Framing Reparations

Since the enactment of reparations for Japanese American World War II internees in the early 1990s, the public debate on slavery reparations has gained momentum. Recently, a number of states and the U.S. House of Representatives have issued formal apologies for slavery. In light of this debate, it may be important for policymakers, as well as policy researchers, to better understand public opinion on this issue. At present, not much is known other than that most Americans oppose reparations. However, public opinion surveys yield widely varying population estimates. These differences may represent random error by an uninformed public or they may reflect complex considerations about “who” should be compensated “by whom” in “what form” and “for what” injustice. Using the results of a nationally representative question wording experiment ( n =  2,001) this article investigates whether opposition to slavery reparations is unqualified, or whether it depends on the specific policy design. Since data collection was completed before Virginia became the first state to apologize for slavery in February 2007, the study offers a window into the formation of public opinion prior to elite policy enactment. Results suggest that the public carefully distinguishes between different reparations proposals and that policymakers, as well as policy researchers, may have to be very specific when addressing an issue of this complexity.

Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955–1975 – By Marcos Cueto

Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics – By Matthew B. Robinson and Renee G. Scherlen

The Obama Administration's Challenges after the “War on Science”: Reforming Staffing Practices and Protecting Scientific Integrity in the Executive Branch

In this article, we examine the difficult leadership position President Barack Obama inherited as he took office with respect to science and technology policy making and implementation, particularly following the Bush administration and years of the so‐called “war on science.” We contend that the Obama administration's challenge is not only to take substantive policy action, but also to reform certain administrative practices, particularly in light of the previous administration's practice of the politics of strategic vacancies, a managerial technique that rearranges an agency's ideological inclinations not through the usual forms of active politicization (i.e., by filling the appointee ranks with like‐minded ideologues) but instead by “starving” the agency of staff and co‐opting its agenda that way.

Willem J. Kolff: A great man

Willem Kolff, often called the father of the artificial kidney, died in January 2009, 3 days before his 98th birthday. During his long life he received numerous honors and accolades for his work. Many people thought he should have received the Nobel Prize, but as he once said himself, they do not honor people who build mouse traps. Yet because of the mouse traps he built, almost one million people are now alive who otherwise would have died. True, he did not invent dialysis. Others worked before him, and some developed dialyzers concurrently with his. But Dr Kolff combined a dogged determination with a flair for salesmanship, resulting in dialysis becoming a practical worldwide method of treating uremia. The details of Dr Kolff’s life are well known. He published his early experiences in March 1965 in the Annals of Internal Medicine in an article that as a fellow I was assigned to edit. At the outbreak of World War II he left his job at the University of Groningen in protest against the actions of the Nazis, and took up a position at the local hospital in the small town of Kampen. There he developed his dialysis machine in collaboration with Mr. Berk, an engineer, availing himself of the recent advent of cellophane (used to make sausage skin) and of heparin. After several attempts he settled on an apparatus consisting of 20 m of cellophane tubing wrapped around a horizontal drum half submerged in a bath filled with dialysate. He had to use rubber tubes and glass connections, because plastics were not yet available. A pump was used to rotate the drum, but on bad days Mrs Kolff had to take turns cranking the machine. As no other funds were available, Dr Kolff used his own money to build the device. Fifteen patients were dialyzed in the spring of 1943 before the first survived—a woman who had been a Nazi collaborator. Upon waking up, she reportedly said she was going to divorce her husband, which she did. Later 8 dialysis machines were built, of which Dr Kolff sent one to London, one to New York, and one to Montreal. He also sent one to Poland, but it disappeared somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. In 1947 Dr Kolff moved to the Cleveland Clinic. These were difficult years, working on the mechanism of renoprival hypertension and doing nephrectomies on dogs under the stern stewardship of Irving Page. Exemplifying Dr Kolff’s travails was one episode when he came into Dr Page’s office with the final version of a much-retyped manuscript ready to be sent off. But Dr Page objected to the gender of the pronoun by which the dogs were referred to, and marked the paper from top to bottom. An eyewitness described later how Dr Kolff went into the next room and broke into tears. Later he began again to work on dialysis. He said that as everything in America was disposable so had to be his dialyzer. With Bruno Watchinger, they rolled cellulose tubing around soft drink cans (alcohol not being permitted at the Cleveland Clinic), then had Baxter Travenol build the ‘‘Twin Coil’’ and the steel tank, and gave them the patent—as doctors in those days did not patent their discoveries. He used to say that he could build a kidney faster than Bruno Watchinger could calculate a clearance—and that he learned nothing from a clearance that he did not know already from the serum creatinine, an unfashionable point of view but one for which he might be vindicated some day. By the end of the 1950s the Cleveland Clinic created for him a Division of Artificial Organs. It consisted of a Correspondence to: G. Dunea, 222 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Hemodialysis International 2009; 13:150–152

Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror by John Michael

Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses During World War II by Meghan K. Winchell

The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy 1945–89 by Nicholas J. Cull

Hate, Narrative, and Propaganda in The Turner Diaries

When Agent William Eppright of the FBI's evidence response team opened the sealed envelope found in Timothy McVeigh's yellow Mercury, he found among the clippings two highlighted passages from The Turner Diaries. This novel of Aryan revolution was written by Dr. William Pierce, leader of the neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance (Serrano 218-20). During McVeigh's trial, The Turner Diaries was the first piece of evidence introduced, and the prosecution called witnesses that testified to McVeigh's obsession with the text. These witnesses told the court that McVeigh had read the novel repeatedly while in the military and later sold it at a loss at gun shows (Griffin 8). While McVeigh's case brought The Turner Diaries to the public's attention, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented multiple cases since the 1980s in which violent hate groups have cited Pierce's novel as influential. Two of these have even taken their names from the novel (ADL). During the dragging murder of James Byrd in 1998, the driver, John William King, is reported to have shouted, "We are going to start the Turner Diaries early," as he shackled Byrd's legs to his truck (Meggido 2). Pierce's novel was first self-published in his periodical Attack! and then self -published as a novel in 1978. Since that time it has become required reading for Aryan groups and has been widely disseminated at gun shows throughout the country. While no precise circulation numbers are available, as of 2001 estimates were that at least 300,000 copies had been sold (Griffin 138). As a vehicle for hate propaganda, Pierce's tract has been all too successful. The Turner Diaries is unambiguously a hate novel. According to its Foreword, the novel is a manuscript found in 2100 after a worldwide Aryan revolution. This manuscript is the diary of Earl Turner, a member of the Aryan "Organization" that started the revolution that has led to the worldwide massacre of all non-Aryans. The diary narrates the beginnings of this revolution from the perspective of Turner and follows him through his guerilla war against the "System," documenting his methods and hate crimes. Despite its historical and political importance, critical research on The Turner Diaries has been sparse- presumably because one finds simply reading it horrifying enough. Those critics who have examined the novel write about it as hate speech: condemning its politics and psychology, and critiquing its narrative failings.1 For example, in a insightful discussion of the novel's anti-Semitism and racism, Joe Lockard has noted that the novel "is not one that invites prolonged contemplation on issues of critical undecidability" and that the Aryan ideology exists "beneath a fairly crude narrative surface" (Lockard 121, 127). Evaluating the novel's obvious ideological contradictions, Jonathan Cullick has argued that "Turner assumes that the Organization has freed his intellect from the System, but he neglects to notice that the Organization has only provided him with a different kind of cognitive prison" (Cullick). Lockard's and Cullick's evaluations of the novel's literary merit are accurate. The Diaries are crudely written and the ethical position they invoke is not only repugnant, but also often inconsistent and self-contradictory. However despite these failings, a "cognitive prison" is exactly what the novel intends for its reader. As a piece of propaganda fiction it is not interested in trying to open up discussion or encourage deliberation and "undecidability," but instead seeks to trap its reader within its ideology, persuading through identification and imposing its ideological authority. While Cullick sees "the device of the diarist-narrator [as] merely the vehicle for a book that is intended to carry heavy ideological freight," the diaries and the framing narrative are not "merely" trappings, but calculated propaganda techniques (Cullick). The voices of the diarist narrator and the editor work in unison to promote the ideology of hate by urging the reader to identify with Turner while using editorial authority to foreclose ideological alternatives. …

Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books & the Unmasking of Cold War America by Matthew J. Costello