Not the O.K. Corral

My recent reading includes THE LAST GUNFIGHT by Jeff Guinn.

This is a 2011 publication, from Simon & Schuster, about the showdown popularly known as the Gunfight at the OK Corral. More broadly the book is about Tombstone AZ and its surroundings in its heyday as a mining town.

And a mining town is what it was. Its brief golden age began with a major strike in 1878 of so-called “horn silver”  in the San Pedro Valley. The location of the strike was too far away from Tucson for that town to serve as a home base for the wave of prospectors who inevitably followed the first strike. So Tombstone grew up -- impression one gets from this book is that it almost immediately sprouted up out of the Arizona Territory desert floor!  and fulfilled just that function.

At its height it was important enough that when a San Francisco based acting troupe did a tour of the southwest, bringing a performance of the hot new comic opera “HMS Pinafore” to the unwashed – Tombstone was inevitably one of its stops.

But nowadays we only remember Tombstone for the confrontation on October 26, 1881, when seven men faced off, four to three, separated by only six feet of air, and fired about thirty shots at one another over the course of about as many seconds. It would have been four against four except that Ike Clanton, who had been very busy for hours provoking this confrontation, actually fled the scene just as guns were being drawn, or perhaps even five to four had not another of their companions likewise made himself scarce.

Ike Clanton’s brother and two of his friends were killed in that exchange. Among the party opposing, Doc Holliday and two of the Earps were seriously injured. Only Wyatt Earp walked away unscathed.

The fight was not literally at the OK Corral, although it is known as the “Gunfight at the OK Corral” because that became the title of a movie in 1957, which was still the golden age for westerns.  John Sturges’ movie made no pretense of historical accuracy.

Nonetheless, the connection between this confrontation (a block away) and that particular corral is not entirely accidental.  At one point in the crowded timeline leading to those terrible 30 seconds, the Clantons and their allies postured in that corral, in what Guinn calls “the worst tradition of overweening male pride” they were there “boasting loudly about what they would do if the Earps were foolish enough to bother them any further.”

There are a lot of reasons to recommend this book. I won’t recite them now, though. I’ll simply say that it inspires thought not only about what happened, but about how we know what happened, about the epistemological troubles in sorting through the conflicting accounts.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Part 4

I’m looking at a copy of Robert Caro’s latest, THE PASSAGE OF POWER. This is the fourth book in his series THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON.

One of the themes in the early going of Vol. 4 could be summarized in the words “Johnson dithered.” It is Caro’s view that he might well have won the Democratic nomination for President in 1960 if he had grabbed for it himself with his usual decisiveness and energy. But that would have meant laying groundwork as early as 1958, and engaging in a serious hunt for delegates through 1959. Johnson did neither of those things.  Nor did he close the door on them. 

He dithered.

By January 1960, he finally seemed ready to get busy. His strategy required the Mountain West. He assumed he could go into the convention as the south’s candidate, but to be something more, his natural allies were to be found in the mountain states – on mining and other resource issues, he had a Senate record that found admirers there.

So Caro gives us the following scene from early 1960. An experienced western-states political operative, Irving Hoff, was now working there on LBJ's behalf, and Hoff spoke for example with a key figure in Idaho who had the wonderfully appropriate name Tom Boise.

These are Caro’s words:

In Idaho, where the Hells Canyon Dam was rising day by day, and where political leaders knew who had gotten them the dam at last, the Democratic state chairman, Tom Boise, had told Hoff that, despite all the Kennedy efforts, many party leaders were still considering supporting Johnson. ‘These guys were for Johnson,’ Hoff says, ‘If we had been able to tell them that he was going to run, we’d have had that delegation.’ He explained this to Johnson, and Johnson accepted an invitation to speak in Lewiston, Idaho, and afterwards to have a drink with Boise and his leaders in a hotel suite. But in the suite [Johnson still couldn’t quite bring himself to declare.] He said, ‘What the heck do you think I’m out here for – catching butterflies? Do you see me carrying a net?’ But there were future government positions at stake, careers at stake,  issues at stake – with the convention so close, rhetorical humor wasn’t enough. They pressed him further. But all Johnson would say was, ‘I’ll let you know…You’ll be the first to know.’”  

(p. 74.)

I love Caro’s way of developing – and, you might say, milking – such a scene. He even tells us that Johnson was walking around the living room of the hotel suite in his pajamas while saying these evasive things, and that he was stirring his drink with his big finger. That’s the way to do biography!

Anarcho-Capitalism

An acquaintance who doesn't cotton to my theorizing about anarcho-capitalism put his objections thus: "How can money arise without a government? You're back to stuff with intrinsic value like precious metals but that puts power into the hands of those with mines or anyone who has enough power to corner the market."

To which I answered thusly.

Money can arise without government because humans are intelligent creatures who can easily recognize the utility of a medium of exchange.

As for going back to precious metals, that's possible. But why are precious metals "precious"? What is their "intrinsic value"? Use in jewelry? That's a big leap.

The value of gold comes from certain physical facts. First, there's only a limited amount of it in the world.

Second, it is a chemical element -- so it is neither created nor destroyed except by very unusual processes (is gold fissionable? -- probably not).

Third, gold is malleable enough so that numbers can be printed on it easily, yet sufficiently solid so that a coin can keep its shape.

There might be a more psychological point here, one that I believe John Maynard Keynes suggested. Perhaps to our symbol-hungry minds, silver reminds us of the moon and yellow/gold reminds us of the sun, and since these two heavenly bodies are of primordial importance, so are the metals.

Government doesn't have to exist in order to inform people of such facts. They operate whether or not they are broadcast, and they keep gold valuable as a medium of exchange.

Of course other media may also come about. I'm told that unopened packs of cigarettes are frequently exchanged under battlefield conditions. The intrinsic value of a cigarette, the pleasure of smoking, may be the original inducement to their value -- just as the decorative use of gold as jewelry might have originally suggested its value as a medium of exchange -- but once they start circulating they can be sought after simply because they ARE such a medium, and continue to circulate for a long time before anyone breaks the seal, reconverting the packet into a consumer good.

But suppose the precious metals were generally accepted as a unit of exchnage. You worry about this because it "puts power into the hands of those with mines...."

So someone will have a mine, even in the absense of government? Are you acknowledging that private property in real estate -- and in the sort of expensive capital tools used to dig and retrieve gold -- would survive anarchy? [This is btw the sort of contention that my acquaintance, earlier in the exchange, had denied]. If not, you are contradicting yourself here. If no one will "have a mine" then no one will have the power you say you're worried about.

"...or has enough power to corner the market."

Precisely what I'm worried about. The Federal Reserve Board has cornered the market in federal reserve notes. Shouldn't we rebel? Or work to undermine the conditions that cause people to think this is "necessary"?