A shelf of new books examine race, exploration and the dubious actions of the CIA.
The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town (W.W. Norton), by Edward Berenson
On Sept. 22, 1928, Barbara Griffiths, 5, wandered into the woods outside Massena, N.Y., near the Canadian border. When she failed to return home, the townsfolk began searching. The town’s mayor and a state trooper spread a rumor that Jews were behind the disappearance. Massena became one of the only sites in the U.S. where the “blood libel” was hurled at Jews.
It’s an idea worthy of gothic horror, the prolific tales of Jews killing gentile children and using their blood in rituals (or in food). Blood libel originated in medieval England and spread across the European continent; although it was behind notorious incidents in Russia, blood libel rumors were more widespread in Western Europe, popularized by a French bestseller widely read in Quebec. The Accusation points a finger at French-Canadian workers at Massena’s Alcoa plant.
The Accusation’s author, New York University history professor Edward Berenson, can’t prove where the Massena rumor originated but has many interesting anecdotes to relate. Griffiths was found unharmed, but during her 24-hour absence the blood libel spread across the American press with the viral speed of today’s social media. Berenson summarizes the history of blood libel in Europe, Christian anti-Semitism and the immigrants who fled in large number to the U.S. to escape the mounting wave of anti-Semitism. They found prejudice here, too.
Berenson has a stake in The Accusation. He is descended from the small Jewish community in Massena at the time of the events he chronicles and incorporates family lore without getting in the way of the larger story.
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Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Charles Postel
America had always been a nation of joiners, but according to Charles Postel, Americans joined more organizations than ever once the Civil War ended—including many groups that pursued equality of opportunity for all citizens. The latest book by Postel, a San Francisco State University history professor, is a rebuke to the American folklore of rugged individualism and Horatio Alger success stories. In the late 19th century, labor unions, farmers associations and women’s groups were “widely understood as a means to pursue one’s individual social, economic and political interests, as well as the social good.”
Postel also explores the dark side to this earlier vision of collective action: Unions excluded immigrants, the farmers allied themselves with white Southern planters and women’s temperance groups worked with the Ku Klux Klan. Growing disparity of wealth in our own time threatens to return America to the era that is Postel’s subject. The author concludes that the problem of establishing “living forms of solidarity” in a socially divisive nation “remains unresolved.”
Escalante’s Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest (W.W. Norton), by David Roberts
Twenty-eight years before Lewis and Clark’s expedition to survey the West, a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélezde Escalante, set forth from Santa Fe to explore the West for Spain. While the barely literate Clark penned only a disjointed account, David Roberts finds that Escalante left behind a journal “coherent, succinct, yet full of curious asides.” The friar failed in his mission of converting American Indians to Roman Catholicism, and yet, unlike conquistadors before him and Anglos to come, he killed no one and did no harm. Roberts is struck by Escalante’s journal, which fused moral humility with a sense of cultural superiority while avoiding “the modern caricature of Native Americans living in wise and stoic harmony with the earth and their fellow man.”
Murder, Inc.: The CIA Under John F. Kennedy (Potomac Books), by James H. Johnson
John F. Kennedy was obsessed with Fidel Castro. He wasn’t content to overthrow the Cuban leader. He wanted Castro dead. In Murder, Inc., James H. Johnson examines the declassified documents and wonders why the Warren Commission and the FBI resolutely refused to investigate the possibility that Castro might have ordered Kennedy’s assassination as payback. After all, for three years, Kennedy’s CIA, working with the Mafia and Cuban exiles, tried to kill Cuba’s dictator by any means—even poison cigars. Johnson is not just another conspiracy theorist. A lawyer for the Senate committee that investigated the CIA in 1975, Johnson recalls the disingenuous testimony and, sifting through the trove of recently declassified Kennedy assassination documents, finds missing pieces. A negative portrait of the U.S. president emerges. His assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, remains murky as ever.
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (W.W. Norton), by Eric Foner
Books on the Reconstruction have been pouring from the presses. The latest, by Pulitzer-winning historian Eric Foner, opens with the full text of the 13th-15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which he credits as a “constitutional revolution” that forged new ideas about citizenship and equal rights. The Reconstruction period was intended as a time to implement those new standards, but good intentions were thwarted by the resistance of white Southerners and the endemic racism influencing policymakers in all parts of the country. Foner makes his case clearly: Citizenship is not to be taken for granted, and the rights enshrined in those amendments were first proposed by abolitionists and other pre-war reformers. However, it took a century for those amendments to be fully implemented and, in some sense, “Reconstruction never ended.”
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