Wisdom from the 42nd Page

Empire of Debt

On the forty-second page of “Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis” authors William Bonner, & Addison Wiggin wrote (emphasis added):

of property rights or the division of labor. Things got simpler, more brutal, mean, and nasty; lives were shortened. It was not a time to be in the insurance business.

What caused the periodic invasions no one knows. Perhaps good weather out on the plains produced population explosions that caused the nomads to expand. Perhaps bad weather caused famine that sent hungry mouths in search of someone else's meat and grain. Historians don't know. But fear of the barbarians from the steppes has been a chronic theme of Western history—particularly among the Teutonic tribes that were most exposed to them.

The Great Khan

Perhaps the most successful empire builder of all time was a leader of one of those periods of barbarian expansion—Genghis Khan. Since the time of the Romans, it has been fashionable to put a civilized mask on your face when you put the imperial purple on your back. You are bringing religion to the heathen. You are bringing civilization to the indigenes. You are bringing culture, education, and technology. Even Alexander the Great thought he was doing the world a favor. Conquerors do not like to admit—even to themselves—that their instincts are no different from those of barbarians. They have better table manners. But they are subject to the same urges as Genghis or Attila. Bloodlust, prestige; power, status—who can deny that it would be a thrill to conquer a whole city or an entire nation? But empire builders typically put on the imperial purple like a set of angel's wings, leap off the balcony, and come down with a thud.

Genghis Khan needed no mask. The man showed his face as it really was. He united the Mongolian tribes in about 1129 and beginning with a series of attacks on northern China, he embarked on a spectacular epic of mass slaughter and rapine from which two empires were derived. One of them, the Ottoman Empire, lasted until the end of World War I. The Mongol hordes overran northern China, Tibet, Persia, nearlly all of central Asia and the Caucasus, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Anatolia, and much of Russia. They attacked India and eventually, in 1526, Babar, one of Genghis Khan's descendants, set himself up as emperor of the place. In China, too, Genghis's descendants founded the Yuan dynasty, which ruled until nearly the fifteenth century.

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(John Wiley & Sons, September 2005. Hardcover, 370 pages. ISBN: 0471739022; EAN: 9780471739029.)

The Forgotten Man

On the forty-second page of “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” author Amity Shlaes wrote (emphasis added):

opportunity in the small towns, and gold "in the hearts of your citizens, the gold which, too, makes each of us able to go all over the world with respect and safety as American citizens."

In New York, Italian Americans became symbols of success; one of these, the half-Jewish Fiorello LaGuardia, represented the state as a Republican in Congress. Another proud group were his cousins, the Jews, both the older German Jews and the newer East European Jews. Jews at the time had a general belief in charity and taking care of one another: "All Israel is responsible for one another." In addition, they were aware of a specific history in New York; Peter Stuyvesant had asked the Dutch West India Company to ban Jewish settlement, but the company had allowed Jews to stay as long as the Jewish poor "be supported by their own nation." The colonial Jews had pledged that they would, and the commitment was still alive. As late as the 1910s, philanthropist Jacob Schiff said that "a Jew would rather cut his hand off than apply for relief from non-Jewish sources."

The paramount symbol of such immigrant independence was the Bank of United States, which served immigrants and within a few years was establishing sixty offices spread around New York. The bank's very name—Bank of United States, not Bank of the United States or Bank of America—was awkward. Its position was also awkward—while it was large, because immigrants were arriving fast and saving aggressively, it was not a member of the New York Clearing House, and therefore outside the established network of banks. Indeed, one likely reason for the bank's official-sounding name was to signal that the bank was part of the American dream, and as close as a private bank could come to being as trustworthy as government.

The Bank of United States served the textile and clothing businesses—the rag trade and many others, for depositors would soon number 400,000. From the jewel trade to the wholesale meat business, immigrants were integrating into the New York economy. Among the Jewish families in the city throngs were kosher butchers named Schechter, in Brooklyn. In the late 1920s several banded together to open the Schechter Brothers wholesale poulty slaughterhouse.

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(Harper Perennial, June 2008. Paperback, 468 pages. ISBN: 0060936428; EAN: 9780060936426.)

Greed and Glory on Wall Street

Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman” was published in 1987. Obviously the author would have a lot of new material in the past 24-hours (and in the coming weeks and months) for an updated revision! But looking back two decades we find that on the forty-second page author Ken Auletta wrote (some emphasis added):

strategy"; (2) "a fragmented and undisciplined approach to running its business"; (3) "a portion of the partnership whose ability, training, and/or work habits are inconsistent with the competitive demands of the marketplace and with Lehman's present business"; (4) "too small a professional staff relative to the number of clients to be serviced and transactions to be processed"; (5) "a bond distribution system which is in chaos and an equity distribution system which is experiencing declining market share"; (6) "recent management changes throughout the organization"; (7) "high overhead relative to current revenue levels"; (8) "comparatively limited capital." The authors warned that "in our judgment the long-term future of this firm is uncertain."

"The firm must face up to the fact that the ability, training, and/or work habits of a substantial number of partners (totaling perhaps 10 to 15 throughout the Firm) are inconsistent with the competitive demands of the marketplace and with that expected of Lehman partners," the authors concluded. "These individuals should be phased out according to some specific plan. The single most important conclusion of this study is that the quality of the partnership is the key to our present problems and to our ability to be successful in the future [their italics]."

Peterson was determined to phase out some partners and to reinvigorate the forty-four man partnership with new blood. But he was sensitive to how fragile the partnership was, and he moved slowly. It wasn't until September 1976 that he replaced seven senior members of the board, reducing the average age of the board from fifty-six to forty-seven years. After his friend Warren Hellman left in 1977 to start his own venture capital firm, Peterson left the presidency vacant.

To address the composition of the partnership required Peterson to confront a strategic question: What kind of investment bank did Lehman wish to be? With remarkable prescience, the internal report had sketched how investment banking had changed, and was likely to change further: "As the nation industrialized, financing was the most important element of corporate life, since shortages of goods created demand which eliminated marketing as the key feature. Few of the inventory-entrepreneur class understood how to raise capital; they had limited contacts with financial institutions and knew of only the handful of investment banking firms whom they could solicit to assist them in the critical function of raising capital... Personal contacts, imaginations, salesmanship and an entreprenurial orienta[tion]

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(Warner Books, March 1987. Paperback, 292 pages. ISBN: 0446384062; EAN: 9780446384063.)

The Worst Hard Time

On the forty-second page of “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” author Timothy Egan wrote (emphasis added):

Fruit crates, or planks nailed to stumps, did the job. After school, Hanzel had to do the janitor work and get the next day's kindling—dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.

When the winds kicked up as always or a twitching sky threatened hail, she felt like she was back in the dugout, cramped and gasping for space. But when it was nice, she took the children outside and staged horse races. She taught them basketball. Once, she loaded up the players in a wagon and galloped off four miles to play another team. But the sky turned ugly, growled, and broke in a fit of hail. The Children started to cry. One horse panicked and bolted. Kids jumped from the wagon, hail storming down on them. Hazel Lucas leaped from the carriage seat to the back of the panicked horse, seized the bridle, and rode the horse to calm.

All the while, she wondered about a life far away, in one of the bustling cities of the Midwest, or just a place where the routine of a day was not so full of random death. The Kansas City Star arrived by mail in Boise City once a week, and Hazel got a sense of how fast America was moving: flappers, gangsters, and stunts—two men tried to play airborne tennis while standing, strapped, to the wings of a biplane. In Cimarron County, most people didn't even have electricity, and many still lived in earthen dugouts or soddies.

But no group of people took a more dramatic leap in lifestyle or prosperity, in such a short time, than wheat farmers on the Great Plains. In less than ten years, they went from subsistence living to small business-class wealth, from working a few hard acres with horses and hand tools to being masters of wheat estates, directing harvests with wondrous new machines, at a profit margin in some cases that was ten times the cost of production. In 1910, the price of wheat stood at eighty cents a bushel, good enough for anyone who had outwitted a few dry years to make enough money to get through another year and even put something away. Five years later, with world grain supplies pinched by the Great War, the price had more than doubled. Farmers increased production by 50 percent. When the Turkish navy blocked the Dardenelles, they did a favor for dryland wheat farmers that no one could have imagined. Europe had relied on Russia for export grain. With Russian shipments blocked, the United States

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(Houghton Mifflin Company, December 2005. Hardcover, 340 pages. ISBN: 061834697X; EAN: 9780618346974.)

The 9/11 Commission Report

On the solemn occasion of the seventh anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil we turn to forty-second page of “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” where the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks wrote (hyperlinks & emphasis added):

inbound aircraft. In the apt description of one witness, "It drops below the radar screen and it's just continually hovering in your imagination; you don't know where it is or what happens to it." Eventually, the shelter received word that the alleged hijacker 5 miles away had been a medevac helicopter.²²⁴

Transmission of the Authorization from the White House to the Pilots

The NMCC learned of United 93's hijacking at about 10:03. At this time the FAA had no contact with the military at the level of national command. The NMCC learned about United 93 from the White House. It, in turn, was informed by the Secret Service's contacts with the FAA.²²⁵

NORAD had no information either. At 10:07, its representative on the air thread conference call stated that NORAD had "no indication of a hijack heading to DC at this time."²²⁶

Repeatedly between 10:14 and 10:19, a lieutenant colonel at the White House relayed to the NMCC that the Vice President had confirmed fighters were cleared to engage inbound aircraft if they could verify that the aircraft was hijacked.²²⁷

The commander of NORAD, General Ralph Eberhart, was en route to the NORAD operations center in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, when the shootdown order was communicated on the air thread conference call. He told us that by the time he arrived, the order had already been passed down NORAD's chain of command.²²⁸

It is not clear how the shootdown order was communicated within NORAD. But we know that at 10:31, General Larry Arnold instructed his staff to broadcast the following over a NORAD instant messaging system: "10:31 Vice president has cleared us to intercept tracks of interest and shoot them down if they do not respond per [General Arnold]."²²⁹

In upstate New York, NEADS personnel first learned of the shootdown order from this message:

Floor Leadership: You need to read this..... The Region Commander has declared that we can shoot down aircraft that do not respond to our directions. Copy that?

Controllers: Copy that, sir.

Floor Leadership: So if you're trying to divert somebody and he won't divert—

Controllers: DO [Director of Operations] is saying no.

Floor Leadership: No? It came over the chat.... You got a conflict on that direction?

Controllers: Right now no, but—

Floor Leadership: Okay? Okay, you read that from the Vice President right? Vice President has cleared. Vice President has cleared us to

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(W. W. Norton & Company, September 2004. Hardcover, 604 pages. ISBN: 0393060411; EAN: 9780393060416.)

The Zookeeper's Wife

Loyal 42nd Page reader Eliza Challis sends us the forty-second page of “The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story” where author Diane Ackerman wrote (most emphasis added):

Rzadza. And there's his enchanting game of cowboys and Indians when he shoots pinecones with ow and arrow...but the other possibility, of a real war, that he doesn't understand yet, thank heavens."

The older boys believed, as Antonina did, that war belonged to the world of adults, not children. She sensed that Rys yearned to grill them with questions, though he didn't want to look stupid, or worse, like a little kid, so he kept quiet about the invisible hand grenade lying at his feet that everyone feared might explode.

"What a subject to be broached by the innocent lips of children," Antonina reflected, glancing at the sun-bronzed faces of the three boys, glistening in the light cast by a large oil lamp. "Grazed by sadness" about their safety, she wondered yet again: "What will become of them, if war begins?" It was a question she'd been denying, sidestepping, and rewording for months. "Our animal republic," she finally admited to herself, "exists in the busiest and most buzzing Polish city, as a small autonomous state defended by the capital. Living behind its gates, as if on an island cut off from the rest of the world, it seems impossible the waves of evil spilling across Europe could overwhelm our little island as well." As darkness began seeping into everything, erasing edges, a free-floating anxiety plagued her; eager as she was to mend the fabric of her son's life the instant holes formed, she could only await the unraveling.

She meant the last idylls of summer to be well spent, so the next morning she organized a mushroom-hunting brigade, with prizes and honors for whoever bagged the most saffron milk-cap, boletus, and button mushrooms, which she planned to jar. If war did erupt, spreading mushroom marinade on

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(W. W. Norton & Company, September 2007. Hardcover, 368 pages. ISBN: 0393061728; EAN: 9780393061727.)

Echoes of Texas Football

On the forty-second page of “Echoes of Texas Football: The Gretest Stories Ever Told” author Ken Samelson wrote (emphasis added):

Texas had no time to weep for USC. This was too new for the 'Horns even to consider next season. The Longhorns hadn't wont a national championship since 1970.

That's years of woulda-shoulda-couldas served with two scoops of "wait till next year"—enough to turn the stomach of any Texas-loving fan who could recite the pain and suffering the past 35 years had wrought:

• The 1984 Cotton Bowl meltdown against Georgia.
• The 2001 Big 12 title game flop against Colorado.
• The Oklahoma losses under Mack Brown. Pick one.
• The John Mackovic era. And David McWilliams. Ugh.

But this night wasn't about the past. And it wasn't about next year, when Young will be in the NFL. This night was all about the here and now and a national title for Texas. In 1970, the Longhorns shared the title and finished with a blemish when they lost in the Cotton Bowl to Notre Dame. Page back to 1969 to find the last time the Longhorns finished unbeaten and on top of the college football world. In an interesting twist, that Texas team was the last all-white squad to win a national championship. Thirty-six years later, a black quarterback was the centerpiece of the program's return to the pinnacle.

Everyone wanted a piece of that action on this chilly California night. Actor and Texas alum Matthew McConaughey behaved like a freshman at a fraternity party. He leaped, yelled, hugged, and hollered. No one heard him, but everyone saw him. A giant Texas player waved a giant Texas flag. People cried on the 35-yard line. Cheerleaders ran in delight—and in fear of being trampled by the horde that hounded Young. Surely, this must have been what it was like for Elvis.

Young wasn't ready to leave the building, but he needed sanctuary in the locker room to digest it all. Had Texas just pulled off a title game upset that ranks with Miami's toppling of Nebraska in the 1984 Orange Bowl, Penn State's tripping Miami in the 1987 Fiesta Bowl, and Ohio State's takedown of Miami in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl? No doubt. And even better: Young outplayed Leinart, his more ballyhooed and beloved counterpart.

But there's no rivalry between the two. Before Leinart limped away from the Texas locker room for another lonely stroll, Young grabbed him. They said the usual nicey-nice stuff winners and losers chat about while wearing dirty uniforms in half-lit hallways. But before Leinart left, Young grabbed paper and a pencil. He wanted to get Leinart's cell phone number.

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(Triumph Books, August 2006. Hardcover, 192 pages. ISBN: 1572437634; EAN: 9781572437630.)

Firestorm at Peshtigo

On the forty-second page of “Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History” authors Denise Gess & William Lutz, wrote (emphasis added):

of his heroes, the journalist Horace Greeley, who lectured on "Self-Made Men" in Green Bay. He penned a rousing article about the upcoming Republican convention that was to be held in Marinette in mid-October at which Marinette's own Honorable Isaac Stephenson would be elected to Congress; and he wrotes a passionate, stirring please for the value of education, calling it "one of the fundamental necessities of life." He was pleased to print his friend Tommy Hay's announcement that he planned to move his jewelry shop from the west side of Peshtigo to the east side. Noyes reviewed the touring exhibition "Old Babylon," he praised the newly organized brass band in Menominee, and he advocated the appropriation of $100,000 to be spent on improving and enlarging the Peshtigo Harbor settlement.

In Chicago rain fell on September 16, but it was only a sprinkle, fleeting and unremarkable. The only place unaffected by the persistent dry spell was the city of Milwaukee, which had enjoyed a driving rain on September 11 and still another downpour with lightning, thunder, and hail on September 18. Unlike the rest of the region Milwaukee, situated on the banks of Lake Michigan, was wrapped in a spray of consistent moisture. Then, on Wednesday, September 20, Franklin Tilton made special note of the conditions around Green Bay. In the Advocate he wrote that the "morning smoke was more dense than at any other time before, the air is suffocating and is filled with flakes of ashes. On the Bay the streamers have to navigate by compass, and blow their fog horns, the shores being invisible."

Fortunately, Green Bay was surrounded on three sides by the Fox and East Rivers, and the city had an excellent fire department, which had been organized in 1858. The Germania Fire Company was equipped with the Steamer Amoskeg and twelve hundred feet of hose; Wide Awake No. 2 was headquarters on Adams Street, and

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(Owl Books, June 2003. Paperback, 304 pages. ISBN: 0805072934; EAN: 9780805072938.)

Are We There Yet?

On the forty-second page of “Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations” author Susan Sessions Rugh wrote (emphasis added):

feelings of national identity to sell tourism in the "See America First" movement.² What sets the postwar period apart is the increased scale of heritage travel. The linkage of education, democratic values, and travel reassured Americans of their superiority as they dealt with the insecurity of cold war politics. War veterans toured the United States as an affirmation of their own values and as a means of passing them on to their children. Travel to historic sites nurtured a commitment to the nation for which they had fought.

Visitors were searching for an affirmative national history better labeled as heritage, a selective remembering of what is "attractive or flattering" and ignoring all the rest. Historian Michael Kammen argues that the end of World War II "brought a pronounced sense of discontinuity between past and present," and Americans sought a "sense of continuity" by visiting historic sites and museums. About 49 million persons visted historic sites in the United States in 1954, and they could choose from about 1,000 historic restorations. Annual attendance surged 20 to 30 percent at historic sites and national parks until 1976, when it began to decline.³

We can label these travels pilgrimages because the destination is a special place, a place that has become set apart or "sacred." By going to those places, whether Washington D.C., or a religious shrine, tourists strengthened their sense of national or religious identity. Central to pilgrimage tourism is the quest for authenticity, to see the actual site of a historic event, the same monument visited by all Americans, or the very spot a miracle took place. In that way, tourists can better imagine themselves as part of a larger community or can travel backward in time, to imagine that they too were a part of history. They sought no ordinary history but instead pursued a grand narrative of national greatness, or for African Americans, equality in a time when Washington D.C., tourist homes turned them away. Parents who wanted their children to consider their citizenship, whether full or partial, took their children on pilgrimages to the sacred places of America. In the process, they strengthened their own sense of national ideals and reinforced their commitment to a nation with equal justice for all.⁴

Maps and guides facilitated civic pilgrimage by guiding travelers to national landmarks and historic sites in a landscape prepackaged for the traveling consumer. Map publishers, states, and automobile touring associations designed their products to appeal to the family on vacation, both by depicting families on maps and by mapping routes and listing sites that would most appeal to parents traveling with children. Maps and guides in hand, families set off on cross-country tours of historic sites or

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(University Press of Kansas, May 2008. Hardcover, 240 pages. ISBN: 0700615881; EAN: 9780700615889.)

The Turk

On the forty-second page of “The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine” author Tom Standage wrote (emphasis added):

Altering the automaton for travel, so that it could be taken apart, packed, transported, and then put back together again, took several months. To Kempelen's chagrin, it also put a stop to his work improving his speaking machine. Buy by the beginning of 1783 the preparations were complete and the Turk was ready to go on the road. It must have seemed to Kempelen that the automaton had a life of its own. He had brought it into the world—yet now it was controlling his destiny.

Of all the cities of Europe, two were renowned for their enthusiasm for chess during the eighteenth century: Paris and London. Chess had been a popular pastime in coffeehouses in both cities since the beginning of the century and enjoyed a period of heightened popularity in the 1770s and 1780s, when it became extremely fashionable in high society. As the nearer of the two cities to Vienna, Paris was the logical place for the first stop on the Turk's tour of Europe.

As the French writer Denis Diderot put it in 1761, "Paris is the place in the world, and the Café de la Régence the place in Paris where this game is played best." The Café de la Régence was a coffeehouse founded in the 1680s, and by the 1740s it had become the most prominent haunt of chess players in the city. Well-known intellectuals who were regulars at the café over the years included the philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the American states[man]

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(Berkley Trade, August 2003. Paperback, 288 pages. ISBN: 0425190390; EAN: 9780425190395.)