The United States Military: A Melting Pot of Change

The late nineteenth and the early twentieth century of American history encapsulated enormous amounts of change.  The shifting from a rural based society to one of mass production and large urban growth with massive amounts of immigrants migrating into America created a fear among the established white society.  The new European people were not Anglo-Saxon in heritage but Southern European or Eastern European with different customs, vastly different religious views and languages that did not sound intelligible.  The reigning establishment worried over how these new immigrants would fit into the established society.  New laws were taking shape in the government to limit the access of those immigrants who the lawmakers felt would not forego their old ways of life and adapt with the culture of America.  So how did these new immigrants fall into line with the established way of life?  World War I brought unusually large amount foreign-born draftees into the American Military.  Adapting progressive liberal managerial styles the military sought to create a melting pot of soldiers and Americanize them for society.  Did this assimilation work?
By 1914, war over took most of Europe.  Immigrants in America took sides based on their ethnic background in support of the combatants.  In 1917, the United States entered the war with some “490,000 immigrants” volunteering or having the government draft them into the military.   This paper will look at the response the military took to integrate those immigrants and mold them not only into soldiers but also into American citizens.  With the use of the new realm of social science does the military become the first real melting pot of America?  To understand the radical new course the military took one must understand how immigrants factored into American society.
Since the beginning, America was built by people who wanted to create something new and break away from the heavy-handed rule of tyrants.  America was founded on the principles of self exiled Northern Europeans.  They created and shaped the country as a whole into their own likeness and image meaning white Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.  Even with those European ties, America became diverse in its own bloodlines.  As Nathan Glazer points out with his quoting of the Crévecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer of 1782,
What then is the American, this new man?  He is either a European or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.  I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose married a French woman, and whose present four sons have four wives of four different nations.  He is an American…

This statement shown a light on the diversity that American generally accepted, but leaves out certain groups of individuals.  The era in which this was written left out American Indians and Afro-Americans that made up a substantial portion of the population.  By the 1920s, America was attempting to stem the tide of the increasing amount of Southern Europeans—Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Russians, etc.—and the influx of Asians coming into the Western United States.  This encroachment from these areas created a fear that these groups of people would not fit into American society.  Starting with the Naturalization act of 1790, 1870 and the Immigration act of 1924 limited the amount and types of immigrants that could enter and become citizens of America.  One basic fear of the new immigrants was their solidarity to their homeland.  Helen Papanikolas points to the fighting between ethnic groups in Utah at the beginning of World War I.  “To Americans the brawling of immigrant groups over European events was the ultimate evidence that these newest arrivals could never be Americanized, their concerns were totally with their native countries.”   Papanikolas also points out that at the start of the war, many immigrants wished to return to their homelands to take up arms against the enemy.  New immigrants—loathed by native-born American laborers for taking jobs at lower salaries—sent their earnings back to their families in their former countries thusly taking money out of the local economies and bolstering their homelands.  The new immigrants clustered themselves into communities of their own background which kept alive their cultures and languages instead of embracing their new homelands way of life.  When America entered World War I in August 1917 what was the immigrants reaction to the war?
World War I drove a wedge between some of the immigrants and changed the status of an established group of people.  When German entered the war in 1914, the status of German immigrants and in some cases Americans with German ancestry changed.  As Helen Papanikolas explains about German immigrants, “Once looked upon as sober, industrious people who would be an asset to the country, they became Huns and Boches (“thick-headed persons”).   The pressure on them was so intense that they began to call themselves Dutch, Russian or Swiss.  The other major Central Power, Austria-Hungary, created friction between its multi-national ethnic groups.  Serbs, Croats and Slovenes all fell under the rule of the Austria-Hungary Empire and fighting between the groups flared up around the country.  The countries that lined the Mediterranean sea fell into different camps in regards to the war.  Greek immigrants, divided between those who supported King Constantine and neutrality and the Cretan Greeks who supported the Premier Eleftherios Venizelos, who lobbied for Greece to join the allies.  On Italy’s entrance into the war in 1915, groups of loyal Italians sailed back to their homeland to fight.  Fiorella Ventresco estimates that some “9,000 reservists left the United States…between June and October 1915.”   As the war dragged on and Italy’s losses mounted, fewer and fewer Italians left America to fight for the homeland.  By 1917, America entered the war and many immigrants feared military service with little knowledge of the English language and the knowledge they may not return to support their families.
The entrance into the war by America drew up huge waves of patriotism and those immigrants, who were fearful of war, caught the wave of war fever.  The fear of service did not affect all immigrants, “those immigrants who had come to America as boys or adolescents were buoyed by the wartime fervor and were eager to show they were not radicals but loyal to the United States.”   These young men spoke some English, had made friends with their American peers and felt an obligation to serve their new country.  With the country gearing up for war, how did the government deal with immigrant draftees and volunteers?
The integration of immigrants into the military was not automatic.  At the time of World War I, the United States had never dealt with such a drastic influx of men into the military.  The military needed to transform millions of civilians into soldiers.  In 1917, Congress directed the Selective Service to establish three classifications for foreign-born registries—declarant, nondeclarant, and enemy alien.  Declarant immigrants were men who had filed their initial set of citizenship papers and were eligible for the draft.  Nondeclarants had not proceeded with filing their paperwork and were considered ineligible for the draft.  Enemy aliens were those from both groups that did not want to fight due to the prospect of fighting their own countrymen.   On paper this process worked, in reality the Selective Service ran into problems with immigrants who considered themselves oppressed individuals, as in the immigrants from Serbia and parts of Hungary, not countrymen of the enemy state.  Other acts of confusion also plagued the Selective Service, for instance during the first round of the June 1917 draft were 123,277 immigrants of which 76,545 had not declared their intentions of becoming citizens.   A large part of the confusion rested on the immigrants not understanding the conditions of the draft and in some cases; unscrupulous people took advantage of them. By the end of the war, some 200,000 nondeclarant aliens had waived their exemption to fight in the war.  With so many immigrants arriving at training camps all over the country, how did the military respond.
In the beginning of the recruitment of men for military service, base commanders did not know how to deal with the influx of non-English speaking trainees.  Most of the immigrant soldiers, without regard to their cultural or linguistic differences found themselves lumped into the native-born trainees or assigned to menial jobs around the camps to keep them occupied.  Morale among these men was understandably low.  Grasping upon the wave of new progressive ideas that were an outcome of the industrialization of America and the development of Social Sciences, the military became a proponent of what Robert Fogel described as part of the Third Great Awakening.  Which he claimed became more “modernist or liberal” in its outlook towards society.   This increasingly more liberal outlook shaped the War Departments policies towards its new immigrant soldiers.  The War Department established the “Foreign-Speaking Soldier Sub-section (FSS)” with the intent of improving its management of immigrant soldiers.   The FSS recruited a prominent immigrant civic leader to head its organization and promoted from within the military itself two progressive soldiers.  Those recruited for this were: D. Chauncy Brewer, a Boston Lawyer and head of the North American Civic League for Immigrants, Captain George B. Perkins and Lieutenant Herbert A. Horgan.  These men grasped the idea of scientific management that had reorganized the urban-industrial America.   What steps did these individuals take to reshape the military into a progressive organization?
To begin with Brewer appointed Lieutenant Stanislaw A. Gutowski to the FSS staff.  Gutowski was a naturalized American citizen.  Born in Russian Poland, he spoke many languages and demonstrated great knowledge of ethnic customs.  Gutowski began his work at Camp Custer, Battle Creek, Michigan where the language barrier and morale of the troops was causing large problems.  Upon arriving, he selected 15 immigrant soldiers to work as his multi-lingual staff and commenced to interview individual foreign-born soldiers.  After a few days, the staff and Gutowski recommended changes to the existing structure of the immigrant division.  They separated the mixed language units into units of the same language and promoted multi-lingual soldiers into non-commissioned ranks to interpret and translate orders to the units.  By the end of February 1918 Gutowski also reorganized Camp Grant in Illinois with the same procedure.  At the same time, the FSS realized that foreign-born non-commissioned officers were not enough and soon recommended that foreign-born Commissioned officers be put in charge of these groups of soldiers.   Gutowski and his staff traveled from camp to camp reorganizing the immigrant soldiers along the same lines.  Promoting the bi-lingual soldiers into places of authority ensured that orders had the proper translation and the concerns of the men were understood by the chain of command.  The immigrant soldiers—under the new system—functioned better than they had, still more work lay ahead for the FSS.
The simple reorganization of the soldiers into working ethnic based groups at the camps did not solve all of the problems for the FSS.  There was a lack of educated bi-lingual and multi-lingual men to promote from within to take over these new groups of soldiers.  Brewer contacted the President of Lehigh University, Henry S. Drinker and asked for his help in finding college educated men to fulfill the ranks of commissioned officers.  Along with this search for college educated officers, the FSS started to look into the morale problems that plagued these soldiers.  Before those issues were dealt with the military created a new department called the Military Morale Section (MMS), which was under the Military Intelligence Division (MID) of the War Department.  The FSS soon found itself under Military control and in June 1918, Brewer resigned.  In a brief six months, Brewer transformed most of the organizational standards of the military’s structure regarding its immigrant soldiers.  Brewer’s replacement fell to Lieutenant Herbert A. Horgan.   Under Horgan’s command, the FSS expanded and improved the conditions of the immigrant soldiers for the duration of the war and through the demobilization period.  What lengths did the FSS and the military go to, to build up the failing morale of the immigrant soldiers?
Once the United States entered the war, it created the Commission on Training Camp Activities run by another progressive leader Raymond Fosdick.  The Commissions job was to provide morally uplifting activities for the soldiers.  Fosdick undertook the responsibility of providing a “cultivating and conserving the manhood and man-power of America’s fighting forces by providing a clean and wholesome environment.”   Fosdick brought a new combination of managerial and progressive liberalism to the office.  He was no stranger to difficult tasks as his former occupation was New York’s Commissioner of Accounts and led the way to the break up of the Tammany Hall political machine.  Fosdick wrote as part of the mission statement for the Commission,
The Commission’s aim to surround the men in service with an environment which is not only clean and wholesome but positively inspiring…the kind of environment which a democracy owes to those who fight in its behalf.

Fosdick faced a considerable challenge not only with immigrant soldiers, whose cultures varied greatly but needed to provide for the native-born soldiers as well.  Falling in line with the idea of Fogel’s Third Great Awakening, the progressives sought to limit and even eradicate the social ills of alcohol, prostitution, and gambling and poor health conditions within the military.  An advocate of Fosdick’s progressive reforms was the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, once the mayor of Cleveland, Ohio who adopted methods of social welfare to combat crime and other social ills.  The two saw eye-to-eye on how the reshaping of America’s fighting men needed to happen.  How did the Commission change the social welfare of the fighting men?
The Commission of Training Camp Activities broke down into several different sections.  They included Social Hygiene, Law Enforcement, Athletics, Music, Theaters, Education and Publicity.  Within these groups, the Commission requisitioned the help of outside organizations to deal with the needs of foreign-born soldiers.  Those groups were the YMCA, YWCA, American Social Hygiene Association, Playground Recreation Association, American Library Association, Knights of Columbus and Jewish Welfare Board.  The American Red Cross and Salvation Army provided support for the fighting men in conjunction with these other groups.  With these groups assembled, Baker and Fosdick attacked the social ills of the military.
The first social change the Commission went after was the immorality and dangers of prostitution.  According to the Commission, the Central Powers “lost 60 divisions of men who became ‘incapacitated’ by venereal disease.”   The Commission also pointed to the 1916 Mexican conflict where reports of disease were very high among American troops.  Fosdick and Baker started at the top to change the military’s attitudes towards sexual activities among the men.  Many seasoned officers believed that “men would be men…Soldiers must have women and they made poor soldiers if they did not have women.”   Changing the older soldiers’ ideas about prostitution and replacing it with a new moral standard would filter from the top to the bottom.  The Commission refused to hand out prophylaxis to the soldiers as that only seemed to encourage the activity, they developed a program of pamphlets and films that showed and discussed the ramifications of such liaisons.  In regards to the foreign-born soldiers, the pamphlets and films circulated in English, leading to much confusion among those soldiers.  The FSS and the Commission translated the pamphlets and hired multi-lingual soldiers to translate the films and discuss the themes of the movies to the men.   To help encourage the men to find other outlets, the Commission setup positive recreational activities for the men to enjoy.  The soldiers leisure time was taken up with “exercise, sports, books, and singing.”   The other larger social realm that Fosdick and Baker concentrated on was providing religious outlets for all faiths.  With a large number of Catholics and Jews drafted, the Commission recruited the Knights of Columbus and the Jewish Welfare Board to oversee the spiritual wellbeing for those denominations.  The YMCA and the YWCA also provided large amounts of materials and volunteers for the soldiers to instruct and entertain themselves while in camp and across the ocean at the front.  The FSS also requested that holidays and special ceremonies of the different faiths required the same attention as did Protestant rituals by the military.   The canteens provided kosher meals for Passover and traditional meals were prepared for Greek and Russian Orthodox holidays.  The YWCA provided services to the wives of immigrant soldiers who spoke no English and needed to provide for their families while their husbands fought in the war.  Classes were setup to teach them English and in most instances teach them how to read and write as well.  While all of these services were provided to the foreign-born and native born soldiers, the military also took advantage of the situation to assimilate the foreign-born soldiers into American society.
The progressive reformers, who filled the administrative roles of these services, balanced a fine line between accepting the foreign-born ethnic pride and educating them with mainstream American values.  The War Department and the FSS accomplished this role by gaining the assistance of prominent ethnic leaders from the communities to spread the values of being a citizen.  In one instance in Utah, the newspaper News Advocate printed this story about Greek soldiers who attended a rally, “In high spirits the men sang, danced, listened to the familiar, stirring patriotic speeches about the historic struggle of the Greeks against the Turks, and expressed their loyalty to the United States.”  Similar rallies happened in all of the camps in all the languages spoken by the immigrant soldiers.  Schools were setup in the camps to teach English, civics, American History and citizenship to immigrants.  They were taught to read and write and in most cases the classes were mixed between foreign-born soldiers and native-born soldiers that were illiterate.  According to a FSS report in February 1918, “14,249 non-English speaking soldiers were enrolled in camp English classes…at another camp some 600 foreigners joined 250 American illiterates in English school.”   Civics and citizenship fell within the English lessons and at times focused on the country’s democratic values.  The FSS instructed its various groups to educate the foreign-born in classical music, renowned artists, visit museums and attend plays all constructed to bridge the gap between the old world and the new.  The military’s stance on assimilation of its foreign-born troops was gentle and caressing, not harsh and unforgiving.  The military allowed the immigrant cultures to survive and thrive while teaching them the values of their new home and how to fit in without giving up everything that was familiar.
The military translated propaganda into various languages to instruct and uplift the foreign-born soldiers with patriotic slogans to instill a sense of American spirit in them.  The FSS circulated translated newspaper articles to describe the effort and sacrifice that other soldiers were making for the war effort.  The FSS established a club for immigrant soldiers known as the “Order and Liberty Alliance.”   This club’s intent was built around the idea of creating a loyal spirit in the army.  The club helped solidify the understanding of how important the immigrant soldier was to America and its cause during the war.  The War Department made it easier for immigrant soldiers to naturalize themselves by providing the services in the camps or at the YMCA houses setup in Europe while the men were overseas.  The military took great pains to educate and train the foreign-born soldiers with the hopes of creating new citizens.  Did the military accomplish its goal to assimilate the foreign-born soldier into the fold of America?
The military’s progressive style of leadership and organization showed a quicker adaptability than what was slowly making headway in the civilian world.  The speed at which the military accomplished a fostering of old world cultures with American values took only 11 months.  Fosdick commented on the efforts of the Commission on Training Camp Activities as, “the most stupendous piece of social work in modern times.”  The FSS and the Commissions success at instilling middle class values to its foreign-born recruits stems from tight knit structure of the military in general.  The progressive leaders that the military placed in command of these organizations showed an intense trust in the new untested social sciences and social welfare.  The military became the testing ground for new ideas on assimilating the wave of immigrants that arrived and were still arriving into America at that time.  In the brief period of America’s involvement in World War I, the progressive reformers fought a relentless battle against the social ills of the day like prostitution, alcohol, social disease and sanitary conditions.  All of those conditions infected society outside of the military and largely in areas where immigrants lived.  The structure of the military provided the needed education to those immigrants and native-born soldiers on how to behave in the outside world.  Despite the testing ground the military became, did it foster a melting pot society after the war was over?
At the end of the war, immigrant veterans received citizenship for their service, if they had not already applied for it before hand.  Many of the foreign-born soldiers became members of the American Legion, which established itself in 1919.  That organization also led an unrelenting fight to Americanize all immigrants.  The push to Americanize the immigrants in the country continued and were harsher than methods used by the military.  Those soldiers that experienced the war together assimilated far faster than the rest of the country.  I am sure the bond of wartime brotherhood between veterans of wars erases any concept of race and makes them all American.

Bibliography
Farley, John. “Twentieth Century Wars: Some Short-Term Effects on Intergroup Relations in the United States.” Sociological Inquiry 64, no. 2 (1994): 151-237.
Fogel, Robert. The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism. 1st ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Foner, Philip Sheldon. Labor and World War I, 1914-1918. 1st ed. Ne: International Publishers, 1987.
Ford, Nancy Gentile. “Mindful of the Traditions of His Race: Dual Identity and Foreign-Born Soldiers in the First World War American Army.” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 2. America: History & Life (1997): 35-57.
—. “War and Ethnicity: foreign-born soldiers and United States military policy during World War I,” 1994.
Glazer, Nathan. “Is Assimilation Dead?.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 530 (1993).
Mabra, Fred. “ManPower Utilization.” Military Review 46, no. 12 (1966): 92-97.
Papanikolas, Helen. “Immigrants, Minorities, and the Great War.” Utah Historical Quarterly 58, no. 4 (1990): 351-370.
Sarkesian, Sam. “Who Serves?.” Society 18, no. 3 (1981): 57-60.
Ventresco, Fiorella. “Loyalty and Dissent: Italian Reservists in America During World War I..” Italian Americana 4, no. 1 (1978): 93-122.

The Great Awakenings

This little essay is from my Modern U.S. Social and Intellectual History class.  The essay was an exam we took after reading Robert Fogel’s The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism.

Outline and assess Fogel’s presentation of the origins and consequences of the purported awakenings, with particular attention to the third and fourth.

Robert Fogel’s arguments that four “awakenings” are the reasons for the dramatic changes in American history are sweeping and simple.  Fogel presents four cycles of time that end with some sort of dramatic change in American politics and society.   Each cycle last about one hundred years and generally, the next cycle begins before the preceding one ends (Fogel, 9).
The first great awakening takes place between 1730 and 1830 and its emphasis—according to Fogel—witnessed the weakening of predestination and the rise of ethic benevolence and the belief that sinners may be predestined for salvation.  These traits lead to the American Revolution and the want for self-determination and a need to break away from the tyranny of the British crown.  The religious component of the first great awakening challenged the Calvinist point of view that only those whom God chose could find redemption.  The new church leaders also accused the Calvinists of being greedy for power and luxury.  Fogel states, that while the religious portion of this period was “latent, incipient, or muted, it laid the basis for the frontal assault on orthodoxy that emerged during the Second Great Awakening” (Fogel, 20).  The political aspect of the first awakening erodes away the British authority on the colonies.  With constant accusations of political and moral corruption, a need for new desirable qualities arose. The birth of the revolution allowed an establishing of a legitimate authority, the breaking down of friction between the colonies and allowed a freedom of thought that broke with the traditional Calvinists.  Fogel presents his thesis for this book as technological change that brings on the need for a religious revival.  Yet, the first awakening does not present a technological change but a change of ideas fostered from the Enlightenment and a questioning of strict puritanical ideas.  This awakening seems to fall short of the argument that technology ripens the revival.
The second great awakening begins in the year 1800 and lasts until 1920.  The revival puts further distance between predestination and the ability for anyone to obtain God’s grace through inner and outer perseverance against sin.  One cause for this was the dawning of the a new millennium and what probably stems from a fear tactic that the God’s vengeance will destroy those who did not accept his virtue.  God’s virtue included the cessation of all consumption of alcohol, the rise of the abolitionist movement and the need to limit the number of Catholics entering into the country (Fogel, 21).  The abolitionist movement sees an immediate change with their movement for change.  The Civil War mobilizes and strikes at the heart of slave states to free the blacks from their Southern owners.  Social reforms grew out of the second awakening as well.  The need for education for everyone, child labor laws and the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement also take hold.  The crowning achievements for the second awakening are the three amendments that end slavery, giving citizenship to former slaves and giving them the right to vote.  The fight for civil equality for ex-slaves might have gone further if the focus did not shift to Darwinism and the growing urban crisis (Fogel, 22).
The second awakening comes at a time when the country goes through the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the need to better one’s self through outward works of goodness to reach salvation.  This seems to tie closely to what Fogel means by technology requires social change.  With the advent of new machinery to accomplish menial tasks then why, does a plantation owner need slaves?  That logic follows along with the need to better ones self in the eyes of the Lord.  Salvation came from good deeds and changing the society from the evils of slavery was one way to go about it.
The third great awakening starts up around 1890 and has not quite ended yet, but Fogel gives a date of 1970.  A clear cut erupts between the ideas that poverty was a reason for sin.  The growing unrest in the urban centers of America draws the attention of churches.  The social reformers saw the cities as centers for corruption, crime, drunkenness, prostitution and graft that could have infected the entire society.  Charles Darwin strikes at the heart of the creation of man with his theories on evolution that challenges the very existence of God’s word.  The shift to a scientific view of the Bible and its subsequent interpretation that it was nothing more than a historical document sends the churches into strong battle to who was right and who was wrong.
The rise of industry in the cities of America brought in new waves of immigrants who were not equal in the eyes of the Evangelists.  The living conditions, corruption and graft became the focal points of cleaning up America in order to gain God’s favor.  This view point extended from the second awakening and found a hearty root in the Social Gospel Movement, that emphasized that if salvation was what one wanted then the society as a whole would have to change for the better and it fell to everyone to correct society.  Their solution to these problems included the redistribution of wealth, reforms to end city corruption, the education of children and limiting child labor, prohibition of alcohol, and women’s right to vote.  These changes culminate into the welfare state.
The sort of freethinking that the third awakening encourages seems to lead away from the idea that the churches created the need to right the wrongs.  The shift away from the individual to better ones self, to the collective society takes away from individual achievement.  Once the individual was removed from the equation of change, the church’s hold on people withers.  Fogel points out that the leaders of the churches do shelter themselves from society (Fogel, 25).  Technology and science foster free thinkers, who do not hold themselves accountable to the confines of churches.  These educated people perceived a need for change from more economic viewpoints than Godly ones.
The fourth great awakening picks up in the 1960s and continues today.  The civil rights movements to bring equality and prosperity to blacks and women picks up here where the third awakening left off.  Education becomes the forerunner to the changes in society that need to take place.  Better educated people means more money earned and that then creates more time to spend on other activities. The focus of the fourth awakening takes shape after World War II.  With dramatic increases in salaries, life expectancy increases and the number of hours one devotes to work shortening—by 40% in 2040—(Fogel, 188-189), the need to find a outlet has and will occur.  For Fogel, the rebirth of religion as a social sandbox to cope with the changes in technology and the world around us will grow (Fogel, 204).  In order to achieve this, Fogel believes that the education opportunities need to expand to include all those who would only receive a high school degree.  Fogel states,
the main solution to the relative stagnation in the wages of high school trained     workers is to reduce their supply by educating more of them for higher-level technical and professional jobs.  Given the rate of decline in the supply of good jobs for those with only high school training, an appropriate target is a doubling in three decades of the share of those receiving bachelor’s degrees and a similar increase in high-level technical training (Fogel, 216).

With better-educated people, the demand for better salaries will increase and for Fogel the time spent on leisure activities will increase dramatically.  What does not seem clear in Fogel’s presentation of the fourth awakening revolves around whom or what will be doing the tasks that the better educated do not want to do?  Fogel never clearly defines if technology will completely take over the mundane jobs and chores to leave us with the recreation time to deal with life’s social issues.  Fogel also seems to suggest that technology and religion will learn to live together.  This does not seem possible given the state of arguments over creationism and evolution, stem-cell research and its retrieval from unborn babies to name a couple.  Better education seems to push people away from religion and it seems that people who wish to change society do so out of some sort of need than a mandate from the pulpit.
Fogel’s book while rich in historical and empirical data makes certain assumptions about how the future will look.  Looking into the future does not fit into the job description of a historian.  By the year 2040, I will be 70 years old and certain that I will have lots of time on my hands.  The intervening years are what will shape me into Fogel’s model or not.

Welcome to my site.

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