Though sometimes a slog, a welcome contribution to the history of modern right-wing politics at its extremes.
The GOP may be Donald Trump’s party—but at heart, this book argues, it’s really the party of a revanchist John Birch Society.
“We live in the age of Robert Welch—whether or not we know who he is, what he did, or why he matters.” So writes Miller in a sometimes-ponderous but nevertheless meritorious life of Welch, a candy magnate whose conspiracy theorizing foreshadowed today’s QAnon. Welch was an early champion of the isolationist “America First” movement, whose slogan Trump appropriated, and he fomented ideas that ranged from charging that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent to asserting that Sputnik was a hoax and the Vietnam War was run by the Kremlin to advance one-world government. As Miller documents, Welch was a brilliant young man who memorized thousands of volumes of poetry, literature, and history. Still, he descended into what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” of interpreting government. By the end of his life, Welch believed that it wasn’t the communists after all but instead the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission that controlled the planet. Despite such bizarre views, the John Birch Society was successful in the age of Joseph McCarthy and even more so in the 1970s, when public trust in government plummeted, in part thanks to Richard Nixon, who espoused some of Welch’s doctrines. Although, as Miller documents to sometimes tedious length, the John Birch Society fell apart thanks to infighting and insolvency, its worldview is alive and well in QAnon, the “truther” and “birther” movements, and the mainstream GOP, the last of which likely embraced it out of sheer cynicism. After all, Miller writes, “Welch was an eccentric, a conspiracy theorist who said zany things, but he had sincerity.” Sincerity is scarcely something one would apply to the current run of right-wing politicians, from Trump on down, who seem to throw out conspiracy theories willy-nilly to see what sticks.
Though sometimes a slog, a welcome contribution to the history of modern right-wing politics at its extremes.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-226-44886-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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