Madness Writers

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Groupon, by contrast, is a much more old-school business. It doesn't have any obvious technological advantage. Its users don't really do anything other than hit the "buy" button. And its business requires lots of hands-on attention: thousands of salespeople to sell to and service local businesses, copywriters to come up with the right pitches for customers (Groupon's clever ad copy is one of its selling points). Groupon isn't just flinging piles of deals at users; the idea is that it's performing a "curatorial" role, and is relying on humans, instead of on Google-style algorithms. All these things are real assets—and a reason that Groupon is less vulnerable to competition than people think—but they're also very labor-intensive. Facebook, with five hundred million users, has fewer than two thousand employees, while Groupon, with some forty million subscribers, already has three thousand employees. Groupon can obviously add subscribers easily (all it has to do is send out more e-mails), but serving them enough deals to keep them happy is another matter: the more business it does, the more people it has to hire. Recently, Groupon has experimented with a self-service system, which would let it outsource some of the work to local merchants, who could set up virtual storefronts. But, unless it wants to abandon the approach that made it successful, scaling up will require more work and more workers than the Twitters and YouTubes of the world need.

This isn't an impossible task; Amazon succeeded in the face of similar obstacles. But, even if Groupon doesn't end up changing the way we shop, there's still a good chance that it will make a lot of money—maybe even more than some of its revolutionary brethren. When we think about the Internet, we often think of businesses in black-and-white terms: either they're huge, world-changing hits or they're flops. But that's a false dichotomy. These days, the Web is full of good, solid businesses that may not be remaking the world but that are helping give people what they want. If that's what Groupon ends up being, well, there are worse fates. ♦

Gulag Lite

by David Remnick December 20, 2010

Keywords Russia; Mikhail Khodorkovsky; Vladimir Putin; Trials; Josef Brodsky; Yukos; Frida Vigdorova

In 1964, a twenty-three-year-old poet was arrested by the Leningrad K.G.B. and charged with the crime of "malicious parasitism." His name was Josef Brodsky. One Communist Party newspaper denounced his poetry as "pornographic and anti-Soviet"; another noted archly that he wore "velvet pants." The authorities permitted him to testify in court, but they soon regretted their decision, and their failure to prevent a brave woman named Frida Vigdorova from taking notes on the proceedings. Vigdorova wrote down this exchange—the most famous legal exchange in Russia since Stalin's show trials—and the transcript was smuggled to the West:

JUDGE: And what is your profession?
BRODSKY: Poet. Poet and translator.
JUDGE: And who told you that you were a poet? Who assigned you that rank?
BRODSKY: No one. (Non-confrontationally.) Who assigned me to the human race?
JUDGE: And did you study for this?
BRODSKY: For what?
JUDGE: To become a poet? Did you try to attend a school where they train [poets] . . . where they teach . . .
BRODSKY: I don't think it comes from education.
JUDGE: From what, then?
BRODSKY: I think it's . . . (at a loss) . . . from God.

The judge sentenced Brodsky to five years of internal exile. Living in a village near the Arctic Circle, he crushed rocks and hauled manure by day. At night, he wrote, and he improved his English by reading Auden and Frost. Brodsky's mentor, the great Silver Age poet Anna Akhmatova, laughed at the K.G.B.'s shortsightedness. "What a biography they're fashioning for our red-haired friend!" she said. "It's as if he'd hired them to do it on purpose."

Akhmatova was hardly naïve about the capabilities of Soviet justice—she had lost a husband and countless friends in the Gulag—but she could see that the state was providing a linguistic genius with an aura of heroism. By the time Brodsky returned to Leningrad, he was a mature poet, whose brand of dissidence was an implacable disdain for the Soviet regime and an enduring devotion to the Russian language. The state soon found it necessary to exile this untamable creature abroad.

On December 15th, a Russian court with no greater sense of independence or justice than its Soviet forebears is expected to begin delivering judgment in the continuing saga of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Once the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky ran afoul of Vladimir Putin, and has spent the past seven years in various prison cells and a Siberian labor camp near the Chinese border. Just as his initial sentence, for a conviction on trumped-up charges of fraud and tax evasion, is coming to an end, he faces new charges and the prospect of fourteen more years in prison.

Khodorkovsky is no Brodsky, or Solzhenitsyn, or Sakharov. A functionary of the Young Communist League in college, he emerged in the post-perestroika period as one of a small breed of talented, visionary, rapacious, and, in some instances, thuggish businessmen, who made unheard-of fortunes through a combination of hustle, political connection, and outright larceny. The new Russian state suffered from a poverty of legal and business norms, and from a desperate need for capital. In 1995, the government of Boris Yeltsin instituted a "loans for shares" auction of the most precious and profitable state enterprises still in its possession—particularly oil and metals. Khodorkovsky, who had already started a bank and was close to various Kremlin officials, bought an oil company, called Yukos, for three hundred million dollars. By 2003, his personal fortune was estimated at eight billion dollars.

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Khodorkovsky exploited the lawlessness of the era no less than his fellow-oligarchs did, but he was more reserved than the rest. His displays of wealth were, by New Russian standards, old Wasp. He spoke softly and wore turtleneck sweaters. Over time, he also displayed unusual signs of independence from his Kremlin patrons. And, for Putin, there was the rub. Khodorkovsky began to see the necessity of playing a less sleazy game—not least in order to attract foreign investors. He hired Western consultants and lobbyists. He started funding human-rights groups, opposition political parties, and a charity called Open Russia. He talked about selling off a quarter of Yukos to ExxonMobil or Chevron, retiring from the business, and devoting much of his time to some kind of public service.

Putin, a former officer of the K.G.B., was especially infuriated by Khodorkovsky's attempt to negotiate independent deals with foreign partners. In the emerging system, widely known as Kremlin Incorporated, these were not the prerogatives of a private businessman. Putin had instructed the oligarchs that he would not question the origins of their lucre so long as they kept out of politics. And yet, in February, 2003, at a televised meeting at the Kremlin, Khodorkovsky sparred recklessly with Putin, challenging him on questions of government corruption, and implying that top state officials were pocketing millions in bribes. Privately, Putin told Lord John Browne, the former head of BP, "I have eaten more dirt than I need to from that man."

In October, 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested. With him out of the way, Yukos's huge oil fields and assets were absorbed by the state oil conglomerate, Rosneft. Igor Sechin, then Putin's chief deputy, added to his portfolio the chairmanship of Rosneft's board of directors. As if to illustrate further the new folkways of the authoritarian corporate state, Sechin's daughter married Dmitry Ustinov, a trainee in the secret services; Ustinov's father, Vladimir, was the prosecutor-general who initially directed the case against Khodorkovsky.

Khodorkovsky, who hardly set out to be a moral example, has been elevated by his persecutors. Many Russians still see him as a robber baron who got his comeuppance, but some have recognized his trials for what they are—absurdist acts of injustice no more respectable than the railroading of Josef Brodsky.

Khodorkovsky has shown an undeniable endurance. From his prison cells, he has written articles and given epistolary interviews in which he speaks up for democratic norms. Despite his suffering—he was stabbed by a provocateur in a Siberian prison camp—he has the decency to point out that many Russians today suffer even worse privations for equally bogus charges; he describes his airless destiny as "Gulag lite." Andrei Sakharov's widow, Elena Bonner, is among the pro-democracy activists who have come along to defend and define Khodorkovsky. "I think that any person becomes a political prisoner if the law is applied to him selectively, and this is an absolutely clear case," she said. "This is a glaringly lawless action."

The Khodorkovsky affair long ago erased any notion in Russia of an independent judiciary; it made plain that the courts do the bidding of a corrupt hierarchy that will stop at little to enrich itself. Khodorkovsky and his lawyers call themselves "realists." They understand that, although President Obama has raised the issue with Putin, the United States has other pressing business with Russia: nuclear-arms control, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran. But Russia undermines its pretense to modern statehood with such an appalling abuse of state power. Putin's ruthlessness is apparent. President Dmitry Medvedev ostensibly has the power to pardon, and he has shown some small measure of independence from his patron, speaking of the "legal nihilism" that prevails in Russia today. Does he have the capacity, much less the courage, to release Mikhail Khodorkovsky? ♦

Shouts & Murmurs

Santaleaks

by Ben Greenman December 20, 2010

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Keywords WikiLeaks; Santa Claus; Christmas; Leaked Documents; Elves; North Pole; "Fred Claus"

An analysis of more than a hundred thousand documents recently leaked by a disgruntled elf has revealed several surprising facts about the North Pole's most famous citizen.

· Santa and several top elves colluded to circumvent a ban on Chinese-made toys, despite pressure from the North Pole community to deliver only toys made locally.

· Santa has, over the years, acted to undermine potential successors, privately disparaging one of his nephews as "lazy," another as "not really committed to the whole Christmas thing," and yet another as "incapable of growing a beard of the appropriate size, if you know what I mean."

· Senior North Pole officials were astonished when an elf in Santa's cabinet proposed halting a long-standing program monitoring pouting and crying. "For years, we've been telling people that they'd better not do this," one said in a confidential cable, "and now we're removing all restrictions? What's next? Decriminalizing the failure to watch out?"

· After Santa suffered a serious hip injury, in the late seventies, the Prime Minister of Norway offered him access to several chimneys to conduct entrance and egress exercises.

· A reported mixup in 2004 that brought eleven-year-old Jack Keller, of Seattle, a book of math games instead of a football was not accidental: Santa was sending a message.

· During home visits last Christmas, Santa spied on the C.E.O.s of several Fortune 500 companies, and collected personal data including but not limited to credit-card and frequent-flier numbers.

· The song "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" has more basis in truth than was previously thought; elves worried for years about Santa's philandering, which began to decrease only recently, after Mrs. Claus discovered an illicit text message from an Arizona school-board member.

· Santa doesn't enjoy going to certain St. Louis suburbs. "They just give me the creeps," he told one top elf.

· Most cookies left out for Santa end up being fed to the reindeer.

· In 2007, Santa suppressed the delivery of gifts to more than a thousand residents of Los Angeles as a result of his displeasure with the movie "Fred Claus."

· Just this year, Santa accepted a payment of twelve million dollars to keep Charlie Sheen on the "nice" list.

· A potential environmental disaster was kept secret by the North Pole in 2008, after a large bag filled with painted blocks from Vietnam fell from Santa's sleigh into the Anglezarke reservoir, in Lancashire, raising fears of lead contamination. Elves with scuba gear and flashlights were sent in to retrieve the blocks under cover of night.

· Contrary to popular belief, Santa cannot really tell when you're sleeping or when you're awake, but he will fly into a rage if his ability to do so is questioned. ♦

Books

Staying Power

Mao and the Maoists.

by Pankaj Mishra December 20, 2010

Mao, in an official photograph, on a horse during a 1947 trip to north-central China. Two years later, his dominion was complete.

"A revolution is not a dinner party," Mao Zedong declared. Rather, as he helpfully clarified in 1927, it is "an insurrection, an act of violence." He might have warned that nation building is no picnic, either. Mao rose to supremacy within the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), through several bloody purges of "revisionists" and "rightists." After long years as a marginal peasant leader, he finally brought his revolution to all of China, forcing his great rival Chiang Kai-shek to flee to Taiwan (then called Formosa). Founding the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao exulted, "The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have stood up." He soon knocked them down, overwhelming the gradual processes of China's modernization with the frenzy of permanent revolution.

Modernizing autocrats elsewhere in Asia—Turkey's Atatürk, Iran's Reza Shah Pahlavi, and Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek—also dragooned their peoples into traumatic social and political experiments. But Mao tormented the Chinese on a far bigger scale, condemning tens of millions to early death with the Great Leap Forward, and then exposing many more to persecution and suffering during the Cultural Revolution.

Just five years after his death, the C.C.P. officially blamed the "mistaken leadership of Mao Zedong" for the "serious disaster and turmoil" of the Cultural Revolution, and the garishly consumerist and inegalitarian China of today seems to mock Mao's fantasies of a Communist paradise. Nevertheless, China's leaders today continue to invoke "Mao Zedong Thought." Taiwan, now rowdily democratic, has begun to dismantle the personality cult of Chiang Kai-shek, removing his statues and erasing his name from major monuments. But Mao still gazes across Tiananmen Square from the large portrait hanging on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Visitors from the countryside often line up all day for a fleeting glimpse of his embalmed corpse south of the square, and in folk religions throughout China Mao is revered as a god.

This persistence of Mao in official discourse and popular imagination may seem an instance of ideological pathology—the same kind that makes some Russian nationalists get misty-eyed about Stalin. Indeed, the Communist state's vast propaganda apparatus first exalted Mao to divine status. But then a non-ideological view of Mao has rarely been available in the West, even as he has gone from being a largely benign revolutionary and Third Worldist icon to, more recently, sadistic monster. This is largely due to China's ever shifting place in the Western imagination. Three new books—Patrick Wright's "Passport to Peking" (Oxford; $34.95), Frank Dikötter's "Mao's Great Famine" (Walker & Co.; $30), and Timothy Cheek's anthology "A Critical Introduction to Mao" (Cambridge; $27.99)—attest to the difficulty of definitively fixing Mao's image, a project that amounts to writing a history of China's present.

Early visitors to Mao's guerrilla base camp in Yan'an in the nineteen-thirties—notably the American writer Edgar Snow—managed to project onto the revolutionary the ideals of American progressivism. Snow's popular report "Red Star Over China" (1937) presented a "Lincolnesque" leader who aimed to "awaken" China's millions to "a belief in human rights," introducing them to "a new conception of the state, society, and the individual." More perceptively, Theodore White, then a reporter for Time, who visited Yan'an in 1944, concluded that the Communists were "masters of brutality" but had won peasants over to their side. Other "China Hands"—an assortment of journalists, American Foreign Service officials, and soldiers who succeeded in meeting the Communists—preferred Mao to Chiang Kai-shek, who, though corrupt and unpopular, was receiving enormous amounts of military aid from the United States. "The trouble in China is simple," Joseph Stilwell, the commander of U.S. Forces in China-India-Burma, told White. "We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son of a bitch." But, as the Cold War intensified, the China Hands found themselves ignored in the United States. Following Chiang Kai-shek's defeat and flight to Taiwan in 1949, the Republican Party angrily accused the Truman Administration of having "lost" China to Communism. Then they berated it for hindering Chiang Kai-shek's reconquest of the mainland. The China Hands in particular came under sustained fire from early and zealous Cold Warriors for their supposed sympathy with the Chinese agents of Soviet expansionism. Henry Luce, who saw the Christian convert Chiang Kai-shek as a vital facilitator of the "American Century," fired White from Time.

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The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist. The Eisenhower Administration now vigorously backed Chiang Kai-shek, signing a mutual-defense treaty with him in 1954, and threatening China with a nuclear strike the following year. The State Department imposed a full trade embargo on China and prohibited travel there. Sinologists were reduced to speculating from afar whether Mao was more nationalist than Marxist.

The god of Communism had failed for many admirers of the Russian Revolution by the time Mao reunified mainland China, in the early nineteen-fifties. Still, many Western intellectuals, recoiling from the excesses of McCarthyism, and hampered by lack of firsthand information, gave the benefit of the doubt to Mao in the decade that followed. Travelling to China in 1955, Simone de Beauvoir drew a sympathetic picture of a new nation overcoming the aftereffects of foreign invasions, internecine warfare, natural disasters, and economic collapse. Neither Paradise nor Hell, China was another peasant country where people were trying to break out of "the agonizingly hopeless circle of an animal existence."

The British visitors to China described in Patrick Wright's entertaining "Passport to Peking" tried to maintain a similarly open mind. Then as now, plenty of liberal as well as left-wing Brits resented their government's reflexive adherence to Washington's foreign policy. When China's urbane Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai made his first public appearance in Europe, many were persuaded that China was more than a clone of Soviet totalitarianism, and that "peaceful coexistence" was a real possibility. "Come and see," Zhou said, and a motley bunch of politicians, artists, and scientists took up his invitation in 1954. Among them were a few fellow-travellers, most notably the artist Paul Hogarth. Some, like members of the Labour Party delegation headed by former Prime Minister Clement Attlee, were seasoned anti-Communists. Others were simply self-absorbed tourists, routinely stumbling into comic misunderstandings. The British artist Stanley Spencer first accosted Zhou Enlai with a rapturous account of his native village of Cookham, and then went on about the delights of a little island in the Thames called Formosa, not realizing the name was shared by his hosts' fiercest international adversary.

The Chinese, who, Wright says, "had learned a lot from Moscow about the art of seducing foreign visitors," laid on extravagant banquets for the British. (The headline in the Daily Mail was "SOCIALISTS DINE ON SHARK'S FINS.") The mammoth Chinese construction of factories, canals, schools, hospitals, and public housing awed these visitors from a straitened country that American loans and the Marshall Plan had saved from financial ruin. They were impressed, too, by the new marriage laws that considerably improved the position of Chinese women, by the ostensible abolition of prostitution, and by the public-health campaigns.

Yet no "useful idiots" of the kind who had made the Soviet Union under Stalin appear the savior of humanity emerged from the trip. The parade held in Beijing to mark the fifth anniversary of the People's Republic reminded the philosopher A. J. Ayer of the Nuremberg Rallies. Though impressed by the "dedicated and dignified" Mao, the trade unionist Sam Watson was dismayed by Chinese talk of the masses as "another brick, another paving stone." Mao asked Attlee to help reverse the American policy of encircling his country through defense treaties with Southeast Asian countries and the rearming of Japan. Attlee firmly informed Mao that "two-way traffic was needed" for peace, and asked Mao to help persuade the Soviet Union to free its satellite states in Eastern Europe.

Other European visitors to China were relative pushovers. François Mitterrand, who visited China at the height of the devastating famine in 1961, denied the existence of starvation in the country. André Malraux hailed Mao as an "emperor of bronze." Richard Nixon, who consulted Malraux before "opening up" China to the United States in 1972, and Henry Kissinger were no less awed by Mao's raw power and historical mystique. Two decades after Nixon himself denounced China as Stalin's puppet state in the East, the country seemed to the United States a likely counterweight to the Soviet Union. Accordingly, American attitudes to China in the nineteen-seventies were marked by what the Yale historian Jonathan Spence characterized as "reawakened curiosity" and "guileless fascination," followed soon by "renewed skepticism" as travel and research in China became progressively easier.

In the seventies and eighties, American scholars and journalists could finally experience the realities they had only guessed at, and they began compiling a grim record of China under Mao—a task that was speeded up by Deng Xiaoping's repudiation of the Cultural Revolution after Mao's death, in 1976. More Chinese also began to travel outside their country. Some, safely settled in the West, published memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. This fast-growing genre, which flourished particularly after the brutal suppression of the protests in Tiananmen Square, in June, 1989, described the violence and chaos suffered by ordinary Chinese during Mao's quest for ideological and moral renewal. One émigré Chinese writer, who had previously been Mao's private doctor, published the first intimate account of the Chinese leader, "The Private Life of Chairman Mao" (1994). It depicted a luxury-loving narcissist who was at once autocratic, whimsical, and calculating.

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's best-selling biography "Mao: The Unknown Story" (2005) went much further, describing a man who was unstintingly vile from early youth to old age. Far from Edgar Snow's champion of human rights, this particular Mao was working toward "a completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility." In Chang and Halliday's account, Mao killed more than seventy million people in peacetime, and was in some ways a more diabolical villain than even Hitler or Stalin. The authors claimed—among other comparisons they made to twentieth-century atrocities—that the victims of the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) were worse off than the slave laborers at Auschwitz.

In "Mao's Great Famine," Frank Dikötter, a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Hong Kong, deepens this trend in Mao studies. Boldly and engagingly revisionist in his previous books—which stressed the benefits of opium smoking to the Chinese and judged China under Chiang Kai-shek to be vibrantly cosmopolitan—Dikötter hopes that his new book will help make the famine "as well known as the two other man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century, the Holocaust and the Gulag." Drawing on fresh research and a new tally, Dikötter revises upward the commonly accepted estimate of thirty million deaths in these four years, exceeding the thirty-eight million proposed by Chang and Halliday. His conclusion: out of a total population of six hundred and fifty million, "at least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962." This is still a conservative estimate, he judges, and by the end of the book Dikötter speculates that the body count could be as high as sixty million. Not only that: Mao also precipitated the biggest demolition of real estate, the most extensive destruction of the environment, and the biggest waste of manpower in history.

How did this come about? Dikötter is not much interested in a wide-ranging account that would necessarily include China's internal political and economic situation in the nineteen-fifties, the shifting hierarchy of the C.C.P., or the Chinese sense of siege following the Korean War and the sharpening of Cold War divisions in Asia. He describes in some detail Mao's personal competitiveness with Khrushchev—made keener by China's abject dependence on the Soviet Union for loans and expert guidance—and his obsession with developing a uniquely Chinese model of socialist modernity. Hence the Great Leap Forward, which Mao designed to boost China's industrial and agricultural output and move the country ahead of the Soviet Union as well as Britain in double-quick time. An urban myth in the West held that millions of Chinese had only to jump simultaneously in order to shake the world and throw it off its axis. Mao actually believed that collective action was sufficient to propel an agrarian society into industrial modernity. According to his master plan, surpluses generated by vigorously productive labor in the countryside would support industry and subsidize food in the cities. Acting as though he were still the wartime mobilizer of the Chinese masses, Mao expropriated personal property and housing, replacing them with People's Communes, and centralized the distribution of food.

Organized in very short chapters, Dikötter's book takes its reader through a brisk tour of the follies, inefficiencies, and deceptions of Mao's commandeered economy: impossible targets, exaggerated claims, maladroit innovation, lack of incentive, corruption, and waste. Ordered to go forth and make steel, Chinese flung anything they could find—pots, pans, cutlery, doorknobs, floorboards, and even farming tools—into primitive furnaces. Meanwhile, fields were abandoned as farmers fed furnaces in giant coöperatives, worked in similarly wasteful irrigation schemes, or migrated to urban factories in their millions.

Having mobilized the masses, Mao continually searched for things for them to do. At one point, he declared war on four common pests: flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows. The Chinese were exhorted to bang drums, pots, pans, and gongs in order to keep sparrows flying until, exhausted, they fell to earth. Provincial recordkeepers chalked up impressive body counts: Shanghai alone accounted for 48,695.49 kilograms of flies, 930,486 rats, 1,213.05 kilograms of cockroaches, and 1,367,440 sparrows. Mao's Marx-tinted Faustianism demonized nature as man's adversary. But, Dikötter points out, "Mao lost his war against nature. The campaign backfired by breaking the delicate balance between humans and the environment." Liberated from their usual nemeses, locusts and grasshoppers devoured millions of tons of food even as people starved to death.

While food shortages deepened, the Chinese regime continued to insist on huge grain procurements from the countryside. The aim was not only to maintain outstanding export commitments but also to protect China's image in the world. According to Dikötter, Mao ordered the Party to procure more grain than ever before, declaring that "when there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill." In 1960, the worst year of the famine, which was exacerbated by drought as well as flash floods, grain was sent, often gratis, to Albania, Cuba, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Poland.

Not all Chinese died of starvation or of the diseases that accompany malnutrition. "Coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward," Dikötter writes, estimating that at least two and a half million were worked, tortured, or beaten to death or simply executed by Party officials, and between one and three million people committed suicide. Some of those who survived did so by selling or abandoning their children or by digging up and devouring the dead.

Dikötter closes his vivid catalogue of horrors with the "turning point" of the Party meeting in early 1962, where Mao's colleague and head of state Liu Shaoqi admitted that a "man-made disaster" had occurred in China. Dikötter evokes Mao's fear that Liu Shaoqi could discredit him just as completely as Khrushchev had damaged Stalin's reputation. The book ends with a chilling foretaste of the next catastrophe to overwhelm China: "Mao was biding his time, but the patient groundwork for launching a Cultural Revolution that would tear the party and the country apart had already begun."

This narrative line is plausible: exhorting young Chinese to assault the allegedly expanding bourgeoisie within the Party, Mao hoped to preserve his power and revolutionary legacy from bureaucratic "revisionists" like Liu Shaoqi, who was among the leaders who died at the hands of the Red Guard. Yet Dikötter's account of Mao's inner life scants some crucial details that would give a richer picture of his motivations and his constant maneuvering within the Party, while also undercutting the image of him as an indefatigable megalomaniac; for instance, the fact that Mao, after resigning as head of state in 1959, was unhappy with his diminished role in day-to-day decision-making, or that he had already called for a major change of course in November, 1960, and criticized himself at the Party Conference in 1962.

Dikötter is, indeed, generally dismissive of facts that could blunt his story's sharp edge. Explaining Mao's well-known defense of farmers' evading grain procurers in 1959 and his advocacy of "right opportunism," Dikötter writes, "Mao took on the pose of a benevolent sage-king protective of the welfare of his subjects," but, he says, historians have erred in seeing this period as "one of 'retreat' or 'cooling off.' " This would be persuasively contrarian if Dikötter hadn't mentioned four pages previously that while Mao was pretending to be a "benign leader," from November, 1958, to June, 1959, "the pressure temporarily abated."

Focussing relentlessly on Mao's character and motivations, Dikötter confirms the man's reputation as sadistic, cowardly, callous, and vindictive. Yet his bold portrait bleaches out much of the period's historical and geopolitical backdrop (the uprising in Tibet in 1959, anti-American riots in Taiwan, border clashes with India, the Sino-Soviet rift), and he misses, too, the abusive relationship between Mao and the Chinese people: how sincerely and deeply, for instance, they trusted and revered their leader before being betrayed by him.

Dikötter's explanation of the Great Leap Forward omits the fact that—despite the damaging effects of the Korean War and the American trade embargo—China had, by 1956, made remarkable progress in securing social stability, achieving economic growth, and improving living conditions. According to Roderick MacFarquhar, a leading historian of Mao's China, "what Mao accomplished between 1949 and 1956 was in fact the fastest, most extensive, and least damaging socialist revolution carried out in any communist state." The distinguished expatriate writer Liu Binyan recalled the early nineteen-fifties as a time when "everyone felt good . . . and looked to the future with optimism"; most were eager to do their bit for their country.

Little did these enthusiasts know that they were about to be kicked in the teeth. Dikötter doesn't make the imaginative move into ordinary people's lives, their longings for stability and dignity, which Mao's utopianism so cruelly trampled. The manifold victims in "Mao's Great Famine," keenly computed but cursorily described, remain a blur. And Dikötter's comparison of the famine to the great evils of the Holocaust and the Gulag does not, finally, persuade. A great many premature deaths also occurred in newly independent nations not ruled by erratic tyrants. Amartya Sen has argued that "despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former." Describing China's early lead over India in health care, literacy, and life expectancy, Sen wrote that "India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame."

The discrepancy between democratic India and authoritarian China is due to a complex interplay of political, geographical, and economic factors. Certainly, it cannot be explained through the fantasies and delusions of an Oriental despot. Mao's individual pathology goes only so far in explaining China today, and it is pretty much useless in figuring out the Chairman's enduring, even growing, influence outside China. What, for instance, is one to make of the irruptions of Maoism in the age of globalization? The Maoists of Nepal, who overthrew the monarchy in 2006 and won nationwide elections in 2008, remain a formidable political force. The Indian Maoists, whom India's Prime Minister describes as the country's gravest internal-security threat, are ranged against mining corporations and security forces in a vast swath of central India. Consisting largely of forest-dwelling peoples and landless peasants, these insurgent groups mouth a Mao-inspired rhetoric against foreign imperialists and local "compradors." But, like Che Guevara and the Vietcong, they also adopt Mao's tactic of marshalling rural populations against the cities, establishing, in addition to a cohesive party and militia, their own administrative structures and organizations.

This model of mass mobilization was Mao's singular contribution to the making of the modern Chinese nation-state, though it also nearly unmade China after 1949. The most stimulating chapters in the academic collection "A Critical Introduction to Mao," edited by Timothy Cheek, discuss Mao's "Sinification" of a European tradition of revolution. Mao belonged to a Chinese generation of activists and thinkers who developed a fierce political awareness at the end of a long century of internal decay, humiliations by Western powers and by Japan, and failed imperial reforms. Whatever their ideological inclinations, they all believed in a version of Social Darwinism—the survival of the fittest applied to international relations. They worried about the social and political passivity of ordinary Chinese, and were electrified by the possibility that a strong, centralized nation-state would protect them from the depredations of foreign imperialists and domestic warlords. As Sun Yat-sen, China's first modern revolutionary, explained in a speech shortly before his death, in 1925, "If we are to resist foreign oppression in the future, we must overcome individual freedom and join together as a firm unit, just as one adds water and cement to loose gravel to produce something as solid as a rock."

Others took on the arduous task of welding a defunct empire into a nation-state, most prominently Chiang Kai-shek, whose urban-based Nationalist Party first brought a semblance of political unity to postimperial China. But it was Mao who, helped by a savage Japanese invasion and Chiang Kai-shek's ineptitude, came up with an ideologically like-minded and disciplined organization capable of enlisting the loyalty and passions of the majority of the Chinese population in the countryside. More enduringly, Mao provided a battered and proud people with a compelling national narrative of decline and redemption. As he stressed shortly before the founding of the People's Republic, "The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments." This would change: "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. . . . We will have not only a powerful army but also a powerful air force and a powerful navy." Unlike India and Nepal, China contains very few active Maoists today, but strains of Mao's anti-imperialist rhetoric grow more potent every year. As Timothy Cheek, a historian at the University of British Columbia, explains, "Most people in China appear to accept the assumptions in this story about China's national identity, about the role of imperialism in China's history and present, and about the value of maintaining and improving this thing called China. Increasingly, moreover, China's middle classes accept the additional story in Maoism—the story of rising China: China was great, China was put down, China is rising again."

Though better informed about Mao's calamitous blunders, Chinese intellectuals today are far from united in their assessment of him. Attacked for his despotism by liberal-minded scholars, Mao is admired by New Left intellectuals for his assault on Communist bureaucracies and advocacy of "extensive democracy" during the Cultural Revolution. Summing up the diverse and contested meanings of Mao in China, Xiao Yanzhong, a professor at People's University in Beijing, describes Mao scholarship as "a bellwether that can indicate changes in China's politics, economy, and society, as well as the states of mind of the Chinese people."

Certainly, the C.C.P., which remains as opposed to free elections as ever, has no choice but to derive its legitimacy from Mao Zedong even as it drifts further away from his ideals. Shortly after the sixtieth anniversary of the People's Republic last year, the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, visited the tomb of Mao Anying, Mao's favorite son, who died in the Korean War. Laying a wreath, Wen abruptly addressed a stone statue of the dead soldier. "Comrade Anying," he said, "I have come to see you on behalf of the people of the motherland. Our country is strong now and its people enjoy good fortune. You may rest in peace."

Comrade Wen surely realizes that, absent Mao's exploits, the Chinese people would have started to enjoy their present good fortune three decades earlier. But would China have found a strong political basis for its prosperity without Mao? This is the harder counterfactual question. Asked for his views on the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai replied that it was too early to say; and he must have hoped for a similarly delayed verdict on the Chinese Revolution, the human costs of which truly did make the Reign of Terror look like a dinner party. Zhou, in pleading for the long view, was not being entirely shifty (nor is George W. Bush, who, after unleashing violent revolution in Iraq, has also entrusted his score sheet to future historians).

We have surely made up our minds about Mao. But the Chinese judgment on Mao's revolution has been complicated and deferred by the longevity of the Communist regime and the country's extraordinary economic successes. Another revolution, such as the one that has occurred in Taiwan, could bring, along with political freedoms, a new self-image to China, which would likely disown Mao. But it is also possible that the Chinese nation will continue in the decades ahead to acknowledge Mao as its father—disgraced, discredited, and irreplaceable. ♦

Books

Tea and Antipathy

Did principle or pragmatism start the American Revolution?

by Caleb Crain December 20, 2010

Boston merchants may have instigated early unrest to protect smuggling profits.

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Related Links Ask the Author: Join a live chat with Caleb Crain about the Tea Party on Wednesday, December 15th, at 3

Keywords American Revolution; Tea Party; "As If an Enemy's Country" (Oxford; $24.95); Richard Archer; "American Insurgents, American Patriots" (Hill & Wang; $27); T. H. Breen; "Defiance of the Patriots" (Yale; $30)

What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two. "One side of the face blazed of an intense red, while the other was black as midnight," he wrote. This uncanny visage appears in Hawthorne's tale "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," of 1831; its owner rides on horseback through moonlit Boston streets, carrying a drawn sword and leading a mob of people who laugh and shout as they wheel along a rich elderly man whom they have tarred and feathered.

Hawthorne's "double-faced fellow" was modelled on a historical figure who went by the pseudonym Joyce Jr. and, in the seventeen-seventies, claimed to lead Boston's Committee for Tarring and Feathering. In 1777, Abigail Adams recorded the charges against five merchants who were his victims: "It seems they have refused to take paper money, and offered their goods lower for silver than for paper." During wartime, anxieties about hoarding and profiteering no doubt shortened tempers, and, in the Boston Gazette, Joyce Jr. threatened "Judgment without Mercy" to anyone else guilty of "such nefarious Practices." Joyce Jr. had little of the dignity that we associate with the Founding Fathers; his tone was bitter, and, more important, his grievance was mercenary rather than ideological.

His method of punishment, however, became iconic. Tarring and feathering was so popular in New England in the seventeen-sixties and seventies that at least one observer thought Americans had invented it, though in fact it has been around since at least the twelfth century. What was it like? Pine tar, used to waterproof ships, is liquid at room temperature and, in most cases, was probably applied unheated. Feathers were obtained either from fowl (the smellier the better) or from cushions. The third and most essential ingredient was exposure. One customs agent was kept outdoors in his "modern jacket" until he was frostbitten. "They say his flesh comes off his back in Steaks," a woman reported afterward. Victims felt a lingering shame, though the frostbitten customs agent, a resilient personality, petitioned King George III to dub him a "Knight of the Tarr."

Few victims held the high social status of the elderly gentleman in Hawthorne's tale, but he, too, seems to have had a historical model. Hawthorne was probably thinking of Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, whose Boston town house was destroyed, in 1765, by a mob upset by Parliament's new stamp tax on the colonies' newspapers, legal documents, and pamphlets. Hutchinson and his family fled their supper table just minutes before a crowd screaming "Liberty and property!" axed open the doors of their home. As Richard Archer notes, in "As If an Enemy's Country" (Oxford; $24.95), a lively and sympathetic history of pre-Revolutionary Boston under British occupation, the rioters scattered or stole nearly everything inside, including jewelry, dishes, furniture, paintings, about nine hundred pounds in cash, and an archive of New England history that Hutchinson had spent thirty years collecting. "I see they threatened to pitch and feather you," George III later observed, during a debriefing with Hutchinson, who by then had served as Massachusetts's second-to-last royal governor. Hutchinson, a slender, fastidious man who liked to debate political philosophy, corrected him: "Tarr & feather, may it please your Majesty."

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"Insurgencies are not movements for the faint of heart," T. H. Breen writes, in "American Insurgents, American Patriots" (Hill & Wang; $27), a scholarly, unnerving account of the American Revolution's darker side—the violence, death threats, false rumors, and extremist rhetoric that introduced a new political order. Breen suggests that Americans today "have come to regard insurgency as a foreign and unpleasant phenomenon" and are now so imperial in outlook that we'd rather not remember that American revolutionaries, too, were irrational and cruel. The implied comparison with the contemporary insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan is interesting, but over the past two years the history of America's first insurgency has taken on a new pertinence, as the Tea Party movement has laid claim to its anti-tax and pro-liberty principles—and has inadvertently reproduced its penchant for conspiracy theory, misinformation, demagoguery, and even threats of violence. Furthermore, in much the way that journalists have begun to ask whether shadowy corporate interests may be sponsoring today's Tea Party, historians have long speculated that merchants may have instigated early unrest to protect smuggling profits from British regulators—that the start of the Revolution may have been Astroturfed. Archer's history focusses on the years 1768 to 1770, and Breen's on 1774-75; Benjamin L. Carp's assiduously researched "Defiance of the Patriots" (Yale; $30) tackles the 1773 Tea Party itself. Breen is not concerned with the revolutionaries' financial motives, and Carp sometimes takes the rebels' rhetoric at face value. Nonetheless, the three books together offer a chance to ask new questions about the American Revolution, including one that the conventions of political sentimentality usually render unspeakable: Was the Tea Party even such a good idea the first time around?

In pre-Revolutionary Boston, merchants and government officials were often at odds, because economics more or less required some merchants to break the law. Americans spent about a tenth of their income on manufactured goods from Britain, but Britain wanted little that New England was selling. To keep the cash flowing, Boston merchants therefore sold to planters in the French West Indies, who fed New England's low-quality dried fish to their slaves and made barrels for their molasses from New England timber. Inconveniently, Britain taxed molasses from foreign countries a burdensome sixpence a gallon and, from 1756 to 1763, during a war with France, outlawed molasses from the French West Indies entirely. So merchants smuggled. For a bribe of between half a penny and one and a half pence per gallon, a typical British customs official was willing to shrink the reported amount of non-British molasses on board a ship by a factor of ten. The scale of the deception can be estimated by comparing customs records with insurance records: though smugglers lied to the government, they told the truth to their insurers. The historian John W. Tyler, in his book "Smugglers and Patriots" (1986), identified twenty-three Boston smugglers from insurance records and suggested that there were many more. He also discovered that these illicit traders were highly influential among political radicals.

It seems to have been bad feeling between merchants and magistrates that led to the sacking of Hutchinson's town house. The seventeen-sixties saw the introduction of two new laws, the universally unpopular Stamp Act and, more damaging for merchants, the Sugar Act, which altered tariffs to discourage smuggling and altered the judicial system to make it easier to win convictions. To fight both measures, radicals like Samuel Adams hit on the idea that Parliament's laws were invalid if they were "unconstitutional," then a relatively new word. Adams argued that the traditional British balance of powers and liberties was violated if Parliament taxed Americans, who weren't represented in it.

In addition to rhetoric, a follow-the-money investigation indicates that Adams took coarser measures. As one of Boston's tax collectors, he stayed popular by collecting very little, but on August 12, 1765, he uncharacteristically took out a warrant to seize back taxes from a shoemaker named Ebenezer Mackintosh, a rabble-rouser who led an annual parade at which effigies of Satan and the Pope were burned. Around the same time, a club of small businessmen known as the Loyal Nine, with whom both Adams and the city's merchant élite were friendly, recruited Mackintosh to incite public disturbances against the new laws. On August 14th, Mackintosh's rioters pulled down an office built by the colony's appointed stamp distributor, beheaded an effigy of him, and broke into his house. The stamp distributor resigned twice—first by letter, and then, when another riot threatened, a few months later, in person, under an elm that became known as the Liberty Tree. "We do every thing in order to keep this and the first Affair Private," a merchant in the Loyal Nine wrote to a friend after the second resignation, "and are not a little pleas'd to hear that Mackintosh has the Credit of the whole Affair." Though Mackintosh never paid his delinquent taxes, Adams returned the warrant against him to the court unused. The Loyal Nine rewarded Mackintosh with a gilt uniform and a speaking trumpet, with money provided by John Hancock—one of the city's richest merchants and a probable smuggler, and thought by one loyalist detractor to be "as closely attached to the hindermost Part of Mr. Adams as the Rattles are affixed to the Tail of the Rattle Snake." Mackintosh led the crowd that, two weeks later, destroyed Hutchinson's home, though perhaps not at the bidding of Adams, who in a letter deprecated the "truly mobbish Nature" of the attack. Mackintosh was briefly detained, but, after a gentlemen's militia threatened not to defend the customhouse from future mobs, the sheriff let him go.

In the spring of 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act and revised its trade laws, replacing a threepence duty on foreign molasses with a one-penny duty on all molasses—about what a bribe had cost. Now that legally imported molasses was cheap, Boston's smugglers turned to wine from Madeira and the Azores, which was heavily taxed, and to Dutch goods, which it was against British rules to import directly to the colonies. Although the colonists were still being taxed and still had no representation in Parliament, protest faded. "Were the people of Boston therefore hypocrites?" Archer asks. "There is no simple answer to that question."

The stamp-tax riots set a pattern, and when, in 1767, Britain further strengthened the customs service and levied new taxes, Boston merchants—smugglers in the lead—again organized the resistance, this time through an agreement not to import British merchandise. The agreement, though ostensibly a matter of principle, was financially very convenient. Easy credit from Britain had glutted Boston with manufactured goods and had tripled the number of the city's shopkeepers who moonlighted as importers. Non-importation gave more established merchants a chance to restrict supply, sell off inventory, and thin out the ranks of their rivals.

Legally, the merchants couldn't enforce compliance, so they set about turning public opinion against those who resisted. The non-importers published the names of holdouts and called on Bostonians to boycott them. (Embarrassingly, a loyalist newspaper retaliated by printing the ship manifests of the non-importers, some of whom turned out to be importing after all; Hancock, for example, had brought five bales of fine linen into Boston four months after the agreement went into effect.) A series of street actions was also arranged. This time, the merchants' populist intermediary was William Molineux, a smuggler, embezzler, and sometime hardware merchant who became known as "the first leader of dirty matters." Windows were smashed, homes were smeared with feces and urine, and one holdout merchant was carted through town with a supply of tar and feathers until he requested permission to leave Boston forever. Customs agents were manhandled and hanged in effigy—those who seized a sloop of John Hancock's were stoned—and in October, 1768, British troops moved into the city and occupied it for a year and a half.

All in all, the campaign worked so well that the merchants found it difficult to extricate themselves when Parliament, in April of 1770, repealed all the duties except one, on tea, which George III thought Parliament should retain so as to "keep up the right." The tea tax had become a symbol, and it infuriated the populace. But the businessmen thought they could live with it; by 1770, supplies were beginning to run low and prices of most goods were pleasantly high. The merchants began to hold private meetings; one complained that it wasn't fair for non-merchants to prevent merchants from dissolving an agreement made among themselves. In October, the merchants scrapped non-importation, and some non-merchants felt betrayed. "Great Patriots," a Worcester man sneered to John Adams, Samuel Adams's then less famous cousin, "were for Non Importation, while their old Rags lasted, and as soon as they were sold at Enormous Prices, they were for importing."

For the next three years, Americans ostensibly boycotted the tea of the East India Company, Britain's licensed monopoly provider, though in practice they drank what they liked. Indeed, for consumers, anger over the tea tax had never made much economic sense. For one thing, many drank Dutch-supplied tea, which was smuggled and therefore tax-free. Benjamin Woods Labaree, the most attentive scholar of the Colonial tea trade, estimates that three-quarters of the 1.2 million pounds of tea that Americans consumed each year was smuggled. Meanwhile, the tax on legal tea was largely offset by a tea-tax refund passed the same year. But in 1772 that tax refund shrank, making British tea more expensive and enhancing smugglers' price advantage. Tea piled up in the British warehouses of the East India Company, which owed money to the British government and also needed to ask it for a loan. Someone had an idea: why not raise cash by dumping the company's surplus tea on the American market? Parliament agreed to help by restoring the old refund in full and by allowing the company to export tea directly rather than through merchant middlemen. With the new measures, the price of legal tea was expected to halve. Consumers would save, Parliament needn't lose quite so much on its bailout of the East India Company, and smugglers would be driven out of business.

Boston's big businessmen felt threatened. Not only might smuggling cease to be profitable but, if the experiment of direct importation were to succeed, it might cut them out of the supply chains for other commodities as well. Clearly, it was time for Sam Adams and William Molineux to rile up the public again. At the start of November, 1773, a public letter summoned merchants expecting tea consignments from the East India Company to the Liberty Tree. When they failed to appear, Molineux led five hundred people to the store where the merchants were huddled, and its doors were torn from their hinges. A second letter warned the consignees not to take it for granted that the colonists would remain "irreconcilable to the idea of spilling human blood." Amid the populist fervor, only a few noticed that the working-class Bostonian stood to gain little from the protest. Joke in a Boston newspaper, November 4, 1773: Colonist No. 1, hurrying to the Liberty Tree, says he hopes that a mob will force merchants to lower the price of tea, which has risen to a dollar a pound. Not exactly, Colonist No. 2 says. The mob is going "to make those who expect to sell at half that price send it back again."

On November 28th, the first of three ships carrying East India Company tea arrived in Boston Harbor. If the tax on the tea was not paid within twenty days, customs had the right to seize it, and, because tea had grown scarce in Boston, it was sure to find its way into teapots once ashore. The next day, Boston's radicals invited anyone with a stake in the city's commerce to a meeting. Five thousand people showed up, and the group resolved that the tea should be sent back to Britain with the tax unpaid. The day after that, when Governor Hutchinson ordered the group to disperse, one of its leaders declared that they needn't obey, because they had reverted to "a state of nature." On December 16th, the last day of the first ship's grace period, the group ordered the shipowner to trek to Governor Hutchinson's country home, seven miles away, and ask, once and for all, for permission to leave the harbor with the tax unpaid. It was nearly six in the evening before the man returned with Hutchinson's refusal. On hearing it, Sam Adams declared, "This meeting can do nothing more to save the country," and someone yelled, "Boston harbor a tea-pot tonight!" By six-thirty, three teams of men, some in Indian disguise, were hoisting tea chests onto the decks of all three ships, hatcheting them open, and dumping the tea in the harbor. Between thirty and a hundred and fifty men took part, possibly, according to the historian Dirk Hoerder, under the supervision of Molineux, and in less than two hours they destroyed nine thousand six hundred and fifty-nine pounds' worth of tea—some ninety thousand pounds by weight. The Massachusetts Gazette noted with approval that "such attention to private property was observed, that a small padlock belonging to the captain of one of the ships being broke, another was procured and sent to him." Such an efficient and disciplined mob was unlikely to have been a spontaneous one. Indeed, Carp, who has identified a hundred participants, reports that eight of them were employed by a single radical merchant.

George Washington disapproved of the Tea Party, and Benjamin Franklin called it "an Act of violent Injustice on our part." But the Revolution was not yet in the hands of the Founders, although it had left those of the merchants, who now dodged and stalled as the people—passionate and heedless of economic niceties—called for a ban on all tea, even what was smuggled from the Dutch. The merchants were also losing their ability to control crowd violence. Breen reports that, in early 1774, a New Hampshire supporter of Parliament bled to death after a mob forced him to ride a sharp fence rail, which left a four-by-six-inch hole in his groin.

Britain overreacted, closing the port of Boston, restricting town meetings in Massachusetts, and giving the King the power to appoint the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature. British troops arrived in Boston in May. A Salem newspaper called Britain "more cruel than Sea-Monsters towards their young ones," and a meeting in Wrentham declared that Britain seemed to want to reduce colonists "to nothing short of the miserable and deplorable State of Conquered Slaves." A few merchants still hoped that Boston might pay for the tea and reconcile with Britain, but they were too intimidated by the outbursts of popular anger to give voice to their proposal at a Boston town meeting.

Sympathy for Massachusetts broke out in other colonies, and radicalized colonists across the region threw off the guidance of the merchant class. "These sheep, simple as they are, cannot be gulled as heretofore," the wealthy New York City lawyer Gouverneur Morris wrote to a friend. "The mob begin to think and to reason."

In Philadelphia in September, 1774, as representatives from twelve colonies met for a Continental Congress, bells tolled throughout the city for Americans killed during a British assault on Boston. In fact, the British hadn't assaulted Boston or killed anyone; the bells tolled for a false rumor. Nonetheless, tens of thousands—about a third of New England's able-bodied men, according to one contemporary estimate—mustered to reclaim Boston. Breen observes that "no one seems to have expressed the slightest skepticism" about the truth of the rumors of British atrocity. A loyalist of the time put it more bitterly: "If the Faction had told their deluded Followers, that an Army of 30,000 Men were crossing the Atlantick in Egg Shells, with a Design to roast the Inhabitants alive & eat them afterwards, the People would have first stared, & swallowed down the Tale, whole."

Breen argues that the emotions roused by the false rumor emboldened the delegates, who soon passed the Continental Association, an agreement not to import or consume British goods. They voted not to let colonists export to Britain, either—though only after an interval that allowed Virginia to sell off its latest tobacco harvest. In addition, Americans were not to drink any taxed tea after March 1, 1775; sheep were to be preserved from slaughter, for the sake of a native wool industry; and no one was to indulge in cockfights, horse racing, theatre, or fancy dress at funerals. Soon the local committees charged with enforcing the Continental Association patrolled for thought crimes, too. They read private mail. They ordered loyalist pamphlets burned or tarred and feathered.

Tea abstention and consumer sacrifice, Breen writes, "created a climate that encouraged other people to adopt more coercive ways to preserve liberty"—a phrase of Orwellian depths. Since the local committees lacked legal authority, their chief tools were intimidation and ostracism. As for violence, the committees forswore it "except so much as is necessary," as a Worcester group nicely explained. In Wilmington, North Carolina, a committee went door to door for signatures to a new loyalty oath. According to its own minutes, the committee gave holdouts six days to reconsider before it published their names and ordered fellow-citizens to shun and boycott them—a stern but legal measure. In the journal of a visiting Englishwoman, however, Breen found another version. In downtown Wilmington one day, the woman saw a number of her American friends on the street: "I stopped to speak to them, but they with one voice begged me for heaven's sake to get off the street, making me observe they were prisoners . . . and that in all human probability some scene would be acted very unfit for me to witness." Probably, they expected a punishment like tarring and feathering, which would be more humiliating if a woman they knew was watching. Militiamen said the Englishwoman's friends were free to go if they signed the loyalty oath. She waited in a house nearby while her friends held out, and sometime after two in the morning they were released.

Violence unlicensed by committee was wilder. In Plymouth County, Massachusetts, a drover who bought an ox from a royally appointed legislator was carted for miles inside the belly of its partially dressed carcass. In East Haddam, Connecticut, a loyalist doctor was tarred with hot pitch, feathered, and rubbed with pig dung. Deaths at the hands of American insurgents were rare, though. For their part, British troops did kill a few of Americans over the years, but even the so-called Boston Massacre, Archer shows, seems to have been a case not of malice but of soldiers panicking in the midst of a crowd throwing snowballs and sticks. Tempers were high, but it wasn't yet clear to most people that the stakes were high, too. It had all happened so many times before: a British tax, an American fuss, British repeal, American calm. Until the Battles of Lexington and Concord, in April, 1775, neither side imagined that the other might not back down.

Breen thinks that most Americans didn't feel licensed to kill British soldiers until they learned of American deaths at Lexington and Concord, and began to read reprints of "The Crisis," a series of vitriolic anonymous essays thought to be the work of a radical essayist named William Moore. "The Crisis" (not to be confused with Thomas Paine's work of the same name) is spiteful and unhinged, and it's dismaying that it spoke to the American spirit at the moment of independence. The author described the British Prime Minister, Lord North, as being "engendered in the womb of hell"; imagined George III eagerly plotting "the people's ruin"; and claimed that the King's friends in Parliament were planning "to plunder, butcher, starve, or enslave" first the colonists and then the British themselves. The author flirted with calling for the assassination of George III and wished death on both houses of Parliament. He could write as violently as he liked, he taunted, because under British law conspiracy to make war on the king didn't qualify as treason unless accompanied by an overt act. As Breen notes, the author "did not worry a lot about evidence."

In 1974, the historian David Ammerman wrote that it is obvious in retrospect that America wasn't going to play second fiddle in the British Empire indefinitely. "What is not so clear," Ammerman continued, "is that the pursuit of equality need have included violence or that the equality sought necessitated independence." Spend a little time with the venality, misinformation, hysteria, and violence that led up to the Revolution, and the picture becomes murkier. As Breen notes, "No evidence survives showing that the king or his ministers contemplated a complex plan to destroy American rights," yet a significant proportion of the American populace became convinced that this was the case. The confusion might have been deliberately induced, if merchants were pulling strings. But then why did the puppets keep waving their hands even after the merchants tried to yank the strings in the opposite direction?

In the mid-twentieth century, historians trying to make sense of the paranoid style in American Revolutionary politics suggested that it derived from essayists on the fringe of the Whig Party in England who saw themselves as heirs of the men who had launched the English Civil War. Though marginal in England, these conspiracy theories seemed cogent in America, where colonists lived under governors with strong executive powers but no local constituency. Still, historically informed descriptions of what people believed don't explain why colonists stood up for their principles only some of the time, and why they disagreed so acrimoniously that they were willing to dip one another in tar barrels. In a 1972 article, "An Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution," Marc Egnal and Joseph A. Ernst suggested that the Revolution may have been triggered by the growth of British capitalism, which for decades flooded the colonies with easy credit and with manufactured goods that were better and cheaper than Americans could make themselves. The British were doing to us in the seventeen-sixties more or less what China is doing to us today. Merchants were the first to make their discontent political, because they were the first to see that the economic predicament could be eased if the colonies had the autonomy to, say, print paper money or trade with other nations. The people, for their part, may have hoped that boycotts of imported luxuries would limit their personal spending and encourage American manufacturing, which might, in time, employ them. But the people's enthusiasm for the boycotts far outran the merchants'. In banning such items as funeral scarves and elaborate mourning dress, the colonists seem to have been admitting to powerlessness, as if their desire for British goods were itself the instrument of their subjugation.

Maybe that's where the paranoia and the rage came in. The British never forced John Hancock to ship fine linen to Boston, after all. He just suspected that Americans wanted it in spite of themselves, however loudly they said they preferred independence. Even today, Americans don't want a revolution against their own consumerism—not for all the tea in China. ♦

Profiles

Master of Play

The many worlds of a video-game artist.

by Nick Paumgarten December 20, 2010

Shigeru Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment. He

Shigeru Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment. He's the closest thing there is to an autobiographical game creator, and shuns focus groups: "As long as I can enjoy something, other people can enjoy it, too."

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Related Links Slide Show: Photographs from Sonobe.

Keywords Nintendo; Shigeru Miyamoto; Video Games; Super Mario Brothers; Donkey Kong; Wii; Zelda

When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn't really have any toys, so he made his own, out of wood and string. He put on performances with homemade puppets and made cartoon flip-books. He pretended that there were magical realms hidden behind the sliding shoji screens in his family's little house. There was no television. His parents were of modest means but hardly poor. This was in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, in the rural village of Sonobe, about thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town's ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

Miyamoto has told variations on the cave story a few times over the years, in order to emphasize the extent to which he was surrounded by nature, as a child, and also to claim his youthful explorations as a source of his aptitude and enthusiasm for inventing and designing video games. The cave has become a misty but indispensable part of his legend, to Miyamoto what the cherry tree was to George Washington, or what LSD is to Steve Jobs. It is also a prototype, an analogue, and an apology—an illuminating and propitious way to consider his games, or, for that matter, anyone else's. It flatters a vacant-eyed kid with a joystick (to say nothing of the grownups who have bought it for him or sold it to him) to think of himself, spiritually, as an intrepid spelunker. The cave, certainly, is an occasion for easy irony: the man who has perhaps done more than any other person to entice generations of children to spend their playtime indoors, in front of a video screen, happened to develop his peculiar talent while playing outdoors, at whatever amusements or mischief he could muster. Of course, no one in the first wave of video-game designers could have learned the craft by playing video games, since video games didn't exist until people like Miyamoto invented them. Still, there may be no starker example of the conversion of primitive improvisations into structured, commodified, and stationary technological simulation than that of Miyamoto, the rural explorer turned ludic mastermind.

In his games, Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment, if not always the actual experiences that gave rise to it, since the experiences themselves may be harder to come by in a paved and partitioned world. "I can still recall the kind of sensation I had when I was in a small river, and I was searching with my hands beneath a rock, and something hit my finger, and I noticed it was a fish," he told me one day. "That's something that I just can't express in words. It's such an unusual situation. I wish that children nowadays could have similar experiences, but it's not very easy."