobgollion', the fine strings and tatters of membrane which are suspended in the spermaceti and which would tend to char in the pots and somewhat affect the quality of the head oil.

So was sperm-squeezing real? I'm still not sure. The very word slobgollion, not being Portuguese, is probably one that Clarke brought with him to the Azores, borrowed from his reading of Melville. Also, the telltale phrase "I understand" seems to indicate that Clarke did not witness the practice himself. Still, he was told by someone he trusted that it did take place. Note that Clarke's understanding of the purpose of sperm squeezing is not Melville's but the one William M. Davis gave in Nimrod of the Sea (1874).

Did Melville invent sperm-squeezing?

Once spermaceti, the oil inside the head of a sperm whale, is extracted, it begins to congeal, and in "A Squeeze of the Hand," the 94th chapter of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville claims that sailors used to be put to work rehomogenizing the oil by hand:

When the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty!

Melville goes on to describe an ecstatic experience that overcame his narrator while engaged in sperm squeezing; that ecstasy has attracted much commentary and speculation about its possible sexual and psychological significance. The meanings that Melville invests in the task are clearly a contribution of his own. Much of the whaling practice described in the novel, though, is non-fiction. Was sperm-squeezing?

When I reviewed Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan for the New Yorker in 2007, I concluded that it wasn't, but the case is a tricky one, so here's a presentation of the evidence.

Dolin himself was agnostic, and merely quoted Melville's description of "the experience of squeezing the lumps out of congealed spermaceti" (Dolin, p. 267). A number of nineteenth-century whaling narratives do confirm that spermaceti looks, feels, and behaves as Melville describes, though prior to the publication of Moby-Dick, none that I know of describes hands-on delumping.

In Incidents of a Whaling Voyage (1841), for example, Francis Allyn Olmsted writes:

The case [the head of the whale] is surrounded by a thick wall of a white, gristly substance, termed by the whalers "white horse;" the cavity is lined with a yellowish fat, and is filled with oil of a very superior quality, which, when warm, is perfectly limpid, but concretes in beautiful white masses, if allowed to become cold, or as it drips upon the water. (p. 65)

Olmsted goes on to say that "The head oil and fat are immediately committed to the try-pots"—cauldrons where the fat is purified by high heat. He makes no mention of physical manipulation.

According to William Scoresby's Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), head oil wasn't passed through try-pots before it was stored: "The head-matter congeals when it is cold; it is put into casks in its crude state, and refined on shore at the conclusion of the voyage" (vol. 2, pp. 534-35). In Whaling and Fishing, published in 1856, Charles Nordhoff also describes storing case oil immediately, without boiling it first in try-pots:

Meantime the case was opened; a man being placed in the large opening, the pure and beautifully white spermacetti was bailed out with a bucket constructed for that purpose. It is quite fluid when first taken out, but quickly congeals on exposure to air. It is at once placed in new casks, which are duly marked "case." (p. 127)

Since I haven't found any accounts before Melville that refer to sperm squeezing and since the episode in the novel is overlaid with such personal psychological significance, it seems possible that Melville invented the practice, which doesn't on the face of it make much sense. If sperm oil congeals as it cools, then presumably it melts again when heated, so the try-works would render squeezing unnecessary. On the other hand, if the spermaceti is to be stored in barrels without heat purification, squeezing would be in vain, because the lumps would inevitably form again while the oil waited inside the barrels; whalers often spent years at sea. Melville does sometimes invent. In the very next chapter, "The Cassock," he writes that before the tougher blubber of the whale is sliced up for the try-pots, the slicer dresses himself in the skin of the whale's penis. As Howard P. Vincent observed in In The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, "the whaling sources give no indication, physiological or otherwise, of the facts of Melville's chapter" and so "one must assume that it came from memory or from an imagination profoundly Rabelaisian." Probably the latter.

But there's at least one piece of evidence vindicating Melville. In Nimrod of the Sea (1874), in a passage that I was first directed to by Wilson Heflin's Herman Melville's Whaling Years, William M. Davis does describe sperm squeezing:

On being withdrawn [from the head of whale], the bucket is filled with transparent spermaceti, mixed with the soft, silky integuments, and possessing the odor of the new-drawn milk of our home dairies. With our hands blistered yesterday by the oar, and all on fire to-day by the harsh friction of the handspike, it was luxurious to wade deep in the try-pots filled with this odorous unguent, in order to squeeze and strain out the fibres, which, if allowed to remain, would char with the heat, and darken the oil. No king of earth, even Solomon in all his glory, could command such a bath. I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs, as I stroked the precious ointment from the skin.

One reason to hesitate in accepting this evidence is the date. Since Nimrod began writing his book in 1872, there's a possibility of contamination—in other words, there's a possibility that he read Melville's novel and later remembered Melville's account as an experience of his own. (For a contemporary example, consider Tony Blair, whose account of meeting with the queen incorporates dialogue from Stephen Frears's movie The Queen, which Blair claims not to have seen.) It argues against contamination that Davis's account differs somewhat from Melville's. The purpose of squeezing, Davis writes in the passage above, wasn't to redissolve lumps but to remove fibers that would darken the oil—a more plausible explanation than Melville's, though it suggests that if the task was real, Melville failed to understand the point of it and probably didn't do a very good job. Davis's reference to Solomon's bath reminds me of Melville's reference to Constantine's, though—hinting at contamination. Maybe Davis did unconsciously turn Melville's fictional description into a memory of his own and just as unconsciously revised it, to make it more rational. Also worrisome: Try-pots had to reach a very high temperature, and they stayed at that temperature for days while a whale was being processed, so I'm a little skeptical of Davis's account of wading into the try-pots, which implies significant delay in heating them. Also, even a small amount of moisture in the try-pots was dangerous, because it caused the oil to sputter. Olmsted says the whalers went to great lengths to keep moisture out, making it unlikely that sailors, who perspire, would have been asked to wade into the fluid.

Despite my reservations, I'm inclined for the interim to accept Davis's testimony and believe that sperm-squeezing was an activity that real whalers engaged in, as well as fictional ones. But I wish there were more evidence on either side. A plea for crowd-sourcing: If anyone knows of another reference to sperm squeezing—especially one published before 1851—I'd love to hear about it.

Presidential phonetics

In the tradition of They Might Be Giants' "James K. Polk," the band Two Man Gentlemen Band, who describe themselves in an email to me as a "vaudevillian-swing duo," have released the song "Franklin Pierce," in honor of the fourteenth U.S. president. They rhyme the president's last name with the word tears and beer, perhaps on account of his struggle with alcoholism. (It may not have been pronounced that way, though. His contemporary Lydia Maria Child, who loathed Pierce for opposing abolitionism, once said his name rhymed with curse.)

Glut and deflation

"We are undergoing what they call in California 'a paradigm shift,'" writes Nigel Burwood at Bookride, his brilliant blog about bookselling. "An older more bookish generation is dying off or downsizing," he explains. And as a result, booksellers like Burwood "are being offered far too many books."

I've been wondering about this. I'm a buyer of secondhand books rather than a seller, so I'm not as acutely aware of market vicissitudes, but there is an indicator that I've been curious about. At the used-book search site Abebooks.com, if you aren't ready to buy, you can "Save for later" the books you've found. Since my reach usually exceeds my financial grasp, and since searching for copies of books in and of itself satisfies a certain obsessive-compulsive craving, I often have dozens of books in my "Save for later" list. Over the years, I have learned that the list is not stable. From time to time, either I or Abebooks upgrades software and inadvertently deletes all the titles. Sometimes individual books vanish from the list without explanation, perhaps because a software cookie has expired, but if you notice that such a book is gone, you can easily search for it again. Even less distressingly, if a bookseller goes on vacation, his book remains in your "save for later" list but the price is replaced by the notation "Temporarily unavailable." It comes back of its own accord when the bookseller does.

Excruciatingly, however, the price next to a title in your "Save for later" list is sometimes replaced with the notation "Book sold!" That exclamation point always cuts like salt dashed into a wound. How long did the very good set of all eleven volumes of the Bodley Head Henry James in very good dust jackets remain in my "Save for later" list, priced at $150, without my finding the necessary funds and courage? I do not know, but I remember the day that the numerals disappeared, the title went from clickable blue to unclickable black, and I was forced to concede that "Book" had "sold!"

As recently as a few years ago, I felt such pangs more or less monthly. As much as the pangs pained me, I recognized them as a sign of general economic health and my own good judgment about prices. After all, I put a book in my "Save for later" list because I thought it was the cheapest available copy in good condition of an edition that I wanted. If anybody else wanted the same edition, the copy in my cart was exactly the one they would buy, if they had any sense.

The pangs became less frequent in 2008, with the advent of the Great Recession. Oddly, though, they didn't return with the so-called recovery. In fact, over the past year, almost no books in my cart have been sold out from under me—so few, in fact, that I erroneously concluded that Abebooks must have changed its methodology and must now be silently vanishing sold books from "Save for later" lists, perhaps on the advice of some marketing psychologist who had revealed to the site's managers how traumatic those words and that mark of punctuation were to fragile personalities like mine. But then, a month ago, I was once more stabbed in the heart: "Book sold!" It was a shock. Once I recovered from the particular loss, though, I became perplexed. So Abebooks hadn't changed its methods. That meant that only one book I wanted had been bought by someone else in the course of almost a year.

A number of explanations suggest themselves. First: perhaps there is no economic recovery, not really, at least not among people who buy the sort of books I like. Second: perhaps e-readers, by changing habits, have thinned the ranks of collectors and made physical books a drug on the market, as Burwood has suggested. Third: perhaps it's a sign of deflation. (Number three isn't so much an alternative to number two as an alternative way of thinking of it.) General deflation would be a worldwide economic nightmare, to the extent that I understand it, but it's possible that there might only be deflation in the market for used books. New booksellers, especially online,  constantly vary their prices, but used booksellers usually price their books just once. That practice works well in an era of mild inflation; the real cost of a book drops the longer it sits on the shelf, as a reasonable seller would want it to. But if, because of changing tastes or general economic malaise, the demand for used books is dropping, then most old prices are now too high, and as time goes by, the real value of these books to buyers will fall ever further below the price written on the front flyleaf. But few booksellers are likely to want to endure the tedium of repricing their whole stock.

Deflation would explain why I often nowadays buy books through another feature offered by Abebooks, the "Wants" list. If you enter search criteria for a "Want" and add it to your "Wants" list, Abebooks will email you any new books entered into its database that match. Often the newly added copies are priced substantially lower than the ones currently sitting around, perhaps on account of the factors sketched out above.

To look on the bright side, if the trend persists, I might someday be able to afford a library much ampler and substantial than I ever thought possible. (Where to put it is another question. And if the market for used books collapses altogether, of course, I won't be able to find the books that I will theoretically be able to afford.) Among the drawbacks of this state of affairs, however, is the sense of an era ending. One kind of book that I like to have is a reasonably attractive hardcover scholarly edition of a literary classic; recently, for example, I got a bargain on the second edition of Eugene Vinaver's three-volume Sir Thomas Malory. In that vein, when Jenny Davidson's blog Light Reading alerted me last week to a TLS review of a new edition of the poems of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, I devoured the review at once, because I don't have an edition of Rochester, and I've never been able to figure out which one to get, if I were to get one. Bad news: the new Wiley-Blackwell edition costs $99, but according to the TLS, the edition you probably want is Harold Love's 1999 Oxford English Texts edition, which costs $350 new, and only about a C-note less used. The price of scholarly hardcovers of classic literary texts has been rising for decades, and in many cases, they're now out of the reach of everyone except research libraries and a few of the academics who specialize in that specific author, if said academics are well funded. Indeed, when columnists at the Chronicle of Higher Education recently recommended that new graduate students "build a personal library," they weren't referring to the purchase of books at all. They were merely advising that grad students store in a software program the titles of articles and books they read, preferably along with a few keywords. (Happily, Penguin often republishes the texts I covet, but they're stripped of much of the scholarly apparatus, and a paperback isn't as durable, nor is it quite the same aesthetic object.)