Monthly Archives: June 2023

The Run.

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            A “run” is an old-timey word for a creek or stream, like Bull Run.  Kingsbury Run is a winding creek and valley in southeastern Cleveland, Ohio.  It fed into the Cuyahoga River near the city’s main industrial and railroad area, the “Flats.”  The valley had served as a transportation route, an industrial site, a drainage route for rainwater, and as a kind of boundary between different communities on the higher ground.  By the late 1920s, it had returned to Nature to some extent.  Up on the east side above the “run,” there grew up a working-class entertainment district: bars and brothels, gambling joints and cheap hotels.  When the Depression hit, Kingsbury Run became home to one of Cleveland’s shanty towns housing poor people. 

            Between 23 September 1935 and 16 August 1938, all or parts of ten dismembered bodies were discovered.  Most were in the area of Kingsbury Run, one on the city’s west side, and one in Columbus, Ohio.  Only three of them could even be tentatively identified.  Six men and four women who shared anonymity in a grisly fate.[1] 

            To make matters worse, other murders in other places and at other times bore a marked resemblance to the Cleveland killings.  In September 1934, part of a dismembered woman’s body had been fished out of Lake Erie outside the Cleveland city limits.  At various times between 1921 and 1942, dismembered or decapitated bodies were found in waste ground near railroad yards in western Pennsylvania.  A Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line (B&O) connected Pittsburg with Cleveland (and with Columbus).  The police were willing to consider the possibility that all these were the handywork of one person.[2]  All things considered, it might be better for the public’s peace of mind if only one uncatchable demented killer existed. 

            The manhunt for the killer dragged on.  Although the police never caught the killer, their investigation solved 1,000 other crimes.[3]  Perhaps reasonably, perhaps out of desperation, some detectives focused on Dr. Francis Sweeney (1894-1964).  He fit the bill for a demented disassembler of humans.  Sweeney was a doctor who had worked at a hospital near the Run; an apparently “shell-shocked” (PTSD) veteran of the First World War, where he had served in a medical unit doing lots of amputations; a gas casualty suffering nerve damage; a severe alcoholic who had ruptured many relationships; and the cousin of a bitter critic of Cleveland Public Safety Director Eliot Ness.[4]  Confronted by Ness in 1938, Sweeney checked himself into a veterans hospital.  The killings specific to Kingsbury Run stopped. 

            One of the lead detectives wasn’t so sure.  Both the murders in Cleveland and the similar ones elsewhere along the B&O lines suggested to him that the killer might be one of the many hobos or tramps “riding the rails” during the Depression.[5]  Equally possibly, the killer might have been a railroad man, the “Headless Brakeman of Demon Run” so to speak. 

[1] Daniel Stashower, American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper (2022). 

[2] Elizabeth Short–the “Black Dahlia”–killed in Los Angeles in 1947, also suffered wounds very similar to those of the Cleveland victims.  Perhaps the killer, like so many other people, had gone West to help with the war effort. 

[3] Sort of like in “M” (dir. Fritz Lang, 1930). 

[4] Ness had made a name for himself fighting Al Capone and organized crime in Chicago in the 1930s.  In 1936, Ness became the Public Safety Director in Cleveland.  Cleveland wasn’t Chicago, but it was bad enough and in the same ways.  There was multi-ethnic organized crime running gambling and prostitution, while both the police and the city government were riddled with corruption.  Ness got to work on all fronts, making many enemies. 

[5] On “Tramps,” see: Tramp – Wikipedia; on “Hobos,” see: Hobo – Wikipedia 

Adjusting the Overton Window.

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            Joe Overton,–“he of the Overton window,” as Howard Cosell would have said—saw “think-tanks” as a prime mover of the range of acceptable ideas.  They advocate for opening, closing, and moving or not moving the “window.” 

Inspired by Overton, political scientist Daniel Drezner examined the development of this “ideas industry” with regard to his own academic specialty, international relations.[1] 

            Drezner argues that times have changed.  Once upon a time, the general public received enlightenment and guidance from “public intellectuals.”  Commonly, these were subject-area experts, often academics who wrote fluently.  What they wrote provided a kind of small-ball explanation of the events at the center of attention and controversy at any given moment.[2]  Newspapers and journals of opinion read by the next several tiers of regional and local opinion-leaders received the fruits of this expertise, then communicated it to the larger readership.  Generally, various levels of the public could respond through “Letters to the Editor.” 

            Those days are, to an extent, gone the way of the Blackberry.  The “public intellectuals” have been shouldered into the second rank by what Drezner calls “thought leaders.”  They differ from their predecessors in two ways.  First, commonly they are not generalists with opinions on all sorts of things.  They are One Big Idea people.[3]  They provide a context for thinking about “all the frequent troubles of our days”[4] within some framework.  Examples of such thought leaders would include Francis Fukuyama and Tom Friedman.[5]  Second, they reach their audiences in new venues: TED talks, blogs, Twitter.  Experienced editors don’t make a selection of reader responses to illustrate the diversity of reactions.  You just get Likes and much yelling. 

            Drezner argues that the creation and dissemination of Ideas now reflects several decades of accumulating changes.  The era of globalization and tech booms created immense new fortunes.  Once upon a time, much of that wealth might have flowed to building libraries or art galleries.  Now, privately-funded–and to a degree opaque–“think tanks” adopt the ideological perspective of their patrons.  Finally, there’s been a general decline of Authority in favor of individual Liberty.[6]  Arguably, audiences on left and right seek voices who tell them what they want to hear, regardless of competence or wisdom.  Arguably, there are far too many people who tailor their commentary to what people want to hear.[7] 

            Thee are symptoms, more than causes, of America’s bitter partisan quarrels. 

[1] Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (2017). 

[2] It’s not completely fair to offer Walter Lippman as the “beau-ideal” of the public intellectual as described above.   On Lippmann, see Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980).

[3] This is not so different from what historians do when they write books on the “Age of…” this, that, or the other period.  It’s just that Thought Leaders are writing mid-stream without any knowledge of how things will play out. 

[4] Stole that from the title of Rachel Donner’s biography of Mildred Harnack. 

[5] See, for example, Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992); Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999); The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005). 

[6] I’m not sure that Drezner understands how pervasive the change has been.  He is preoccupied with subject-area expertise.  Much of this disdain springs from revelations of incompetence and corruption on the part of Authorities. 

[7] For an example from one side, but readers can find the same stuff on the Right: Robert Reich – The goal is to deflect and distract – to use… | Facebook

Just asking.

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Can we distinguish between laws that receive universal or near-universal approval/assent and laws which are contested by a large share–even if a minority–of the population? Murder and drunk driving happen, but they are pretty much universally condemned. And commonly repented by people who do them. Prohibition and the War on Drugs did not enjoy such broad support. As a result, they didn’t/haven’t worked. Abortion seems to me to fall into the same category. So do Second Amendment issues. These all can be seen as attempts to police cultural divisions. Nineteenth Century “temperance” campaigns did a lot to reduce excessive alcohol consumption. Much more effective than Prohibition and getting the cops into the question. They were persuasive, not coercive, in nature. Perhaps those campaigns, like the very successful one that reduced smoking in the late 20th Century, offer a better path forward. 

The Overton Window.

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            Joe Overton (1960-2003) died young, but left a durable legacy in American practical political thought.  His Dad worked for Dow Chemical, so the family ended up in Midland, Michigan.  Joe got a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (Michigan Technological University).  Like his Dad, he went to work for Dow Chemical, as an engineer and project manager.  Later on, he earned a J.D. from Western Michigan University.[1] 

            Overton was a Libertarian.  He went to work for the recently founded think-tank The Mackinac Center for Public Policy.  The Center describes itself as “socially tolerant, economically sophisticated, desiring little government intervention in either their personal or economic affairs.”  It advocates for lower taxes, less government regulation, school choice (i.e. charter schools), and right to work laws.  On the other hand, it will not involve itself in socially conservative causes like abortion (ending legal abortion), marriage (i.e. marriage equality), or book-banning. 

            Being economically “free market” and socially liberal, this particular mix of policies fell neither within the Democratic or Republican ideological camps.  In short, it couldn’t get a hearing.[2]  As a part of his work, Overton worked up a brochure that explained how think-tanks could alter public attitudes toward public policies.  He argued that policies were characterized in public discussion roughly on a range from “Unthinkable” to “Acceptable” to “Popular.”  Only policies described as “Acceptable” got any discussion; only policies that could be discussed could become “Popular.”  Anything that achieved sufficient “Popular” support could become “Policy.”  This narrowed range of possibility became known as the “Overton window.”[3] 

The resolution of the debt ceiling stand-off leaves the United States on course for a financial catastrophe at some point in the future.[4]  With the deficit at 5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) the United States has the highest ratio of the seven largest advanced economies.[5]  Total debt amounts to 97 percent of GDP; in a decade it will increase to about 115 percent.  The rise in interest rates that is being used to combat inflation is expanding the weight of government debt on public finances.  Those rates have increased the cost of government borrowing from a long period of near zero to five percent; the higher rates may last for a while. 

            How did we get into this mess?  Fundamentally, the country itself is both united on some things and divided on others.  It is united on the untouchability of the big drivers of government spending: Defense, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid.  It is divided over reducing spending, or increasing taxation, or both as a solution to the problem.  Clearly, this combination of policies cannot be sustained over the long term. 

In short, solving our problems will require shifting or widening the “Overton window.”  Neither party seems interested in doing that.  It may take “the prospect of being hanged.”

[1] Reportedly “the worst law school in America.”  Michael Cohen (yes that Michael Cohen) went there.  See: Western Michigan University Cooley Law School – Wikipedia 

[2] “Why am I short of attention?/Got a short little span of attention”—Paul Simon, “You Can Call Me Al” (1986).

[3] For two takes, see: How the Politically Unthinkable Can Become Mainstream – The New York Times (nytimes.com) and An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibility – 101 Recommendations to Revitalize Michigan – Mackinac Center 

[4] Greg Ip, “A Debt Deal That Doesn’t Deal With Debt,” WSJ, 1 June 2023. 

[5] Britain is at 3.5 percent, Japan at about 2.5 percent; and Germany has a surplus of about 0.5 percent.