Revisiting Robert Frank's The Americans part 2 by Carol Wallwork

                                                                                           Welsh miners, Robert Frank, 1948                     
First published online February 19, 2009

“Never before have I experienced so much in one week as here.  I feel as if I’m in a film...This is really a free country, there’s only one thing you should not do, criticize anything,” Robert Frank wrote to his parents in Switzerland after his first week in New York City, 1947.


 Frank became quickly acquainted with a group of artists who would go on to determine the face of American art for decades to come:  painters Kline, de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko; photographers Richard Avedon, Russian photography teacher Alexey Brodovitch; poets and writers John Ashbery, Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Frank O’Hara. 


Brodovitch encouraged Frank to use a 35mm Leica instead of his more cumbersome, less fluid medium format Rolleiflex.  Frank was also persuaded to discard his more methodical Swiss approach to photography, and instead learn a more risk-taking American way.


These artists and writers embraced “the same romantic, almost heroic conviction in the redemptive quality of art, committed to breaking with the traditions of the past, celebrating art that was full of risk and highly expressive of personal experience,” Sarah Greenough wrote in her hefty, Looking In  Robert Frank’s The Americans.


By 1947 Frank discovered Bill Brandt,  a British documentary photographer expert at infusing his images with “loneliness..and images that showed Britain as a gloomy, class-bound society,” Greenough writes.  What most impressed Frank about Brandt was the way he infused seemingly documentary photographs with mystery.

Train leaving Newcastle 1930s photo Bill Brandt

  Misty Evening in Sheffield 1930s photos Bill Brandt

Frank knew he wanted to create picture stories in the style of Life magazine.  So he set out to try his hand by leaving fashion photography in New York in June 1948 to travel for 6 months in France, London, Wales, Italy, Switzerland, Cuba, Panama, Peru and Bolivia.

London 1951 photo by Robert Frank

The closest Frank ever got to
being published in Life was
coming in second place in a 1951
Life magazine’s Contest for Young Photographers.  His work appeared
November 26th.  Although he submitted
several photo essays to Life, including
his fine work of Welsh miners, Life
magazine said no.  Later, even after an extraordinary letter of endorsement from
his friend/mentor, Walker Evans didn’t
inspire Life to bite.

During this period, after 10 years studying and practicing photography, I contend Robert Frank captured his finest work.

My favorite image is called Horse and Sun/Peru 1948.  No Bill Brandt-saturated blacks here, high up in the Andean foothills.  It’s of a group of about six men, but only one of their faces is visible to the camera, the others you see only  their hats.  A person is approaching on a small horse or burro, dragging a white stick.  This figure adds some tension. 


The whole center of the image is filled with the man facing the camera.  He is bathed in a glorious  shaft of sunlight, a serape draped around his chest and he has an ecstatic smile, full of hope, optimism and the élan of youth.  The landscape is treeless, hard-looking, the dirt road winding ahead, into the middle distance.  The center figure is living in a hard land yet he has such delight, such free-spirited wonder.  It’s unlike any other Frank photograph, except maybe the one of his first wife Mary, called, My Family/New York City 1951, nursing their infant son with two cats.  This was before his book's success and the later tragedy befalling his family. First there was his divorce from his first wife then the death of his daughter and the diagnosis of his son with schizophrenia and early death. 


Most of the other photographs Frank took during this intermediate period between student and famous photographer have a classic documentary style, capturing old Europe, Central and South America.  One, called Dead Horse/Angers 1949 is quite possibly the most brutal image of a horse in existence, strung up like a dead rabbit, in an abattoir.  
                       

                                    Wales, Ben James and His Wife, 1953 Robert Frank

Wales, Ben James and His Wife, 1953  is a testimony to that odd moment when extreme contrast is a wondrous thing.  The mining couple’s small humble dining room almost glows from the light filtering in through the window.  The window, the tablecloth, the curved back of the miner on the floor, immersed in a large galvanized tub of murky water, scrubbing off coal dust, brings home the job of a miner more intensely than a dark candlelit pit. 


These photographs were done during documentary photography's noble period.  Frank captures the world of his subjects with great empathy, specially in Wales and South America.  These are the photos for which Edward Steichen said, “Frank demonstrated that he was more than capable of getting life and infusing the feel and atmosphere of subjects into his photographs.”  Steichen advised Frank to seek to penetrate deeper and closer into our brothers.


Influenced by Steichen and the 1939 novel How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn.  Frank went to Caerau, a mining village in Wales in March 1953 where he spent several days photographing Ben James and his life as a miner.  This in-depth method of a photographer immersion into the lives of subjects is a long-established one.  Some of Walker Evans best photographs of the Great Depression resulted from his summer spent with three families, along with writer James Agee, in 1936 in Hale County, Alabama.  Likewise W. Eugene Smith spent time in Minimata, Japan, poignantly documenting mercury poisoning of the fishermen in that village.


After Frank's intense period working as a documentary photographer in Europe and the Americas, he returned to New York City in 1953. He was particularly frustrated when Life magazine wouldn’t publish his photos. It was during this time he strengthened his relationships with the Abstract Expressionists painters and the Beat poets, which also contributed to his developing philosophy that art ‘was an expression of experience, not of fact.’  There is no reality except action, they declared, in the spirit of existentialist  philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.  “Feeling is what I like in art,” Kerouac said, “not craftiness and the hiding of feelings.”


Frank’s most helpful supporters at this time were Edward Steichen and Walker Evans.  Both believed him a capable photographer.  Evans went so far as to almost write Frank’s Guggenheim grant proposal, complete with how Frank should go about photographing The Americans.  Needless to say Evans helped Frank propose a classic documentary photographer’s methodology, using an anthropologist-sociologist approach to study our civilization.’


Frank applied for a Guggenheim fellowship to fund his road trip across America for several years, to produce a series of photographs capturing, along with Evans suggestions, ‘the impact of industrialization on people and families and the strong influence of women on all levels such as I have never seen in Europe.’  Frank got the fellowship.


After finishing photographing The Americans--all 764 rolls of film, 10,000 images--he said, “Black and white is the vision of Hope and despair.  That is what I want in my photographs.”  

                                    Fourth of July, Jay, New York, 1954 by  Robert Frank 

I do not like Frank's The Americans.  There may be three people in all his images that are halfway appealing.  Even the children look sad or sinister.  Frank’s dominant feeling looks like anger.  Or disdain.  Living in England for a time in the 1970s I felt that European scorn for the land of the Philistines.  What’s different about the reaction to The Americans is, for the first time, we Americans began to think this way too.

There is one image, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1955 that reminds me of what real life was like at that time.  It’s of a black woman sitting on a wooden chair in a field of wildflowers.  A telephone pole is just right of center looking like a cross.  The woman is dressed in a ruffle trimmed skirt, she is comfortably draped over the chair, leaning back, smiling.  It looks like sundown.  There is no pretense, no axe to grind, no political cynicism.  Just her and me, the viewer.  Walker Evans photographed Beaufort in the 1930s and told Frank to go there.  Frank was wise to listen to him.


Most of these photos are like watching a flat-character-ed old cowboy and Indian movie.  There’s no bead work, or wild rice, or myths. Just the bizarre battle scenes of whoops and flailing tomahawks. Frank failed to capture the other half of the story of us Americans.  His vision is of a mood, not in his subjects, who are too self-absorbed to be aware of moods, or of a country.  Frank’s brewing mood is a philosophical paradigm shift into cynicism, defiance, a Balkanization of classes, of vapidness taking hold in politics, entertainment, all, tragically, determining how we see ourselves.   It’s hard to achieve great things when we despise ourselves specially when we base our suppositions on a criteria other groups aren’t expected to match.


Frank has no photos of gardens, or quilts, or  the inside of spirited homes, of families eating together or washing, or attending church.  Maybe he thought those things sentimental. His Americans mainly live outdoors, or at gambling tables, or standing alone next to glowing juteboxes.  Cars are the most constant fixture, that and vacuous or suspicious faces.  How did these photos garner such power?  Fifty years on, we’re still looking at this flat view of ourselves.


Bibliography:
-Aperture Master’s of Photography Henri Cartier-Bresson (Aperture Foundation, New York 1976)
-Bourcier, Noel,  Andre Kertesz ( Phaidon Press Ltd., London 2001)
-Buell, Hal, Moments The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs (Black Dog & -Leventhal Publishers New York 1999)
-de Tocqueville, Alexis Democracy in America (1835)
-Frank, Robert, The Americans (SCALO Publishers New York-Zurich-Berlin 1958)
-Greenough, Sarah,  Looking In  Robert Frank’s The Americans (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 2009)
-Greenough, Sarah & Brookman, Philip, Robert Frank Moving Out (National    
 Gallery of Art, Washington DC 1994)
-Life Magazine, The Country Doctor (Time, Inc., New York 1948)
-Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower  (Alfred A. Knopf New York, 2006)

Revisiting Robert Frank's The Americans, part 1 by Carol Wallwork First published online Feb. 12, 2009

                                                                   Butte Montana 1956 by Robert Frank

In 1958 Elvis Presley was beginning his reign;  Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner were receiving Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes; The Honeymooner’s and Gunsmoke were the most watched t.v. shows, and Life and Look magazines were the major formats for photography.  Swiss photographer Robert Frank’s book, The Americans, published in the U.S. in 1958, slammed headlong into this cultural comfort zone and we haven’t been the same since. 

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC is celebrating the 50th anniversary of publication of Frank’s book with the exhibit, Looking in: Robert Frank’s The Americans, January 18-April 26, 2009, traveling to San Francisco, May 16-August 23, and New York City, September 22 -December 27, 2009.

                                                                              photo by W. Eugene Smith

One of the pinnacles of early post World War II documentary photography was W. Eugene Smith’s photo essay, The Country Doctor  published in Life Magazine 1948, documenting the daily life of an heroic Colorado physician as he cares for his multi-cultural community of hard scrabble farmers.

Photo by Bill Beall

The 1958 Pulitzer Prize photograph is of a young boy looking up, with a face as sweet as any on celluloid, into the ideal demeanor of a tall kindly policeman, at a Chinatown parade, reflecting earthy American goodness.   It was taken by Bill Beall, for the Washington (DC) Daily News,  and is the most endearing of any of the Pulitzer prize winning photographs in the history of the awards, from 1942 to the present.

You come away from such photojournalism feeling good about the world, hopeful, maybe even a little smug at being part of such a fine branch of humanity.  You feel none of those emotions viewing The Americans.  Frank never lets us forget the more venial side of America and the acute shortcomings of a “civilization born here and spreading elsewhere.” 

Like other foreign observers of America before him--such as Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America (1835-40) and Egyptian Sayyid Qutb in his Muslim Brotherhood manifesto, Milestones -- Frank’s otherness gave him a divergent perspective of American life.  The ‘outsider’ can see the good, the bad, a mirror reflection of himself or if truly gifted, the all.

               

                                            Bar, New York City 1955 by Robert Frank

Frank’s view of Americans was for the most part from the ‘bad school.’  He views us as odiously flat and wane, with none of the qualities that mark people of a noble civilization.  Frank’s impressions of America, circa 1955-58, seem inculcated with the equally severe view of humanity shared by Frenchman John Calvin (1509-1564) who for a time lived in Frank's home country of Switzerland. 

Reformed theologian Calvin’s interpretation of Scripture introduced such ideas as ‘total depravity’ and ‘limited atonement’ into the lexicon of Christian exegesis.  I can see those very qualities in Frank’s mid-20th century photographs of my fellow Americans. His subjects are often bawdy and shallow, with a commercial lust for canned music, Huey Long-style politicians and a weak faith.  Frank grabs them, shaping their image, with a stern, unforgiving eye.

I’m not preternaturally disposed to happy photographs.  My favorite photographers--Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, Andre Kertesz, for quick example,--have captured on film breathtaking atrocities but their genius is they’ve also captured human goodness, delight, humor and charm, creating what my English major classes taught me is a round vision of humanity.

                                  Funeral, St. Helena, South Carolina 1955 by Robert Frank

Where Frank’s outsider status and character did succeeded was in his images of black people and the issue of racism.  Many of these photographs convey an elegance and dignity of black culture that was largely ignored or invisible by much white society at that time.

                                                  Trolley, New Orleans 1955 by Robert Frank

                                                                                                         London street 1951  by Robert Frank

Background

It’s perennially annoying that most successful photographers’ early work is their best.  Much of Frank’s is no exception.  There’s more light and symbolism, less negativity.  There’s even real joy.  And more Life with a capital L even in scenes of death.

Robert Frank was born into a middle class family in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924.  His coming of age was surrounded by the rest of the world collapsing.  His German father immigrated to Zurich after training as an interior designer.  He imported radios from Sweden, maintaining a comfortable middle class lifestyle for his family, despite the severe challenges during the 1930s and the war years.  His father thought the spoken Swiss-German dialect “inhuman” and looked down on the Swiss.  Young Robert was affected by these difficult cultural, social and civic issues. 

After high school he knew he did not want to be involved with his father’s business, and material comfort was not important to him, unlike his father.  But he did have his father’s ambition to make a mark in the world.  Frank became an apprentice to a Zurich photographer.  He went on to get a thorough grounding in all aspects of photography, including advertising, publishing and cinema.

After the war Frank knew he didn’t want to stay in Switzerland, a place he regarded as too predictable and narrow.  He first went to Paris, then America.

Part 2:  Traveling around Europe, the Americas; Guggenheim Fellowship, and beyond...

                                                        New Mexico 1958 photo by Robert Frank

Bibliography:
Aperture Master’s of Photography Henri Cartier-Bresson (Aperture Foundation, New York 1976)

Bourcier, Noel,  Andre Kertesz ( Phaidon Press Ltd., London 2001)

Buell, Hal, Moments The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers New York 1999)

de Tocqueville, Alexis Democracy in America (1835)

Frank, Robert, The Americans (SCALO Publishers New York-Zurich-Berlin 1958)

Greenough, Sarah,  Looking In  Robert Frank’s The Americans (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 2009)

Greenough, Sarah & Brookman, Philip, Robert Frank Moving Out (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 1994)

Life Magazine, The Country Doctor (Time, Inc., New York 1948)

Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower  (Alfred A. Knopf New York, 2006)

For the Love of Books

      The Inspector Morse mysteries by Colin Dexter

First publshed online February 10, 2010

In the 1980s Jim introduced me to P.D. James.  I read each new novel published years apart.  I discovered the 14 Inspector Morse mysteries, written by Colin Dexter, a few months ago.   Needless to say they’re a fearsome but delicious distraction. 


Morse is a senior police detective in Oxford, England.  As a young man he dropped out of St. John’s College, Oxford. He was on track for a first but fell in love--lost his focus, the woman and his scholarship.  After leaving the Army he joined the police department.


Morse’s Christian name is Endeavor, not revealed until the second to the last Morse book, Death is Now My Neighbor.  “Morse, just call me Morse,”  he says.  His father was a fan of Captain James Cook who’s ship HMS Endeavor discovered Australia and New Zealand.  


He’s one of the most difficult of the English ‘gentlemen’ detectives---caustic-tongued, head-strong and drinks gallons of the best real ale.  He’s also a Times crossword puzzle doer, fretting when it takes longer than 8 minutes.  Colin Dexter pens crossword puzzles so wordy clues pepper his mysteries. 


Morse’ other passion’s are Wagner and opera.  He’s an intellectual snob and a bachelor not immune to attractive female witnesses/suspects.  He’s assisted by his trusty sergeant, Lewis.

Lewis is Morse’s polar opposite.  He’s a       

working class bloke from Wales in the
novels, Newcastle, in the TV series.  He
drinks in moderation, is com se com sa
about words and Wagner, and is happily
married.  He fetches Morse coffee and
beer, despite Morse’ indifference to
paying his fair share of the  pub tab.
  
Although Morse often misjudges suspects
he’s still the best detective in the Thames
Valley Police.   He regards the grunt work
of sleuthing beneath him, so rarely
acknowledges Lewis’ mastery at checking
alibis, corroborating witness statements with
other witnesses, record searches, etc., which
Lewis does with affable charm.   A mountain of random detail may overwhelm the average detective.  But Morse, like Sherlock before him, is a cut above, tapping into his attention to stray detail, intuition and remarkable memory.


You’ll learn much about Oxford reading these mysteries.  Many of the books have a map of the city although in the paperback versions it’s too small.  The colleges, Bodleian Library, Ashmolean Museum, Randolph Hotel and Cherwell River all figure prominently.  (Dexter lives in Oxford).


After the first few books I stopped trying to solve the Morse mysteries. They’re salted with too many characters and plot twists.  I read them because of Morse, Lewis and the locale.                    


                Lewis nodded again, then climbed the stairs, wondering
                that Monday morning how it would turn out-knowing              
                how Morse hated holidays; how little he normally enjoyed
                the company of others; how very much he enjoyed a very
                regular allotment of alcohol; how he avoided almost all
                forms of physical exercise. And knowing such things
                Lewis realized that in all probability he would fairly soon
                be driving Morse out to the Musac-free pub at Thrupp
                where a couple of pints of real ale would leave the
                Chief marginally mellower and where a couple of orange
                juices would leave the chauffeur (him!)  unexcitedly 
                unintoxicated.                                         
                                                                        --The Remorseful Day


Favorite stories are The Dead of Jericho and The Remorseful Day, which is the last Morse mystery and should be read only after reading all the others.

The novels in the series are:
Last Bus to Woodstock (1975)
Last Seen Wearing (1976)
The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977)
Service of All the Dead (1979)
The Dead of Jericho (1981)
The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983)
The Secret of Annexe 3 (1986)
The Wench is Dead (1989)
The Jewel That Was Ours (1991)
The Way Through the Woods (1992)
The Daughters of Cain (1994)
Death is Now My Neighbour (1996)
The Remorseful Day (1999)


There are also several Inspector Morse short stories in Morse’s Greatest Mystery and Other Stories

A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark 2007

 
The failure to forecast the 2008 banking crisis appears to stem, in part, from the fact that few fully understood how much risk there was in the global financial system.  There were too many   mathematicians posing as financial experts and economists who did  not have enough knowledge of economic history or long enough historical periods  with sufficient data to measure risk as as precisely as they claimed.  As a result we underestimated systemic risks...

 -A Talent for Missing Trends, Richard W. Rahn

Like me you’ve no doubt had time to fret about the economy lately. Lost jobs, slashed home and portfolio values, bailouts, persistent stock volatility, etc., all too close to home. Now's the perfect time to learn more about the dismal science.  Ten years ago would have been better but ‘better late than never.’  A Farewell to Alms:  A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark offers a start to educating ourselves about things we’ve left to the increasingly NOT SO expert experts.

Like much of our modern systems such as the  internal combustion engine, medical billing, water purification, etc., we know little about money, i.e. the how and whys of capitalism, socialism, communism or any of the hybrid variations in the world today. This book offers a base-line of economic smarts.

To study economics is at heart saturated with statistics, formulae (this book alone has a 23-page bibliography--all book and scientific journal references). Taken in small bites, a chapter at a time, it is as captivating as a good thriller (except the formulae).   Like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’ Das Kapital and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Clark’s template is the BIG PICTURE.  He also asks big questions:  Why are we at this economic juncture and not still hunter gatherers?  Why are some countries so rich and others so poor?  What does the future hold?

Although Clark is chair of the economics department of the University of California, Davis, most of his wealth of statistics are from England, which has the best statistical evidence of any country in the world, dating back to the 13th century.

Hunter gatherer societies are the most egalitarian.  In Mesopotamian the Agrarian Revolution millennia ago produced the first burst of great wealth, but not for everyone.  And on page one you learn that, “the average person in the world by 1800 AD was no better off than the average person of 100,000 BC.”  By page two you begin to see the true meaning of Industrial Revolution in this chart: 

The history of wealth in one picture

The economic history of the world is represented by a squiggly line with scant variation from 1000 BC until about 1800 AD.  The wonders of ancient Greece and Rome...mere blips in the increase of world wealth. The Black Death, a down tick, the Renaissance an uptick.

Not until the Industrial Revolution do we see a dramatic change in world economy.  Mill owners in a remote corner of northern England began grappling with a peculiar confluence of forces--new business models using capitalism, insurance (think Lloyd’s of London, established 1688), the application of water power with machine technology and consolidating the workforce--created the most formidable, indeed revolutionary change in wealth the world has ever experienced.  

This vertical, nearly tenfold increase of wealth was garnered by an equally revolutionary portion of the population: the non-ruling class-- unskilled workers, risk-takers, financially strapped entrepreneurs, prisoners and other disenfranchised land-strapped people traveling to the four corners of the world. Think Andrew Carnegie, Henry Shaw, James J. Hill, thousands upon thousands of European and Chinese migrants, African slaves against their will.  These disparate groups created farms, new businesses and railroads in America, Australia, South America, Asia and Africa, ushering in a era of all new wealth with the advent of rapid economic, social, political and physical change.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, changed how people saw wealth.  According to Smith wealth was no longer just what you could touch--gold, jewels, land, kingly power, hereditary title--but also what you could produce, ideas and labor to make other things possible.  “The real wealth of a country lies in its consumable goods and in the labour which produces them.”  This was a sea change in how we saw value, and in no small part influenced the necessary risk takers, within a few generations, to invest in the seemingly abstract factory model when it started to look promising.  Smith also noted that people work hardest for themselves, not for king or church.  He also advocated free trade and low taxation.  

The first nine chapters of A Farewell to Alms, published 2007 by Princeton University Press and written by Gregory Clark, uses a dark, Malthusian lens to examine world wealth before the Industrial Revolution.  Thomas Malthus you recall was a Cambridge educated minister in Surrey who published his most famous pamphlet, Essay on Population, 1798, postulating economic success is followed by an increased birth rate which taxes existing resources causing economic depression and famine.  “In the pre-industrial world sporadic technological advance produced people not wealth,” Clark says in chapter 2.  

Malthus’ ideal population would be in Malthusian Equilibrium when all of its production is used only for subsistence so the world’s poor would not increase in number.  Innovation, agricultural good years, charity and government assistance all contributed to more births and then inevitable decline, causing the Malthusian Trap.  These ideas are still very much debated today as they were 200+ years ago for often, in the West, the Malthus model is false, but sometimes not.  Europe’s population is almost four times what it was in Malthus’ day but Europe is noticeably wealthier.  Parts of Africa and Asia exemplify the dire Malthusian Trap. 

Part Two of A Farewell to Alms analyzes the Industrial Revolution, why it began in England and not other possible locales such as China, India or Japan. The last two chapters and the Conclusion grapples with why great swaths of the world’s population is still outside the loop of this extraordinary surge in affluence, and in many instances are now even poorer than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

In 1800 the wealthy were four times more affluent than the most destitute.  Today, the wealthy are now 40 times more wealthy than the poor.  “Within societies the forces set in motion by the Industrial Revolution have moved toward equality and social harmony.  But across societies, the Industrial Revolution led a marked increase in income differences.  Before the Industrial Revolution the rich and poor were close neighbors.  Now they are but distant cousins, gazing at each other across national borders and widening income gaps,”  Clark concludes.

Pre-Industrial labor was rewarded more for brute strength.

By the mid-1700s it took about 18 man-hours to turn a pound of cotton into cloth.  One hundred years late it could be done in 1.5 hours.  “Rising incomes switched the emphasis of production away from sectors such as agriculture (demanding strength) toward such sectors as manufacturing and service (dexterity and social graces became more important).  

“In 1886 women cotton weavers in Lancashire averaged 82 percent of male weaver’s production.  Nevertheless the average woman in cotton textiles earned just 68 percent of the average man’s wages because only men filled such skilled occupations as foreman, mechanic, or mule spinner.  But despite these barriers to promotion, women’s relative wage was already an improvement over the situation in pre-industrial agriculture,” Clark explains in Chapter 14, Social Consequences (of the Industrial Revolution).

  Although economists do not agree on what confluence of events spurred the development of the Industrial Revolution they can document the results.  There was marked improvement in many people’s lives.  “...Aspects of the quality of life including life expectancy, health, numbers of surviving children and literacy--the differences between rich and poor (within certain countries) have probably narrowed since the Industrial Revolution,” Clark states.  The value of land decreased too. 

The Industrial Revolution  The switch from an organic to inorganic system of energy maximized production but with an environmental cost.  Coal and iron were far more productive than plants and animals.  Sudden wealth led to cheaper land, more expensive labor, especially skilled laborers such as managers of mills and railroads, but created more pollution and, initially, disease because people were flocking to the growing cities.

The British dominated trade at the height of their empire which included most of India, Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Egypt.  The British policy of free trade did much to facilitate the growth of their markets.  In 1910 the total size of the open cotton textile market was about $400 million, with a quarter of world production controlled by the British.

“British imperialism contained the seeds of its own downfall.  It created growing cities such as Alexandria, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Shanghai that enjoyed the cheapest labor in the world; security of property; complete freedom to import technicians, machinery, capital, and even the entrepreneurs; easy access to the largest market in the world. This was the closest any society has ever gotten to Adam Smith’s ideal free market.  World War 1 ended this 100+ years experiment.

Clark’s analysis of England compares its development to Japan and China, circa 1600-1800.  These two Asian societies had many of the same components Clark describes as the ideal incubator for the Industrialization Revolution:

                    -stable institutions
                    -creation of well-defined property rights
                    -low inflation rates
                    -low marginal tax rates
                    -innovative ideas
                    -free markets and free trade
                    -avoidance of armed conflict

A curious historical difference between England and Asia was the  birth rate of the ruling classes.  The English ruling class was more successful at reproducing than the working class and the Japanese and Chinese ruling classes.  The only direction for a recently successful Englishman’s children to go financially was down. 

Wealth did not increase so much as get redistributed.  When another knight lost his title and property because he chose the wrong side to support in war or politics, for instance, a hypothetical young man, circa 1450 AD, could then be knighted after returning from the Crusades, thus joining the landed gentry, and going on to have five children surviving to adulthood.  Our nouveau riche knight’s children would then most likely marry beneath them because of the aforementioned limited pool of wealth, but taking literacy, knowledge of law and order, and a host of establishment values with them as they integrated with the merchant and working classes, spreading Clark’s list of ideal conditions throughout the society, over 500-600 years. Because ruling class Asians were less fecund this filtering down occurred more slowly.

The Great Divergence  “...Differences in income per person across economies can have only three basic sources: differences in capital per person, differences in land per person, and differences in efficiency,” Clark explains in Chapter 16, Proximate Sources of Divergence.  “...Poor economies since the Industrial Revolution have been characterized mainly by inefficiency in production.”  It has continually puzzled manufacturers and economists that poor countries, despite huge amounts of available investment capital worldwide did not take over the textile industry.  The British invested heavily in India to achieve this goal.  After importing textile machinery and managers, and with far less overhead for wages--the most expensive component of producing cloth--the productivity of Indian mills still could not compete with English mills.

Before World War II the inability of Asian, African and Middle Eastern workers to compete with industrialized Europe and North America was attributed to quality of labor.  After World War II it was attributed to quality of  management.  Surprisingly, as recently as 2004 the “U.S. production of apparel was still 42% of its consumption, despite having the highest labor costs.  American workers are simply far more productive.  Why is this?

Our Man in Havana*  Clark’s most engaging explication for the Great Divergence takes place in chapter 17, Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed?  In 1907 the Indian Factory Labour Commission reported on why Indian mills were not productive.  “A substantial faction of workers were absent on any give day.  Other workers would supervise the absentee workers’ machines while they were gone...The mill yards would have large eating places, barbers, drink shops and other facilities to serve workers taking a break.  Some mothers allegedly brought their children with them to the mills.  And workers’ relatives would bring food to them inside the mill during the day.  There was an utter lack of supervision in the Bombay mills. One manager stated the typical worker ‘washes, bathes, washes his clothes, smokes, shaves, sleeps, has his food, and is surrounded by his relations.’”  Needless to say English mills had shop foremen that ran their mills like battleships.  

The novel, The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, comes to mind.  It’s a story of a newly married Indian couple who move to America to study at MIT.  They are at the pinnacle of American university life but Boston is a cold city, especially juxtaposed with their memories of the vibrant and colorful city they left behind, as well as the fold of their extended family.  It’s the modern, dichotomy of work over hearth, and the difficulty of finding a place that meets both essential human needs.  

This may be the cumulative effect of the social genes Clark alluded to earlier--remember the nouveau riche knight?  Could this ability to sacrifice certain things be what propels some English to become more goal oriented at the expense of community and family?  

For many people at the bottom end of the income spectrum, such as Malawi, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe , Haiti, etc., the risk of violence or famine occurs too frequently causing the tensile social fabric to break.  The same is true for the richest countries, such as the United States, Britain, Germany, etc.  where drug use, consumerism and machines take over the roll of community.   

Impoverished economies can be nudged into remarkable innovation.  In 2006 Mohammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory and success with micro loans of sometimes only $25- $100 to very poor women to start small businesses that fit in with their family life.  It was often just enough to make all the difference in their lives.  They avoided usurious loan rates of conventional loans. This idea has spread to hundreds of countries throughout the undeveloped world.

We in the developed world can retire this catastrophic borrowing madness that’s weakened individuals, banks and whole governments and return to normal business models, only this time directing our energies toward more lasting needs such as designing homes that have a longer life span than 15 years.  No doubt each person that reads this blog has ideas how we can improve our economy which is what we do best: Innovate.

The title, A Farewell to Alms, I believe, is interwoven with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, about a soldier who is broken by life and ends up with nothing to fight.  A poem of that title was written by a contemporary of Shakespeare, George Peele.

                  A Farewell to Arms 

                      (To Queen Elizabeth)

            HIS golden locks Time hath to silver turn'd

            O Time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!

            His youth 'gainst time and age hath ever spurn'd,

            But spurn'd in vain; youth waneth by increasing:

            Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen;    

            Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

            His helmet now shall make a hive for bees;

            And, lovers' sonnets turn'd to holy psalms,

            A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,

            And feed on prayers, which are Age his alms:

            But though from court to cottage he depart,

            His Saint is sure of his unspotted heart.

           And when he saddest sits in homely cell,

           He'll teach his swains this carol for a song,—

           'Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well,
           Curst be the souls that think her any wrong.'

           Goddess, allow this agèd man his right

           To be your beadsman now that was your knight.

An aging warrior, now a monk, has gone from honoring his love of country in battle to saying prayers on his rosary (beads) for his Queen.  He no longer uses-or needs?- the ‘arms’ of the title.  Once we understand how wealth is created we will no longer need alms?  Or...You decide. 

This was a hard book to read and review.  There was so much information it made for slow reading, so data could percolate.  But by the time I got to the last few chapters I was able to use a more Socratic method of interpreting all the statistics, instead of simply trying to absorb them.  ‘Reminds me of when I spent three months reading Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, which weighs in at about 1000 pages.  Those weird characters kind of became part of my life for a while.  So much so it’s hard not to distinguish them from the real life events they were built around.  I’ll see if I begin to quantify each new garment I buy (amazingly, the Eileen Fisher tee shirt I bought in my Mall Musings was made in the USA!) or if I become inordinately curious about any factory I pass.  I understand more about how wealth is created after reading this remarkable book.