|
|
|
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
|
|
|
In an otherwise intelligent and judicious review of my book—"A Broad and Ennobling Spirit"—in the March 2005 JAH, Brian Greenberg fails to capture the breadth of my study of workers in late Gilded Age New York City and Brooklyn, which covers building tradesmen, garment workers, and printers as well as cigar makers—the only group he actually mentions. In addition, the reviewer gives the reader a misleading impression that I presented my research as groundbreaking. Instead I aimed to draw from both the cultural and the institutional approaches to labor and working-class history to understand better how craft and industrial workers build unions in a less-than-hospitable economic, legal, and political environment without falling prey to making normative assessments of that experience. To be seen as following in the tradition of David Montgomery and Nick Salvatore is an honor, and I trust I have built on their scholarly foundation. |
|
| Ronald Mendel
|
University College
Northampton, England |
Editorial note: Brian Greenberg preferred not to respond. He believes that the original review adequately addresses the issues raised in Ronald Mendel's letter to the editor.
|
To the Editor:
|
|
|
Paul J. Dosal's review in the March 2005 JAH of Steven Schwartzberg's Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America during the Truman Years was particularly eloquent and deserving of wide attention, as is Schwartzberg's book itself. The proof of the attainments not only of the State Department's Cold War liberals of Harry S. Truman's time but also even the later Cold War conservatives has been demonstrated by the extensive subsequent successes over a half century of U.S. diplomatic policy in Latin America. |
|
|
Thus today, from the Rio Grande to the furthest tip of the continent, the various Latin states and their peoples are concluding fifty years of steady progress and have reached a point in their development that is widely envied and which promises yet more agreeable advances. Among the surprising results of U.S. policy during this period ought to be mentioned an almost total absence of nondemocratic dictatorships (Fidel Castro being an exception), broad economic advance with virtually all social and economic niveaux participating in fair and generously distributed economic gains, great economic and financial stability over most of the period (always a prerequisite for meaningful economic advance), and a notable lack of militarism coupled with major gains in human rights that were especially visible in Central America, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. |
|
|
The result is that we have, for example, in Mexico and the Central American republics at present populations that are generally thriving and content, and not perpetually attempting to force their way into the more-prosperous United States as they used incessantly to do, and we have in the great cities further south a wide distribution of social goods such as decent housing, clean water, good sewage systems, adequate and affordable health care, and schools. It is true that there are still in some large cities such as Rio de Janeiro a certain number of murders and some crime each year, but the numbers are trifling compared with what they could be. |
|
| Dennis K. McDaniel
|
| Washington, D.C. |
Editorial note: Paul J. Dosal preferred not to respond.
|
. . .
|
