The Doomsday Scam

For decades, aspiring bomb makers — including ISIS — have
desperately tried to get their hands on a lethal substance
called red mercury. There’s a reason that they never have.

By C. J. CHIVERS NY Times

The hunt for the ultimate weapon began in January 2014, when Abu Omar, a smuggler who fills shopping lists for the Islamic State, met a jihadist commander in Tal Abyad, a Syrian town near the Turkish border. The Islamic State had raised its black flag over Tal Abyad several days before, and the commander, a former cigarette vendor known as Timsah, Arabic for ‘‘crocodile,’’ was the area’s new security chief. The Crocodile had an order to place, which he said he had received from his bosses in Mosul, a city in northwestern Iraq that the Islamic State would later overrun.

Syrian Kurdish fighters walk near unexploded and abandoned munitions in the Syrian city of Kobani on March 27.Where the Islamic State Gets Its WeaponsAPRIL 27, 2015

Shahad, Abu Anas's surviving daughter, carries the scars from a blister agent attack on her home in August.What an ISIS Chemical Strike Did to One Syrian FamilyOCT. 6, 2015

Abu Omar, a Syrian whose wispy beard hinted at his jihadist sympathies, was young, wiry and adaptive. Since war erupted in Syria in 2011, he had taken many noms de guerre — including Abu Omar — and found a niche for himself as a freelance informant and trader for hire in the extremist underground. By the time he met the Crocodile, he said, he had become a valuable link in the Islamic State’s local supply chain. Working from Sanliurfa, a Turkish city north of the group’s operational hub in Raqqa, Syria, he purchased and delivered many of the common items the martial statelet required: flak jackets, walkie-talkies, mobile phones, medical instruments, satellite antennas, SIM cards and the like. Once, he said, he rounded up 1,500 silver rings with flat faces upon which the world’s most prominent terrorist organization could stamp its logo. Another time, a French jihadist hired him to find a Turkish domestic cat; Syrian cats, it seemed, were not the friendly sort.

War materiel or fancy; business was business. The Islamic State had needs, it paid to have them met and moving goods across the border was not especially risky. The smugglers used the same well-established routes by which they had helped foreign fighters reach Syria for at least three years. Turkish border authorities did not have to be eluded, Abu Omar said. They had been co-opted. ‘‘It is easy,’’ he boasted. ‘‘We bought the soldiers.’’

This time, however, the Crocodile had an unusual request: The Islamic State, he said, was shopping for red mercury.

Abu Omar knew what this meant. Red mercury — precious and rare, exceptionally dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, its properties unmatched by any compound known to science — was the stuff of doomsday daydreams. According to well-traveled tales of its potency, when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives, red mercury could create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb. In another application, a famous nuclear scientist once suggested it could be used as a component in a neutron bomb small enough to fit in a sandwich-size paper bag.

Abu Omar understood the implications. The Islamic State was seeking a weapon that could do more than strike fear in its enemies. It sought a weapon that could kill its enemies wholesale, instantly changing the character of the war. Imagine a mushroom cloud rising over the fronts of Syria and Iraq. Imagine the jihadists’ foes scattered and ruined, the caliphate expanding and secure.

Imagine the price the Islamic State would pay.

Abu Omar thought he might have a lead. He had a cousin in Syria who told him about red mercury that other jihadists had seized from a corrupt rebel group. Maybe he could arrange a sale. And so soon Abu Omar set out, off for the front lines outside Latakia, a Syrian government stronghold, in pursuit of the gullible man’s shortcut to a nuclear bomb.

To approach the subject of red mercury is to journey into a comic-book universe, a zone where the stubborn facts of science give way to unverifiable claims, fantasy and outright magic, and where villains pursuing the dark promise of a mysterious weapon could be rushing headlong to the end of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the broad agreement among nonproliferation specialists that red mercury, at least as a chemical compound with explosive pop, does not exist.

Legends of red mercury’s powers began circulating by late in the Cold War. But their breakout period came after the Soviet Union’s demise, when disarray and penury settled over the Kremlin’s arms programs. As declining security fueled worries of illicit trafficking, red mercury embedded itself in the lexicon of the freewheeling black-market arms bazaar. Aided by credulous news reports, it became an arms trafficker’s marvelous elixir, a substance that could do almost anything a shady client might need: guide missiles, shield objects from radar, equip a rogue underdog state or terrorist group with weapons rivaling those of a superpower. It was priced accordingly, at hundreds of thousands of dollars a kilogram. With time, the asking price would soar.

As often happens with durable urban legends, the red-mercury meme found just enough public support to assure an unextinguishable life. Chief among its proponents was Samuel T. Cohen, the American physicist and Manhattan Project veteran often called the father of the neutron bomb, who before his death in 2010 spoke vividly of the perils of nuclear terrorism and what he said was poor government preparation for such attacks. Cohen joined the red-mercury bandwagon as it gathered momentum in the early 1990s, staking a lonely position by asserting that the substance could be used to build nuclear weapons of exceptionally small size.

In one edition of his autobiography, he claimed red mercury was manufactured by ‘‘mixing special nuclear materials in very small amounts into the ordinary compound and then inserting the mixture into a nuclear reactor or bombarding it with a particle-accelerator beam.’’ The result, he said, ‘‘is a remarkable nonexploding high explosive’’ that, when detonated, becomes ‘‘extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen and producing a pure-fusion mini neutron bomb.’’ Here was a proliferation threat of an order never before seen.

The establishment largely dismissed him. ‘‘If he did ever reveal evidence, I never saw it,’’ said Peter D. Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist who served as chief scientific adviser for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time. He added, ‘‘I would have seen it, at that point in history.’’ Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation analyst at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., put matters less delicately, saying Cohen followed a classic formula for conspiracy theories, mixing ‘‘nonscientific mumbo jumbo’’ with allegations that governments were withholding the truth. ‘‘I could never figure out where Sam Cohen the physicist ended and Sam Cohen the polemicist began,’’ he said.

Russian news organizations in the 1990s nevertheless relayed claims of red mercury’s destructive potential at face value, and foreign news outlets occasionally repeated them, boosting the material’s credibility and mystique. Britain’s Channel 4 elevated the material’s profile with two documentaries — ‘‘Trail of Red Mercury’’ and ‘‘Pocket Neutron’’ — that presented, according to their producers, ‘‘startling evidence that Russian scientists have designed a miniature neutron bomb using a mysterious compound called red mercury.’’ Cohen held a news conference after one broadcast to say it confirmed his fears.

Outside this circle of the faithful, red mercury faced doubters. The substance was almost everything but scientifically verifiable. It was not even reasonably explicable. ‘‘Over all it doesn’t make much sense,’’ an engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory wrote to a supervisor in 1994. It was also devilishly elusive, turning up in tales of smuggling mafias but never quite finding its way to a law-enforcement body or nuclear agency for proper frisking. When hopeful sellers were caught, substance in hand, it reliably turned out to be something else, sometimes a placebo of chuckle-worthy simplicity: ordinary mercury mixed with dye. The shadowy weaponeer’s little helper, it was the unobtainium of the post-Soviet world.

Among specialists who investigated the claims, the doubts hardened to an unequivocal verdict: Red mercury was a lure, the central prop of a confidence game designed to fleece ignorant buyers. ‘‘Take a bogus material, give it an enigmatic name, exaggerate its physical properties and intended uses, mix in some human greed and intrigue, and voilà: one half-baked scam,’’ the Department of Energy’s Critical Technologies Newsletter declared. In 1998, 15 authors from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which helps maintain the American nuclear-weapons stockpile, published an article in The Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry that called red mercury ‘‘a relatively notorious nuclear hoax.’’ In 1999, Jane’s Intelligence Review suggested that the scam’s victims may have included Osama bin Laden, whose Qaeda purchasing agents were ‘‘nuclear novices.’’ The most accommodating theory held that red mercury might have been a Soviet code name for something else — maybe lithium-6, a controlled material with an actual use in nuclear weapons — and traffickers repurposed the label for whatever nuclear detritus they were trying to move.

A true believer of the legends might interject that official skepticism in public did not preclude another discussion playing out on classified channels. But when WikiLeaks published American diplomatic cables in 2010 and 2011, snippets of the internal red-mercury dialogue were consistent with the public statements. In 2006, according to one cable, Sri Lanka notified the American Embassy in Colombo of concerns that the Tamil Tigers, a secessionist militant group, had tried to procure the substance. ‘‘Red Mercury is a well-known scam material,’’ a State Department nonproliferation official told the embassy. ‘‘There is nothing to be concerned about.’’

Few people are more familiar with the lingering red-mercury assertions than Zimmerman, who later became director of the Center for Science and Security Studies at King’s College in London. For years, he canvassed his peers in nuclear-weapons and nonproliferation communities. He asked about the substance in conferences. He brought it up in one-on-one sessions with weaponeers from multiple countries and scientists from the former Communist bloc. He concluded that the substance was not just ‘‘hot air, myth, smoke and mirrors’’ but also ‘‘a con job.’’

When I called him, he laughed and referred to people convinced of its powers as ‘‘Red Mercurians.’’ Some of the stories he’d heard, he said, resembled ‘‘an old Jack Benny routine.’’ He paused to be straightforward and clear. Red mercury (or, for that matter, any mercury compound of any color), he said, had no nuclear-weapons application of any sort. The particulars of its supposed martial utility do not square with basic science. ‘‘It cannot be true,’’ he said, and spoke as if restating a longstanding challenge. ‘‘I have plenty of times staked my reputation on these statements, and no one has ever called me on it.’’

And yet a generation after the hype first burned bright, shopworn legends of red mercury’s powers, lodged in fringe provinces of the popular imagination, continue to surface, rekindled by shifting casts of jihadists, tomb looters, smugglers, journalists, YouTube salesmen and other wannabe profiteers. One thing about red mercury: If it’s not nuclear, it’s viral.

Abu Omar had joined a long line of players. It was impossible not to wonder: Did he really believe in red mercury himself?

When the Crocodile placed his order, Abu Omar said, the smuggler asked how much the Islamic State was willing to pay. The answer was vague. The Islamic State would pay, he said, ‘‘whatever was asked.’’ This was not the practical guidance a businessman needs. So the Crocodile sharpened the answer. Up to $4 million — and a $100,000 bonus — for each unit of red mercury matching that shown in a set of photographs he sent to Abu Omar over WhatsApp, the mobile-messaging service.

The images showed a pale, oblong object, roughly the length of a hot-dog bun, with a hole at each end. It bore no similarity to the red mercury that smugglers often described — a thick liquid with a brilliant metallic sheen. It appeared to be a dull piece of injection-molded plastic, like a swim-lane buoy or a children’s toy. But it had an intriguing resemblance that hinted at how the Islamic State’s interest might have been piqued: It was the exact likeness of an object that in 2013 the Cihan News Agency, one of Turkey’s largest news agencies, had called a red-mercury rocket warhead.

In that case, three men were said to have been arrested near Kayseri, a city in central Turkey. Cihan’s coverage followed the familiar arc of red-mercury hype. Footage shot at night showed officials in protective suits and masks approaching a van. The news presenter reported the operation in matter-of-fact tones, noting that the seized rocket component ‘‘was examined by six different institutions, including the Turkish Atomic Energy Authority, all of which found that it contained the material red mercury. The liquid can cause large explosions and is worth $1 million per liter. Red mercury is used for intercontinental rocket systems and hydrogen bombs.’’

With that validation, the photographs traveled on social media, finding their way to the Islamic State and then to Abu Omar, who said he remembered something he had heard from his cousin in Syria, a fighter for Jabhat al-Nusra, the Qaeda affiliate and bitter Islamic State rival. This cousin, he said, had told him that Nusra fighters had taken red-mercury warheads from a now-defunct rebel group, Ghuraba al-Sham, which the jihadists had overpowered in 2013, executing its leaders. The warheads that the Nusra fighters confiscated, Abu Omar said, matched those in the Crocodile’s photographs.

Not long after leaving Tal Abyad, Abu Omar said, he tracked down his cousin near the front lines outside Latakia to arrange a sale. The plan quickly tanked. His cousin, he said, suspected Abu Omar was shopping for the Islamic State. He refused to discuss terms. ‘‘I want you to end this talk about red mercury because I know where it is going to go,’’ Abu Omar recalled his cousin saying. ‘‘I know ISIS wants them. But we will never sell.’’

Abu Omar was describing all this in the lobby of a Turkish hotel, where he appeared one night this fall after several phone calls and chat sessions. His stories were more than far-fetched; they were confounding. Anyone with an Internet connection could quickly discover that the red-mercury meme was widely regarded as nonsense. Even a visit to Wikipedia — whose entry on the subject began, ‘‘Red mercury is a hoax substance of uncertain composition’’ — would surely be enough to raise questions for anyone disbursing Islamic State cash. I told Abu Omar that I had spoken with several nonproliferation experts, and they roundly agreed: Red mercury was a scam. Did he believe otherwise?

Abu Omar listened patiently. His face gave nothing away. Then he replied politely, as if addressing the uninformed. ‘‘I have seen it with my own eyes,’’ he said.

Two years before in Ras al-Ain, another Syrian border town, Abu Omar said, he was with a group of Islamic fighters that organized a test with 3.5 grams of liquid red mercury and a container of chlorine. The experiment was led by Abu Suleiman al-Kurdi, who commanded a small fighting group that has since joined the Islamic State. Al-Kurdi gathered the jihadists around his materials as the test began. ‘‘I will count to 10, and whoever stays in the room after that suffocates and dies,’’ he warned.

The chlorine was held in a foil-lined container, Abu Omar said. As the group watched, al-Kurdi dipped a needle into the red mercury and then touched the needle to the chlorine, transferring a drop. ‘‘Everything interacted with everything,’’ Abu Omar said, and a foul vapor rose. All of the fighters were driven away, first from the room, then from the house.

The powers of red mercury, Abu Omar said, were real.

Almost every aspect of this story, like so many other breathless accounts of red mercury, was unverifiable. And even if something did happen in that room, the noxious vapors could have a simple explanation: Chlorine alone damages the respiratory tract and can be deadly if inhaled.

But Abu Omar had answered the question. He stood firmly in the red-mercury camp. He was hardly alone.

Safi al-Safi, an unaffiliated rebel and small-time smuggler specializing in weapons, antiquities and forged documents, sat in an open-air cafe beside the Syrian-Turkish border. He was smoking scented tobacco from a water pipe while discussing the cross-border mercury trade. ‘‘Red mercury has a red color, and there is mercury that has the color of dark blood,’’ he said. ‘‘And there is green mercury, which is used for sexual enhancement, and silver mercury is used for medical purposes. The most expensive type is called Blood of the Slaves, which is the darkest type. Magicians use it to summon jinni.’’

This primer — passionate, thorough, outlandish to its core — fits a type. In meetings with smugglers in several towns along the border, red mercury inhabited the fertile mental terrain where fear and distrust of authority meet superstitious folklore. Descriptions of the material varied slightly in detail and sharply in price, and there were ample contradictions. But there was a remarkable consistency in several intricate legends and origin stories, even among people who did not know one another and who were separated by many miles.

Another smuggler, Faysal, who said he was awaiting results of vetting by the United States government to join a Pentagon-backed force opposing the Islamic State (the program has since been dropped), continued the lesson. ‘‘It has two different types: hot and cold,’’ he said. The cold form, which other smugglers sometimes call ‘‘spiritual mercury,’’ he said, ‘‘can be found in Roman graveyards.’’ He added: ‘‘Kings and princes and sultans used to take it to the graves with them.’’

This type of red mercury, the smugglers said, has been recovered by Middle Eastern grave robbers for at least several decades. ‘‘In previous generations, old women wore it in a necklace to keep the devil’s eye away,’’ Faysal said. More recently, rich men shopped for cold red mercury as either an aphrodisiac or to improve their sexual performance.

The substance was so valuable that dishonest traders, al-Safi said, often trafficked in fake red mercury. ‘‘In my village at least 15 people trade in it,’’ he said. ‘‘They buy normal mercury, and they color it. They use red lipstick and put a little on a spoon and heat the spoon until it turns to powder, and you put the powder in the mercury, and you mix it, and it becomes that color. This is how you cheat it.’’

Identifying such cheats was easy, the smugglers said, because real red mercury is attracted to gold but repelled by garlic. Wise buyers bring gold and garlic to test the product before cash changes hands. ‘‘You put a drop on a plate and you approach it with garlic, and that drop is going to move away,’’ a third smuggler, Abu Zaid explained. ‘‘But if you put red mercury on a plate and move a piece of gold under the plate, the red mercury is going to move with it.’’

Cold red mercury, these smugglers said, could not be used for nuclear weapons; that was the role of hot red mercury, which had a more recent origin. Only sophisticated laboratories manufactured it, and the hot red mercury available in Syria had come from the Soviet Union — usually, according to Raed, another smuggler, ‘‘in a specially maintained box with equipment and a manual and special gloves.’’

Abu Zaid said hot red mercury was sometimes offered for sale in Syria and could be useful for the Islamic State, which has a cadre of former Iraqi officials who would know how to harness its power. But he cautioned that buyers could easily make a grievous mistake. ‘‘It is not only about getting the red mercury,’’ he said. ‘‘The very small box needs special equipment to open it, and special reactors to work with it. If you open this box, a radius of eight kilometers around you will be destroyed.’’

This was especially dangerous, because hot red mercury could also be harvested from junkyards and seamstress shops. Al-Safi described how this came to pass. To prevent the weapons-grade material from falling into the wrong hands during what he called ‘‘the American occupation’’ of the former Soviet Union, he said, Russians safeguarding the stock late in the Cold War cached tiny reservoirs of red mercury in sewing machines and radios bound for export, which were then scattered throughout the Arab world. (Another version of the same tale says that red mercury is hidden in old television sets.)

These rumors have been circulating for years, once driving prices for old sewing machines as high as $50,000 in Saudi Arabia, according to a 2009 Reuters report. Often the most-sought-after machines were the Singer brand — which, considering that Singer was an American manufacturer, did not quite align with the Soviet fable. No matter. Abu Omar also insisted that old sewing machines were a red-mercury source. ‘‘Specific machines,’’ he said, ‘‘with a butterfly logo on them.’’ He said he knew this from experience because the red mercury used in the jihadists’ chlorine experiment in Ras al-Ain had come from his grandmother’s machine.

If all of this seems like a bad and ever-expanding joke, it can work that way. When I mentioned the garlic-and-gold tests and red mercury’s supposed qualities as a sexual stimulant to Peter Zimmerman, the nuclear physicist, his answer came quickly. ‘‘Take that with a grain of red mercury,’’ he said.

Jokes may be as useful a means as any of understanding red mercury, considering another origin theory that has made the rounds for years: that the hoax has roots in an intelligence-service put-on, a disinformation campaign of phony news articles planted decades ago in Russian newspapers by the K.G.B. and one of its successors, the F.S.B.

There are other variants of this story, including one in which Washington and Moscow collaborated in circulating red-mercury stories to flush out nuclear smugglers and to waste terrorists’ time. American soldiers and officers in bomb-disposal and counter-W.M.D. jobs shared that version with me, although, once again, no one had evidence for its veracity. It was something that they had heard on their jobs and a story they admitted that they liked — the thinking being that if the Four Lions wanted to shop for photon torpedoes, let them shop; that would be preferable to how the Islamic State otherwise spends its time. (Abu Omar, for example, said the Islamic State had also sought his help in abducting Western journalists.)

And yet the U.S. military and its allies, too, had found themselves expending resources on the hoax. In early 2011, a European military unit in Afghanistan handed over supposed red mercury to their American colleagues at Task Force Paladin, the command charged with countering and analyzing improvised bombs. The handoff triggered an international counterproliferation response, according to several American soldiers familiar with the events and an officer who participated in the operation but requested anonymity because parts of it remain classified.

Task Force Paladin alerted the 20th Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosives Command, the primary U.S. Army unit trained to eliminate threats of W.M.D., that they had an unknown substance that could be dangerous material. Back at the command’s headquarters in Maryland, teams of specialists in nuclear disablement and chemical response were packed into a C-5 military-transport jet and rushed to Bagram Air Base, where they were shown two small, lead-lined containers. One was about the dimensions of a quart-size Mason jar; the other roughly the size of a pint glass.

The nuclear-disablement team went first but found no sign that the containers held anything radioactive. They then passed the job to the chemical-warfare specialists and bomb-disposal techs. External tests on the containers were inconclusive, the officer involved said, so the soldiers took up the unenviable task of breaching the vessels to find out what exactly was inside. Wearing protective suits and breathing apparatuses, they put the first lead-lined container inside an airtight glove box within what the officer called a ‘‘secure, reinforced’’ shipping container, and then monitored it from afar by video as the spinning bit from a remote-controlled power drill plunged through the container’s soft wall. Out spilled ordinary mercury, the old standby of red-mercury scams. The second container was empty. In all, the officer said, the mercury amounted to ‘‘about a quarter or half cup.’’

The American soldiers quietly packed up and flew home. Their mission is memorialized in the Army’s classified records with a title — Operation Chimera — that members of the American bomb-disposal community said suggested a certain sense of humor about the whole affair. How the Europeans had been deceived is not publicly known. (One American familiar with the events said a European special-forces team had been lured into a bad buy.) On that matter, the American military declined to comment.

This was hardly the worst of the hoax’s real-world effects. In southern Africa, it has cost lives. According to a regional and especially cruel variation of the legend, the substance is found in conventional military munitions, particularly land mines, there to be claimed by anyone daring enough to take them apart and extract the goods. Tom Dibb, the program manager in Zimbabwe for the Halo Trust, a private mine-clearing organization, said he and the local authorities have documented people being killed in explosions while hunched over land mines or mortar bombs with hand tools.

In the bloodiest incident, in 2013, six people were killed near Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, by a blast in the home of a faith healer. One victim was an infant. Dibb spoke with the police and said ‘‘they were pretty convinced that it was a tank mine being taken apart for red mercury.’’ In another case, which Dibb examined himself, two men were killed and another wounded as they tried harvesting land mines for red-mercury extraction from a minefield. The most recent death that the Halo Trust investigated occurred on Nov. 1, Dibb said, when a 22-year-old man, Godknows Katchekwama, was killed while trying to dismantle and remove red mercury from an R2M2, a South African antipersonnel land mine about the size of a tuna can.

The explosion outside Harare prompted Michael P. Moore, who manages the Landmines in Africa website, to start a second site, the Campaign Against Red Mercury, which documents hoaxes and urges people not to believe them. Moore said he tried tracing how the meme leapt from sewing machines to explosive devices but could not figure it out. Public-education campaigns were needed, he said, because ‘‘it’s enough of a pervasive myth that it’s not going to go away anytime soon. And people are dying.’’

The Crocodile kept inquiring about red mercury for more than a year, Abu Omar said, pressing for results. He reached out one last time on WhatsApp in June 2015. At the time, Kurds were attacking the Islamic State in Tal Abyad, and the commander also sought what he called ‘‘thermal panels’’ to deceive the weapons-guidance systems on American warplanes. But by November of this year, Abu Omar was still empty-handed. By then Tal Abyad had fallen to the Kurds, and the Crocodile had gone silent, leaving the quest without a sponsor for now.

Abu Omar had kept busy with other work; he said he had recently delivered 23 commercial drones to the jihadists. He remained a storehouse of red-mercury yarns. Word was that the Kurdish fighting groups opposing the Islamic State had been buying up the stuff. ‘‘People I know sold it to Kurds three times,’’ he said. And eight red-mercury warheads had been found in the Aleppo countryside, too. The story was similar to one from Reyhanli, another Turkish border city, where smugglers insisted that rebels in Idlib had overrun a military checkpoint and captured a few grams of red mercury. This material was said to be available for sale, although no one who said this could arrange to see it. It led to an obvious question: If Syria’s military possessed red-mercury weapons, why hadn’t it used them? Why would an imperiled force with a well-documented disregard for restraint forgo uncorking such a weapon as its garrisons fell?

If red mercury seemed a perfect fit for the particular nature of this brutal, shadowy war — an apocalyptic weapon for a terrorist group driven in part by the belief that we are approaching the return of the Mahdi, the final defeat of infidels and the end of the world — it was not making itself easy to get. All this, and the police were drawing near. In June, Turkish news agencies reported another red-mercury bust, this time of a pair of Georgians. And Abu Omar said an associate of his had managed to obtain the material, only to be arrested in Ankara before he could unload it. The authorities released him but kept his red mercury, he said, for themselves. ‘‘His phone was monitored,’’ Abu Omar said, and thus the bad turn.

None of this was verifiable, either. The Turkish government declined to answer questions about its red-mercury arrests over the last two years. And his friend? Abu Omar said he had fled to Sweden. He provided a link to the man’s Facebook profile, but the man was not replying to requests. You can’t be too careful in the red-mercury game.

ARE WE WITNESSING A MAJOR SHIFT IN AMERICA'S TWO-PARTY SYSTEM?

by Akim Reinhardt 3 Quarks Daily                                    

The 150 years since the end of the U.S. Civil War, the Republicans and Democrats have maintained a relentless stranglehold on every level of American politics nearly everywhere at all times. While a handful of upstart third parties and independent candidates have periodically made waves, none has ever come close to capturing the White House, or earned more than a brief smattering of Congressional seats. Likewise, nearly ever state and local government has remained under the duopoly's exclusive domain.    

Why a duopoly? Probably because of they way the U.S. electoral system is structured. Duverger's Law tells us that a two-party duopoly is the very likely outcome when each voter gets one vote and can cast it for just one candidate to determine a single legislative seat.

However, in order to maintain absolute control of American politics and fend off challenges from pesky third parties, the Democrats and Republicans needed to remain somewhat agile. The times change, and in the endless quest to crest 50%, the parties must change with them.

Since the Civil War, both parties have shown themselves flexible enough to roll with the changes.  The Civil War, the Great Depression, and Civil Rights era each upended the political landscape, leading political constituencies to shift, and forcing the Democrats and Republicans to substantially and permanently reorient themselves.

Now, several decades removed from the last major reshuffling of the two major parties, we may be witnessing yet another major transformation of the duopoly as the elephant and the donkey struggle to remain relevant amid important social changes. The convulsions of such a shift are reflected in the tumultuous spectacle of the parties' presidential nomination processes.

The Republicans are in a state of disarray, with inexperienced outsiders currently leading the pack while career politicians struggle to find their way. Meanwhile, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, also faces a serious threat from an outsider, independent socialist Bernie Sanders.

Personally I very much doubt that an outsider such as Sanders, Donald Trump, or Ben Carson will emerge to claim the nomination of either party. Party nominating procedures and the oceans of money flowing to mainstream candidates make it rather unlikely. However, these outsiders' surprising successes thus far may be an indication of something greater than their own charisma. It may very well signal the fourth major shift in America's two-party system since the Civil War. 

How and why is such a shift occurring? And what might the two parties look like after the dust settles? To answer those questions, we should be begin with a brief history of the duopoly itself.

                    

The 1st Iteration: 1854-1932

The first iteration of the  Democratic-Republican duopoly emerged from the tumult of the Civil War era and lasted until the Great Depression. For nearly 80 years, the duopoly was framed by sectional divide as the nation lingered in the long shadow of the Civil War. The Democrats were the party of the South and the Republicans were the party of North

As Southern states re-entered the union during the Reconstruction Era (1865-77), white supremacists "redeemed" one Southern state after another; they used intimidation and violence to suppress the new African American franchise, to scare their white sympathizers out of the G.O.P., and to establish the South as a one-party region. 

Later, white Southerners would employ legalistic tactics to codify the widespread disenfranchisement of black voters, and white Democrats would rule the South virtually unchallenged for a century. Along the way, they built a brutal system of Jim Crow apartheid based on the economic exploitation, social segregation, cultural denigration, and political oppression of African Americans.

Meanwhile, Republican interest in African American affairs had largely faded by the end of Reconstruction. A strain of moralism remained in the party, taking various forms, but business concerns came to dominate the G.O.P. at the national level. During the ensuing decades, Republicans supported business interests of the industrial North by promoting various protectionist tariffs and championing a tight currency to benefit creditors. The growing ranks of Northern urban industrial wage workers could often be brought to heel on this issue because they feared the rising prices that would result from an inflationary monetary policy.

All the while, Northerners continued to stew in their resentment over the war, and the Republican Party deftly used this to its advantage in dominating politics above the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, rallying a Republican electoral campaign around fiery rhetoric about the Civil War became so commonplace during the back half of the 19th century that the tactic earned a nickname: Waving the Bloody Shirt.

RedemptionAs the Democrats maintained their monopoly on the South, they also made modest but important inroads in the North. Urban Democrats appealed to urban immigrants who resented the patronizing bigotry of Victorian Republicans. By the end of the 19th century, cities like New York and Boston were dominated by immigrant-backed Democrats.

However, the emergence of a nascent Northern Democratic wing wasn't enough to prevent Republican dominance in national politics. With the exception of New York City, cities weren't big enough to swing states. Nearly every Northern state was reliably Republican; Ohio and New York were the only important swing states. And since the North had a far greater populace than the South, the results were predictable. 

From 1860-1908, the Democrats were able to muster only one successful presidential candidate: former New York Governor Grover Cleveland, who won non-consecutive elections in 1884 and1892.

The Democrats broke through again in 1912 with Woodrow Wilson, but this was only possible because former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt broke away from the G.O.P. and ran a third party ticket against the Republican incumbent, William Taft, thereby splitting the Republican vote. When Wilson finished up his two terms in 1921, Republican dominance of the White House resumed at an unprecedented level with three successive and resounding victories by Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.

After Hoover's 1928 drubbing of New York Democrat Al Smith, some pundits wondered if the Democrats were still a relevant national party. After all, in a span of 68 years, they had fielded just two presidents, and their defeats of the 1920s were staggering, with Republicans repeatedly setting records for margin of electoral victory. And after severe immigration restriction was enacted in 1924, Democrats' primary opportunity to expand in the North seemed cauterized.

Such concerns evaporated with the outbreak of the Great Depression in late 1929, and the popular tidal wave that brought Democrat Franklin Roosevelt to the White House in 1932. He would go on to win four consecutive elections, and his rise to power marks the second iteration of the Democratic-Republican duopoly.

The 2nd Iteration: 1932-1950

If the catastrophe of civil war had established the first iteration of the Republican-Democratic duopoly, then the calamity of the Great Depression created an opportunity for the master politician Franklin Roosevelt to usher in the second iteration. For while his initial victory in 1932 was largely a result of Herbert Hoover's deep unpopularity, his 1936 campaign reshaped the Democratic Party for decades to come, and by default, greatly impacted the Republicans too.

In 1932, Roosevelt had run as a centrist against Hoover's dogmatic laissez-faire conservativism. FDR was touted as the man who saved capitalism from itself. However, by 1936, he learned the lesson that on some level seemed to elude Barack Obama: It is nearly impossible to broker reasonable compromises with extremists. 

So instead of continuing to extend the olive branch to conservatives, only to see them continually snap it and sneer, FDR comfortably settled into his progressive base and forged what came to be known as the Roosevelt Coalition. The Solid South, as the Democratic South was known, would be complemented by four major constituencies in the North:

-African Americans: FDR hadn't excluded them from the New Deal, and they were grateful.

-Urbanites: FDR expanded the old Democratic immigrant vote with a progressive agenda. For example, he championed the repeal of prohibition.

-Labor: FDR promoted legislation that expanded union rolls, and union members repaid him with votes.

-Farmers: Various New Deal programs helped rural America. This would prove to be the weakest link in the chain.

From among these core, Northern Democratic constituencies, black voters offer them most dramatic example of the shift that had taken place. In 1932, Hoover claimed only 39% of the total popular vote, but 75% of the African American vote, as blacks remained loyal to the party of Lincoln. Just four years later, Roosevelt the Democrat captured 75% of the black vote.

The second iteration of the Republican-Democratic duopoly was now set. In addition to maintaining the Solid South, Democrats were the party of America's urban working class: white ethnics descended from European immigrants who had arrived between 1880-1920; African Americans who fled the rural, Jim Crow South for Northern industrial jobs; and a rising tide of organized labor among the working classes. 

The Republicans, meanwhile, catered to the established white population outside the South. They remained the party of business interests and moralism. Their primary demographic was middle class, white Protestants. In other words, the Republican Party appealed the majority of Americans not in the South or the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest.

FDRThis competitive balance defined the Democratic-Republican duopoly for several decades after World War II. Both parties were conservative in foreign affairs during the Cold War. On domestic issues, the Democrats followed FDR's lead, pushing a progressive agenda that reached its climax with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society (1963-69), while Republicans held a center-right position. Scarred by the Great Depression, both parties accepted the basic tenets of Keynesian economics, believing the government had a role to play in moderating the boom/bust economic cycle. There were real differences between the two parties, but the distance between them was not vast. 

Of the eight presidential elections following Franklin Roosevelt's reign, each party one four. 

However, by the late 1960s, this second iteration was of the duopoly began was beginning to crumble under the weight of major demographic, social, and economic shifts. The person who best took advantage of those changes was Ronald Reagan.

The 3rd Iteration: 1980-?

By the late 1960s, three main factors had begun to wreak havoc on the Democrats' old Roosevelt coalition: deindustrialization, suburbanization, and civil rights.

The decline of America's manufacturing economy depleted the ranks of union workers specifically and blue collar workers more generally. It also greatly damaged the cities of the industrial Northeast and Midwest.

Just as cities began to deteriorate, a massive housing boom on their rural edges was subsidized by federal agencies such as the Veteran's Administration (via the G.I. Bill) and the Federal Housing Authority. Farms morphed into suburbs, which then siphoned off populations from nearby cities. And these new suburban voters were up for grabs. 

As cities lost population, capital, and tax revenues, crime skyrocketed and city services crumbled. White flight escalated in the 1970s and 1980s, and the white middle class largely vacated urban America for the new suburbs.

The other trend that radically reshaped American demography was a massive westward migration that had begun during World War II and continued unabated in the decades that followed. Millions of Americans left the East for the growing industrial sector along the Pacific coast, and to a lesser extent the Southwest.

However, post-WWII growth in Western cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle was fundamentally different than the growth of 19th century Eastern cities. Amid cheap Western real estate and the rise of car culture, Western urban growth was actually suburban growth. 

Thus, post-war white-flight suburbanization in the East was complemented by migratory suburbanization in the West, both of which shifted power away from traditional Democratic cities. But perhaps the most problematic development for the Democrats, or certainly the most complicated, was the rise of civil rights.

At first glance it seemed that African Americans regaining their franchise in the South was a win for Democrats. But of course it wasn't that simple. Millions of blacks had left the South since the early 20th century, mostly moving to Northern cities. Meanwhile, the Southern white backlash against civil rights drove many white Southerners out of the Democratic Party, and there were not enough black Southern voters to counter them.

The Southern backlash first appeared in presidential politics. Democrats continued to dominate Southern local and state elections for decades, but almost immediately began losing white voters in the quadrennial cycle. As early as 1948, when Democratic President Harry Truman made civil rights part of his platform, White Southerners had voted for a third party segregationist: Democrat schismatic, "Dixiecrat" Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

The third party segregationist trend continued in the 1960s with the rise of Alabama's George Wallace. But eventually it was the Republicans who adapted and began scooping up disaffected Southern whites. Richard Nixon employed his notorious Southern Strategy in 1972, courting white Southerners with barely coded racist appeals. Republicans would continue that tactic for two decades, proving that either major party was capable of profiting from racism.

But the long term electoral impact of Civil Rights stretched well beyond the South. The Civil Rights movement had helped usher in an era of protests that manifested itself in various forms ranging from the anti-Vietnam War movement, to women's rights, to Black, Red, and Chicano Power movements. And if white Southerners were alienated by black civil rights, then many white Northerners were alienated by the protest movements that followed.

Once again, Republicans pounced, offering a new law and order/tough on crime/silent majority platform that many white ethnics found attractive. With the Solid South slowly disintegrating, the biggest Northern Democratic pillar also began tilting Republican, pushed by their resentment over the protest culture, their fear of crime, and their disenchantment with cities that were increasingly dark and poor.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan's overwhelming victory against incumbent Jimmy Carter was made possible by this convergence of forces. As a former governor of California, Reagan represented the new suburban West; furthering Nixon's old Southern Strategy, he ate into the Democratic South, with Carter holding onto only his Native Georgia; and the Gipper also swept most of the Northeast by appealing to voters the press dubbed Reagan Democrats: disaffected white, urban ethnics, many of whom were now actually new suburbanites. Their patron saint was Archie Bunker.

Archie BunkerThe Reagan Revolution spawned the third iteration of the Democrat-Republican duopoly. Democrats still held the Northern urban vote, which was increasingly poor and minority. They also held most of the South in local and state elections. Meanwhile Republicans, still the party of business, began gobbling up much of suburbia by attracting several other conservative demographics: cultural (Christian) conservatives who prioritized issues like abortion, school prayer, and an opposition to feminism; social conservatives who wanted government to get tough on crime; hawkish political conservatives who rejected Nixon's detente Cold War strategies; and economic conservatives who opposed the New Deal reforms, loathed LBJ's Great Society reforms, and rejected the Keynesian economic doctrines that had dominated mid-century American politics.

Suburbia, now firmly established as the home to America's white middle class, was the new electoral battleground of the duopoly's third iteration. This posed a major problem for the Democrats. Generally speaking, suburbia was more conservative than the industrial cities of the 1st and 2nd iterations had been. Even the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965 didn't help the Democrats as much as they had hoped. Instead of replenishing cities, new immigrants were more likely to settle in suburbs, and became less reliably Democratic, although they still leaned that way.

During the 1990s, the Democrats adjusted to this new reality by moving to the right. The shift was embodied most dramatically by Bill Clinton, whose infamous politics of "triangulation" saw him repeatedly undercut Republicans by beating them to the conservative punch.

On issues like free trade, welfare reform, and mandatory sentencing, Clinton outmaneuvered the G.O.P. and dragged his party further from its progressive moorings. Meanwhile, Democrats placated their base by remaining liberal on social and cultural issues such as gun control and abortion rights. Split the difference and you might consider them the Democrats the party of the Expansive Center, or the Straddled Center. They have remained there ever since.

The 4th Iteration?

The 1st iteration of the Democratic-Republican duopoly, based on geography in the aftermath of the Civil War, lasted three-quarters of a century. The 2nd iteration, based on social and economic class in the aftermath of the Great Depression, lasted half a century. The 3rd iteration, based on a tripod of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and Civil Rights, may be waning as we speak.

If so, the we are perhaps on the verge of a 4th iteration of the Republican-Democrat duopoly, one which is based on ideology.

Today both parties are struggling to define themselves in ways that appeal to voters. Even with structural forces largely insulating the Democrats and Republicans from third party challenges, they are stumbling badly as they try to maintain their relevance. Consider the evidence.

According to a Gallup poll conducted last January, 43% of America's registered voters are Independent. Only 30% are Democrats. Barely a quarter are Republicans. This is a staggering development, a forceful rejection of both parties by a plurality of the nation's voters. These numbers are even more impressive when one considers that more than half the states run closed primaries that require party registration to vote in party primaries.

Yet because of a political system that punishes third parties at every turn, the duopoly remains. And so, even as more than four-tenths of registered voters have abandoned the two major parties, third party such as the Greens or Libertarians remain on life support. Instead of their expansion we are seeing a reshaping of the Republicans and Democrats.

As tens of millions have flee the major parties, what often remains behind is an energized, extremist base. That is not to say most Independents are necessarily moderates. Rather, as disaffected party members leave, the remaining party membership becomes more homogeneous and ideology crystalizes. And so the Republicans move further into their conservative corner while Democrats are evermore bogged down in the straddled center.

Compounding this development is the increasing social and economic segregation of Americans, which has now reached unprecedented levels. The divides between rich and poor, white and black (or brown), and religious and secular, are thoroughly mirrored by geography. For example, as wealth inequality grows, wealthy families continue to segregate themselves in exclusive enclaves, while the poor are left behind in abandoned rural and urban pockets. Meanwhile, the various shades of middle class sort themselves out in suburbia. 

Likewise, racial segregation in America is now worse than it has been at any time in the nation's history, including during the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. This development, which was utterly unfathomable after the Civil Rights movement toppled Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s, results from a complicated brew of economic and social factors. The net result is that even America's ultimate multi-cultural city, New York, is made up of little more than highly segregated ethnic and economic pockets.

Patterns of ethnic, social, and economic segregation dominate modern America. And that has made it all the easier for politicians to gerrymander local, state, and Congressional electoral districts; dividing up Americans isn't quite so hard when Americans have already divided themselves.

Consequently, fewer and fewer general elections at any level are competitive. Instead, Democrats and Republicans have created a patchwork of fiefdoms for themselves across the electoral landscape. In essence, many political districts, whether federal, state, or local, have descended into effective one-party rule. That in turn means more and more politicians face no real threat in the general election. Instead, they must expend almost all their energy and resources securing the party's nomination, which effectively translates into electoral victory.

As politicians increasingly run in what amount to single-party districts, they must cater to their party's base during primary elections. And with party ranks depleting, the parties are producing more extreme platforms. Suuccessful primary politicians must cater to extreme ideologies; as time goes by and politicians emerge from such cultures, they actually believe extreme ideologies.

Amid these developments, Republicans and Democrats are likely transforming into their fourth duopolistic iteration.

For the most part, they are no longer primarily the parties of North and South, of class, or even of race and place. Echoes of all these prior iterations remain, of course. However, increasingly the elephant and the donkey are the parties of Liberal and Conservative ideology.

The Republicans are the Conservative party and the Democrats are the Liberal Party, each becoming ever more focused on its own ideological agenda.

For the Republicans, this trend first became a national issue with the rise of the Tea Party earlier in this century. Since then, far-right wingers have increasingly asserted themselves at every level of the G.O.P. For Democrats, the move to an ideological platform above all else has not been as dramatic or as fast. In part this is because the Occupy Movement (the Left's version of the Tea Party in some respects) was far less institutionally organized than the Tea Party, did not infiltrate a party to the same degree, and no longer even exists as such. Furthermore, since the Democrats have established themselves along the straddled center, their base now has to drag them back towards the center on economic issues, not away from it, and such a movement is inherently less dramatic than rambling away from the center, which is what the Republicans are doing.

Regardless, the reshaping of both parties into ideological institutions is becoming readily apparent as they muddle their way through the current presidential nomination process. 

Each party's establishment is struggling to push a conventional political candidate to the fore. This is most evident with the Republicans, as conservative politicians like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Jeb Bush are confounded by amateurs who lap them in the polls, one an ultra-conservative (Ben Carson), the other a brash populist (Donald Trump).

The situation in the Democratic Party is not quite as extreme, yet the ongoing success of Bernie Sanders mirrors that of Carson and Trump on the Republican side, at lest to some degree. Sanders is a lifetime politician, unlike Carson and Trump, but he is an outsider in other ways. Not only has Sanders never been a member of the Democratic Party until his current run for its presidential nomination, but he is an avowed Socialist, far to the left of any presidential nominee the Democratic Party has ever produced.

The likeliest scenario, due to a variety of factors ranging from campaign funding to party-influenced voting procedures, is that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination and some established Republican politician like Marco Rubio will capture the G.O.P. nomination. Despite this, however, we may nevertheless be witnessing a substantial shift in the political duopoly. More and more, both major parties are using modern Conservative and Liberal ideology as the main filter for attracting voters, as older filters like geography and class begin to fail. 

The Republican Party has stationed itself on the far right of virtually every conceivable issue. Meanwhile the Democratic establishment is struggling to maintain its center-right economic platform as the party's base demands a shift to the left.

As the parties continue their process of purging and ideological purification, we find that there are no more conservative Democrats, nor are there any liberal Republicans. Eve moderate Republicans are an increasingly rare breed, and moderate Democrats may not be far behind.

A politician of the duopoly's 3rd iteration, such Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, may very well be the next president. Nevertheless, ideologically extreme politicians are playing evermore important roles in local and state governments, as well as Congress.

It seems that perhaps the 4th major iteration of the Democratic-Republican duopoly is upon us and the guiding factor is ideology.

Akim Reinhardt's website is ThePublicProfessor.com

Did anyone invent rock and roll?

BY LOUIS MENAND The New Yorker

In 1968, when Patti Smith was twenty-one and working in a Manhattan bookstore, she went to a Doors concert at the old Fillmore East. She loved the Doors. As she described the concert in her memoir “Just Kids,” everyone was transfixed by Jim Morrison, except for her. She found herself making a cold appraisal of his performance. “I felt,” she concluded, “that I could do that.” For many people, that response is the essence of rock and roll.

To this way of thinking, rock and roll—the music associated with performers like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and the early Beatles—is music that anyone can play (or can imagine playing) and everyone can dance to. The learning curve for performing the stuff is short; the learning curve for appreciating it is nonexistent. The instrumentation and the arrangements are usually simple: three or four instruments and, frequently, about the same number of chords. You can add horns and strings and backup singers, and you can add a lot more chords, but the important thing is the feeling. Rock and roll feels uninhibited, spontaneous, and fun. There’s no show-biz fakery coming between you and the music. As with any musical genre, it boils down to a certain sound. Coming up with that sound, the sound of unrehearsed exuberance, took a lot of work, a lot of rehearsing. No one contributed more to the job than Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records, in Memphis, and the man who discovered Elvis Presley.

In twenty-first-century terms, Phillips was an industry disrupter. He had a regional business, little access to capital, and no reliable distribution system for his product. He recorded a style of music that the major record companies—there were six of them when he started out, and they dominated the national market—had deemed unprofitable. But he helped identify an audience, and that audience transformed the industry and the nature of popular music.

In the beginning, Phillips had not planned to run a record company. He was born, in 1923, in a small place in Alabama called Lovelace Community, not far from Muscle Shoals. His father was a flagman on a railroad bridge over the Tennessee River. Phillips got his start in radio, working in Decatur and Nashville, and, finally, in 1945, making it to Memphis, his version of what Paris was for Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. In January, 1950, he opened the Memphis Recording Service, in a tiny space on Union Avenue, just a block away from Beale Street, the heart of the Memphis music scene. (The building still stands, now a National Historic Landmark.)

“We Record Anything—Anywhere—Anytime” was the slogan. This meant a lot of church services, weddings, and funerals, but Phillips’s dream, the reason that he set up the studio, was to have a place where any aspiring musician could come in and try out, no questions asked. Phillips would listen and offer suggestions and encouragement. If he liked what he heard, he would record it. For a fee, the performer could cut his or her own record.

Phillips was extremely good at this. He was patient with the musicians; he was adept with the technology; above all, he was supportive. He hated formulas. He thought that music was about self-expression, and he liked songs that were different. The pop sound in 1950 was smooth and harmonic. Phillips preferred imperfection. It made the music sound alive and authentic. Word got around, and musicians no one else would record started turning up at the Memphis Recording Service. Phillips got them to believe in him by getting them to believe in themselves.

To have the recordings pressed and distributed, he relied on small independent labels like Modern Records, in Los Angeles, and Chess, in Chicago. But he found the men who ran those outfits untrustworthy—he felt that they were always trying to poach his artists or cheat him on royalties—and so, in 1952, he started up his own label, Sun Records.

Phillips rarely scouted for artists. Sun was designed as a walk-in business. And amazing performers walked in, some on their own, some referred by other musicians. By 1958, Phillips had produced sides by a major-league roster of talent. He was the first to record, besides Elvis, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison. He produced and released songs that people born decades afterward still play in their heads while doing the dishes: “Mystery Train,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line,” “Ooby-Dooby,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” “Great Balls of Fire.” That’s a plausible soundtrack at Starbucks more than half a century later.

Still, despite commercial success, Phillips continued to lose his artists, this time to major record labels, like Columbia and RCA Victor, and, around 1960, he more or less gave up producing. A wealthy man, he disappeared from the music scene for almost twenty years. When he reëmerged, he devoted some of his time to creating new radio stations but most of it—he died in 2003—to burnishing his legend. Peter Guralnick’s “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll” (Little, Brown) is an interesting contribution to the self-promotion project.

The book is a labor of love. Guralnick is an eminent authority on rock and roll and related musical styles. He is passionate about the music, but he doesn’t let his passion overinflate his prose, and he seems to know everything about everyone who was part of the Southern music world. He is best known as the author of a classic and probably unsurpassable two-volume biography of Presley, “Last Train to Memphis” (1994) and “Careless Love” (1999). He spent many years trying to get an interview with Phillips. Finally, in 1979, the year Phillips decided to come out of hibernation, he succeeded. It turned out to be worth the wait, and not only professionally. “Meeting Sam for me was a life-changing event,” Guralnick says.

Phillips and Guralnick became friends, although it was a Yoda-Luke sort of relationship, which appears to have been the sort of relationship Phillips was most comfortable with. He was always a great talker. In his later years, and with a glass of vodka in hand, he seems to have been a verbal Niagara. He told Guralnick how it was, and Guralnick wrote it down (or taped it).

In some respects, therefore, “Sam Phillips” is the memoir that Phillips never wrote. The book adopts a down-home slash mythomaniacal voice that is presumably meant to capture Phillips at his most loquacious:

And it came to him in that moment that this could be his calling: not just the righting of wrongs but the study of humanity, in all its diversity, in all of the multitude of its manifestations.

In the opening pages, Phillips is equated with Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Michelangelo. Even in a eulogy, it would seem a little much. When our hero’s patronage of the local brothel is described as a humanitarian act in support of women down on their luck—women who, if not for such patronage, might have had to turn to . . . what? cleaning houses?—you know you are not reading a conventional biography.

But Guralnick understands his subject, and, after a while, you pick up on the subtext. Phillips had a genuine feel for a kind of music that was, in a Southern context, slightly asymmetrical to his own race and class. He liked the blues, and his liking of the blues was bound up with progressive views on race relations. He really did believe that by recording B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf—and many other African-American musicians, most of them now largely forgotten—he was doing God’s work. He respected his musicians as artists and as people; he identified with their travails; and he threw himself into the job of getting their music out.

Personally, as becomes clear in the course of the biography, he could be self-centered to the point of coldness. He made it a principle never to let other people’s feelings stand in his way. As a number of witnesses explained the deal to Guralnick, Sam was Sam; he did what he wanted to do. He was a good-looking man. Women fell for him, and he did not demur. He had several long-term mistresses with whom he lived publicly, though he remained married to the same woman his whole life. At some point, he simply moved her into a house of her own, so that he could live with his girlfriend. That girlfriend had to wait out other public affairs later on. All the women seem to have remained loyal, including his wife.

Phillips was also not a very good businessman. Other independent labels, like Atlantic, managed to keep their artists and to thrive well into the nineteen-sixties. Phillips got out of the business just as the pop-music revolution that he helped make happen was starting to cash out in a big way. Even if he had just kept running the studio, he would have had plenty of work. FAME Studios, which was founded in Florence, Alabama, in 1959 and moved to Muscle Shoals in 1961, recorded huge hits by artists like Arthur Conley (“Sweet Soul Music”), Wilson Pickett (“Mustang Sally”), Percy Sledge (“When a Man Loves a Woman”), and Aretha Franklin (“Chain of Fools”).But Phillips, after losing virtually all of his original hit-makers, was convinced that the majors would always stick it to the little guy, and had largely dropped out. A sound he did much to develop conquered the world through work done by other hands.

As for the mythomania: it seems that, basically, you just gotta love it. Phillips could be petty about insisting on credit for various things, but he was an outsized personality. Putting up with a little grandiosity, and some occasional cornball wisdom, came with the territory. He was one of those people with whom, if you are willing to play by their rules when you are in their house, everything is better than good.

The subtitle of Guralnick’s book should probably be read in quotation marks. “The man who invented rock and roll” is a phrase that Phillips wanted to be remembered by, and the label has stuck. Guralnick suggests that it might be more accurate to call him “the man who discovered rock and roll.” But even that seems misplaced, not because Phillips wasn’t in the yolk of the egg, which he was, but because how the egg got hatched is still a mystery.

Rock and roll is usually explained as rhythm-and-blues music—that is, music performed by black artists for black listeners—repurposed by mostly white artists for a mostly white audience. How do we know this? Because that’s the way the industry trade magazine Billboard represented it.

Billboard started charting songs in 1940. By 1949, it was publishing charts in three categories: pop, country-and-Western, and (a new term, replacing “race music”) rhythm and blues. Every week, in each category, there were lists of the songs most frequently sold in record shops, most frequently requested in jukeboxes, and most frequently played by disk jockeys. (These rankings were all relative; actual sales figures were proprietary.)

The charting system was predicated on a segregated market. How did Billboard know when a song was a rhythm-and-blues hit, and not a pop hit? Because its sales were reported by stores that catered to an African-American clientele, its on-air plays were reported by radio stations that programmed for African-American listeners, and its jukebox requests were made in venues with African-American customers. Black artists could have pop hits. The Ink Spots, a black quartet, had fourteen songs in the Top Five on the pop chart between 1939 and 1947. That was because their songs were marketed to whites.

The foundation on which this scheme rested was obviously extremely shaky, and several industry developments made it even shakier. One was the rise of the local radio station. Before the nineteen-forties, radio was dominated by national broadcast networks like CBS, NBC, and Mutual. As a consequence of an F.C.C. policy designed to break up this oligopoly, the licensing of local stations increased from around eight hundred in 1940 to more than two thousand in 1949. By 1950, the radio stations most people were listening to were local. And everyone listened. Ninety-six per cent of homes in the United States had a radio.

One article of faith in the music business is that repetition is a key to sales. The more often people hear a song, the more they feel the need to buy it, and radio was one way to lodge a song in people’s heads. Jukeboxes were another. By 1940, there were close to half a million jukeboxes in the United States. This is why d.j. and jukebox plays were charted in Billboard: they were market indicators. A song that was played a lot could be predicted to sell a lot, so distributors and retailers took notice.

Jukeboxes and local radio stations allowed the music audience to segment—a key development in a racially divided society. A third of the population of Memphis was African-American, for example, and so a small local station could survive profitably with programming for African-American listeners. In fact, the first station with all-black programming in the United States (it was owned by whites) was in Memphis: WDIA, which began broadcasting, at two hundred and fifty watts, in 1949. B. B. King started his career there, as a disk jockey and on-air performer.

The major record companies got out of the “race music” business in the nineteen-forties. But the spread of jukeboxes and the success of local radio showed that the market, though small, was still there. As if on cue, a swarm of independent labels arose to manufacture and sell rhythm-and-blues records: Specialty, Aladdin, Modern, Swingtime, and Imperial (all in Los Angeles—for a time, oddly, the capital of R. & B.), King (Cincinnati), Peacock (Houston), Chess (Chicago), Savoy (Newark), Atlantic (New York), and many more. All those labels were established between 1940 and 1950. Phillips actually came late to the party.

Rock and roll became possible when it started to dawn on people that not everyone buying R. & B. records or listening to R. & B. songs on the radio was African-American. In 1952, the year Phillips launched Sun, forty per cent of R. & B. record buyers at the Dolphin Record Store, in L.A., were white. The year before, a classical-music d.j. in Cleveland, Alan Freed, had been astonished to see white teen-agers eagerly buying R. & B. records at a local record shop, and he started following his “quality music” program with a show devoted to R. & B. In 1954, Freed moved to WINS, in New York. He was one of the first people to call R. & B. music listened to by white kids rock and roll—a key move in repositioning the product.

By the time Sun opened for business, it was obvious that many white teen-agers wanted to listen to R. & B. Sam Phillips knew it, but, as Guralnick says, everybody knew it. The problem was not how to create the market but how to exploit it. Phillips is supposed to have gone around saying, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” In an unsympathetic biography of Presley, published in 1981, Albert Goldman has Phillips referring to “the nigger sound”; Guralnick makes it clear that Phillips didn’t talk or think that way. And Guralnick is confident that Phillips didn’t talk about the music in terms of getting rich, either.

Still, it raises an interesting question. Phillips had had success in 1951 with a song called “Rocket 88” (the title refers to a model of automobile), performed by Ike Turner’s band and sung by Jackie Brenston, who became the headliner (much to Turner’s annoyance). The band had damaged an amplifier on the way to the studio, so it buzzed when music was played. Phillips considered this a delicious imperfection, and he kept it. That is the sound that makes the record, and many people have called “Rocket 88” the first rock-and-roll song. (I guess some song has to be the first.) But “Rocket 88” was performed by a black group. Why, if white kids were already buying records by black musicians, did the breakthrough performer have to be white?

The answer is television. In 1948, less than two per cent of American households had a television set. By 1955, more than two-thirds did. Prime time in those years was dominated by variety shows—hosted by people like Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Milton Berle, and Perry Como—that booked musical acts. Since most television viewers got only three or four channels, the audience for those shows was enormous. Television exposure became the best way to sell a record.

On television, unlike on radio, the performer’s race is apparent. And sponsors avoided mixed-race shows, since they were advertising on national networks and did not want to alienate viewers in certain regions of the country. Nat King Cole’s television show, which went on the air in 1956, could never get regular sponsors. Cole had to quit after a year. “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark,” he said.

The stage was thus set for Elvis Presley. Presley was a walk-in. He showed up at the Memphis Recording Service in the summer of 1953, when he was eighteen, to make a record for his mother. (At least, that’s the legend.) He paid four dollars to record two songs, “My Happiness,” which had been a hit for several artists, including Ella Fitzgerald, a few years earlier, and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” an old Ink Spots song. Whether Phillips was in the booth that day or not later became a matter of acrimonious dispute (he insisted that he was), but someone wrote next to Presley’s name, “Good ballad singer. Hold.”

A year later, Phillips invited Presley back to try out a ballad he’d discovered. The song didn’t seem to work, and Phillips had Presley run through all the material he knew, any song he could remember. After three hours, they gave up. But Phillips thought of putting Presley together with a couple of country-and-Western musicians—Scotty Moore, an electric guitarist, and Bill Black, who played standup bass—and invited the three of them to come to the studio.

They began their session with a Bing Crosby song called “Harbor Lights,” then tried a ballad, then a hillbilly (or country) song. They did multiple takes; nothing seemed to click. Everyone was ready to quit for the night when, as Elvis told the story later, “this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago and I started kidding around.”

The song was “That’s All Right,” an old R. & B. number, written and recorded by Arthur Crudup. “Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them,” Scotty Moore recalled. Phillips stuck his head out of the booth and told them to start from the beginning. After many takes, they had a record.

Phillips had become friendly with a white disk jockey, Dewey Phillips, who played some R. & B. on his show, on WHBQ, in Memphis. (Becoming friendly with d.j.s who played the kind of music you recorded was basic industry practice. Leonard Chess, of Chess Records, used to have a trunk full of alligator shoes when he drove around visiting local d.j.s. He’d ask for their shoe size and gift them a pair.) Sam gave the recording to Dewey, and Dewey played it repeatedly on his broadcast. It was an overnight sensation.

To make a record that people could buy, they needed a B-side. So, the next day, Presley, Moore, and Black recorded an up-tempo cover of a bluegrass song called “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and, in July, 1954, Elvis Presley’s first single came on the market. In Sun’s promotional campaign, Phillips emphasized the record’s “three-way” appeal: to pop, hillbilly, and rhythm-and-blues listeners.

The point was that Elvis was not a pop singer who covered R. & B. and country songs. Plenty of pop singers did that. Elvis was a crossover artist. “Operators have placed [“That’s All Right”] on nearly all locations (white and colored) and are reporting plays seldom encountered on a record in recent years,” Phillips announced in a press release. “According to local sales analysis, the apparent reason for its tremendous sales is because of its appeal to all classes of record buyers.” The press bought the theory that Elvis was unclassifiable in conventional terms. “He has a white voice, sings with a Negro rhythm, which borrows in mood and emphasis from country styles,” a Memphis paper explained.

Presley’s next two singles on Sun didn’t have much success. He finally made it onto the national country-and-Western chart in July, 1955, with “Baby Let’s Play House.” In September, his cover of “Mystery Train,” a song that Phillips had recorded two years earlier with Junior Parker, the black singer who wrote it, made the Top Ten on Billboard’s country-and-Western chart. Guralnick says it was Phillips who persuaded Junior Parker that the train should have sixteen coaches. “Mystery Train,” Phillips told Guralnick, was “the greatest thing I ever did on Elvis. I’m sorry. It was a fucking masterpiece.” Two months later, he sold Presley’s contract to RCA Victor for thirty-five thousand dollars.

Presley was made for television. Offstage, he was bashful and polite, but, with a microphone and in front of an audience, he was a gyrating fireball with an unbelievably sexy sneer. He loved to perform. He made his first national television appearance on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s “Stage Show,” on CBS, in January, 1956. His big television moment came a few months later, though, when he sang back-to-back versions of “Hound Dog,” the second time with full range of pelvic motion, on Milton Berle. Forty million people watched his performance, and that summer “Hound Dog” and its flip side, “Don’t Be Cruel,” went to No. 1 on all three Billboard charts. The rest is history.

But let’s rewind the tape. Originally, Phillips never had any idea of using Presley to cover an R. & B. song. He called him in as a ballad singer, and that is what Presley always believed he essentially was. Presley’s favorite among his own songs was “It’s Now or Never.” The song is not bluesy, and it’s not rock and roll. It’s Neapolitan. Musically, “It’s Now or Never” is a cover of “O Sole Mio.”

When Phillips decided to bring in two white musicians, Moore and Black, to back Presley, he had them try pop and country songs. “That’s All Right” began as a joke. Moore and Black thought the song was a joke, too. It worked, but it seems to have been completely unpremeditated.

“That’s All Right” did not make the national charts. It was a regional hit. Its reception sent a signal that “a white man singing black” excited listeners, but Presley didn’t make it to the big time for another year. By then, as Elijah Wald points out in his recent revisionist history of popular music, “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll,” white performers and producers had stopped recasting R. & B. songs in a pop style and had started imitating them. Producers knew where the new sound was headed.

Rhythm and blues was hot. By 1954, the all-black-programming WDIA had become a fifty-thousand-watt station reaching the entire mid-South. A year later, there were more than six hundred stations, in thirty-nine states, that programmed for black listeners. When the young Pat Boone walked into the studio at Dot Records, in Gallatin, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955, he was shocked to be asked to sing an R. & B. song. Like Presley, Boone saw himself as a ballad singer. But he recorded Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” and it went to No. 1 on the pop chart. The same summer, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” became a No. 1 song after it was heard in the movie “Blackboard Jungle.”

African-American performers began to benefit from the popularity of the new sound. In May, 1955, Chuck Berry recorded “Maybellene” for Chess Records; Chess rushed the record to Alan Freed, in New York, and it went to No. 1 on the R. & B. chart and No. 5 on the pop chart. Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” was released a few months later. By January, when Presley was beginning to appear on television, it had reached No. 17 on the pop chart. In 1954, only three per cent of songs on the pop retail chart were by African-American artists; in 1957, it was nearly thirty per cent. That was unprecedented.

Presley quickly covered “Tutti Frutti.” So did Pat Boone, who, in the nineteen-fifties, was second in record sales only to Presley. An aspiring English teacher, Boone insisted on announcing his first big hit onstage as “Isn’t That a Shame.” He did not, even remotely, “sound black.” But, from an industry point of view, he brought respectability to the material. He helped make R. & B. the new pop. In 1956, seventy-six per cent of top R. & B. songs also made the pop chart; in 1957, eighty-seven per cent made the pop chart; in 1958, it was ninety-four per cent. The marginal market had become the main market, and the majors had got into the act.

When we look back at this history, the best conclusion seems to be the one reached by the sociologist Philip Ennis in his valuable analysis of popular music, “The Seventh Stream” (1992). “Did the music industry force-feed teenagers into the acceptance of rock and roll?” Ennis asked. “To the contrary, it was almost the reverse.” White listeners began consuming a style of music that had not been manufactured for or marketed to them. The d.j.s and the record companies were only scrambling to meet the demand. That demand seems to have sprung up everywhere—in Cleveland and Memphis, in Los Angeles and New York—and all at once. If advertising and promotion didn’t bring about this phenomenon, what did?

It’s tempting to interpret it as a generational rebellion against a buttoned-up, conservative domestic culture, but this is almost certainly a retrospective reading, created by looking at the period through the lens of the nineteen-sixties. Folk songs had a message, and some sixties rock songs had a message. Rock and roll did not have a message, unless it was: “Let’s party (and if you can’t find a partner, use a wooden chair).” Or maybe, at its most polemical, “Roll over, Beethoven.” But it was music intended for young people, and this was the distinctive thing.

In order for a music for young people to come into being, young people have to have a way to play it. The jukebox was one delivery mode: kids could listen to the music in a diner or an ice-cream shop, someplace outside the home and in the company of other kids. More significant, as Ennis points out, were several inventions. The 45-r.p.m. record—the single—was developed by RCA and marketed in 1949. Soon, RCA introduced a cheap plastic record player, which played only 45s and sold for twelve ninety-five. This meant that teen-agers could play “their” music out of their parents’ hearing. They did not have to listen in the living room on the family phonograph.

In 1954, transistor radios came on the market. Kids could now carry the music anywhere, including to school. A robust national economy in the United States after 1950 meant that teen-agers were staying in school longer than they had in the nineteen-thirties or during the war years. High school became an important social space. Material conditions therefore existed for a quasi-autonomous “teen culture,” and rock and roll beautifully fit the bill.

It has also been tempting to make sense of the rise of rock and roll as somehow related to the civil-rights movement, whose origins date from the same period. White enthusiasm for R. & B. music looks like a cultural indicator of future changes in race relations. This, too, seems largely a retrospective reading. The music of the movement was gospel, not pop or rhythm and blues.

In fact, the racialization of the rock-and-roll story, which continued after the nineteen-fifties in the form of charges that white artists had appropriated an African-American art form, is a simplification. It’s based on the idea that there is or was a “black” sound or a “black” musical style. That idea is an artifact of the old Billboard charting system, which was premised on just such an assumption. When you get down to cases, the racial elements become complicated very quickly.

Take “Hound Dog,” one of Presley’s biggest hits. It was originally released by a black R. & B. singer named Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton, in 1953, and went to No. 1 on the national R. & B. chart. But Thornton didn’t write the song. It was written by a couple of Jewish teen-agers living in L.A., Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, on commission from the producer Johnny Otis, who was recording Thornton for Peacock Records. It took them about fifteen minutes to compose it.

Leiber and Stoller thought they had written a raunchy blues number, but when they brought it into the studio Thornton insisted on crooning it. Leiber had to sing it for her so she could hear how it was supposed to go. When she was ready to record it, the drummer wasn’t making the right sound, so Otis played the drums himself (and also took co-writing credit). Otis always considered himself part of the African-American community, but in fact he was the son of Greek immigrants; his real name was John Veliotes.

Presley needed thirty-one takes to record “Hound Dog.” He didn’t cover Big Mama Thornton’s version, though. He had decided to record the song after hearing it performed by an all-white Las Vegas lounge act called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, who had rewritten the lyrics to turn “Hound Dog” from a song about a lover who won’t go away to a song about, actually, a dog. It was a gag number, and that’s how Elvis performed it. When he sang it on “The Steve Allen Show,” Allen brought a basset hound onstage and Presley sang to the dog. Whatever sexual innuendo a couple of white songwriters had invented and had managed to persuade an African-American singer was in the lyrics had been completely erased.

The flip side of Presley’s “Hound Dog” single, “Don’t Be Cruel,” is completely different, a doo-woppy, country-sounding song. “Don’t Be Cruel” was written by Otis Blackwell, who later gave Presley two more songs with the same sound, “Return to Sender” and “All Shook Up.” Blackwell was African-American.

All history is retrospective. We’re always looking at the past through the lens of later developments. How else could we see it? We are ourselves, as subjects, among those later developments. It’s natural for us to take events that were to a significant extent the product of guesswork, accident, short-term opportunism, and good luck, and of demographic and technological changes whose consequences no one could have foreseen, and shape them into a heroic narrative about artistic breakthrough and social progress. But a legend is just one of the forms that history takes—which is why it’s good to have Guralnick’s book.