pragmatic organization of government printing

Government printing has encompassed a wide range of institutional forms through U.S. history.  The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), established in 1861, became by the beginning of the twentieth century the world’s largest printshop.  GPO has been a highly successful government venture.  U.S. government printing history, not surprisingly, tends to be divided into Before GPO and Anno GPO.  GPO, however, has been largely a pragmatic, results-oriented agency.  GPO over its history has encompassed procurement of commercial printing and co-existed with independent government printing.

The establishment of GPO did not end commercial printing of government documents, nor even commercial printing of U.S. congressional documents. The U.S. executive branch, U.S. courts, and other U.S. agencies continued to make commercial arrangements for printing after the establishment of GPO.  So too did state and local governments.  GPO was established as the printer for the U.S. Congress.  Nonetheless, printing of U.S. congressional proceedings remained in the hands of commercial printers until 1873.  In competitive bidding against commercial printers, GPO was chosen to begin then its still-existing publication, the Congressional Record.[1]  GPO received nominal responsibility for all federal printing only under the Printing Act of 1895.

Federal government agencies continued to do their own printing even after the Printing Act of 1895.  A study of federal printing in 1955 found that GPO accounted for only 19% of federal expenditure on printing.  Executive-branch departments, which accounted for 77% of federal printing expenditure, ran 327 departmental printing and duplicating plants.  Military services operated 60% of those printing and duplicating plants.[2]  Non-GPO printing was not cataloged as government publications, was not distributed to depository libraries, and did not get free carriage through the U.S. Postal Service.  Non-GPO printing was probably largely informal and ephemeral printed matter.  Such printed matter is important in the day-to-day functioning of organizations. Centralized printing and management of informal and ephemeral printed matter would be rather impractical.[3]

In response to high wartime demand for printing, GPO pragmatically procured commercial printing.  During World War I, GPO worked three 8-hour shifts a day.  In addition, government departments directly procured commercial printing.  The head of GPO, recognizing the use of commercial printers, declared:

Without making any reflection whatever, it is evident that * * * bureaus of the Government have paid excessive prices for printing. * * * all printing and binding * * * should be handled by the Public Printer, who is in reality the official printer for the Government and who should be responsible for all of that work.

He recommended:

immediate legislation that will require all printing and binding orders * * * to be placed direct with the Public Printer and to be done in the GPO, with proviso that such work as cannot at any time be handled in the GPO may be let out by the Public Printer on contract to commercial printing offices.[4]

In 1929, Congress formally authorized GPO to procure commercial printing.[5]  During World War II, GPO rapidly expanded its commercial procurement.  In 1945, GPO’s procurement of commercial printing amounted to 138% of the value of its own printing.[6]

After World War II, GPO continued to procure commercial printing.  Commercial procurement amounted to 42% of the value of GPO-directed printing in 1961, and then rose to 57% in 1970 and 70% in 1979.[7] At GPO’s 150 anniversary exhibit in 2011, a large poster declares:

Except for congressional work, secure documents such as passports, and publications like the Federal Register and the President’s budget, GPO produces virtually all work on contracts in partnership with the private sector printing industry. Our procurement staff handles about 75% of all work sent to GPO for production, amounting to over $450 million annually.

The system is one of the Government’s longest running and most successful partnerships with the private sector. More than 16,600 firms nationwide are registered to do business with GPO; the majority are small businesses averaging 20 workers per firm.

Contracts are awarded on a purely competitive basis. This partnership creates jobs across the nation and saves a significant amount of taxpayer money.

Over the course of the twentieth century, GPO transformed itself from the world’s largest printshop to a very large procurement agency for commercial printing.

GPO historians have described patronage, corruption, and inefficiency in competitive, commercial printing as the motivation for the formation of GPO. Those were historically specific problems at the federal level, not general features of competitive, commercial printing.  Inflammatory print material played a major role in causing the U.S. Civil War.  Printing hand-written manuscripts required considerable printer engagement with the content, and significant typographic errors were a possibility.[8]  Perhaps greater control over the printing of government documents in the tense circumstances of the incipient Civil War was also a historically specific motivation for establishing GPO in 1861.

The establishment of the GPO was much different than the U.S. nationalization of telephone and telegraph networks in 1918.  GPO was a new, government-controlled organization established to serve specific government needs.  GPO’s history reflects that pragmatic, results-oriented founding.

*  *  *  *  *

Notes:

[1] GPO (1961) pp. 48-50.

[2] Id. p. 149.

[3] U.S. Code Title 44, Chapter 19, concerns the Depository Library Program.  Under § 1901:

“Government publication” as used in this chapter, means informational matter which is published as an individual document at Government expense, or as required by law.

Government publication was probably defined in practice even more narrowly across Executive Branch agencies.  Non-GPO federal printing was a matter of some formal controversy.  The Executive Branch and Congress disagreed on whether requiring Executive-Branch agencies to use GPO for printing was constitutionally permissible.  In 2005, GPO and the Executive Branch’s Office of Management and Budget established a compact to give Executive Branch agencies more printing choices.  See GPO (2011) p. 129.

[4] GPO (1961) p. 99.  The “*  *  *” in the source text may indicate elided text.

[5] Id. p. 117.

[6] Calculated as $50 million commercial procurement divided by $36,035,211 GPO in-shop printing.  See id. pp. 130, 134.

[7] Kling (1970) p. 46 (share in 1961 and 1970); GPO (2011) p. 106 (share in 1979).

[8] Kerr (1881), p. 8, observes:

It not infrequently happens that the document has been kicked from pillar to post at the committee-rooms of the Capitol for days, or pulled to pieces by a dozen different correspondents in their eager hunt for news; and, nine times out of ten, when it reaches the Public Printer, it is in the reverse order of its original production, or so badly “mixed up” by the displacement of pages, that it would be a mass of nonsense if printed as received at the office. But here it falls into the hands of careful and conscientious workmen, to whom the authors of Government literature owe a debt of gratitude of great magnitude, who exert a “rectifying” influence over this rumpled monstrosity that smooths its future career, and places the author in the first ranks of modern writers. When the order of its being has thus been determined by these experts, it is carefully read over, page after page, by the same individuals, who seek to harmonize the many inconsistencies found, and by a series of hieroglyphic pencil-marks, only intelligible to printers, indicate the particular type in which each headline or portion of the text is to appear. Each page of the manuscript is then numbered, from the first to the last, to prevent any confusion in its subsequent career.

References:

GPO, United States. 1961. 100 GPO years, 1861-1961: a history of United States public printing. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O.

GPO, United States. 2011. Keeping America informed: the U.S. Government Printing Office : 150 years of service to the nation. [Washington, D.C.]: U.S. G.P.O.

Kerr, Robert Washington. 1970. History of the Government Printing Office (at Washington, D.C.); with a brief record of the public printing for a century, 1789-1881. New York: B. Franklin.

Kling, Robert E. 1970. The Government Printing Office. New York: Praeger.

erotic services in ancient Egypt: love spells

Erotic services were an important subsector of ancient ritual services markets.  Among a collection of ritual service texts from Egypt from about the second to the fifth century, roughly 20% concern love and sex.[1]  Men’s love interests in general differed significantly from women’s love interests, with social circumstances objectively constraining neither men’s nor women’s sexual activity.

Spells for male users vastly predominated among love spells directly seeking sex.  A careful categorization of love spells from across the ancient Mediterranean world shows that 87% of love spells directly seeking sex were written for male spell users.[2]  Here’s an example of an ancient love spell for a male user:

Pudenda key spell: Take an egg  of a crow and the juice of the plant crow’s-foot and gall of a river electric eel, and grind them with honey and say the spell whenever you grind and whenever you smear it on your genitals.

This is the spell to be spoken: “I say to you, womb of {spell target}, open and receive  the seed of {spell user} and the uncontrollable seed of the IARPHE ARPHE (write it).  Let her, {spell target}, love me for all time as Isis loved Osiris and let her remain chaste for me as Penelope did for Odysseus.  And do you, womb, remember me for all the time of my life, because I am AKARNACHTHAS.”

Say this while grinding and whenever you rub your genitals, and in this way have intercourse with the woman you wish, and she will love you alone and by no one will she ever be laid, just by you alone.[3]

This spell’s focus on the spell user’s penis isn’t an idiosyncrasy: Osiris’s penis is an important element in the love story of Isis and Osiris, and other love spells also involve smearing material on the spell user’s penis.[4]  The sexual biology that generates male paternity uncertainty also tends to generate male concern about female sexual fidelity (“she will love you alone and by no one will she ever by laid, just by you alone”).  A sense of powerful agency also typically supports male sexual self-confidence.  In this spell, that psychological need is expressed with a conjunction of the user’s seed (semen) and magical “uncontrollable seed,” as well as with the imperative, “womb, remember me for all the time of my life.”

While male love spell users were highly interested in having sex, they weren’t interested in having sex with just any woman.  Female prostitutes probably were more readily available than were providers of erotic spells.  Prostitutes also probably provided faster, cheaper, and more reliable service than did erotic spell providers.  Erotic spells, however, served the needs of men interested in having sex with a specific woman that the man selected from the general population of women.  Men’s genital focus existed in conjunction with men’s interest in the specific person of a woman.

Love spells for female users tended to be oriented to gaining affection, rather than specifically sex.  Here’s the first part of an ancient love spell for a female user:

I will bind you, Nilos, who is also {called} Agathos Daimon, whom Demetria bore, with great evils.  Neither gods nor men will procure a clean getaway for you!  On the contrary, you will love me, Capitolina whom Peperous bore, with a divine passion, and in every way you will be for me an escort, as long as I want, that you might do for me what I wish and nothing for anyone else, and that you might obey no one save only me, Capitolina, and that you might forget your parents, children, and friends.

The first sentence of the above spell is completely conventional for such ritual services.  The next two sentences seem like a transcription of Capitolina’s oral request.  That request describes love without physical specificity (“love me…with a divine passion”).  It primarily concerns attention (“forget your parents, children, and friends”) and general personal services (“be for me an escort … do for me what I wish .. obey no one save only me”).  The rest of the spell consists of fairly conventional spell text, along with restatements of the request for attention and affection:

Accomplish everything for me and rush in and take away the mind of Nilos, to whom this magical material belongs, in order that he might love me, Capitolina, and that Nilos, whom Demetria bore, might be inseparable from me, every hour and every day.  … bind Nilos, who is also {called} Agathos Daimon, whom Demetria bore, to me, Capitolina, whom Piperous bore, for his {whole} life.  Nilos shall love me with an eternal affection; immediately, immediately; quickly, {quickly}.[5]

The spell describes spirits “releasing all who have drowned, have died unmarried, and have been carried away by the wind.”  Committing suicide without using instruments that break the surface of the body, e.g. drowning oneself, is more typical of female suicides than male suicides.  Dying unmarried indicates lack of affiliation, not necessarily lack of sex.  These distinctive references may represent Capitolina’s suicidal ideation and her fears for her life’s end.  In any case, the primary focus on affiliation and affection characterizes love spells for female users compared to those for male users.

The social and familial position of women in the ancient Mediterranean world did not effectively constrain women’s opportunities to have sex with men for whom they developed an erotic passion. Erotic love spells sought to generate intense suffering in the spell target, usually a woman.  That passion would prompt the spell target to come to the spell user, usually a man:

attract, inflame, destroy, burn, cause her to swoon from love as she is burnt, inflamed.  Sting the tortured soul, the heart, of Karosa, whom Thelo bore, until she leaps forth and comes to Apalos, whom Theonilla bore, out of passion and love

Whenever I throw you, Myrrh, … as you burn, so also will you burn her, {spell target} … seek out her, {spell target}, and open her right side and enter like thunder, like lightning, like a burning flame, and make her thin, {pale,} weak, limp, … until she leaps forth and comes to me, {spell user}[6]

Love spells targeting women focused on motivating them to leap forth, not on enabling them to do so.  Among the elite women who probably predominated among erotic spell targets, what governed their erotic passion was within their minds and bodies, not the social circumstances objectively around them.[7]

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

Notes:

[1] The collection is called the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM); for English translations, see Betz (1992).  Faraone (1999) p. 15, citing Petropoulos (1988) p. 215, states that “about one-quarter of these texts are concerned with love and sex.”  Based on Betz’s spell list, I estimate that 18% concern love and sex.  The division of the texts into separate spells and the categorization of the spells allow significant margins for ambiguity.

[2] Faraone (1999) p. 43, ft. 9 (underlying counts).  Id. is an impressive feat of rhetorical contortionism to maintain willful ignorance of sexual biology and evolution.

[3] PGM XXXVI.283-94, trans. Betz (1992) p. 276.  PGM VII. 185-6 describes grinding up pepper with honey and coating one’s penis with that mixture to get an erection.

[4] E.g., among the Greek Magical Papyri, PDM xiv. 335-55; PDM xiv. 930-32; PDM xiv. 1026-45; PDM xiv. 1046-47; PDM xiv. 1047-48.

[5] From PGM XV.1-21, trans. Betz (1992) p. 251.  The variant spellings of Capitolina’s mother’s name exist within the text. An interesting comparison is PGM LXI. 1-38.  That spell explicitly signals a male user, but its first two parts have female-user attention and affiliation themes, and it lacks an explicit appeal for sex.  It may be a female spell that was adapted for a male user.  The last section, which may have been appended, describes how to get the woman to leave.

[6] PGM XIXa.51-53; PGM XXVI.333-60; trans Betz (1992) pp. 257, 277.

[7] Ritual service users in Roman Egypt apparently were economically secure.  Male erotic service users probably targeted predominately elite women because of class-based patterns of association and because these men’s high status and material resources served less well to attract similarly positioned women.  The sexuality of low-status women apparently was not significantly constrained normatively. Social circumstances and bodily circumstances are of course interrelated through life history.  For example, if a person grew up in a family with little food, the person probably would be undernourished and in poor physical health.  Similarly, a person might internalize social devaluation and legal repression of her or his sexuality.

References:

Betz, Hans Dieter, ed. 1992. The Greek magical papyri in translation: including the Demotic spells Vol. 1, [Texts].  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Faraone, Christopher A. 1999. Ancient Greek love magic. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Petropoulos, J.C.B. 1988.  “The erotic magical papyri”, in Basil G.Mandilaras (ed.), Proceedings of the XVIIIth International Congress of Papyrology, Athens 25-31 May 1986, i (Athens, 1988), pp. 215- 222.

legal standards for imprisoning child-support debtors

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Turner v. Rogers (2011) decision established due-process safeguards for proceedings threatening unrepresented child-support debtors with incarceration. A key element of those safeguards is an explicit, simple determination that the child-support debtor is presently able to pay.  Turner v. Rogers formally declared procedural conditions.  U.S. v. Ballek (1999) addressed substantial reasons for incarcerating child-support debtors.  Procedural and substantial issues in imprisoning child-support debtors are closely related.  Despite its formal scope, Turner v. Rogers provides higher, better, more recent reasoning relevant to substantive grounds for incarcerating child-support debtors.

The U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, issued the decision in Ballek.  An Assistant Federal Public Defender brought Jeffrey Ballek’s case against the United States government, represented in the person of an Assistant United States Attorney.  Child support is an off-budget, twenty-seven-billion-dollar, tax-and-transfer program that provides more benefits to adults associated with other adults who have more money.  One could hardly imagine a more attractive program to politicians than such “child support.”  One man’s liberty interest against a large, politically appealing program is a set up for a mugging, even in a court of law, and even with an Assistant Federal Public Defender there to square off against the Assistant United States Attorney.  The Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Ballek reads as if Ballek’s side was pummeled into silence before it could deliver key understanding to the court.

The Ballek opinion fails to recognize basic aspects of child support. The Ninth Circuit grasped for self-evident observations:

We start with the self-evident observation that the relationship between parent and child is much more than the ordinary relationship between debtor and creditor.

The reference to parent is nicely sentimental, but divorced from knowledge.  Child support, when imposed on men, is legally based on no action other than having sex, or, alternatively, being married.  In California in March, 2000, 71% of child support obligors with arrears had at least one child support order established by default judgment.[1]  When child-support obligations are established by default judgment, the obligor isn’t even aware of the obligation.  The ordinary relationship between debtor and creditor typically is longer than a one-night stand.  Moreover, the debtor actually knows of the obligation and explicitly agrees to it.

Child-support orders are highly disproportionately imposed on men, and so too is imprisonment. The Ninth Circuit judges’ lack of interest in sex continued through their consideration of debt imprisonment and forced employment:

Imprisoning someone for failure to pay a debt can run afoul of the Thirteenth Amendment.  See, e.g., Pollock v. Williams, 322 U.S. 4, 64 S.Ct. 792, 88 L.Ed. 1095 (1944).  However, not all forced employment is constitutionally prohibited.  Where the obligation is one that has traditionally been enforced by means of imprisonment, the constitutional prohibition does not apply.  See, e.g., Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275, 287-88, 17 S.Ct. 326, 41 L.Ed. 715 (1897) (imprisonment for sailors who desert their ships);  Arver v. United States, 245 U.S. 366, 390, 38 S.Ct. 159, 62 L.Ed. 349 (1918) (imprisonment for refusal to perform military service);  Butler v. Perry, 240 U.S. 328, 332-33, 36 S.Ct. 258, 60 L.Ed. 672 (1916) (imprisonment for failure to do roadwork).

These traditional forms of forced employment all concern forced employment of men.  A fundamentally sex-biased interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment should be overruled even sooner than sexist selective service registration is.

The Ninth Circuit described imprisoning persons for not providing money to a custodial parent as one of the most important exercises of state police power.  That understanding shaped the Court’s interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment:

We decline to interpret the Thirteenth Amendment in a way that would so drastically interfere with one of the most important and sensitive exercises of the police power – ensuring that persons too young to take care of themselves can count on both their parents for material support.

While two-breadwinners per child might be imagined as an ideal, that ideal has little relation to current or historical reality.  Many families have only one income earner as a result of family caretaking choices or the death of a spouse.  About 40% of persons providing financial child support as a non-custodial parent are married to another person.[3]  Thus the two-breadwinners per child ideal would require extensive double-counting across households.  Most importantly, imprisoning a person can drastically interfere with that person’s ability to provide material and non-material support for the custodian of a child, or children under the imprisoned person’s own custody. Australia, Austria, and Finland do not allow the imprisonment of child-support debtors.  In Denmark, such imprisonment never occurs, and in France, it’s very rare.[4]  Describing imprisoning child-support debtors as “one of the most important and sensitive exercises of the police power” is absurd.  U.S. government officials and the public have had, until recently, little knowledge of the actual extent of such incarceration.[5]

From an economic perspective, child-support prices function much differently from prices in labor and financial markets.  Child-support orders do not respond automatically, quickly, or rationally to changes in economic circumstances.  Child-support orders administratively fix substantial nominal payments for up to twenty-one years into the future.  In response to an adverse economic shock such as loss of a job or imprisonment, a child-support obligor must seek a court order to have the child-support order changed to reflect the changed economic circumstances.  Even if a court recognizes the changed economic circumstances, the court is prohibited under the Bradley Amendment from retroactively changing the child-support obligation to recognize the actual date of the changed economic circumstances. Apparently oblivious to these economic and procedural realities, the Ninth Circuit in Ballek stated:

In making such an award, the state courts take into account a variety of factors, including the non-custodial parent’s other obligations and his ability to pay child support;  if circumstances change, the obligor can return to court and seek to have the amount reduced.  See Alaska Stat. § 25.24.170 (Michie 1998);  Curley v. Curley, 588 P.2d 289, 291 n. 2 (Alaska 1979).

Given this means-testing, which is an integral aspect of every child support award, a non-custodial parent should never be confronted with a situation where he is ordered to make child support payments he cannot afford.  A non-custodial parent who does not have the funds to satisfy the child support award, and who does not obtain a reduction or remission of the award because of inability to pay, will almost certainly be engaged in willful defiance of the state court’s child support order.[2]

If such a process of administratively adjusting nominal economic values could work well, the Soviet Union would never have collapsed.  Soviet planners, moreover, were not legally prevented from making true-ups to account for administrative lags relative to dynamic, decentralized economic change.

The best explanation for the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Ballek is that it didn’t hear a strong case.  The Court’s opinion merely ratified powerful political and economic interests in the status quo.  Law can do better than that.  Turner v. Rogers is a good start.

*  *  *  *  *

The Ballek decision: United States v. Ballek, 170 F.3d 871 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 528 U.S. 853 (1999), argued before Circuit Judges Aldisert, Wallace and Kozinski, opinion from Kozinski.

Read more:

Notes:

[1] See Elaine Sorensen, Heather Koball, Kate Pomper, and Chava Zibman, “Examining Child Support Arrears in California: The Collectibility Study,” March 2003. Urban Institute, Prepared for the California Dept. of Child Support Services. See p. 118.

[2] The use of the term “means-testing” here is unusual.  Means testing is usually associated with the conferral of benefits.

[3] See U.S. Census Bureau, Support Providers: 2005, Table 3.

[4] See p. 43, Table 8, in Skinner, Christine, and Jacqueline Davidson (2009).  “Recent Trends in Child Maintenance Schemes in 14 Countries,” International Journal of Law, Policy, and the Family 23, pp. 25-52.

[5] Jeffrey Ballek was sentenced to six months imprisonment for his child-support debt.  The Ballek decision noted that child-support awards are “routinely enforced by imprisonment.”  Actual data on persons incarcerated for child-support debt are highly fragmentary.

word and image in the Book of the Dead

About 4400 years ago, Unas, the last Egyptian pharaoh in the 5th dynasty, was buried within a pyramid with written inscriptions on the walls of the burial chamber.  Subsequent pharaohs were buried similarly.  The texts on the walls of the pyramids’ burial chambers are a corpus of spells to aid the pharaoh in the afterlife.  These pyramid texts were not illustrated.  After a few centuries, texts began to be written on the inside surfaces of wooden coffins that contained non-royal persons.  These coffin texts seldom had any illustrations.  After another roughly six centuries, funerary texts began to written on papyrus rolls buried with the deceased.  The funerary texts written on papyrus, called the Book of the Dead, have a well-differentiated textual corpus from the earlier pyramid texts and coffin texts.  In addition, Book of the Dead rolls usually include illustrations.  Book of the Dead rolls have been found that include text only in a brief opening, with the rest of the work consisting only of illustrations.[1]

The inclusion of illustrations in ancient Egyptian funerary texts is plausibly associated with broadening of demand for the texts.  The change in media from burial chamber walls (pyramid texts) to coffins (coffin texts) to papyrus (Book of the Dead) reduced requirements for site-specific work and fostered increased division of labor and mass production of texts.[2]  The supply of scribal skills was probably constrained by the complicated representational language and well-established scribal guilds.  Illustrators, in contrast, probably were less organized and had less formal training.  Hence the supply of illustrators could increase more rapidly and more propitiously than the supply of scribes.  Popular demand favors production of images.  That sensory effect is likely to be greater in a largely illiterate society such as ancient Egypt.  Illustrated funerary texts were thus probably a market-driven development in ancient Egypt.

The relation between word and image in the Book of the Dead is highly fluid.  Consider, for example, the text images above and below from the papyrus of Ani, a Book of the Dead from Thebes about 1275 BGC.[3]  The illustrations in the text above are irregularly positioned and do not have bounding boxes.  The three illustrations in the top left portion of text below have regular bounding boxes.  The right portion of the text contains top-and-bottom nearly identical images that actually differ in subtle ways (the most obvious difference is the left-most white figure’s hairstyle).  Most surprising is the right-most figure’s hand gesture that breaks into the column of text.  Having an illustrated figure gesture into the space of the text is common in European medieval illuminated manuscripts.

*  *  *  *  *

Notes:

[1] Taylor, John H (2010).  Journey through the afterlife: ancient Egyptian Book of the dead.  Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.  See p. 268.

[2] In some instances, different sections of a Book of the Dead were written by different scribes.  Scribes might work on separate pieces of papyrus that would later be joined together.  Scribes produced texts with spaces left for illustrations (vignettes).  Scribes also left blank spaces for filling in the name of the person who purchased/acquired a particular text.  Id.  pp. 36, 268-9, 286.

[3] Ani was a Theban royal scribe — “Accounting Scribe for the Divine Offerings of all the gods. Overseer of the Granaries and of the Lords of the Tawer.” Id. pp. 310, 36.