Book Review, Pamela E. Pennock, Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing, 1950-1990

"I think I'll take up smoking
Though I've never smoked before"

Tom Russell
"What Do You Want"

I've always been extremely uncomfortable with the moralistic overtones of anti-smoking fanatics. I am a non-smoker. But the condescension that non-smokers have toward smokers often makes me angry. To what extent should the government regulate the personal behavior of citizens, particularly when they are not hurting others? Yes, second-hand smoke can be bad, especially for children. But unless you are going to regulate the behavior of adults inside their homes, there is little to be done. Outside of that, second-hand smoke isn't really going to hurt you, unless you are in a band or work in a bar. It's not good for you, but neither are a lot of other things that people don't complain about either. They whine about smelling a cigarette and then drive 50 miles in their SUV through massive air pollution, stopping at McDonald's on the way home where they get everything super sized, and then sit and eat it on the couch while watching "American Idol"

On the other hand, there's little question concerning the lack of morality among tobacco officials. Their product does cause cancer, they knew it, and they didn't care. Should cigarette companies be able to advertise on TV? No, I don't think so. Should they target children through Joe Camel and other cartoon figures? Probably not. So clearly, there is a role for government regulation of legal drugs.

It is much the same with alcohol. While I don't smoke, I certainly do drink. It's hard to look back at the temperance movement without laughing. Yet, while prohibition was a failure, it did reduce Americans' drinking consumption. As Pamela Pennock shows in Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing, 1950-1990, the Prohibitionist movement was far from dead after World War II. It pushed for a total ban on alcohol, but knowing that was pretty well impossible, had to settle for reductions on advertising pushed on children.

The problem though with limiting advertising aimed at children is that the assumption remains that alcohol is a bad thing. The problem to me is not with alcohol per se, but with the underlying moralistic assumptions of American culture. The constant moralizing is combined with a consumer culture that undermines those morals and personal desires that shows the hypocrisy of so many Americans. They speak of "family values" and then drink, smoke, take drugs, go to prostitutes, cheat on their spouses, etc.

What if we focused on reforming Americans' attitudes toward pleasure rather than think of it as a bad thing that needs regulation? But I guess that would be swimming upstream against 400 years of American Puritanical moralizing. There's no doubt that anti-alcohol groups have done some good things. In the 1970s, drunk driving was not only extremely common but basically unpunished, even when someone was killed. Only with the creation of MADD and intensive lobbying did Americans begin taking drunk driving as a serious offense. I'm glad that has happened. We should continue to make driving drunk socially unacceptable and punishable by law. But I have to wonder if another way to fight these problems isn't making drinking an acceptable everyday occurrence that would make binge drinking less appealing to younger people, as well as a national investment in public transportation that would mean you could drink all you want and still have a reasonable way to get home without driving.

Pennock's book is an interesting overview of the policy debates taking place in the postwar years over restricting the advertising of tobacco and alcohol. I don't want to get into the details of the book in too great of detail. If you have a scholarly or personal interest in issues of alcohol history like I do, then it is an important book. But it is policy and therefore a bit on the dry side. I do want to focus on a couple of interesting issues she touches upon.

First, these debates mirrored postwar debates over free speech. Different makeups of the Supreme Court led to slightly different interpretations of the protections granted to advertisers and broadcasters over advertising sin. One argument the industries consistently fell back upon was the idea of the slippery slope. Once you start banning ads for alcohol and tobacco, what is next? Why not coffee? Sugary drinks? Anything that could be seen as bad for you might be next? Where do you draw the line? These are important questions for anyone thinking about free speech issues, regardless of their interest in these particular products. It is almost impossible to demarcate what is OK and what is not. Almost inevitably, reformers draw the line wherever they are comfortable, which makes it almost impossible to create lasting legal codes with any sense of logic. My sense is that we should ban very little. Perhaps restricting certain sorts of ads to late night hours works, but in reality it just gives those products an aura of naughtiness about them, which just reinforces the problem of overwrought morality in America to begin with.

Second, Pennock offers useful insights on the increased role of science in these debates. While the temperance movement after World War II was still dominated by aging prohibitionists, few took their arguments seriously. But once scientists began studying the effects of smoking, fetal alcohol syndrome, and other affects of these substances on bodies, the terms of the debate began changing. The moral component largely (but certainly not entirely) fell by the wayside and scientific evidence began to take over the now regulatory rather than prohibitionist movements. I think Pennock makes good points here, though she does overstate Americans' love affair with science in the postwar period (92). Rather, Americans were enamored with technology and the good life. Science brought us those things but we've never had a national love affair with science. Large numbers of Americans opposed to teaching Darwinism, discomfort with the effects of the atomic bomb in the early years of the Cold War, and today's baseless skepticism over climate change are just a few examples of the ambivalent relationship Americans have had with science. Technology we love, science we love only when it serves our desires.

My other big criticism of the book is the lack of focus on illegal drugs, especially marijuana. She tries to cut off this criticism early on by saying that she is interested in legal marketing practices (9). OK, but that is a narrow interest. Why not expand the study to ideas about regulation of drugs more generally and use marketing as a tool to understand these questions? I think bringing a discussion of marijuana to these broader questions would make the book all the more interesting and useful for current political debates. Certainly the kind of prohibitionist rhetoric that dominated the temperance movement continues to play a huge role in debates over marijuana. Plus such a discussion would help expose the absurdity of marijuana restriction, at least in comparison to the far more destructive and legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol.

Book Review: Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America

U.S. historians intentionally stay a little behind the times. Usually, U.S. historians don't begin working on a period until about 25 years later. This is opposed to Latin Americanists, who start about 25 seconds later. This means that our first really good histories of the 1970s and early 1980s are just starting to come out. The most interesting, challenging, and provocative of these works I've read so far is Philip Jenkins' Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, published by Oxford in 2006.

Jenkins argues that the mid to late 1970s truly were an awful time in American history. Certainly people at the time believed that. The making of Reagan's America came on the heels of that sense of disaster. Disgust over Watergate and political corruption was high. The economy was bad. It seemed that serial killers roamed every neighborhood. Sex was everywhere, including child pornography. The cities had collapsed. The nation's international prestige was at an all-time low. Domestic abuse, drunk driving, and PCP use raged like an epidemic.

As the conservative myth goes, Ronald Reagan came riding through this muck and saving America. He made America whole again. And all of that crap. The 80s saw the rejection of drugs, sex, abuse, weak foreign policy, etc. Well, maybe. That seems simplistic, but Jenkins really believes that the late 70s were a bad time. He seems to buy into more than one conservative talking point about the period. It's a good book. I do recommend it for anyone interested in the period. But beware that you may read some really annoying sentences and have to take some of the conclusions with a grain of salt.

One thing Jenkins does particularly well is move the narrative out of traditional political and social history and centers his story on cultural phenomena like the rise of the serial killer in the American media, the nation beginning to take child abuse seriously, and the rise of the war on drugs. He rightly points out that none of these things were new to the late 1970s. Serial killers had been around for a long time. Various drugs were popular at different times. But the impending sense that America was going down the toilet helped focus media and public attention on these problems.

Another strength of Jenkins' work is downplaying the central role of Ronald Reagan in the period's narrative. While I think he doesn't take a critical enough stance toward Reagan, he rightly points out that most of the cultural phenomena we think of as resulting from Reagan, including support of anti-revolutionary movements in Central America, the drug war, and economic policy began during the Carter administration.

Jenkins' book is challenging and I have some trouble accepting some thrusts in his argument. I can't help but believing he thinks that liberals are at fault for many of the problems of the 70s. He claims that the "extreme liberalism of the 1970s naturally generated the conservative reaction of the following decade" (56). He connects liberalism with the worst killers of the decade, with child pornographers, and with cultish religious movements. I just can't agree with this. I don't think the rise of conservatism was just a reaction against an extreme liberalism of this type. It's not that I don't think conservatives were horrified by these things. I'm sure they did connect them to the evils of liberalism. But I don't think these things were liberal in any way. I don't think liberalism really helped child pornography except perhaps to not be inclined to push for punitive laws. He also claims that liberals in the mid-70s saw the government as evil. Well, a) we had just fought a war that killed 58,000 Americans for no good reason, b) this was just after Watergate, where Richard Nixon brought disgrace to the office, and c) no they didn't. Jenkins makes an incredible overstatement. Liberals distrusted government, and for good reasons. They thought the government had been acting evil. Hell, maybe some of them did believe the government was evil. You can't paint 1/2 the country with an unfounded blanket charge like this without challenge.

He also comes across as rather conservative on foreign policy issues. He dismisses critics of the U.S. selling arms to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, saying that Iran was legitimately the greater threat, neglecting the argument that the U.S. should not have armed anyone during that stupid, pointless conflict. What really bugged me though was his brutal attack of Cyrus Vance, Carter's Secretary of State. Evaluating Vance's work during the Iran crisis, Jenkins writes, "Cyrus Vance consistently behaved the way a stereotypical ultra-liberal politician might have done in a simplistic morality tale drafted by the far-right: at every stage favoring negotiation in the face of extortion, and resisting attempts to grant the shah asylum in the United States" (158).

I think this is unfair. There are lots of options in diplomacy outside of military attack and it makes a lot of sense to use them up before you start killing people. Vance rightly opposed the attack--how many hostages would have died had the attack reached Tehran? When the attack was launched, Vance resigned. He said the the attack would destroy U.S. prestige in the Middle East and around the word. He was right, in no small part because the attack helicopters wrecked in the Iranian desert.

In any case, it's a good narrative with a ton of interesting information (did you know that George W. Bush won 25 of top 26 states in white fertility?) and Jenkins does a great job of periodization--the 70s don't work that well as a coherent decade for historical study--essentially splitting it between the 60s and 80s makes a lot of sense. Jenkins certainly gets at the mindset of conservatives in the late 70s and early 80s, showing both why they were so angry and why they were successful at drawing people to their causes. His examination of cultural phenomena is first rate.

Like most really challenging books about the recent past, I can't agree with everything Jenkins says. Maybe I am too invested in my own narrative of the period. But I certainly recommend this book to anyone looking to understand the rise of conservatism in the United States.

Book Review: Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to the Civil War

As part of remembering Treason in Defense of Slavery Month, I will be reviewing some of the recent literature on the Civil War and related issues, including Southern identity, Reconstruction, and slavery.

I want to start this little series by discussing Joel H. Silbey's 2005 excellent work, Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to the Civil War. This is one of the best books on antebellum politics I have read in a long time. Silbey asks a straightforward question: What role did Texas annexation have in propelling the nation to Civil War. The answer: A lot.

I'm not sure that there's a lot that is particularly new in Storm over Texas. But what Silbey provides is a well-written narrative of how the annexation controversy destroyed the Second Party System and allowed sectionalism to dominate American politics.

Before 1840, American politics were exceptionally partisan. Party concerns predominated while sectional concerns were kept under the rug. This was promoted by leading Democrats, especially Martin Van Buren. How long could have this continued? How long could slavery not dominate American politics? It would have destroyed the nation eventually, but a few unfortunate events in the 1840s allowed it to pop up earlier.

Texas became independent in 1836, as part of the first Treason in Defense of Slavery act. Anglo Texans, invited into Mexico to protect the nation's heartlands from Comanches and U.S. expansion were told they could have land if they became Catholic and did not bring in their slaves. Of course, Mexico in the 1820s was a remarkably weak nation and had very little day to day control over its northern territories. Thus, Texans agreed to these stipulations and then ignored them. When General Santa Anna took over Mexico and became the first strong ruler in that nation's short history, he looked to crackdown on Texan slavery. The Texans, who wanted to be part of the United States and who saw Texas as a natural extension for their cotton economy based upon slave labor, revolted. While the Texans defeated these pro-slavery traitors at the Alamo, they lost the war overall when the Texans captured Santa Anna. The Texans now assumed the United States would welcome them with open arms. However, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren saw the danger in acquiring Texas and put the question off for several years. They feared the effect Texas would have on national politics and the balance of power in the Senate.

In 1840, the Whig William Henry Harrison won the presidency. Harrison did not have particularly strong feelings on the slavery issue. He likely would have left the question lie if he could. But only a month into his presidency, Harrison died of pneumonia he got at his inauguration. Vice-President John Tyler took over. Tyler was not popular among Whigs. He was only on the ticket so that the Whigs could expand their vote among southerners who hated Jackson. Tyler, from Virginia, was soon excommunicated by the Whigs as he agreed with them on almost nothing. Tyler, who hated the Jacksonians and the Whigs, looked for a base that he could build political capital on. He found that among sectionalist Southerners who did not have a political home in either party. Tyler looked at acquiring Texas as the best way he could be elected to the presidency in 1844. Thus, he named John C. Calhoun to be Secretary of State. Calhoun began to berate British ambassador to the United States Richard Packenham on the benefits of slavery and telling Britain to stay out of Texas. When Calhoun's correspondence was revealed to the nation, the sectional crisis began to bubble over. The small antislavery camp began to grow in the North; in response, Southerners began to feel that slavery was under attack and that it was in their interests to organize sectionally rather than along the old party lines.

All of this began to erode the Second Party System. Silbey goes into detail into how these issues split the New York Democratic Party, particularly after the Wilmot Proviso of 1846. The election of James K. Polk ensured the annexation of Texas early in 1845. Polk then went on to instigate a war with Mexico, a war that allowed the United States to steal the northern half of that nation. Many northerners were furious at the war, leading to the Wilmot Proviso and the fear that the nation would collapse over whether the new territories would be slave or free. Henry Clay managed to piece the nation back together through the Compromise of 1850. But these sectional demons could never be completely put away. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 brought them all back to the forefront and by then Clay was dead. The Whigs collapsed and the Republican Party formed in 1854, running John C. Frémont for president in 1856. The Democrats could have stayed in power for a very long time but sectional rivalries and increasingly belligerent South meant that even Stephen A. Douglas was not an acceptable candidate for half the party in 1860. The Democrats split apart, Abraham Lincoln was elected president, South Carolina seceded to protect slavery, and the Civil War began.

What I really took from Silbey is how dominant the slavery issue was in starting the Civil War. Confederate apologists always underplay slavery's role, but they are telling half-truths at best. Texas was about slavery, from their secession from Mexico in 1835 through the Mexican War in 1848. The fanatical pro-slavery Texans helped pull the nation away from the compromise of the Second Party System and to sectional rivalries that destroyed the nation in 1861. Joel Silbey's work tells this story in a convincing way and is well worth reading for anyone interested in these issues.

Also, I recommend reading this review of the book in the greatest review journal in the field of history, Reviews in American History.

Book Review--The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Two people, identified only as the man and the boy, walk stoically across a burned, desolate landscape. The desiccated earth an endless horizon of formless ash. How long have they been walking? Where are they going? These are constant questions never answered in The Road, Cormac McCarthy's most recent novel. While most of his books take place on the outskirts of civilization, McCarthy takes this to its logical end: the aftermath of civilization’s destruction. There are no more cities, no more animals, no more vegetation, only the rare can of ancient food and a prayer for death. But, with all people dead, there is no god to answer the prayer. So these solitary travelers, father and son, wander and roam with only a vague notion of where they are going and why, avoiding cannibalistic bands of survivors, those who will “eat your children in front of you,” hoping against hope to find a group that they can join with and allow them to be human, once again.

Through the repetitive (eat, hide, and sleep) nature of survival and the formless setting, McCarthy creates a world that is barely more than a blank canvas. In this bizarre futurism, time has moved forward while civilization has regressed all the way to its base state, where predator and prey are revealed quickly, where there is no ambiguity about which is the correct path; the correct path is the one in which you survive. The man strives to stay somehow civilized, both in thought and action, with utter futility.

“In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could here him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.” [p.66]

That the man tries so hard to keep himself and his son human is the saddest part. For the man, he stretches back to grab semblances of what he used to know. For the boy, who never knew civilization before, all his father’s stories are lies and, in the end, happiness is the biggest lie of all. For them, the closest they can come to joy is relief, and true relief may only come in death. We then have two people walking through a formless landscape toward inevitable misery, starvation, and death. Yet, this is the most humane, soulful, spiritual work he’s ever done. Through the bleakness comes a philosophy of why we live, and what we live for. As wretched as their lives may be, the man looks at the son and he knows why; he struggles moment after moment with the thought of his son growing up without him but, inside or outside of these apocalyptic circumstances, these are the musings of a parent.

The book is written more in aphorisms than any kind of traditional prose. The above selection is one such aphorism. It comes toward the beginning of the book, but it could stand anywhere and work as well. Ultimately, the beauty lies here. The mantra of the walk, the repetition of hunger and of terror, the same questions asked over and over can seem, at first, redundant, but the stepwise changes in the characters as they march to their inevitable ends give each aphorism nuance that defies explanation and must be witnessed. McCarthy’s prose has always been terse, even in the long form works like The Crossing, but the sparseness of language here is a whole new level of brevity. Dialogue consists mainly of statements like “Let’s go,” “I’m scared,” “I know,” “We must keep moving,” “Talk to me,” “I am.” But, again, the sheer simplicity allows for a subtly sublime building of the relationship between father and son, a relationship that exists silently and without expression. This relationship reminds me strongly of Lone Wolf and Cub, the landmark comic by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima, and I can’t help but think McCarthy may have drawn inspiration from the Shogun’s assassin and his young son with the eyes of the Samurai. In The Road the bond is chillingly emotional, especially as they come to the shocking end in a twist that, as a fan of McCarthy’s, I could not possibly expect, one that is more mystical than anything he’s written previously. When all the myriad of emotions in the human experience are reduced to love and fear, do we become animals, or can there be something more? One thing is certain: sometimes simple is best, and McCarthy cuts straight to the bone. This is one of the best books to come from McCarthy, and I simply cannot recommend The Road highly enough.