SPOILER ALERT (of the interpretive kind?) Digging further into this: Orange Julius was even associated with the devil in the 1970s: https://www.sjpl.org/blog/looking-back-devilish-good-drink-remembering-orange-julius I'll just leave it at this: there are satanic interpretations of Peace out there

Haha I was just coming here to say this too. Wolfe must have intended this, as the Orange Julius is even an alchemical transformation of the orange into a drink originally associated with tonics and which was popular at state fairs! So much fits with the setting of Chapter 3. From Wikipedia: "In 1929, Bill Hamlin, Julius Freed's real estate broker, developed a mixture that made the acidic orange juice less bothersome to his stomach. Freed's stand began serving the drink, which had a frothier, creamier texture. The sales at the stand increased substantially after the introduction of the new drink, going up to $100 a day. During the 1950s and 1960s, Orange Julius was sold at a variety of outlets, including state and county fairs and freestanding Orange Julius stands. The original stand also provided medicinal tonics and Bible tracts."

As usual, many of the points I wanted to make were already made by @stephenfrug! I think the Robber's Cave experiment is as important to this story as the Stanford Prison Experiment. As anyone who has ever participated in Color Wars at a summer camp can attest, attachment to arbitrary identities can be created in an instant. Also, putting my social scientist hat on for a second, these studies are only non-replicable because an IRB wouldn't let you replicate them anymore. To my mind, the problem with many psych experiments is a lack of "external validity"--do the findings generalize past extremely specific manipulations to extremely specific populations in extremely controlled environments? In most cases, no! This leaves me feeling that the rape and torture and barbarism in this story is extremely contrived. For one thing, I have participated in many Color Wars, and I have never witnessed a ritual murder of a Green! FWIW, this was one of my least favorite Wolfe stories so far (right down there with Car Sinister and How I Lost The Second World War). Like in those pieces, the gender and racial attitudes in this piece do not sit well with me. Glenn and Brandon present the piece as wrestling with Yellow Peril and Orientalist tropes in pulp fiction, but to me it felt like Wolfe was using them for humor rather than holding them up for examination.

I second @stephenfrug in having a much more literal reading of this story than Glenn and Brandon. In particular, I want to support the reading that the eyes at the end belong to people, and not to tigers or to Quoquo's imagination*. Consider the final sentence of the piece: "...dark eyes, timid but bright with an intelligence not found in any animal, followed him from the depths of the a thicket of yellowing bamboo." Wolfe's use of "yellowing" convinces me that these eyes belong to the People of the Yellow Leaves, who are called this because they come down from their hiding places in the hills only "when the leaves turn yellow for want of moisture--particularly the bamboo." When a writer as careful as Wolfe inserts that detail about yellowing bamboo, and then ends the piece with a reference to yellowing bamboo, he surely must want us to make that connection.

Minor comment here regarding the name "Cim Glowing." I never thought it was a typo because I took her name to be referring to the light source mentioned in the first day's entry: "the light is a luminous fungus suspended from a rawhide thong." It seemed reasonable to me that the blossoms blowing in the wind at her birth might either be (or be covered by) this luminous fungus. Anyway, I fell behind on the podcasts when the pandemic hit (working from home + no daycare doesn't leave much time for podcasts) but I'm starting to catch up again. Looking forward to rejoining the forum!

Yes, that's well put about Wolfe's blindspot for the expansion of freedom in the US post-60s. Wolfe's interest (tepid as it seems) in Buchanan does make me uneasy, especially as Buchanan was being accused of anti-semitism and Holocaust denial by fellow conservatives at the time. It's worth noting that Chesterton was anti-semitic (though Wolfe tries to deny it in Castle of Days, if I recall). I don't think Wolfe is anti-semitic (honestly, I don't), but this all makes me feel that Wolfe wasn't as revolted by anti-semitism as much as I would've hoped. All of that said, I will be curious to discuss Wolfe's invocation of Judaism when we get around to Peace. It's perhaps my favorite Wolfe novel, but I feel weird about how the Jewish characters are portrayed there. Maybe I am missing a deeper theme and if so, I'd love to hear it.

This is an interesting conversation. I think one way to assess Wolfe's ideology is not to assess his point-by-point beliefs, but the kinds of conversations he wants to contribute to, and thus who his implicit interlocutors are (e.g. Chesterton). It strikes me that Wolfe sees himself as playing a role in intra-conservative discourse similar to one that a Ross Douthat plays today: more steeped in Catholicism than markets, and tending to judge policies and institutions by how much they support traditional family structures, communities, and (particular visions of) freedom. It's even more clear to me that Wolfe does not see himself as part of ongoing conversations on the left. While we've seen him write a little about the Civil Rights Movement, he is relatively uninterested in the more expansive versions of the black liberation movement. I've never seen his stories really engage with feminism, women's rights, or the gay rights movement. Given how preoccupied Wolfe is with exploring identity, this omission is striking--except that he is obviously more interested in exploring universal forms of identity (like, say the universality of the soul) than he is in exploring particular expressions of identity (like, say, the experience of being a black woman in 1960s America). It's funny, one can imagine Thecla-varian becoming a queer icon if Wolfe's ideological orientation were a little different. But Wolfe is not Le Guin, whose ambisexual Gethenians are clearly meant to be part of a larger conversations on the left about gender and sexuality. FWIW, I am a Jewish lefty and Catholic conservative Wolfe is my favorite writer. That speaks to the generosity of his soul, his gifts as a writer, and--as @stephenfrug says--that Wolfe can't be reduced to his politics. He's much more interesting than that. Still, I do often find myself daydreaming of a world in which Gene Wolfe was the modal Republican.

I like your explanation for the title. It occurred to me it could also be a pun on "trust" in the Teddy Roosevelt "trustbuster" sense: This story is about a trust--a large number of business interests who collude in order to enhance their collective power. The governments of the world have been replaced by a single trust of trusts.

The Powell memo was super important to the modern conservative movement, but I really doubt Wolfe had access to it. Still, nice connection and it really goes to show how these ideas were in the air! IMO the two most prominent pieces that would've been on Wolfe's mind would have been John K. Galbraith's The New Industrial State (1967, 1972) and Milton Freidman's 1970 NYT essay that declared business has no social obligations to society. Freidman's doctrine would later be formalized by economists like Michael Jensen as the "shareholder theory of value." Wolfe's story reads like the future Galbraith feared--but one that never came to pass because of the influence of people like Freidman. This may sound like I'm defending Freidman but I am most certainly not. (The Freidmanites may have ended corporate empire building, but they are responsible for popularizing the idea that firms should act like sociopaths, which has led us to the brink of ecological collapse.) 1. First thought: Wolfe's recognition that managers of business were increasingly similar to managers of war was a popular insight among scholars of the corporate form like Alfred Chandler. 2. Glenn and Brandon note a character sardonically noting the goal of business is power, not profit. From Wikipedia on Galbraith: Galbraith argues that the "industrial system" – by which he means (in general terms) the companies which control around two-thirds of output in key sectors of the economy – are controlled in practice by a technostructure rather than shareholders; he claims that the technostructure does not act to maximise profit (as that involves the risk of failure) but principally to maintain the organisation and, as a secondary aim, to ensure its further expansion. This was the era of corporate empire builders, who wanted nothing more than to build the largest, unwieldiest conglomerate. Did it make sense for a wig company to own a TV network and a microwave manufacturer? No, but what is more prestigious than being the CEO who oversees the largest corporate empire! 3. Glenn and Brandon also noted that none of the executives seemed to have any experience with their industries, and in fact were completely removed from the realities of production. This too is consistent with research on business transformation in the era! The sociologist Neil Fligstein analyzed the backgrounds of corporate executives. He documented how the tendency of executives in this period to have backgrounds in industry ("I'm a third generation washing machine guy") was slowly giving way to promoting executives from outside the industry. 4. What changed? Friedman and the shareholder theory of value. Instead of third generation washing machine guys, Fligstein documents the increasing tendency to promote executives with marketing and finance backgrounds (who had no connection to the industry, or even the regions, that they suddenly became kings in. Corporate founders tended to have dense social ties with local community, but finance and marketing guys were interlopers who would not hesitate to close factories and offshore production, and they were especially happy to sell off "underperforming assets"--which meant corporations giving up entire industries and subsidiaries. Hence, the Rust Belt. As it turned out, shareholders loved downsizing. Executives were no longer like generals, happy to preside over the biggest corporate bureaucracy they could get their hands on. Instead, they tried to juice stock prices by presiding over as few workers as possible. This was the beginning of the rise of contract labor, the Uberization of work, and factory-less companies (like Nike and Vizio). Companies today employ shockingly few employees per market cap as compared to companies of Wolfe's day. 5. This was a longwinded way of my saying: I think this story is Wolfe extrapolating a Galbraith-Freidman hybrid dystopia. He extrapolates (accurately) from Galbraith about what 1994 would look like if corporate executives continued to build empires, and the countervailing powers of labor and the state continued to wither. He is also extrapolating from Freidman's championing of the sociopathic corporation, freed from all responsibility to community, employees, and indeed society. Wolfe failed to predict (and who could blame him) how the Freidman-view would so utterly dominate the Galbraith view, making corporate empire building a thing of the past (but still ushering us into a completely different utopia). In 2019, corporations haven't become the state. Rather, they have hollowed out the state such that the wealthiest global citizens have been emancipated from all obligations to the communities that generate wealth for them.

@G.L. McDorman I can't wait to listen! My dissertation actually touched on antebellum attitudes toward the corporation, and the "free labor" advocates I discuss above scorned the corporation for similar reasons as Wolfe. There was a great deal of overlap (sometimes cringeworthy to us today) between their critiques of slavery and their critiques of the corporate economy.

I think there are two (related) historical contexts that have been missed in these discussions about "Slaves of Silver" that are especially relevant to Wolfe, as a Republican, responding to the recent Civil Rights Movement. First, for any Republican in 1971 wanting to associate with the right side of history, there were still champions of civil rights in the party, most famously Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and (before '68) Jackie Robinson. As long as the Democrats relied on a large bloc of southern segregationists (as they would into the mid-90s), there was still the possibility that the GOP wouldn't travel further down the road of the southern strategy. If Wolfe in 1971 hoped the GOP wouldn't permanently abandon what was (until the 1960s) actually a pretty decent history of championing civil rights, he may have been drawn to explore the ideological origins of his party's opposition to slavery. Whether directly or indirectly, Wolfe may have been aware of Eric Foner's landmark book on this topic that was published in 1970 entitled "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War." This was the motto of the 1850s Republicans, and it bears a very close resemblance to the motto "Free markets and free robots" on which Wolfe's society is founded. The GOP motto led to the passage of the three civil rights amendments during Reconstruction--just as "Free markets and free robots" led to the passage of the Civil Rights law in Wolfe's story. Note that these parallels make sense chronologically too: Wolfe's story is set in a neo-Victorian era with a neo-civil rights movement in its recent past, just as the real Victorian era (or Gilded Age in the U.S.) came on the heels of the Civil War and Reconstruction. What does this do for our thematic interpretation of the story? From OPERATION ARES, we know Wolfe was concerned with the dignity of work. Well, so were antebellum Republicans--in fact, that's the thesis of Foner's book! Foner shows that, unfortunately, vanishingly few Americans were *moral* abolitionists. Most anti-slavery voters supported the Republicans precisely because they believed slavery undermined the dignity of their work: "[Foner] also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in [Republican] ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself." In Wolfe's world, robot slavery had squeezed out free labor (just like Lincoln's Republicans feared it would) and thus the dignity of work had been taken away from (almost) all humans. However, the robot Civil Rights Act allowed robots like Westinghouse to achieve dignity (exceeding that of most humans, even) through their work. I've only read the story once, and I'd need to spend some more time on it to fully work out these parallels. The most notable difference between the antebellum era and Wolfe's story is that one exists in an era of scarcity, and one exists in a world of abundance. What are we to make of free labor ideology in a post-scarcity world of universal basic incomes? Important differences aside, I'm pretty convinced that Wolfe had the Lincoln-era Republican Party on his mind while he was writing this. (And now for some wild speculation: when the robot in the TRI-D utters "DREAD," which is such a particular word, this could be an allusion to one of the most famous enslaved man of the antebellum era, Dredd Scott.)

Thank you! As a sociologist in my day job, I usually have a lot to say on race, but--at least from what Wolfe I've read--I find it hard to get a handle on how he thinks about race in the American context. Outside of "The Eyeflash Miracles," I can't think of a time Wolfe develops an African-American character. His non-white characters are often foreign, and I think it is that latter aspect that interests Wolfe more. As for Wolfe and Judaism--I am very curious to hear what you make of his treatment of Jewish characters in Peace!

I really liked this episode too. The story's ending fell flat for me until I heard you two unpack it. In any case, I wanted to put in my two cents on the family's identity (even if I am a few years too late). I assumed the family was black on my first read: the brown head, the attitude toward the police. The text is ambiguous. But I really can't see them as Jewish. The major reason: the son is named Paul! And Jews have good reasons to not name their children Paul. This is a bit of conjecture about Morris (but worth mentioning given Wolfe's fondness for saints' names): St. Morris is often portrayed as being of African descent, and he is venerated in the Coptic church. We know from "Relays and Roses" (published a year later) that Wolfe was thinking about the Coptic church, even writing about an African-American man with a deep interest in it. So is the family black? There's a reasonable case. Is the family Jewish? Unless Wolfe is playing with the Saul/Paul conversion (which to be honest would make me uncomfortable in the context of this story), then I doubt it.