Truman's Firing of MacArthur as Background to General McChrystal's Trip To Washington

As General McChrystal flies to DC, summoned to meet the President after speaking poorly of the President, Vice President, and the Ambassador to Afghanistan to the Rolling Stone magazine, it might be useful to recall another general, 60 years ago, who also spoke his mind to the press. 

Does the relationship between General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman sixty years ago tell us anything about Obama and McChrystal?  I would note here, that this post is all based on the account in  William Manchester's American Caesar:  Douglas MacArthur.  

 Of course, historical precedents can be tricky.  While some parts of a situation may be analogous to our present dilemma, there may also be factors that are very different.  So read this with care.  It is, I would say, instructive to consider all the unknowns and hidden issues that we can know about the 1950 situation in hindsight, that are obviously taking place today, but we won't know about for many years.  [This is probably going to be a little less proofread than normal.  I've been working on this a good part of the day and I'm losing my concentration.  I'll try to clean it up a bit later.]

It was June 24, 1950 in Washington DC when word came in that North Korea had launched an all out attack on South Korea. The Communists had declared victory in mainland China the previous year. MacArthur had been the General who had forged victory in the Pacific and was now in Japan where, since the end of the war in August 1945, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) he had conducted the occupation and democratization of Japan with cultural sensitivity and respect.  He was a highly intelligent and independent general and had tangled with other generals and US presidents before. In 1948 he dabbled in presidential politics in the Republican primaries with poor results. 

After Kim Il Sung's North Korean army  had taken Seoul, MacArthur's responsibility was expanded to cover Korea.    His immediate call for more troops had been rejected by the Joint Chiefs who were more concerned about Europe.  There were press reports that cited General Chiang Kai-shek  of Formosa (Taiwan) misquoting MacArthur about his intentions for China.  The State Department's roving envoy Averell Harriman was sent by Truman to make sure MacArthur understood the Administration's position.  Harriman reassured Truman

"he was convinced that the Supreme Commander was loyal to 'constitutional authority' . . . and he felt that 'political and personal considerations should be put to one side and our government [should] deal with General MacArthur on the lofty level of the great national asset which he is." [Manchester, p. 566]

But within the week, MacArthur got further instructions from the Secretary of Defense regarding Formosa and the mainland.

The General tartly replied that he fully understood the presidential determination 'to protect the Communist mainland.'  That was insolent.  If Washington meant to take a hard line with him, this was the time to do it.  Instead Truman encouraged him by altering his stand on Formosa [more in line with what MacArthur wanted. (p. 567)

The reason for Truman's policy change was political, not military.  He was trying to ward off Republican attacks that he was soft on Communist China at the expense of Formosa.  Immediately after this MacArthur was invited to send a message to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) convention. Manchester continues:

Whitney tells us, 'MacArthur decided that this was an excellent opportunity to place himself on the record as being squarely behind the President.'

It was an excellent opportunity to remain silent.  U.S. policy in his theater was changing so swiftly that even those close to the oval office had trouble keeping up with it, and a General halfway around the globe, anxious to see in it what he wanted to see, had no business interpreting it for veterans or anybody else. [p. 568]

The message he sent strongly argued that

"Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument" that "if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia"

and continued with a lecture on Oriental psychology and

"The geographic location of Formosa is such that in the hands of a power unfriendly to the United States it constitutes an enemy salient in the very center"

The Administration got copies of the speech three days before it was to be read to the VFW meeting, but it was already being printed in Life, and the U.S. News and World Report and in England.

As Wayne Morse later pointed out, its impact could hardly have been greater had it already been delivered in person.  And the timing, from the President's point of view, could not have been worse.  He had just proposed that the U.N. investigate the Formosa situation in the hope of reducing the areas of conflict in the Far East.  He felt that "General MacArthur's message - which the world might mistake as an expression of American policy - contradicted this". . .[p. 569]

An angry President Truman toyed with relieving MacArthur of his command (but leaving him in Command of Japan) but did not want personally hurt MacArthur.  He demanded a retraction of the message before it was delivered.

MacArthur instantly complied, but he was, he said, "utterly astonished" . . . "My message was most carefully prepared to fully support the President's policy position.  My remarks were calculated only to support his declaration and I am unable to see wherein they might be interpreted otherwise."  He was hurt and angry, and with some justification.  He was capable of impudence and provocation, but in this instance his only sin was taking Truman's pronouncements on Formosa at face value.  The President was following one course in the United Nations and another in fencing with his critics on Capitol Hill.  MacArthur, believing that the administration was determined to keep the island out of hostile hands as a link to the U.S. defense system, had unintentionally embarrassed the chief executive in the world forum.  He was wrong to have said anything - the contretemps over his trip to Taipei should have taught him that - but right in his paraphrasing of what the White House was telling the American people.  He was a casualty of rough politics, a loser in a game whose rules he never mastered.  [p. 570]

Since he couldn't get more soldiers right away, he started a buddy program pairing US troops with ROK (Republic of Korea) troops.  But these troops were being pummeled by the North Korean troops and MacArthur came up with a plan to bring in a force behind enemy lines and cut off their supplies and take back Seoul.  His target was Inchon and everyone else said this was impossible.  He was given a reluctant green light and he pulled it off to everyone's surprise.  (For Alaskans, I would note that he crossed from Japan to Inchon on the Mount McKinley.)

But as MacArthur's UN troops routed the North Koreans and retook Seoul, he rubbed Washington the wrong way again when in the bombed out National Assembly Chamber, he reinstalled the ROK President Rhee, not a particular favorite in Washington, .
 
But these victories led to new policy dilemmas.  Should he stop at the 38th parallel, the dividing point between North Korea and the ROK, or should he go on north to reunite the two Koreas?  His directives were vague as Washington and the UN debated this.  Would China and Russia be provoked to enter the fray?

"...on September 27 [barely a week after landing at Inchon] he had been directed to "conduct military operations north of the 38th Parallel leading to "the destruction of the North Korean armed forces."  Just two restraints were imposed upon him.  He was forbidden to send aircraft over Sino-Russian territory, and only ROK troops could approach the Yalu.  In forty-eight hours he replied, tacitly accepting these limitations and proposing to capture Pyongyang with the Eighth Army, land X Corps at the east-coast port of Wonsan, and, after wide sweeps to effect a "juncture" of the two.  The White House agreed, but then, having committed itself, Washington felt uneasy over its own temerity.  MacArthur also had reservations.  He wanted a firmer mandate, and the day after the Seoul ceremony the new secretary of defense, George Marshall, gave it to him in an "eyes only" cable:  "We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th Parallel."  The General replied, "Unless and until the enemy capitulates, I regard all Korea as open for our military operations."

Marshall agreed, and the issue seemed resolved.  It wasn't quite.  When MacArthur submitted a directive he planned to issue to the Eighth Army on October 2, launching the coming offensive, Marshall wired him:  "We desire you to proceed with your operations without any further explanation or announcement and let actions determine the matter.  Our government desires to avoid having to make an issue of the 38th Parallel until we have accomplished our mission."  This, according to a SCAP aide, made MacArthur "raise his eyebrows."  It plainly intimated that the United States intended to present its allies with a fait accompli.  [p 584]

Now the Chinese started making statements that they wouldn't stand by idly if MacArthur crossed the 38th Parallel.  The UN called for the unification of the two Koreas. Mao's foreign minister, Chou En-lai broadcast that

The UN resolution was illegal. . . American soldiers were menacing Chinese security, and "we cannot stand idly by .  .  . The Chinese people love peace, but, in order to defend peace, they will never be afraid to oppose aggressive war."  That afternoon Mao's divisions began to slip over the Yalu to prepare a counterattack.  Meanwhile McArthur's men, unaware of the Chinese buildup, continued to roll forward over the disintegrating units of Kim's (Il Sung) army. [p. 587]

Truman called for a meeting with MacArthur and flew all the way to Wake Island to confer with him for two hours.  There was much debate about what was said at the meeting and whether it even should have been held.  It allowed both Truman and MacArthur to make claims about what they had said and the press to make their own claims.  Manchester suggests it was to boost Truman's flagging political popularity, but he also writes that

MacArthur affected to reject that interpretation.  He would write in his Reminiscences:  "Such reasoning, I am sure, does Mr. Truman an injustice.  I believe nothing of the sort animated him, and that the sole purpose was to create good will and beneficial results to the country." [p. 588]

A new problem arose.

Eventually paranoiacs exhaust their credibility.  MacArthur had long since lost his.  The Joint Chiefs were undismayed therefore, when, in the autumn of 1950, he began claiming that his "strategic movements" were being betrayed to the Communists.

This time, however, his suspicions may have been justified.  That fall the first secretary of the British embassy to the United States was H.A.R. "Kim" Philby.  The second secretary was Guy Burgess.  And the head of England's American Department in London was Donald Maclean. . . It is a shocking fact that all three men were Communist agents. [p. 596]

 In any case, the Chinese managed to hide two hundreds thousands of troops in North Korea, and while MacArthur saw victory in sight, his army walked into the Chinese trap.

American and British newspapers gave their readers the impression that UN forces had been ingloriously crushed, which was true, and had suffered staggering casualties, which was not at all true.  Indeed, MacArthur's Korean retreat was one of his most successful feats of arms. . . .And the price the Chinese had paid for the ground yielded to them was shocking.
Unfortunately, the General couldn't bring himself to leave it at that. [p. 611]

 MacArthur gave stories to various news outlets defending his actions and rejecting all blame.  Manchester's account basically agrees with MacArthur's assessment, but says he should have let others do the defending.  Nevertheless, Truman again leaves him in place.  However, a general directive is sent out to all agencies including the military banning all but minor issues being discussed with the press without prior approval from higher up.  It was clear that this was aimed at MacArthur, who didn't take long to violate it. 

Another important development occurs when General Ridgeway goes to Korea to replace General Walker, who was killed, as commander of all UN ground forces.   He began to win battles and make assessments that challenged MacArthur's stories of defeat if not given permission to go for all out victory.   This changed Washington's confidence in MacArthur and his indispensability.    

Basically, there was a disagreement between MacArthur who believed that he should be allowed to win or he should withdraw.  The White House asked him to maintain the status quo - a divided Korea pretty much back, geographically, to the way it was before hostilities erupted.  Politically, this was echoed by hard line Republicans who said that Truman had lost China and was about to lose Korea versus the Democrats and Europeans who saw Korea as of minor importance geopolitically and wanted to avoid war with the most populous nation in the world.

In the end, it seems that MacArthur, then 70, decided to go over the President's head and appeal to the US public.  He issued stories to three different media that challenged the administration's position.  After conferring with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Truman ordered MacArthur relieved of his duties.  When word came that MacArthur might resign first, the poorly worded memo was rushed to Tokyo.  Manchester writes,

Here, as so often in his feisty administration, he had done the right thing, in this case avoiding the hazards of a general war, in the wrong way.  Because he insisted that MacArthur be fired, instead of permitting him to retire gracefully, millions questioned the President's motives.  [p. 644]

Because the current situation involves a General who has gone to the press with his grievances with the Administration, doesn't mean that it is the same situation as with General MacArthur.  However, we can learn lesson relevant to today, by reviewing the MacArthur situation.  One thing is clear, that military and political considerations cloud every decision.  Uncertainty as to the strength and intentions of allies and enemies makes decisions difficult.  And miscommunication among the President and his General played a big role. 

MacArthur was a much more formidable and well known figure than McChristal is.  And MacArthur's comments were focused on policy differences rather than personal evaluations of individuals.

Fiction Even Stranger than Fact

Every once in a while my mind spins out totally absurd scenarios.  I assure you this is complete fabrication, but just for fun, imagine. . .

Afghan Mineral Wealth Part of DOD Afghanistan Exit Strategy

So, you've heard about the trillion dollar mineral discoveries in Afghanistan.  I'm guessing this is really a desperate plot to get out of Afghanistan without the Taliban taking over.   The US is hoping that they can broker some sort of face saving deal to pull out of Afghanistan.  Then,  even though the Russians left Afghanistan with their tail between their legs the US is hoping all that mineral wealth will lure the Russians back and they'll have to fight the Taliban.  This time though, the US won't be arming their enemy. 

Sarah Palin to Become BP Spokesperson in US

By now you've all heard that Sarah is headed for the UK and is even setting up a photo opportunity with Margaret Thatcher.  But the real story is that she's been negotiating with BP to become their North American spokesperson.  She's going to work it all out.  You thought she made money with the book and tv deals; this one will make all that sound like peanuts.  But we'll never get the details.  Before long, the little people will be back shouting Drill Baby Drill.


Thinking about Palin getting a photo with Margaret Thatcher, who's been suffering from dementia since 2003 - her daughter said, in 2008,

The death of Sir Denis Thatcher in 2003 was “truly awful” since she “kept forgetting he was dead”

made me think of our kids getting their pictures taken with the stuffed moose that used to be in Tok.



OK, for those of you who come here for more sober posts, I'm blaming it on the spectacular solstice we had yesterday.  It went straight to my head. 

Fresh Greens

A friend, whose garden is already doing really well, dropped a bag of fresh greens off the other day.  Since we didn't get back until the very end of May, we have no home started seedlings this year.  Plus where we used to grow vegetables has gotten pretty shady over they years. 

We did join a CSA this year - that's Consumer Supported Agriculture.  I learned about those when I was working in Thailand and wrote a long post about it then, including links to some Alaska CSAs.  

This is a way to support local farmers by agreeing in advance to buy a box of freshly grown food every one or two weeks.  J set this up and I think we pick ours up every two weeks.  We joined with other friends and we'll split the bounty. 

I'll post more about this option later.  This one we joined brings up food from Seattle during the winter so it's not really all local. Until we have more greenhouses using alternative fuels (such as the Seeds of Change program that will use steam from the Municipal electrical plant), we're not going to have many local vegetables here in the winter.

This bok choi and lettuce was fantastic.  Thanks D.

When the light's just right

Just as the earth is about to shift back, the eve of the longest day in the northern hemisphere . . .

Downtown Happenings on Gray Drizzly Saturday

We went downtown to  check out the Juneteenth Festival and the Solstice activities yesterday.  It was pretty gray with light mist coming down now and then and finally rain when we left.  But it didn't seem to bother anyone.  People were having fun.

People waiting for the next band to play.

The Rollergirls were still there, but we missed the show.

Audrina from The Hills was there for photos and there was a steady line of people.

And the reindeer sausage folks were out. 

Non-motorized activities kept the kids busy.

At 4th and F there was a series of different dance demonstrations.

There's a new Cake Shop on 4th.

A block of Corvettes on display

The Juneteenth celebration on the Park Strip was pretty sleepy.

The ACLU and the Alaska Right to Life had adjacent booths.

More non-motorized fun for the kids

Even on a gray day, it was fun to stroll around downtown and see people we knew and people we didn't.  Then we stopped at the museum which we haven't seen since the opened the new exhibit halls while we were gone.  Another post for that. 

What You Can Do About the Gulf Oil Despoilation?

You have lots of choices.

You can fret.
You can curse at BP and call them all kinds of nasty names.
You can  wash oiled seabirds (probably doing more good for your ego than for the birds.)
You can send assistance to the people whose livelihoods are affected.

Or you can start using less fossil fuel.  Here's one simple thing you can do:

Hang Your Laundry Out to Dry

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy says

. . .dryers are the most energy-intensive "white good" in the house, so it pays to use them efficiently.

HA!  Even better is to use a clothesline.  Michaelbluejay writes on a page devoted to calculating energy use related to washing and drying:

The Japanese are way ahead of us on that one -- they use most of the modern conveniences we do, but clothes dryers aren't among them.  Even in the luxury apartments, you'll see the residents hanging their laundry out on their balconies.  I asked my Japanese friend what they do when it rains for a solid week, and she said, "We just hang the laundry up inside."

I wanted to be able to tell you exactly how much one load on the line instead of the dryer would impact US energy use.  It's not easy because it varies and because there are different ways to calculate.   Most sites focus on how much you save in dollars per year (assuming, I guess, personal gain is more appealing that doing general good.)  But here are some numbers.  The US Department of Energy has a chart which shows energy consumption per appliance.  It shows about 9000 Kwh/year for the average US household dryer use.

Note:  You need to have a sense of humor when you read all these statistics.  Earlier I had a quote that says that dryers use the most energy of "white goods" in the house, which this chart doesn't show.   And the The California Energy Commission says, "A dryer is typically the second-biggest electricity-using appliance after the refrigerator."  Maybe refrigerators come in more colors.


A March 2009 Wall Street Journal article that looks at the carbon footprint of five products (Cars, shoes, laundry detergent, jackets, milk, and beer)

The U.S. emits the equivalent of about 118 pounds of carbon dioxide per resident every day, a figure that includes emissions from industry. Annually, that's nearly 20 metric tons per American -- about five times the number per citizen of the world at large, according to the International Energy Agency.

See, this isn't easy.  (A lot of the 118 pounds per day is industrial, not household.) First kilowatt hours now pounds of carbon dioxide.  And this WSJ article focuses on washing, not drying.  But, hidden in the article is perhaps the most useful (though who knows how accurate?) bit of information:

The biggest way to cut the environmental impact of cleaning clothes, however, is to stop using a clothes dryer. Drying laundry outside on a line, Tesco says, will cut the carbon footprint of every load by a whopping 4.4 pounds.

It's clear that dryer use is an area where we can, without a lot of trouble, reduce energy use.  Yes, it will take up a little more time to hang up the laundry, but it will also provide some exercise, get you outside, and perhaps you can also notice the flowers and the birds.  Plus the laundry has that great outdoor smell. Though I've talked to some people who always got their laundry from a dryer and think the feel and smell of dryer clothes are natural.


So, big deal.  What difference will it make if I hang up the laundry instead of using the dryer?  It's the collective impact, not just one person.  But as you hang up a load and a million others do the same it starts to matter.  Just like the impact of one potato chip is no big deal.  It's the second and third and one hundredth potato chip that leads to headlines like in today's ADN for this NY Times story: "Plus-size trend grows on retailers."



Look, you don't have to stop using your dryer altogether.  But if one million households (the Census Bureau estimates  (p. 7) about 103 million households in the US,  so that is just under 1% of all the households)  dried one load a week on the line instead of in the dryer it would save 118 million pounds per year, which happens to be the same amount as the average American uses per day times one million.

It's a start.  It's a couple of potato chips less.  And once you get used to doing it once a week, adding a second load a week isn't all that hard. 

Technology was supposed to make our lives easier and there is no doubt that the washing machine has liberated American women from hours of hard work per day. (I know that might sound sexist, but when washing machines were introduced, women did most of the household laundry.)  But sometimes the old technology works better in the long run and the new technology isn't better, it's only better for corporate profits.  (OK,  corporate profits help the economy, except nowadays a much larger proportion of those profits are going to executives rather than to the workers and suppliers.)

My 88 year old mother has never had a dryer and to this day hangs her laundry to dry every load.  Now she does live in Southern California so that helps.  But you can hang things out to dry inside as well.  And in the winter when heating systems suck the humidity out of the house, hanging the laundry to dry adds a bit of moisture to the air.

And there are lots and lots of ways to hang out your clothes.  We have a 25 year old Cordomatic that we can use outside or inside.  

Tiptheplanet gives you more options for air drying racks than you ever thought existed.



And when you've gotten used to hanging out the laundry, here are some other things you can do:

Energy-saving strategies (from michaelbluejay.com)

Here's how much various strategies can save you.

Easy Strategies
Strategy	Up front cost	Savings per year
(1) Use space heaters to heat only the rooms you're in, (rather than a central system that heats the whole house), and turning off the heat when you're not home.	$80	$1023
(2) Use ceiling fans instead of the air conditioner	$100 if you don't already have ceiling fans	$438
(3) Turn off lights you're not using	$0	$274
(4) Use a clothesline or a laundry rack instead of a dryer	$20	$196
(5) Sleep your computer when you're not using it	$0	$178
(6) Wash laundry in cold water instead of hot or warm	none	$152
(7) Turn off a single 100-watt light bulb, from running constantly	$0	$131
(8) Replace ten 60-watt light bulbs with compact fluorescents	$32	$123
Total	$232 once	$2515 every year

And everyone is responsible for getting two more people to hang up their laundry once a week too.  This is something you can do and know that you are making a difference instead of fretting about the oil gushing into the Gulf. 

The Dragon Tattoo, Diving Bell and Visiting Band

For movie folks, we had a pretty dry run since we left for Juneau back in January.  We've seen a couple in theaters, the two experimental movies in Berlin, and we saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last week at Bear Tooth.  J has read the first two books in this trilogy.  She said the movie follows the book closely.  I thought it had great characters - particularly the girl with the dragon tattoo.  It's neat in this US centric modern culture to have a book written by a Swede become a giant US best seller and then have a Swedish team make it into a movie.  It's a looong movie, but I was completely into the film the whole way.  However, it does center on sick violence against women.  I mention this because my daughter has pointed out how many movies include violence against women.  I realized, she's right and what's worse, most of us haven't noticed this as unusual.  What does that say about how much a part of American life violence against women is?

We finally stopped at Blockbusters the other night and picked up some movies in the foreign language section.  The first one neither of us had heard of:

The Band's Visit.

It's a delightful Israeli movie about an Egyptian band of about eight people who fly to Israel for the opening of an Islamic-Israeli Center.  But they mix up the name of their destination, get on the wrong bus,  and end up at a desolate Israeli village.

It's a great story about travel and cross-cultural humanity and while it's an Israeli movie - English is the common language of the Israelis and Egyptians in the movie.  A very low key but satisfying movie in which you slowly get to meet people and then get to go past your initial stereotypes of them and get to really know them.



The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I'd heard this name over and over again and really had no idea what it was about.  I wouldn't have guessed.  The editor of Elle magazine has had a stroke and now has a condition in which he's fully conscious, can see and hear, but can't move or talk.

The film does a great job of seeing the world from his perspective and I found it totally fascinating.

The therapist works out a method where she reads the alphabet (organized in order of frequency of the letters*) and he blinks his eye when she gets to the letter he needs.  It's agonizingly slow, but they do amazing things with this.  Reminds us how easy our lives are in comparison.   It turns out to be an American movie, but they filmed it in France at the actual hospital where he was and it's all in French with subtitles.  I know that puts some people off, but get over it. 


*After sleeping on the movie, it seems to me they could have come up with much more efficient system.  Just dividing the alphabet into four groups would have cut out a lot of work.

While We Watch the Oil, Let's Not Forget the Fish

A critical issue in Alaska and the rest of the world is the health of the ocean and the creatures that depend on the ocean. 


 Groundswell Fisheries Movement  is run by long time fisheries participant/experts.  Here's what they say about themselves: 

Fisheries activists bring you the latest fish tales from Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska…and statewide fisheries politics.  This site is designed to post up archived FISH POLITICS AND POLICY articles of the GROUNDSWELL FISHERIES MOVEMENT, primarily by its founder, Stephen Taufen and key players such as Victor Smith, Shawn Dochtermann, Ray Metcalfe and others.  The site will feature former AlaskaReport.com articles, Op-Ed pieces published in “The Fishermen’s News” under the BONSAI BUCCANEERS IN THE FISH REPUBLIC OF ALASKA series, and other industry media; as well as new perspectives. 

Book mark it.  Or look for new posts on my Alaska blogroll in the right side column.

NY Times Editorial Elegantly Notes Today is Bloom's Day Or The Problem of a Good Education

The New York Times notes Bloom's Day today with an editorial about a corporate executive who sent Bloom's Day cards to 16 of his best executives in 1954.

Two years earlier . . . W. D. Gillen, then president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, had begun to worry about the education of the managers rising through the company’s hierarchy. Many of these junior executives had technical backgrounds, gained at engineering schools or on the job, and quite a few had no college education at all. They were good at their jobs, but they would eventually rise to positions in which Gillen felt they would need broader views than their backgrounds had so far given them.

Gillen took the problem to the University of Pennsylvania where they set up a

 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education.

 Besides classes and seminars and vast amounts of reading, they also did field trips to museums and concerts and to study the architecture of the cities nearby.  

Perhaps the most exciting component of the curriculum was the series of guest lecturers the institute brought to campus. “One hundred and sixty of America’s leading intellectuals,” according to Baltzell, spoke to the Bell students that year. They included the poets W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz, the Princeton literary critic R. P. Blackmur, the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the composer Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling intellectual carnival.

Finally, they struggled with James Joyce's Ulysses.

It was clear as the students cheered one another through their final reports that reading a book as challenging as “Ulysses” was both a liberating intellectual experience and a measure of how much they had been enriched by their time at the institute. . .

The institute was judged a success by Morris S. Viteles, one of the pioneers of industrial psychology, who evaluated its graduates. But Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.

The whole article is well with thinking about.   The problem with a good education is that it is liberating.

Curious Numbers in South Carolina's Election

After finishing the last post on the South Carolina primary elections, I kept poking around.  What I found first was election results from the 2008 Democratic primary in South Carolina and they were so completely bizarre I couldn't believe them. And with good reason, they were totally wrong. All the Obama results were 0% with just a few votes per county even when there were thousands of African-American voters. I mention this to remind people to think when they see things on the internet. When it's too strange to be true it probably isn't.  Fortunately there was a link to the same results in a different format. They seemed much more sensible - Obama won with 55% of the vote. But let's try thinking again. In 2008, Obama got 55% of the Democratic primary vote in South Carolina.

In 2010, Al Greene took the Democratic primary with 59% of the vote!  According to Charleston South Carolina's Post and Courier these are the election results for last week's Democratic primary election for the US Senate:

U.S. Senate - Dem Primary

June 09, 2010 - 04:54AM ET

South Carolina - 2109 of 2109 Precincts Reporting - 100%

Name Party Votes Vote % Greene , Alvin Dem 99,970 59% Rawl , Vic Dem 69,572 41%

Let's think about this for a bit.  First, a small discrepency:

In 2008 the Post and Courier says there were 2259 precincts and in 2010 there are only 2109 precincts.  There's probably a good explanation, but we do need to find out what it is.

Now, let's think about the 2008 primary election.  The first really serious female presidential candidate and the first serious black presidential candidate were both running and getting tons of attention.  Everyone was worked up about this and there was lots of national attention on the primary elections that day.  Plus, John Edwards from neighboring North Carolina was on the ticket.

So an extremely articulate black candidate with lots and lots of publicity running against two white candidates, Obama,  got 55% of the vote in 2008.

In 2010,  an inarticulate black candidate with no publicity and no funding running against one white candidate with high name recognition and good funding got 59% of the vote.  Something is bizarre here.

You can say, "But far fewer voters actually turned up to vote, only about 1/3."  But, presumably, the voters who turned out this time around would be more likely to be party regulars who pay more attention to the elections and are better informed.  They would have looked at the two candidates and seen that the one was totally off the wall.  The other candidate was white - like 62% of South Carolinians (though the percent of white Democrats is probably lower, it still appears to be over 50%.)  I know almost nothing about North Carolina politics, but nothing I've read yesterday and today suggests that Vic Rawl had high negatives.

When something doesn't look right, we should look a little harder.  Sometimes we can explain the problem.  Like the other day while running, I sensed the color of the trees was funny.  I looked up and one of the birches had been broken near the top and it was hanging down.  Oddity explained.  Now, these numbers in South Carolina, plus Greene's inability to answer questions about things like where he got the money to run and reports of problems with the computers all raise serious questions.  These were paperless touch screen computers so voters don't have, and the voting machines don't produce, any independent hard copy of the votes.  There are serious questions about electronic voting and it's quite possible that South Carolina could be the first example of voting machine rigging on a large scale.

Or, it could turn out to be as simple as voters voting for the candidate with the same name as a famous gospel and soul singer.  

[Update 3:30pm June 16:  This Huffington Post blogger found a lady who said she voted for Al Greene because his name sounded like the singer.  The blogger writes as though this were further proof of South Carolina's problems, we all know that name recognition is a major goal in  politics.  After all, Californians elected a governor because his name was the same as a movie star.  What's the difference?]