Category Archives: Modern History

Modern History, National Politics

The risks of ill-informed meddling

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The 1929 crash exposed the naivety and ignorance of bankers, businessmen, Wall Street experts and academic economists high and low; it showed they did not understand the system they had been so confidently manipulating. They had tried to substitute their own well-meaning policies for what Adam Smith called ‘ the invisible hand’ of the market and they had wrought disaster. Far from demonstrating, as Keynes and his school later argued – at the time Keynes failed to predict either the crash or the extent and duration of the Depression – the dangers of a self-regulating economy, the degringolade indicated the opposite: the risks of ill-informed meddling.

– Paul Johnson, Modern Times, p. 240

I teach the chapter entitled Degringolade to my students tomorrow. In context, the chapter title is a trilingual pun. The students’ first assignment was to research the meaning of the title.

Modern History, National Politics

‘our last natural recovery to full employment’

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Harding inherited an absentee presidency [Wilson had been incapacitated by a stroke for the last 17 months of his second term] and one of the sharpest recessions in American history. By July 1921 it was all over and the economy was booming again. Harding had done nothing except cut government expenditure, the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan was later to call it ‘our last natural recovery to full employment.’ But the cuts were important. Indeed, Harding can be described as the only president in American history who actually brought about massive cuts in government spending, producing nearly a 40 per cent saving over Wilsonian peacetime expenditure.

– Paul Johnson, “The Last Arcadia” in Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties

children's books, Colonial Period, Modern History

Sample Chapter – Famous Men of the 18th Century

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Peter the Great, born 1672, Tsar of Russia 1682-1725

Below, I have linked in a sample chapter from my current writing project, Famous Men of the 18th Century.

Like the previous Famous Men books, this one will include about 30 short biographies of key figures whose lives will collectively, tell the story of the period from 1700-1800. The target audience is students in the 6th-11th grades. In our scope and sequence, we’d recommend parents use this book with their sixth or seventh graders, and then again in the junior year of high school.

Comments and feedback will be most appreciated. This chapter began as part of the original series by Poland and Haaren, but if you compare their text with mine, you will see that I have made large alterations and added a great deal of additional material.

My target is to finish these chapters by the end of next summer. I’m looking forward to taking a crack at the American founders as well as key figures from Britain and France. Though I must confess that I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how interesting Peter and King Charles XII of Sweden have turned out to be.

– Rob Shearer

Famous Men-18th Peter the Great

book reviews, Modern History

Paul Johnson on Sigmund Freud

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“. . . his methods of therapy have proved on the whole, costly failures, more suited to cosset the unhappy than cure the sick. We now know that many of the central ideas of psychoanalysis have no basis in biology. They were, indeed, formulated by Freud before the discovery of Mendel’s Laws, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, the recognition of inborn metabolic errors, the existence of hormones and the mechanism of the nervous impulse, which collectively invalidate them. As Sir Peter Medawar has put it, psychoanalysis is akin to Mesmerism and phrenology: it contains isolated nuggets of truth, but the general theory is false.”

– Paul Johnson, Modern Times, p. 6

The reading assignment for the Year Four students at the Schaeffer Study Center this week is chapter one, “A Relativistic World.”

Modern History

They’ve always been like this

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“During a congressional committee hearing in the late 1960s, as a Census Bureau official told it, a congressman was questioning statisticians from the bureau about the projected scope and costs of the 1970 census. The tenor of his questions was highly critical. Why did the bureau need to ask so many questions? Did not the projected questions constitute an invasion of individual privacy by the government? And why did the census cost so much?

Bureau officials responded patiently to each question, although it was clear that the congressman was unconvinced. Why did the federal government have to get so involved in collecting statistics in the first place, the congressman asked. After all, he continued, whenever he needed statistical information, he just went and looked it up in an almanac.”

– quoted from The American Census: A Social History,
by Margo J. Anderson, 1988

Modern History

Giant government program that serves millions can’t meet its pension obligations

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I received a copy of one of my specialty magazines today, MAIL.

There are two headlines on the cover:

USPS To Discount First-Class Mail 20% To Boost Volumes

and

Post Will Default on Retiree Payment to U.S.Treasury

About the first – I doubt that the bulk use of First-class mail is all that sensitive to price-discounting. The program will only be available to mailers who mailed 500,000 or more pieces in the fourth quarter of each of the past two years. Not going to affect me (or Greenleaf Press), I can assure you.

The 2nd headline is more disturbing. Postal Service retirees have their healthcare covered by the US Government. The Postal Service is obligated to fund the cost of its retiree’s healthcare. Their obligation for September 30, 2009 is to pay $5.4 billion to the US Treasury in order to pay those healthcare expenses. They don’t have the cash. Guess who will wind up paying the expenses? The taxpayers of the United States.

Why does anyone believe that a federal government can figure out how to run the entire healthcare sector of the economy? They can’t figure out how to pay for the healthcare of retired postal workers?

Modern History

That “dead orthodoxy” is pulsating with life

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In no branch of science would there be any real advance if every generation started fresh with no dependence upon what past generations have achieved. Yet in theology, vituperation of the past seems to be thought essential to progress. And upon what base slanders the vituperation is based! After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives rather a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession, for example, or to that tenderest and most theological of books, the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of John Bunyan, and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a “dead orthodoxy” that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love.

– J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923

Modern History

Admiring Jesus is not the same as having Faith in Jesus

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The truth is that when men speak of trust in Jesus’ Person, as being possible without acceptance of the message of His death and resurrection, they do not really mean trust at all. What they designate as trust is really admiration or reverence. They reverence Jesus as the supreme Person of all history and the supreme revealer of God. But trust can come only when the supreme Person extends His saving power to us. “He went about doing good,” “He spake words such as never man spake,” “He is the express image of God” – that is reverence; “He love me and gave Himself for me” – that is faith.

– J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923 page 37