One hundred years ago today The Logan Republican of Cache County, Utah published the obituary of President John Henry Smith. At the time of his death Smith was the Second Counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The obituary is, not surprisingly, laudatory but as I read it over I felt that there must be something missing. Smith had been one of the people who worked behind (and in front of) the scenes to negotiate Utah\’s transition from territory to state. He had been born in Iowa in 1848 son of Gordon Smith (a leader in the LDS) and must have known in his childhood and his early adult life many of the towering (and many married) figures in the LDS. Including his own father.

Reading that obituary made me think about a statement made not to long ago by Mitt Romney, We’re going to call marriage what it’s been called for 6,000 years or longer: A relationship between one man and one woman. Surely Romney is (and his followers are) aware that not too many generations ago his co-religionists did not consider a marriage to consist of one man and one woman (unless, of course, you are making the rather sophistical argument that each of a polygamist\’s marriages are between one man and one woman. But each woman was only allowed one marriage at a time while a man might have as many as he liked/could afford.)

How \”hidden\” was the practice of polygamy (or plural marriage as the LDS often referred to it)? The death of Smith was recorded in The New York Times of October 14, 1911. The last sentence of the obituary was Two wives, fifteen children, and eight grandchildren survive him.

Mitt Romney has, of course, a right to his own beliefs about the what marriage \”should be\” but, as it has been said elsewhere \”you have a right to your own opinions but not a right to your own facts.\” It is not factually true that marriage has been called \”a relationship between one man and one woman\” for 6,000 years. Indeed in Utah it wasn\’t until President (of the LDS) Woodruff\’s manifesto of 1890 that Morman leadership stopped solemnizing plural marriages. Since those men who were already married to more than one woman were not called to separate from all but one the church leadership did not seem to be stating that those prior relationships had not been marriages and thus were acknowledging the fact that relationships that could be called marriages varied by place and time. If was, after all, not until 1904 the the leadership of the LDS issued a worldwide ban on plural marriage.

So, Mr. Romney, you have a right to your opinions, you have a right to your religion but you do not have a right to alter (or ignore) the historical record.

Many of the rights that women in the \”western\” world consider unquestioned and unquestionable are comparatively recent and thus, one might argue, have shallow roots and might be less secure than one might presume.

Consider this headline on the first page of The Washington Herald on October 16, 1911. \”Court may have women for jury\” with the subhead \”Suffrage victory affects McNamara Case.\” The reader is told that given the recent passage of the women\’s suffrage amendment,[1] \”Eminent legal authorities hold that women of the State are now on an equal footing with the men. so far as jury service is concerned,\” and given the fact that the court may find it difficult to seat a jury of men women \”may be peremptorily summoned.\” The ruling of the judge that \”there was nothing to prevent a woman serving on a jury.\” came after a \”demand by Mrs Johanna Engelman that she be given a place in the jury box.\”

It may seem strange to us today that even after the suffrage there were questions about whether women could serve on juries and it is clear from the text of the article that they would be only if men could not be found. This clarifies one of the basic underlying issues that made women\’s fight for the vote and other legal rights so difficult–women may have been seen as citizens for the purposes of paying taxes and apportioning congressional seats, but they were not seen as completely, fully functioning adult human beings in the eyes of the kyriarchy. Thus rights and duties which one might imagine would have flowed automatically from the passage of suffrage did not.

The same page of The Washington Herald also gives one a rather frightening insight into the treatment of and attitude toward African-Americans in 1911 and includes a laudatory piece about a lecture on eugenics that was schedule to be given by Willet M. Hays [2] at the local YMCA.

The offensively jocular page 1 article about \”Charles Charles\” attempting to rescue a beleaguered elderly African-American woman gives the reader a sense of just how \”free and equal\” life was for African-Americans in Washington D.C. in 1911. On page two of the same paper one finds the article Will Celebrate Freedom: Washington Negroes to Commemorate Abolition of Slavery just about the article Veterans Will Convene: Confederates of Virginia meet at Newport News tomorrow. The placement of the two pieces seems an appropriate commentary on the reality of their lives–whenever African-Americans gather to exercise their theoretical rights they need look over their shoulders for the men who are still celebrated and honoured for having attempted to deny them those rights.

And, of course, The Herald\’s Page for Every Woman includes the requisite advice and criticism of mothers without which few family newspapers ever went to print.

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[1] At the state level. The 19th amendment, which gave American women the right to vote, was not ratified until 1920. &#8617

[2] Not the Hays of the Hays Code. &#8617

Whether or not one agrees with Christopher HItchens\’ conclusions a surprising large number of people don\’t question the statements of \”fact\” on which he bases his argument. After all he is male, white, has what sounds to American ears a posh well-educated \”British accent.\” He went to the right schools and speaks with the tone of authority–so what more is there to say?

The first thing to say that HItchens not infrequently is wrong. By this I don\’t mean that frequently I disagree with HItchens\’ conclusions but rather that sometimes he is simply wrong on the facts. And since he is wrong on some facts for all I know he is wrong on many facts. And since he is well-educated enough (and has enough resources) that he can easily find out what the facts actually are then he is either consciously lying, unable to conceive of the fact he could be wrong, and feels that the point he is making is so important that fudging or overlooking a few facts is acceptable.

Case in point, in his Slate.com article Lord Haw Haw and Anwar al-Awlaki Hitchen\’s wrote:

The United States happens also to be almost uniquely generous in conferring citizenship: making it available to all those who draw their first breath within its borders.

Now that statement is a piece of arrant nonsense. Leaving aside the past actions the American government denying access to citizenship to some groups of immigrants the country is today far from being \”almost unique\” in granting birthright citizenship. The number of member nations in the UN is 193. Let\’s round up and say that there are at the moment 200 nations. Over 30 of those nations recognize birthright citizenship. So the United States is among a minority of nations there need to be far, far fewer before the phrase \”almost uniquely\” become appropriate.

Hitchens may be suffering here from \”old worldism.\” He himself was born and raised in Britain and most European nations do not grant birthright citizenship. However the United States, like most of the other nations in the Western Hemisphere, was built from immigrants and historically offered few bars to children of those immigrants becoming citizens. The mistake he makes here is not particularly relevant to the overall argument he is making however it warns the reader that he is arrogant and/or careless about facts.

A further, minor example of the same thing can be found later on in the same article when he writes of William Joyce:

He actually became rather a popular entertainment item in Britain, his arrogant drawling tones earning him the nickname “Lord Haw Haw.”

Despite that rather definitive statement as to why Joyce was known as \”Lord Haw Haw\” there is some question as which voice of German propaganda the original epithet \”Lord Haw Haw\” was used to describe. At least four different people were dubbed \”Lord Haw Haw\” during the war. We also know that some members of the British media simply used that phrase to describe any English language speaking German propagandists irrespective of their particular manners of speech.

Again, this is a minor point except that we become lazy listeners/readers and HItchens (like many other \”respected\” pundits\”) becomes a lazy writer/speaker thinker if the underpinnings of their arguments are not subjected to scrutiny.

Interestingly enough neither of these points is pertinent to the case Hitchens is arguing–indeed they obfuscate it. William Joyce (the Lord Haw Haw to whom HItchens is referring) argued as to his \”true\” citizenship as part of his defense against being executed as a traitor. He claimed that since he was actually an American citizen he could not be guilty of treason to Britain. al-Awlaki, unlike Joyce, was not tried in a court of law. al-Awlaki was not executed he was assassinated. In fact he was assassinated while outside the United States on the basis of the President \”deciding\” he was a traitor. In other words, the argument is not whether al-Awlaki was actually an American citizen but whether the President acted extra-judicially. To bring up any other points is to muddy the situation rather than make it clearer.

As George Orwell, one of Hitchens\’ favourite writers, put it. \”When there is a gap between one\’s real and one\’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II

This small book(let) prepared for American servicemen stationed in Iraq during the Second World War is in its own way a masterpiece. The \”voice\” in which it is written is friendly and easy to understand and it is informative without being condescending. Individuals writing training manuals for governments and institutions today would do well to study this (among other manuals and booklets released during the war) for tips on how to write clear and useful instructions without descending into jargon and writing down to one\’s audience.

Reading it gives one insight into what was considered normal among American servicemen in 1943. For example, its readers are admonished not to \”show race prejudice\” because the Iraqis \”draw very little color line,\” and soldiers are advised not to approach women on the streets not only to avoid offending Iraqis but also because that is not where the prostitutes could be found. The underlying presumption is that the men reading the booklet do draw more than a little color line and will attempt to locate prostitutes.

But the book also can surprise with its determined resistance to what is now called \”mission creep\” and cultural colonialism:

Sure, there are differences…But what of it? You aren\’t going to Iraq to change the Iraqis. Just the opposite. We are fighting this war to preserve the principle of \”live and let live.\” (5)

Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl writes in the modern day introduction

I wish that I had read it before beginning my own yearlong tour of Al Anbar in late 2003!

and I imagine that many of the pundits I hear every day on television would do well to read it before next they share they thoughts on the US involvement in Iraq.

It is short and aimed at someone with no more than a high school education so I think that they could manage it.

Some questions crossed my mind the other day as I watched the coverage of teabaggers at a rally. At almost every rally there was at least one person festooned with teabags. \’Do these people think that the tea thrown into Boston Harbor in 1773 was packaged in tea bags?\’ \’Do they think that the tea the Founding Fathers drank was brewed using tea bags?\’ and \’Do they think that tea bags are historically associated with conservatism?\’

As comic and irrelevant as those questions might seem to be they help to identify some of the misconceptions and misunderstandings that befall many in the teabag movement.

First, \’Do these people think that the tea thrown into Boston Harbor in 1773 was packaged in tea bags?\’

No, it wasn\’t (and more on that below.) I ask the question because I am fairly sure that many of the people in the movement (many of whom are decorating their hats and caps with teabags) have no clear idea of what happened at (or caused) the original Boston Tea Party. Yes chests of tea were thrown into the Boston Harbor. Yes, the destruction of the tea was part of a larger action to protest taxation without representation. But much of the anger about the Tea Act of 1773 was that it was passed in part to support what we would now call a large multinational corporation (the East India Company) by allowing it to charge less for tea than its local (to Boston) competitors who were smuggling tea into the colonies.

If any group today did what the \”tea partiers\” did in 1773–trespass on private property and destroy merchandise and goods for the purpose of making a political statement against the government–they would be labelled terrorists.

Second, \’Do they think that the tea the Founding Fathers drank was brewed using tea bags?\’

The rhetoric of the modern \”teabaggers\” is often that of originalism and constitutional essentialism yet there was at the time not a particularly strong association between that act of rebellion with the larger project of colonial independence. Indeed many of the early histories of the American Revolution played down or ignored what was then called \”the act of the destruction of the tea\” since it had been violence aimed at private property not the installation of an oppressing government. Given the laudatory rhetoric about corporations, capitalism and private property of many modern day teabaggers one wonders if they realize they are lionizing an attack on the very things they appear to hold most dear.

Third, \’Do they think that tea bags are historically associated with conservatism?\’

If the tea baggers wish to associate themselves with the \”old days\” and \”old ways\” it would better serve them to sprinkle themselves with loose tea leaves. The brewing of tea with tea bags is a quite recent custom. The tea bag is the accidental creation of an American tea merchant who, about 100 years ago, sent out samples of his tea leaves in silk sachets which some recipients thought were to be used for the brewing of tea. It took some time for the practice of using tea bags become wide spread (especially in England) and even today many tea snobs consider tea brewed from bags rather than loose leaves to be of inferior quality. Indeed they argue that the use of tea bags is yet another sign of the modern day devaluing of the things that matter and the turning away from the manners and beliefs of our forefathers.

In short, the history of the tea bag and the act of the destruction of the tea suggests that the tea bag itself is a symbol of much that the teabaggers despise and the teabaggers\’ ignorance of the real history and meaning of the tea bag and the act of the destruction of the teat make the tea bag a perfect symbol of all the modern day teabag party stands for.

Writing a \”good\” book introduction is a difficult thing–not least because of the fact that readers do not agree among themselves on exactly what it is they are looking for in an introduction. Some readers are looking for information about the life and career(s) of the author(s) while others are hoping that the introduction will place the book into a larger context. Some readers think that the larger context the book should be placed into is that of the author(s) thematic and stylistic growth (and perhaps decline.) Other readers think that books should be placed within the context of the time and culture in which they were initially written and/or published. Yet other readers would prefer that books were placed within the context of other books written/published at the same time and/or same genre.

I, myself, am open to many types of introduction. However no reader should stumble across spoilers in an introduction. If the writer of the introduction cannot discuss the book without spoilers then they, or the editors, should do the reader the courtesy of marking them plainly and unmistakably.

And yes, I did just have that happen to me. I curled up in a chair with a book I had not read before and glancing at the introduction hoping for insight into the placement of this book in the development of the author\’s style and choice of topic(s) I came across a massive spoiler. Yes, I will forge on and read the book but (warning to any editor who happens to come across this entry) I have made a note of the author of the introduction, will avoid reading any by the same author and will, if possible, avoid buying editions that include introductions by that author.

Avoiding spoilers and/or clearly marking them is an act of respect to the reader.

I have been reading (and rereading) quite a bit of E. F. Benson lately. Benson is probably best known today for the novels about Miss Mapp and Emmeline Lucas [1] published between 1920 and 1939 and later bundled together and published in omnibus form in 1977 as Make Way for Lucia. Benson\’s writing styles (for he had more than one) and the things about which he wrote (he had several distinct subjects of interest) were extremely popular during his lifetime but subsequent to his death and the end of the Second World War his books fell out of print.

Benson\’s fortunes revived in the 1970s as many of his books began once again to be available in print however it is likely that many know Benson (and his characters Mapp and Lucia) more from the BBC Mapp and Lucia series than from the novels themselves. I did not see that television adaptation before I first started to read Benson. I chanced on a description of one of the Mapp and Lucia books in a critical review of another book I had been reading and I tracked down a copy of the The Worshipful Lucia in the local library. I soon began to hunt down every Benson book I could find. Since most were out of print I either found old battered Benson books in used bookstores and I downloaded those that were now in the public domain from online sources.

Yesterday I was trying to trace the origin of a theme (and style of writing) that I had noticed in Benson\’s writing as early as 1912 (Mrs. Ames) and in full flower by 1929 (Paying Guests). I wondered if there were hints of that theme in his earliest books so I pulled out my copy of Dodo: A Detail of the Day first published 1893 and first read by me in a battered old copy I no longer own. My current copy is one of three Dodo novels published together 1986 in Dodo: An Omnibus with…..as the cover proclaims…..a \”New Introduction by Prunella Scales.\” \’Oh,\’ I thought, \’I hadn\’t realized that Scales had been a Benson aficionado before she was cast as Miss Mapp in the BBC series.\’ The second sentence of the introduction disabused me of that notion

I had read very few of his books before 1984, when I swallowed all the Lucia novels at once while preparing to attempt Miss Mapp in a television serial.

Scales was not familiar with any of the Dodo books before she was asked to write the introduction to the omnibus. The introduction itself is competently written but has as much depth and insight as one would expect from a high school student\’s \”treatment\” of an author. It doesn\’t help me as a reader to understand the world of the book, it doesn\’t help me as reader to understand Benson as a writer, and it doesn\’t really help the reader to place Dodo into the context of its time.

I understand why someone at The Hogarth Press decided to ask Scales to write the introduction since the BBC production of Make Way for Lucia did much to revive Benson\’s popularity. Scales was Miss Mapp for many people who had not read the books previous to their television adaptation. One can imagine the logic \”people associate Scales with Benson so if we get her name on a Benson book it will help to sell the book.\” That may even have worked. However, that decision distresses me for two reasons.

First, I do not begrudge Scales the right to have opinions about the Dodo books but I wish that they had spent the money instead on a less famous but better qualified person who could have written informedly and usefully about the book(s) and the author. No reader who knows Benson only from the BBC adaptation and is not used to reading books written in the latter years of the 19th century is going to find Dodo an easy book to read. Putting Scales name on the cover may have sold more copies of the Dodo omnibus but only, I fear, at the cost of readers who never \”got\” the books and never bought another Benson (from The Hogart Press or any other publisher.)

Second, even in the few pages of the introduction Scales convinced me that she misunderstands Benson in much the same way as many writers of his time (and his subjects of interest) are misunderstood by people who come across them without the appropriate context. Scales writes of Benson:

one must not be too frivolous about this dear, gentle, funny writer, with his romantic cynicism and demure extravagance, his faultless ear and wicked tongue

and I watch Scales\’ (in my opinion dreadfully misconceived) performance of Miss Mapp and can only think how little she understands Benson. Benson could be icy, insightful, cynical and cruel. He had seen some of the horrors of life. He was for some time mayor of Rye (the \’real world\’ Tilling.) He was the son of an Archbishop of Chanterbury and the sibling of writers and intellectuals. None of his generation of the family married and had children. His parents had a famously \”chilly\” marriage and once widowed his mother lived the rest of her life with a woman friend. Underneath the glittering surface of Benson\’s books one can often glimpse the emptiness and hopelessness of the lives of his characters.

So, the answer to \”why Scales\” is–a short-sighted marketing scheme that did nothing to build a readership that would continue to buy Benson\’s less famous books and that helped to perpetuate a facile understanding of his best selling books.

[1] Queen Lucia (1920), Miss Mapp (1922), Lucia in London (1927), Mapp and Lucia (1931), Lucia\’s Progress aka The Worshipful Lucia (1935) and Trouble for Lucia (1939) &#8617

Last night I heard the news that Steve Jobs had died just a few minutes after apple.com posted the announcement on their website. His death was not unexpected but I was still struck by it. For me, as for many other people who grew up in a world without personal computers and who were involved (in a far more tangential way than Jobs) in their development and popularization, this man I never met was vividly real to me. I am very aware of the impact that Jobs had on the development of much of the technology we now depend in the western world.

Almost as soon as Jobs\’ death was officially announced the responses poured in from people who ranged from customers, to co-workers to politicians. His death was not a surprise and I imagine that many of the formal responses to the announcement had been drafted weeks ago when it became clear that his health had taken a turn for the worse.

One of the constant claims/statements/arguments across the many expressions of sympathy was that virtually everyone in the world had been touched by Jobs. And that claim led to me think \”how\” and ask \”for the better?\” I have no doubt that the lives of those in the Horn of Africa, in Darfur and in Myanmar have been touched by the information revolution if we stretch \”touched\” to include \”the individuals who hound the poor and prey on the weak have been known to use new technologies in order to perpetuate their power.\” I have no doubt that the lives of those in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq have been touched by the computer revolution if we stretch \”touched\” to include \”they are now being killed in ways that would not have been possible without the computer revolution.\” And it is important to remember that not everyone who has been more directly \”touched\” by Jobs and Apple would describe the result as \”for the better.\” The workers in Taiwan who committed suicide after enduring the working conditions in IPhone assembly plants would probably not have characterized they way in which their lives were \”touched\” as for the better.

I am not arguing that Jobs was a bad person. However I do think that we should take care not to universalize from the nature of his impact on the lives of comparatively privileged people to the impact it had on humanity in general. I do know that Jobs was a charismatic individual who could sweep a room of tech reporters off their metaphorical feet. I don\’t know that Jobs ever sat down and thought about what his wealth could do beyond \”make more money\” and \”create more gadgets that he would like to play with.\”

Bill Gates was never Steve Jobs equal in terms of charisma. One seldom hears of Gates \”wowing\” a room of reporters. And Microsoft in its time has resorted to some extremely questionable business practices. But so too did Apple. Bill Gates has spent over a decade giving away much of the money that he made while he, too, was changing the world. We have not heard of Jobs doing anything similar.

Today there are people in the world who are safer, less hungry, healthier, more educated and have more hope for the future because Bill Gates has decided to work almost as hard at giving away his money as he once worked at making it.

Steve Jobs made life more fun, interesting and easier for that portion of the world that already enjoyed the most privilege and the greatest likelihood of having safe, interesting and comfortable lives. It would be nice to find out that Jobs decided that in death he would attempt to compete with Gates on the field of philanthropy just as in life he competed with Gates on the field of technology.

Ontario goes to the polls tomorrow (October 6th.)

It seems like such a small thing to do. Someday between the 9 in the morning and 9 at night I will wander over with my notice of registration and draw an X through the circle next to one of the local candidate\’s name.

Like most of the elections in which I have taken part the person I will vote for has little chance of winning. But it is still very important for me to mark my ballot. I read the local newspaper, I talk to other people on my street and in my neighbourhood and I do some research to find out the relative strengths of the different parties in my riding. I rank the local candidates from those I think are very bad for my community, my province or my country to those which are think are best. Then I have to sit down and work out the likelihoods. If \’VeryWorst\’ is leading \’NotMyFavouriteButAcceptable\’ by a small margin then I will vote for NMFBA (hoping to help keep VW from winning.) If one of the parties enjoys a comfortable margin locally then I like to sit down and take a good look at the minor parties in my riding. And sometimes I vote for one of those parties not because I agree with everything in their platform but because I think that they are talking about things which are very important and offering solutions and suggestions which should be among those seriously considered.

Canadian political parties can grow very quickly. Take, for example, the Bloc Québécois. That party began in 1990 as disaffected members of both the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals joined together informally. In 1993 (the next federal election) the Bloc won the second largest number of seats and became the official opposition. Because political parties such as the Bloc and Reform (which was born in the 1980s and by 1997 had replaced the Bloc as the official opposition) can grow so quickly there is room for new ideas and new conversations in Canadian politics. If the old parties won\’t talk about the things we care about then we just go out and form new parties that will.

Both the sense of power this gives to voters and the way in which the growth of new parties allows for new ideas to take root hit me today as I sit and watch the CNN coverage of the occupation of Wall Street. Few reporters talk to the protestors and most of the reports I listen to are interviews of the old regulars–the talking heads who I could have seen and heard anytime in the last two decades. One can imagine the logic of those of those who handed out the assignments and who edited together the news reports. After all, they must be thinking, what choice will the protestors have when next they vote? Everyone to the left of whatever point will be the \”center\” at that moment will have the choice of voting for a Democrat or strengthening the Republicans by not voting at all. Everyone to the right of whatever point will be the \”center\” at the moment will have the choice of voting for a Republican or strengthening the Democrats by not voting at all. The greatest degree of freedom in voting will be during the nomination processes but even then the voters will have a severely limited range of ideologies among which to choose and the barriers for entry into the \”serious\” nomination race will be high. Those who give aid and comfort to some portion of the monied and active elements of the kyriarchy will be given the money and the access to the media necessary to run a serious campaign. Those who do not, will not.

When it is members and functionaries of the kyriarchy who decide the candidates you get to chose between then no matter the tally the outcome is the same:

Meet the new boss
same as the old boss[1]

[1] The Who, Won\’t get fooled again.

I have time machines in my library. They work like magical one-way windows for when I gaze into them I can see and listen to people from times past yet they cannot see or hear me. Some, I think, suspect that people from the future might occasionally look in on them and so they are on what they feel to be their \”best\” behaviour. It is interesting and informative to see what they consider \”best\” behaviour.\” Other people from the past seem either to be totally unaware or totally unconcerned that people from the future might pass through every once and a while.

In 1943 the Special Service Division of the Army Service Forces, United States Army prepared a booklet Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq. In 2007 The University of Chicago press recently reprinted a facsimile of the original with an added foreword written by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl. Nagl served in Iraq from September 2003 to September of the following year. He has high praise for much of it \”I wish I had read it before beginning my own yearlong tour (v)\” although he also points out:

there are also tips in the 1943 Short Guide that absolutely would not see the light of day in the politically correct world of today. None of the men serving there need to be told, \”Don\’t make a pass at any Moslem women or there will be trouble.\” But the guide continues with more advice that caused my jaw to drop; \”Anyway, it won\’t get you anywhere. Prostitutes do not walk the streets but live in special quarters of the cities.\” If service members today do need this guidance, I can absolutely guarantee that they won\’t get it from an official War Department publication! (xi)

Two other pieces of advice stood out to this reader:

Be kind and considerate to servants. The Iraqis consider all people equal. (29)

Note that the soldiers are not told to be kind and considerate to servants because it was right to do so. Nor were they told that they should be kind and considerate to servants because it would make the United States look good. Nor does the booklet say \”The Iraqis, like us, consider all people equal.\” The Iraqi attitude/belief that all people are equal is put forward as just another one of their cultural quirks about which servicemen should be forewarned.

Avoid any expression of race prejudice. The people draw very little color line. (29)

The American Army was at the time this booklet was issued a segregated institution. One can deduce that the troops for whom this booklet was published were overwhelmingly white, male and at least nominally Christian. They weren\’t admonished not to \”feel\” race prejudice, just to avoid expressing it. And they were to do so not because it was right or reflected well on the United States but because having \”very little color line\” was just another one of those strange Iraqi quirks.

These two points stand out because of the clear line against religious proselytizing and prejudice in the same booklet.

You probably belong to a church at home, and you know how you would feel towards anyone who insulted or desecrated your church. The Moslems feel just the same way, perhaps even more strongly. In fact, their feeling about their religion is pretty much the same as ours toward our religion, although more intense. If anything, we should respect the Moslems the more for the intensity of their devotion.(12)

So, in 1943 the authors of this handbook felt that the ordinary American serviceman was more able to feel fellowship and empathy with Moslems on matters of religion that they were about matters of racial and social equality.

Which tells us just as much about the America of 1943 as it does of the Iraq of the same year.