Posts Tagged ‘Roosevelt’
“See, all our people are businessmen. Their loyalty’s based on that.”*…
In his nifty newsletter, Benedict Evans observes…
In ‘Godfather II,’ the Cuban representative of ITT gave President Batista a solid gold telephone. In 2025, Apple’s Tim Cook gave President Trump a piece of Corning Glass on a gold plinth…
See this University of Florida piece for more background on the 1959 “gift” to Bautita and the corruption it came to symbolize. (But note that the U of F note incorretly attributes the gesture to AT&T; it was in fact from ITT.) And see Tim Cook pay Apple’s “tribute” here.
Apposite: “A UFC fight at the White House.”
Oh, and (from The Onion): “Frito-Lay CEO Gifts Trump Gold Funyun.”
* “Michael Corleone” (Al Pacino), The Godfather Part II
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As we ponder payola, we might remind ourselves that things have been– and can again be– different: on this date in 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, part of his New Deal program that created a government pension system for the retired.
By 1930, the United States was, along with Switzerland, the only modern industrial country without any national social security system. Amid the Great Depression, the physician Francis Townsend galvanized support behind a proposal to issue direct payments to older people. Responding to that movement, Roosevelt organized a committee led by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to develop a major social welfare program proposal. Roosevelt presented the plan in early 1935 and signed the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935. The Supreme Court upheld the act in two major cases decided in 1937.
The law established the Social Security program. The old-age program is funded by payroll taxes, and over the ensuing decades, it contributed to a dramatic decline in poverty among older people, and spending on Social Security became a significant part of the federal budget. The Social Security Act also established an unemployment insurance program [only a few states had poorly-funded programs at the time] administered by the states and the Aid to Dependent Children program, which provided aid to families headed by single mothers. The law was later amended by acts such as the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which established two major healthcare programs: Medicare and Medicaid.
“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status”*…
… which is one of the reasons that they’re hard to update. Kevin Baker describes a 1998 visit to the IRS Atlanta Service Center and ponders its lessons…
… the first thing you’d notice would be the wires. They ran everywhere, and the building obviously hadn’t been constructed with them in mind. As you walked down a corridor, passing carts full of paper returns and rows of “tingle tables,” you would tread over those wires on a raised metal gangway. Each work area had an off-ramp, where both the wires and people would disembark…
… The desks were covered with dot matrix paper, cartons of files, and Sperry terminals glowing a dull monochromatic glow. These computers were linked to a mainframe in another room. Magnetic tapes from that mainframe, and from mainframes all over the country, would be airlifted to National Airport in Washington DC. From there, they’d be put on trucks to a West Virginia town of about 14,000 people called Martinsburg. There, they’d be loaded into a machine, the first version of which was known colloquially—and not entirely affectionately—as the “Martinsburg Monster.” This computer amounted to something like a national nerve center for the IRS. On it programs called the Individual Master File and the Business Master File processed the country’s tax records. These programs also organized much of the work. If there were a problem at Martinsburg, work across the IRS’s offices spanning the continent could and frequently did shut down.
Despite decades of attempts to kill it, The IRS’s Individual Master File, an almost sixty-year old accumulation of government Assembly Language, lives on. Part of this strange persistence can be pegged squarely on Congress’s well-documented history of starving the IRS for funding. But another part of it is that the Individual Master File has become so completely entangled in the life of the agency that modernizing it resembles delicate surgery more than a straightforward software upgrade. Job descriptions, work processes, collective bargaining agreements, administrative law, and technical infrastructure all coalesce together and interface with it, so that a seemingly technical task requires considerable sociological, historical, legal, and political knowledge.
In 2023, as it was in the 1980s, the IRS is a cyborg bureaucracy, an entangled mass of law, hardware, software, and clerical labor. It was among the first government agencies to embrace automatic data processing and large-scale digital computing. And it used these technologies to organize work, to make decisions, and to understand itself. In important ways, the lines between the digital shadow of the agency—its artificial bureaucracy—and its physical presence became difficult if not impossible to disentangle….
Baker is launching a new Substack, devoted to exploring precisely this kind tangle– and what it might portend…
This series, called Artificial Bureaucracy, is a long-term project looking at the history of government computing in the fifty-year period between 1945-1995. I think this is a timely subject. In the past several years, promoters and critics of artificial intelligence alike have talked up the possibility that decision-making and even governance itself may soon be handed over to sophisticated AI systems. What draws together both the dreams of boosters and the nightmares of critics is a deterministic orientation towards the future of technology, a conception of technology as autonomous and somehow beyond the possibility of control.
These visions mostly ignore the fact that the computerization of governance is a project at least seventy years in the making, and that project has never been determined, in the first instance or the last, primarily by “technological” factors. Like everything in government, the hardware and software systems that make up its artificial bureaucracy were and are subject to negotiation, conflict, administrative inertia, and the individual agency of its users.
Looking at government computing can also tell us something about AI. The historian of computing, Michael Mahoney has argued that studying the history of software is the process of learning how groups of people came to put their worlds in a machine. If this is right—and I think it is—our conceptions of “artificial intelligence” have an unwarranted individualistic bias; the proper way to understand machine intelligence isn’t by analogy to individual human knowledge and decision-making, but to methods of bureaucratic knowledge and action. If it is about anything, the story of AI is the story of bureaucracy. And if the future of governance is AI, then it makes sense to know something about its past…
Is bureaucracy the future of AI? Check it out the first post in Artificial Bureaucracy, from @kevinbaker@mastodon.social.
* Laurence J. Peter
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As we size up systems, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. A key component of Roosevelt’s New Deal domestic program, the Act created both the Social Security program and insurance against unemployment.
“Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop”*…
The unpredictable outbreak of the COVID pandemic caught the whole world off guard and brought strong economies to their knees. Has an exogenous shock ever blindsided markets like this before? As Jamie Catherwood explains, of course it has…
On the morning of April 18, 1906, at 5:13 AM, an earthquake registering 8.3 on the Richter scale tore through San Francisco. The earthquake itself only lasted 45-60 seconds, but was followed by massive fires that blazed for four days and nights, destroying entire sections of the city, Making matters worse, the earthquake ruptured the city’s water pipes, leaving firefighters helpless in fighting the flames.
Eventually, the earthquake and ensuing inferno destroyed 490 city blocks, some 25,000 buildings, forced 55–73% of the city’s population into homelessness, and killed almost 3,000 people. In a matter of days, the Pacific West trading hub looked like a war-torn European city in World War II.
The unpredictable nature of San Francisco’s earthquake made it all the more damaging, and had a domino effect in seemingly unrelated areas of the economy…
The stock market fell immediately in the aftermath of the disaster; but more damagingly, British insurers (who covered much of San Francisco) had to ship mountains of gold to the U.S. to cover claims… which led the Bank of England to raise interest rates… which raised them around the world… which squelched speculative stock trading… which led to the collapse of a major Investment Trust (a then-prevalent form of “shadow bank”)…
The fascinating– and cautionary– story of The Panic of 1907, from @InvestorAmnesia.
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As we prioritize preparedness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933, in the depth on the Depression, that Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address. Although the speech was short on specifics, Roosevelt identified two immediate objectives: getting people back to work and “strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments.”
The next day, cabinet members joined with Treasury and Federal Reserve officials to lay the groundwork for a national bank holiday, and at 1:00 a.m. on Monday, March 6, President Roosevelt issued a proclamation ordering the suspension of all banking transactions, effective immediately. The nationwide bank holiday was to extend through Thursday, March 9, at which time Congress would convene in extraordinary session to consider emergency legislation aimed at restoring public confidence in the financial system.
It was a last-ditch effort: in the three years leading up to it thousands of banks had failed. But a new round of problems that began in early 1933 placed a severe strain (largely, foreign and domestic holders of US currency rapidly losing faith in paper money and redeeming dollars at an alarming rate) on New York banks, many of which held balances for banks in other parts of the country.
The crisis began to subside on March 9, when Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act. On March 13, only four days after the emergency legislation went into effect, member banks in Federal Reserve cities received permission to reopen. By March 15, banks controlling 90 percent of the country’s banking resources had resumed operations and deposits far exceeded withdrawals. Although some 4,000 banks would remain closed forever and full economic recovery was still years in the future, the worst of the banking crisis seemed to be over.
“About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm”*…
In a 1938 book, How to Know People by Their Hands, palmist Josef Ranald included these three handprints of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler, analyzing each. His analyses offer an unexpected window into popular perspectives on these leaders’ personalities, before the outbreak of World War II.
“I myself began my study of hands in a spirit of skepticism,” Ranald, who served as an officer in the Austrian army during World War I, admits in the introduction to the book. An encounter with a palmist while Ranald was in the service irritated him rather than impressing him, and while he got out of a tight spot when a prisoner of war by pretending to read the palms of his captors, he reported that he still saw the practice as a scam. (Such admissions of doubt may have been well-designed to gain credibility with his reading audience.)
As a newspaper correspondent, Ranald had contact with many people, whose palms he read on a lark. He wrote that he came to see the practice as scientific: he gathered ten thousand such handprints, using sensitized paper (some sheets of which he included in the back of this book, so that the reader could follow his lead). “With a larger and larger sampling to go by, I felt that I could draw some conclusions from my findings,” he wrote. “On the basis of probabilities derived from statistical averages, I could associate certain markings in the hand with certain characteristics in men and women.”
The spatulate hand of FDR, Ranald wrote, belonged to a person of “advanced and liberal views.” The president was “social-minded,” “of sanguinary temperament,” not at all reclusive or introverted. (Read Ranald’s full analysis of FDR here.)
Read Mussolini’s and Hitler’s palms at Rebecca Onion’s “Handprints of Hitler, Mussolini, and FDR, Analyzed by a Palm Reader in 1938.” (From the Tumblr of the Public Domain Review, reposted from Tumblr user nemfrog. The Internet Archive’s copy of the book was scanned from the collection of the Prelinger Library.)
* Kurt Vonnegut
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As we trace out life lines, we might spare a thought for Heinz Edgar Lehmann; he died on this date in 1999. A psychiatrist who recalled that at the beginning of his practice, in Canada in the 1930s, psychiatric hospitals were “Snake Pits,” Dr. Lehmann led the transformation of North American asylums into the therapeutic environments they are today. But Lehmann’s greatest legacy was a single pill – Largactil (chlorpromazine hydrochloride, best known on the U.S. as Thorazine), the first anti-psychotic drug used in North America. In successfully treating patients with this drug, Lehmann introduced the world to the idea that biology plays a role in mental illness. Chlorpromazine remains on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines, a list of the most important medication needed in a basic health system.
“He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession”*…
The Descriptive Catalogue of Special Devices and Supplies, used by British spies sent to the Continent to track Nazi movements and aid resistance fighters during World War II, has been recently reprinted by the Imperial War Museum. These pages from the back of the two-volume catalogue, which was published in 1944 and 1945, show a few of the ways that the Special Operations Executive (the name for the secret British agency charged with training and deploying these agents) managed to sneak arms and ammunition to its operatives.
As historian-author Sinclair McKay writes in the introduction to the new volume, the Special Operations Executive trained many volunteers and recruits with no previous experience in the field. The recruits underwent crash courses, with SOE personnel bringing them quickly up to speed on the use of weapons and explosives, the maintenance of communications equipment, and the cultures of the places they were to infiltrate.
The two volumes of the manual are packed full of explanations of the many devices SOE operatives might encounter, or choose to use, in their operations…
More in the remarkable Rebecca Onion’s “Nifty Methods for Smuggling Contraband, From a Manual for WWII-Era British Spies.”
* Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
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As we dawdle at the dead drop, we might recall that it was on this date in 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered the “Infamy Speech”–the name deriving from the first line of the speech, in which Roosevelt describes the previous day as “a date which will live in infamy”– to a Joint Session of Congress.
Read Roosevelt’s original typescript here; and hear an except here.
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