Tag: United States

History and Historians, Now in Actual Work

a profound break with the historical patterns of American capitalism

daelnorwood

Or, My Contribution to “What People Are Saying”

I was quoted in a short article in Newsweek, offering an assessment on just how much of a radical break Trump’s seizure of effective control of several major American industrial corporations is, historically.

Andrew Stanton, “Is Donald Trump Undermining Capitalism?,” Newsweek, August 30, 2025:

Dael Norwood, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, told Newsweek a key difference between the Intel deal and those bailouts made during the Great Recession is that those programs were “quickly unwound.”

Another key difference from these historical deals is that those of Trump seem to be “arbitrary exercises of personal power, very directly tied to Trump himself,” Norwood said.

“A ruler seizing direct, personal control of large corporations (though various means) and using public policy to directly benefit his family’s enterprises is a massive break with the history of US capitalism, at least as since the American Revolution,” he said.

“In no case did the executive branch seek to exercise either strategic or tactical control over the business, much less extort them for personal gain,” he said.

…

Dael Norwood, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, told Newsweek: “I think these ‘deals’ suggest we’re witnessing a profound break with the historical patterns of American capitalism. American capitalism has always been deeply and inescapably intertwined with government – markets and private property exist only insofar as the law creates, legitimates, and regulates them; corporations are all literally creations of state and federal governments; government funding through grants or purchases has always been critical to the development and marketing of new technologies; and so on.”

Per the article, this take puts me in some agreement with a VP of the Cato Institute and Rand Paul, apparently – though I disagree that any of this is “socialism – but firmly on the other side from a corporate governance scholar at the University of Chicago, who advances a shockingly imaginative retelling of U.S. business history.

Strange days!

You can see more of what I have to say on this topic on my post on the US Steel “deal,” “Autocracy, Incorporated.”

Now in Actual Work

As Threatened, er, Promised

daelnorwood

Or, Not Pervasive, but maybe Persuasive or Practical?

So here’s what I’ve come up with as an op-ed proposal. It lacks a strong policy argument, but hopefully uses that perspective trick to good effect.

For the forgetful, here’s the prompt again:

a proposal for a New York Times opinion piece which applies a major finding from your research to a current public policy problem. … it must describe a full op-ed that you might write, and explain its relevance to current events.

Any and all thoughts heartily welcomed.

~~~

“Not so Fast, We’ve Been Here Before”: An Op-Ed Proposal

In 1841, an ex-President and former Secretary of State declared his support for British forces in the “Opium War,” Britain’s war with China over Chinese trade restrictions and closed markets. Though many commentators, then and now, cited the opium trade as the casus belli, John Quincy Adams told a Boston audience that the motive went deeper : “The cause of the war is the Ko-tow! – the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China, that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind, not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of the relation between lord and vassal.” In Adams’s view, the political despotism of China’s government found its worst expression in illiberal trade policies; and that these restrictions on foreign merchants, Americans prominently among them, justified war.

More recently, another Secretary of State gave a speech calling for all nations to recognize a basic “freedom to connect” to the internet. Made in light of Google’s decision to stop censoring search results in China, Secretary Hillary Clinton’s remarks were a pointed rebuke of Chinese policy. Condemning government censorship of the internet, Secretary Clinton argued that “from an economic standpoint, there is no distinction between censoring political speech and commercial speech.” By linking political and economic liberty together, and critiquing China on both fronts, Clinton’s remarks strongly echo Adams’s speech of almost 170 years before.

This op-ed will argue that U.S. officials would do well to understand the deep historical resonance of American calls for economic and political liberty in China. Though Chinese censorship is indefensible, an awareness of how American calls for reform in China themselves spring from complicated roots in national economic interest and Western imperialism can only improve Sino-American relations.

Image cite: The Suss-Man (gone for the weekend), “Project 366 – 78/366 Diplomacy,” Flickr, CC License

Golden Ghetto, History and Historians, Our Glorious National Heritage

A Brief Account of Cushing’s America

daelnorwood

Or, Contractually Bound, Peaceful, Prosperous, and Surprisingly Plural

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~I~

A portrait can tell you a lot about a person. Especially one done in the older style — before the head shot — where objects and landscapes were visible at the margins of the frame. The value lies, not it its status as as a representative image of a person (though that’s usually approximated), but rather in what it says about both the idealized self of the person pictured and the cultural context within which they lived – the materials from which they pulled together their ideals. In trying to squeeze information from such paintings, a nose for discrepancies – in historical ones, our sense of what’s foreign about the past – are among our best tools, and have long served historians well.

(Of course, the information thus obtained is as much a creation of our own selves as it is of those pictured in the past … but that’s history, folks.)

As luck would have it, the archival record of the first American diplomatic mission to China gives us an opportunity to do the same thing for the United States. From the pen of Caleb Cushing, U.S. minister to China, we have an idealized portrait of the country in the form of a memo he drafted for circulation among Chinese officials and merchants.

He wrote the piece, he explained to his superiors, to correct the “very imperfect and incorrect notions” in China “as to the constitution and character of the United States.” At the end of July 1844, the State Department received a copy of the 1,200-word pamphlet that Cushing, with input from other members of the legation’s staff, had written and translated into Chinese. In his cover letter for the pamphlet, he promised to deliver it “to official and other persons in China” to help achieve the mission’s goals, and further U.S. interests in general. He called the memo “A Brief Account of the United States.”

Cushing’s memo was not the first attempt at American image control in China, of course. The American mercantile community was no stranger to keeping up particular (and peculiar) appearances at Canton. But Cushing’s mission in 1844 was the first instance of an official, organized, and duly deputized national self-presentation to China, and as such should be accorded a bit more weight. He represented more — at least to his countrymen — than the aggregate of a dozen mercantile houses.

More than a PR piece, though, what Cushing had written was, in effect, a snapshot of what he thought the U.S. was, or should be, refracted through some ideas about what he thought would appeal to the Chinese.

Continue reading “A Brief Account of Cushing’s America” →