War Time Hysteria, 1917: Senator Miles Poindexter, ‘American-ness’ and the Strange Case of Colonel Carl Reichmann*

When, on 6 April 1917, the United States entered into the First World War, a wave of anti-German sentiment captured the nation. The Army was not immune from accusations of subversion. In 1917 Senator Miles Poindexter accused a high ranking officer named Carl Reichmann of being in league with Germany. Despite the support from officers such as Hugh Lennox Scott and John J. Pershing, Reichmann was not permitted a promotion to general or service in France. Although most senators supported the promotion, Poindexter was able to prevent a vote on the subject using internal Senate rules. The resulting notoriety Poindexter gained made him a viable Republican candidate in the 1920 election. Although the military did not prevail over Poindexter — thereby continuing the constitutional expectation of military subservience to the civil government — the forces sent to France were without a commander who had gained a scholarly understanding of modern warfare well before the actual conflict.     

Agency Characteristics and the Use of Executive Orders

Past scholarship has offered varying explanations for why presidents choose to use executive orders. However, to this point, much of what we know of unilateral powers does not adequately address the role the bureaucracy plays in the president's decision. This research seeks to account for bureaucratic factors as a strategic presidential consideration in the employment of such directives. I classify executive orders from 1989–2012 based on which agency or agencies they apply to, and consider the importance of various characteristics (e.g. agency ideology, level of centralization, politicization, etc.) in determining which organs of the bureaucracy presidents will direct executive orders to generally. The results provide evidence that the White House directs fewer executive orders to agencies that have a politically independent leadership structure, and this result holds across a variety of measures judging an order's impact. The results demonstrate that the type of directive is crucial in determining a president's strategic decision to use executive orders, in line with previous research, and that agency centralization is one crucial component of this strategic calculation.     

‘Germany’s salvation’: Carl Schmitt’s teleological history of the Second Reich

Although Schmitt’s enthusiastic conversion to National Socialism is well known, his short history of the German Kaiserreich, published in 1934, remains neglected in Anglophone scholarship. This article contextualizes Schmitt’s narrative through the National Socialist conception of history and its accompanying teleology leading to the formation of the Third Reich. By placing Schmitt’s historical text in conversation with his earlier Staat, Bewegung, Volk, this article argues that Schmitt appropriated the history of the Kaiserreich to construct liberalism as a social pathology which could only be cured through the ‘concrete state theory’ he outlined in Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Furthermore, this article argues that Schmitt’s history relied heavily on propagandistic clichés of the Third Reich and thereby functioned as a rhetorical legitimation of Hitler’s rise to power.     

Housing Allowances: Emerging Answers

Katharine L. Bradbury and Anthony Downs (editors), Do Housing Allowances Work? (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1981), 419 pp; ISBN 0-8157-1052-6, $26.95. Judith D. Feins and Terry Saunders Lane, How Much for Housing? (Cambridge, Mass.: Abt Books, 1981), 208 pp; ISBN 0-89011-558-3, $19.00. Raymond J. Struyk and Marc Bendick, Jr. (editors), Housing Vouchers for the Poor; Lessons from a National Experiment (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 1981), 424 pp; ISBN 87766-280-0, $25.00.     

Identical rock types with different chemistry: sourcing phyllite-tempered Hohokam pottery from the Phoenix basin,Arizona

The organization of ceramic production and distribution among the ancient Hohokam of the Phoenix basin, Arizona, has been documented in recent years with much detail. Based on diverse temper and clay compositions, the provenance of individual ceramics is routinely determined with considerable precision. One exception is phyllite-tempered pottery, which was made in one corner of the basin but also across a broad upland zone adjacent to the north. The phyllite-tempered pottery from different production sources cannot be distinguished on the basis of their temper type. As shown with assays with an electron microprobe, however, both the temper and clay fractions are chemically diverse and geographically distinct, allowing many of the phyllite-tempered wares to be sourced. Among the phyllite-tempered ceramics consumed in the Phoenix basin, some are shown to have been made locally, but, surprisingly, large numbers were imported from the northern uplands. Their numbers support the idea that the connection between the Phoenix basin and the northern uplands was a prominent component of the Hohokam regional economy despite the great difference between them in settlement size and density.     

Trauma and pathology of a buried dog from San Nicolas Island,California, U.S.A.

To date more intact dog remains have been found on San Nicolas than on any of the other seven California Channel Islands. However, little is known about them. During the 2007 summer field season we excavated a medium sized young male dog in a flexed burial position from a pit at CA-SNI-25, a large Native American village site. The dog exhibits hypodontia, noticeable tooth attrition, severe scapular trauma, and vertebral, rib, and phalanx pathologies. Most of the injuries appear to have resulted from a severe blunt force trauma of unknown origin and it is likely the dog would not have survived without human care. The results of our analysis contribute to the, somewhat limited, published data on archaeological dogs in California. In this paper we describe the biological characteristics of the dog especially his anomalies and pathologies and compare them with published reports of other North American archaeological dogs with similar conditions.