Gar Alperovitz Research Articles

The American Midwest and the Early Cold War

The American Midwest and the Early Cold War Bernard Lemelin Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. 142 pp. $19.95. Lawrence S. Kaplan, The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 294 pp. $45.00. Lawrence J. Haas, Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 313 pp. $29.95. Hendrik Meijer, Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 414 pp. $35.00. William Langer (North Dakota), Henrik Shipstead (Minnesota), Robert Taft (Ohio), Arthur Capper (Kansas), Charles Wayland Brooks (Illinois), Kenneth Wherry (Nebraska), Forrest Donnell (Missouri), William Jenner (Indiana), these were the names of a number of prominent isolationist members of the Congress from the Midwest during the early Cold War era. In the same period, however, this region was home to two significant internationalist politicians, Harry Truman (Missouri) and Arthur Vandenberg (Michigan), who have both been the focus of the recent monographs mentioned above. In his book entitled Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists, Robert Ferrell, one of the main biographers of Truman, castigates the group of historians known as the revisionists who have undertaken to disparage the foreign policy of the thirty-third American president since the 1960s. Among them were Gar Alperovitz, Barton Bernstein and Lloyd Gardner. For [End Page 142] the prolific scholar, who reminds that the conventional military strength of the United States in 1945–1950 was far from impressive, such an indictment is profoundly irrelevant to the basic idea of revision in history: "Th ere is nothing wrong … with the notion … of revisionism, taken by itself. My generation of historians, who began their studies in the years just after the war of 1941–1945 … appreciated the essays of the best-known historian of the time, Charles A. Beard, who declared that revision was the essence of scholarship. … We are all revisionists." Adds the eminent historian: "But the [C]old [W]ar revisionists who attacked … Truman did not understand the time in which he was president nor the man himself."1 Based on various primary sources (e.g., Truman papers, Department of State's Foreign Relations of the United States and memoirs of Dean Acheson), Ferrell's brief monograph particularly flays the three main theories advanced by the revisionists for the year 1945. The first one lies in the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt was "a subtle, sophisticated operator in foreign relations … and that President Truman was pretty much the opposite." The second theory consists in the conviction that the American nation, after the Yalta Conference, "sought to intervene in Russia's security zone in Eastern Europe, trying to gain influence, perhaps even dominance, over the cordon sanitaire of weak nations lying between Western Europe and the Soviet borders." The third hypothesis held by the revisionists, and notably Gar Alperovitz in its controversial Atomic Diplomacy (1965), was that the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, "not so much to end the war … but to impress the Russians, who were giving trouble in Eastern Europe." Concerning this last assumption, Ferrell stresses that an invasion of Japan would have definitely cost far more casualties than some nuclear revisionists had believed, asserting that the invasion of Luzon and Okinawa had cost respectively 31,000 and 63,000 U.S. casualties.2 Although Ferrell's volume exhibits several strengths (cogency of the overall demonstration, accuracy of facts, etc.), readers familiar with Truman's foreign policy, and acquainted for instance with the works of scholars on the atomic bomb such as Robert Maddox and J. Samuel Walker, will hardly find novelty in this book. In his monograph The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, Lawrence Kaplan, an expert on NATO, aims to follow "the odyssey of a major political figure from arch-isolationism in the 1930s to ardent internationalism after World War II." For the author, who consulted the rich Vandenberg papers located at the Bentley Library (University of Michigan), [End Page 143] the Midwest senator played a pivotal role in the conversion of...

Does Cleveland Know the Secret to Building Wealth without Gentrification?

The following is an interview with historian, political economist, activist, and writer Gar Alperovitz from City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, a collection of essays on American cities, written by the people who live in them.

The Next American Revolution? Reflections on Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?

Marx is concerned with theory that not only interprets but also changes the world. A central issue is thus the transition from capitalism to communism, a topic rarely considered by critics of capitalism today. An important exception is Gar Alperovitz, who, although eschewing the word “communism,” argues that we need “a new system” and sketches a transition strategy for moving “beyond capitalism.” This paper elaborates and evaluates this strategy.

Democratizing Wealth, Democratizing Power

Democratizing Wealth, Democratizing Power

Book review: America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, by Gar Alperovitz

Book review: <i>America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy</i>, by Gar Alperovitz

Constitutionalizing Property-Owning Democracy

Constitutionalizing Property-Owning Democracy

Returns to Capital:

Returns to Capital:

Rethinking the Utility of Nuclear Weapons

The parameters of the discussion about nuclear weapons are well known and appear to be relatively fixed. It seems as if there has been little on that front in forty years. Most civilian scholars have lost interest in nuclear weapons and moved on to other topics. But it is the habit of the military mind to learn from the past; even today there are lessons to be learned from Cannae, Waterloo, and Vicksburg. It will not surprise thoughtful military officers to find that the past has something important and interesting to tell us about nuclear weapons. The conventional wisdom is that nuclear weapons are horrible, probably immoral, but necessary. We keep them because they have a unique ability to coerce and deter. There are psychological characteristics to the weapons--as Secretary of War Henry Stimson pointed out in the first semiofficial discussion of them in 1947--that make them unlike other weapons. (1) Now evidence is throwing doubt on these decades-old conclusions. Actually not new evidence, but additional evidence culled from a careful study of the past. Hiroshimas The first and most important revision to history has to do with the efficacy of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (2) This evidence, however, has nothing to do with the school of Hiroshima history. The revisionist school ascended in 1964 with the publication by Gar Alperovitz of a book arguing that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary--the Japanese would have surrendered anyway. (3) This debate has caused controversy and aroused passions for almost fifty years. But it is not really about nuclear weapons. The revisionists argue that the bombings were horrible and, since they weren't necessary to win the war, they were immoral. The counterrevisionists argue that the bombings were required and were, therefore, moral. But this is a debate about whether the United States acted morally, not about whether nuclear weapons work. New evidence seems to suggest that while the bombs destroyed the cities, they didn't play much of a role (or perhaps any) in convincing Japan's leaders to surrender. Over the last twenty years, increasing access to records in Japan, Russia, and the United States has revealed that in the three days following the bombing of Hiroshima Japan's leaders had little idea that they had to surrender as a result of the bombings. (4) Meeting notes, diary entries, and the actions that various actors took during this period show that while Japan's leaders knew Hiroshima had been destroyed by a nuclear weapon, they saw this as another problem in an already difficult war, not a war-ending crisis. The Foreign Minister, Togo Shigenori, actually suggested convening the Supreme Council two days after the bombing of Hiroshima to discuss it and found he could not generate enough interest on the subject to get it on the agenda. When the Soviet Union, which had signed a five-year neutrality pact with Japan in 1941, broke that agreement and joined the war at midnight on 8-9 August, however, it touched off a crisis. Within hours of the news reaching Tokyo, the Supreme Council met to discuss unconditional surrender. It is clear from all the evidence now available that Japan's leaders surrendered because of the Soviet entry into the war and not because of the nuclear bombings. There are reasons to doubt the traditional story that the Emperor was horrified by the bombing of Hiroshima. The documentary evidence is thin, (5) and if the Emperor was so moved, it begs the question: why was he moved by secondhand reports of a city destroyed in August when he was not moved by driving through Tokyo and personally witnessing the devastation of that city in March? Would it not be sensible to expect that firsthand experience would have a stronger emotional impact than a secondhand report? (6) In some ways, this conclusion about Hiroshima makes sense. In order to believe that Hiroshima was the cause of Japan's surrender, it was necessary to believe that Japan's military men didn't know their business. …

Reclaiming Realism for the Left: Gar Alperovitz and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

Sixty-seven years after the decision to use the atomic bomb in World War II, controversy remains whether the United States was justified in using fission bombs in combat. Gar Alperovitz, the great revisionist historian, in his Atomic Diplomacy and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb transformed our knowledge of the geopolitical motives behind the atomic attack against Japan at the end of World War II. These uranium and plutonium-core bombs were political, not primarily military in purpose and motive behind their deployment. His analysis will be compared to realists such as Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Henry Kissinger and George Kennan who for the most part questioned unrestrained violence and offered nuanced views on the wisdom of using such indiscriminate, savage weapons of war. The paper will explore Alperovitz’s classic argument that out of the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the A-bomb drove the incipient Cold War conflict. American national-security elites construed the bomb as a political-diplomatic lever to contain Soviet power as much as a military weapon to subdue Japan. The views of various political and military leaders, President Truman, Henry Stimson, James Byrnes, General George C. Marshall, Admiral William Leahy and General Dwight Eisenhower are assessed.

Constitutionalizing Property-Owning Democracy

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Political constitutions are essential components of political-economic regimes. If one accepts the postulate that society needs to move towards a post-capitalist political-economic system, a key question that immediately follows is whether and in what ways existing political constitutions will need to change. The concept of property-owning democracy has been extensively explored in recent scholarship.1 In a nutshell, property-owning democracy consists of a system combining political democracy with a market economy, but with explicit measures in place to broaden the distribution of capital and property as widely as possible and prevent domination of the economy (and state) by a small elite. Many recent articulations of the idea also call for establishing in effect a right to a meaningful share of property (be it cash, housing, and/or productive capital) for individuals or households. A property-owning democracy is intended to realize effective political equality, fair equality of opportunity, and an economy that lifts the position of the least well off group over time to a much greater degree than do even the best forms of welfare state capitalism. Property-owning democracy shares many of the same features and intellectual sources as the “Pluralist Commonwealth” model articulated by Gar Alperovitz,2 and most if not all of the argumentation below would in my view apply with equal force to the Pluralist Commonwealth. Indeed, the Pluralist Commonwealth model can be viewed as a specific version of property-owning democracy, tailored especially to American conditions. Constitutionalizing Property-Owning Democracy

Democratizing Wealth and Building a Community-sustaining Economy From the Ground Up

This symposium consists of a keynote talk by Gar Alperovitz, noted scholar, activist, founder of the Democracy Collaborative, and author of such books as America Beyond Capitalism, followed by discussion and provocation by Jerry Davis. Alperovitz has been directly involved in community-based efforts at economic revitalization, including most recently the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland. His talk poses the provocative question: If you don’t like capitalism, and you don’t like socialism, what do you want? He outlines the rationale and prospects for a new economy movement, what it means to build a new system to replace the crumbling one, and how we might begin. He proposes a possible next system that is not corporate capitalism, not state socialism, but something else entirely—and something entirely American.

The Embrace of Atomic Bomb Orthodoxy and Revisionism

Wilson Miscamble, an award-winning diplomatic historian at the University of Notre Dame, would like everyone to stop talking about atomic-bomb revisionism: the idea that the atomic bomb was not primarily used to end the war with Japan but to intimidate the Soviets and make Joseph Stalin more pliant in the emerging postwar order; thus the weapon’s use formed an important seed of the Cold War that blighted the world for the next four decades. This historiographical tradition stems from Gar Alperovitz’ Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965), timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alperovitz used the newly released diaries of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the Truman administration to argue that the Americans engaged in a “strategy of delayed showdown” with the Soviet Union in the endgame of World War II. Miscamble will have none of this, and he structures this slim textbook as an all-out attack on every major thesis launched by Alperovitz. Miscamble’s central argument echoes what is known in atomic-bomb historiography as the “orthodox” position: the atomic bomb(s) ended the war, as intended, and had no connection to postwar (or wartime) efforts at “atomic diplomacy” with respect to the Soviet Union. Recent scholarship has confirmed most of this picture, especially the last point about the failure of the Americans to make any substantial geopolitical hay out of their atomic monopoly. Yet, by patterning his argument on Alperovitz’, Miscamble recapitulates a mirror-image of revisionism. Simply put, the best way to stop the error of linking the atomic bombs’ use in the war with postwar diplomatic history is to stop doing so. The historiography of nuclear weapons in the 1940s divides into three general subfields of history, each stressing progressively later years of that decade. The first concerns the actual building of the atomic bomb, and it has traditionally been a story of physicists (recent scholarship also includes chem-

An Emancipatory Interpretation of Property-Owning Democracy:

An Emancipatory Interpretation of Property-Owning Democracy:

Rawls, Adam Smith, and an Argument From Complexity To Property-Owning Democracy

Rawls, Adam Smith, and an Argument <i>From</i> Complexity <i>To</i> Property-Owning Democracy

THE KNOWLEDGE INHERITANCE THEORY OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

This article criticises the ‘knowledge inheritance theory of distributive justice’ presented by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly in their Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back; Wealth and Inequality in the Knowledge Economy (New York: The New Press, 2008). The authors claim that since innovation depends far more on accumulated knowledge than on any individual's contribution, most resulting wealth is deserved equally by all members of society. Their redistributive conclusion is not justified. Illegitimately applying the concept of justice to contexts where it is at best metaphorical, the ‘knowledge inheritance theory’ massively undervalues the role of individual intellectual activity, and relies on confusions concerning the nature of society, rights, causality, and gifts.

A Commentary on Choices Under Fire

March/April 2008 Historically Speaking 43 head of the NASM finally consulted a leading military historian, months after the disastrous original script became public knowledge, he was informed diat "your history is bad: unbalanced, skewed, misapplied ."3 As die NASM exhibit was being cancelled, one of its defenders opined that the dispute over Hiroshima was between "memory and history," the former being the flawed recollections of aging veterans and the latter unbiased and reliable research of upto -date scholars. Whatever its self-serving pretentiousness , the comment became a rallying cry in revisionist circles. But by then the tide had turned decisively against revisionism and Truman's critics regarding Hiroshima. During the 1990s a succession of scholarly publications demonstrated convincingly that those who allegedly had relied on "memory" during the Smithsonian debate possessed accurate recall after all. Some of those works came from academics , including Robert H. Ferrell's and Alonzo Hamby's respective biographies of Truman and the Maddox and Newman monographs mentioned above. Others were pathbreaking works by military historians such as EdwardJ. Drea, D. M. Giangreco, and, of course, Richard B. Frank.4 These and subsequent works demonstrated that the real fracture in remembering Hiroshima was not what Bess calls "the rift between popular culture and academic culture " but the gap between revisionist scholarship and so-called orthodox scholarship. Fortunately, in Choices Under Fire Bess almost always comes down on die latter side. MichaelKort isprofessor of socialscience at Boston University's College of GeneralStudies. In 2006 M.E. Sharpepublished the 6th edition of his textbook , The Soviet Colossus: History and Aftermath . His most recent book is The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (Columbia University Press, 2007). 1 See Robert P. Newman, Truman andthe Hiroshima Cult (Michigan State University Press, 1995), one of the essential studies on the bombing of Hiroshima that Bess unfortunately overlooks, and my The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima andthe Bomb (Columbia University Press, 2007). 2 RobertJames Maddox, The New Left andthe Origins of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 1973), chapter 3; Maddox, Weaponsfir Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later (University of Missouri Press, 1995), 2, 3, 49, 120-21, 153-54, 183,191. See also Maddox, "Gar Alperovitz: Godfather of Hiroshima Revisionism," in RobertJames Maddox, ed., Hiroshima in History:Myths of Revisionism (University of Missouri Press, 2007), 7-23, which was published too late for Bess to consult 3 Robert P. Newman, The Enola Gay and the Court of History (Peter Lang, 2004), xiii-xv, 97-133. The quotation, from military historian Richard Kohn, is on page 122. On page 120 Newman writes that overlooking Ronald Spector "has to be called obscurantism ." * See Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (University of Missouri Press, 1994); Alonzo Hamby, A Man of the People:A Life of Harry S. Truman (Oxford University Press, 1995); Edward J. Drea, MacArthur's Ultra: Codebreaking andthe WarAgainstJapan, 1942-1945 (University of Kansas Press, 1992); DM. Giangreco, "Casualty Projections for the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1946: Planning and Policy Implications,"Journal of Military History 61 (1977): 521-581. I would add all of these scholars to the list of historians whose insights would have enriched Bess's discussion of the Hiroshima decision. A Commentary on Choices Under Fire Harry S. Stout No 20di-century American war looms larger in moral and mythic grandeur than World War II. In the course of vanquishing fascism and tyranny in Europe and Asia, World War II stands in American history as the emblem of American values and deep nobility. World War II established die "Greatest Generation" in American history according to Tom Brokaw, and most Americans would agree with him. So why, in his provocative book Choices Under Fire, isn't Michael Bess cheering? In this deeply researched and extraordinarily well-written moral analysis of World War II, Bess offers a nuanced and complicated account of British and American behavior in World War II. He doesn't hesitate to praise American and British behavior where praise is due, but at the same time he raises hard questions diat will compel Anglo-Americans to hold the accusing mirror upon themselves as well as their vanquished enemies. Other historians, most notably David Kennedy...

Hiroshima in history: the myths of revisionism

When President Harry Truman authorized the use of atomic weapons against Japan, he did so to end a bloody war that would have been bloodier still had the planned invasion of Japan proved necessary. Revisionists claim that Truman s real interest was a power play with the Soviet Union and that the Japanese would have surrendered even earlier had the retention of their imperial system been assured. Truman wanted the war to continue, they insist, in order to show off America s powerful new weapon.This anthology exposes revisionist fallacies about Truman s motives, the cost of an invasion, and the question of Japan s surrender. Essays by prominent military and diplomatic historians reveal the hollowness of revisionist claims, exposing the degree to which these agenda-driven scholars have manipulated the historical record to support their contentions. They show that, although some Japanese businessmen and minor officials indicated a willingness to negotiate peace, no one in a governmental decision-making capacity even suggested surrender. And although casualty estimates for an invasion vary considerably, the more authoritative approximations point to the very bloodbath that Truman sought to avoid.Volume editor Robert Maddox first examines the writings of revisionist Gar Alperovitz to expose the unscholarly methods Alperovitz employed to support his claims, then distinguished Japanese historian Sadao Asada reveals how difficult it was for his country s peace faction to prevail even after the bombs had been dropped. Other contributors point to continuing Japanese military buildups, analyze the revisionists low casualty estimates for an invasion, reveal manipulations of the Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, and show how even the exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum hewed to the revisionist line. And a close reading of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa s acclaimed Racing the Enemy exposes many grave discrepancies between that recent revisionist text and its sources.The use of atomic bombs against Japan remains one of the most controversial issues in American history. Gathered in a single volume for the first time, these insightful readings take a major step toward settling that controversy by showing how insubstantial Hiroshima revisionism really is and that sometimes history cannot proceed without decisive action, however regrettable.

America Beyond Capitalism : A Socialist Stew Prepared for Liberals and Conservatives

America Beyond Capitalism : A Socialist Stew Prepared for Liberals and Conservatives

There is No Alternative to Forging an Alternative: On Gar Alperovitz's American Beyond Capitalism

There is No Alternative to Forging an Alternative: On Gar Alperovitz's American Beyond Capitalism

The Values of the Pluralist Commonwealth

Gar Alperovitz's America Beyond Capitalism is an inspiring book.1 For although Alperovitz paints a disturbing picture of America's failure to live up to its values, he provides inspiration for the way forward. In his book, Alperovitz describes a workable alternative to existing institutional arrangements; he terms this alternative the Commonwealth. He describes elements of this alternative that are already in place and outlines strategies for realizing this alternative more fully. At the same time, the Pluralist Commonwealth remains firmly grounded in the values that existing institutional arrangements have failed to realize. America's failure to live up to its values may be great, but it is not too late to address that failure. According to Alperovitz, realizing those values is still within reach. This makes his book inspiring. For theorists, there is a second sense in which the book is inspiring. The book manages to engage theoretical debates while addressing contemporary political and economic issues. The book is not just about applying a theory; the book does not simply work out what some theory would prescribe for political and economic arrangements. Nor is the book solely about the strategy for implementing the prescription of that theory. The book is also an argument about the content of that theory. These two senses in which America Beyond Capitalism inspires are nicely reflected in contributions to this symposium.2 In his essay, Waheed Hussain agues that although the Pluralist Commonwealth is a move in the right direction, more needs to be done to move us closer to realizing the ideals that it is meant to embody.3 As part of his essay, Thad Williamson describes the book's contributions to theoretical debates about democracy and distributive justice.4 In this essay, I would like to focus on a third sense in which I take it that a book like America Beyond Capitalism can be inspiring. This third sense of inspiration concerns the values that the Pluralist Commonwealth is meant to realize. As noted above, part of what makes America Beyond Capitalism inspiring is that it presents a workable alternative to existing institutional arrangements that have failed to realize the values that Alperovitz takes to be central to American thought. There is inspiration in knowing that the realization of these values is fea sible. However, if the feasibility of the Pluralist Commonwealth is to inspire reform, the values to be realized must themselves be sources of inspiration for reform. In this essay, I examine the case for grounding reform in the three values the Pluralist Commonwealth aims to realize: equality, liberty, and democracy. In doing so, I aim to highlight what I take to be distinctive about the Pluralist Commonwealth as a proposal for reform, and in turn, discuss the ways in which the values it is meant to realize might serve as sources of inspiration for reform.