by Charles C. Jett

The Man in the Reading Room – Part II – After the Diagnosis

The first essay, The Man in the Reading Room – Will He Be Right Again – traced the American economy from 1900 to 2026 and ended with a question. Whether a free people will choose, again, to govern the economic forces in its midst.

This essay names the levers.

Three principal ones — a modern Glass-Steagall, a structural antitrust standard, Wagner-Act protections extended to contingent work — and two supporting ones. Each is laid out with the historical statute that originally embodied it, what it would do, what it would cost, and what is most often argued against it.
The exercise is not advocacy. It is the kind of orderly description a writer can produce when he believes the citizens he is writing for are capable of weighing the evidence themselves.
The patterns are visible. The data is on the table. The levers are named.
The rest is yours

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – He Turned Survival into Evidence

Kidnapped at eleven. Sold four times. Marched six months to the African coast. Loaded onto a slave ship with two hundred and forty-four others. Survived the Middle Passage. Survived the Seven Years’ War. At twenty-one, he placed forty pounds on a Quaker merchant’s table in Montserrat and walked out a free man. Then he kept the receipt. Twenty-three years later, he printed it inside a book — and dedicated the book to Parliament. The slave traders are remembered as ledgers. The boy from Essaka who built a legal case in the form of his own life is barely remembered at all. He turned a manumission certificate into evidence and a memoir into a brief — and helped end the British slave trade ten years after his death. Olaudah Equiano needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Man in the Reading Room – Will He Be Right Again?

In 1916, the top one percent of American households held 45 percent of the nation’s wealth. By 1978, after four decades of New Deal regulation, antitrust enforcement, and a strong labor movement, that figure had fallen to about 22 percent. By 2025, it had climbed back to 31.7 percent — within striking distance of where it stood in 1916. This essay traces the American economy across one hundred and twenty-six years: the trust era, the Crash, the Depression, the New Deal, the postwar Great Compression, the deregulation that followed, and the present moment of platform monopolies and gig labor. The patterns are striking. They were also predicted — by an unexpected observer, working in the Reading Room of the British Museum in the 1860s, with no knowledge of America at all.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – An Enslaved Poet Wrote to the Generalissimo

A slave ship called the Phillis. A child in the hold. Eighteen prominent Bostonians forced to sign their names to certify she had written her own poems. A forty-two-line ode mailed to General George Washington in October 1775, before independence had even been declared. That was Phillis Wheatley’s case for entry into the public sphere of the founding. Washington answered. He praised her talent. He invited her to Cambridge. He sent her poem to the press. Then she married a free Black grocer, lost three children, took work as a scullery maid, and died in a boarding house at thirty-one with her infant daughter beside her. The Constitution that arrived four years later counted three-fifths of her in the House. She wrote her way into the founding before the founding had decided she was a person. Phillis Wheatley needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

A Nuclear Submarine, a Spy, and a Thesis: Forty Years on the Close Aboard Bastion.

Scorecard. A 1988 master’s thesis predicted today’s Russian and Chinese naval strategy. The world has confirmed most of it, revised the rest, and demonstrated something more important than either.
Answer. Walter M. Kreitler, then a Navy lieutenant, argued in his Naval Postgraduate School thesis that the Soviets would tuck their ballistic missile submarines inside the twelve-mile territorial sea, defend them with mines and coastal forces, and free the blue-water fleet for other work. Forty years on, the bastion is the operating doctrine of the Russian Navy and increasingly of the PLAN.
Pivot. The Soviet fleet collapsed before it could execute the strategy. Sea-based deterrence split into two families. Project Harmony, revealed in October 2025, has filled in exactly the kind of defensive architecture Kreitler’s thesis said Moscow would need. New START’s central limits expired on 5 February 2026.
Closing Claim. Kreitler’s thesis is a demonstration of how a young officer, using only open sources, can reason from hardware and geography to a doctrine whose shape four decades largely confirm. The method outlasted the prediction.
My thanks to Walter Kreitler for the work, to Jan Breemer for guiding it, and to my shipmate Bob Mhoon, who sent me the thesis. Ray is long since decommissioned. The questions she was built to answer are not.

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