Book Review 275: Endgame, 1945

ENDGAME, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II, by David Stafford. 581 pages, illustrated. Little, Brown $26.99

Canadian historian David Stafford fingered a gap in the enormous historiography of World War II – most authors (unless perhaps writing monographs) – stop when the fighting stopped. I don't know a good general history of the transition to peace and the enormous, world-shaking events that occurred in the “peacetime.”

“Endgame, 1945” isn't it, either, though not a bad job of retelling a story told many times before.

Stafford gets no further into the postwar than the Potsdam conference.

The most momentous event of the postwar period was not the consolidation of Soviet political power in a buffer zone of satellites that had been conquered by the Red Army. This was important.

More important, in the long run, was the expulsion of the Germans from the east. Stafford covers this, without remarking on its consequences.

When I say he covers it, he reports the beginnings. As the Russians advanced into East Prussia and Poland, raping and plundering and murdering, the Germans who could packed up and ran west.

Not much is said about what replaced them. In fact, in this book, the western allies get all the attention. Europe east of the Elbe is mentioned briefly and seldom.

Yet we now know that the occupation of the Russian army was a passing event. The unmixing of the national groups that had been the source of so much conflict for a thousand years was the permanent change.

In particular, the driving out of the Germans set the stage for the final act of national creation that had began in the revolutions of 1848.

A smaller example was the struggle over the presence of a minority of Italians among the Slavs of Yugoslavia. Stafford has a bit about this, but only because one of the individuals he follows along to personalize his history ended up in the Trieste area, where the struggle was sharp and deadly.

In each case, a more modern linguistic group had lorded it over a mass of politically unsophisticated peasants.

This clearing of the peoples – Stafford calls the expulsion of about 12 million Germans the biggest movement of peoples in so short a period in all history, which is about right – set up a world order in which some 200 states would be created, mostly on linguistic/cultural bases.

This was the big result of the war, although not many people seem to have understood the consequences when the United Nations Organization adopted its charter in San Francisco during this period. Astonishingly, Stafford does not mention this event.

More about the DPs, (displaced persons), who were the human expression of this momentous political rearrangement, would have been welcome. Stafford does a bit along this line, since one of the individuals he follows is Francesca Wilson, an experienced relief worker who joined UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency). Stafford mentions, just briefly, that this was another new thing in the world, an attempt by a conquering army to take care of the people in its path.

Wilson was frustrated by the confusion and mixed directions of the effort, which would have been a profitable path for Stafford to have traced in more detail.

“Endgame, 1945” is not a bad book, but it has been written before as well or better by others. It promises to tell the story of how “victors do not suddenly turn their swords into plowshares.” Stafford says, correctly, that peace requires “more than the absence of conflict, and is harder to build than battering cities to rubble.”

He does not do such a good job of telling that story.

Book Review 272: The Cotton Plantation South

THE COTTON PLANTATION SOUTH SINCE THE CIVIL WAR, by Charles S. Aiken. 451 pages, illustrated. Johns Hopkins paperback

Professor Charles Aiken's “The Cotton Plantation South” is the most perceptive book about the place I have read. It is written from the perspective of theoretical geography, a discipline I have not studied, although some of its core concepts are readily understood from the text.

“De land ob cotton” was far larger than the plantation region, which is limited to a (formerly, now degraded) fertile crescent starting in eastern Virginia and passing through the Carolinas, comprehending most of Georgia, the narrow black belt of Alabama, about half of Mississippi, and into Arkansas, Louisiana and east Texas.

Here for nearly 400 years, most of America's black people lived and worked, and the story of the plantations is a story of labor and mismanagement. A plantation, to a geographer, has a restricted definition, but it is enough to consider that it is a large agricultural unit with central direction of large labor forces.

After the laborers became freedmen, the economic organization of the plantation region was revolutionized four times, but the political organization only twice, and the social organization only partly.

Aiken's chapters on the civil rights movement are the best I know, and ring perfectly true to what I experienced at the time (in North Carolina, not the cotton belt).

After the Civil War, freedmen had a limited opportunity to trade their labor for concessions, although – as Allen Nevins remarked in his history of Reconstruction, the failure to dispossess the landowners meant that no true reform would occur – and they opted to get away from massa.

The old, nucleated, closely watched (but not profoundly understood) “quarters” were abandoned for dispersed cabins across the plantation, where each family could labor on its sector without much supervision.

This was bad for the land. The blacks had neither the education nor the capital to preserve the land, and it was quickly ruined. The status of tenant, also, turned out to be an economic trap.

“Management failure was the underlying basis of the decay,' writes Aiken, contradicting the fondest beliefs of southern whites.

It is somewhat satisfying to realize that the planter class's efforts to keep blacks impoverished left the planters impoverished, too. Aiken does not make too much of this, only referencing Hortense Powdermaker's observation that the Delta elite was, compared to national norms, barely middle class.

He could have said more. On a single day in 1933, one quarter of the land in Mississippi was sold at sheriff's sales. It is not true that old families maintained their position after the war.

Old classes did, but as Aiken mentions (but only in a note), land changed hands frequently, at least until corporations snapped it up around World War II. Most of the cotton plantation South changed hands at $5 or $6 an acre and is now in pines or weeds. The tens of thousands of pillared mansions in Atlanta refer back to the movie of “Gone with the Wind,” not to anything in the South's real history.

Aiken finds that large parts of the plantation South failed early, in large part because of the incompetence and indifference of the landlords. Even the parts where plantation agriculture remained viable (especially the Yazoo Delta) made decisions which pushed the South into an economic trap from which it may never emerge.

“The South is the part of the United States which is most similar to the rest of the world,” writes Aiken, trying to place the South's situation at the end of the 20^th century in a wider context.

However, he cautions that the common interpretation of the South as a colony is at most incomplete.

The book is well illustrated with photographs of old and new buildings, many taken by Aiken, that, using the concepts of spatiality, tell their wordless stories about what was going on among the people.

Nowadays, blacks are back in nucleated settlements, but not in agriculture. It is a fascinating tale, full of heroes and villains.

Aiken is more likely to praise the heroes than to sneer at the villains; the book is remarkable for its calmness. Only twice does Aiken resort to emotionally-tinged characterizations: once to praise Harry Caudill's “Night Comes to the Cumberlands”; and once to condemn the Agrarians, whom he calls charlatans. Since Aiken taught at Knoxville, calling the Agrarians charlatans probably cost him some invitations.

I could go on and on about the insights in this book but will mention only one more. When federal registrars were sent into the South to register voters after the Voting Rights Act (whose attack by rightwing Supreme Court justices is wrongheaded, as this book makes clear), more whites than blacks were registered.

It has been said many times that freeing the black Southerners equally freed the whites. That is true. White Southerners of good will did not vote, because there was no one to vote for. It took some argument from me to persuade my father to register when I did, in 1968, but from then on for the rest of his life, he became an enthusiastic and conscientious voter.

“The Cotton Plantation South” explains why as a man of conscience, he did not vote earlier.

Battle cry

Mark Adams, who worked at The Maui News and was, I thought, rather the ideal of the unpolitical reporter -- he enjoyed reporting stupid political moves no matter what the party -- has gotten more and more political since moving back to the Mainland.

Today, he posted a long and personal political piece that I think nicely sums up the outlook of my leftish friends, although I do not share Mark's optimism about how well the Democrats are going to do in the 2014 elections.

I share most of Mark's thoughts about the 21st century Republican Party. I can sum it up more briefly: Today's GOP is just the John Birch Society without a credible commie menace to cringe before; but Mark's version is more eloquent, so read the whole thing.

Sample graf:

But today's right isn't reasonable in so many areas, and this is not compassionate conservatism. It is a scorched-earth knee jerk reaction to a spiraling debt level that when studied in hindsight has GOP fingerprints all over it -- and their party leaders claim they have no fingers. None they're willing to lift, anyway. Their stand ironically will hurt Republicans and Tea Partiers and members of the religious right and neocons and skinheads and militia members and fascists and RWNJs and all their families as much as it will progressives and Democrats and liberals. Democrats are often wrong, but I believe they're more often right because they genuinely care about other people -- kids, grandparents, students, women, immigrants, gay kids, straight kids, church kids. My stepfather's stepkids like me. Like so many of us.